SK Race Choice
 

Looking for some input

Is Iksar SK worse for end-game solo crawling than other races?
Do the armor clickies account for serious mana saving etc?

At 60 with raid gear? Not particularly. I use the gloves sometimes to save a little mana and the legs are useful in a pinch. Nothing game breaking. While leveling, though, when you're just trying to kill as many mobs as possible, the mana savings are noticeable.

Overall, I'd say Iksars are solid. Regen is quite good for soloing and offsets Souldefiler nicely. The balanced stats and AC aren't bad either. You gotta live with that broken 2hs animation, though. I personally couldn't do it.

The Blood Ember clickies are great mana savers, and are better than Greenmist in terms of utility. Stacking the procs on Epic and Greenmist is not worth it unless you get the extremely lucky scenario where both proc within 6 seconds of each other.

Troll is the better option between the two regen races due to being able to use Blood Ember. Obviously if you really like Iksar and want to play one, go for it. You won't be screwed. You will just have more down time due to medding while soloing 45+.

Blood Ember Greaves are also useful outside of just mana saving. Having a free FD can save you in any situation where you don't have enough mana to FD. Before level 60 Blood Ember Greaves are your only method of FDing multiple times in a row after a failure, due to the standard FD having a fairly long refresh timer. When you hit level 60 you get Death's Peace, which is a fast refresh FD with increased chance of success. But it does cost 120 mana instead of 60, so the pants are still good at saving mana whenever you don't need to cast it.

You go Erudite SK, buy/farm cultural armor, and fuckin win with the best looking outfit in the game.

I also have a troll SK (52) and get a lot of use out of BE clicks when I play him. I don’t have the full set - iirc i am missing boots.

Yeah you should get the boots. Usually you can get like 4 seconds into the cast when the mob is coming back to get you after the fear wears off, so it has a good chance of landing, since regular fear is a 4 second cast. Depends on your Mana/HP ratios at the time. I use the boots a decent amount.

Iksar is mostly fine in Velious since the Velious armors don't have race restrictions. You do miss out on some useful clickies from Blood Ember pieces, but it isn't something you can't live without. For dungeon crawling in particular, you won't be doing a whole lot of fear-kiting, so lacking access to the free darkness and fear clickies doesn't matter that much. They're definitely good when soloing outdoors, but there are very few places in dungeons where fear-kiting is feasible, so if dungeon crawling is what you have in mind, it's no biggie. The legs are great for pulling but not a significant mana saver, it's more of a plan B for when FD fails or you need to do it repeatedly. You don't generally FD so often that being able to do it for free will have a meaningful impact on your mana sustain. The breastplate clicky is just a nice buff.

The bigger concern is stats. I get the impression that you're not a hardcore high-end raider, and this means that you definitely won't have maxed strength/stamina unbuffed on an iksar. I'd say this matters more than the AC and regen that lizards get. An ogre has 52 more stamina and 60 more strength than an iksar. That has a pretty significant impact on solo performance. The FSI is quite handy as well, though not as much as it was before the changes to bash. If you're keen on regen, trolls have 39 more stamina and 38 more strength than an iksar, which is also quite a bit. That's more stats than an entire set of Velious quest armor gives, even the Skyshrine one.

Personally, I think intelligence is irrelevant unless you're trying to truly push the limits of what an SK can solo and are actually spending an entire mana pool in one fight. For any ordinary kind of soloing, it almost never matters how big your mana pool is because you're either never at full mana or you never spend it all in one go. It's like getting a 10% bigger gas tank for your car when you never drive more than ten miles in a day. The only time the size of your gas tank ever matters is if you need to drive as far as you possibly can without ever stopping to refill. I can't even think of anything an SK can do solo where that would be relevant, it's not like you're gonna be soloing cliff golems and shit. The hardest thing I've ever heard of an SK soloing is one of the WW dragons, and in the video the guy posted of it, he didn't even spend all his mana. And that was a troll. Besides, the difference in mana pool between the dumbest race and the smartest is the equivalent of like one or two lifetaps, so it's not like it has any serious impact on what you'll be able to do. People who say it's important are just trying to sound like they know more than everyone else.

Lack of BE clickies is significant. You’re saving at minimum 120 mana a split. I fear kited like crazy in dungeons. Slam goes a long way in addition to short term fear in close quarters. DSM has provided multiple videos of zones like hs and seb where you can fear kite.

Go troll with all into INT for a solo crawler. If you’re gonna go BIS, then maybe erudite/DE for best mana pool but by the sounds of it troll is the winner for you.

Agreed. People underestimate Gloves/Pants for pulling. Saving 120 mana is no joke when you are trying to minimize meditation times. You're saving 6 minutes of med time every 10 splits.

For those curious, here are the videos Crede is referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUYKBvYpPyM - Seb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmDvk3udrhI - HS

The trick to fear kiting in dungeons is learning spawn locations and pathing tendencies for fleeing mobs. You need to find areas with enough runway for your lowest level fear, and find the point at which they will reliably run in the direction that you want. As Crede said, Bash/Slam help with shortening the runway because the mob will stop moving for a second or two when stunned.

Having slam also improves your fear kiting (which is another plus for trolls), because 2h weapons are better for chasing fleeing mobs. You have less chance of missing a swing compared to 1h weapons due to not following the mob correctly at all times (being out of auto attack range).

If you're interested in soloing at 60, go watch a real SK solo vid by Keerarae and note how many times they click BE items. That should give you an idea of how make or break they are.