As a wizard

[DrJHS]

What is the most useful element?

[LurkingVeteran]

What is the most useful element?

The one nice thing about Wizard nuking is that since they do not have a specialization, you are not tied to one. Itemization still kind of ruins generalist nuking though.

[Urklore]

I find there are only a few monsters that have total acid immunity (I defy you Green Abishai!)

[slarden]

The one nice thing about Wizard nuking is that since they do not have a specialization, you are not tied to one. Itemization still kind of ruins generalist nuking though.

I agree with this. Negative on a PM is strong and force is useful. You definitely don't want to box yourself into one element.

[elvesunited]

My evoker archmage has been retired for a long time.
( Having bad DC problems and waiting for a archmage update that never came )
But the spell damage of choice was Force.

However I maintained 3 main spell hot bars

Force + Fire ( primary due to fire being more useful spells )
Force + electricity ( because fire immune enemies are common )
Fire + electricity ( on very rare occassion force immune enemies )

Acid was rejected for most of its spells being conjuration rather than evocation.
Cold had too many that were resistant or immune.

[LurkingVeteran]

Ideally you would pick the opposing element. E.g, if you run into fire elementals you use cold etc. This could have been better than immunity bypass if you juggle it perfectly. However, gearing for everything is never going to be as good, and there are much more immunities than weakness in DDO. It's a shame really. Especially problematic are the semi-OP ED SLAs (e.g. Dragon Breath) that lock you into one element anyway for some weird reason...

[Eantarus]

What is the most useful element?

Whichever one the fewest mobs have blanket immunity to.

[KoobTheProud]

I think the most useful element for a wizard for sustained damage is steel. You can add any of the above elements to it with an elemental imbue and you can also fully profit from spellpower to that imbue as well as all the melee feats that increase damage for the style you choose.

I'm not being facetious about this either. The best sustained damage from a pure Wizard will come from EK and at melee range the PM auras kick in as well.

[salmag]

I'd say None of the Above.

In the current game, as far as spells for Wizard go, Negative and Force.

Situationally, ALL the elements work for them. Just know what type of quest you're going into and switch spells. Versatility rules for Wizards.

[KoobTheProud]

I played a 1st life Deep Gnome Archmage to cap recently and I was shocked by how little damage the Force SLA's did. Every element will beat them out by a wide margin for actual damage per cast and the trade-off is that you need to chug mana pots now and then when you run low between shrines.

Just absolutely shocked by how bad an enhancement tree Archmage was. Do not do an Archmage at this point. Just don't.

If you really feel the need to do heavy spell DPS as a caster pick a Sorceror or a Druid.

[Splunge]

I have a PM DC wizard that specializes in CC and instakills. I added as much damage dealing as I could without affecting my DCs. Negative is my primary "element" since it fits well with a PM. There are a lot of mobs that are immune to negative damage and I can only strip immunity from undead, so I wanted to take some other damage spells. Instead of specializing in a single secondary element, I took as much general potency and general crit chance as I could. Wizards get a lot of spell slots, so I slotted the highest damage dealing AOE spell for each element as well as polar ray. That way, I can target a mob's weakness if it has one, and I know I can always bypass immunities.

I don't do a lot of damage compared to a sorc that specializes in single element damage, but I do pretty well for a wizard that focuses on DCs. My spell power and crit chance aren't as high for my secondary elements as they would be if I only focused on one of them, but I can use the highest damage spell for each one instead of having to rely on lesser spells while my biggest one is on cooldown.

[FuzzyDuck81]

I usually prefer acid, it's reliable against most things, though I'll keep a couple of other spellpowers high too for backups.

[Enoach]

One of the benefits of being a wizard is being able to switch spells to be "Best for the situation"

That being said, I do tend to lean towards Acid in early levels and later levels. But always have an alternate type.

So while I like acid neglecting other types is a mistake as sometimes those are the best choice.

[elvesunited]

I played a 1st life Deep Gnome Archmage to cap recently and I was shocked by how little damage the Force SLA's did. Every element will beat them out by a wide margin for actual damage per cast and the trade-off is that you need to chug mana pots now and then when you run low between shrines.

Just absolutely shocked by how bad an enhancement tree Archmage was. Do not do an Archmage at this point. Just don't.

If you really feel the need to do heavy spell DPS as a caster pick a Sorceror or a Druid.

Even when it was half-way effective, it needed a 2 level splash in favored soul to get the temporary spell points needed to keep from running out of sp.
Then you could rely on Arcane bolt, Arcane Blast, Master of Knowledge, Shiradi procs to get decent damage.

But then Arcane Bolt and Arcane blast were never updated with the other spells.
There was hope with the destiny tree update that shiradi caster would make a comeback
But that got nerf-nuked from orbit.

Currently the only usage I know is for illusionists who are willing to spend 21 AP to get another phantasmal killer SLA.

[KoobTheProud]

Magic Missile and Chain Missiles have no saving throw. Really they need to make all the SLA's in the tree be save-free. That *might* bring the damage up high enough to make it worthwhile. Just *might* though. It's really a very weak tree overall. The two damage spells that are save-free also cap at ridiculously low levels from a modern view of DDO.

[LurkingVeteran]

I have a PM DC wizard that specializes in CC and instakills. I added as much damage dealing as I could without affecting my DCs. Negative is my primary "element" since it fits well with a PM. There are a lot of mobs that are immune to negative damage and I can only strip immunity from undead, so I wanted to take some other damage spells. Instead of specializing in a single secondary element, I took as much general potency and general crit chance as I could. Wizards get a lot of spell slots, so I slotted the highest damage dealing AOE spell for each element as well as polar ray. That way, I can target a mob's weakness if it has one, and I know I can always bypass immunities.

I don't do a lot of damage compared to a sorc that specializes in single element damage, but I do pretty well for a wizard that focuses on DCs. My spell power and crit chance aren't as high for my secondary elements as they would be if I only focused on one of them, but I can use the highest damage spell for each one instead of having to rely on lesser spells while my biggest one is on cooldown.

This is I think the "intended" or at least most interesting way to play Wizard. The problem is as you say that general potency and spell lore items are pretty far behind. This is in addition to enhancements, feats etc. I wonder if anybody has tried to maximize their potency and spell lore, I'm curious what values they ended up with compared to a specialized build. In particular the lore items seem to be way behind (like half).

I wonder if SSG actually benchmarked the damage output of these, because spell damage really grows cubicly with spell power, crit % and crit damage. It might look like you will get 70% of the power because the values are 70% for the general options, but you actually get something closer to 0.7^3 = 34% of the specialized damage (although the difference in crit damage is smaller). I think it would be fair if the generalist nuker got more like 75% of the final damage output (with an option to get more than 100% if you exploit weaknesses, for the mobs that have them).

[archest]

wizard has such a large assortment of spells.
were as the sorcerer is more directional.
a wizard can be built for any or all of the above.

[unbongwah]

What is the most useful element?

Of the four, acid is the least resisted element - important since wizards don't get the immunity-stripping powers of Savants - but most of its spells are Conjuration while other elemental DPS spells are usually Evocation, which can split your DC focus. Fire has a good mix of both single-target (Scorching Ray) and AoEs like Firewall. Electricity has high burst DPS (Chain Lightning etc.) but there's a lot of enemies with electrical resistance/immunity so it can't be your sole element. Cold is probably the worst for someone without cold-immunity-stripping like a Water Savant.

But as others said, the silver lining to wizards being generalists wrt pure DPS spells is you don't have to pigeon-hole yourself into a single element in quite the same way that a sorcerer or warlock does. [Doesn't help that Archmage is the weakest caster tree.] It's mostly a matter of swapping gear and your prepared spell lists to switch from focusing on one element to another. Necromantic (Negative), Force, and even Sonic spells can be useful too. There's also a couple of gnome Feydark Illusionist builds which focus on Shadowblades SLAs plus Phantasmal Killer plus Pale Master form for a mix of direct-damage and instakills.

[elvesunited]

wizard has such a large assortment of spells.
were as the sorcerer is more directional.
a wizard can be built for any or all of the above.

In theory but practically ....

1) Wizards have spell point issues that make relying on non-SLA spells difficult
2) The archmage evocation SLAs range from weak to very weak
3) Gear awards specialists and punishes generalists.

[Aelonwy]

I'm sure my wiz is by no means considered min-max but I have a fun and comfortable time playing her on elite, maybe some low reaper when they drag me through it but I don't like reaper itself so no class or build is going to make me enjoy that difficulty.

She is 2rog/18Wiz, T5 and capstone 42 pts in Feydark Illusionist, 28 pts in Archmage T4/core4 Illusion Focus, 13 pts in Gnome. Obviously, she does mostly force damage and also obviously there is a focus on locking things down through CC as much as possible. I don't really solo much, I'm in a family static group with several IRL gaming friends that come and go as they are serial game hoppers.

Serviceable not... what's the term? LEET?