I was wondering if it's at all normal to only land about 1 in 10 successful casts with both the chill flame and venom spells. Does anything affect the accuracy of which these spells work? Thanks.
Btw, I'm new to the game, thanks again!

[Edited by lumyn at 11:10 AM on 8/28/2005]

well this should be in the orc forums... but I will ask quickly..

What lvl mobs are you fighting.. white? yellow? pink? red?
What weapon are you using?
are you using bsps or sps?

and no chill flame and venom should have a around a 60% or better land rate on white and yellow mobs.. lower on the pink and red ones.. but bsps fixes that!

It also depends on whether you are using a mage weapon (ie staff) or a normal warrior weapon. The success rate of Chill Flame and Venom landing is directly related to matak, so if you want either to land, pick up a mage weapon.

Well i have an ma of 14,using willow staff, and the success rate is around 30-40% on green mobs. Is there a certain ma you have to have in order to have a half decent success rate for landing these spells?
It's just kind of hard to grasp that i can't land either of these spells with this character while my noob elf mystic can nuke to his heart's content.

Its just your weapon. Its just crap lol which is to be expected as a newbie. Work your way up and you will get better. Also Orc Mystics have a great deal lower INT (Magic Power) and WIT (Cast speed) then the other mystics.

Yeah it's your weapon if you want DOTs to land you need high M.Attack.

I'm guessing your a shaman. I suggest fighter weapon, heavy armor and just drain then melee. It's boring but a ver effective way to level your shaman to 40.

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sirfancypants wrote:

Yeah it's your weapon if you want DOTs to land you need high M.Attack.

I'm guessing your a shaman. I suggest fighter weapon, heavy armor and just drain then melee. It's boring but a ver effective way to level your shaman to 40.

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WoW you know nothing of the shaman..

Dot's are the way to lvl... Flame especially... it works fast costs half the amount of MP LD does and does the same amount of dmg as almost 2ld's (with no bsps).. Get a heavy set and a mage staff or a single handed blunt and shield.. the reason I say this is because in groups in the low lvls you are techniclly a DD, any other buff class will have better buffs then you... open with your DoT then run in and stun and then hit away.. The same basically goes for Soloing.. the only buff you wanna use is soul shield.. its cheap and effective.. all the others suck up to much MP so you want to avoid them.. open with the flame.. uses a Bsps if ya have to.. then wack away.. wearing heavy with your soul shield up should allow you to walk through a number of mobs before you have to LD and get you HP back... you lose the bonus MP from the mage sets but the added PDef makes up for it plenty. This also means less time sitting since you don't have as much MP to recharge...

That is the way I worked myself through the low numbers.. You may have to use sleep every once and while... but this should prove very usefull...

Okay is there like a cut off point for m.a. in which you have in order to land the spell? I just bought a mage staff, have an m.a. of 35 and i still can't land the damn spell. It looks like i'm going to have to go melee/ld after all.

If you can't afford to use sps (bsps are wasted on dots imo) it can be hard to get those spells to work... but to make it easier always hunt white/green mobs cause from my experience it is near impossible to land a dot on a yellow mob without sos/bsps ;)

To lvlin:

I have been in robes ALL the time, from 1-4x.

Until 20 I mainly doted golems and killed em of in one hit after the dot wore off (I could spam sps ;) )

From 20-40 I got into top D grade robes and meeled. Yes, I meeled in robes. Just dot once and then beat the mob up, without ss or soulcry, if it is too slow, rather use soulcry than ss cause money>mana. Of course you will take a lot of damage in robes, but in exchange you got a lot of mana, and fast mp regen. So you can afford more dots and drains. From my lvling experience it worked really well this way ;)

Then after 40 (warcryer that is) I still went with robes and a dagger. No more doting because imho the dots after 40 just can't keep up with the mobs' HP, and if you are in a group dots are useless, because a) mobs die too fast and b) you will be hunting red mobs most likely which tend to resist the dots. I chose a dagger here, because soulcry works best with them and I get lots of nice crit and speed buffs :) I can solo quite well this way if I want but parties are always better cause then I can either concentrate on buffing (group without other buffer) or DD (group with other bufer) both at the same time is hard, because you run out of MP really quickly :/

Yep that is a good way you can go..I had a dagger for most of my 20-30's where I finnaly got a Tarbar in my 30's..

But I honeslty find it odd that their DoT's don't land.. I had mage set and mage staff 1-19... I landed my dots all the time prolly around 75% on white mobs.. and no sps cause I couldn't afford it. The same has carried up through my 40's which I am in now.. the land rate has dropped to around 50% no sps or 75% sps. Also I have been grouping in DVC since i was 44.. with sps I can still get my dots to land on blood red mobs, and I can get sleep to land without sps..

I suggest tho to not just dismiss your dots after 40.. one thing, you will need them in PvP, but try an experiment... sleep the mob then dot them... see how much dmg the dot will actually do... as the life of the mob drops while you are meleeing it the dot doesn't look signifigant, but just see how much life it really takes away.. even if its only 3-4 hits, thats 3-4 hits where you will be farther away from death.

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Arreco wrote:

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sirfancypants wrote:

Yeah it's your weapon if you want DOTs to land you need high M.Attack.

I'm guessing your a shaman. I suggest fighter weapon, heavy armor and just drain then melee. It's boring but a ver effective way to level your shaman to 40.

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WoW you know nothing of the shaman..

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Well I know enough that Orc Mystics are the most versatile toon to play.

And there are numerous ways to play. Some are more effective then others in different situations: Soloing, PvP, duoing or partying. Also with different toons that U group with.

I also know enough to level up a mystic to a 58 OL (I know there are many Ols much higher than that) in a relatively short period of play time with out spamming sps or bsps.

I'm not sure  Arreco might be the mack-daddy of orc mystics but that doesn't matter to me. What matters is that I play, I enjoy and I kill all those who stand in my way leaving a bloody trail of corpes in my mighty wake.

Now, Why and when fighter weapon and heavy is good for a Shaman.

107s are very cheap and readily available other top D weapons are expensive. Top D grade staves aren't only expensive but also hard to find (on my server they are). I know you will miss sometimes Scallops are better for accuracy but also more expensive. If it's your first/main toon and you don't have a generous friend or want to do something as uncouth as ebaying, they are great for the relatively short time you'll be inbetween 20-40 compared to the ammount of time you'll be 40+ if you stick with it. Brig is also the best if you're going heavy but expensive expecially the helmet. U could also use half plate also expensive and a bit more rare to find. Just draining and meleing can get you through the shaman levels quickly, I didn't spam bsps but and occational one worked great.

Yes, if you do have alot of funds then go with a top D staff. Or just about any other top D except a bow (that's one model I've never seen work, but cheers if you can find away to do it) if you can afford it.

When I was a Mystic and shaman I contemplated over OL vs WC and wanted to save SPs (it was my first toon and I didn't realize that the higher SP cost of 40+ skills wouldn't be affected by choosing any number of pre 40 skills) So I only leveled up my passive skills, drain and buffs. With this set up I COULD solo very well or duo with DD or Tank with small party.

Play your Orc how you want to. My advice isn't bad. Some people want to believe they are smarter and that what they choose is the best and anyone who doesn't follow them is stupid or KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT THE SHAMAN this is definitely untrue. I believe they do this because of some sort of insecurity or something. 

[Edited by sirfancypants at 10:20 AM on 8/31/2005]

Can i point out that no one particular way of playing a shaman is "right" so don't think everyone else is stupid because they chose a different way to level.

I had fantastic success in an elven mithril set with 107s, i'd run in, melee to kill them, then if my life dropped below about 300 i'd pop a life drain before i ran in to hit the mob. I had 0 down time as my mp was going up faster than i could use it.

Oh, you are right the Orc mystic is the most versitle class in the game, but also one of the hardest to master.... with general weapon masteries and all 3 of the armor masteries we can go anyway we want..We can go heavy/melee for solo but unless you have a SE behind you being a mana battary then melee/LD is the slowest and worst way to lvl in solo ( i say learn your dot's and love them).. For parites we need Robes and a mage weapon.. more MP for your buffs and better Mattk for our dot's/sleep and seals....

Most my 30 - 40 run I had Sala and a Tarbar. This is what I have gotten from trying diffrent things while lvling.

Life drain and Frost Flame do roughly the same amount of dmg.. you might not agree, But that is the way I saw it. I could sleep a creature and DoT them, the dot would remove the same amount of HP as a single life drain would. But the diffrence and the key is this. The dot was like a second attack. as I meleed the mob I would hit it.. take off the 40-50 dmg and immiditly after the bleed would remove anout 20-30. The mobs drop fast this way, its like we are weilding duels in our low lvls. In the higher lvl's this is the basics of the flames tho... they will always remove around 1/3 of the life of any normal mob that is around your lvl.

Now just using LD what I would find is this. Yes I coudl eat half the creatures HP in one shot, but then I would run in, and unless I was spamming ss, the mob would deal as much dmg to me as I just consumed before I knock him down. This leads to me using LD on each and every mob. Wich brings a quick use fo my MP and a lot of sitting..

Now I know that the flames can fail, but so can LD.. I don't know why he isn't landing the DoT's.. like I have said I have always had a really nice land rate reguardless of our lower int, and yes if you want your LD to do more dmg and your dot's to land more get some int tatoo's, but the WC and the OL both thrive off their DoT's and Seals.. if your not using them then you arn't utilizing the class to its fullest (at least that is my feeling)

Anyways... I guess that I have plead my case. You can do whichever you want. Experiment and figure out what works for you.. No one has the same play style.. find yours and go with it.

I think with a dagger in meele you will do more damage/mp than you would with dots. That is only for Warcryers of course because you need Rage/Predator/Fury to be effective with a dagger. Atm I SS-crit for about 550 damage or so on white mobs and I can get like 3 crits in if I'm lucky. Now of course a Flame would make this faster but the problem is that the basic buffage and soulcry eat up so much MP that I just can't afford DoTs anymore. Steal Essence helps now and then as I can drain back roughly 600HP with a bsps but I hardly use it because it sucks too much MP, even more than dots :/.
This is only PvE though, in PvP if you try to meele in robes with a dagger you are most of the time terribly lost. Here matk is what counts to get the dots/drains/sleep to work, so imho the eprfect setup would be a good dagger for PvE and a good staff for PvP. As i can't afford this though, I went the PvE way ;)

I used a dagger in my 30's... and it did work out quite well.. A Cursed Man is a very nice item for a shaman.. you get bleed without casting (if your lucky). The One thing I like about blunts tho is stun... oh man has that move saved my butt so many times. Yet like I said, you really have to discover wich way you like to play best. I chose a staff and robes for the sa/mp that robes have and the mattk of a staff... so I don't solo much.. but I am damn awsome in groups ^^.. with a MP up sa i have over 1800 mp.. Almost 2 full buff rounds of MP.. and thats a lot... but all that extra MP allows for me to do some amazing crowd control, dot's, LD.. anything I want... to me its all about the MP and Mattk.. Oh and stun is a necesity if you want to PvP.. a NECESSITY!!

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Arreco wrote:.. like I have said I have always had a really nice land rate reguardless of our lower int, and yes if you want your LD to do more dmg and your dot's to land more get some int tatoo's,

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Shamans, OL and WC can't get INT tatoo's. The only way to increase INT is with armor sets (Demon being the set of choice 4 most).
[P]but then again

WOW I know nothing of the shaman

[Edited by sirfancypants at 8:38 PM on 8/31/2005]