New Druid Advice from the experts

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

People have mentioned that if you're gonna charm, may as well start as early as possible. At level 14 you can't easy remobilise to pick up PoTGs and C2s, and mobs don't last long. The mana spent on casting invis certainly adds up quickly.

Perhaps. I certainly agree that the mana-free IvA is most impactful at lower levels. If charm never broke early, and the pet and target always evenly matched, and you have space to chase down runners, you're only using Befriend Animal at 70 mana and IvA at 30 mana, so the ring would be saving you a huge 30%.

If you're trying to charm at the very earliest at 14, I've personally found there to be too many early charm breaks to be efficient. I've found 18-20 to be a reasonable starting point. But here's someone who found it effective:

Originally Posted by Wilshire [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We're going to have to disagree on the use of Befriend Animal, though. I have been having a decent amount of success using it to charm a high green or blue mob and then use that as a pet to attack an even con. I usually have to assist my pet win, and it ends up at 25% to half health when the fight ends. Then I hit hide, break the charm, and root-rot my (former pet). Gets me two xp kills pretty easily.

I'm not sure if this way of killing two mobs at once would be more mana-efficient than just rooting both of them and dotting though. I have to test that still.

Two things I notice: first, if you're fighting alongside the pet, the instant invis part of the ring doesn't matter so much. You can wait until the pet's at whatever low % you want to aim for and jump into the fight at that point. Second, the free invis part of the ring also doesn't matter if you're either Halfling or Wood Elf, the two most popular druid classes. Hide only has a 50% success rate but you'll have a couple chances to hit it if you're not terribly concerned with the exact mob health when you break. Sounds like he's using hide after the first mob dies, so then there's no timing impact. Even if you do try to break before the fight ends you can use a macro that first hides and then /targets you, then casts IvA. So if hide succeeds, the /target fails and you can duck out of the IvA.

Another tactic that I've never used, but I bet would be pretty effective, is bring a mob over to the guard by the bridge, letting him beat it down, then charm, take it elsewhere, break charm, and kill. Here again the timing isn't very important so it would be fine to use hide. If you're Human or Half Elf without hide than the free invis part of the ring will be very efficient in this situation.

I like starting to charm around 18-20. A lot of your targets will be Dark Stalkers and Gorge Hounds, each of which are 15-17. At that similar of a level you're going to have a lot of charm breaks. If you get a charm break at like 80% you should probably to re-charm, but around 40% it's probably more efficient not to recharm. At that point I prefer to cast a Thistles and melee it out - this is predicated on having a decent weapon but I think even a Wraith Bone Hammer would be sufficient here.

One reason I like melee here is because of how efficient Treeform is. After somewhere between one and four of this style of fight you'll end up around 20-30% each on health and mana. Now you head back to the bridge, Treeform, bind wounds to 50%, meditate. You'll end up with full health and mana around the same time. Treeform plus a re-sow is 70 mana, which is either three Light Healing for 75 mana and 75-100 hp or a little over one Healing for 60 mana and 85-100 hp. Treeform is 5 hp/tick, so at 20 ticks or 100 hp worth of damage it'll be more efficient than heals.

Even if you don't worry about charm breaking early, it's rare that the two mobs will be perfectly matched. Frequently you'll end up with one mob at 5-10% and the other at 40%. Lets say you root-rot the 40% while chasing the 5-10% down with melee. A gorge hound will have about 450 health, so 40% is around 180 damage. That'll be one or two Grasping Roots and one or two Stinging Swarms, or 100-200 mana. Add in the initial Befriend Animals and you're at 170-270 mana, so now the free IvA would only be 12-15% of the total mana expenditure instead of the ideal-case 30%.