Why not make every skill as an aura, no need for pushing any button at all 
I mentioned before, maybe if they had longer cool downs on the skills, then I would use them more judiciously. Being able to cast them infinitely they may as well be an aura.
At higher levels, you won’t run out of mana, you regen faster. Sure you don’t want to recast often on the same enemies, but new ones join.
I only use Bloody Pox and Curse of Frailty on Bosses, so what I do on Blood of Dreeg? I replace my character’s Boots and Leggings to GREEN which has a High Resistance on Poison and Acid so I don’t keep pressing Blood of Dreeg every second in the game so instead I use it as a healing skill.
Weird that you don’t want the 12% physical resist.
and not to mention a free +100% resist, makes overcapping the other ones quite easy
I do want it though, but I’m really lazy keeping it active every second. I don’t tend to face tank tons of mobs and I’m always aware of every corners so that I won’t get trapped, I keep moving around most of the time in the game.
every second? the duration is 30 seconds and cooldown is 15 seconds
Ok, every 30 seconds.
Ok, so what should i do differently?
Currently, I go into a battle with new opponents and just press 1234 for the four debuffs and usually press 5 for the heal since it gives other bonuses besides healing.
I see a new group, and press 12345. Then repeat for the next.
I’m not putting any thought in it, because it doesn’t seem there needs to be. It gets tedious fast.
Other classes, I put thought into how I use the skills. Whether others put thought into skills of other classes or not is not the issue here. Yes, I know they are useful, which is why I have them. It’s about executing them, not what they do.
What am I doing wrong? Is there a better way of using those 4 debuffs that I need to use some sort of strategy? Help me to make these skills something I need to plan for and interesting. I want to make the conjurer, occultist in particular, more fun so I use them.
Is there something particularly unique about Occultist you derive enjoyment from that you can’t find a suitable substitute for in another mastery?
If not, then it wouldn’t be such a tragedy to just avoid the mastery altogether. I mean you still have like 21 other class combos available with Occultist.
Sounds like casting overkill for a bleed melee build. You can certainly spam all the buttons for any class you want but you’re not really utilizing the skills efficiently that way.
Also I’d ask why you are using Devouring Swarm and Curse of Frailty? You really only need one for the bleed debuff. You could choose one and spend those points you saved elsewhere, Wendigo Totem+BloodPact would be a good option.
The same for CoF vs Vines. You’re doubling up on move speed penalty debuffs which tends to minimize your point allocation efficiency. Personally I’d go either Devouring Swarm+Vines or CoF+Wendigo Totem+BloodPact. Feral Hunger is another good option.
In general it just seems like too many overlapping debuffs that are doing similar things and don’t stack anyway. Casting CoF on top of Devouring Swarm only gives you a -51% Bleeding Resistance Value (based on 10/10 on CoF) so the -Bleed Resistance on Swarm doesn’t add anything.
As Mamba said, Blood of Dreeg is also best used situationally because of the heal component. Not sure where you are in progress but if you’re hitting BoD early then you can run into trouble with some hard hitters when the CD is up but you need a heal. I mean you still tend to press it a lot but you shouldn’t be hitting it the first thing in the fight. I know people would prefer to have BoD as an aura but I’m in the other camp of preferring it to have utility beyond an aura. I tend to like the dual purpose abilities and, in my own personal experience, have a League of Legends type play style to skills.
That’s a good question. I have played all the character combinations over the years, but hardly play occult, so I want to play it more.
One reason I want to play it, is I have the set that gives me an extra hellhound and I want to try that.
I also like solael’s witchfire, which works well with the hellhound and the Solael’s witchblade devotion, plus it helps blood pact from wendigo totem.
I like how the bleeding debuffs work well with shaman (which i’m doing with the conjurer) for a bleeding melee build. I like how wendigo totem + sigil work together to heal me.
The trouble is with those 4 debuffs for conjurer, I don’t have to think. When that happens, my mind isn’t engaged in what I’m doing. No matter how much I like other aspects of the characters, it becomes a boring character, and that’s the problem. Especially when 5 of the 10 buttons I press at every battle are just mindless pressings of buttons.
I want to play it, so I want to find out how to make those 4 buffs more engaging.
I’ll give 2 examples of characters I find engaging:
- Death knight. With only 5 buttons, plus 2 for its pets (from deathstalker relic and bloodknight set, not raise skeleton or blightfiend), I can focus on making a few buttons work well. Quality over quantity. I have warcry, overguard, siphon souls, hungering maw (from the shield), and mark of torment.
I position myself where I can get the most enemies when I use siphon souls and warcry. I use overguard only for an emergency. Hungering maw and mark of torment I only use on bosses and heroes.
It’s not rocket science, but I have to think and plan how I use them. That keeps me engaged. Not one of those am I spamming, or would spam even if they made the cooldowns 0.
- A more extreme example is my non-class character I beat ultimate vanilla with, but still need to figure out how to beat the final AoM boss with.
Every skill is carefully chosen, because without classes the only skills I can get come from equipment and components. I need to pick the ones that will work with my devotions, which is a challenge because often I’ll find I have a devotion skill and not enough skills from equipment to tie it to.
You also can’t spam them because you have a very limited mana pool and have to use them carefully.
I depend on each skill to survive. One mistake and I can be insta-killed.
When I fought Loghorrean with it, it took many setups before I could figure out how to survive him and his minions while still doing enough damage to kill him.
Every skill took thought for planning and execution. These 4 debuffs, they are just mindless. They are more suited for an aura.
To the OP. Have you though about getting a mechanical macro keyboard, like a long-term g170+? with it, I’m able to use 8 skills, with 3 buttons, and two are toggled to always be in affect
Just one example of a build I play.
Easiest way to manage skills.
That’s a great idea.
There’s another game that lets you chain multiple skills on the same button. It’d be a nice feature to add to this game.
exactly what you’re askin for
AND THIS is just plain wrong these debuffs effects do in fact stack as they are considered separate. a combo of CoF and Swarm is -90% bleed resist and the MS slow on CoF is a -50% pentalty while vines slow is slows target by X% both of which stack while being mitigated by the targets slow resist
Oh thanks with the hotkey, I like to focus on game play and not mashing buttons.