Area Effect Strategy

Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

AREA EFFECT USE AND STRATEGY

Area Effect spells comprise the bulk of the spells a Wizard has in his book, more than the DD spells and bolts of all kinds combined. As a result, failure to understand and use these spells will result in a Wizard who is not living up to his full potential and power. This page is an attempt to help my fellow Wizards understand and use these spells to their best potential without endangering themselves or their party.

Despite their description all too often as 'sucicide spells' by some people, Area Effect spells are very powerful and very useful when use properly. First, an examination of their advantages:

Give you better damage for each point of mana than any spell you have. They result in incredible ratios, especially the Point Blank series, that lets you damage up to 20 or more targets with Supernova (Myztic has the exact numbers here) at the same time.
Can turn a bad situation into a winning one, with or without an enchanter.
Allow the Wizard to contribute significantly in any fight in a way that few if any classes can. Wizard AE spells have better mana cost, larger areas, and more variety than any other class.
Make you feel damn powerful.
Allow you to function as more than simply a cannon.
Clear those out stupid, aggro greens faster and better than anything else in the game.
You can damage the entire crowd of guys enough that they all drop faster, if done right sometimes you can hurt them all so bad the tanks can nearly one-hit each creature, which makes them feel pretty good too.

However, it would be foolish to ignore that AE has inherent dangers and drawbacks, and to have a complete picture, their problems must be examined as well:

Dangerous to use without crowd control, caution must always be taken in when they are used and how.
Use up a lot of mana. Yes, they are mana efficient, but they also suck mana like a firehose, and you have to be very careful not to overuse them.
Slow down people's computers. If you want to use these a lot, advise your group to shut off the particle rate in their Display Options. Spells will not show up most of the time (in fact you will be mystified whether any spells are going off at all some times).
Take only a few resistances and things go from a managable fight to a total slaughter very easily.
Damage the monsters. Rarely will you drop an entire crowd of guys using AE only, and a hurt monster hits just as hard as a healthy one (some hit HARDER when hurt).
Aren't always feasible with crowding and camping. The situation will most often not allow you to intentionally pull more than 1-2 guys at once, which isn't exactly AE heaven.
Few groups like to pull multiple targets and will actively resist using AE spells. One blue at a time for steady, safe xps is the catchword for a game that erases hours of work with a single death.
Effective use almost always requires the assistance of an Enchanter to control the monsters. Wizards (despite Verant's apparent belief) do not come equipped with a pocket Enchanter.
The radius on AE spells is big enough and the nature of all of them is such that you can hurt yourself pretty badly. Remember you have a fraction the hit points of your enemy. Why, exactly this is set up like this is confusing (it doesn't hurt your friends, and isn't part of the target count, you can hit 4 targets with a Pillar/Column spell... plus you).
On PVP servers, AE spells hit your friends (except teams, where they hit the races you are supposed to be enemies with but not friendly ones)
Pets of any kind are treated as a valid target, but are not harmed on normal EQ servers (on PVP they are hurt and will turn on you).

General Area Effect Strategy

Area Effect spells require somewhat more thought than your usual blast to get the best effect from. Too often, people think of an AE spell as being like a grenade, you pull the pin, throw it at your enemy and they fly all over the place and die. In Everquest NOTHING works that well unless the targets are so weak to be nearly harmless to you in the first place. To use Area Effect Spells properly, consider them to be a DD that hits multiple targets, nothing more, nothing less.

There are a few things that a good Wizard will keep in mind with the use of Area Effect spells:

Know Your Radius - learn and understand the radius of each type of AE spell so you can predict and control who and what you affect with it. Each one has a different area that it affects, which means they vary by their proper use
Know Your Setting - some areas are totally deadly to use Area Effect in. Unrest, for example, has very thin walls and floors, ceilings, which means casting an AE in the wrong spot will result in something running in from possibly even another floor, bringing all his friends.
Watch your Hits - you can tell how many targets you have in your area and how many you struck, if you only hurt a couple, this tells you something about their resistances and if you missed any. If you hit more than you can see, you probably just made a train, be ready.

With this in mind, to use AE properly they should be considered to be slightly higher power than their damage listed in terms of aggression. Do not simply open up with an AE, let the monsters get good and angry at the puller and tank. Usually a stun spell works well for this, shaking up your main target and keeping it put while the tanks beat it up. This will keep the monster you target from aggroing on you, and usually, if you are back a fair distance, the other monsters in the area will not aggro either.

This is the secret of using AE spells intelligently, if you control your burn like you would with a normal blast, you will often be able to hit creatures not actually being attacked and not aggro them. Another secret is that if someone else is blasting them with AE spells the aggro can often act as if you are negating each other, not building up, so that you can alternate between targets and drop them all. This is far from foolproof, and you are always best off with someone to control the aggro, and can only work if you have a main target that the tank is taunting. It seems to work like this: if your main target will not aggro on you, the others nearby him tend not to either.

Another thing to remember is that Area Effect spells have some odd errors with up and down (the z-axis) due to the way the game perceives things. In some places, something far, far above you will be considered in the radius of the AE, as if it was an infinite column into the sky. This doesn't come up much, but in Kedge Keep, for instance, you can make some very unpleasent enemies by using them.

Now then, the Area Effect spells you will get as a Wizard come in several different types. Each one has a use, although the Al'Kabor subset is almost useless, and the AE Rain spells require work to be properly useful. Here are the three basic types of AE lines you will use as a good Wizard:

Point Plank or PB spells, which damage everything adjacent to YOU. This is what Numbing Cold does. These can be handy at very low levels to damage the 3 wasps all buzzing around you. At higher levels it basically is suicide unless you use it in very specific circumstances. All those monsters will become highly aggressive on you and will be very hard to taunt away. More on this below.

However, they can be used to save your friends from a train, by sacrificing yourself and annoying a large number of the train to pay attention to you. This is very heroic and epic, but is suicidal, you will not get away. But Point Blank AE spells, when used with a capable Enchanter can be very powerful. They have two big advantages: First, you do not have to target PB spells, they just zap anything nearby. Second, they can affect over ten targets at a time. Now, without at least an Enchanter and a Cleric handy for controlling this horde, having that many monsters around everyone is a death sentence.

And now a note about using PB spells. I call this the Myztic Strategy, for the most vocal proponent of using AE spells in this manner. Get an enchanter and a couple of healers in your group. Nail a green and let it run off to get his buddies, and when they arrive, let the Enchanter use his color flux line of stun PB spells to keep the monsters tame. Chain cast using several Point Blank AE spells, and have the healers watch health and heal anyone who needs it. Use skin and rune spells liberally, and make sure nobody runs because you will be very low on mana in a hurry doing this. If done properly, the group gains a lot of experience in a big hurry because you are killing many monsters at once. Remember, though, that all it takes is one or two resistances and you will die, and die fast, I recommend you use this on greens before you try it for experience.

Another strategy is to use this effect on Shadowed Men. Because they are essencially invisible, Shadowed Men are often very difficult to target. But PB spells don't need a target, which is a big advantage here. Use a similar strategy as the Myztic one above.

Rain spells, which do damage to everything adjacent to the target in three separate waves of damage like a storm. These are similar to a DOT in the sense that they continue to have effect after casting unlike a DD spell. However, AE Rain is a totally unique creature, with its own unique advantages and limitations. When cast, an Area Effect Rain Spell will cause a wave of damage to each target under it, and then every six seconds or so another wave takes effect on the area targetted. Each wave is resisted separately, and monsters are able to physically walk out of the radius at any time.

Rain spells are often the safest to use at higher levels, because due to the smaller radius, you will not hit monsters that are calm nearby. Often it works best to target your Tank with this, and all the creatures he is whuppin' on will take a hit or three. Because their damage is low for each pulse, and the rain waves are spaced apart, with a good damaging group, you can often get the spell off without angering the monsters. Rain spells are limited to hitting 4 targets at most, and due to their broken status, the more targets you have the weaker the spell becomes.

At present, and probably for the duration, Rain Spells are bugged. They do not hit the proper number of targets with enough waves. Instead of hitting up to 4 targets with 3 waves of effect, the Rain Spells for all classes treat each wave of damage against each target as a separate target... so it will hit 4 times at most. Thus if you have 3 targets, it hits them both with one wave (3 hits) and then hit one target with one wave (4th hit). This grossly reduces the effectiveness of the spell. In addition, it treats friendly pets as a valid target, which reduces the hits even more. This is being petitioned and pleaded with Verant to no avail so far.

Radius spells, which blow up everything in a large area. This is sort of like fireball in AD&D but you dont get the nifty graphic, just some effects around the creatures affected if you are close enough. These tend to put less junk on the screen, and as such don't annoy the party as much, but some of them still do. They also are the ones most likely to make you lots of enemies, because they will hit monsters just hanging out or flying by you. They also do the most damage per target of all the Area Effect spells.

Radius AE spells are in two basic types, the pillar/column line that can hurt 3 targets most (but are very mana efficient) and the Al'Kabor spell line that has a much larger area, and can affect more targets but cost a VERY large amount of mana, and are not especially popular.

Incidentally I have a document written up examining the relative damage and mana efficiency of Area Effect Spells for perusal. Nicol Bolas does this as well, in a different format with his analysis below.

LINKS

Here are a few useful links for more information on Area Effect spells and their proper use:

Nicolbolas has put a great deal of work into this page, an excellent resource on the AE spells and their uses, especially with the numbers he has come up with.

Cinius Shade, a prominent figure on Graffe's Wizard Compilation has written up an essay that has some use for Wizards if they want to use AE spells. This is primarily for higher level Wizards using a specific type of spell.