You gesture.
A lurid green bolt of lightning strikes a baby forest gryphon! The worst of the bolt misses, but tendrils of lightning lash out in passing to scorch its abdomen.
The baby forest gryphon is lightly stunned!
A lurid green bolt of lightning strikes a baby forest gryphon! The worst of the bolt misses, but tendrils of lightning lash out in passing to scorch its back.
The baby forest gryphon is lightly stunned!
A lurid green bolt of lightning strikes a baby forest gryphon! The worst of the bolt misses, but tendrils of lightning lash out in passing to scorch its left hind leg.
A lurid green bolt of lightning strikes a fledgling forest gryphon! A fledgling forest gryphon flinches as the bolt grazes its abdomen and scorches the skin.
The forest gryphon is lightly stunned!

Roundtime: 2 sec.

This is pretty much a common thing for me to see , grazing hits on critters ect. a spell that costs me 34 mana seems like it should produce more effect. I have 477 tm and yet, I am grazing hits. Is it just me? I am getting frustrated with WM magic in general and this seems pretty much like the proverbial straw.

CL and LB both reserve descriptions of direct hits for limb-destruction levels of wounds, a grazing hit from a bolt of lightning is pretty damaging.

---

>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

I gave up PVP on the WM, rolled a paladin. They are awesome, magic tert guild with an aoe that makes wm aoe look shameful (which it is at this point).

You mean Smite Horde? Shouldn't it be on the same template as chain lightning? All things being equal, a multi-strike TM AOE spell is the same across guilds, except....

1. Warrior mages can learn TM skill at roughly 2x the rate of a paladin.

TM learning was never in question, believe it or not I do understand the difference between magic prime and magic tert.

2. Warrior mages can stack a cyclic TM with a straight cast TM spell.
*Addressed at bottom

3. Warrior mages have far more ways to buff their TM/Magic skills than a paladin.
1 spell, substrat, which is also on scroll.
4. Warrior mages can cast far more often than a paladin at more mana due to mana regen.
What version of DR are you playing where magic prime and magic tert get different mana regens?
5. Warrior mages have an easier time picking up feats to further assist casting.
pretty sure they all cost the same amount of slots for every guild, warmages start with one free feat

I love paladins as much as the next guy, but claiming they're as good as or better than a warrior mage in AOE TM seems crazy.

*Our spells are nerfed to crap, see the post on Erixx casting on someone with 500 ranks of defenses lower than his TM, then please come back to me and explain how you believe warmage magic is superior.

SMite horde is a true multistrike aoe whereas we have this nerfed down craptastic version of chain lightning that's one hit per target and does crap damage unless the target is woefully outclassed.

>>What version of DR are you playing where magic prime and magic tert get different mana regens?

This use to be true, it hasn't been true since around 3.1... sorta. Mana regen is a function of pool size, and magic primes will have larger mana pools than mana terts (Which is why the regen rate was equalized, otherwise terts were being penalized twice), however I recently found a bug that was preventing mana pools from scaling with skill. It'll be fixed once we address some other issues with mana.

Also, the amount of mana you can sense and the efficiency at which you use it is also based on skill set placement.

Long story short - Yes, there's a difference between magic tert and prime, but it's intended to be smaller than 2.1 and due to a bug is currently smaller still.

>>SMite horde is a true multistrike aoe whereas we have this nerfed down craptastic version of chain lightning that's one hit per target and does crap damage unless the target is woefully outclassed.

Chain Lightning is single strike AoE. Warrior Mages do have multiple multistrike AoE spells (As pointed out the last time this thread came round comparing CL to SMH).

I also can't throw a stone around here without someone screaming about how multistrike spells are useless compared to single strike.

They're different. Not strictly better.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Ring of Spears.
Rain of Fire.

I remember there being a third one last time I went through the list but I don't have code access at the moment to confirm which one it is. Shockwave?

Either way, both of the above spells use the same damage template as smite horde.

IIRC you're the only guild aside from Paladins with AoE multistrike right now (TKS aside which I think is bugged again). That's not really intentional, but a quirk of where we're at right now.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

So just did some toying around with Fire Rain in silver leucros, 22 mana cast and it takes 2 pulses to kill them on average.
That's 44 mana for a critter i can just as easily kill with 3 casts of min prep ala. I get that single target single strikes are meant to be stronger i do but c'mon man, the damage is waaaaaaaaaaaay underwhelming.

> TM learning was never in question, believe it or not I do understand the difference between magic prime and magic tert.

The higher your TM skill = the more mana you can push into the spell = the more damage you do. Therefore, warrior mages and paladins of equal time in combat will have different damage potentials.

> 3. Warrior mages have far more ways to buff their TM/Magic skills than a paladin.

You're forgetting about pathways. They can buff the damage output, accuracy, power, ease, cast time, and other features.

There are two scrolls they can pick up. Will of the Winter and Substratum which are temporarily or permanently learnable. Paladins require sorcery to make those scrolls work and have no native TM buffs. They have no native TM buff in either their own or the cleric toolkit.

> What version of DR are you playing where magic prime and magic tert get different mana regens?

You're kidding, right?

1. WM have way more attunement than the paladin with equal investment,
2. They have more slots to spend on things like efficient harnessing,
3. And (the most important), magic primes recover attunement more quickly than magic secondaries which recover more quickly than magic terts.

See here: https://elanthipedia.play.net/mediawiki/index.php/Attunement

> *Our spells are nerfed to crap, see the post on Erixx casting on someone with 500 ranks of defenses lower than his TM, then please come back to me and explain how you believe warmage magic is superior.

My understanding is that buffs are buffs. It's the same across everyone within your SOI.

> pretty sure they all cost the same amount of slots for every guild, warmages start with one free feat

Warrior mages get the TM feat for free. Spell slot progression is based on magic tert/secondary/primary allotments.

* At 20th circle, the WM will have 9 more slots than the paladin.
* By 50th circle, the WM will have 24 more slots than the paladin.

This is where they even out, but the WM will always have more slots than the paladin. That makes it easier to get feats as they have less spells to give up, and they can get them earlier.

> SMite horde is a true multistrike aoe whereas we have this nerfed down craptastic version of chain lightning that's one hit per target and does crap damage unless the target is woefully outclassed.

Fire Rain + CL > SH for AOE TM.

Gar Zeng + Tingle > Smite Foe for single target TM against plate classes.

Either way, damage output is based on many factors.... the spell in question is not one of them. Attributes of the spell are.

Double post, but I would love it if shockwave did knockdown rather than knock back/out of room. The fact that it removes critters from an area make it pretty crap for hunting.

- Starlear, Warrior Mage and Lieutenant of Ilithi's Crystal Vanguard -

I have a friend with a 151st circle paladin, he has all the worthwhile feats and all paladin spells and still had slots left over iirc.


Fire Rain at 22 mana was doing 2 strikes per target , taking two pulses to kill something that's i think close to 400 ranks below my tm skill cap. Basically Silver leucros were way outclassed imo by my tm, yet still wasnt getting any spectacular hits.
RoS was doing about the same, killing with two pulses of the spell at 20 mana as this is my cap for it.

Yeah it really is down to preference. I prefer MoF to Aegis myself (+agility and +weapon skill with all weapons fits my playstyle more). The electricity book is really underwhelming (LB is too inaccurate for too little damage even though it is DFA, CL is also underwhelming. Arc Light rules though). Earth book I find underwhelming as well but it has its uses (Stone Shards would be a lot better if the lodged things pulsed appreciable amounts of damage again, even if it capped at a light bleeder or something. RoS is sort of good but I feel Rimefang is more effective even though it isn't multistrike). Water book is good but there just isn't a lot there. Ultimately I say pick one or two single shot spells, one multishot spell, and then just go after spells you want or that are useful. There is enough redundancy in our books that there is no need to get all the spells.

- Starlear, Warrior Mage and Lieutenant of Ilithi's Crystal Vanguard -

A couple things on RoS, I took it and Fire Rain as well because you won't always be in situations where you can cast fire rain or it's acceptable by local township. Which is a whole nother can of worms right there. RoS can be used prettymuch everywhere as far as I know.

Now the mana issue, i agree completely. If CL is not going to be tweaked for damage it should be turned down on cost. 32 mana for a min prep when i can do better with an intro spell at min prep as far as kill ratio/time.


solutions. Turn up the damage or turn down the mana cost pretty sensible to me, same with FR and RoS.