These skills are a mystery to me. They literally REQUIRE that you facetank- yet they also require that you caster offhand… their windup time is so slow that it’s impossible to use them on the go-
Just re-tried Obliteration on my caster who’s sitting on 1600% cold damage, with as much survivability as i can come up with (very good resists, 11k hp, 2200+ DA), and not only is it EXTREMELY dangerous to attempt to use it, but the damage is LESS than 1 point in Savagery and spamming sky shards + melee.
which is just silly. The beam abilities prevent you from interrupting them with complementary spellcasting because you have reboot the beam afterwards- so it seems to me they just do not work at all.
has anyone been able to pull them off and facetank successfully or get them to actually hurt enough to somehow be worth it?
Strange, I’d seen screenshots with 100k sheet DPS AARs somewhere around here. Don’t think any other character could dream about such number.
Personally I don’t play AAR anymore because it’s too clunky, too much focus on energy management and necessity of being able to facetank (since some enemies are pretty much unkiteable).
AAR has a really high DPS (i have a sorcerer with a simple Callidor set with 100k dps) so, with a bit of kiting, you should be able to deal a fair bit of damage from afar.
You can eve face tank bosses for a limited time with Mirror of erectodes (3 sec invunerability), even more if you have blast shield at high levels (+4 sec).
[talking about aether AAR with agrivix or iskandra’s set here]
Yes AAR can reach over 100k dps, however three things make it barely usable:
1] Energy consumption. You can do 100k+ dps… for a couple of seconds, then you run out.
2] Inability to kite. That is due to many factors - the delay between the moment you start casting to the moment the beam reaches your enemy, the slow turn rate of AAR (used to be even worse) and the fact that you need to stand still. Good luck killing highly mobile targets.
3] Single target only.
Yes if you are allowed to stand still and can be bothered to drink royal jelly energy regen pot every 15 minutes AAR build COULD work.
I’m waiting for AAR to be changed so it pierces enemies… mmm yeah!
I find OFF definitely helps with keeping ray casters relatively safe, and since every ray deals at least some fire damage the debuff is pretty useful too. Procs from devotions and equipment are also pretty important, especially those with a low cooldown - Elemental Seekers are a good match for Obliteration, and the stun they provide when exploding helps keeps enemies off your back a bit too. Not having to spend your skill points on an entire line of skills (as is required for AAR) also means you have plenty spare to put elsewhere to boost your damage/defenses even further.
anyone saying kite with AAR/Oblit hasn’t used either imo. these abilities are impossible to kite with, the ramp up and aim time is more than enough for all but the absolute slowest mobs in the game to close the distance.
i’m not real sure how they would fix it but in its current state these abilities cannot justify being single target, very slow to use, and insane mana cost.
A few fixes would be greatly increased casting speed, or ability to cast while moving, AOE splash effect on hit, or lancing through mobs and hitting them at a much greater distance in a straight line. To justify the mana cost beam abilities need to be MUCH more effective and much less suicidal to use.
Also DROP the caster offhand restriction, especially considering facetanking is currently required :rolleyes:
I do well with the chaos flavored ray. 91k at lv68
Energy regen is only a problem until 35-40 or so. Just use guns w/ fire strike until your energy use evens out. Then move all but a few points out of fire strike.
Kiting is just about impossible, but you are forced to do it with certain bosses. MAX YOUR FREEZE BOMB. The most underrated skill in the game. Especially with fire aoes.
Actually lately, when I run into one of these bosses, I seem to have better luck waiting until I ding to the next level, then suicide rush. Much more efficient and quicker.
When I want single target, I attach Abom Might.
When I want aoe, I attach Fissure (or any one of a hundred ranged aoe devotion spells - Fissure feels like BiS right now because of the duration and heavy use of the freeze aoe, but it’s probably not)
It really is a huge bag of fun, but there is one very obvious very annoying downside (circled at the bottom).
Getting all that from gear? That looks like the black flame set which means he’s tanking from inside the invincibility circle. I mean that’s awesome but most of us don’t have the new helms yet.
Yes wast majority of OA is from gear and yes that’s BF set
Edit: Fabius is straight up facetank and spank, you have enough energy to drop him, Mos needs few seconds of rest sometimes, to replenish energy. And ritual circle doesn’t give you invincibility, but it is handy especially -20% skill energy cost
