Appotus Dominus

[Velnarin]

The Raiding Wizard's Handbook - Version 2.0

Foreward

This is an updated version of a guide written in November of 2008. Last Updated: July 2009

The purpose of this guide is no different than the purpose of a good raid leader: To bring out all of your potential. Wizards rely on a series of concepts to make potential into reality. Unfortunately, many such concepts are lost in a clutter of numbers and percentages. This guide aims to make sense of them for you.

To begin, freshen your mind to some of the concepts. A wizard is to, beyond all else, do as much damage as quickly as possible while attempting to never be completely out of mana until the fight is complete. It is prerequisite that a wizard be aggressive toward this goal --- That they be downright competitive. When a battle is ready to ensue, do you feel excited? Remember why you began to play this class, or at least why you continue to: You want to do damage. As much of it as you can. You must experiment and push yourself. Set goals for yourself in all things --- Especially in parses, with regard set aside to making it without doing anything to jeopordize the raid's success. Even if you don't meet the goal, you still come out on top, because it means you tried as hard as you could. The harder you try, the better the raid does. The better the raid does, the better you do.

Finally, you must realize that there are infinite ways to do a lot of burst damage, yes, but there are very limited ways to do a lot of damage over a long period of time for this class. There ARE wrong ways of doing things. Some wizards seem to believe they can randomly nuke until out of mana and that means they've done the best they can. Wizardry is an art, and a science.

Here are some compiled "right ways" that will hopefully help somebody.

Author's Note/Disclaimer:

I make no claim that the methods I've described are the only ways to use your maximum potential. The quest for the best methods to DPS is ongoing and you never know when stuff will be nerfed.

To get the most out of this guide I would suggest you skim as little as possible. But obviously some people are going to know all of this, so whatever.

This has been written in a way that assumes people know what the AAs I mention do, assumes the person does not have a lot of raid experience, assumes that people are level 85, and also assumes they have a mana pool of at least 20k. Hopefully it will inspire you on what AAs to get next if you don't already have the ones mentioned.

Now then.

The Method to the Madness ---- Spell Lineup and Usage

First of all, a point of note is that this setup assumes that you'll be doing mostly long (2 min+ duration) fights and do not necessarily have a 40k mana pool.

Wildmagic is KEY. A LOT of wizards do not have Wildmagic Burst (Level 76) because they do not know how to get it. Yes, you must have both the 76 and the 81 one.

The easiest way to obtain this spell (76 one) is by killing Vampires in the Vampire Caves in Loping Plains (unless you've completed the Soulbleeder raid; keep reading). It is the cave directly southeast of the Hills of Shade zoneline. In SoF, specific rank 1 spells can only drop in certain places, but almost all of them have a single spot where they will drop phenomenally more often than anywhere else. The Vampires of LP are your only chance to get this spell unless you farm the faction for rank 2 (guh) OR have all prerequisites for rank 3.

To get rank 3 you must have completed the raid Bimbalicus the Soulbleeder, and have the following Hills of Shade tasks completed:

Making Up for Lost Time
I Would Exhume So
The Power of Decay
One of Our Own
Recoup from the Coop (Bertox)
The Perfect Omelette
Cartographical Nightmare
Bigger, Faster, Stronger, Dumber

You must keep your TWO highest-level Wildmagic spells up at the same time, as well as your TWO highest-level Ethereal Fire spells. (The only exception is the event that you don't have Wildmagic Burst, but you have Strike and Blast - then you could use Ethereal Combustion + Conflagration but you won't do as well that way. You just need to pick Ethereal spells of the correlating level to which Wildmagics you're using.) If you do not do this, you'll be lucky to do very well on long fights.

Wildmagic is a wizard's greatest spell line: It can crit nearly 20k for ~300 mana after preservations. Better yet, its cast time is 0.8 seconds, and multiple spells of the same line are not recast-linked, so you can chain cast them indefinetly (and you'll never run out of mana). This alone puts out a significant amount of damage, but more importantly, it will set off your Gifts of Mana like firecrackers. This means you are able to cast Ethereal spells, your biggest damage ability, very often in comparison to using other spells. Beyond that, you'll also get a ton of Mana Reiteration procs from it if an enchanter is in your group, which can add a rather astounding amount of damage over time.

You must always be careful to note which type of Gift of Mana just went off. You must remember that you are going to be using two different level ranges of spells. It can get confusing if you're not used to it. This is an optimal spell lineup:

1) Wildmagic Burst
2) Ethereal Incineration
3) Wildmagic Blast
4) Ethereal Combustion
5) Flashblaze
6) Serene Harvest
7) Twincast
8) Concussive Blast
9) Ethereal Iceblight

So, you're pairing up your level ranges on the top. 80, 80, 85, 85. If Wildmagic sets off Gift of Mana you just have to click right below it to use it with the correct Ethereal nuke. Easy. Painless. Well, not for the mob.

[Charotica]

*Applauds Velly* This is very cool! No, I'm not a wizard and no, I didn't play one on TV and no, I didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night - but I am a super-huge fan of reference guides and help sheets - and helpful people - so I wanted to give my two cents and cheer you on for your time and effort!

-Charotica

[Velnarin]

^_^ Aww, thanks sugar. *huggabies*