Sharpedge’s “Almost Everything” CW Guide:(Mod 8 PVE)
NOTE: I will NOT be providing people with the ability to comment on, view or edit the unpublished version of this document, to all of those of you who are requesting it. If you feel it is important that you have access, mail me in game or on the official forums and motivate your reason as to why you feel that you need access.
Last updated: 19/04/2016
Table of Contents
Preface:
Section 1: Theory
Powers:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Daily Powers:
At Wills:
Feats:
Heroic Feats:
Oppressor Feats:
Thaumaturge Feats:
Renegade Feats:
Stat Theory:
Offensive Stats:
Power vs Crit:
Arp:
Recovery:
Defensive stats:
HP vs Defence:
Lifesteal:
Deflect vs Defence:
Survivability:
Race:
Section 2: Build Development
Where does my damage come from?
Which build should I play?
Boons for all builds:
Sharandar:
Dread Ring:
Icewind Dale:
Tyranny of the Dragons:
Elemental Evil:
Underdark:
The Maze Engine:
Strongholds:
Ability Scores:
Encounters:
MoF:
SS:
Section 3: Builds
SS Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
SS Renegade:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Oppressor:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Renegade:
Feats:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
Section 4: Gearing your wizard
New player Levelling Guide:
MoF Power Points:
SS Power Points:
Level 70 Basic Gear:
How to progress:
Gearing at 70:
Where to allocate 4th power points:
Weapon Enchantments:
Vorpal:
Feytouched:
Plaguefire:
Dread:
Other Weapon enchantments:
Trans Lightning:
Armour Enchantments:
Offense Slots:
Defence Slots:
Overload Enchantments:
Artifact Choices:
Companions:
Augment:
Bonding Proccer:
Active Companions
Companion Gear:
The High Vizier Set:
Mounts:
Stat bonus:
Zen Mounts:
BoE Mounts:
Insignias:
Insignia Set Bonuses:
Which Insignia Bonuses do I Recommend?
Insignia Stat Bonuses:
Section 5: Appendices
Appendix 1: Further Reading:
Appendix 2: Other Builds I have tested:
Appendix 3: An example of a Glass Cannon Build:
Appendix 4: An example of a BiS support MoF:
Appendix 5: What my CW looks like:
Appendix 6: Abbreviations
Appendix 7: Astral Diamond Generation
Generating rAD
Salvage
Other Sources of rAD
Earning AD
Notes:
Smolder:
The Behaviour of DoTs:
Acknowledgements:
Conclusion:
Change Log:
Preface:
At the start of mod 6, I had intended to write a budget CW guide. A guide that focused on how to build a decent CW, but on a cheap budget. However, with mod 6, came the paladin and this idea fell to the wayside after the first time I saw a devotion paladin in a random elol. I fell in love with that yellow aura that I later discovered to be bond of virtue, which then side-tracked me from CW, until late mod 7 where the glamour of the devo pally started wearing off and I once again picked up with my CW. Once I started playing my CW again fully as my main character, I intended to finish off on my unfinished project. However, looking at the guides and level of theory that was reaching the forums and MMO minds I realised that rather than just a budget guide, a complete CW guide was sorely missing. Chem left in mod 5 and since then, no major undertakings of those proportions have occurred. At first, I was hesitant to undertake such an objective, but come the winter festival, I received a very large number of respec tokens which allowed me to do a lot of testing on the live server. This had the side effect that a lot of people got to see those builds that they believed would never work on live and I started receiving requests for either a build, or a complete guide. So, as a result, this guide is an attempt to recreate something similar to chem’s guide of mod 4/5, it is not as complete as chem’s guide was and it never will be, there are some aspects of the game where my knowledge is lacking and unless someone wants to help me fill in those gaps, I will leave those portions unsaid. With all of this being said, I hope those of you who read this come away with 1 or 2 things that you did not know. Also, to anyone who has not read one of my guides before, be warned, there is math on its way :p
Section 1: TheoryAnything that deals Arcane Damage is highlighted in purple, anything that deals Cold damage is highlighted in blue, anything that deals Fire damage is highlighted in red, anything that deals Lightning damage is highlighted brown.
Powers:
Encounters:
Chill Strike:
Effect: Hits a single target , adds a stack of chill and briefly stuns the target.
Mastery: it is now splash (target limit 5).
Notes: Single target fights it’s a good option. Many people level with it as it is good for soloing. However, in dungeons it doesn’t really have the duration to be effective. A drawback of it is that the animation is about slow, and can be hard to cancel, leading to getting smashed. An additional benefit of this power is it counts as a control power on tab, applying 3 stacks of HV. Whilst its animation may be slow, if you chain it with other encounter powers, it does allow you to get both off quicker, but by itself it is long.
Entangling Force:
Effect: Chokes a single target and lifts them off the ground.
Mastery: Pulls mobs together (target limit 5), gain a stack of arcane mastery per mob.
When to use: When you are fighting a small group of mobs, one of them is dangerous, and you want to increase team DPS.
Notes: While the gather effect is nice for team DPS, it has no stun and a low target limit. Its usefulness is only situational. Alacrity (oppressor feat) has a chance to reduce the cooldown of this by 0.5 seconds per rank when you deal damage, however, I do not recommend taking the feat as it is a poor choice.
Conduit of Ice:
Effect: Puts an icy wind around the target, dealing damage over time to surrounding targets (1 primary, 5 secondary). Ticks six times.
Mastery: The AOE is larger, each tick adds chill, now can affect one primary and 6 secondary targets.
When to use: Basically all the time.
Notes: Conduit on tab is marvelous, the chill adds control and if MoF it refreshes smolder. There is a visual bug where if you use a vorpal conduit of ice will do additional hits for 0 damage, it is purely a visual bug and is in no way hurting your dps.
Repel:
Effect: Pushes a monster back.
Mastery: Now Pushes 5 mobs back.
When to use: In PVE never (hopefully), well, maybe if pushing things off ledges ever becomes a thing again.
Shield:
Effect: The first hit to a freshly summoned Shield will have its damage reduced by 80%. The shield will then go down and you will take full damage for a few moments. The shield takes eight seconds of not being hit to refresh. While it is refreshing incoming damage is reduced by 2.5%. If the shield is up and you are attacked by multiple enemies simultaneously all of the hits will be reduced by 50%. When you pulse the shield (dismiss it) it will do damage to and repel up to 5 enemies near you. Doing this will grant a second arcane stack that lasts 10 seconds. Summoning the shield and pulsing it count as casting two different encounter spells for proc purposes. Shield damage is buffed by Evocation.
Mastery: When Placed in the Tab Slot: If Shield is placed in the tab slot it becomes significantly more effective. A freshly summoned tabbed shield will absorb 80% of the damage from an incoming hit. The shield will then shrink. The next hit it you take will be reduced by about 50% and the shield will disappear. While the shield is recharging you will take 5% less damage. The shield takes 8 seconds of not being hit to return to the smaller 40% shield, and another 8 seconds of not being hit to return to full size.
When to use: When soloing dungeons.
Notes: When the shield is summoned you will be granted a stack of arcane mastery that lasts 10 seconds (much longer than most arcane stacks).
Fanning the Flame (Master of Flame):
Effect: A fire nuke spell with a DoT added. Applies Smolder when on tab.
Mastery: Is AoE on tab (target limit 8)
When to use: Single target fights, maybe on mastery where the pulls are small.
Notes: Gathering flame causes nearby enemies to take fire damage, followed by fanned flame which causes the main target to take additional fire damage and ending off with Final flame which causes smolder to spread to nearby enemies upon death. It is no substitute however for conduit of ice. Furthermore, fanning the flame counts as an external damage source as it procs abilities like abyss. Drifting embers (thaum feat) means that targets affected may add smolder to nearby targets when hit. Also, this ability can proc the death slaad if on tab. Also, this ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Sudden Storm (Spellstorm):
Effect: A chain of lightning hitting all monsters in a line
Mastery: The effect now chains, doing additional damage. Since this is bugged, you can buff the mobs with it, applying things like EoTS to them.
Notes: half of the time sudden storm isn’t hitting anything at all even though it should be, I am not sure of the exact cause of the bug but this bug detracts from this skill overall making an excellent skill only a good one. Sudden Storm on mastery procs abyss of chaos. Chilling Control (oppressor feat) adds chill stacks to the first hit of sudden storm, helping you control with it. Sudden storm is a viable alternative to disintegrate, however if you use it, I also recommend dropping focused wizardry. Another viable option when using sudden storm in a thaumaturge build is to drop icy veins, take chilling control and then put the 5 points that would go into icy veins into frigid winds. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Icy Terrain:
Effect: Creates a patch of ice that adds chill and damages mobs that walk over it. It ticks often, lasts ten seconds or so, and has no target limit.
Mastery: You can now throw icy terrain to a target circle.
Notes: This should always be on your bar. It is amazing control, it procs everything, feats like assailing force and warped magics and weapon enchants like plague fire often, and it has no target limit. In addition, a very short cast time means you can cast while kiting. The only downside is that it does no damage to frozen opponents ☹ It is also important to note that at the time of writing this, icy terrain is bugged and is considered a single target encounter power and thus if storm spell procs off of it, it gains the benefit from focused wizardry. Furthermore, evocation does not increase the damage of icy terrain. Also, it is impossible to have more than 1 icy terrain of your own on the ground at once, casting it a second time causes the first to disappear. Alacrity, an oppressor feat, has a chance to reduce the cooldown of IT by 0.5 seconds per rank when you deal damage.
Ray of Enfeeblement:
Effect: Increases damage to the target by 20%, also has a DoT.
Mastery: You can now cast it twice.
When to use: Single target fights.
Notes: This spell should NEVER be on mastery. The DoT’s do not stack, and you have to wait the cool down for BOTH charges, hence you get double the debuff, but only one DoT at first, then it’s just the same as not on mastery. It’s a waste. The only exception to this is if you are trying to burst a boss down faster than it takes both buffs to expire. Also, if you have the feat masterful arcane theft, it increases the damage dealt by RoE by 15% against targets afflicted with chill and by 6% per stack of arcane mastery.
Icy Rays:
Effect: Nuke spell that can hit two targets. More damage if you target the same monster. About the same as chill strike, though it only immobilizes the targets and does not stun.
Mastery: Damage increased by 50%
When to use: Single target fights.
Notes: A spell that was once really good for single target but was replaced by disintegrate. Also note that when feated icy rays deals 25% more damage when used on the same target twice and if used on 2 different targets, it reduces the cooldown by 5 seconds.
Steal Time:
Effect: Hits mobs for five ticks each, each tick applying slow, final tick hits harder and applies stun.
Mastery: Now creates combat advantage and increases run speed for team.
When to use: All the time except single target fights.
Notes: Steal time is incredible, it does good damage, has a long stun, and procs all your feats and abilities. In addition, if you are wearing the HV set and you interrupt it before the third hit by dodging, it places steal time on a 4 second cooldown but applies 2 stacks, potentially allowing you to continuously reapply the set bonus with just 1 ability. The Renegade feat masterful arcane theft increases the damage dealt by 15% to targets afflicted with chill and by 6% for each stack of arcane mastery.
Shard of the Endless Avalanche:
Effect: Summons a big ball, which can be pushed (twice). The ball will slam and prone (one target at a time), then finally explode (after ten seconds or when you hit two targets at once), which deals additional damage and prones. The target limit on the explosion is 10, but can prone more than 10.
Mastery: You can now summon and move the shard wherever you want.
When to use: When you are with a poor group and you are initiating combat with CC.
Notes: although it is not terrible, there are quite simply better choices. Disintegrate to reduce your cooldowns, Fanning the flame if you want (and are MoF), sudden storm (if you are SS), the only time this is good is in massive groups of enemies that you want to CC which is very much a thing of the past. It is also worth noting that transcended master (thaum feat) increases its damage by 25%.
Disintegrate:
Effect: Hits a single opponent for a large amount of damage, however, bear in mind the tooltip damage from this encounter power is higher than the damage it actually does.
Mastery: Basically does nothing, the idea is that if the opponent has less than 480% (+40% per rank) of your weapon damage as HP, disintegrate will instantly kill them. The issue is, if your opponent has less than that amount of HP, disintegrate will kill them regardless as its damage as a skill is higher than that amount.
Notes: Disintegrate has a really low cooldown and has high single target damage, making it exceptionally good even in AoE fights in PVE. This is because of spell twisting, you can spam this, continually gain stacks of spell twisting and keep your encounters off of cooldown. All in all, I highly recommend the use of this encounter.
Imprisonment:
Effect: Stun a target for up to 15 seconds. The target cannot take damage while stunned. The issue with this spell is that while you are stunning the target you cannot move as breaking it ends the animation.
Mastery: Reduces the cooldown
Notes: This ability is bad, whilst casting it you are vulnerable to anything that is not the target and attempting to do anything during the encounter will cause the stun to end. This encounter effectively immobilizes you so that you can immobilize a single opponent.
Class Features:
For the damage and debuff orientated class features I am providing ACT logs to provide some additional information to anyone interested on how these features work. For these logs, I did not use focused wizardry, I only had 1 class feature active (whichever 1 I was testing) and I had the offhand bonus for that feature. For the test, I had no summoned companion and no weapon enchantment, however, I did have the wererat thief, the death slaad, the owlbear cub and the lightfoot thief active to see how their bonuses interact with class features, as well as greater black dragon glyphs. Also note that for some of the tests, the game glitched out and only recorded part of test in 1 combat log and the rest in another, so referring to the dps column is best. Here are the base logs of the char I used for testing, for MoF and SS, for you to compare with:
SS:
Rotation: CoI (tab), Steal time, Disintegrate, Icy Terrain.
MoF:
Rotation: FtF (tab), CoI, Disintegrate, Icy Terrain
Orb of Imposition:
Effect: Increases the duration of control effects by 20%
Notes: With the control resistance present in mod 6 and onward, the benefit provided by control bonus is so marginal that it is not worth it, so I do not recommend using this. Glacial movement (an oppressor feat) increases it from 20% to 24%.
Arcane Presence:
Effect: Arcane stacks now apply to cold spells, also +5% recharge speed increase per rank.
Notes: Were you any other class looking at this class feature, you would be thrilled, 5 arcane stacks*0.03*1.33 =19.95% increased dps in addition to 20% recharge speed increase. However, we are CW’s, we have a monopoly on all the best class features in the game and this simply doesn’t compare to the better ones. Furthermore, recharge speed increase is almost meaningless for us as CW’s because of spell twisting.
Example of Arcane Presence’s Boost:
Chilling Presence:
Effect: increases damage by 8% per chill stack. And 96% if the target is frozen
Notes: Meet the best class feature in the game. There isn’t another class feature that provides a bigger damage boost for any class then this one. Furthermore, if you have chilling advantage (renegade feat) then you gain 2% crit chance per rank of the feat.
Example of Chilling Presence’s Boost:
Evocation:
Effect: Increases AoE power damage by 20%
Notes: Similar to chilling presence, this is also a great feature. However, we do have better options.
Example of Evocation’s Boost:
Combustive Action (Master of Flame):
Effect: Every time you kill a monster affected by smolder or rimefire smolder you get action points. Also smolder and fire do 24% more damage and anyone hitting the debuffed target do additional damage as well.
When to use: Rarely, for certain support builds.
Notes: Combustive Action is hard to fit into a build because it is always replacing something with high utility. It is either replacing critical conflagration, meaning you need to manually apply smolder, or it replaces chilling presence, greatly reducing your damage, or it replaces swath. My advice is if you want to use it, fit it into a support build and replace crit conflag, then manually apply smolder with ftf on tab+ FI. Also, the damage buff from combustive applies to all sources of damage and not just smolder. Finally, when you apply combustive action to the enemies, it also applies to yourself.
Example of Combustive Action’s Boost:
Storm Fury (Spellstorm):
Effect: Whenever you are under 50% hit points and you get hit you deal a substantial amount of damage to nearby enemies. There is also an internal cooldown. However, the damage is quite good.
When to use: Probably never.
Critical Conflagration (Master of Flame):
Effect: Critical hits now apply smolder, also add 20% critical severity.
When to use: When you rushing through content so quickly that stopping to apply smolder manually is slowing you down. As PVE is so easy and you kill stuff so quickly, this is most of the time and as of such it is a feature I recommend.
Notes: If you use both this and swath, smolder’s damage is only buffed by 1 or the other and not both at once.
Example of Critical Conflagration’s Boost:
Storm Spell (Spellstorm):
Effect: On critical hits there is a 30% chance to additionally do shock damage to the enemies
When to use: All the time.
Notes: Storm spell makes up 20-25% of your dps, meaning it is a 30% dps increase, putting it ahead of all other class features except chilling presence. Also, it is important to note it does not crit, but the offhand bonus for it does. Also, if storm spell procs off an AoE, it counts as an AoE and gets the downside of focused wizardry but if it procs off a single target, it counts as a single target and gets the positive.
Example of Storm Spell’s Boost:
Swath of Destruction (Master of Flame):
Effect: 60% more smolder damage and targets take 20% more damage
Notes: When to use: Every time you are not forced out of it, which if you are building a MoF for dps is most of the time with the exception of boss fights. Swath is really an incredible dps boost - your personal DPS goes up at least 10% and team DPS goes up 20%. The problem is that outside of boss fights, you cannot reliably keep up smolder without critical conflagration as fights are so darn short that by the time you have applied smolder with something else, everything is dead. In boss fights, you can afford to use it.
Example of Swath of Destruction’s Boost:
Eye of the Storm (Spellstorm):
Effect: When not on cooldown, the first hit to in combat grants you 8 seconds of 100% crit chance. After that 8 seconds there is a 20 second cooldown.
When to use: Not anymore
Notes: EoTS used to be amazing with the old curves when crit was capped to sensible amounts, with the new stat curves however, you can build up ridiculous amounts of crit essentially nullifying this class feature.
Frost Wave:
Effect: When you cast a daily power, you stun opponents for 2 seconds +1 second*rank. The problem is, CW dailies have CC built into them and also that the control power of this passive is shortened drastically by monster’s control resistance. All in all, I don’t recommend using this.
When to use: Never
Arcane Power Field:
Effect: Do roughly 94 damage to everything around you when you cast a daily.
When to use: If Chilling Presence is the best class feature, this is the worst, so never.
Daily Powers:
Ice Storm:
Effect: A burst effect, add chill stacks and knockback. Hits very hard (target limit 5).
When to use: When you have small groups of control resistant opponents, that won’t be blasted back by the knockback.
Notes: The knockback normally is bad for the party, so this daily has very limited uses, but is very nice in those situations, for example, we used it in etos at the last boss at the start of mod 6.
Arcane Singularity:
Effect: Gathers mobs up into a singularity in the sky, then drops them. Effect is somewhat slow (target limit 8)
When to use: Never if MoF, there are some situations it can find use as SS.
Oppressive Force:
Effect: Creates an oppressive force, ticks multiple times, stuns all the mobs, no target limit
When to use: Anytime there are more than 8 mobs.
Notes: OF is good for a number of reasons, 1 is its no target limit making it good in massive pulls, 2 is it ticks multiple times, allowing it to do silly stuff with storm spell and 3 is its fast cast time, allowing it to be used as a panic button in sketchy situations. It does have the downside of knocking back monsters though. To use this properly, you should not use it inside of monster packs and should rather use it from the side to push them all in the same direction.
Ice Knife:
Effect: A single target nuke, adds chill stacks, prone effect
When to use: Any single target fight.
Notes: Ice Knife has the highest damage of any daily, but only affects one target. If you are facing 2-5 targets, ice storm is better, if it’s 6-8 targets, Furious immolation is better, and if it’s over 8 targets the Oppressive Force.
Furious Immolation (Master of Flame):
Effect: Gathers all the mobs together, quickly. Does good damage and adds smolder (target limit 8).
When to use: Any dungeon or situation where you are under the target limit.
Notes: Really an amazing daily, as it gathers the mobs together and maxes team DPS. The damage is pretty good and smolder on everything - so this is an excellent option for almost all dungeons. Oppressive force has the weakness of spreading the mobs out, so if you don’t have target limit issues, FI is the best option. This ability can proc the death slaad. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Maelstrom of Chaos (Spellstorm):
Effect: Creates a large pillar of lightning, doing moderate damage with no target limit in a small area. While casting you have high damage resistance and control immunity
When to use: The main reason for maelstrom is the control immunity. The damage is less than your other dailies
Notes: You can always cast this daily, even when under the influence of madness in prophecy of madness or when CCed by valindra’s hands. The renegade feat unrestrained Chaos causes maelstrom to have a chance to apply 6 stacks of chill to foes or 5 stacks of arcane mastery to you every second for 5 seconds. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
At Wills:
Magic Missile:
Effect: High single target, no AoE damage, builds arcane stacks on the third hit and doesn’t add chill. Also, it roots you while casting and you cannot remain as mobile as you can with Ray of Frost.
Ray of Frost:
Effect: Ray of frost is a single target, relatively low DPS at will, however the benefit of RoF is that it builds chill stacks very quickly and freezes monsters. Furthermore, you can bunny hop and cast which is why this is my preferred secondary at will.
When to use: When there is a single monster that can be frozen.
Notes: The Oppressor feat Glacial Movement gives a 10% chance per rank to apply another stack of chill on each hit.
Chilling Cloud:
Effect: This is pretty much the most basic CW at will, quick to cast, however, like all CW at wills, it has the disadvantage that spell twisting makes casting them very awkward.
Notes: If you take Frozen Power Transfer, you have to use this at will in order to gain the damage bonus. The same is true for energy recovery, which has a 25% chance to grant 5% of your max HP as temporary hitpoints. In all honesty, I do not recommend taking either of those feats.
Scorching Burst (Master of Flame):
Effect: Scorching Burst is a chargeable AOE at will that hits up to five targets, has a 30% chance to build arcane stacks if you have the feat for it, and starts a smolder dot. While theoretically it sounds great, you do have to stand there, charge and aim. There is a visual bug that causes the size of the AoE to appear to scale with the size of the monster targeted, however the AoE’s actual size does not change. I personally dislike it because my playstyle involves a lot of moving.
When to use: To start smolder and arcane stacks as you engage a group, then switch back to chilling cloud.
Storm Pillar (Spellstorm):
Effect: You charge your powers up, then release forming a storm pillar, hitting multiple targets.
Notes: The damage and the AoE are quite nice, and it’s useful to work into your rotation. If you take destructive wizardry, you also take this as you will gain 5% additional damage for 20 seconds. You can also cast it with no targets around, which is useful for proccing chaotic buffs without opponent , which also makes it great to proc spell twisting between fights to reduce the cooldowns.
Feats:Heroic Feats:
CW’s have good Heroic feats, which is why human is a potentially good choice for CW’s, because the loss in crit from losing 2 points in CHA may be justified in the gain from feats.
Controlling Action: this feat gives you a 10% bonus to your AP gain bonus while controlling targets. So say your CW has +35% ap gain, that means you get a whole 3.5% ap gain while hitting a controlled target. As it is, this feat is completely worthless.
Weapon Master: 3% crit chance is just too good to pass up.
Toughness: Toughness is good because controlling action is bad, really simple isn’t it?
Fight On: This does not actually reduce cooldowns by 10% Rather it works as follows: CD/(1+Recharge speed + Fight on). Where CD is the spell cooldown, the recharge speed is how much you have without fight on and then fight on is the bonus from fight on. So say you already have 35% recharge, so that is 100/135. Now with 5 points it becomes 100/145, which is NOT a 10% decrease. So this feat is less worthless than Controlling Action, but still not good.
Battlewise: if you get threat, you freeze/stun/kill. If you can’t do that, you kite. In fact, managing aggro is very productive as a CW. This is a waste
Wizard’s Wrath: AOE powers do 3 % more damage. Since almost everything you do is AOE - this is a great feat.
Blighting Power: Cold powers deal 6% more damage to targets affected by chill.
Arcane Enhancement: Arcane powers deal 3% more damage.
Focused Wizardry: Really good for MoF as it boosts the damage of smolder, optional for SS. Also, it is worth noting that if you are using abyss of chaos focused wizardry boosts its damage as well.
Learned Spellcaster: This increases your damage based on your intelligence multiplier. Say you have 24 points in intelligence here, for a 14% damage boost. This would give you a 1.14% damage bonus per point. For the purposes of building personal dps, this is the best option after focused wizardry.
Prestidigitation: It has potential uses for endgame BiS builds where you are trying to increase your party’s dps through the bonus, outside of those it is no good.
Oppressor Feats:
Severe Reaction: Upon taking damage there is a chance to repel the attacker and restore some of your stamina. Many people dislike this feat because of the repel part of this feat, however, I actually like this as I noticed that due to the monsters high control resistance in t2 dungeons, the repel is not noticeable and you still get the stamina regen.
Bitter Cold: Targets take 5% more damage when affected by chill. If you are going oppressor, this is 1 of the better feats and I recommend taking it.
Chilling Control (Spellstorm): This feat causes sudden storm to apply 5 stacks of chill. It used to be good before mod 6 but now I actually consider it bad because icy veins exists and icy veins does the same thing, but for all your encounters, rendering this useless.
Brisk Teleport: After teleporting, your run speed is increased by 10%. It isn’t a very useful feat, but it is still better than Chilling Control.
Twisting Immolation (Master of Flame): Adds a stun effect to FI and increases the duration of the combustive action class feature. The stun is not that significant, as monsters in t2’s have high control resistance, however if you use combustive action it is worth considering taking this as the debuff from combustive action is quite significant.
Icy Veins: This feat is amazing. Firstly, it provides you with high burst, allowing you to instantly freeze packs of monsters with icy terrain and get off a 96% damage boosted OF at the start of combat. Secondly, it behaves weirdly on certain encounters like icy terrain, bugging out the ICD on freezes and continually refreezing opponents. Thirdly, it increases your survivability by making freeze a more reliable way of CCing opponents. When choosing between icy veins and abyss of chaos as a thaum, it comes down to personal preference. For more burst damage, icy veins is always better because you get that immediate damage boost from chilling presence, however, in extended fights where you can build up stacks of chill and sustain them, then abyss of chaos becomes better because it actually provides damage rather than just scales up the speed at which you gain the most benefit from CP.
Frigid Winds: When a target unfreezes, frigid winds is applied, boosting the parties damage against that target by 10%. This is one of the better oppressor feats, with the drawback that it provides no bonuses against control immune targets like bosses.
Cold Infusion: Causes opponents that are chilled to deal 5% less damage and is completely useless. With the damage mitigation tools available to DC, GF and OP this feat is completely unnecessary and I do not recommend taking it at all.
Glacial Movement: Increases the effectiveness of orb of imposition by 20%, changing orb to providing 25/30/35/40% control bonus rather than 5/10/15/20%, which is a bug as it should provide 25/50/75/100% control bonus.
Alacrity: There is a chance to Reduce the cooldowns of Icy Terrain and Entangling Force by 0.5 seconds*rank. I personally don’t find much utility from this skill and do not recommend investing more than 2 points into it at most.
Controlled Momentum: Nearby Allies do 5% more damage when you control something. Although it is one of the better oppressor feats, it is worth taking into consideration how inferior this feat is to feats on similar positions in the thaum and renegade feat paths.
Shatter Strike: When you Freeze a target, you apply shatter. When you damage a target which is affected by shatter you have a chance to stun them and deal 5% of their max HP (up to 300% of your weapon damage) as damage to them. This bonus does not scale with buffs and makes up for ~1% of your dps, making it not particularly impressive. In addition, if you use a control power against a control immune target, it deals your weapon damage as an additional hit. Once again, that weapon damage does not scale. Finally, it increases the duration of chill on targets by 2.5 seconds.
Thaumaturge Feats:
Tempest Magic: Tempest magic boosts your damage to targets under 30% by 5%, resulting in a 1.5% DPS increase. In my opinion this feat is good, but not great. It is better than any T2 options though.
Malevolent Surge: When you kill something (very often), you do 5% more damage. This uptime is actually very high, so this is close to a 5% DPS boost. This is the better of the T1 options
Snap Freeze: increases damage by 10% for cold based damage sources against targets without chill, so it only applies on the first hit upon entering combat and is otherwise useless.
Drifting Embers (Master of Flame): when you damage something affected by fanning the flames, there is a chance it spreads smolder to nearby targets. While it theoretically sounds good, in reality most things die far too fast for this to be useful. Then when you are in a situation where there are enough monsters to make this feat useful, you will be using other spells anyway. Hence, this is relatively useless.
Destructive Wizardry (Spellstorm): Gain 5% increased damage after casting a fully charged Storm Pillar. This is really a playstyle choice. If you use it properly, it can be very, very good and certainly better than Tempest magic. However, this means you must work Storm Pillar into your rotation like a 5th encounter. Now, if this is your playstyle, take destructive wizardry and be happy. However, if it’s not, then you might be wasting your points.
Spell Twisting: This is the feat that replaces recovery for you as a CW. What it does is after you use an encounter power, you gain a stack of spell twisting, which stacks up to 3 times. When you use an at will, it then consumes all your stacks of spell twisting and reduces your cooldowns by 0.1*number of stacks. This means that if we compare this to recovery we find the following:
Recharge speed increase works as follows: CD/(1+recharge speed increase)
Spell twisting works as follows: 0.7*CD
To correlate the 2, spell twisting is worth [1+(recharge speed)]/0.7-(1+recharge speed)
Which means assuming you got 0 recharge speed increase, at absolute worst, spell twisting is worth 42% recharge speed increase, or 8400 recovery. If you have any more recharge speed increase then 0, it is worth a whole lot more. Also, note that spell twisting does not reduce the cooldowns of shield, icy rays on tab, shard of endless avalanche and ray of enfeeblement on tab.
Elemental Reinforcement: When you use a cold, fire, lightning or arcane encounter power it adds 1 stack of elemental reinforcement for each element used. Each stack multiplies your damage by 1.05 making this a feat worth using. It is worth noting that the fire bonus from elemental empowerment is currently not provided from using fanning the flame.
Far Spell: Increases the range of your single target powers. The problem is, in pve a CW needs to be close to his opposition, making this feat useless.
Frozen Power Transfer: The third strike of chilling cloud grants you 5% bonus damage for every target (up to 3) it hits for 20 seconds. This feat is good in theory; the problem is in practice you cannot keep up the bonus. For this to be good, you need to get off the third cast of chilling cloud and with the addition of spell twisting, most of the time you do not. It should also be noted that this feat does not currently work as intended, and cannot stack more than once.
Transcendent Master: Increases the damage of Shard of the Endless Avalanche and Icy Rays, also decreases the cooldown of Icy Rays. I do not recommend using this as it means you would have to use 2 suboptimal encounter powers to take advantage of it.
Elemental Empowerment: This feat puts a dot when you hit things with cold or arcane damage. The dot makes up for 6% of my damage and whilst not being amazing, is better than any alternatives except FPT assuming you can somehow use it. Also, this counts as a single target power and is boosted by focused wizardry.
Assailing Force: Damaging foes has a chance to grant you Assailant, which is an extra hit on your next encounter power for 15% of the target’s max HP. This feat is an 8-12% dps increase, making it an obvious choice if you are going thaum. It is worth noting that when assailant says it is unresistable, it means it is unresistable. You can kill Ethraniev Marrowslake during her invulnerability phase with Assailant. Like Elemental Empowerment, this counts as single target and is boosted by focused wizardry.
Renegade Feats:
Critical Power: Grants AP on critical hits. This is an excellent renegade feat and with the mod 6 stat curves you will proc it approximately once every 10 seconds, restoring 5% AP every 10 seconds. Definitely take this if you going ren.
Reaper’s Touch: this feat boosts your at will damage and the procs from that at will damage. Now, at wills are only a small portion of your damage, but it is still decent.
Energy Recovery: The third strike of Chilling Cloud has a chance to grant you a small amount of temp HP. The HP this feat provides is so marginal that this feat is meaningless.
Unrestrained Chaos (Spellstorm): Maelstrom of Chaos now adds chill. Considering that maelstrom is really situational and you will hardly ever use it, I don’t recommend this feat.
Arcane Burst (Master of Flame): Scorching burst has a chance of generating more arcane stacks. Scorching burst is a sub-par at will overall. I dislike it because it significantly slows down your clear speed as you have to stand and cast. Due to this, I would not take the feat either.
Uncertain Allegiance: When you land a critical hit, you grant up to 5% crit to all allies for 10 seconds. It’s a great feat all around unless you run in really highly geared groups who are crit capped. Definitely a good choice.
Abyss of Chaos: When you hit an opponent with an encounter power you mark them with abyss of chaos and if an ally (either a companion or member of your party) hits that target, abyss is consumed and you deal 60% of your weapon damage as an additional hit. I find this feat makes up 6% of my damage when I take it, so it is definitely worth considering. Also, it is worth noting this procs off of the lightning weapon enchantment, the bilethorn weapon enchantment and its damage is boosted by focused wizardry.
Phantasmal Destruction: Increased Crit Severity while in combat advantage. A great feat overall, the damage boost is very nice, however, if you have high crit severity it is worth bearing in mind that the damage boost it provides depends very much on how much crit sev you have and the more you have, the worse this is.
Nightmare Wizardry: Crit has a chance of giving combat advantage for the whole team. This is the most important feat in the tree, with the exception of chaos magic, giving your team 15% bonus damage, at least. The uptime varies, but if you crit substantially, it will give you 50% or more. 7.5% team dps is huge and too good to pass up.
Masterful Arcane Theft: A feat with nice damage boost to steal time and Ray of Enfeeblement. It’s not that great of a feat now as so much of our damage is from passive sources though and very little is from steal time.
Chilling Advantage: 10% more crit chance when chilling presence is slotted. This feat is a must if you are going renegade, providing a sizeable damage boost particularly because storm spell or critical conflag proc off crits. Furthermore, as chilling presence is the best class feature in the game, you will almost always be using chilling presence anyhow unless you playing a pure support build.
Chaos Magic: You get one of 3 buffs, 30% more party damage and lifesteal; bonus arp (which at the time of this writing is not working) and crit; or bonus regen. It is also worth noting that sometimes you get more than 1 buff, I do not know the condition for that happening.
Stat Theory:
There are 2 types of stats in NWO, which I will label the primary stats and the secondary stats. Primary stats are stats with no diminishing returns on the stats itself, and secondary stats are stats that have heavy diminishing returns. Please note that for some of the stat comparisons I have provided an excel spreadsheet to make them easier which can be accessed here:
https://goo.gl/AKGczE
Another useful tool for character optimisation is:
https://goo.gl/K6GJFA
The primary stats look like this: (taken from the guide by @beatannier)
Where investing 399.795~~~400 into the stat yields 1% return. These stats include the following:
Critical Strike
Defence
Deflect
Lifesteal
Recovery (note this is 200:1% curve for recharge speed and 400:1% for AP gain, however, it is still a linear curve)
Movement
Regeneration
Power
The secondary stats are stats that you do not acquire from the majority of your gear but you rather get from things like reinforcement kits and artefacts.
They do have diminishing returns and look like this:
Where the formula for the graph for character level 70 is the following:
Meaning that these stats are effectively capped at 11.36%, however you hit the stats soft cap at roughly 1000 points of investment. These stats include the following:
Combat Advantage Bonus
Action Point Gain
Control Bonus
Control Resistance
Incoming healing Bonus
AoE Resistance
Companion Influence
Gold Gain
Lastly, armour penetration is not linear, but for all functional purposes in pve it might as well be and gives close to 1:100 stats up to 60% resistance ignored which is as high as you need to go.
Offensive Stats:
The 3 main offensive stats in Neverwinter are power, crit and recovery. Secondary offensive stats are Combat advantage bonus and AP gain.
Power vs Crit:
When considering power vs crit, you need to understand how both stats work:
Power is a multiplier that boosts your damage by 1+(Power/40000).
Which means that damage dealt by power = hit*(1+(Power/40000).
Crit increases your damage according to the following formula:
Damage = (1+(Total crit Severity))*Crit Chance*hit+(1-Crit Chance)*hit
Together they increase your damage by:
Damage = hit*(1+(Power/40000)*( (1+(Total crit Severity))*Crit Chance+(1-Crit Chance))
What is also important to note is that the damage bonus from power diminishes in effectiveness the more power you have, in other words, to calculate how much investing 1 point in power will boost your dps, you need to look at (1+new damage bonus)/(1+old damage bonus) to work out how much power is actually boosting your dps by. For a more in depth comparison, a tool for comparing power and crit is available in the spreadsheet listed above.
Boosting power is normally the correct way to go unless you are playing a crit based build with high crit severity.
Arp:Until you have more RI than NPC’s have damage resistance, arp is your biggest boost to damage. This is primarily because armour penetration as a stat follows a curve of 1:100 as opposed to 1:400, but to demonstrate this fully, I will illustrate this with an example:
Let us take the last bit before you have 60% resistance ignored:
So, you have 59% resistance ignored and let us say no power at all and are wondering whether it is better to put 100 points into power or 100 points into arp. The reason we are assuming you have no power at all is because this is when you will get the best returns on power, where putting 1 point in power will actually boost your dps by 1%.
So, you take a theoretical hit at an opponent who has 60% dr, the hits damage before dr is 10000
The following happens:
With 100 points in power:
10000*1.0025*0.99 = 9924.75
With 100 points in arp:
10000*1.00*1.00 = 10000
This illustrates that even in the best case scenario for power, arp will always win out until you have capped your arp to match your opponent's damage resistance.
Recovery:
Recovery reduces your cooldowns and boosts your action point gain. Although the stat itself is linear and works by providing 1% recharge speed increase for every 200 points and 400:1% AP gain, the way it reduces your cooldowns is not. The way it works is as follows:
New CD = Old CD/(1+Recharge Speed Increase)
Which means that at low levels of recharge speed increase, it reduces your cooldowns quite quickly but the higher you get, the less it reduces your cooldowns. Since mod 6, the introduction of spell twisting has made recovery effectively an unnecessary stat and as of such I do not recommend investing in it unless you intend to drop spell twisting (which I do not recommend either)
Defensive stats:
There are 5 main defensive stats in Neverwinter, defence, hitpoints, deflect, regeneration and lifesteal. There are also other defensive stats like stamina regeneration, AoE Resistance and control resistance. Here is how to compare them:
HP vs Defence:
To compare HP vs defence, you need to compare the effective HP pools, in other words, how much damage an opponent has to do to you in 1 hit to kill you. This can be calculated by doing the following:
HP/(1-Damage resistance) = current effective HP pool
HP/(1-Damage Resistance – additional defence) = effective HP with added defense
HP/(1-Damage Resistance)+additional HP = effective HP total with added hitpoints
The biggest number you get as a solution is the best direction to go.
Lifesteal:
Lifesteal is a defensive tool that acts a method to keep you up and keep you going, as a CW you want between 10-20% lifesteal, any more would be overkill.
Deflect vs Defence:
This is where things become interesting, many CW’s outright ignore deflect and in pve that may be the right way to go, however, it depends entirely on your opponent’s armour penetration. Say for example an opponent has 20% resistance ignored and you have 10% damage resistance, he currently ignores all of your defence and he will continue to ignore all of your defence until you have more than 20% damage resistance. For most cases, monsters armour penetration is less than 10% and so your defense is more effective, the exceptions being bosses like lostmauth, assassin drakes (appear to have the highest resistance ignored in the game, ignore 80% of your DR) and phase spiders.
Firstly, you need to calculate how much damage resistance you actually have, this is done by taking your damage resistance, subtracting your opponents ARP then if the total is less than 0 write the answer as 0 and if it is greater than 0.8 write your answer as 0.8. This gives you your actual DR, or ADR as I will call it.
Damage Mitigated =
Damage Taken - Damage Taken*(1-ADR)*((1-Deflect Severity)*Deflect Chance+(1-Deflect Chance))
Survivability:
So, after taking into account all of the offensive and defensive stats, you can then create a single formula that calculates a character’s general “survivability”. Bear in mind, in reality this number is meaningless as a rating, however, it allows you to effectively compare 1 character to another in a much more efficient manner than gearscore, item level or any other of Cryptic’s ratings. I will explain this in a number of steps:
Effective HP1 (EHP1) (Before Lifesteal or Deflect) =
(Base HP + HP Bonuses)/(1 - Damage Resistance + Opponent Armour Penetration) The limit on this formula is that the denominator is never smaller than 0.2.
Effective HP2 (EHP2) (Before Lifesteal) =
EHP1/(1 - Deflect Severity)*Deflect Chance + EHP1*(1-Deflect Chance)
Effective Healing (EH) =
DPS*Lifesteal Severity/Lifesteal Consistency Factor
Lifesteal Consistency Factor (LSCF) =
(1-Lifesteal Chance)^Hits Per Second
Survivability =
EHP2*EH
The larger the number, the better your survivability potentially is. The numbers are arbitrary, but it gives you a method to more accurately compare 1 build to another in terms of how well it will survive. For instance, if the number is 3x larger for 1 person than another, they will be roughly 3x more durable.
Race:
So, when looking for a Race for CW, what are you looking for? You are looking for a combination of 2 things, firstly a good racial bonus and secondly a good attribute point bonus. For CW that leaves us with the following good choices:
Human: You can get 2 int points, 3% more defense and 3 more heroic feats. As CW’s have good heroic feats on the final tier (prestidigitation, focused wizardry and learned spellcaster) human is there for a good choice.
Moon Elf: +2 int, +2 cha, 1% stamina, 1% AP gain and CC resist, definitely a decent choice.
Sun Elf: +2 int, +2 charisma, 2% AP gain, CC resist. Maybe slightly better than Moon elf, but we are splitting hairs. These guys are excellent options as well.
Tiefling: +2 int, +2 charisma, 5% more damage to weak monsters, chance to debuff the mobs - great stats great bonuses and my personal choice.
Dragonborn: +2 int, +2 cha, more crit, more power, more incoming healing - Dragonborn are excellent at everything, except for the fact that they look downright ugly and can’t wear the hexbane hood which is the best looking CW helm in the game.
Drow: Please take note this is a very niche choice. If you are going to go MoF Renegade and only intend to play as a supporter you can take drow for the darkfire bonus which provides a 5% increase to party damage effectiveness per stack of darkfire. I do not recommend going this route myself, as it means that if you intend to respect to a non-supporter build you will also have to change your race, but the choice is up to you. An additional note, darkfire can proc off abyss of chaos and so if you run drow with abyss+lightning you can proc darkfire rapidly on targets and sometimes multiproc it, I have seen 4x the darkfire buff on a single target from 1 Drow.
Example of darkfire, 120% effectiveness (darkfire was the only debuff I was applying at the time):
Section 2: Build Development
Build development is something unique to each person, it is about how you develop your character, which feats you choose, what path you wish to aim for and how you like to play. With that being said, I can give you some guidance on this from my experience with playing CW. Take note, I do not recommend playing a SS Oppressor at all and so I have not included a bit on them. Whilst I do not recommend a MoF Oppressor, I feel it is not as terrible is an SS Oppressor can be.
Where does my damage come from?
This may seem like an odd statement to put into a guide, but it is a very important question to ask yourself. Where does your damage, as class X (in this case CW) primarily come from. Identifying this key aspect allows you to understand what you should try not to sacrifice when building your character, unless you are trying to pigeonhole yourself into some niche build or to try something out of the box for pure personal enjoyment. For CW, your damage Primarily comes from Class Features and gear. Why is this? Well, this is because the CW as a class has some very powerful class features, in fact, I would argue, the CW class has the most powerful class features out of any class in the game. Chilling presence is the single biggest damage boost of any class feature, normally boosting your damage by 36% or 48% (depending on the rank you have) and then sometimes boosting your damage by 72% or 96% (when your target is frozen). Those numbers are very high and it is why Chilling presence is almost guaranteed a must for any CW build (unless you are playing some support build). Storm spell or Critical Conflagration is the next biggest damage boost. Now, you may wonder why I include Crit Conflag here, considering evocation and swath on paper provide a bigger boost, but you have to consider that for most MoF’s, the only reliable way to put smolder on a target is with Crit Conflag and so the damage boost provided by smolder, may as well come from crit conflag. Storm spell is a 17-30% damage increase for a CW, depending on a number of factors, also making it a highly effective Class Feature. Finally, the wheel of elements boosts your damage by ~10-15%. For comparison, all the feats in thaum boost your damage by approximately 50%, so 1 class feature (chilling presence) is equivalent to all the feats in thaum. This shows that for a CW, your gear and your class features are where the majority of your damage comes from.
Which build should I play?
The build you play is entirely your choice, you may play one of the ones I suggest, or one completely different. With that being said, this section describes each of the builds I have provided here in terms of what it excels at so that if you want to decide to play one of mine, you have background information on what each one excels at. The SS Thaum build is purely a damage build, if you want to hit hard with massive burst damage, attempting to play the role of a striker, then this is the build to go with. The SS ren build is a mix of a party buffer and a damage dealer, focusing on balancing party damage with personal damage, it’s a jack of all trades and master of none build. The MoF Ren build is a pure support build, it has low personal damage, but high group utility. If you want to fill the role of a support who makes other damage dealers feel powerful, this is the way to do so. Finally, the MoF thaum is the build with the highest durability. It is the most tanky out of all of my builds, with many procs and dots constantly triggering lifesteal at the expense of losing some damage. MoF thaum is the build I currently play, as it I am currently spending time trying to solo t2 dungeons, however, what works for me may not work for you.
Boons for all builds:
Due to how boons are only of a binary nature (i.e, 1 offensive stat vs 1 defensive stat) I have not included them in the Theory section and am rather including them in the build development section, suggesting the boon choices I prefer, obviously, if you want to stack stats more defensively in some areas or more offensively in others, it is entirely your choice.
Sharandar:
Dread Ring:
Icewind Dale:
It is important to note that if you truly want to take advantage of cool resolve, you should consider not using an elven battle and not stacking stamina gain, then deliberately keeping your stamina low and using elvish fury from sharandar. I do not opt to go this route as I prefer to have a tankier CW.
Tyranny of the Dragons:
Note I have not completed the tyranny of the dragon’s boons, however, if I did, I would take 2 more points in dragon’s thirst for life steal. I prefer the additional survivability over the crit severity. Also, please note that the boon actually grants 4/5/6% lifesteal, not 3/4/5%. It is also worth noting that another viable option is putting 1 point into control bonus, 1 point into critical severity and 1 point into lifesteal.
Elemental Evil:
Underdark:
The Maze Engine:
Strongholds:
Strongholds boons, unlike other boons, can be changed at whim depending on what you need. I would recommend taking the power boon for offense and the defence boon for defence, but lifesteal is also a good choice.
Ability Scores:
Unless you are human or drow, I recommend rolling for 16 int and 16 cha. Unless you are human or drow, I recommend putting 2 points into int and 2 points into cha and if you are those 2 then I recommend 2 points in int for human and +2 dex and +2 cha for drow.
Alternatively, if you are going for a pure support MoF build you can put points into int and wisdom, completely forsaking crit for the extra recovery, I do not recommend going this route.
Encounters:
I recommend using the following encounter powers:
MoF:
CoI on tab, Icy Terrain, Steal Time and Disintegrate. Other alternatives include using ray of enfeeblement for single target boss fights, shield on tab for soloing dungeons and Chill strike on tab if you are wearing HV to apply the set bonus. You can also use fanning the flame on tab and conduit of ice instead of disintegrate and if you choose to do this, if you are thaum you should put points into frozen power transfer instead of elemental empowerment as you will have sufficient downtime on cooldowns to take advantage of FPT. A final potential rotation to try out is CoI (tab), FtF, IT, Disintegrate.
SS:
CoI on tab, Icy Terrain, Steal Time and Disintegrate. Alternatives include Sudden Storm, Ray of enfeeblement for single target fights, shield on tab for solo dungeon attempts and Chill Strike for applying HV stacks.
Section 3: Builds
This section covers how I would build particular feat paths and serves to provide examples.
SS Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Spell Storm (+ Offhand bonus) and Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
You don’t have nightmare wizardry, which means you need to consciously position yourself for combat advantage, it won’t just happen for free. Yes, I know this is a pain and it is something the renegade does not have to do, but if you manage to do it, you will do more damage than renegade. Also, I would only advise going this route if you are around 3k ilvl, because before then most of the time the support you provide following one of the other builds is more likely to outweigh the loss of personal dps. I consider a thaum build an expensive endgame option and not something I would look into until you can achieve high crit without uncertain allegiance, chilling presence + chaotic nexus. Once you have bonding stones rank 10 and higher, this is probably an option you can start considering.
SS Renegade:
Feats:
Class Features:
Spell Storm (+ offhand bonus) + Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
An advantage of going Renegade is most of the time you have combat advantage, which means that you can take advantage of CA to a degree that the other builds cannot. Combat advantage pets are definitely the way to go. However, you do not have icy veins, which means you will have to be far more careful then you would otherwise have to be in dungeons, you cannot instant freeze everything and use the opportunity to kill everything before it regains mobility.
Your damage looks something like this:
MoF Oppressor:
Feats:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration (+ Offhand Bonus) + Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
I would not recommend going the oppressor route but if you decide to go it, then this is how I would do it. You do lose quite a bit of damage by going this route and it isn’t really made up by anything, with that being said, if you choose to go this way, it is entirely your own choice.
MoF Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration (+ Offhand Bonus) + Chilling Presence or optional Swath (With offhand bonus) + CP.
Advice for the build:
I advise using crit conflag + CP to maximise your damage potential. In theory, if you use scorching burst as a secondary at will you can achieve higher damage potential using swath + CP, however I find that usually you just cannot keep up smolder without critical conflagration reliably and as of such I do not recommend going that route. It is good in theory; it fails in practise with the exception being boss fights. A little note for this build, if you want to gimp yourself for dungeons but make yourself look good on dragon heralds (or any other single target fight), you can take abyss of chaos instead of icy veins and transcended master instead of elemental empowerment and then use icy rays (tab), CoI, disintegrate, ftf as well as swath + chilling presence. You apply smolder at the start of the fight using the MoF at will scorching and then use magic missile as your primary at will.
Here is a picture of what you can expect your damage distribution to look like if you go this route:
MoF Renegade:
Feats:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration + Swath of Destruction (+ Offhand Bonus) or Swath (+ offhand bonus) + Combustive Action.
Advice for the build:
This is a pure support build, you sacrifice a lot of damage going this route and I only recommend going this route if you either are playing CW as an alt and don’t intend to invest much into it, but still want it to provide a significant boost to any party it is in, or if you spend most of your time playing with premade teams and are trying to as a team kill things as quickly as possible. I do not recommend this build if you are playing with random groups or poor players, as the loss in personal damage is only worthwhile if it is being compensated by boosting the damage of some other very good dps.
Section 4: Gearing your wizard
New player Levelling Guide:
This section is for new players to the game who need help with some more basic things. Firstly, at level level 21 you will get a quest called artifact recovery, for that quest, the best choice is the lantern of revelation, I recommend getting that. Secondly, I recommend joining a guild, whether it is a good guild or a bad guild doesn’t matter so much, your first guild is likely to be temporary and it is more about getting to talk to some friendly people who have been playing the game for longer than you, who can help you out.
MoF Power Points:
I recommend allocating the following power points:
Depending on your build, you will then be able to change between whatever powers you need as well as class features.
SS Power Points:
I recommend the following power points for SS CW’s:
Level 70 Basic Gear:
For a new player, once you have hit level 70, I recommend grabbing the following gear from the Auction house when you can:
Cruel Cap of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Robes of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Gloves of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Boots of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Amulet of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Ring of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Belt of Piercing/Smiting
These items should cost you roughly 15k AD and will put you in a better position to progress. Furthermore, I would stick some azures in offence slots, some darks in defense slots and some azures in utility slots. The reason I would stick azures in utility slots starting out is to get enough XP to acquire bonus stat points, you need at least 2 more skill points to allocate towards your 2 passive powers, as those give a huge damage bonus. Once you are able to start doing dungeons, I would then recommend using the following gear for a while from t1 dungeons:
Ensorcelled Mulhorand Orb
Elemental Fire Talisman
Alliance Raid Robes
Alliance Assault Cap
Alliance Assault Armlets
Alliance Raid Shoes
Alliance Assault Ring x2
Lostmauth's Hoard Necklace
Owlbear Leather Belt of Intelligence
Drowcraft Underwear
When you can, get a hold of a dusk boots pack for 6k AD.
How to progress:
Once you have got to this point, you have got to the milestone where it is a lot more expensive to progress and you will have to invest more time (or money) in order to get further. My advice is to join a channel like legit:
(http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/544112/nw-legit-community-channel-info-discussion)
There are other channels that are better, but they all have requirements. As a new player, you are looking for a channel with people in it who can help you without any item level or experience requirements and that is the place I would recommend looking.
Gearing at 70:
Once you have progressed beyond your basic gear at level 70, there is some more advanced and expensive stuff, which is listed below in this section. This is for more experienced players and is what you can look into once you no longer have the tight restrictions of a new level 70 player budget.
Where to allocate 4th power points:
The Places I would allocate passive points are as follows:
Firstly, your passive powers, so chilling presence, storm spell/critical conflagration/swath.
Secondly, your encounter powers, so icy terrain, conduit of ice, steal time disintegrate in that order.
Thirdly, your daily powers.
Lastly, your at wills.
Weapon Enchantments:
There are a number of good weapon enchantments for CW, which I will list here, you can then choose between them and decide which one you prefer. I have included pictures of the testing of the various enchants, each one done with the same gear, with the exception of the weapon enchantment. Neither a bonding companion or an augment was summoned for the testing. The reason I did leave the rest of my gear on is because I need to have some crit for the comparison between fey and crit severity weapon enchantments and 57% is roughly the point where they equal. All weapon enchants tested were at trans rank.
Gear used:
Damage with no enchant:
Vorpal:
Vorpal boosts your damage by boosting your critical severity. However, unlike other weapon enchantments, vorpal is not a damage multiplier by itself, rather it adds itself to form part of a damage multiplier and so the larger the other part, the smaller the damage bonus provided by vorpal. The damage dealt by the vorpal is illustrated by the formula below:
A*B*C+(1-B)*C = D
Where A = Crit Severity and is comprised of E and F, where E is the crit severity from other sources and F is the crit severity of the vorpal enchantment. B is the crit chance, C is the base damage and d is the damage output. From the formula if you focus on just A and break it down into its parts you can see the following:
A = (1.75+Boosts+Vorp) and as vorp has a peak damage output of 0.5, the larger the boosts to crit sev are from external sources, the less effective the vorp will be in comparison. Therefore if you already have a large amount of crit severity, I recommend staying away from the vorpal and using another enchantment, you can check these values using the tool I provided in the stat theory section to work out which enchant is better for personal dps. When comparing this to feytouched, you need to find your real crit using ACT.
To calculate how much of a boost to your damage vorpal is, use the following formula:
[(A+0.50)*B+(1-B)]/[(A*B+(1-B)]
Where for A you exclude vorpal. Take note, this is not including the debuff.
A screenshot showing the testing of vorpal with 57% sheet crit chance, the dps column is the one to take a look at.
Feytouched:
Feytouched is a multiplier. It boosts your damage by multiplying it, at transcendent by 1.18. However, at lower ranks it has a downtime period on the buff and so unless you have this enchant at transcendent, I do not recommend using it for dps. In addition to boosting your damage, it also reduces your opponent’s damage by 18%, making it an enchantment with defensive capabilities as well. For the purposes of calculating how much it boosts your damage use the formula below:
New damage = 1.18*Old damage*Uptime+Old damage*(1-uptime)
Where uptime is what percentage of the time you can keep it up for. For example, if the feytouched buff was for 10 seconds and the cooldown was for 20 seconds, then 10/20 = 50% uptime or 0.5.
One downside of feytouched is if 2 people are using it, only 1 person gets the buff. However, most players in pve use vorpal so it is very definitely a good choice and worth considering in certain circumstances.
Here is a screenshot showing feytouched:
Plaguefire:
Plaguefire provides a party wide damage boost of 3% per stack of the buff. Long ago, CW’s could only reliably keep up 1 or 2 stacks of the buff however with the introduction of all the new procs its possible to keep up 3 stacks. The way to calculate how much the Plaguefire enchant is boosting your damage is as follows:
(1,03*(ch1+2*ch2+3*ch3)/100) * admg + (1 - (ch1+ch2+ch3)/100) * admg = pf damage; where:
ch1 - chance to have 1 stack of plague fire debuff on target;
ch2 - chance to have 2 stacks of plague fire debuff on target;
ch3 - chance to have 3 stacks of plague fire debuff on target;
admg = (1+crit severity)*(crit chance*dmg + (1-crit chance)*dmg;
Which is a big mess and basically just boils down to the faster you hit, the more damage the enchantment does. The enchantment is good because it boosts the entire parties damage, not just your own, by up to 9% which in some cases can be more damage than the other personal damage boost weapon enchantments boost your damage.
A screenshot showing the testing of plaguefire with 57% sheet crit chance, the effectiveness column is the one to take a look at:
Dread:
So after testing this a third time, (after the lolset nerf/buff fix thing) I find dread superior to vorpal. The way this enchantment works is quite complex. It firstly provides 75% crit severity to encounters. It secondly deals an additional unbuffed hit for 25% of weapon damage. Thirdly, it provides a defense debuff of 40% and forthly it reduces an opponent’s damage resistance by 4%. The defense debuff does not function in pve. The formula for calculating how much Dread is boosting your damage is as follows:
Damage*{[%encdamage*(1+critsev+dreadcritsev)+(1-%encdamage)*(1+critsev)]*%critchance+(1-critchance)} = Dread Damage
Where %encdamage is the percentage of your damage that is from encounters, crit sev is your critical severity without dread, dreadcritsev is the crit sev bonus from dread and crit chance is your critical chance. It is important to note this formula does not account for the debuff or the hit for 25% of weapon damage, the latter is not included because in any group with many buffs, that becomes such a miniscule portion of your dps that it is then not worth noting. Note, this enchantment is always better than terror.
Here is a screenshot showing dread:
Other Weapon enchantments:
These are other weapon enchantments that I am posting information on by request, so I will not cover all of them and not in as much depth as the ones listed above but at least it does provide you as the reader with information about them if you desire it. I will update this section as requests for specific enchants are made.
Trans Lightning:
This enchantment isn’t great for dps, because the way it works is by boosting your damage by a fixed amount of weapon damage, dealt as an additional hit, which chains to other targets. The issue with this is that the lightning damage does not crit, does not proc stuff (with the exception of abyss of chaos) and does not benefit from buffs or debuffs. In addition, the enchantment generates large amounts of threat as you hit opponents so rapidly. Don’t be surprised if you always have aggro if you are using this enchant. The enchantment is good for niche support builds where you are trying to multiproc darkfire through abyss, but outside of that, it isn’t a good choice.
Here is an example of a combat log showing lightning, same test as all of the above, with the same character. Something to bear in mind is that the lightning arc (which makes up a significant portion of the damage) does not exist in single target fights and is much lower in AoE fights in any group situation as the enchantment isn’t benefitting from buffs and debuffs so realistically, in party situations, its a 1-2% damage boost and not 11%.
Armour Enchantments:
There are 3 armour enchantments I would recommend choosing between, the negation, the elven battle and the soulforged. If you don’t want to invest too much into defensive enchantments, then I recommend the soulforged as it is good from lesser which cannot be said for any other armour enchantment however if you intend to use a higher level enchant say greater upwards, then I would strongly recommend considering using 1 of the other 2. My personal preference is Elven Battle, because the problem with negation is you need to be able to take damage for it to become good. By nature, CW’s are squishy, meaning that the monsters in dungeons hit so hard that by the time you have stacks, you are dead. The stamina gain and control resistance from elven battle though can actually make a considerable difference.
Offense Slots:
There are 3 main offensive enchantments, the Brutal, the Radiant and the Azure. Prior to mod 6, I would have recommended putting Radiants in all offense slots however, post mod 6 I would recommend staying away from radiants and investing into azures or better yet, brutals if you can afford them. However, the enchantments you should use on your offense slots differ on a case by case basis, to truly get the most out of your stats I recommend using the spreadsheet provided in the stat theory section to work out what will give you the biggest boost.
Defence Slots:
For defence slots, I recommend either darks or savages, savages being my preferred choice. Once you have enough lifesteal to feel satisfied you can sustain yourself, it then becomes a choice between HP, defence and deflect. For CW’s, you will very rarely be in a position where defence is better than HP and so I will confidently say that in most cases savages are the way to go, however, if you want to be certain based off of your own stats, you can check on my spreadsheet.
Overload Enchantments:
Not many players use overload enchantments, which is why this section is included. Think about it this way, each overload enchantment is worth 800 stats for 2 hours if they are greater and 8 hours if they are of the black ice type. So, how do they work? Well, if you have 2 overloads of the same type, you have 100% uptime on the bonus, but only 1 stat bonus for 800 stats, if you have 2 different types, you have 50% uptime on the bonus, but 1600 stats. Now, why is it worth investing in them? Well, think about it this way. 2 greater black dragon glyphs will cost you 1k AD. For that 1k AD, you are temporarily gaining a stat bonus worth more than a rank 12 enchantment (700 stats) in addition to whatever other bonus the overload enchantment gives, if it is red or black, the additional bonus makes up roughly 1% of your dps. Now, a rank 12 enchantment costs 1.5M AD, so you would have to go through 3000 overload enchantments (dragon glyphs) in order to make up the cost of 1 rank 12, which is giving less stats. That is the equivalent of 3000 hours of uptime. Furthermore, even if you were only refining AD on 1 toon for your AD income, that is only costing you 1/36th of your total AD income on your toon per day. Due to this, it is a mistake to not use overload enchantments, even if it is only for the stat gain.
Good overload enchantments include:
Greater Red Dragon Glyph (If you are not capped on arp, this adds 800 in addition to the damage bonus)
Greater Black Dragon Glyph (This is my preferred one, giving 800 crit and the dot)
Greater White Dragon Glyph (If you only care about the stat, this gives 800 power)
Black Ice Overloads (Give AP gain + stats, also a decent choice)
Mark of the Dragon Slayer +1 or 2 (Gives extra damage against dragons)
Mark of the Demon Slayer +1 or 2 (Gives extra damage against demons)
Artifact Choices:
For your artifacts, there are 2 important categories, your main artifacts and then your secondary artifacts. Your main artifact is there firstly for its bonus; your secondary artifacts are there for their stats. For your main artifact, I would strongly recommend the wheel of elements, which provides a 10-15% damage boost, or a cheaper alternative being the devoted cleric sigil, which can be obtained by levelling a cleric to 60 and doing the vault of the 9 quest. The last main artifact choice I would recommend is the lantern of revelation, which I would only suggest for a support build.
For the secondary artifacts, there are many good choices and they all depend on the stats you need. Artifacts are primarily there to help you balance out your stats. Here is a list of good choices:
Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
Lantern of Revelation
Sigil of the Controller
Kessel’s Sphere of annihilation
Thayan book of the dead
Tiamat’s orb of Majesty
Shard of Valindra’s Crown
Heart of the Blue Dragon
Horn of Valhalla
Ideally, you want your last 2 artifacts to have 3 relevant offensive stats, so power, crit, arp, combat advantage bonus, action point gain and stamina gain are all good. Ideally, I would focus on sorting out your action point gain and combat advantage bonus here, as it is hard to get it on other gear pieces without going to ridiculous lengths like reinforcement kits (which cost a lot).
For weapons, you will want either the twisted set (for a dps setup) or the burning orb and talisman (for a support setup). if you are really rich and are in a rich guild, the stronghold set is potentially best in slot, but it is completely superfluous unless you run with other people who have it almost all the time, so I do not recommend investing in it.
Companions:
For anyone intending to min/max, companions play a vital role and can boost your damage by up to 50%. Due to this, you need to choose carefully and their importance should not be underestimated. There are 2 types of companions, your summoned companions and then your active companions. You want your summoned companions for the stat bonuses they provide and then your active companions for the percentage damage increase they provide.
Augment:
This is the cheap option for your summoned companion, if you cannot afford greater bonding runestones or better I recommend sticking with this. Using a non-augment will only become an option for you at around 3k ilvl when you can afford it, until then, augments are a good choice. The cheap augments are the cat and the ioun stone of allure. These companions are good because they provide you with 100% of their stats, which can boost your damage by between 10-20%.
Bonding Proccer:
This is the expensive choice. If you can afford 3 greater bonding runestones or better, then using a bonding proccer becomes better than using an augment. It is important to note that even though the tooltips for rank 11 and 12 bonding runestones state they grant 65% of the companion’s stats, they actually grant 80% and 95% respectively. There are 3 criteria for judging a good bonding proccer, the first is attack speed, which determines how fast it can proc something once it is in combat, how fast it can get into combat, which determines bonding downtime and then thirdly whether or not it can multi proc the stones. Good companions that meet the requirements are listed below:
Blink Dog
Shadow Demon
Zhentarim Warlock
Dwarven Battlerager
For the cheaper option with a good active bonus, I recommend the blink dog or the dwarven battlerager. An advantage the battlerager has is it has 3 ring slots which makes it ideal for underdark rings, also, it is an account wide companion unlock, however, bear in mind he is melee and often doesn’t make it to combat on time. Another good choice for a summoned companion is a sellsword for a MoF ren support build, it applies a debuff which improves team dps by 10%.
Here is a screenshot of what I have seen with the lightfoot thief:
As you can see, there are 9 stacks of companion’s gift. The reason the bonding stone route is so good is because even with 3 stacks of rank 12 bondings, its 285% of a companion’s stats vs 100% from augment. It is important to note that by using different ranks of bonding stones it increases the rate of proccing and in some cases causes the stones to multiproc, however, I do not see any noticeable dps increase in the long run going 3 rank 12 vs rank 10/11/12, so if you have 10/11/12, there isn’t any reason to upgrade and if you have 3x12, there isn’t any reason to downgrade.
Also something to keep in mind when using a bonding companion: You receive that stats you place on it multiplicatively, making stat allocation critical. If you have 4k power and 2k crit, there might be times when you will receive up to almost 12k power and 6k crit from your companion in combat. As a CW, this can be used to your advantage - you can stack a lot of crit on your companion, and benefit by having an extremely high crit chance in combat. I’d also recommend using your highest ranking enchants on your bonding companion, you’ll get more stats overall by doing it that way.
Active Companions
Active companions are all about the active bonus. The first thing to take note of is that Stat bonuses (example 400 power) are ALWAYS worse than percentage bonuses (example 4% damage increase). This is because when the stat curves were updated for mod 6, the amount of stats provided by stat companions was not boosted enough to compensate for the new curves.
Some good companion choices include:
Siege master: (+4% damage)
Air Archon: (+5% damage when your target is not at full health)
Blink Dog: (1.05 damage multiplier when you have CA)
Intellect Devourer: (1.05 damage multiplier when you have CA)
Cambion Magus: (+10% crit severity)
Fire Archon: (+7% damage bonus when your opponent is below 50% HP)
Wild hunt Rider: (on encounter use there is a 10% chance to boost your damage by 10%)
Wisp: (+control bonus and control resistance)
Cantankerous Mage: (+25% control bonus)
Pseudodragon: (on damage dealt there is a chance to restore some stamina)
Owlbear Cub: (Deal 50% of your power as an additional hit on encounter use. For Thaums with low crit, this companion can be as much as a 20% dps boost so definitely worth considering)
Companion Gear:
For your active companion, there is 2 choices good choices for gear. The first is the “of the loyal avenger” gear which boosts power, crit and armour penetration and has an offense slot and a defence slot and the second good choice is the adorable bites gear. If you are capped on armour penetration without your companion, then I recommend going the adorable bites route if you want to maximise your damage potential. With that being said though, I actually prefer having those defence slots to help balance my CW’s stats and help make him more tanky over all.
Loyal Avenger gear is BoE gear that drops from Sword Coast Adventures, a game found at:
http://www.gateway.playneverwinter.com
This gear can be acquired by playing the game and hoping that RNG is on your side, or by purchasing it in the AH.
The Adorable Bites Gear is a more expensive option, it drops from legendary lockboxes. Of course, this means that it comes with a hefty price tag - this option is only really applicable to min-maxers and BiS builds.
The final option is using underdark and maze engine rings, for example rising power or brutality on your companion. The companion can proc them and the results can be quite impressive.
The High Vizier Set:
Although it is a level 60 set, it is still very powerful and deserves a special mention. If you run in premade groups and you own this set, I highly recommend using it. What it does is when you use controlling powers, it applies stacks of arcane force transference which increase the parties damage against the target debuffed by the HV set by 10% per stack. Abilities that can apply the HV bonus are as follows:
Procs Debuff with:
- Chill Strike x2 (x3 on mastery on main target, x1 on others)
- Icy Terrain x1 per target.
- Ice Knife: x3
- Ice Storm: x2 per target
- Icy rays: x1
- Shard of Endless Avalanche x1 per target on roll, x1 on explode.
- Oppressive Force x3 over the duration per target
- Furious immolation x3 over the duration per target
Buff and Debuff (buff stacks up to 3 times)
- Entangling force x1 (x1 per hit on mastery)
- Steal time x3 per target (x1 buff total, x2 on mastery)
- Repel x1 (x1 per target on mastery)
- Shield x1 per target.
A good example of a rotation that can apply the high vizier set is chill strike on tab, steal time, disintegrate and icy terrain. You would apply 3 stacks of the debuff with either chill strike or steal time and then refresh it with steal time, icy terrain and chill strike.
Mounts:
This section is currently being expanded on. There is a useful tool to be found here that lists which mounts have certain insignia bonuses, I will not be including this in my guide, if you want to find this information, you will have to refer to it:
https://goo.gl/mN4W6z
https://two30.github.io/neverwinter-combo/?0,0,0,0,0
Stat bonus:
I will break this section down into zen mounts (account wide) and then non zen mounts (per char). Bear in mind, I am only listing the mounts I think are good for pve. Also, take note that you can only have 1 stat bonus active at a time, my recommended bonus is highlighted in red:
Zen Mounts:
Heavy Howler: 2k Crit
Guard Drake: 2k Power
Dusk Unicorn: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Warg: 1k Crit, 1k Arp
BoE Mounts:
Gorgon: 15% of your AP back over 10 seconds.
Heavy Mystic Nightmare: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Inferno Nightmare: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Twilight Nightmare: 2k Power
Heavy Howler: 2k Crit
Flail Snail: 15% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Flail Snail (legacy): 25% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Coastal Flail Snail: 25% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Gas Spore: Increases Stamina Regeneration by 20%. (30% with mount and companion affinity)
Imperial Rage Drake: 4k Crit
Rage Drake: 2k Crit
Apparatus of Gond: 2k Power
Dusk Unicorn: 2k Lifesteal
Black Ice Warhorse: 4k Power
Insignias:
The way insignias is supposed to stack is the following: The first insignia provides 100% of the bonus and subsequent insignias provide 25% of the bonus.(confirmed by http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/comment/12803623) However, I find that not all bonuses stack this way, so I will not specifically list which ones stack and which ones don’t until I am absolutely sure.
Insignia Set Bonuses:
Magister’s Patience/Restraint: Although these bonuses look good on paper, after testing them I can say for certain they are disappointing on CW. They make up less than 1% of my damage and they do not scale with buffs or debuffs. Due to this, I do not recommend investing in this bonus. Also, the bonus does not stack, so 1 person can apply only 1 magister’s at a time. The tooltip of magister’s restraint is wrong and it provides roughly half the boost of patience, not the same amount.
Warlord’s Inspiration/Encouragement: This used to be brokenly overpowered and basically multiply your stats by 4, however, since the nerf, it is underwhelming and increases your companion’s damage by 25%.
Protector’s Camaraderie/Friendship: Whenever your companion attacks, it increases your power and defense by 3% for 10 seconds. The bonus stacks up to 4 times and provides a total of 12% power and defense. Each time you stack an additional mount with the bonus, the tooltip adds an additional 4%, but the bonus does not change if you actually test it, so there is no point to stacking this bonus.
Artificer’s Persuasion/Influence: What it does is Increase your recovery, movement speed, action point gain and stamina gain by 10% of your power for 15 seconds after using an artifact. So, basically, assuming you have a mythic artifact, this is worth 2.5% of your power (it has a 25% uptime). Furthermore, AP gain and stamina gain are probably stats you have already capped, meaning you are only gaining movement speed and recovery.
Shepherd’s Devotion: Currently provides you with the artificer’s persuasion bonus.
Barbarian’s Revelry/Delight: This one sounds good in theory and was one I was really looking forward to using, healing 3% of your max HP whenever you crit seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. The bonus has an internal cooldown and doesn’t proc off all crits, only some of them, making it underwhelming and inferior to lifesteal.
Gladiator’s Guile: This one works as per the tooltip, when your stamina is above 75%, you gain 15% movement speed and when it is below 25%, you gain 15% of your power as stamina gain. This is the best insignia bonus of them all.
Wanderer’s Fortune: This bonus does work, however, as it doesn’t provide any numerical information that can be easily measured, I am unsure if it has an ICD or if it stacks. What it apparently does if give you a 4% chance to have a refinement stone drop at your feet on killing an enemy, I am not sure if it really is 4%. What I do know though is that it is amazing, I strongly recommend using this.
Which Insignia Bonuses do I Recommend?
Insignia Stat Bonuses:
Here is a complete list of all the “suffixes” to insignias and what they provide. I have highlighted the good ones for a dps toon in red. For a completely BiS DPS specced character you should aim for characters with those suffixes on your insignias:
Section 5: Appendices
This section provides additional information and examples of builds which you may or may not find useful.
Appendix 1: Further Reading:
Death is the Best Crowd Control: A Spellstorm Renegade Guide by Ironzerg:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/551341/spellstorm-renegade-guide-death-is-the-best-crowd-control/p1
Chem’s Comprehensive Mod 5 CW Guide: Even though this has not been updated since module 5, it still contains a large amount of valuable information you won’t find anywhere else.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/548656/chems-comprehensive-mod-5-cw-guide/p1
Burn With Me! A Master of Flame Guide written by Beatannier.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1202467/master-of-flame-renegade-guide-burn-with-me/p1
Thaumaturge’s Time to Shine: A Complete Guide, written by katamaster81899.
http://mmominds.com/2016/03/02/thaumaturges-time-to-shine-a-complete-guide/
Level 70 stack curve progression during mod 6 preview.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/552973/level-70-stat-curves/p1
Kaelac’s Guide to stats in general.
http://laggygamerz.com/forum/index.php?/topic/382-kaelac%E2%80%99s-guide-to-damage-tenacity-reisistance-and-debuffs-in-neverwinter/
The mathematical proof regarding when a Thaumaturge CW should use Chilling Presence over EotS.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1210860/at-what-point-does-eots-become-less-effective-than-chilling-presence-for-a-thaum-ss
The different possible ability score roles.
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Ability_Score_Rolling
An up to date list of current bugs plaguing the CW Class.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1211157/list-of-known-and-suspected-cw-bugs/p1
A list of interesting CW mechanics.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1191344/the-library-of-interesting-mechanics
An in depth discussion on how combat advantage works.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1209235/10-combat-advantage-boon/p2
The mechanics of plaguefire and vorpal.
http://knightsofnever.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10724422&p=37386569&gid=427468&sid=96e7167586e4f0f4aae4b4dcb225dca0#37386569
Damage Coefficients for CW abilities:
http://laggygamerz.com/forum/index.php?/topic/351-damage-calculations-for-control-wizard-abilities/
Outdated stat theory:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/547746/chems-neverwinter-stat-theory/p1
Appendix 2: Other Builds I have tested:
Take note for this section I will not list all the aspects I used to test each of these builds, but rather just list what they are and if you have any questions I can explain all the aspects of a particular discarded build and why it failed. Please take note I tried all of these builds on live.
MoF Oppressor:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:15u0uwj:1z00u00:1000000&h=0&p=mof
SS Ren with icy Veins:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1z00u00:1000000:1z050uv&h=0&p=ssm
SS Ren with Elemental Empowerment:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05000:1z054ij&h=0&p=ssm
SS thaum with no capstone:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05uu0:1z00v00&h=0&p=ssm
SS thaum with Abyss:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05uu1:1z00u00&h=0&p=ssm
MoF Thaum with Abyss + lightning/Bilethorn enchant:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05u0v:1z00u00&h=0&p=mof
MoF Thaum+SS Thaum with neither abyss nor Icy Veins:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1500000:1uu5uuv:1500000&h=0&p=mof
And several other variations of the above builds, I am not going to list all of them.
Appendix 3: An example of a Glass Cannon Build:This is an example of a max dps Glass cannon thaum CW build. It is not what I recommend as it has low defensive capabilities, but if doing as much damage as you possibly can is the way you want to play, then this is for you. I understand that some people like this playstyle, which is why I am including it.
Race: Tiefling
Attributes: 16/16 int+cha and 2 points put in each of those till level 70.
Feats: SS Thaum Listed Above
Boons: Listed in Build Development, with the exception of Elvish Fury instead of Resolve and Dragon’s fury instead of Dragon’s thirst.
Gear:
Dusk Assault Cap
Dusk Raid Robes
Dragonflight Raid Armlets
Elven Assault Shoes
Lostmauth’s Hoard Necklace
Belt of Valindra’s Guard
Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Shirt+Pants
Twisted Skulls
Twisted Talisman (Offhand Feature: Storm Spell; Offhand Stat Bonus: AP Gain)
Ring of Rising Power +5
Ring of Rising Precision +5
Crit Reinforcement kits
Combat Advantage Jewelry Reinforcement kits.
Artifacts:
Wheel of Elements (Primary)
Lantern of Revelation
Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
Thayan Book of the Dead
Enchantments:
Brutal Enchantment, Rank 12 in all Offense Slots
Transcendent Dread
Transcendent Elven Battle
Savage Enchantment, Rank 12 in all Character Defence Slots
Greater Black Dragon Glyphs in all overload slots
Companions and Companion Gear:
Lightfoot Thief (Summoned)
Air Archon
Blink Dog
Intellect Devourer
Wild Hunt Rider
That should cover the really expensive “BiS” Glass Cannon CW build.
Appendix 4: An example of a BiS support MoF:
If you are interested in playing a very expensive support MoF build, then this is an example of what it looks like:
Race: Drow
Attributes: 16 int 16 wis take the 2 optional points in charisma
Build:
Weapon enchant: Lightning, terror or plaguefire
Armour enchant: Elven Battle
Weapon and Offhand: Burning orb and talisman
Armour:
Full HV set
Valindra Set
Artifacts with Power, Arp, Recovery but not crit. This is because you will be utilising the baby owlbear companion as one of your active companions.
Rings: Personalised Adamant Rings of recovery or piercing
Radiant in every offense slot
Savages in every defense slot
Sellsword Companion
Drowcraft shirt and pants
Class Features:
Combustive Action + Swath of Destruction (with offhand bonus)
Encounter powers:
FtF (tabbed), steal time, ray of enfeeblement, icy terrain, FI, chilling cloud, scorching burst
After capping arp, you need to prioritise power and recovery but not crit, you will be going full support with relatively low personal damage but high team utility. I do not recommend playing a build like this unless you love support roles and even then, it is something I would spec into later and not something to level with.
Here are some examples of the levels of damage effectiveness you can achieve as a support wizard:
Appendix 5: What my CW looks like:
Here is the current iteration of Sharpedge:
Appendix 6: Abbreviations
There are many abbreviations in Neverwinter, which whilst the veteran may know, will be completely foreign to a new player. Due to this, I have a section here that can be referred to that includes many of the commonly used abbreviations.
Crit = Critical Chance
Arp = Armour Penetration
AP = Action Points
SigDev = Sigil of the Devoted
CW = Control Wizard
MoF = Master of Flame
SS = Spellstorm Mage or Storm Spell (the class feature) or Sudden Storm (Encounter)
PF = Plague Fire/Phantasmal Fortress
Vorp = Vorpal
Crit Sev = Critical Severity
RI = Resistance Ignored
RSI = Recharge Speed Increase
CA = Combat Advantage
Proc = Activate/Trigger
DoT = Damage over Time
DPS = Damage Per Second
AoE = Area of Effect
Ren = Renegade
Thaum = Thaumaturge
Opp = Oppressor
Fey = Feytouched
TEB = Transcendent Elven Battle
SF = Soulforged
LS = Lifesteal
IT = Icy Terrain
CoI = Conduit of Ice
ST = Steal Time
RoE = Ray of Enfeeblement
CS = Chill Strike
FtF = Fanning the Flame
FI = Furious Immolation
CP = Chilling Presence
OF = Oppressive Force
DR = Damage Resistance/Dread Ring
Int = intelligence
Cha = charisma
HV = High Vizier (legacy armour set)
HP = Hit Points/High Prophet (legacy armor set)
AH = Auction House
RP = Refining Points/Role Play
SH = Stronghold
PE = Protectors Enclave
Shar = Sharandar
ToD = Tyranny of Dragons
Appendix 7: Astral Diamond Generation(Note this section was written by @katamaster81899.)
There are two main types of AD
Generating rAD
Recent changes to the game have made it very easy to generate rAD. I’ll list every source that I know of, and explain how it can be farmed in the most efficient manner possible. This subcategory will also be broken into two sections - rAD that is directly deposited in your character's inventory, and rAD that is earned by salvaging items that are transferrable between characters.
Salvage
Certain level 60 and level items have the item qualifier “Salvageable”. This property means that the item can be salvaged at a salvage anvil. Typically items with this property are found or purchased in endgame content. Here are all known sources of salvageable items:
Salvageable items can be moved around characters as they are almost always BoA. This will allow you to move salvageable items to a character that has not yet hit the daily astral diamond refining limit in order to get a faster turnaround on your AD refinement.
Other Sources of rAD
There are many other sources of rAD other than salvage. However, rAD earned this way is stuck on one character until it is refined.
Notes:
I may add notes on interesting CW features here later, as I discover them. For now, the only notes I will be listing are the following:
Smolder:
It is possible to stack smolder and Rimefire by yourself:
Smolder lasts 5 seconds and Rimefire lasts 10 seconds. To apply both, apply smolder to a target and then use icy terrain on it. If you are using crit conflag, then icy terrain will apply both if it crits. To keep up both smolders, you need to refresh both using cold and fire spells, which is a pain. It is easy to get up 2 but hard to sustain them. It is also possible with icy veins, but is really tricky and involves getting out of range then doing stuff from a distance. In order to really make it work with icy veins, you have to use Icy terrain on tab but if you using icy on tab, then why on earth are you taking icy veins (which requires you to fight close to monsters to be good) in the first place?
It is also worth noting that it is abysmally difficult to do the above if there is more than 1 CW in the group and that if there are multiple CW’s in the group then smolder will apply for each CW in the group.
The Behaviour of DoTs:
Some DoT’s Scale with damage buffs, others do not. Some DoT’s can proc Stuff, others cannot. For example, the death slaad does scale and can proc things, for example, aura of vengeance on an OP. Smolder scales, RoE scales, IT scales, CoI scales, FtF scales. If a DoT procs off an arcane ability, it will not crit, the exception being oppressive force, which has to crit first. Some DoT’s do not proc anything, an example being the plaguefire DoT. Some dots proc things only on the first hit, an example being Ray of Enfeeblement and finally there are dots that proc things on each hit, an example being conduit of ice for CW or Hadar’s grasp for SW.
Acknowledgements:
A HUGE thanks to everyone who helped with the assembling of this guide. You are the people who helped ensure the quality of this guide is far higher than it would otherwise be :) The efforts you went to is beta testing on a scale that Cryptic wishes it has access to :) This very much was a collaborate effort and not just the work of 1 person.
@chemboy613 for providing a lot of the groundwork which I have updated.
@romotheone for providing the inspiration that lead me to do some in depth MoF testing, as well as for providing contrasting ideas and interesting theories for me to test.
@itbls you should be writing this, not me, you know this class better than I do, however, given that you have elected not to, I have gone to the effort of updating this myself. You probably know things that I do not, however I cannot know everything and anything I have left out you are certain to make me aware of.
@katamaster81899 wrote the section on AD generation. Also helped to check large portions of the guide. (Formatting, correcting miscellaneous content)
@bigredbrenteth Helped with insignia bonus testing.
Proofreaders:
@ariesvehemens (Pointed out the missing Owlbear cub and the lack of comparison between abyss and Icy Veins)
@melO_O (information regarding icy terrain and feytouched)
@zekethesinner
@userutf8 (general information on stat theory)
@durugudesu
@xaltoltun
@d66723225
@oria1 (more detail regarding MoF Renegade and support builds)
@narjima (helped a lot with expanding the descriptions of feats and corrected many typos)
@hypergorila2
@decioteixeirapt (information on boons)
@zhodia (helped with presentation and formatting)
@agatagdr (helped clarify the descriptions of multiple powers)
@skyvalker64 (formatting suggestions)
@silverkelt
Conclusion:
There is much that is known about the CW class, because of how active the CW community is when it comes to testing and discovering new things. At the same time, there is also much that is still to be discovered. Like all classes, there is room for experimentation, the CW however is blessed with the ability to make many builds viable. I would like to end this off by thanking everyone who goes to the effort of reading through this, taking the time to check, verify or criticize any part of it, your effort helps to improve the overall quality of this guide and any others that are posted ☺
Change Log:
Updated for post elol set nerf
NOTE: I will NOT be providing people with the ability to comment on, view or edit the unpublished version of this document, to all of those of you who are requesting it. If you feel it is important that you have access, mail me in game or on the official forums and motivate your reason as to why you feel that you need access.
Last updated: 19/04/2016
Table of Contents
Preface:
Section 1: Theory
Powers:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Daily Powers:
At Wills:
Feats:
Heroic Feats:
Oppressor Feats:
Thaumaturge Feats:
Renegade Feats:
Stat Theory:
Offensive Stats:
Power vs Crit:
Arp:
Recovery:
Defensive stats:
HP vs Defence:
Lifesteal:
Deflect vs Defence:
Survivability:
Race:
Section 2: Build Development
Where does my damage come from?
Which build should I play?
Boons for all builds:
Sharandar:
Dread Ring:
Icewind Dale:
Tyranny of the Dragons:
Elemental Evil:
Underdark:
The Maze Engine:
Strongholds:
Ability Scores:
Encounters:
MoF:
SS:
Section 3: Builds
SS Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
SS Renegade:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Oppressor:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
MoF Renegade:
Feats:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Advice for the build:
Section 4: Gearing your wizard
New player Levelling Guide:
MoF Power Points:
SS Power Points:
Level 70 Basic Gear:
How to progress:
Gearing at 70:
Where to allocate 4th power points:
Weapon Enchantments:
Vorpal:
Feytouched:
Plaguefire:
Dread:
Other Weapon enchantments:
Trans Lightning:
Armour Enchantments:
Offense Slots:
Defence Slots:
Overload Enchantments:
Artifact Choices:
Companions:
Augment:
Bonding Proccer:
Active Companions
Companion Gear:
The High Vizier Set:
Mounts:
Stat bonus:
Zen Mounts:
BoE Mounts:
Insignias:
Insignia Set Bonuses:
Which Insignia Bonuses do I Recommend?
Insignia Stat Bonuses:
Section 5: Appendices
Appendix 1: Further Reading:
Appendix 2: Other Builds I have tested:
Appendix 3: An example of a Glass Cannon Build:
Appendix 4: An example of a BiS support MoF:
Appendix 5: What my CW looks like:
Appendix 6: Abbreviations
Appendix 7: Astral Diamond Generation
Generating rAD
Salvage
Other Sources of rAD
Earning AD
Notes:
Smolder:
The Behaviour of DoTs:
Acknowledgements:
Conclusion:
Change Log:
Preface:
At the start of mod 6, I had intended to write a budget CW guide. A guide that focused on how to build a decent CW, but on a cheap budget. However, with mod 6, came the paladin and this idea fell to the wayside after the first time I saw a devotion paladin in a random elol. I fell in love with that yellow aura that I later discovered to be bond of virtue, which then side-tracked me from CW, until late mod 7 where the glamour of the devo pally started wearing off and I once again picked up with my CW. Once I started playing my CW again fully as my main character, I intended to finish off on my unfinished project. However, looking at the guides and level of theory that was reaching the forums and MMO minds I realised that rather than just a budget guide, a complete CW guide was sorely missing. Chem left in mod 5 and since then, no major undertakings of those proportions have occurred. At first, I was hesitant to undertake such an objective, but come the winter festival, I received a very large number of respec tokens which allowed me to do a lot of testing on the live server. This had the side effect that a lot of people got to see those builds that they believed would never work on live and I started receiving requests for either a build, or a complete guide. So, as a result, this guide is an attempt to recreate something similar to chem’s guide of mod 4/5, it is not as complete as chem’s guide was and it never will be, there are some aspects of the game where my knowledge is lacking and unless someone wants to help me fill in those gaps, I will leave those portions unsaid. With all of this being said, I hope those of you who read this come away with 1 or 2 things that you did not know. Also, to anyone who has not read one of my guides before, be warned, there is math on its way :p
Section 1: TheoryAnything that deals Arcane Damage is highlighted in purple, anything that deals Cold damage is highlighted in blue, anything that deals Fire damage is highlighted in red, anything that deals Lightning damage is highlighted brown.
Powers:
Encounters:
Chill Strike:
Effect: Hits a single target , adds a stack of chill and briefly stuns the target.
Mastery: it is now splash (target limit 5).
Notes: Single target fights it’s a good option. Many people level with it as it is good for soloing. However, in dungeons it doesn’t really have the duration to be effective. A drawback of it is that the animation is about slow, and can be hard to cancel, leading to getting smashed. An additional benefit of this power is it counts as a control power on tab, applying 3 stacks of HV. Whilst its animation may be slow, if you chain it with other encounter powers, it does allow you to get both off quicker, but by itself it is long.
Entangling Force:
Effect: Chokes a single target and lifts them off the ground.
Mastery: Pulls mobs together (target limit 5), gain a stack of arcane mastery per mob.
When to use: When you are fighting a small group of mobs, one of them is dangerous, and you want to increase team DPS.
Notes: While the gather effect is nice for team DPS, it has no stun and a low target limit. Its usefulness is only situational. Alacrity (oppressor feat) has a chance to reduce the cooldown of this by 0.5 seconds per rank when you deal damage, however, I do not recommend taking the feat as it is a poor choice.
Conduit of Ice:
Effect: Puts an icy wind around the target, dealing damage over time to surrounding targets (1 primary, 5 secondary). Ticks six times.
Mastery: The AOE is larger, each tick adds chill, now can affect one primary and 6 secondary targets.
When to use: Basically all the time.
Notes: Conduit on tab is marvelous, the chill adds control and if MoF it refreshes smolder. There is a visual bug where if you use a vorpal conduit of ice will do additional hits for 0 damage, it is purely a visual bug and is in no way hurting your dps.
Repel:
Effect: Pushes a monster back.
Mastery: Now Pushes 5 mobs back.
When to use: In PVE never (hopefully), well, maybe if pushing things off ledges ever becomes a thing again.
Shield:
Effect: The first hit to a freshly summoned Shield will have its damage reduced by 80%. The shield will then go down and you will take full damage for a few moments. The shield takes eight seconds of not being hit to refresh. While it is refreshing incoming damage is reduced by 2.5%. If the shield is up and you are attacked by multiple enemies simultaneously all of the hits will be reduced by 50%. When you pulse the shield (dismiss it) it will do damage to and repel up to 5 enemies near you. Doing this will grant a second arcane stack that lasts 10 seconds. Summoning the shield and pulsing it count as casting two different encounter spells for proc purposes. Shield damage is buffed by Evocation.
Mastery: When Placed in the Tab Slot: If Shield is placed in the tab slot it becomes significantly more effective. A freshly summoned tabbed shield will absorb 80% of the damage from an incoming hit. The shield will then shrink. The next hit it you take will be reduced by about 50% and the shield will disappear. While the shield is recharging you will take 5% less damage. The shield takes 8 seconds of not being hit to return to the smaller 40% shield, and another 8 seconds of not being hit to return to full size.
When to use: When soloing dungeons.
Notes: When the shield is summoned you will be granted a stack of arcane mastery that lasts 10 seconds (much longer than most arcane stacks).
Fanning the Flame (Master of Flame):
Effect: A fire nuke spell with a DoT added. Applies Smolder when on tab.
Mastery: Is AoE on tab (target limit 8)
When to use: Single target fights, maybe on mastery where the pulls are small.
Notes: Gathering flame causes nearby enemies to take fire damage, followed by fanned flame which causes the main target to take additional fire damage and ending off with Final flame which causes smolder to spread to nearby enemies upon death. It is no substitute however for conduit of ice. Furthermore, fanning the flame counts as an external damage source as it procs abilities like abyss. Drifting embers (thaum feat) means that targets affected may add smolder to nearby targets when hit. Also, this ability can proc the death slaad if on tab. Also, this ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Sudden Storm (Spellstorm):
Effect: A chain of lightning hitting all monsters in a line
Mastery: The effect now chains, doing additional damage. Since this is bugged, you can buff the mobs with it, applying things like EoTS to them.
Notes: half of the time sudden storm isn’t hitting anything at all even though it should be, I am not sure of the exact cause of the bug but this bug detracts from this skill overall making an excellent skill only a good one. Sudden Storm on mastery procs abyss of chaos. Chilling Control (oppressor feat) adds chill stacks to the first hit of sudden storm, helping you control with it. Sudden storm is a viable alternative to disintegrate, however if you use it, I also recommend dropping focused wizardry. Another viable option when using sudden storm in a thaumaturge build is to drop icy veins, take chilling control and then put the 5 points that would go into icy veins into frigid winds. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Icy Terrain:
Effect: Creates a patch of ice that adds chill and damages mobs that walk over it. It ticks often, lasts ten seconds or so, and has no target limit.
Mastery: You can now throw icy terrain to a target circle.
Notes: This should always be on your bar. It is amazing control, it procs everything, feats like assailing force and warped magics and weapon enchants like plague fire often, and it has no target limit. In addition, a very short cast time means you can cast while kiting. The only downside is that it does no damage to frozen opponents ☹ It is also important to note that at the time of writing this, icy terrain is bugged and is considered a single target encounter power and thus if storm spell procs off of it, it gains the benefit from focused wizardry. Furthermore, evocation does not increase the damage of icy terrain. Also, it is impossible to have more than 1 icy terrain of your own on the ground at once, casting it a second time causes the first to disappear. Alacrity, an oppressor feat, has a chance to reduce the cooldown of IT by 0.5 seconds per rank when you deal damage.
Ray of Enfeeblement:
Effect: Increases damage to the target by 20%, also has a DoT.
Mastery: You can now cast it twice.
When to use: Single target fights.
Notes: This spell should NEVER be on mastery. The DoT’s do not stack, and you have to wait the cool down for BOTH charges, hence you get double the debuff, but only one DoT at first, then it’s just the same as not on mastery. It’s a waste. The only exception to this is if you are trying to burst a boss down faster than it takes both buffs to expire. Also, if you have the feat masterful arcane theft, it increases the damage dealt by RoE by 15% against targets afflicted with chill and by 6% per stack of arcane mastery.
Icy Rays:
Effect: Nuke spell that can hit two targets. More damage if you target the same monster. About the same as chill strike, though it only immobilizes the targets and does not stun.
Mastery: Damage increased by 50%
When to use: Single target fights.
Notes: A spell that was once really good for single target but was replaced by disintegrate. Also note that when feated icy rays deals 25% more damage when used on the same target twice and if used on 2 different targets, it reduces the cooldown by 5 seconds.
Steal Time:
Effect: Hits mobs for five ticks each, each tick applying slow, final tick hits harder and applies stun.
Mastery: Now creates combat advantage and increases run speed for team.
When to use: All the time except single target fights.
Notes: Steal time is incredible, it does good damage, has a long stun, and procs all your feats and abilities. In addition, if you are wearing the HV set and you interrupt it before the third hit by dodging, it places steal time on a 4 second cooldown but applies 2 stacks, potentially allowing you to continuously reapply the set bonus with just 1 ability. The Renegade feat masterful arcane theft increases the damage dealt by 15% to targets afflicted with chill and by 6% for each stack of arcane mastery.
Shard of the Endless Avalanche:
Effect: Summons a big ball, which can be pushed (twice). The ball will slam and prone (one target at a time), then finally explode (after ten seconds or when you hit two targets at once), which deals additional damage and prones. The target limit on the explosion is 10, but can prone more than 10.
Mastery: You can now summon and move the shard wherever you want.
When to use: When you are with a poor group and you are initiating combat with CC.
Notes: although it is not terrible, there are quite simply better choices. Disintegrate to reduce your cooldowns, Fanning the flame if you want (and are MoF), sudden storm (if you are SS), the only time this is good is in massive groups of enemies that you want to CC which is very much a thing of the past. It is also worth noting that transcended master (thaum feat) increases its damage by 25%.
Disintegrate:
Effect: Hits a single opponent for a large amount of damage, however, bear in mind the tooltip damage from this encounter power is higher than the damage it actually does.
Mastery: Basically does nothing, the idea is that if the opponent has less than 480% (+40% per rank) of your weapon damage as HP, disintegrate will instantly kill them. The issue is, if your opponent has less than that amount of HP, disintegrate will kill them regardless as its damage as a skill is higher than that amount.
Notes: Disintegrate has a really low cooldown and has high single target damage, making it exceptionally good even in AoE fights in PVE. This is because of spell twisting, you can spam this, continually gain stacks of spell twisting and keep your encounters off of cooldown. All in all, I highly recommend the use of this encounter.
Imprisonment:
Effect: Stun a target for up to 15 seconds. The target cannot take damage while stunned. The issue with this spell is that while you are stunning the target you cannot move as breaking it ends the animation.
Mastery: Reduces the cooldown
Notes: This ability is bad, whilst casting it you are vulnerable to anything that is not the target and attempting to do anything during the encounter will cause the stun to end. This encounter effectively immobilizes you so that you can immobilize a single opponent.
Class Features:
For the damage and debuff orientated class features I am providing ACT logs to provide some additional information to anyone interested on how these features work. For these logs, I did not use focused wizardry, I only had 1 class feature active (whichever 1 I was testing) and I had the offhand bonus for that feature. For the test, I had no summoned companion and no weapon enchantment, however, I did have the wererat thief, the death slaad, the owlbear cub and the lightfoot thief active to see how their bonuses interact with class features, as well as greater black dragon glyphs. Also note that for some of the tests, the game glitched out and only recorded part of test in 1 combat log and the rest in another, so referring to the dps column is best. Here are the base logs of the char I used for testing, for MoF and SS, for you to compare with:
SS:
Rotation: CoI (tab), Steal time, Disintegrate, Icy Terrain.
MoF:
Rotation: FtF (tab), CoI, Disintegrate, Icy Terrain
Orb of Imposition:
Effect: Increases the duration of control effects by 20%
Notes: With the control resistance present in mod 6 and onward, the benefit provided by control bonus is so marginal that it is not worth it, so I do not recommend using this. Glacial movement (an oppressor feat) increases it from 20% to 24%.
Arcane Presence:
Effect: Arcane stacks now apply to cold spells, also +5% recharge speed increase per rank.
Notes: Were you any other class looking at this class feature, you would be thrilled, 5 arcane stacks*0.03*1.33 =19.95% increased dps in addition to 20% recharge speed increase. However, we are CW’s, we have a monopoly on all the best class features in the game and this simply doesn’t compare to the better ones. Furthermore, recharge speed increase is almost meaningless for us as CW’s because of spell twisting.
Example of Arcane Presence’s Boost:
Chilling Presence:
Effect: increases damage by 8% per chill stack. And 96% if the target is frozen
Notes: Meet the best class feature in the game. There isn’t another class feature that provides a bigger damage boost for any class then this one. Furthermore, if you have chilling advantage (renegade feat) then you gain 2% crit chance per rank of the feat.
Example of Chilling Presence’s Boost:
Evocation:
Effect: Increases AoE power damage by 20%
Notes: Similar to chilling presence, this is also a great feature. However, we do have better options.
Example of Evocation’s Boost:
Combustive Action (Master of Flame):
Effect: Every time you kill a monster affected by smolder or rimefire smolder you get action points. Also smolder and fire do 24% more damage and anyone hitting the debuffed target do additional damage as well.
When to use: Rarely, for certain support builds.
Notes: Combustive Action is hard to fit into a build because it is always replacing something with high utility. It is either replacing critical conflagration, meaning you need to manually apply smolder, or it replaces chilling presence, greatly reducing your damage, or it replaces swath. My advice is if you want to use it, fit it into a support build and replace crit conflag, then manually apply smolder with ftf on tab+ FI. Also, the damage buff from combustive applies to all sources of damage and not just smolder. Finally, when you apply combustive action to the enemies, it also applies to yourself.
Example of Combustive Action’s Boost:
Storm Fury (Spellstorm):
Effect: Whenever you are under 50% hit points and you get hit you deal a substantial amount of damage to nearby enemies. There is also an internal cooldown. However, the damage is quite good.
When to use: Probably never.
Critical Conflagration (Master of Flame):
Effect: Critical hits now apply smolder, also add 20% critical severity.
When to use: When you rushing through content so quickly that stopping to apply smolder manually is slowing you down. As PVE is so easy and you kill stuff so quickly, this is most of the time and as of such it is a feature I recommend.
Notes: If you use both this and swath, smolder’s damage is only buffed by 1 or the other and not both at once.
Example of Critical Conflagration’s Boost:
Storm Spell (Spellstorm):
Effect: On critical hits there is a 30% chance to additionally do shock damage to the enemies
When to use: All the time.
Notes: Storm spell makes up 20-25% of your dps, meaning it is a 30% dps increase, putting it ahead of all other class features except chilling presence. Also, it is important to note it does not crit, but the offhand bonus for it does. Also, if storm spell procs off an AoE, it counts as an AoE and gets the downside of focused wizardry but if it procs off a single target, it counts as a single target and gets the positive.
Example of Storm Spell’s Boost:
Swath of Destruction (Master of Flame):
Effect: 60% more smolder damage and targets take 20% more damage
Notes: When to use: Every time you are not forced out of it, which if you are building a MoF for dps is most of the time with the exception of boss fights. Swath is really an incredible dps boost - your personal DPS goes up at least 10% and team DPS goes up 20%. The problem is that outside of boss fights, you cannot reliably keep up smolder without critical conflagration as fights are so darn short that by the time you have applied smolder with something else, everything is dead. In boss fights, you can afford to use it.
Example of Swath of Destruction’s Boost:
Eye of the Storm (Spellstorm):
Effect: When not on cooldown, the first hit to in combat grants you 8 seconds of 100% crit chance. After that 8 seconds there is a 20 second cooldown.
When to use: Not anymore
Notes: EoTS used to be amazing with the old curves when crit was capped to sensible amounts, with the new stat curves however, you can build up ridiculous amounts of crit essentially nullifying this class feature.
Frost Wave:
Effect: When you cast a daily power, you stun opponents for 2 seconds +1 second*rank. The problem is, CW dailies have CC built into them and also that the control power of this passive is shortened drastically by monster’s control resistance. All in all, I don’t recommend using this.
When to use: Never
Arcane Power Field:
Effect: Do roughly 94 damage to everything around you when you cast a daily.
When to use: If Chilling Presence is the best class feature, this is the worst, so never.
Daily Powers:
Ice Storm:
Effect: A burst effect, add chill stacks and knockback. Hits very hard (target limit 5).
When to use: When you have small groups of control resistant opponents, that won’t be blasted back by the knockback.
Notes: The knockback normally is bad for the party, so this daily has very limited uses, but is very nice in those situations, for example, we used it in etos at the last boss at the start of mod 6.
Arcane Singularity:
Effect: Gathers mobs up into a singularity in the sky, then drops them. Effect is somewhat slow (target limit 8)
When to use: Never if MoF, there are some situations it can find use as SS.
Oppressive Force:
Effect: Creates an oppressive force, ticks multiple times, stuns all the mobs, no target limit
When to use: Anytime there are more than 8 mobs.
Notes: OF is good for a number of reasons, 1 is its no target limit making it good in massive pulls, 2 is it ticks multiple times, allowing it to do silly stuff with storm spell and 3 is its fast cast time, allowing it to be used as a panic button in sketchy situations. It does have the downside of knocking back monsters though. To use this properly, you should not use it inside of monster packs and should rather use it from the side to push them all in the same direction.
Ice Knife:
Effect: A single target nuke, adds chill stacks, prone effect
When to use: Any single target fight.
Notes: Ice Knife has the highest damage of any daily, but only affects one target. If you are facing 2-5 targets, ice storm is better, if it’s 6-8 targets, Furious immolation is better, and if it’s over 8 targets the Oppressive Force.
Furious Immolation (Master of Flame):
Effect: Gathers all the mobs together, quickly. Does good damage and adds smolder (target limit 8).
When to use: Any dungeon or situation where you are under the target limit.
Notes: Really an amazing daily, as it gathers the mobs together and maxes team DPS. The damage is pretty good and smolder on everything - so this is an excellent option for almost all dungeons. Oppressive force has the weakness of spreading the mobs out, so if you don’t have target limit issues, FI is the best option. This ability can proc the death slaad. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
Maelstrom of Chaos (Spellstorm):
Effect: Creates a large pillar of lightning, doing moderate damage with no target limit in a small area. While casting you have high damage resistance and control immunity
When to use: The main reason for maelstrom is the control immunity. The damage is less than your other dailies
Notes: You can always cast this daily, even when under the influence of madness in prophecy of madness or when CCed by valindra’s hands. The renegade feat unrestrained Chaos causes maelstrom to have a chance to apply 6 stacks of chill to foes or 5 stacks of arcane mastery to you every second for 5 seconds. This ability benefits from arcane mastery.
At Wills:
Magic Missile:
Effect: High single target, no AoE damage, builds arcane stacks on the third hit and doesn’t add chill. Also, it roots you while casting and you cannot remain as mobile as you can with Ray of Frost.
Ray of Frost:
Effect: Ray of frost is a single target, relatively low DPS at will, however the benefit of RoF is that it builds chill stacks very quickly and freezes monsters. Furthermore, you can bunny hop and cast which is why this is my preferred secondary at will.
When to use: When there is a single monster that can be frozen.
Notes: The Oppressor feat Glacial Movement gives a 10% chance per rank to apply another stack of chill on each hit.
Chilling Cloud:
Effect: This is pretty much the most basic CW at will, quick to cast, however, like all CW at wills, it has the disadvantage that spell twisting makes casting them very awkward.
Notes: If you take Frozen Power Transfer, you have to use this at will in order to gain the damage bonus. The same is true for energy recovery, which has a 25% chance to grant 5% of your max HP as temporary hitpoints. In all honesty, I do not recommend taking either of those feats.
Scorching Burst (Master of Flame):
Effect: Scorching Burst is a chargeable AOE at will that hits up to five targets, has a 30% chance to build arcane stacks if you have the feat for it, and starts a smolder dot. While theoretically it sounds great, you do have to stand there, charge and aim. There is a visual bug that causes the size of the AoE to appear to scale with the size of the monster targeted, however the AoE’s actual size does not change. I personally dislike it because my playstyle involves a lot of moving.
When to use: To start smolder and arcane stacks as you engage a group, then switch back to chilling cloud.
Storm Pillar (Spellstorm):
Effect: You charge your powers up, then release forming a storm pillar, hitting multiple targets.
Notes: The damage and the AoE are quite nice, and it’s useful to work into your rotation. If you take destructive wizardry, you also take this as you will gain 5% additional damage for 20 seconds. You can also cast it with no targets around, which is useful for proccing chaotic buffs without opponent , which also makes it great to proc spell twisting between fights to reduce the cooldowns.
Feats:Heroic Feats:
CW’s have good Heroic feats, which is why human is a potentially good choice for CW’s, because the loss in crit from losing 2 points in CHA may be justified in the gain from feats.
Controlling Action: this feat gives you a 10% bonus to your AP gain bonus while controlling targets. So say your CW has +35% ap gain, that means you get a whole 3.5% ap gain while hitting a controlled target. As it is, this feat is completely worthless.
Weapon Master: 3% crit chance is just too good to pass up.
Toughness: Toughness is good because controlling action is bad, really simple isn’t it?
Fight On: This does not actually reduce cooldowns by 10% Rather it works as follows: CD/(1+Recharge speed + Fight on). Where CD is the spell cooldown, the recharge speed is how much you have without fight on and then fight on is the bonus from fight on. So say you already have 35% recharge, so that is 100/135. Now with 5 points it becomes 100/145, which is NOT a 10% decrease. So this feat is less worthless than Controlling Action, but still not good.
Battlewise: if you get threat, you freeze/stun/kill. If you can’t do that, you kite. In fact, managing aggro is very productive as a CW. This is a waste
Wizard’s Wrath: AOE powers do 3 % more damage. Since almost everything you do is AOE - this is a great feat.
Blighting Power: Cold powers deal 6% more damage to targets affected by chill.
Arcane Enhancement: Arcane powers deal 3% more damage.
Focused Wizardry: Really good for MoF as it boosts the damage of smolder, optional for SS. Also, it is worth noting that if you are using abyss of chaos focused wizardry boosts its damage as well.
Learned Spellcaster: This increases your damage based on your intelligence multiplier. Say you have 24 points in intelligence here, for a 14% damage boost. This would give you a 1.14% damage bonus per point. For the purposes of building personal dps, this is the best option after focused wizardry.
Prestidigitation: It has potential uses for endgame BiS builds where you are trying to increase your party’s dps through the bonus, outside of those it is no good.
Oppressor Feats:
Severe Reaction: Upon taking damage there is a chance to repel the attacker and restore some of your stamina. Many people dislike this feat because of the repel part of this feat, however, I actually like this as I noticed that due to the monsters high control resistance in t2 dungeons, the repel is not noticeable and you still get the stamina regen.
Bitter Cold: Targets take 5% more damage when affected by chill. If you are going oppressor, this is 1 of the better feats and I recommend taking it.
Chilling Control (Spellstorm): This feat causes sudden storm to apply 5 stacks of chill. It used to be good before mod 6 but now I actually consider it bad because icy veins exists and icy veins does the same thing, but for all your encounters, rendering this useless.
Brisk Teleport: After teleporting, your run speed is increased by 10%. It isn’t a very useful feat, but it is still better than Chilling Control.
Twisting Immolation (Master of Flame): Adds a stun effect to FI and increases the duration of the combustive action class feature. The stun is not that significant, as monsters in t2’s have high control resistance, however if you use combustive action it is worth considering taking this as the debuff from combustive action is quite significant.
Icy Veins: This feat is amazing. Firstly, it provides you with high burst, allowing you to instantly freeze packs of monsters with icy terrain and get off a 96% damage boosted OF at the start of combat. Secondly, it behaves weirdly on certain encounters like icy terrain, bugging out the ICD on freezes and continually refreezing opponents. Thirdly, it increases your survivability by making freeze a more reliable way of CCing opponents. When choosing between icy veins and abyss of chaos as a thaum, it comes down to personal preference. For more burst damage, icy veins is always better because you get that immediate damage boost from chilling presence, however, in extended fights where you can build up stacks of chill and sustain them, then abyss of chaos becomes better because it actually provides damage rather than just scales up the speed at which you gain the most benefit from CP.
Frigid Winds: When a target unfreezes, frigid winds is applied, boosting the parties damage against that target by 10%. This is one of the better oppressor feats, with the drawback that it provides no bonuses against control immune targets like bosses.
Cold Infusion: Causes opponents that are chilled to deal 5% less damage and is completely useless. With the damage mitigation tools available to DC, GF and OP this feat is completely unnecessary and I do not recommend taking it at all.
Glacial Movement: Increases the effectiveness of orb of imposition by 20%, changing orb to providing 25/30/35/40% control bonus rather than 5/10/15/20%, which is a bug as it should provide 25/50/75/100% control bonus.
Alacrity: There is a chance to Reduce the cooldowns of Icy Terrain and Entangling Force by 0.5 seconds*rank. I personally don’t find much utility from this skill and do not recommend investing more than 2 points into it at most.
Controlled Momentum: Nearby Allies do 5% more damage when you control something. Although it is one of the better oppressor feats, it is worth taking into consideration how inferior this feat is to feats on similar positions in the thaum and renegade feat paths.
Shatter Strike: When you Freeze a target, you apply shatter. When you damage a target which is affected by shatter you have a chance to stun them and deal 5% of their max HP (up to 300% of your weapon damage) as damage to them. This bonus does not scale with buffs and makes up for ~1% of your dps, making it not particularly impressive. In addition, if you use a control power against a control immune target, it deals your weapon damage as an additional hit. Once again, that weapon damage does not scale. Finally, it increases the duration of chill on targets by 2.5 seconds.
Thaumaturge Feats:
Tempest Magic: Tempest magic boosts your damage to targets under 30% by 5%, resulting in a 1.5% DPS increase. In my opinion this feat is good, but not great. It is better than any T2 options though.
Malevolent Surge: When you kill something (very often), you do 5% more damage. This uptime is actually very high, so this is close to a 5% DPS boost. This is the better of the T1 options
Snap Freeze: increases damage by 10% for cold based damage sources against targets without chill, so it only applies on the first hit upon entering combat and is otherwise useless.
Drifting Embers (Master of Flame): when you damage something affected by fanning the flames, there is a chance it spreads smolder to nearby targets. While it theoretically sounds good, in reality most things die far too fast for this to be useful. Then when you are in a situation where there are enough monsters to make this feat useful, you will be using other spells anyway. Hence, this is relatively useless.
Destructive Wizardry (Spellstorm): Gain 5% increased damage after casting a fully charged Storm Pillar. This is really a playstyle choice. If you use it properly, it can be very, very good and certainly better than Tempest magic. However, this means you must work Storm Pillar into your rotation like a 5th encounter. Now, if this is your playstyle, take destructive wizardry and be happy. However, if it’s not, then you might be wasting your points.
Spell Twisting: This is the feat that replaces recovery for you as a CW. What it does is after you use an encounter power, you gain a stack of spell twisting, which stacks up to 3 times. When you use an at will, it then consumes all your stacks of spell twisting and reduces your cooldowns by 0.1*number of stacks. This means that if we compare this to recovery we find the following:
Recharge speed increase works as follows: CD/(1+recharge speed increase)
Spell twisting works as follows: 0.7*CD
To correlate the 2, spell twisting is worth [1+(recharge speed)]/0.7-(1+recharge speed)
Which means assuming you got 0 recharge speed increase, at absolute worst, spell twisting is worth 42% recharge speed increase, or 8400 recovery. If you have any more recharge speed increase then 0, it is worth a whole lot more. Also, note that spell twisting does not reduce the cooldowns of shield, icy rays on tab, shard of endless avalanche and ray of enfeeblement on tab.
Elemental Reinforcement: When you use a cold, fire, lightning or arcane encounter power it adds 1 stack of elemental reinforcement for each element used. Each stack multiplies your damage by 1.05 making this a feat worth using. It is worth noting that the fire bonus from elemental empowerment is currently not provided from using fanning the flame.
Far Spell: Increases the range of your single target powers. The problem is, in pve a CW needs to be close to his opposition, making this feat useless.
Frozen Power Transfer: The third strike of chilling cloud grants you 5% bonus damage for every target (up to 3) it hits for 20 seconds. This feat is good in theory; the problem is in practice you cannot keep up the bonus. For this to be good, you need to get off the third cast of chilling cloud and with the addition of spell twisting, most of the time you do not. It should also be noted that this feat does not currently work as intended, and cannot stack more than once.
Transcendent Master: Increases the damage of Shard of the Endless Avalanche and Icy Rays, also decreases the cooldown of Icy Rays. I do not recommend using this as it means you would have to use 2 suboptimal encounter powers to take advantage of it.
Elemental Empowerment: This feat puts a dot when you hit things with cold or arcane damage. The dot makes up for 6% of my damage and whilst not being amazing, is better than any alternatives except FPT assuming you can somehow use it. Also, this counts as a single target power and is boosted by focused wizardry.
Assailing Force: Damaging foes has a chance to grant you Assailant, which is an extra hit on your next encounter power for 15% of the target’s max HP. This feat is an 8-12% dps increase, making it an obvious choice if you are going thaum. It is worth noting that when assailant says it is unresistable, it means it is unresistable. You can kill Ethraniev Marrowslake during her invulnerability phase with Assailant. Like Elemental Empowerment, this counts as single target and is boosted by focused wizardry.
Renegade Feats:
Critical Power: Grants AP on critical hits. This is an excellent renegade feat and with the mod 6 stat curves you will proc it approximately once every 10 seconds, restoring 5% AP every 10 seconds. Definitely take this if you going ren.
Reaper’s Touch: this feat boosts your at will damage and the procs from that at will damage. Now, at wills are only a small portion of your damage, but it is still decent.
Energy Recovery: The third strike of Chilling Cloud has a chance to grant you a small amount of temp HP. The HP this feat provides is so marginal that this feat is meaningless.
Unrestrained Chaos (Spellstorm): Maelstrom of Chaos now adds chill. Considering that maelstrom is really situational and you will hardly ever use it, I don’t recommend this feat.
Arcane Burst (Master of Flame): Scorching burst has a chance of generating more arcane stacks. Scorching burst is a sub-par at will overall. I dislike it because it significantly slows down your clear speed as you have to stand and cast. Due to this, I would not take the feat either.
Uncertain Allegiance: When you land a critical hit, you grant up to 5% crit to all allies for 10 seconds. It’s a great feat all around unless you run in really highly geared groups who are crit capped. Definitely a good choice.
Abyss of Chaos: When you hit an opponent with an encounter power you mark them with abyss of chaos and if an ally (either a companion or member of your party) hits that target, abyss is consumed and you deal 60% of your weapon damage as an additional hit. I find this feat makes up 6% of my damage when I take it, so it is definitely worth considering. Also, it is worth noting this procs off of the lightning weapon enchantment, the bilethorn weapon enchantment and its damage is boosted by focused wizardry.
Phantasmal Destruction: Increased Crit Severity while in combat advantage. A great feat overall, the damage boost is very nice, however, if you have high crit severity it is worth bearing in mind that the damage boost it provides depends very much on how much crit sev you have and the more you have, the worse this is.
Nightmare Wizardry: Crit has a chance of giving combat advantage for the whole team. This is the most important feat in the tree, with the exception of chaos magic, giving your team 15% bonus damage, at least. The uptime varies, but if you crit substantially, it will give you 50% or more. 7.5% team dps is huge and too good to pass up.
Masterful Arcane Theft: A feat with nice damage boost to steal time and Ray of Enfeeblement. It’s not that great of a feat now as so much of our damage is from passive sources though and very little is from steal time.
Chilling Advantage: 10% more crit chance when chilling presence is slotted. This feat is a must if you are going renegade, providing a sizeable damage boost particularly because storm spell or critical conflag proc off crits. Furthermore, as chilling presence is the best class feature in the game, you will almost always be using chilling presence anyhow unless you playing a pure support build.
Chaos Magic: You get one of 3 buffs, 30% more party damage and lifesteal; bonus arp (which at the time of this writing is not working) and crit; or bonus regen. It is also worth noting that sometimes you get more than 1 buff, I do not know the condition for that happening.
Stat Theory:
There are 2 types of stats in NWO, which I will label the primary stats and the secondary stats. Primary stats are stats with no diminishing returns on the stats itself, and secondary stats are stats that have heavy diminishing returns. Please note that for some of the stat comparisons I have provided an excel spreadsheet to make them easier which can be accessed here:
https://goo.gl/AKGczE
Another useful tool for character optimisation is:
https://goo.gl/K6GJFA
The primary stats look like this: (taken from the guide by @beatannier)
Where investing 399.795~~~400 into the stat yields 1% return. These stats include the following:
Critical Strike
Defence
Deflect
Lifesteal
Recovery (note this is 200:1% curve for recharge speed and 400:1% for AP gain, however, it is still a linear curve)
Movement
Regeneration
Power
The secondary stats are stats that you do not acquire from the majority of your gear but you rather get from things like reinforcement kits and artefacts.
They do have diminishing returns and look like this:
Where the formula for the graph for character level 70 is the following:
Meaning that these stats are effectively capped at 11.36%, however you hit the stats soft cap at roughly 1000 points of investment. These stats include the following:
Combat Advantage Bonus
Action Point Gain
Control Bonus
Control Resistance
Incoming healing Bonus
AoE Resistance
Companion Influence
Gold Gain
Lastly, armour penetration is not linear, but for all functional purposes in pve it might as well be and gives close to 1:100 stats up to 60% resistance ignored which is as high as you need to go.
Offensive Stats:
The 3 main offensive stats in Neverwinter are power, crit and recovery. Secondary offensive stats are Combat advantage bonus and AP gain.
Power vs Crit:
When considering power vs crit, you need to understand how both stats work:
Power is a multiplier that boosts your damage by 1+(Power/40000).
Which means that damage dealt by power = hit*(1+(Power/40000).
Crit increases your damage according to the following formula:
Damage = (1+(Total crit Severity))*Crit Chance*hit+(1-Crit Chance)*hit
Together they increase your damage by:
Damage = hit*(1+(Power/40000)*( (1+(Total crit Severity))*Crit Chance+(1-Crit Chance))
What is also important to note is that the damage bonus from power diminishes in effectiveness the more power you have, in other words, to calculate how much investing 1 point in power will boost your dps, you need to look at (1+new damage bonus)/(1+old damage bonus) to work out how much power is actually boosting your dps by. For a more in depth comparison, a tool for comparing power and crit is available in the spreadsheet listed above.
Boosting power is normally the correct way to go unless you are playing a crit based build with high crit severity.
Arp:Until you have more RI than NPC’s have damage resistance, arp is your biggest boost to damage. This is primarily because armour penetration as a stat follows a curve of 1:100 as opposed to 1:400, but to demonstrate this fully, I will illustrate this with an example:
Let us take the last bit before you have 60% resistance ignored:
So, you have 59% resistance ignored and let us say no power at all and are wondering whether it is better to put 100 points into power or 100 points into arp. The reason we are assuming you have no power at all is because this is when you will get the best returns on power, where putting 1 point in power will actually boost your dps by 1%.
So, you take a theoretical hit at an opponent who has 60% dr, the hits damage before dr is 10000
The following happens:
With 100 points in power:
10000*1.0025*0.99 = 9924.75
With 100 points in arp:
10000*1.00*1.00 = 10000
This illustrates that even in the best case scenario for power, arp will always win out until you have capped your arp to match your opponent's damage resistance.
Recovery:
Recovery reduces your cooldowns and boosts your action point gain. Although the stat itself is linear and works by providing 1% recharge speed increase for every 200 points and 400:1% AP gain, the way it reduces your cooldowns is not. The way it works is as follows:
New CD = Old CD/(1+Recharge Speed Increase)
Which means that at low levels of recharge speed increase, it reduces your cooldowns quite quickly but the higher you get, the less it reduces your cooldowns. Since mod 6, the introduction of spell twisting has made recovery effectively an unnecessary stat and as of such I do not recommend investing in it unless you intend to drop spell twisting (which I do not recommend either)
Defensive stats:
There are 5 main defensive stats in Neverwinter, defence, hitpoints, deflect, regeneration and lifesteal. There are also other defensive stats like stamina regeneration, AoE Resistance and control resistance. Here is how to compare them:
HP vs Defence:
To compare HP vs defence, you need to compare the effective HP pools, in other words, how much damage an opponent has to do to you in 1 hit to kill you. This can be calculated by doing the following:
HP/(1-Damage resistance) = current effective HP pool
HP/(1-Damage Resistance – additional defence) = effective HP with added defense
HP/(1-Damage Resistance)+additional HP = effective HP total with added hitpoints
The biggest number you get as a solution is the best direction to go.
Lifesteal:
Lifesteal is a defensive tool that acts a method to keep you up and keep you going, as a CW you want between 10-20% lifesteal, any more would be overkill.
Deflect vs Defence:
This is where things become interesting, many CW’s outright ignore deflect and in pve that may be the right way to go, however, it depends entirely on your opponent’s armour penetration. Say for example an opponent has 20% resistance ignored and you have 10% damage resistance, he currently ignores all of your defence and he will continue to ignore all of your defence until you have more than 20% damage resistance. For most cases, monsters armour penetration is less than 10% and so your defense is more effective, the exceptions being bosses like lostmauth, assassin drakes (appear to have the highest resistance ignored in the game, ignore 80% of your DR) and phase spiders.
Firstly, you need to calculate how much damage resistance you actually have, this is done by taking your damage resistance, subtracting your opponents ARP then if the total is less than 0 write the answer as 0 and if it is greater than 0.8 write your answer as 0.8. This gives you your actual DR, or ADR as I will call it.
Damage Mitigated =
Damage Taken - Damage Taken*(1-ADR)*((1-Deflect Severity)*Deflect Chance+(1-Deflect Chance))
Survivability:
So, after taking into account all of the offensive and defensive stats, you can then create a single formula that calculates a character’s general “survivability”. Bear in mind, in reality this number is meaningless as a rating, however, it allows you to effectively compare 1 character to another in a much more efficient manner than gearscore, item level or any other of Cryptic’s ratings. I will explain this in a number of steps:
Effective HP1 (EHP1) (Before Lifesteal or Deflect) =
(Base HP + HP Bonuses)/(1 - Damage Resistance + Opponent Armour Penetration) The limit on this formula is that the denominator is never smaller than 0.2.
Effective HP2 (EHP2) (Before Lifesteal) =
EHP1/(1 - Deflect Severity)*Deflect Chance + EHP1*(1-Deflect Chance)
Effective Healing (EH) =
DPS*Lifesteal Severity/Lifesteal Consistency Factor
Lifesteal Consistency Factor (LSCF) =
(1-Lifesteal Chance)^Hits Per Second
Survivability =
EHP2*EH
The larger the number, the better your survivability potentially is. The numbers are arbitrary, but it gives you a method to more accurately compare 1 build to another in terms of how well it will survive. For instance, if the number is 3x larger for 1 person than another, they will be roughly 3x more durable.
Race:
So, when looking for a Race for CW, what are you looking for? You are looking for a combination of 2 things, firstly a good racial bonus and secondly a good attribute point bonus. For CW that leaves us with the following good choices:
Human: You can get 2 int points, 3% more defense and 3 more heroic feats. As CW’s have good heroic feats on the final tier (prestidigitation, focused wizardry and learned spellcaster) human is there for a good choice.
Moon Elf: +2 int, +2 cha, 1% stamina, 1% AP gain and CC resist, definitely a decent choice.
Sun Elf: +2 int, +2 charisma, 2% AP gain, CC resist. Maybe slightly better than Moon elf, but we are splitting hairs. These guys are excellent options as well.
Tiefling: +2 int, +2 charisma, 5% more damage to weak monsters, chance to debuff the mobs - great stats great bonuses and my personal choice.
Dragonborn: +2 int, +2 cha, more crit, more power, more incoming healing - Dragonborn are excellent at everything, except for the fact that they look downright ugly and can’t wear the hexbane hood which is the best looking CW helm in the game.
Drow: Please take note this is a very niche choice. If you are going to go MoF Renegade and only intend to play as a supporter you can take drow for the darkfire bonus which provides a 5% increase to party damage effectiveness per stack of darkfire. I do not recommend going this route myself, as it means that if you intend to respect to a non-supporter build you will also have to change your race, but the choice is up to you. An additional note, darkfire can proc off abyss of chaos and so if you run drow with abyss+lightning you can proc darkfire rapidly on targets and sometimes multiproc it, I have seen 4x the darkfire buff on a single target from 1 Drow.
Example of darkfire, 120% effectiveness (darkfire was the only debuff I was applying at the time):
Section 2: Build Development
Build development is something unique to each person, it is about how you develop your character, which feats you choose, what path you wish to aim for and how you like to play. With that being said, I can give you some guidance on this from my experience with playing CW. Take note, I do not recommend playing a SS Oppressor at all and so I have not included a bit on them. Whilst I do not recommend a MoF Oppressor, I feel it is not as terrible is an SS Oppressor can be.
Where does my damage come from?
This may seem like an odd statement to put into a guide, but it is a very important question to ask yourself. Where does your damage, as class X (in this case CW) primarily come from. Identifying this key aspect allows you to understand what you should try not to sacrifice when building your character, unless you are trying to pigeonhole yourself into some niche build or to try something out of the box for pure personal enjoyment. For CW, your damage Primarily comes from Class Features and gear. Why is this? Well, this is because the CW as a class has some very powerful class features, in fact, I would argue, the CW class has the most powerful class features out of any class in the game. Chilling presence is the single biggest damage boost of any class feature, normally boosting your damage by 36% or 48% (depending on the rank you have) and then sometimes boosting your damage by 72% or 96% (when your target is frozen). Those numbers are very high and it is why Chilling presence is almost guaranteed a must for any CW build (unless you are playing some support build). Storm spell or Critical Conflagration is the next biggest damage boost. Now, you may wonder why I include Crit Conflag here, considering evocation and swath on paper provide a bigger boost, but you have to consider that for most MoF’s, the only reliable way to put smolder on a target is with Crit Conflag and so the damage boost provided by smolder, may as well come from crit conflag. Storm spell is a 17-30% damage increase for a CW, depending on a number of factors, also making it a highly effective Class Feature. Finally, the wheel of elements boosts your damage by ~10-15%. For comparison, all the feats in thaum boost your damage by approximately 50%, so 1 class feature (chilling presence) is equivalent to all the feats in thaum. This shows that for a CW, your gear and your class features are where the majority of your damage comes from.
Which build should I play?
The build you play is entirely your choice, you may play one of the ones I suggest, or one completely different. With that being said, this section describes each of the builds I have provided here in terms of what it excels at so that if you want to decide to play one of mine, you have background information on what each one excels at. The SS Thaum build is purely a damage build, if you want to hit hard with massive burst damage, attempting to play the role of a striker, then this is the build to go with. The SS ren build is a mix of a party buffer and a damage dealer, focusing on balancing party damage with personal damage, it’s a jack of all trades and master of none build. The MoF Ren build is a pure support build, it has low personal damage, but high group utility. If you want to fill the role of a support who makes other damage dealers feel powerful, this is the way to do so. Finally, the MoF thaum is the build with the highest durability. It is the most tanky out of all of my builds, with many procs and dots constantly triggering lifesteal at the expense of losing some damage. MoF thaum is the build I currently play, as it I am currently spending time trying to solo t2 dungeons, however, what works for me may not work for you.
Boons for all builds:
Due to how boons are only of a binary nature (i.e, 1 offensive stat vs 1 defensive stat) I have not included them in the Theory section and am rather including them in the build development section, suggesting the boon choices I prefer, obviously, if you want to stack stats more defensively in some areas or more offensively in others, it is entirely your choice.
Sharandar:
Dread Ring:
Icewind Dale:
It is important to note that if you truly want to take advantage of cool resolve, you should consider not using an elven battle and not stacking stamina gain, then deliberately keeping your stamina low and using elvish fury from sharandar. I do not opt to go this route as I prefer to have a tankier CW.
Tyranny of the Dragons:
Note I have not completed the tyranny of the dragon’s boons, however, if I did, I would take 2 more points in dragon’s thirst for life steal. I prefer the additional survivability over the crit severity. Also, please note that the boon actually grants 4/5/6% lifesteal, not 3/4/5%. It is also worth noting that another viable option is putting 1 point into control bonus, 1 point into critical severity and 1 point into lifesteal.
Elemental Evil:
Underdark:
The Maze Engine:
Strongholds:
Strongholds boons, unlike other boons, can be changed at whim depending on what you need. I would recommend taking the power boon for offense and the defence boon for defence, but lifesteal is also a good choice.
Ability Scores:
Unless you are human or drow, I recommend rolling for 16 int and 16 cha. Unless you are human or drow, I recommend putting 2 points into int and 2 points into cha and if you are those 2 then I recommend 2 points in int for human and +2 dex and +2 cha for drow.
Alternatively, if you are going for a pure support MoF build you can put points into int and wisdom, completely forsaking crit for the extra recovery, I do not recommend going this route.
Encounters:
I recommend using the following encounter powers:
MoF:
CoI on tab, Icy Terrain, Steal Time and Disintegrate. Other alternatives include using ray of enfeeblement for single target boss fights, shield on tab for soloing dungeons and Chill strike on tab if you are wearing HV to apply the set bonus. You can also use fanning the flame on tab and conduit of ice instead of disintegrate and if you choose to do this, if you are thaum you should put points into frozen power transfer instead of elemental empowerment as you will have sufficient downtime on cooldowns to take advantage of FPT. A final potential rotation to try out is CoI (tab), FtF, IT, Disintegrate.
SS:
CoI on tab, Icy Terrain, Steal Time and Disintegrate. Alternatives include Sudden Storm, Ray of enfeeblement for single target fights, shield on tab for solo dungeon attempts and Chill Strike for applying HV stacks.
Section 3: Builds
This section covers how I would build particular feat paths and serves to provide examples.
SS Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Spell Storm (+ Offhand bonus) and Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
You don’t have nightmare wizardry, which means you need to consciously position yourself for combat advantage, it won’t just happen for free. Yes, I know this is a pain and it is something the renegade does not have to do, but if you manage to do it, you will do more damage than renegade. Also, I would only advise going this route if you are around 3k ilvl, because before then most of the time the support you provide following one of the other builds is more likely to outweigh the loss of personal dps. I consider a thaum build an expensive endgame option and not something I would look into until you can achieve high crit without uncertain allegiance, chilling presence + chaotic nexus. Once you have bonding stones rank 10 and higher, this is probably an option you can start considering.
SS Renegade:
Feats:
Class Features:
Spell Storm (+ offhand bonus) + Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
An advantage of going Renegade is most of the time you have combat advantage, which means that you can take advantage of CA to a degree that the other builds cannot. Combat advantage pets are definitely the way to go. However, you do not have icy veins, which means you will have to be far more careful then you would otherwise have to be in dungeons, you cannot instant freeze everything and use the opportunity to kill everything before it regains mobility.
Your damage looks something like this:
MoF Oppressor:
Feats:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration (+ Offhand Bonus) + Chilling Presence.
Advice for the build:
I would not recommend going the oppressor route but if you decide to go it, then this is how I would do it. You do lose quite a bit of damage by going this route and it isn’t really made up by anything, with that being said, if you choose to go this way, it is entirely your own choice.
MoF Thaumaturge:
Feats:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration (+ Offhand Bonus) + Chilling Presence or optional Swath (With offhand bonus) + CP.
Advice for the build:
I advise using crit conflag + CP to maximise your damage potential. In theory, if you use scorching burst as a secondary at will you can achieve higher damage potential using swath + CP, however I find that usually you just cannot keep up smolder without critical conflagration reliably and as of such I do not recommend going that route. It is good in theory; it fails in practise with the exception being boss fights. A little note for this build, if you want to gimp yourself for dungeons but make yourself look good on dragon heralds (or any other single target fight), you can take abyss of chaos instead of icy veins and transcended master instead of elemental empowerment and then use icy rays (tab), CoI, disintegrate, ftf as well as swath + chilling presence. You apply smolder at the start of the fight using the MoF at will scorching and then use magic missile as your primary at will.
Here is a picture of what you can expect your damage distribution to look like if you go this route:
MoF Renegade:
Feats:
Encounters:
Class Features:
Critical Conflagration + Swath of Destruction (+ Offhand Bonus) or Swath (+ offhand bonus) + Combustive Action.
Advice for the build:
This is a pure support build, you sacrifice a lot of damage going this route and I only recommend going this route if you either are playing CW as an alt and don’t intend to invest much into it, but still want it to provide a significant boost to any party it is in, or if you spend most of your time playing with premade teams and are trying to as a team kill things as quickly as possible. I do not recommend this build if you are playing with random groups or poor players, as the loss in personal damage is only worthwhile if it is being compensated by boosting the damage of some other very good dps.
Section 4: Gearing your wizard
New player Levelling Guide:
This section is for new players to the game who need help with some more basic things. Firstly, at level level 21 you will get a quest called artifact recovery, for that quest, the best choice is the lantern of revelation, I recommend getting that. Secondly, I recommend joining a guild, whether it is a good guild or a bad guild doesn’t matter so much, your first guild is likely to be temporary and it is more about getting to talk to some friendly people who have been playing the game for longer than you, who can help you out.
MoF Power Points:
I recommend allocating the following power points:
Depending on your build, you will then be able to change between whatever powers you need as well as class features.
SS Power Points:
I recommend the following power points for SS CW’s:
Level 70 Basic Gear:
For a new player, once you have hit level 70, I recommend grabbing the following gear from the Auction house when you can:
Cruel Cap of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Robes of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Gloves of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Boots of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Amulet of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Ring of Piercing/Smiting
Cruel Belt of Piercing/Smiting
These items should cost you roughly 15k AD and will put you in a better position to progress. Furthermore, I would stick some azures in offence slots, some darks in defense slots and some azures in utility slots. The reason I would stick azures in utility slots starting out is to get enough XP to acquire bonus stat points, you need at least 2 more skill points to allocate towards your 2 passive powers, as those give a huge damage bonus. Once you are able to start doing dungeons, I would then recommend using the following gear for a while from t1 dungeons:
Ensorcelled Mulhorand Orb
Elemental Fire Talisman
Alliance Raid Robes
Alliance Assault Cap
Alliance Assault Armlets
Alliance Raid Shoes
Alliance Assault Ring x2
Lostmauth's Hoard Necklace
Owlbear Leather Belt of Intelligence
Drowcraft Underwear
When you can, get a hold of a dusk boots pack for 6k AD.
How to progress:
Once you have got to this point, you have got to the milestone where it is a lot more expensive to progress and you will have to invest more time (or money) in order to get further. My advice is to join a channel like legit:
(http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/544112/nw-legit-community-channel-info-discussion)
There are other channels that are better, but they all have requirements. As a new player, you are looking for a channel with people in it who can help you without any item level or experience requirements and that is the place I would recommend looking.
Gearing at 70:
Once you have progressed beyond your basic gear at level 70, there is some more advanced and expensive stuff, which is listed below in this section. This is for more experienced players and is what you can look into once you no longer have the tight restrictions of a new level 70 player budget.
Where to allocate 4th power points:
The Places I would allocate passive points are as follows:
Firstly, your passive powers, so chilling presence, storm spell/critical conflagration/swath.
Secondly, your encounter powers, so icy terrain, conduit of ice, steal time disintegrate in that order.
Thirdly, your daily powers.
Lastly, your at wills.
Weapon Enchantments:
There are a number of good weapon enchantments for CW, which I will list here, you can then choose between them and decide which one you prefer. I have included pictures of the testing of the various enchants, each one done with the same gear, with the exception of the weapon enchantment. Neither a bonding companion or an augment was summoned for the testing. The reason I did leave the rest of my gear on is because I need to have some crit for the comparison between fey and crit severity weapon enchantments and 57% is roughly the point where they equal. All weapon enchants tested were at trans rank.
Gear used:
Damage with no enchant:
Vorpal:
Vorpal boosts your damage by boosting your critical severity. However, unlike other weapon enchantments, vorpal is not a damage multiplier by itself, rather it adds itself to form part of a damage multiplier and so the larger the other part, the smaller the damage bonus provided by vorpal. The damage dealt by the vorpal is illustrated by the formula below:
A*B*C+(1-B)*C = D
Where A = Crit Severity and is comprised of E and F, where E is the crit severity from other sources and F is the crit severity of the vorpal enchantment. B is the crit chance, C is the base damage and d is the damage output. From the formula if you focus on just A and break it down into its parts you can see the following:
A = (1.75+Boosts+Vorp) and as vorp has a peak damage output of 0.5, the larger the boosts to crit sev are from external sources, the less effective the vorp will be in comparison. Therefore if you already have a large amount of crit severity, I recommend staying away from the vorpal and using another enchantment, you can check these values using the tool I provided in the stat theory section to work out which enchant is better for personal dps. When comparing this to feytouched, you need to find your real crit using ACT.
To calculate how much of a boost to your damage vorpal is, use the following formula:
[(A+0.50)*B+(1-B)]/[(A*B+(1-B)]
Where for A you exclude vorpal. Take note, this is not including the debuff.
A screenshot showing the testing of vorpal with 57% sheet crit chance, the dps column is the one to take a look at.
Feytouched:
Feytouched is a multiplier. It boosts your damage by multiplying it, at transcendent by 1.18. However, at lower ranks it has a downtime period on the buff and so unless you have this enchant at transcendent, I do not recommend using it for dps. In addition to boosting your damage, it also reduces your opponent’s damage by 18%, making it an enchantment with defensive capabilities as well. For the purposes of calculating how much it boosts your damage use the formula below:
New damage = 1.18*Old damage*Uptime+Old damage*(1-uptime)
Where uptime is what percentage of the time you can keep it up for. For example, if the feytouched buff was for 10 seconds and the cooldown was for 20 seconds, then 10/20 = 50% uptime or 0.5.
One downside of feytouched is if 2 people are using it, only 1 person gets the buff. However, most players in pve use vorpal so it is very definitely a good choice and worth considering in certain circumstances.
Here is a screenshot showing feytouched:
Plaguefire:
Plaguefire provides a party wide damage boost of 3% per stack of the buff. Long ago, CW’s could only reliably keep up 1 or 2 stacks of the buff however with the introduction of all the new procs its possible to keep up 3 stacks. The way to calculate how much the Plaguefire enchant is boosting your damage is as follows:
(1,03*(ch1+2*ch2+3*ch3)/100) * admg + (1 - (ch1+ch2+ch3)/100) * admg = pf damage; where:
ch1 - chance to have 1 stack of plague fire debuff on target;
ch2 - chance to have 2 stacks of plague fire debuff on target;
ch3 - chance to have 3 stacks of plague fire debuff on target;
admg = (1+crit severity)*(crit chance*dmg + (1-crit chance)*dmg;
Which is a big mess and basically just boils down to the faster you hit, the more damage the enchantment does. The enchantment is good because it boosts the entire parties damage, not just your own, by up to 9% which in some cases can be more damage than the other personal damage boost weapon enchantments boost your damage.
A screenshot showing the testing of plaguefire with 57% sheet crit chance, the effectiveness column is the one to take a look at:
Dread:
So after testing this a third time, (after the lolset nerf/buff fix thing) I find dread superior to vorpal. The way this enchantment works is quite complex. It firstly provides 75% crit severity to encounters. It secondly deals an additional unbuffed hit for 25% of weapon damage. Thirdly, it provides a defense debuff of 40% and forthly it reduces an opponent’s damage resistance by 4%. The defense debuff does not function in pve. The formula for calculating how much Dread is boosting your damage is as follows:
Damage*{[%encdamage*(1+critsev+dreadcritsev)+(1-%encdamage)*(1+critsev)]*%critchance+(1-critchance)} = Dread Damage
Where %encdamage is the percentage of your damage that is from encounters, crit sev is your critical severity without dread, dreadcritsev is the crit sev bonus from dread and crit chance is your critical chance. It is important to note this formula does not account for the debuff or the hit for 25% of weapon damage, the latter is not included because in any group with many buffs, that becomes such a miniscule portion of your dps that it is then not worth noting. Note, this enchantment is always better than terror.
Here is a screenshot showing dread:
Other Weapon enchantments:
These are other weapon enchantments that I am posting information on by request, so I will not cover all of them and not in as much depth as the ones listed above but at least it does provide you as the reader with information about them if you desire it. I will update this section as requests for specific enchants are made.
Trans Lightning:
This enchantment isn’t great for dps, because the way it works is by boosting your damage by a fixed amount of weapon damage, dealt as an additional hit, which chains to other targets. The issue with this is that the lightning damage does not crit, does not proc stuff (with the exception of abyss of chaos) and does not benefit from buffs or debuffs. In addition, the enchantment generates large amounts of threat as you hit opponents so rapidly. Don’t be surprised if you always have aggro if you are using this enchant. The enchantment is good for niche support builds where you are trying to multiproc darkfire through abyss, but outside of that, it isn’t a good choice.
Here is an example of a combat log showing lightning, same test as all of the above, with the same character. Something to bear in mind is that the lightning arc (which makes up a significant portion of the damage) does not exist in single target fights and is much lower in AoE fights in any group situation as the enchantment isn’t benefitting from buffs and debuffs so realistically, in party situations, its a 1-2% damage boost and not 11%.
Armour Enchantments:
There are 3 armour enchantments I would recommend choosing between, the negation, the elven battle and the soulforged. If you don’t want to invest too much into defensive enchantments, then I recommend the soulforged as it is good from lesser which cannot be said for any other armour enchantment however if you intend to use a higher level enchant say greater upwards, then I would strongly recommend considering using 1 of the other 2. My personal preference is Elven Battle, because the problem with negation is you need to be able to take damage for it to become good. By nature, CW’s are squishy, meaning that the monsters in dungeons hit so hard that by the time you have stacks, you are dead. The stamina gain and control resistance from elven battle though can actually make a considerable difference.
Offense Slots:
There are 3 main offensive enchantments, the Brutal, the Radiant and the Azure. Prior to mod 6, I would have recommended putting Radiants in all offense slots however, post mod 6 I would recommend staying away from radiants and investing into azures or better yet, brutals if you can afford them. However, the enchantments you should use on your offense slots differ on a case by case basis, to truly get the most out of your stats I recommend using the spreadsheet provided in the stat theory section to work out what will give you the biggest boost.
Defence Slots:
For defence slots, I recommend either darks or savages, savages being my preferred choice. Once you have enough lifesteal to feel satisfied you can sustain yourself, it then becomes a choice between HP, defence and deflect. For CW’s, you will very rarely be in a position where defence is better than HP and so I will confidently say that in most cases savages are the way to go, however, if you want to be certain based off of your own stats, you can check on my spreadsheet.
Overload Enchantments:
Not many players use overload enchantments, which is why this section is included. Think about it this way, each overload enchantment is worth 800 stats for 2 hours if they are greater and 8 hours if they are of the black ice type. So, how do they work? Well, if you have 2 overloads of the same type, you have 100% uptime on the bonus, but only 1 stat bonus for 800 stats, if you have 2 different types, you have 50% uptime on the bonus, but 1600 stats. Now, why is it worth investing in them? Well, think about it this way. 2 greater black dragon glyphs will cost you 1k AD. For that 1k AD, you are temporarily gaining a stat bonus worth more than a rank 12 enchantment (700 stats) in addition to whatever other bonus the overload enchantment gives, if it is red or black, the additional bonus makes up roughly 1% of your dps. Now, a rank 12 enchantment costs 1.5M AD, so you would have to go through 3000 overload enchantments (dragon glyphs) in order to make up the cost of 1 rank 12, which is giving less stats. That is the equivalent of 3000 hours of uptime. Furthermore, even if you were only refining AD on 1 toon for your AD income, that is only costing you 1/36th of your total AD income on your toon per day. Due to this, it is a mistake to not use overload enchantments, even if it is only for the stat gain.
Good overload enchantments include:
Greater Red Dragon Glyph (If you are not capped on arp, this adds 800 in addition to the damage bonus)
Greater Black Dragon Glyph (This is my preferred one, giving 800 crit and the dot)
Greater White Dragon Glyph (If you only care about the stat, this gives 800 power)
Black Ice Overloads (Give AP gain + stats, also a decent choice)
Mark of the Dragon Slayer +1 or 2 (Gives extra damage against dragons)
Mark of the Demon Slayer +1 or 2 (Gives extra damage against demons)
Artifact Choices:
For your artifacts, there are 2 important categories, your main artifacts and then your secondary artifacts. Your main artifact is there firstly for its bonus; your secondary artifacts are there for their stats. For your main artifact, I would strongly recommend the wheel of elements, which provides a 10-15% damage boost, or a cheaper alternative being the devoted cleric sigil, which can be obtained by levelling a cleric to 60 and doing the vault of the 9 quest. The last main artifact choice I would recommend is the lantern of revelation, which I would only suggest for a support build.
For the secondary artifacts, there are many good choices and they all depend on the stats you need. Artifacts are primarily there to help you balance out your stats. Here is a list of good choices:
Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
Lantern of Revelation
Sigil of the Controller
Kessel’s Sphere of annihilation
Thayan book of the dead
Tiamat’s orb of Majesty
Shard of Valindra’s Crown
Heart of the Blue Dragon
Horn of Valhalla
Ideally, you want your last 2 artifacts to have 3 relevant offensive stats, so power, crit, arp, combat advantage bonus, action point gain and stamina gain are all good. Ideally, I would focus on sorting out your action point gain and combat advantage bonus here, as it is hard to get it on other gear pieces without going to ridiculous lengths like reinforcement kits (which cost a lot).
For weapons, you will want either the twisted set (for a dps setup) or the burning orb and talisman (for a support setup). if you are really rich and are in a rich guild, the stronghold set is potentially best in slot, but it is completely superfluous unless you run with other people who have it almost all the time, so I do not recommend investing in it.
Companions:
For anyone intending to min/max, companions play a vital role and can boost your damage by up to 50%. Due to this, you need to choose carefully and their importance should not be underestimated. There are 2 types of companions, your summoned companions and then your active companions. You want your summoned companions for the stat bonuses they provide and then your active companions for the percentage damage increase they provide.
Augment:
This is the cheap option for your summoned companion, if you cannot afford greater bonding runestones or better I recommend sticking with this. Using a non-augment will only become an option for you at around 3k ilvl when you can afford it, until then, augments are a good choice. The cheap augments are the cat and the ioun stone of allure. These companions are good because they provide you with 100% of their stats, which can boost your damage by between 10-20%.
Bonding Proccer:
This is the expensive choice. If you can afford 3 greater bonding runestones or better, then using a bonding proccer becomes better than using an augment. It is important to note that even though the tooltips for rank 11 and 12 bonding runestones state they grant 65% of the companion’s stats, they actually grant 80% and 95% respectively. There are 3 criteria for judging a good bonding proccer, the first is attack speed, which determines how fast it can proc something once it is in combat, how fast it can get into combat, which determines bonding downtime and then thirdly whether or not it can multi proc the stones. Good companions that meet the requirements are listed below:
Blink Dog
Shadow Demon
Zhentarim Warlock
Dwarven Battlerager
For the cheaper option with a good active bonus, I recommend the blink dog or the dwarven battlerager. An advantage the battlerager has is it has 3 ring slots which makes it ideal for underdark rings, also, it is an account wide companion unlock, however, bear in mind he is melee and often doesn’t make it to combat on time. Another good choice for a summoned companion is a sellsword for a MoF ren support build, it applies a debuff which improves team dps by 10%.
Here is a screenshot of what I have seen with the lightfoot thief:
As you can see, there are 9 stacks of companion’s gift. The reason the bonding stone route is so good is because even with 3 stacks of rank 12 bondings, its 285% of a companion’s stats vs 100% from augment. It is important to note that by using different ranks of bonding stones it increases the rate of proccing and in some cases causes the stones to multiproc, however, I do not see any noticeable dps increase in the long run going 3 rank 12 vs rank 10/11/12, so if you have 10/11/12, there isn’t any reason to upgrade and if you have 3x12, there isn’t any reason to downgrade.
Also something to keep in mind when using a bonding companion: You receive that stats you place on it multiplicatively, making stat allocation critical. If you have 4k power and 2k crit, there might be times when you will receive up to almost 12k power and 6k crit from your companion in combat. As a CW, this can be used to your advantage - you can stack a lot of crit on your companion, and benefit by having an extremely high crit chance in combat. I’d also recommend using your highest ranking enchants on your bonding companion, you’ll get more stats overall by doing it that way.
Active Companions
Active companions are all about the active bonus. The first thing to take note of is that Stat bonuses (example 400 power) are ALWAYS worse than percentage bonuses (example 4% damage increase). This is because when the stat curves were updated for mod 6, the amount of stats provided by stat companions was not boosted enough to compensate for the new curves.
Some good companion choices include:
Siege master: (+4% damage)
Air Archon: (+5% damage when your target is not at full health)
Blink Dog: (1.05 damage multiplier when you have CA)
Intellect Devourer: (1.05 damage multiplier when you have CA)
Cambion Magus: (+10% crit severity)
Fire Archon: (+7% damage bonus when your opponent is below 50% HP)
Wild hunt Rider: (on encounter use there is a 10% chance to boost your damage by 10%)
Wisp: (+control bonus and control resistance)
Cantankerous Mage: (+25% control bonus)
Pseudodragon: (on damage dealt there is a chance to restore some stamina)
Owlbear Cub: (Deal 50% of your power as an additional hit on encounter use. For Thaums with low crit, this companion can be as much as a 20% dps boost so definitely worth considering)
Companion Gear:
For your active companion, there is 2 choices good choices for gear. The first is the “of the loyal avenger” gear which boosts power, crit and armour penetration and has an offense slot and a defence slot and the second good choice is the adorable bites gear. If you are capped on armour penetration without your companion, then I recommend going the adorable bites route if you want to maximise your damage potential. With that being said though, I actually prefer having those defence slots to help balance my CW’s stats and help make him more tanky over all.
Loyal Avenger gear is BoE gear that drops from Sword Coast Adventures, a game found at:
http://www.gateway.playneverwinter.com
This gear can be acquired by playing the game and hoping that RNG is on your side, or by purchasing it in the AH.
The Adorable Bites Gear is a more expensive option, it drops from legendary lockboxes. Of course, this means that it comes with a hefty price tag - this option is only really applicable to min-maxers and BiS builds.
The final option is using underdark and maze engine rings, for example rising power or brutality on your companion. The companion can proc them and the results can be quite impressive.
The High Vizier Set:
Although it is a level 60 set, it is still very powerful and deserves a special mention. If you run in premade groups and you own this set, I highly recommend using it. What it does is when you use controlling powers, it applies stacks of arcane force transference which increase the parties damage against the target debuffed by the HV set by 10% per stack. Abilities that can apply the HV bonus are as follows:
Procs Debuff with:
- Chill Strike x2 (x3 on mastery on main target, x1 on others)
- Icy Terrain x1 per target.
- Ice Knife: x3
- Ice Storm: x2 per target
- Icy rays: x1
- Shard of Endless Avalanche x1 per target on roll, x1 on explode.
- Oppressive Force x3 over the duration per target
- Furious immolation x3 over the duration per target
Buff and Debuff (buff stacks up to 3 times)
- Entangling force x1 (x1 per hit on mastery)
- Steal time x3 per target (x1 buff total, x2 on mastery)
- Repel x1 (x1 per target on mastery)
- Shield x1 per target.
A good example of a rotation that can apply the high vizier set is chill strike on tab, steal time, disintegrate and icy terrain. You would apply 3 stacks of the debuff with either chill strike or steal time and then refresh it with steal time, icy terrain and chill strike.
Mounts:
This section is currently being expanded on. There is a useful tool to be found here that lists which mounts have certain insignia bonuses, I will not be including this in my guide, if you want to find this information, you will have to refer to it:
https://goo.gl/mN4W6z
https://two30.github.io/neverwinter-combo/?0,0,0,0,0
Stat bonus:
I will break this section down into zen mounts (account wide) and then non zen mounts (per char). Bear in mind, I am only listing the mounts I think are good for pve. Also, take note that you can only have 1 stat bonus active at a time, my recommended bonus is highlighted in red:
Zen Mounts:
Heavy Howler: 2k Crit
Guard Drake: 2k Power
Dusk Unicorn: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Warg: 1k Crit, 1k Arp
BoE Mounts:
Gorgon: 15% of your AP back over 10 seconds.
Heavy Mystic Nightmare: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Inferno Nightmare: 2k Lifesteal
Heavy Twilight Nightmare: 2k Power
Heavy Howler: 2k Crit
Flail Snail: 15% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Flail Snail (legacy): 25% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Coastal Flail Snail: 25% of your AP back over 10 seconds
Gas Spore: Increases Stamina Regeneration by 20%. (30% with mount and companion affinity)
Imperial Rage Drake: 4k Crit
Rage Drake: 2k Crit
Apparatus of Gond: 2k Power
Dusk Unicorn: 2k Lifesteal
Black Ice Warhorse: 4k Power
Insignias:
The way insignias is supposed to stack is the following: The first insignia provides 100% of the bonus and subsequent insignias provide 25% of the bonus.(confirmed by http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/comment/12803623) However, I find that not all bonuses stack this way, so I will not specifically list which ones stack and which ones don’t until I am absolutely sure.
Insignia Set Bonuses:
Magister’s Patience/Restraint: Although these bonuses look good on paper, after testing them I can say for certain they are disappointing on CW. They make up less than 1% of my damage and they do not scale with buffs or debuffs. Due to this, I do not recommend investing in this bonus. Also, the bonus does not stack, so 1 person can apply only 1 magister’s at a time. The tooltip of magister’s restraint is wrong and it provides roughly half the boost of patience, not the same amount.
Warlord’s Inspiration/Encouragement: This used to be brokenly overpowered and basically multiply your stats by 4, however, since the nerf, it is underwhelming and increases your companion’s damage by 25%.
Protector’s Camaraderie/Friendship: Whenever your companion attacks, it increases your power and defense by 3% for 10 seconds. The bonus stacks up to 4 times and provides a total of 12% power and defense. Each time you stack an additional mount with the bonus, the tooltip adds an additional 4%, but the bonus does not change if you actually test it, so there is no point to stacking this bonus.
Artificer’s Persuasion/Influence: What it does is Increase your recovery, movement speed, action point gain and stamina gain by 10% of your power for 15 seconds after using an artifact. So, basically, assuming you have a mythic artifact, this is worth 2.5% of your power (it has a 25% uptime). Furthermore, AP gain and stamina gain are probably stats you have already capped, meaning you are only gaining movement speed and recovery.
Shepherd’s Devotion: Currently provides you with the artificer’s persuasion bonus.
Barbarian’s Revelry/Delight: This one sounds good in theory and was one I was really looking forward to using, healing 3% of your max HP whenever you crit seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. The bonus has an internal cooldown and doesn’t proc off all crits, only some of them, making it underwhelming and inferior to lifesteal.
Gladiator’s Guile: This one works as per the tooltip, when your stamina is above 75%, you gain 15% movement speed and when it is below 25%, you gain 15% of your power as stamina gain. This is the best insignia bonus of them all.
Wanderer’s Fortune: This bonus does work, however, as it doesn’t provide any numerical information that can be easily measured, I am unsure if it has an ICD or if it stacks. What it apparently does if give you a 4% chance to have a refinement stone drop at your feet on killing an enemy, I am not sure if it really is 4%. What I do know though is that it is amazing, I strongly recommend using this.
Which Insignia Bonuses do I Recommend?
- Gladiator’s Guile
- Protector’s Camaraderie
- Protector’s Friendship
- Wanderer’s Fortune
- Magister’s Patience
Insignia Stat Bonuses:
Here is a complete list of all the “suffixes” to insignias and what they provide. I have highlighted the good ones for a dps toon in red. For a completely BiS DPS specced character you should aim for characters with those suffixes on your insignias:
- Insignia of Aggression: Armor Penetration + Action Point Gain
- Insignia of Courage: Defense + Incoming Healing Bonus
- Insignia of Dominance: Power + Companion Influence
- Insignia of Evasion: Deflection + AoE Resist
- Insignia of Leeching: Life Steal + Life Steal Severity
- Insignia of Mastery: Recovery + Control Bonus
- Insignia of Prosperity: Maximum Hit Points + Gold, Glory, and Experience Gain
- Insignia of Refuge: Regeneration + Control Resist
- Insignia of Skill: Critical Strike + Combat Advantage Bonus
- Insignia of Vigor: Movement + Stamina/Guard Gain
Section 5: Appendices
This section provides additional information and examples of builds which you may or may not find useful.
Appendix 1: Further Reading:
Death is the Best Crowd Control: A Spellstorm Renegade Guide by Ironzerg:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/551341/spellstorm-renegade-guide-death-is-the-best-crowd-control/p1
Chem’s Comprehensive Mod 5 CW Guide: Even though this has not been updated since module 5, it still contains a large amount of valuable information you won’t find anywhere else.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/548656/chems-comprehensive-mod-5-cw-guide/p1
Burn With Me! A Master of Flame Guide written by Beatannier.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1202467/master-of-flame-renegade-guide-burn-with-me/p1
Thaumaturge’s Time to Shine: A Complete Guide, written by katamaster81899.
http://mmominds.com/2016/03/02/thaumaturges-time-to-shine-a-complete-guide/
Level 70 stack curve progression during mod 6 preview.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/552973/level-70-stat-curves/p1
Kaelac’s Guide to stats in general.
http://laggygamerz.com/forum/index.php?/topic/382-kaelac%E2%80%99s-guide-to-damage-tenacity-reisistance-and-debuffs-in-neverwinter/
The mathematical proof regarding when a Thaumaturge CW should use Chilling Presence over EotS.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1210860/at-what-point-does-eots-become-less-effective-than-chilling-presence-for-a-thaum-ss
The different possible ability score roles.
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Ability_Score_Rolling
An up to date list of current bugs plaguing the CW Class.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1211157/list-of-known-and-suspected-cw-bugs/p1
A list of interesting CW mechanics.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1191344/the-library-of-interesting-mechanics
An in depth discussion on how combat advantage works.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1209235/10-combat-advantage-boon/p2
The mechanics of plaguefire and vorpal.
http://knightsofnever.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10724422&p=37386569&gid=427468&sid=96e7167586e4f0f4aae4b4dcb225dca0#37386569
Damage Coefficients for CW abilities:
http://laggygamerz.com/forum/index.php?/topic/351-damage-calculations-for-control-wizard-abilities/
Outdated stat theory:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/547746/chems-neverwinter-stat-theory/p1
Appendix 2: Other Builds I have tested:
Take note for this section I will not list all the aspects I used to test each of these builds, but rather just list what they are and if you have any questions I can explain all the aspects of a particular discarded build and why it failed. Please take note I tried all of these builds on live.
MoF Oppressor:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:15u0uwj:1z00u00:1000000&h=0&p=mof
SS Ren with icy Veins:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1z00u00:1000000:1z050uv&h=0&p=ssm
SS Ren with Elemental Empowerment:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05000:1z054ij&h=0&p=ssm
SS thaum with no capstone:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05uu0:1z00v00&h=0&p=ssm
SS thaum with Abyss:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05uu1:1z00u00&h=0&p=ssm
MoF Thaum with Abyss + lightning/Bilethorn enchant:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1000000:1z05u0v:1z00u00&h=0&p=mof
MoF Thaum+SS Thaum with neither abyss nor Icy Veins:
http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/cw?b=23ci:k6rwk5:8dep:5tb7d,13j3ie3:1500000:1uu5uuv:1500000&h=0&p=mof
And several other variations of the above builds, I am not going to list all of them.
Appendix 3: An example of a Glass Cannon Build:This is an example of a max dps Glass cannon thaum CW build. It is not what I recommend as it has low defensive capabilities, but if doing as much damage as you possibly can is the way you want to play, then this is for you. I understand that some people like this playstyle, which is why I am including it.
Race: Tiefling
Attributes: 16/16 int+cha and 2 points put in each of those till level 70.
Feats: SS Thaum Listed Above
Boons: Listed in Build Development, with the exception of Elvish Fury instead of Resolve and Dragon’s fury instead of Dragon’s thirst.
Gear:
Dusk Assault Cap
Dusk Raid Robes
Dragonflight Raid Armlets
Elven Assault Shoes
Lostmauth’s Hoard Necklace
Belt of Valindra’s Guard
Gemmed Exquisite Elemental Shirt+Pants
Twisted Skulls
Twisted Talisman (Offhand Feature: Storm Spell; Offhand Stat Bonus: AP Gain)
Ring of Rising Power +5
Ring of Rising Precision +5
Crit Reinforcement kits
Combat Advantage Jewelry Reinforcement kits.
Artifacts:
Wheel of Elements (Primary)
Lantern of Revelation
Lostmauth’s Horn of Blasting
Thayan Book of the Dead
Enchantments:
Brutal Enchantment, Rank 12 in all Offense Slots
Transcendent Dread
Transcendent Elven Battle
Savage Enchantment, Rank 12 in all Character Defence Slots
Greater Black Dragon Glyphs in all overload slots
Companions and Companion Gear:
Lightfoot Thief (Summoned)
- Necklace of the Loyal Avenger x2
- Sword Knot of the Loyal Avenger
- 3x Bonding Runestones, either rank 10/11/12 or 3x rank 12
- 3x Dark Rank 12 for companion defence slots
- 3x Brutals Rank 12 for companion offense slots
Air Archon
Blink Dog
Intellect Devourer
Wild Hunt Rider
That should cover the really expensive “BiS” Glass Cannon CW build.
Appendix 4: An example of a BiS support MoF:
If you are interested in playing a very expensive support MoF build, then this is an example of what it looks like:
Race: Drow
Attributes: 16 int 16 wis take the 2 optional points in charisma
Build:
Weapon enchant: Lightning, terror or plaguefire
Armour enchant: Elven Battle
Weapon and Offhand: Burning orb and talisman
Armour:
Full HV set
Valindra Set
Artifacts with Power, Arp, Recovery but not crit. This is because you will be utilising the baby owlbear companion as one of your active companions.
Rings: Personalised Adamant Rings of recovery or piercing
Radiant in every offense slot
Savages in every defense slot
Sellsword Companion
Drowcraft shirt and pants
Class Features:
Combustive Action + Swath of Destruction (with offhand bonus)
Encounter powers:
FtF (tabbed), steal time, ray of enfeeblement, icy terrain, FI, chilling cloud, scorching burst
After capping arp, you need to prioritise power and recovery but not crit, you will be going full support with relatively low personal damage but high team utility. I do not recommend playing a build like this unless you love support roles and even then, it is something I would spec into later and not something to level with.
Here are some examples of the levels of damage effectiveness you can achieve as a support wizard:
Appendix 5: What my CW looks like:
Here is the current iteration of Sharpedge:
Appendix 6: Abbreviations
There are many abbreviations in Neverwinter, which whilst the veteran may know, will be completely foreign to a new player. Due to this, I have a section here that can be referred to that includes many of the commonly used abbreviations.
Crit = Critical Chance
Arp = Armour Penetration
AP = Action Points
SigDev = Sigil of the Devoted
CW = Control Wizard
MoF = Master of Flame
SS = Spellstorm Mage or Storm Spell (the class feature) or Sudden Storm (Encounter)
PF = Plague Fire/Phantasmal Fortress
Vorp = Vorpal
Crit Sev = Critical Severity
RI = Resistance Ignored
RSI = Recharge Speed Increase
CA = Combat Advantage
Proc = Activate/Trigger
DoT = Damage over Time
DPS = Damage Per Second
AoE = Area of Effect
Ren = Renegade
Thaum = Thaumaturge
Opp = Oppressor
Fey = Feytouched
TEB = Transcendent Elven Battle
SF = Soulforged
LS = Lifesteal
IT = Icy Terrain
CoI = Conduit of Ice
ST = Steal Time
RoE = Ray of Enfeeblement
CS = Chill Strike
FtF = Fanning the Flame
FI = Furious Immolation
CP = Chilling Presence
OF = Oppressive Force
DR = Damage Resistance/Dread Ring
Int = intelligence
Cha = charisma
HV = High Vizier (legacy armour set)
HP = Hit Points/High Prophet (legacy armor set)
AH = Auction House
RP = Refining Points/Role Play
SH = Stronghold
PE = Protectors Enclave
Shar = Sharandar
ToD = Tyranny of Dragons
Appendix 7: Astral Diamond Generation(Note this section was written by @katamaster81899.)
There are two main types of AD
- Rough Astral Diamonds (rAD)
- Refined Astral Diamonds (AD)
Generating rAD
Recent changes to the game have made it very easy to generate rAD. I’ll list every source that I know of, and explain how it can be farmed in the most efficient manner possible. This subcategory will also be broken into two sections - rAD that is directly deposited in your character's inventory, and rAD that is earned by salvaging items that are transferrable between characters.
Salvage
Certain level 60 and level items have the item qualifier “Salvageable”. This property means that the item can be salvaged at a salvage anvil. Typically items with this property are found or purchased in endgame content. Here are all known sources of salvageable items:
- T1 and T2 Dungeons - Bosses have a fair chance of dropping a blue salvageable item in T1 dungeons and a purple salvageable item in T2s. Both of these will salvage for the same amount of rAD. The chests at the end of these dungeons also provide 1 or 2 salvageable pieces of gear. These chests can be opened with a daily dungeon key or an epic dungeon key.
- Seal Vendor - Salvageable Items can be purchased from the seal vendor located in the marketplace of PE. Seals can obtained from the following activities
- T1 and T2 Dungeons - Seals drop from bosses and the final epic chest at the end of dungeons
- Dragonflight - killing one or more dragons during the guild dragonflight even rewards a total of 80 seals of the elements
- Demogorgon - Completing demogorgon successfully rewards seals.
- Demonic Heroic Encounters - Completing any demonic heroic encounter will reward a small sum of seals
- Campaign Vendors - Various campaigns allow you to purchase salvageable equipment using that campaigns currency.
- Demonic Heroic Encounters - Have a fair chance at dropping a rare quality salvageable item
- Stronghold Heroic Encounters - These heroic encounters have a somewhat low chance at dropping an epic salvageable piece of companion gear
Salvageable items can be moved around characters as they are almost always BoA. This will allow you to move salvageable items to a character that has not yet hit the daily astral diamond refining limit in order to get a faster turnaround on your AD refinement.
Other Sources of rAD
There are many other sources of rAD other than salvage. However, rAD earned this way is stuck on one character until it is refined.
- Daily Dungeon - The first two dungeons completed each day on a character reward a small sum of rAD. Both leveling dungeons and epic dungeons qualify for this. This can be done on multiple characters each day
- Daily Skirmish - The first two skirmishes completed each day reward a small amount of rAD. Once again, both regular and epic skirmishes qualify for this, and it can be completed on multiple characters each day
- Daily PVP Match - The first two PVP matches completed each day reward a small sum of rAD. Can be completed on multiple characters each day.
- Invocation - A character can invoke up to 8 times every day. Each successful invocation will reward slightly more rAD than the last. The amount of rAD received from this also scales with level. Many players have a large “army” of alts that they invoke multiple times a day for the rAD income.
- Weekly Campaign Quests - Sharandar, Dread Ring, Tyranny of Dragons, and Icewind Dale all have a weekly campaign quest that rewards 4500 rAD when completed.
- Earning AD
- Refined AD is only earned one way: Selling items on the auction house. This is done by selling items on the auction house to other people who made the effort of farming and refining rAD. Typically, you can earn more AD in a shorter period of time by selling these items.
- Leadership Army - this strategy pairs with the invocation armies I mentioned above. Leadership is a profession that rewards refining stones once it is ranked up. These can be sold for large sums of Astral Diamonds on the AH, especially on 2x RP. Leadership armies are created by making several low level characters, and leveling them up until professions is unlocked. From there, you just set leadership tasks once or twice a day, and reap the benefits. The only downside to this is that it can be rather time consuming, and it takes a while to level up leadership to the point at which you are profiting from it, which is at leadership level 24.
- Draconic Heralds - the draconic heralds in WoD appear every hour on the :45. These Heroic Encounters have a high chance of dropping a minor or lesser resonance stone. They also drop the occasional Rare/Greater resonance stone, and very rarely a BoE artifact belt. Resonance Stones sell extremely well, especially on 2x RP.
- Stronghold Heroic Encounters - The major SH heroic encounters often drop resonance stones, from minor to greater quality
- Sword Coast Adventures - The neverwinter gateway webapp includes a web game that can drop BiS pieces of companion gear. I know people who have made millions by farming this webapp. However, many dislike farming this because it can be tedious, and it is nothing like the actual neverwinter game in regards to gameplay (It’s a dice rolling game).
Notes:
I may add notes on interesting CW features here later, as I discover them. For now, the only notes I will be listing are the following:
Smolder:
It is possible to stack smolder and Rimefire by yourself:
Smolder lasts 5 seconds and Rimefire lasts 10 seconds. To apply both, apply smolder to a target and then use icy terrain on it. If you are using crit conflag, then icy terrain will apply both if it crits. To keep up both smolders, you need to refresh both using cold and fire spells, which is a pain. It is easy to get up 2 but hard to sustain them. It is also possible with icy veins, but is really tricky and involves getting out of range then doing stuff from a distance. In order to really make it work with icy veins, you have to use Icy terrain on tab but if you using icy on tab, then why on earth are you taking icy veins (which requires you to fight close to monsters to be good) in the first place?
It is also worth noting that it is abysmally difficult to do the above if there is more than 1 CW in the group and that if there are multiple CW’s in the group then smolder will apply for each CW in the group.
The Behaviour of DoTs:
Some DoT’s Scale with damage buffs, others do not. Some DoT’s can proc Stuff, others cannot. For example, the death slaad does scale and can proc things, for example, aura of vengeance on an OP. Smolder scales, RoE scales, IT scales, CoI scales, FtF scales. If a DoT procs off an arcane ability, it will not crit, the exception being oppressive force, which has to crit first. Some DoT’s do not proc anything, an example being the plaguefire DoT. Some dots proc things only on the first hit, an example being Ray of Enfeeblement and finally there are dots that proc things on each hit, an example being conduit of ice for CW or Hadar’s grasp for SW.
Acknowledgements:
A HUGE thanks to everyone who helped with the assembling of this guide. You are the people who helped ensure the quality of this guide is far higher than it would otherwise be :) The efforts you went to is beta testing on a scale that Cryptic wishes it has access to :) This very much was a collaborate effort and not just the work of 1 person.
@chemboy613 for providing a lot of the groundwork which I have updated.
@romotheone for providing the inspiration that lead me to do some in depth MoF testing, as well as for providing contrasting ideas and interesting theories for me to test.
@itbls you should be writing this, not me, you know this class better than I do, however, given that you have elected not to, I have gone to the effort of updating this myself. You probably know things that I do not, however I cannot know everything and anything I have left out you are certain to make me aware of.
@katamaster81899 wrote the section on AD generation. Also helped to check large portions of the guide. (Formatting, correcting miscellaneous content)
@bigredbrenteth Helped with insignia bonus testing.
Proofreaders:
@ariesvehemens (Pointed out the missing Owlbear cub and the lack of comparison between abyss and Icy Veins)
@melO_O (information regarding icy terrain and feytouched)
@zekethesinner
@userutf8 (general information on stat theory)
@durugudesu
@xaltoltun
@d66723225
@oria1 (more detail regarding MoF Renegade and support builds)
@narjima (helped a lot with expanding the descriptions of feats and corrected many typos)
@hypergorila2
@decioteixeirapt (information on boons)
@zhodia (helped with presentation and formatting)
@agatagdr (helped clarify the descriptions of multiple powers)
@skyvalker64 (formatting suggestions)
@silverkelt
Conclusion:
There is much that is known about the CW class, because of how active the CW community is when it comes to testing and discovering new things. At the same time, there is also much that is still to be discovered. Like all classes, there is room for experimentation, the CW however is blessed with the ability to make many builds viable. I would like to end this off by thanking everyone who goes to the effort of reading through this, taking the time to check, verify or criticize any part of it, your effort helps to improve the overall quality of this guide and any others that are posted ☺
Change Log:
Updated for post elol set nerf