Faywind how's your druid been?
Here's a leveling report. I've done 31-38 in CT gator alley. First greens showed up at 35, but xp has still been very fast and through 38 there were still a third blues. It's not hard to either pair greens v greens and blues v blues or charm a green, add thorns, send at a blue. At 37-38 I tried NK/EK charming griffons into hill giants and griffennes into griffons. Also did some snare/fear against griffons with melee and dots. This all worked pretty well, but CT gators were still faster xp even with greens. Tried Kedge entrance but still too tough. Got kills but they'd take 10 minutes and half my mana. At 39/40 Kedge entrance became viable. Killing the couple of hill giants that I did let me afford my level 39 spells.
I think I got the goblin ring right about when I hit 31 and moved out of the water to the alley. My spell bar has been snare/ensnare; root; dot; harmony; charm; thorns; regen/heal; gate. I made heavy use of gators fleeing at 20%; where I can I frequently swap between the three levels of magic dots to get a mob just below 20%. Oakleaf Scimitar/Guard Captain's Mallet plus 21% haste is great for finishing off fleeing snared mobs without mana.
I haven't noticed any benefit from invis now not costing mana. At full efficiency around 35+ I could do three sweeps/hour or 15 IvA/hour, but there were also plenty of times where I'd get out of the first fight at 30% mana and have to med back up, which might be 3-5 IvA/hour. Saving a spell gem is nice QoL but not important; otherwise I'd have to swap between Harmony and IvA or take Thorns off my spell bar. I lost exactly 8 mobs due to not breaking charm in time. The first two were fumbling with the new/different keystrokes for breaking charm. The next two were re-calibrating the max hit: gator pit can max hit for 5-6%, but gator alley can max hit for 8%. The other 4 lost mobs were mostly player error. Average hp on break was around 6-9% instead of the 12-15% I'd hope for without the ring. There was at least a half dozen instances where I would have lost a mob without the ring - these were almost all cases where I was distracted and glanced back just in time to react before losing a mob.
I killed a total of 432 alligators after hitting level 31. That's a 1.8% loss rate. Four of the losses were in the first few kills of level 31. There were a total of 402 gators after hitting level 32, or a 1% loss rate. I didn't record my losses in gator pit but I'll estimate a 10-15% loss rate there, some of which was due to being underwater. In chardok from 54-60 I'd estimate a 5-10% loss rate without the ring. Given 10 mobs in the entrance wing, that's between one lost mob per clearing of the entrance wing to one per every two clearings of the entrance wing.
When I get a 50%/10% health split on the two mobs I sometimes recharm or root/dot, but more often I'll use regen/thorns to melee the 50% away from the 10% until they run at 20%. I don't think this is a very common approach but I really like it. Combined with AC/HP gear it lets you efficiently use both your health and mana. This worked well in CT but in Kedge the fish are hitting hard enough that I'm switching to nuke or root/dot instead of regen/thorns for finishing off fights.
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