AoC : The pains of grind leveling

Having just reached level 78 on my Priest yestereday, I must say that my rush for capped level has deteriorated into a sluggish grind during these last 10 levels (having left AA and stuck in Keshatta grinding mobs). Seeing that doing quests in Keshatta is getting me nowhere I decided to just respec into nothing but AE-mob grinding feats.

The AE grinding build

With this build (the last few points were all invested in the searing eye related feats), I can pull 10 mobs in the human camp east of the center town in Keshatta and chain kill them for 6400 XP each for the last 4 mobs (chain 7-infinity gives the same XP bonus), compared to the initial 3kish XP you get for killing them one by one.

Here’s a quick rundown of what feats are necessary and how they work:

Lance of Mitra – Absolute must, it’s high damage and AE plus if two mobs stack on top of each other they get hit twice each. Lance when cast will fire a lance at every mob in the column range, and each lance does splash damage, hence mobs stacked on top of each other get hit by multiple lances. The healing component helps so you would want to invest 5 into that.

Exemplar / Wrath of Mitra – More damage is always helpful.

Cleansing fire – Quick, damaging, large area AE, must have.

Holy Vengence – This gives your next few spells a boost to holy damage after casing wave of life. It’s really a filler feat but it helps increasing your damage output.

Searing Light – Turns Radiance into a large area PBAOE nuke. Must have.

Revivication – M u s t  H a v e. There’s no way you are going to find anywhere 2 seconds to cast a HoT that last for 13. Just let the mobs do it for you.

Purification of Mitra – Despite it being nerfed, and despite it only doing 100ish damage for 3 ticks, you’re going to be casting your wave of life anyways, and you won’t run out of mana because of saintly warrior, so there’s no reason to give up bonus damage.

Searing Eye of Mitra – Everybody overlooks this feat because of it’s low damage versus non-demon/undead mobs and the heavy investment required for the corpse-explosion effect. But IMHO it is worth every point if all you want to do is AOE grind. The spell itself hits for about 300ish damage, which is lacklustre for a 3 second cast spell, but if you kill anything with it it hits a large area for 800 damage fully talented (300 and 500 damage with 0 or 1 points in the last talent respectively). Here’s the catch: You don’t have to kill anything with the eye to activate the explosion. All you need to do is cast the spell on mobs with low HP, then immediately finish them off with either cleansing fire or radiance (ie quick spell) and it will still trigger the effect (I can confirm this works). If 300 damage can’t kill a mob, 300+700 from radiance will surely kill it, then AEing the area for another 800 damage, sweet? Sure is.

Saintly Warrior – A must have IMHO, if not just for the unlimited mana it provides you it also gives you valuable stamina that will alow you to sprint around pulling packs or sprint after a repulse to position for a lance. Try AOE grinding with and without this feat, it’s day and night difference.

Presence of the Mind – Get this. It makes your Radiance instant, meaning an instant cast heal/PBAOE and +5% damage fully talented. Remember that Radiance can be cast even if you have the debuff, you’ll still do the AOE damage but no heal. Get used to seeing if your debuff is up to determine whether you’ll need to pop another cooldown to save your ass.

Vengeance of the Gods – It’s nice to have but not really necessary and I hardly use it because of it’s 1.5sec cast time, if it was instant cast and maybe +15% damage it would be 200% better. It’s just a one pointer so it shouldn’t really bother you all that much (since we’re already that deep into the general tree with saintly warrior and presence of the mind anyways).

How to use this build: Ideally, you want to find camps that are pure melee (and maybe archers, but no casters please), and contain no mobs that will stun / knockdown you, the Keshatta human camp east of the center town is perfect for this (though be careful witches can combo you for a 800 damage finisher). Pull with lance if possible, but otherwise just body pull and round up the mobs, in an arc in front of you (just run backwards for a few steps), then cast Healing Wave > Cleansing Fire > Repulse, perhaps drinking a healing potion in the midst of casting the repulse (dont’ ever pre-drink healing pots, you’re wasting the initial heal) if you pulled more than 6, target the mob off to one side of the arc while casting repulse, then after repulse casts immediately sprint to the opposite end of the arc to the mob you targeted (thereby lining up all the mobs you knocked down between you and the target), cast Lance > Searing Eye > Radiance > Cleansing Fire. Unless they resisted the lance or searing eye you should see your screen covered in black lines and chain kills. You don’t even need to wait for your mana to regen because it should be full anyways, cast a healing wave on yourself while you loot and start pulling the next pack. Happy grinding.

WTF!? 2.4.3 nerfs relic swapping

Equipping an item will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress.

Straight from the 2.4.3 patch notes, meaning we can no longer use macros to gain maximum benefits from our relics (intended, I guess). Which means we’ll have to choose the relic most useful for the fight and stick with it for the encounter.

T6 Content Cleared.

After a relatively smooth two-night BT clearing and a 1/2 night MH clearing, we had all of the rest of the week’s raiding nights (ie 2.5) to the guy harassing the world tree (Mr. Archimonde). Archimonde is a fight that can be summed up in 3 lines:

Don’t die falling.
Run away from fires.
Stay alive.

Unfortunately, however simple it may sound, people still fail to click their tears (albeit we’re in Asia and pings range from 200ish to 500+), fail to run from fires, and fail to return to their group to get dispelled. We use the 4 camps method, meaning ranged and healers are divided into four groups which kite fires as a group so that people aren’t left out and are healed or decursed.

Being a 100% raid-idiot check fight, it’s really up to the players themselves to put their act together and simply not die while putting in whatever little DPS they can (there’s 10 minutes for you to get to 10%) At 10% it’s basically time for you to scream and gasp that you’ve killed the final boss in Hyjal and time for you to pray that your T6 head drops.

Tips? Other than staying aware of your surroundings (especially melee and U-turn fires), and using your cool-down buffs before 10% (you’re immune to all buffs after that, and you really don’t need them to get the last 10% down), there’s nothing much special about this boss, at all.

On to Sunwell. Now let’s see if we can get past the trash pulls.

Killshot

We didn’t even know he was dead

It was a good 10 seconds before the first person started screaming on vent after Illidan Stomrage knelt down before the raid with 1% HP left.

“Huh? Wtf is he doing”

“Oh, i think he’s dead”

*People start screeming on vent*

WTB epic death scene for the final boss of 2.3.2.

Illidan is a tank check (unlike Archimonde, who is a raid-idiot check, which we fail). You need a tank who can block all the shears and move Illidan into traps properly (which was the main reason we couldn’t kill him a few days earlier). You need to tanks that can move the fire elementals without getting their asses handed to by a blue laser beam, and you need a tank who can grab aggro off demon form before he 1 shots half you raid with the shadow blast. Other than that, it’s not really that hard a fight: Using the 4 group method for phase 2 to ease out the damage and having your raid spread out properly for phases 3-5 should be pretty easy (there’s even boss mods to help you).

The traps in Phase 5 can get to some really annoying positions on our kill though his last 30% didn’t last long enough to see a second demon phase. The 2nd trap was placed eons away from the tank and he just shield-wall tanked until Illidan was dead.

It’s an interesting fight, but I think it’s a bit drawn out and having to go through phase 1 and 2 to wipe again and again on phases 3 through 5 is just frustrating to no end. I was enhance for the day we killed him, but I did get a healthy amount of tries in as resto as well. All I can say is, aside from Phase 2 where shamans shine, we aren’t the optimal healers for this fight. People are spread out and chain heal is rarely used, and we have to resort to our sub-optimal tank healing and let druids and priests cover the raid.

Killshot

AoC: Priest of Mitra 1-50

As of writing this post, I’m Lv 57 and ran out of quests in the zones that are in my level range and will have to resort to grinding my way to 60. I’m on a PvE server so that I can level in peace and PvP when I want to so there’s not gonna be alot of PvP content I’m going to write about (make that none).

The Priest of Mitra

It’s a very well-rounded class and only lacks in single target direct damage. We’re probably one of the best AoE mob killers in the game coupled with respectable survivability (Divine shield for priests? lol). A good handful of CC abilities as well as heals makes us able to hand some very tough situations. The only drawback is that you really lack the punch to take out something fast when it’s needed.

Unless you’re going to be leveling a friend 24/7, go hybrid build. Get lance+lance heal, get cleansing fire, get searing light (for radiance), get instant radiance (presence of mind) and see your efficiency go up by leaps and bounds, worry about your “support specs”, “team specs”, and “raid specs” later. (PvP servers have other things to worry about, which I don’t care about). Mana talents suck. L2 Drink pots.

Healing in AOC

Even though the developers have said they wanted to take healbotting out of the game, they made it so that healing and healing skill has close to zero impact on the outcome of a combat. Assuming both your hots are up and your 1 minute CD heal is used at a useful time, all you can do is pray that your team’s damage output is higher than the boss mob’s output minus the tank’s mitigation and your heals. The only way to save your tank from certain death because your HoTs aren’t healing enough is by CCing the enemy. Not to mention that besides leveling I have yet to see any item of any sort that will add to our healing power. While I appreciate that they have let healers play in a different playstyle I would definitely appreciate it if they could healing require a bit more skill. (The so called positioning requirements at the moment are dumb, unless you turn with your keyboard there is absolutely no skill involved with being able to heal the people you want to heal with your heals.)

Oh, and healer aggro is crazy. It’s like I’ve done nothing, haven’t put up a single mob, the tank aggros the mob with a bow and it makes a beeline straight for me. Every-single-time.

I hope Funcom can really find a way to fix this whole healer ordeal because atm healers feel pretty useless and the only difference between good and bad ones are probably the ones who can dish out more dps.

Levels 1-50

First 20 levels through Tortage is pretty fun the first time, you learn the basics, you get your destiny quests. Then you have to repeat the whole damned thing if you start an alt.

Levels 20-40 gives you the choice of three zones, one to each of the races’ starting cities. Going through 2 of them will take you easily to 40 if you complete all the content and don’t skip mobs too much (like I did). Towards the end of the 30s you may see that you’ve ran out of quests that are even green to you. Fear not! Doing grey quests are a respectable source of XP too, you still get the full XP reward of the quest, and you can skip all the grey mobs and just do whatever the quest wants you to do. You can go through an entire zone’s worth of grey quests in under 2 hours and get 3 levels just by running around. Near 40 you also get access to the first group dungeon of the game: Sanctum of the Burning Souls. It’s nothing too special but there’s multiple quests there and bosses there actually drop loot, which will last you for quite some levels since itemization is lacking in the game currently.

Levels 40-50 take you to the harder zones (Field of the Dead and OT Noble District). You also get the option of getting amount (which you probably won’t have enough cash for until your early 50s). Quests here start to become the typical kill X of this and Y of that. And FotD has this quest that runs you all aruond the friggin zone. You may run out of quests near the end of 50 and will then have to resort to grinding. There’s also the introduction of “Wanted!” quests that tell you to kill a certain number of mobs after which you automatically complete the quest for a little bonus XP and cash, after which you can go pick up the quest to rinse and repeat (advanced grinding, so to speak). These “Wanted!” quests will be around in the zones to come as well, but considering the distances you have to run to pick up the quests, if you’re just grinding mobs it probably isn’t a very viable method of grinding (instead just stay at the camp and just killing will probably be the better choice).

Mounts

This topic deserves its own section because mounts are so totally useless in this game aside from having gimmicks like mounted combat. The first mount you get is slow. It costs you your entire fortune 10 levels after you can first learn and ride it. It takes 5 seconds to mount. It takes 5 seconds to dismount. If you get knocked off your horse (ie being attacked by mobs) you get knocked down and give the enemy precious time to wack at your head while you try to get up. Or maybe we’re just spoiled by WoW mounts. But wait, i think Funcom’s last game spoiled us even more in terms of transportation convenience.

Just dump your points in run speed, that 3 gold is not worth your investment for a nuisance more than a convenience. And warping to respawn points by killing yourself is still the fastest means of travel by far.