Note: this is bigger than the other sections, lots of reading. This is for Myztic, who did the most for popularizing this system of killing bad guys

One of the few ways Wizards are able to really feel powerful and valuable to a group is to use their Point Blank Area Effect Spells in a group. This can allow a group to get experience faster and in a manner more spectacular than anything in the game. However, it is even more difficult and requires even more planning and specialized work than Quad Kiting does. In addition, with the great fun and destructive power, the great experience and the chance to look impressive there is a price: it is very dangerous. In other words, this requires as much preparation and information as you can get before you give it a shot.

The Basics

PBAE grouping is when you get two or more members to cast Point Blank AE spells on monsters a puller brings, an Enchanter or two to control the monsters using PBAE stun spells, and a healer to keep people alive. The puller gets as many as he feels comfortable at once, it has to be at least 4 to make this worth doing, and brings them right up in the middle of where the blasters and the Enchanter stands. When the fire finally ends, probably 1-2 will be staggering around and the puller can finish it. That is really as basic as it gets, and when it works it works well (you may even get an audience if there are others around to watch the fireworks).

However, that said, there is a lot more to it that can make it work better, things to look out for, ways to maximize your efficiency, and other things to consider.

Your Setting

As with all Area Effect use, a Wizard has to keep an eye on the setting used. Many places are not safe to try any sort of area effect spell with, such as much of the Manor of Unrest, Befallen, Kedge Keep, etc. Don't try it in those spots, you will simply die horribly and most other people in the dungeon will suffer from your attempt. Further, some areas have such poor pulling and pathing that it is nearly impossible to reliably pull multiples, they will stray, get lost, forget the puller or be running around separately until later. And lastly, many places are so camped there isn't a chance to pull more than 1-2 monsters at once.

So it is important to find a good spot that you can work in, but it really is not as difficult as one would think at first. For example, even in dungeons such as Kedge Keep and Unrest you can pull safely to the zone and kill there. Once you find a good spot, you can begin to work on pulling in the monsters carefully to find out their behavior and how well multiple kills work.

The Group You'll Need

There are four basic elements you require to pull off this kind of group. First is the damage, which you are the primary key of, Point Blank Area Effect destruction. The second element is pulling, something to bring you the targets to blow up all at once. Third is the Crowd Control to stun the monsters and keep them from slaughtering the damage dealers. And last is healing, because no matter how well it goes, people will suffer some damage and sometimes the Enchanter really gets tooled over.

Damage is done in this sort of group primarily with Point Blank Area Effect Spells. There are many classes who get these spells at various levels, and as such can join in on the fun. Below you will find a table that gives you all the classes and their levels that they get PBAE at, including the power of their spells. While Wizards are truly the kings of this (getting more and more types), many other classes do it well. You will need at least two people blowing things up for this to work well, although you can technically do it alone. More blasters means less down time and faster kills. In fact, you can get so efficient that you don't have enough targets to keep you busy.

Pulling can be any of a wide variety of possibilities. For example, you can use an Eye of Zomm to pull things nearby to you, because the monsters will aggro on the little eyeball. You can use the usual suspects like a monk or shadow knight or ranger, having them give up their usual system of one at a time and grab everyone in sight. You can use a Rogue, who is able to sneak past lots of targets and get the best grouping and train. Pretty much any choice works well, as they will not be greatly involved with the actual kills. It helps to have someone capable of polishing off the few strays left over after the explosions, and rogues will really love the line of backs to them to pick from, but in all honesty there isn't really enough time for melee guys to shine here.

Crowd Control, sadly, comes down to one class: Enchanter. You just cannot replace the Point Blank Area Effect stun ability that Enchanters have for controlling monsters in this, unfortunately. While they do it very well, that means without an enchanter you just don't have a lot of options. Bards can sort of keep monsters annoyed at them and they have a PBAE mes song, but it is just not reliable nor powerful enough to do the job. When there are 5 or more enraged monsters pounding on you, there isn't really much room for error. It is a fond dream of mine that other classes might get this ability but it seems unlikely at best. By level 44 Enchanters have three of these color spells, allowing them to continuously cast them for total control over the monsters.

The last element, Healing, can be done by any healer. There is not a lot to be said about this, except that things happen faster in a PBAE group. Clerics and other healers tend to have timing down to more or less an art after a while, and that art will fail them when there are a horde of enraged monsters pounding on someone. As such they need to keep close attention and heal FAST because the damage sustained is often not accurately shown on the red hit point bar for the group. The healer will find themselves able to sit aside and cast with total impugnity, as the anger built up by being torn up at the same time as all your friends and repeatedly stunned is very hard to exceed with even huge heals.

With these key elements in mind you can build your group. Having mostly blasters will make the kills go fast, but leave you light on healing (possibly none at all) which can make a death happen once in a while. If that death happens to be your Enchanter, he or she might be less willing to try it again. Having too few blasters makes the kills slow and brings up the possibility of actually running out of mana before the monsters do life. I recommend at least two blasters such as Wizards as a minimum.

The Big PBAE Table

This is the level and type of useful PBAE spell for every class that gets them, including the mana cost and the area that each effects (this is in diameter, so a 25 unit blast is about 12 units in radius around the caster).

Preparation

Get the Enchanter(s) and the PBAE Nukers piled together as chummy as you can. You want the template of your blasts and their stuns to be as closely matched as you can. The best way is to be back in a corner so that the monsters will keep bunched up nicely. While they will tend to pile in to get at you, the "4 NPCs per PC" rule will sometimes make them want to stray, which isn't good.

Have everyone turn off their partical effects entirely, and type in /showspelleffects off. This will prevent you from seeing anything that spells do, but it will also cut way back on lag. People with poor connections and systems will be kicked off the server if they aren't careful with this kind of show. Also turn /serversidefilters on. If you are still getting nasty lag spikes and are frozen, there are other filters you can turn on to help. If you can't move nor cast, you can't kill the monsters.. and they do not suffer the same lag you do.

Make sure everyone knows what they are doing and how this will work. Sometimes some Wizards even will need instructing on how their spells work and what they do. The puller needs to understand clearly what is being done, and the healers need to be on top of their game. It isn't really that difficult when you get going, it just is a little different than people are used to and as such requires some thought to be ready. Most people are so set in their "one pull at a time mes the adds" mentality that this requires a mental gear switch.

Pulling

The first thing you will need to do is get the bad guys to beat up on. There are a lot of options for this, from the standard "hey you, go get a bad guy" pulling technique to using your Eye of Zomm. The first thing to keep in mind is that only 4 monsters at one time will follow one person. As a result it is difficult to get a huge horde pulled to the kill zone at once. Another problem is that bringing lots of creatures means that the puller is being pounded on the whole time, which as one advances in levels becomes increasingly horrible for the puller's chances to survive.

There are a couple ways around this, the simplest being to start a train. Hit something fairly green so bad it runs away in terror, and tells all his friends about you. Then they will come charging in to kill you for hurting their little buddy. This works better the lower level the person that hurt the creature. A similar system is to simply fear a monster and let him come back with friends to build his confidence against you. This has the advantage of not requiring anyone to suffer a beatdown bringing creatures back, but has the drawback of being kind of unreliable in what you'll get, and since you are technically training, others might not smile on your little party. This also only works in places with a fairly dense pack of monsters that are not casters. Places like Droga, most of Paw, Guk, and Permafrost are pretty good for this. Places like Nurga aren't.

Another technique is to have the puller grab batches of 4 and bring them for the enchanter to park using PBAE stun spells cycling. This obviously means the puller repeatedly is exposed to a lot of hammering and as such will require a lot of healing, plus it uses up a more mana and requires a lot of grit on the Enchanter's part. It is one of the most feasible ways to get a good pile of monsters together, however, and doesn't require any fancy tricks to get the monsters around you. Places with spread out, scattered monsters are best served with this technique.

Your Eye of Zomm is handy for this. Creatures hate that lil eye, and they will vent their displeasure at it soon as they see it. This can be used to your advantage, by sending it down into a big pile of bad guys and seeing it vanish when hit. Sometimes the monsters miss it, which is amusing. This will, again, bring at most 4 bad guys, so you will probably have to park them as showed above as you get more. If you have more than one Eye of Zomm caster, they can send one at the same time, to different spots, thus bringing some with their eye.

The last technique to pull I'll cover here is the suicide run. Places like Chardok and Fear have a densely packed bunch of bad guys that aggro heavily and will come to you if you go in and say hi. This, too, can be used to your advantage. It is somewhat more painful, but effective to zone in and either let the bad guys bum rush you or dive into a room and get them around you. Then the PBAE stuns from the enchanter come into play. If you are particularly gutsy you can charge through several rooms and create a sort of mini train around you and kill the results. This can get you dead fast, though, if you don't know the area and end up with lots of long distance casters nuking you from the other rooms, for example.

Techniques

Once you have your group and the basic tactics down, there are a few little things you can add to the mix to fine tune your work. First off, when you get level 34, you get a handy spell called Thunderclap. Not only is this a nice powerful PBAE spell that does good damage for good mana, but it pushes creatures the direction you are facing when it goes off. This can be used to your advantage. Often, monsters run about and around while being blasted, and can leave the area of effect, stray or even try to run away. Pick a nice spot like a corner or a pocket in the wall, and face it while you cast Thunderclap, and the ones that don't resist will push toward that and get stunned by the Enchanter. It can be very useful in containing the monsters and where they stay.

This is a powerful and useful way to clear out Fear by many reports, although highly dangerous. People break in using this because the entry area has so many nasty things at the zone in, getting the horrid things nearby and using high level PBAE's like Jyll's Static Pulse to flatten the monsters fast and all at once.

Dangers

The dangers of doing this sort of killing are fairly obvious. First off, making hordes of monsters mad at you at once is not something you can do with any real safety. You can end up with trains beyond your ability to control or react to. Lag can kill you because you can't react to the beat down you are taking, and monsters more powerful than you care to or can take on might tag along to join in on the fun of killing heroes. All it really takes are a few too many resists (and that isn't very many total) and you will die so fast you don't even know what happened. Worse still, if your damage PBAEs get resisted too heavily all you end up with is a horde of nearly dead but still hitting hard monsters that you have no mana to kill off nor evac from.

The worst danger you can face, though, is the danger you'll rarely if ever get to try this. Players are unwilling to try something as offbeat and risky as this, especially since by the time it is a feasible tactic its so late a level that people have become set in their ways. It is safer and more controllable to bring one at a time and when there is more to control them with mes or root parking (if you can get it to work). And it is easier to not have to build a group of special composition, to take what you get instead. It is easier to not have to use special strategy and fight in certain controlled areas. The fact is, this isn't something you can do any time with any group and that will always stand between its use in the game being common and being rare.

So while I understand and sympathise with the reasons people don't want to try or even repeat a tremendously successful AE party I wish it weren't so. There are few times in a Wizard's existence where you will feel as powerful, useful, and important. For one of the few times in your existence as a character you will feel as critical, as if you contribute as much as an Enchanter or Cleric or Warrior does every single time they group. Area Effect is a large part of the Wizard's arsenal, we have the fewest total spells of any pure caster in the game and most of those are taken up with Area Effect spells. We have more than double the number of blasts in AE spells overall, and not being able to use them regularly means as a class we are crippled and unable to contribute like we are designed to.

Getting It To Happen More Often

As you can guess and probably know from personal experience, getting people to try this is a challenge. Not only are people fairly resistant to the basic concept, but you need to have a certain kind of group to try it, which most people just dont have to offer off hand. But there are ways you can get it to happen. The simplest way to do this is to talk to your guild and set up events. All you need to do is use the usual scheduling and gathering system your guild does for other events, and get a good location ready. Educate them, if you like this guide, have them read this up, or check out Cinius Shade's Essay at Graffe if you want something for them to read. When you get there, be the ringleader, tell everyone their job and how it should turn out, the layout, what spells to have ready, etc. Work closely with the Enchanter, often they aren't used to someone else having a say or being in charge of how things go in a fight, so make sure they feel like they are a part of it. Make sure you play up the fun and explosions and death and experience that lines up.

Once it starts, get people's feedback, see what they think, answer questions, and go for it again, and if it goes to the usual pattern, everyone will go "Whee! that was great! get more!" and have a grand old time. By the end of the night you should have people who, if they are not converts, are willing to try it again and think about it differently. They will look at their xp bar and the raw number of kills and gasp. They will remember the spectacular lights and the rush and smile. As my Enchanter friend once said "I wish I could be part of the fun!" referring to the damage people did while he stunned.

Chances are, the rush and wild excitement will get to you and you will experience a horrid blowout where most if not all of you die. Try not to let that be the first thing that happens and note that it wasn't the concept that got you dead, it was the overpull. Once you have done this a time or two you probably will have people at least willing to give it a shot again. In time you might have an open minded enough Enchanter to want to do it often and whenever he can. It's a lot eaiser on them than messing and faster paced than single pulls, most enjoy it so much they don't want it to ever end.

If you aren't in a guild, it is much harder. Try to make Wizard friends in guilds and see if you can tag along with this sort of thing. Find people who do it on your server and try to work with them, building up friends. Post on your message boards for people and opportunities. Check out the AE Grouping Forum at Graffe.com for a good way to find others who use this technique and some other tips and hints on how to do it. At any rate, don't try to do it with pick up groups, not only do you need a consistent group of a certain composition, but people are really resistant to the idea, even if you are the leader and can enforce it on people.

On the bright side, this whole thing is building in popularity and momentum. Groups are seeing how great and effective this is, and it seems Verant has put many places in the game that would be nearly suicidal to attempt without this. Seeing as most of them went in the game before Verant (not to mention most Wizards) were widely aware of the technique, it seems unlikely this was in response to the idea, but either way it does play into the Wizard's hands.

Closing

Good luck and happy blasting people, this is truly the one way Wizards can be the Masters of Magical damage with no rivals, while there are other classes with PBAE and they might even be more potent, we get more mana efficient, earlier, in more types, and more overall total than any other class (Clerics a close second). Our PBAE spells are truly better, if a bit scattered and uneven in terms of efficiency and power. This is where you will finally feel the power you thought the class would have, you will watch titanic numbers roll past you as you hammer 5, 10, 20 guys at once with your magic and can't erase the smile off your face. And when the kills stop and the little experience messages scroll past, its lootin time. While it takes 20 pulls to get to loot one at a time, when you drop 20 guys, you will find the nice gear and interesting stuff a lot faster.