Druid Charm Soloing

[aresprophet]

Now that I think about it I'm not sure that non-humanoid mobs should even be able to dual wield when given weapons. I'll have to research that.

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

Pet tanking is a lot slower in the long run. Yes, you are going to kill two mobs, but if you just keep a single pet and aggro or fear kite your mana will never run dry. I waste about 500 mana on charm, haste, and chloro. Plus 4pp per pet for daggers. Then I don't use any more mana for 10-20 mins depending on how nice of a pet I have.

Do you see the major flaws here?

You're sitting at full mana, doing nothing to speed up your killing process. Utilizing more mana to kill more mobs = more exp. Who cares if you're less efficient? You only need to be just efficient enough. Too much efficiency is time wasted. So I use 1000 mana instead of 500 over the same period, and in return I get 3 kills instead of 2. Both of us are using less mana than we're medding back, but the difference is that I'm getting more exp than you are. I also can stay in the same place for hours without having to find a vendor to buy daggers. Travel time to and from your killing spot that could be spent killing more mobs is not more efficient. Also I realized you're using Chloroplast, which I don't have to waste 200 mana on.

Your pet dps goes up possible 100 percent from dual wield, and an additional 70 pct from haste. Then you add in the fact that fear or aggro kiting takes away all of the target's mitigation, which is fairly significant since most of these mobs are high level warriors/tanks.

Kiting also takes away all of the target's damage, which is fairly significant since mobs hit much harder than warriors of their level.

Here's the math on why charm-tanking works:

Let's say you have a mob that has 1000 hp and hits for 50 every 2.5 seconds, doing 20 DPS (quasi-realistic figures considering misses, mitigated hits, etc.). You charm this mob, give it dual wield for a 40% damage increase (which is about what mage and necro pets get from dual-wielding, if charmed pets are getting more that's a bug), haste it for 70%, and now it's doing roughly 2.5x that damage for 50 DPS.

With my method, put haste on the pet so it's doing 34 DPS and pit it against another mob doing 20 DPS; slightly less because of dodge and parry, so we'll go with 30 and 16 DPS. Add in the DS: 24 damage every 2.5 seconds is an average extra 10 DPS (rounding is easier) so the pet is doing about 40 and the target mob is still doing 16, for 56 DPS total. The target will die in 25 seconds, and the pet will take 480 damage. In 50 seconds the pet will kill 2 mobs and have 40 HP left, netting me 3 kills after I tag it with ES vambs or a 100 mana root (for speed). You'll have 3 kills in 60 seconds; mine's faster in this scenario.

Now for a real situation: TD Raptor numbers (average 116 damage hits, average 3500 HP) where mobs take much longer to kill each other and repop quickly relative to how long the kills take. I won't run the math on it because I can rely on experience. You can get 9 kills in 3 cycles by charm-tanking and then, because of one or two bad charms, settle for 6 on the 4th cycle to gain back the mana you lost from being inefficient; you've done 33 raptors in one hour (if I'm lucky I can keep going with 9-kill cycles for longer, netting even faster exp, but we'll be pragmatic). I've also done 6 in 15 minutes using fear, for 24 in an hour, with Charm lasting up to 20 minutes which it doesn't do anymore.

Your method is "more efficient" but I'm the one getting 35% more experience. I also don't ever need a charm to last more than about 3 minutes, allowing me to recast it less overall and keep mobs wailing on each other for a larger amount of time. Faster exp, less prone to bad luck, and no wasted time and bag space getting daggers for your pet.