Wizard Rain Spells

[Stonewallx39]

So the wiki says “resist gambling” but I follow Solusek Ro and so love to play with fire. Is anyone else using rain spells as a wizard? I’m 56 now and really like melting mobs with my best rain spell. 1935 dmg for 408 mana is nothing to sneeze at.

I understand there are some serious Z axis risks (I don’t use in PoFear) and the potential to pull aggro, but I’m a patient dark elf.

Any downsides I should be aware of or good reason to steer clear those wiser and more seasoned could share with me? Or can I continue to dabble with the dark side and melt giant’s faces off?

[DeathsSilkyMist]

I tried using https://wiki.project1999.com/Torrent_of_Poison for a while on my Shaman thinking the same thing (good mana to damage ratio). Not sure how consistent this is across rain spells and mobs, but I found that individual waves of the rain have a pretty good chance of being resisted. Enough so to cause concerns about drastic reductions in the damage per mana ratio. If you have one wave of the rain resisted on average, that is a big drop in damage per mana. This is just my own anecdotal experience, I did not do any parses. I did try the spell on quite a few mobs, including greens when I was farming high quality tundra kodiak pelts for the Thurg Ring Quests.

But I would try doing some tests on your end. Just make sure the mob doesn't run up to you, or accidentally target yourself. I have killed myself once or twice with Torrent of Poison lol.

[Stonewallx39]

I’m curious if there’s a mechanic where rain spells individual waves have a higher chance to resist than a static direct damage nuke. The rain spell I’m currently using http://wiki.project1999.com/Tears_of_Solusek has the same fire resist check as my main fire DD, both at -10. I definitely did notice the magic based rain seemed to resist individual waves more frequently then my fire dd, but that was a magic check of 0, so it’s possible that was the major factor.

I haven’t used the new fire rain as much but I’ll do some more testing and check back. I will say if a one wave resists the efficiency is pretty close to my current DD so it’s almost a hedge against a full on resist of dd with some upside when all three waves hit (which they usually do).

I’m totally a novice though and really appreciate the input and would love to hear from others.

[Sabin76]

I'll just copy this over from what I wrote on the Magician page:

Target-Based Area of Effect

Mages have two types of target-based AoE fire spells: "columns" and "rains". Both are limited to 4 "hits" which includes the target (this is in contrast to the player-based AoE spells, which have a max of 25 hits). Unfortunately, from classic until about three months into Velious, if your pet is within the AoE it will "use up" one of those hits (it will not do any damage, but it will count against the number of enemies that can be affected). Without any in-class snare, the use of these types of spells is already quite limited, but rain spells have several quirks that make them even worse than you might think at first glance. First off, your pet eating one of the hits every wave (and only being allowed to hit 4 things, total) means that you will only ever hit your target mob twice if doesn't move. The work-around for this is understanding that the AoE is centered on where the mob was when it was first cast (it doesn't follow the mob around). Because of this, if you can move the mob after the first wave such that your pet is out of the AoE, but the mob is still in, it will take the remaining two hits (the mob and your pet taking the first two). That said, there are two other drawbacks to using rains compared to other types of damage spells: they have an innate 20% resist chance, and they can never kill a mob (if the mob is below 10% health and/or it would land the killing blow, it is automatically resisted). Both of these things were around until well after the P99 timeline and so they will always be in effect here.

Underlined the parts relevant to Wizards.

The good news is that even with 1 resist, they are still better DPM than a comparable DD spell*.

*This statement is comparing Magician rains to DDs and may or may not actually reflect what is true for Wizards, though I suspect a similar relationship, which is why I brought it up.

[kingcowboy]

Rain spells are rough.

Maybe use them on velks spiders if you want to crawl. Can root two or three close together. However the mana saved by the dpm is often offset by the mana used during killing blows and rerooting.

I still haven’t found a good use for these.

[NPC]

On live rains were complete trash. The only time you could use them is in groups because root ALWAYS broke after ANY DD damage or rain damage. You could never use them in groups because the enchanter usually had to multiple mez mobs when pulling. So when you used a rain you would either break mez or agro to multiple mobs an the tanks could not get the agro off you in time to prevent the mobs killing you. Honestly you can tell the wizard is a half finished class because so many of their spells are just completely useless.
On green rains might be viable, cause green is not even close to live. Up is down, root is ungodly powerful, raptor quads give you 1-2% exp.
Its a customer server, so try everything 1st before you give up. Usually one type of damage will get resisted less often depending on the mob. For instance, a classic example, South Karana Treants eat fire spells, they resist ice an poison a ton. Wizards can land fire spells on red con treants, FYI. So try the different types of rain damage spells an see if one gets resisted less on average.

[Jimjam]

They’re fun, gives you extra positioning to think about too, which helps to stay engaged. You can place a corpse or drop an eye to use as an anchor point for your rain.

Casting two different rains and a nuke in quick succession delivers a lot of damage in little time.

[DMN]

It was assumed back in classic that any amount of direct damage would have at least a minimum chance to break root(I wasn't sure then if this was true, and not even sure now how it works on p99). Generally this scared wizards away from even bothering with them when soloing and when grouping the concerns were about breaking CC. In PvP they were also pretty much garbage because people could just run out of the area. I almost never saw anyone use them then and don't see anyone using them on P99 either.

I did sometimes see on the PvP servers several rain casting classes pre-casting them at a zone in point to load it up with rain spells so immediately when you zoned in you'd be getting nailed by a ton of damage. Prolly about the only "good" use I saw of them back then.

[Gwaihir]

Against mobs, rain dmg spells are nearly 100% resisted if a hit would result in a killshot.

[Jimjam]

Against mobs, rain dmg spells are nearly 100% resisted if a hit would result in a killshot.

This only seems to happen against higher level mobs though. I never had the issue until I started fighting seafuries (i think spectres kites could be finished off with rains)...

[NPC]

Something to add, the most efficient use of rain spells is to hit more than 1 mob. Rain spells will do 4 waves if its 2+ mobs. If you are only hitting 1 mob you will only get 3 waves.

[Naethyn]

https://wiki.project1999.com/Tears_of_Druzzil

Is the most mana efficient spell in the game outside of banes. The key is to ONLY hit one target. Rain spells resist exponentially the more targets they hit. If you really want them to work its vital that you only ever hit one target.

[Petel]

A few notes about rains. Some have already been said, other have not.
1. The number of targets hit depends on the number of mobs. (a) If there's one target, it will be hit by 3 waves. (b) If there are two targets, they both will be hit by 2 waves, resulting in 4 times to base damage. (c) If there are 3 or more mobs, only 3 mobs will be hit by the rain.
2. A rain spell can not kill a mob and if it's a blowing spell it will not land.
3. You can be hit by your own rain spells, and so in contrast to 2 above, a rain spell can land a death blow ...on you! (Yes, I died to my own rain spell).
4. For the same reason (3) above, rain spells are not good for belly caster mobs, simply because you will hit yourself.

The resist rate seems to be around 20-25%. I've parsed a long log file and on my wizard and these are the numbers I've seen. 67 resists, 213 lands. This is 67/(67+213) which is 23.9%.

Now the numbers. I'm comparing Tears of Prexus, our best wizard rain, at 20% resist rate with Ice Spear of Solist, a super efficient wizard DPM. Ice spear of Solist is rarely resisted on a "regular" non-ice resistant mob.
* Ice Spear of Solist does 1200 damage at 300 mana which is 4 DPM.
* Tears of Prexus does 690 damage per wave at 437 mana.

So for a single target, and taking into account a resist rate of 20% you get a DPM of 690*3/437*.8=3.79 for Tears of Prexus. Still less than Ice Spear of Solisst.

On two targets, and assuming you could orient them next to each other (doable with roots), you get a DMP of 690*4/437*.8=5.05. Notice 2 waves hit 2 targets. This is the only scenario where Tears outdo regular DD that I've found.

HTH,

- Petel

[Snaggles]

Layering a rain and a DD properly you can also significantly increase burst for grouping situations. That muddy 20-40% hp range is where a lot of bad things happen, CH and gate, so having a final rain wave land with your big DD can put that issue to rest.

Rains aren’t trustworthy and can be annoying with CC but they sure are fun to gamble with. Hell, you get 3x the vfx per cast!

Note: The resist check stuff is very interesting. Thanks for that. Notable tho a 52 rain vs 60 DD spell should be taken into consideration. It might have uses 8 levels later but likely has lost a lot of its function.

[Jimjam]

Layering a rain and a DD properly you can also significantly increase burst for grouping situations. That muddy 20-40% hp range is where a lot of bad things happen, CH and gate, so having a final rain wave land with your big DD can put that issue to rest.

Honestly, the funnest thing being a wizard in mid 50s is being super conservative with mana, just doing a few roots and stuns, to build up a big excess of mana, then on a pull telling the tank “spam aggro” and just spam out 2 rains and a nuke, causing like 5k damage in the space of 11 seconds

[Syndar.SZ]

Wizzards don't use rains because they should be to busy using pillars and quad kiting. Pillars are rarely resisted and damage 4 targets at time. The best pillar is 950 damage to 4 targets. Agro 4 mobs with your flux staff, group them, snare them and pillar them down. Med up.

[Stonewallx39]

This only seems to happen against higher level mobs though. I never had the issue until I started fighting seafuries (i think spectres kites could be finished off with rains)...

Yeah I was dabbling during farming type raids (arena, plate house, dragon necropolis) but didn’t know about the high resist rate and inability to land a killing blow (what a weird...bug?). I’ve quaffed from 16 to 58 now just need to get over that last hump.