Water vrs Air savant.

[kiaoto]

Notice My opinion only.

I am air savant lvl 20. Just recently I went to water do to water savant saying omg to water.

I changed all my spells mostly to water and cold with back up to lightning. I am not uber decked out just hit lvl 20 recently. I also changed some of my gear from lightning to cold.

In my opnion, I wasn't wowed by the cold spells dps. First off, 1st SLA, inless you have very high dc is big waste on time and damage. If it does hit, it hit very well on crits but I wouldn't rely on this SLA. whereas, 1st for air is touch spell that hit's decently well and doesn't miss. The Second snowbow was ok very short time aoe spell. The dmg wasn't that much greater if at all to Air savant. Third to me was ehhh seemed equivelent to lightning bolt.

Now in epic dungeon runs where I did my test, you really can't be using anything other than SLA or you gonna run out of power quickly. Those other spells COC, OFS, PR, etc. Are just not really mana efficient for epic dungeons.

The red boss I did was minatour and I ended up using atleast a quater of my power to take him down. I was hoping for the big hits of PR but it just wasnt mana efficient enough to take him down. In the end, I realized I was wasting way to much power to kill this one epic red mob so I ended up kitting for 10 minutes to kill him with SLA. Yes I used niac biting cold and reduced his resistance to cold damage every chance it came up.

When I was in air spec it was about same result, I ended up having to kite him to use SLA to kill as well cause the other lightning spells weren't mana efficient either. My opinion inless your doing non epic dungeons yea you might be wowed. Epics though inless your really decked out you might not be so wowed.
Also the nerfed to Ice prison makes cold less appealing to me.

Things I missed from air, Mobs knocking me down!!! Ack down I went and death follows soon.
Second My trap avoider the wind dance! Everytime I knew where trap was, I hit that wind dance and blast through the trap = Sweet. Not to mention, I can jump over deep holes without a problem.

I give ice little more chance But ehh I am not that impressed so far.

[Jaid314]

the air SLA are better, for the most part.

but if you took out the boss with only SLAs, you are missing the best part of water savant.

[Thesoulgazer]

The Water Savant's polar ray does quite a bit of damage, I hear.

Anyways, I perfer the Air savant. Wind dance is wonderful, and the knockdown immunity is nice too.

I really wish I could go both.

[Mubjon]

Did you go air the whole way?

[kiaoto]

Yea, I went air all the way to 20 but I don't think that's the correct path to go. I would suggest going fire or acid until around 14 or so. Change when you start getting into many immune mobs.

The ice non SLA are just not mana proficient. I mean yea big numberes but not to epic mobs. When A pm can cast Wail with 50 sp and they all dead whereas you have to cast about 10 spells to do the same, if you survive that long. 50 sp to 500 ehh no comparison. The only advantage you have is the low mana cost on your SLA. But again One wail or cast 10 sla x big time factor advantage to the pm with slight bonus in mana cost.

So In my view the Air has better SLA which Most of the time you be casting from with occasinoal non-mana proficient big nukers when it gets hairy. I enjoy the fact that I feel like dps caster. I prefer that over the instant kill caster. I like the fact that melee like my air savant cause I stun the mobs for them which gives them instant crits which allowing their specialities to happen.

I wish we had more SLA so that I can broaden my spell selections, but I am satisfied with the scrappings that ddo finaly gave us. I feel less like piker now with my caster in regualar non-epic dungeons Now . Maybe some day they be reason to have more than 2 DPS casters on epic raids.

Hope they brodan the lvl 7 to 9 spells so I dont have to take finger of death, wail, etc when I am air savant causes their nothing else to really take.

P.S pets in epic dungeons are uselesssssss Dont bother.

[Jaid314]

Maybe some day they be reason to have more than 2 DPS casters on epic raids.

there is such a reason right now. a moderately well-geared water savant iirc will dish out slightly more DPS than an extremely well-geared melee for a short period of time (almost 2 minutes iirc assuming 3k SP and no refills of any kind)... over 600 DPS, not subject to fortification. most of the dots (all of the single target ones) can have one running per caster, so a team of 10 savants and 2 healers (who honestly shouldn't really be needed, the savants should be able to be pretty self-sufficient) will dish out 6,000 DPS combined (if the healers add none, which they could do easily with divine punishment), or a total of 360,000 DPS in one minute. elite harry has 330,000 HP... so with a full raid of casters, you can destroy elite harry (provided all casters are capable of maintaining the proper nuke pattern flawlessly) in a little under a minute. for the record, i've been in groups that meleed harry down. it took probably 3-4 minutes at *minimum* to do so... i know i burned my full spell bar of 3,000 SP (i was the only arcane in the raid), and my sorc is comparatively crappy at DPS (earth savant, no eladar's, and no empower being the big decrease in DPS). note that no empower also means my spell bar lasts a lot longer in full DPS mode... albeit i do considerably lower DPS.

horoth has 350k HP on elite, as does sully. epic velah has only estimated 150k HP. conjoined devastator is estimated over 150k on epic.

so yeah, with a full group of savants... you can chew things up and spit them out.

the *real* challenge is convincing people that casters actually can DPS. this would be a lot easier if more casters were actually good at it. i haven't measured my caster's DPS, but i suspect it probably rates pretty low... for a caster. i also suspect i probably had at least equal to most of the melees in the group i was in (yes, the best melees can dish out similar DPS... the best equipped melees are also quite rare, and if even 4 of the people in the raid were that good i'd be shocked).

there is a reason now to bring lots of savants... a team of savants can rip apart enemies, even the biggest raid bosses, in extremely short periods of time. that doesn't mean anyone is prepared to acknowledge that fact, though.

[goodspeed]

id say between the 2, the air savant is the group specialist. The water savant is like the assassin, good on single target but not as efficient as air on groups.

[lugoman]

I agree with you about the Niac's Cold Ray sla. Mobs save so much I dont even have it hot barred anymore.

Did you have Otiluke's Freezing Sphere? Does quit a bit of damage to grouped mobs.