The Magician's Tower

Adding a spell on par with spear for conj. only narrows the gap that has widened between conj. and evoc for mages in high end guilds.

The problem with conj is basically that you don't make use of it during an AA burn. Casting gargoyles with your twincast AA on is bad because it eats up twincast charges and doesn't result in two gargoyles. Conj. nukes aren't worth casting except on mobs immune to fire. Combine these two together and your AA burn has basically no conj. spells, so conj. specialization does 0 for you. It's then a no brainer why you don't go conj. when you raid.

Where conj. is decent is during normal soloing / moloing / duoing - ie the 15 mins during which your big hitter AAs are all down. Its effectiveness there depends on the group, because a group that kills very fast does make gargs not worth casting, in which case the only spell you're using for conj. is surge. But say you're there by yourself / duoing with another person and you're taking down mobs in 1-2 mins with mercs. Then conj. is the better option because you're casting surge, you're casting gargs, and when soloing you're casting the regular heal at times and that's conj., though the PR line is not which I think is just copy paste laziness from devs because all mage heals ought to be conj.

To make conj. viable in raid settings, it needs nukes that are castable in an AA burn. A conj. spear helps but it doesn't make up for the fact that strike of many, fickle fire, and bolt are all evoc, while conj. has one nuke that nobody uses and that's it. So a conj. with spear is just a spear, nothing else.

The bigger question is whether you want conj. to be viable in raid settings, and in the case that you do, what then is the difference between conj. and evoc. Giving conj. spells equivalents to evoc is just redundant work for devs, and in the case that conj. and evoc both get the job done, then it achieves nothing because there is no trade off.

One option that I thought of to keep conj. viable is to move rains to conj. This maintains the classic solo/molo/duo efficiency conj. vs raid burn evoc. trade-off because rains are all very efficient and they don't benefit from AA burns. So that makes evoc the best for raiding / high end grouping still, but lower tier grouping mages have the option to stay with conj and get far greater efficiency out of it casting rains and gargs and surges, which makes conj. vs. evoc a viable play style choice.

Another thing that has to be done is that those new pet summons they gave us, the 97 servant line, the other servant line, etc., need to be changed because as it stands they are useless. One cast of an imperious minion does ~55k damage and has a ridiculous cooldown the spells are toys and it's wasting conj. dmg slots. I know the coding limitations and why devs refuse to make new servant lines that scale with EM / AAs because they have to make one pet for every EM, etc. But balancing for people with 0 EM at level 100 is just not practical. The minions need to do ~110k damage at the minimum to be worth casting which requires you to switch out spells etc.

Otherwise conj. is just losing ground to evoc every expansion due to all the usable nukes being on evoc and conj. having nothing new after garg and surge.

^ good post. Thx for insight, mate.

The new rain is ridiculous ( ly great ) 40k base dmg. It is by FAR the most efficient combat spell we have, and also the most damaging, no idea why it was made evoc, just by virtue of its description ( summoning the rain ) you'd think it'd be conj. but I won't switch back to evoc ( for soloing ) just because of this spell... I've yet to do the math, but I still use alot of gargoyles, and though theyre not as efficient, ( rain does more dmg than a gargoyle on average, at half the mana cost ) I think Im still using more mana for conj because I'm still casting gargoyles ( theyre still much more efficient than spears )... regardless of which spell is most damaging or efficient, spec should reflect where the most mana is used.

One thing's for sure, Anyone not using rain is throwing their mana away. It is fully 400% more efficient than a spear, and is doing the same, or more dps, even with the longer casting time.

Rain: 1400 mana, 39k base dmg ( on one mob ) 52k base if you hit a 2nd mob to get the 4th strike )
Spear: 4000 mana, 24k base dmg

The difference in cast time is really negligible when u factor in refresh timer. it might be ten percent.

It's a really good reason to use the spell version of Malo on every mob too, the new rain is magic based. FOr 600 mana to malo, you're going to increase Rain damage 10%, which is 3900 Base dmg, if you only cast it ONCE, you should be using it twice in any fight longer than 15 seconds.

Are the new rains conj?, I rolled evoc because I was casting 3x more evoc than conj. But I do use both conj and evoc 15% augs.

Rains are evocation. They are the exception to magic nukes and conjuration. Surge of Arcanum however is conjuration rather than abjuration which still sounds weird to me.

It boils down to if we chose to make Conj viable it would essentially need to lock-out all of our Evoc spells while using Conj or vice versa. Otherwise it would be: Evoc Spear-Conj spear-Evoc of many-Conj of many. It would not bring about equality, it would merely make us more powerful if they were not locked out. If they were, it would be equality, but then we would need an Evoc garg pet. It would require more work then we would be willing to give for our class.

Why should rains be removed from Evoc crippling Evoc Mages? It isn't like SOE changed them, that is how they have been. Rains are viable in every type of play and should not be changed. And actually if you used Vapor Core, Rains are effected by that because it is a crit DMG modifier.

The way the game is setup Conj has its uses. It won't ever be as powerful as some would like merely because of our current spell choices. Or of the options SOE would give us to not have the situation play out above and give us too much DMG.

Now I am a level 92 conj-spec mage (have always been conj, never respeced). Spec Conj is 267, Spec Evoc is 210. I cast a lot of the evoc line, and occasional RS. Question is just how much extra mana is this costing me, and does it really matter when I solo? Unless I cast a lot of RS I rarely run low on mana. Perhaps I just am not burning the mobs down as fast as I could be...

You're not looking at a significant difference unless you're playing the class in an odd/unproductive way. So long as you're using some of our best spells ( surge of arcanum, servants, Blazing Orb, etc ) The difference will be small or nothing. If you decide to raid, you will want to switch to evocation.

I'll have to run the numbers again now that the levels have increased to 100, but whether you raid or not, it wasn't a big swing either way back at 95. I'm a raid mage and am still conj based. Will see if I have time to run the numbers in the next few days and post.