The faster you drop the target the less damage the raid takes and the less likely a wipe. Ergo, burst damage wins over sustained damage since wizzes can burn their mana bar chain casting nukes to burn a mob down.

Regards,
Mg

Now on raids, bane nukes are the main factor.

2000 unresistable damage for 450 mana. Using Harvest, C2, GoB, Manaskin/Epic, Glades and maybe Bard regen, with a decent 3500-4000 mana pool, and Specialization Evocation, you can usually get about 10-12 Bane Nukes in, with Concussions inbetween. That's about 20-24k DMG in 2-3 min fight.

If you cannot use Bane nukes (or you don't have them), on fights like Sontalak, Klandicar, Statue/AoW, Tunare... You're relegated to using Lure of Ice, which is a far less impressive 875 DMG for 320 mana. Then for fights like Eashen where he is immune to cold and you cannot bane him, and you have to use Lure of Fire, 640 DMG for 320 mana. You may as well swap characters.

Blowing up a mob in a short span is very valuable because it strains cleric mana less and reduces the chance that someone trains you while you're engaged on the mob or you are less likely to have another mob spawn while you're engaged with that one.

It's also easier for wizards to avoid damage from special attacks/aoes since they can sit out and pop in to do their damage. It's easier to get resists up on them as well, and with epic/manasink aoe damage is mitigated a lot, also making it easy on healers.

Wizards also bring much needed blue and orange spell particles to dragon fights.

This is also true. On most ToV Dragons you can get 1 Bane + 1 Concussion in before you need to duck behind a wall. Doing this you can burst nice DPS and never take a hit.

But man, between Manaskin and Bane, I can easily go through 100 Peridots in a weekend. It's cheaper than a Reaper or Wort pot recharge though.

Magic resist gear is really cheap/easy to get on a wizard also. With rather minimal investment (maybe about 10-15k in gear) I can hit 255 Magic and 200~ Fire or Cold when raid buffed on my crappy alt wizard who has no Velious raid gear. Infact the only piece of Velious gear at all I think he uses is a Student's Homework.

Whereas some Melee or tankish type classes have to spend far more to get close to those resist levels.

If you wanna be cheap you can just use manasink, only takes a jasper but mitigates 250spell damage.

It stacks with Manaskin, you should use both for 850 rune total.

But yea having an epic click to replace Manaskin would save me probably half or a full stack of DoTs every week I think.

The sad truth is that Wizards aren't even good burst damage in XP groups 50+. A Warrior tank has no chance to keep a mob off a chain nuking wizard, so for starters you are relegated groups with Paladin or Shadowknight tanks. Even with a suitably on-the-ball hybrid tank, a wizard with 2000 mana available can only cast Ice Comet 5x. Thats 5500 damage assuming no resists . . . which is maybe 2/3 of the HP of a Krup Knight. If your puller fucks up and brings all 5 chef mobs, it will be the Enchanter/Bard locking them all down with mez who saves your ass, not the Wizard.

If you are just dying to beat your head against the wall and play an XP Wizard, you should abandon the idea of burst damage and instead play to their real strengths: porting and stuns. Porting is nearly self explanatory: when you get a cleric rep from two continents over your group will breathe a sigh of relief. Stuns are also tremendously valuable. Stun Wizard mobs when they are about to nuke your tank for 1100+. Stun cleric/shaman mobs before they chain heal themselves for 50% of their bar. Consistently stun charmed pets and Enchanters will love you.

This advice basically follows Loraen's 12th Rule of EverQuest: a class becomes better the closer they play to an Enchanter (who can do all of the above much better than a Wizard). So can a cleric. Which is why Wizards are not good in XP groups.

Wizards are great in xp groups of 4.

When there are 4 mobs, that is. Some good quadding camps for 50+ now with velious out, wizards can probably get 30-60 with less actual time played than any other class, with 10 mins afk and 1 min killing 4 mobs. Good class if you play at work or doing other stuff.

Yah wizards can stun and root CC, but its kinda a catch 22: If theres no enchanter they are useful for it, but they'll be less effective with 0 mana regen. If there is an enchanter, you probably wont' need them for root cc/stuns.

Best played as a solo caster
 

The time from 1-29 is the slowest on a wizard. Once you hit 29 the world opens up, you get your first quad kite tools and now you are an exp machine. As someone mentioned before, do the flux staff quest at 29 (100% MQable) then head to OT and kill whatever is blue to you. The next power spike is at 34 where you get circle of force aoe nuke, now your quad time has improved dramatically. The only other real lull is from 48-51 because you never really get another good quad nuke until 51 with pillar of frost. 51-56 will fly by (besides 54 boo double hell) and after that just port people until you are level 60 from buying Chardok aoe pulls. If you are lucky you can get into the group for free since wizards are needed for the group to function anyway.

I started my wizard in September of 2015, took a break from the game from thxgiving until just a week ago, and I'm currently pushing thru level 49. It is one of the fastest leveling classes I have played in the game. I am not an uber twinked character all on my items I have bought from porting money... hell I still wear cloth legs and wrist.

That said, they are really best played as a solo class. I grouped in arena at com for some of the early 40 levels and the exp even with only 4 of us clearing the goo house and arena was not as good as quad kiting. If you want to play a group caster, roll a mage or an ench or even necro.