Multiple roles?

Anyone have any tips for learning how to play your additional roles? I'm not talking about how to buy the roles or how to create the specs. I've got all that down. I'm talking about how to play them.

As a specific example, awhile back (pre 1.1), I found a build (think is was a necrolock? doesn't reallly matter) I wanted to give a shot. I set it all up... and here I was faced with 40 or more skills and no clue as to what was good and what was filler amongst them. As to trying to figure out any sort of rotation... well, if you don't know which skills you want in your rotation, you're sure not going to figure out an order for them. I went out to a mid-level area (where things wouldn't die too fast but still wouldn't be able to kill me very quickly) and started trying to kill stuff... only to not have a clue what I was doing. Didn't take long at all till I was frustrated and switching back to my old standby solo role.

I "get" the old school way of doing it... you have a Chloromancer and you want to try a Pyromancer, you roll an alt and learn your skills one a time as you level. That way you figure out what's good and what's not so good as you go. But I'm just hopelessly lost when it's all dumped into my lap at once, as it were.

Any suggestions?

Edit: left out a couple of words

» Edited on: 2011-04-18 13:09:27

I know what you mean. I just bought a 4th role and slotted it with a Marksman soul. I was able to fill the soul but, after getting tons of skills, I just have a hard time figuring out which skills to use. I guess, the best thing to do is ask people who are using that soul/build. I know I'm going to ask Xhao about his Marksman the next time I see him on vent.

There really is no surefire way besides asking other players of your class for tips and ideas. I'd also look on the Mage forums to see if there's some helpful information there. Other than that, you're pretty much left to trial and error. For a DPS class, it's often helpful to use a combat parser and the training dummies in Sanctum to see if what you're doing is putting out adequate DPS.

Thanks, y'all! I'm not sure why I've so far been so vested in one single build (chlorolock), when normally I'm an incurable altaholic. :-) I did add a DPS (necrolock) build yesterday, and even managed to get the Xanadu parser up and running. Which brings up a couple of related questions: which combat dummies are considered representative of T1 bosses, and what sort of DPS is considered adequate for T1? From an entirely subjective point of view, things did seem to be dying much more quickly... but I sure missed having an out-of-combat way to quickly top off after I had bitten off a bit more than I could comfortably chew. So much so that I traded out the point I had in Empty the Crypts for Shadow Life. Though it did occur to me that, as easy as it is to swap specs, if I'm too bruised to start the next battle, I could just switch to chloro and heal myself up, then switch back. :-)

The other thing to remember is that you can reset the roles multiple times and the cost does not change. I have spent alot of cash experimenting with different setups withing a role. You can try a setup, fine what does and does not work, then rebuild the spec with those lessons learned.

One idea would be to not spend your points all at once in the new role, so you don't suddenly have 40 new skills to deal with. Equip your souls for the new role, then go out and beat on some low level monsters with the base skills. Then spend a few points, say 5, and go practice some more on low level monsters, learning how the new skills fit in. You can move up to harder monsters as you add points and integrate in the use of the new skills.

Good idea, Galrois! If nothing else, that should allow me to gain some confidence in my understanding of a build and how it works. I really like knowing when to reach into my bag of tricks for those situational spells that don't fit into your "rotation," but are important to a well-played build nonetheless.

When it comes to damage builds Teth, you might have to invest in several types depending on your playstyle. For instance, if you are soloing daily quests or rifts, then you will need some sort of survivability. However, in a Tier 1/Tier 2/Raid Dungeons, you have no such need of things like that and you'd be better off putting those points in increasing your DPS. Then there is the question of utility over DPS. Do you want to spec into things that will help the group more like Crowd Control at the expense of some DPS loss or do you wawnt to go full out damage? Those type of questions can only really be answered by trial and error unfortunately. As for the practice dummies, the ones in the back closest to the PvP barracks area are the Boss dummies. Those are the ones you want to practice on.

I use excel and inkscape to design rotations. First, I either look up or test power coefficents on a dummy/easy mob: Check your (spell/attack) power, the damage the ability should do according to the tooltip, and the damage it actually does. Power coefficient = (RealDamage - BaseDamage)/Power So I currently have 249 spell power, Lightning Strike says it will do 180 damage (average). In reality it did 315 damage to a gloom bat, so (315-180)/249 = 0.54 = 54% of spell power is applied. I then have a spreadsheet, with Name, Base Damage, Cast time (GCD for instants to prevent division by 0), cooldown, duration, mana/energy, charge, power coefficent, current spell/attack power, real damage, crit %, crit damage, average damage, DPS, DPS couting cooldown, damage per mana/energy. The only things you actually need to input are base damage, cast time, cooldown, mana, charge, coefficent, current spell power, crit damage multiplier, and crit chance. Everything else is easy to calculate. I then find the highest DPS abilities, as well as any abilities I want to keep active (say, electrify on my stormcaller) and in inkscape, create bars of a set length for cast time, cooldown, and duration for each spell/ability. I then arrange the abilities to keep buffs/debuffs up, and use dps abilities to maximize dps. This becomes my rotation. An example of the resulting graphic is at http://img231.imageshack.us/i/roguerotationdesigntest.png/ from my rogue.

EEK! Maths! That sounds like a wonderful skill-set to have, but pretty much the only time I spreadsheet is when I change the bed clothes. ;-) Seriously, thanks for the info, SAI, and I know that kind of thing is fun for some people... but I don't tend to be one of them. I'm still trying to figure out what my necrolock is doing wrong, 'cause she only seems to get maybe 50 more dps or so than my chlorolock. But I'm not really ready to resort to such drastic measures, quite yet. ;-) I'll "trial and error" it some more, until I do get frustrated enough to follow your advice, I suppose. :-D

Spreadsheets are what I do when I'm feeling lazy. When I played EVE I used an SQL database and some python code to get the info I needed... I'll see if I can get some power coefficents tables made after 1.2 hits. My rogue alt is 50, my mage main is only 25, but I can at least get a reasonable number of rogue abilities done. Pretty much all the math is in calculating these (though it's not hard. rd bd - sp /) and thus having premade tables saves a lot of time and effort.