Lol at illusion spec. Why don't you already have insightful reflexes?

Seems ok, leave it alone.

If you feel you're missing spell pen make a TF pen stick.

Do not give up insightful reflexes, taking half damage from AoE is a huge boost to survivability and the less you are concerned with staying alive the more you are able to do everything else.

PK has a double save which lowers it's effectiveness compared to other instakill spells. You can somewhat mitigate this by using FoD on casters to avoid their high will save and use PK on high fort mobs (their low will save most likely won't be enough to resist the spell). Still it is weaker then it's counterparts.

If you decide to go illusion in any case then make sure to take 3 ranks in draconic presence for an additional stacking 3 dc for PK (and other fear based spells).

Why are you concerned about sp? And even if so keep in mind that necro focus gets you enervation sla which you'd do well to utilize and profit from low sp cost and higher instakill success rate.

Enervation sla is also nice to have against orange named. An EE orange named HP goes down to EN level after rapidly casting energy drain+ enervation + sla enervation. Casting additional level drain spells once they are off cooldown is a lot less effective since negetive levels lower the maximum hp of the target so the closer the current hp is to max hp the greater your returns are for each neg level (during the cooldown the current hp goes down since the party is beating the mob and the maximum hp goes up since it recovers negative levels rapidly).

Live long and prospore pale one.

Enchantment SLAs are the best IMO. Spamming hypno and dance is very nice when trash is death warded. The DC threshold is much lower so you can spec for necro and still have no fail enchantment for most mobs.

Wipe wrote on Sep 4^th, 2014 at 7:00am:


Am I missing something on enervation? It's a good spell, but I can just slot it...using it as an SLA saves me what? 5 whopping SP?

Hell I can whip out 100 scrolls of it if I really need to.

I consider it as 10 sp debuff for every Finger (adding 1-4 DC to it ), much like 10 sp Hypno for every Mass Hold.
Plus I really hate the slow casting time of Energy Drain/Enervation.
Anyone else Quicken Wails, Fingers and Circles ?
Plus it's level 4 - that is packed with useful stuff.
Energy drain as main debuff is total sp hog, Wail/Symbol as "debuff", hmm, impractical.

Can't imagine scrolling it in addition to all the shit you click / keep eye on. Swapping main weapon every 15 seconds eww.
Good suggestion I suppose.
EDIT : Oh I forgot, Halt Undead sla is not utterly useless either. You can even charm Tor skellies with Command for 10 seconds or so. It's fun for 3 sp or something like that.

Red Sox H8 Yankees wrote on Sep 4^th, 2014 at 7:34am:


Well, I'm not using them on drow...they work fully on mobs without SR.

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 4^th, 2014 at 7:17am:


As others have mentioned it's slotting enervation means giving up something important.

Scrolls, in addition to requiring a double weapon swap and having only 14 spell penetration, are slow and can be interupted by incoming damage. Not practicle.

Going enervation means you get bouns dc to necro rather the enchantment/conjuration and necro is harder to get to a reliable dc.

Wipe wrote on Sep 4^th, 2014 at 7:00am:


They don't have it themselves, just druids throw mass DW on them too, which is pretty annoying. I mean, it's ok that DW blocks instadeath effects, but I can't even damage them while they are DeathWarded.

You're right, I probably needed to target them faster. But so far PM heroic levels are way more problematic than robot sorc heroic levels - Reconstruct and tons of SP rock.

Wipe wrote on Sep 4^th, 2014 at 7:00am:


Hm, never used Otiluke before, gotta try it next time. And DBF I kinda skipped, because the difference in damage between it and common fireball is not that noticeable before level 15ish, and it still has all the drawbacks of REF save and missing moving mobs. Maybe I was doing it wrong. Also should be mentioned that my PM was a first-lifer, so no fancy greensteel to boost SP pool, which was vanishing pretty fast at pre-epic level.