66 and struggling

[Kevis]

I know my job in groups, but with my playtime, I would like to be able to solo for more XP. The problem I am having is it seems to be very inefficient as far as time spent/xp ratio. I used to play a mage main, so I am trying to ween myself away from the pet tanking style and working on root rotting.
I normally pull with malos, VP lvl 3, then slap on Breath of ultor, blood of saryn, and bane. I tried this before in nobles causeway, and after a 2 month break or so, I came back with excitement to try my hand at PoFire. I leveled my bard there back in the day and remember it being totally awesome. Anyways it wasn't near as awesome as I was hoping for.
Can anyone help me out or point me to a better zone?
Do I just need to level?, am I missing any vital dots that I could be loading the mob up with? Should I try to grab a few levels of the DoT AA's?
Any advice is appreciated. My magelo should be in my profile, but here it is anyways...

[WaringMcMarrin]

Might want to check out the AA xp and work on some AA's since the new AA xp curve will speed up AA'ing to a count of 750 or so.

[Macnair]

[Veril]

I do things a little differently from Macnair, I use the root pants as my main source of rooting, and I use VP as my emergency get out of jail for when things go wrong.

Pull with malo type spell,
Root with pants.
drop 5-6 dots on the mob,
re-root.
re-apply dots as they wear off.

The pants are no mana, and can be clicked while spells are refreshing.
It also means I have no spell slot swapping and I don't bother with disease at all.

[Macnair]

I figure Kevis will need to do spell swapping because he doesn't have aa slow, and because he only has 9 spell slots.

With 10 spell slots, I can have 5 dots memmed, and still have 3 heals, decay, and in the last slot either malis (if I reckon I will need to use clicky root as well as VP) or cannibalize (if I know I will be burning mana too fast).

If Kevis has 2 heals, slow, cannibalize, malos, and decay memmed, that would use 6 of his spell slots. So he'll need to do spell swapping to maximize his dps.

[Kevis]

Thanks for the advice. I had the main idea of root rotting down. I think i just need to lvl up a bit to get access to more non dd component dots. I will have to suck it up and put up with the idiots that inhabit BoT lately I guess. Wish me luck hehe.

[Macnair]

Hmm, yah. I was misremembering where the no-DD dot line was; the only ones you have atm would be Breath of Ultor, Blood of Saryrn, and Bane.

You could do a few LDoNs to get Anathema, that would help. It will get better when you get to 69 with Curse of Sisslak, and much better when you get to 70 with Nectar of Pain.

Zones worth checking out would be Riwwi (currently a hot zone) and Buried Sea.

A very few mobs in Riwwi see invisible, so pay attention when you are moving around. Move to the Ferubi zone line for your pull spot. Watch the pathing carefully, and you can pull singles there every time. (If you mess up and get a double pull, don't mess around, just zone.) The mobs there have around 20k hp, if I recall correctly. It will take you 2 rounds of VP to kill them, which is longer than you want but might still be OK since it is a hot zone.

You will be able to kill certain mobs on the south-west island in Buried Sea: regruas, cats, and basilisks. There are places on the north and south shores that have no wandering mobs, where you can pull to. The kills will not be fast, but you can do the quests for that island from Rickan and Johnny the Black Crow (both on the south end of the west-central island), to start building your faction to be able to buy Nectar of Pain when you hit level 70.

Good luck!

[kuzko]

You do not have to do LDoN's to get Anathema, it can be researched, with a relatively low trivial (162).

A note on Macnair's comment of hitting 70. Nectar of Pain is from Saga Skins or any of the alt, spell only quests that you will very likely have done while working in The Devastation on Saga Skins. Nectar of Agony is from TBS (rk.1 from pirates, rk. 2 from katta). Having just finished my hand aug, I can attest that having done no other pirate faction work, the hand aug quest only takes you to amiably (if pirate correlates to katta, then you need warmly for the spell, I could be wrong, I generally prefer to skip faction work when a better option is available with other annoying faction work). I like to eek out every bit of dps I can while root/rotting, so I would suggest trying to work Katta faction as soon as you are able for the rank 2 of Nectar of Agony.

Also, I used epic 1.0 dot for a long time due to non DD dot click....into the 60's iirc. Just a matter of finding the rhythm to cast it w/o messing up your other dot casts.

Having done a ton of soloing throughout the years, starting in the 50s and just putting up with root breaking with front end dd dots, just do what you can with the weapons you have right now (getting Ornate pants for root click is nearly a must for a good soloing shaman imo). Pine for the day you can ditch disease dots (at lvl 80 with 10 spell slots, I run an 8 dot stack when soloing in LP or preferably HoS). It gets alot easier when you ditch dd dots and get an arsenal of stacks that mow down anything that isn't even con or higher at 80.

[Macnair]

Ah, that's right, I misremembered that. Nectar of Pain I got soloing the alt quest in Devastation.

It was Nectar of Agony (Rank I) that I bought from the pirates. I don't remember if it was at indifferent or amiable; it was before I finished the hand aug, though. The plus side of that is, almost all the hand aug quests are easy solos, and many of them are quite easy even at relatively low levels.

That's also good news about Anathema being researchable. It could well be available in the bazaar, then, or at least it should be fairly easy to get someone to research it for him.

[Unmei]

You also haven't totally outgrown the age (level) range where you can solo "in the face"; Slow a mob, drop a couple of DoTs on it, and use Dogdog and Leopard. This means you don't have to worry about DDs on your DoTs, and at your level, Dogdog + Leopard and Leopard on yourself is pretty decent damage. You can add skinspikes potions to the mix if you want as well (Might as well!). As long as you're dealing in fully slowable content, you should be good to go, though without any defensive AAs, you might end up doing better with Root Rotting. Certainly, my little baby shaman (who did a lot of AAing along the way), was quite successful doing this in Grieg's End (which will, alas, be light blue to you at 66, though it might be worth a look just to learn the ropes), and Plane of Valor.

I agree that Root Rotting is pretty annoying at your level; my shaman did things In the Face up to about level 68 or 69 (with a health bunch of AAs along the way to keep it viable), eventually moving on from PoV to Arcstone undead. I don't know how much luck you'll have though, since I have no idea where your gear is versus where hers was at the time. Still, it might be worth a shot if you get frustrated with root rotting.

[Andune]

This may be silly, but is your mage on the same account as your shm? I duo a Mage/Shm (Currently my War is only lvl 63 and unable to tank high zones, so she just sits and soaks xp). With my 2 box, I can easily duo Atiki (mage is 78 and shm 76) using my pet to tank. Even at lvl 66, I was able to duo some pretty good xp.

Now having said all that, if they are on the same account, this is probably a moot post. My mage was my main before I leveled the Shm, so I'm not very good at the whole root-rot thing.