Saturday… maybe late Friday… had to be early saturday…. any way the when is not important. Can you tell I am a little sleepy? Anyway sometime this weekend I uesd a lesser heart of wood taking out the helf dragonmarks. Why? Well after testing them out I decided while they are good… Okay Call lighting storm is good.. look I will get in to the marks in a minute. While they are good, I was being hurt by the lack of a few meta magic feats, and trying to play as a fire savant 1 at level 12-13…
The marks:
The first gives gust of wind, a good spell for limited uses. I need to clear a aoe spell mostly. But I did use it a few times to slow baddies chasing me while a dot killed them. Good on my sorc do to having a small spell list, and swapping in to GoW at a shrine when you notice that casting mobs are a little wall or cloud happy is not possible…
The second mark gives Electric Loop a really great spell. But at the time I had already focused on fire and air and had the spell. A second timer was well and good, with out heighten however, its Dcs are kinda low so 20-50 damage… Still good but just not for me atm..
The third mark, big daddy… Call Lighting Storm. The spell itself is super. A minute of really good spell damage that auto killed guys. Problem was some (most) of the kills are off screen or not right in front of you removing bad guys that are actively trying to kill you. Also one minute? For 3 feats? Wow. Okay you can burn ap and get a few more uses. And 3 minutes is much better. But for that much the dps has to be killer.
I really loved Call Lightning during Frame Work. It is all out side, there are tons of baddies to kill. It mostly one shots every non-boss in the quest. So for 3 minutes you get 1 kill every 3-4 secs…or about 45 kills..I think that mostly sums up the spell. I would totally cast the CLS but devote all those feats and Ap in to 3 minutes? I couldn’t any longer. To solo the kind of content I have to start soloing now my build has to be tighter. And the wiggle room is just gone.
So when I remove the Marks my reasoning for not being an air savant (aka the marks + air S == buged) is gone. Air savant has all the best spells available to it. Ice Storm as always been one of my favorite spells. And is one of the best spells, the cold dot and frost lance rounds out my ice splash, WoF, Fire Ball and Scorching Ray for fire and then there are so many good air spells, Shocking grasp and Elc loop are 2-5 sp clickies but I still pick up Shocking grasp for the second timer. Bolt has become my main spell followed up by Chain Lightning and Ball Lightning, and of course Eladar’s.
Once I was all swapped over, and gotten my bars resetup with my new metas, clickys and whatnots, I thought I needed a good test. Mired in Kobolds is a level 13 quest. Takes about 4 mins to zerg. And has a optional really hard dragon fight that is a real challenge to solo even a few levels over the quest. Is worth about 3k and can drop black scales. Aka $$$.
This fight, while intense, is not super hard for this build. Lots of pack pedaling. Keeping Dots up. Watching the timers and keeping up a few buffs. I ran it solo about 4-5 times. No scales. Just confirms to me that air is the right elemental to focus in as it looses the least amount. And that Helf is the right race for my kind of sorc, even if they are fugly.
❤
Samius Gurobo 
The Dragonmarks always seemed a little costly to me. Neat rewards, but with expensive cost. That, and you can always get by without them.
Perhaps if there were quests that you had to have a mark for. Or, quests that were drastically simplified with the mark (I guess that’ll be Framework, though).
I sorta did the same thing, i was a sorc, went fire savent, but i took the dragon mark of finding, cause i figured, hey +1 to loot, sweet! Overall, bad choice. My method of getting rid of my dragonmark was a little bit more tedious, i had mustered up 3 exceptional dragonmarks and spent 120k to get rid of them…
I wanted to get rid of the dragonmarks from level 13ish, but ended up COMPLETELY getting rid of them by lvl 17.. so many siberys dragonshards 😛
I think i have decided that feats on a sorc are really tight. Metas, toughness, spell focuses and your full. Not a lot of wiggle room. Guess their is lots of reasons that wizards are better in my world.
Cauthey speaks truth.
I can’t imagine being able to keep Dragonmarks on anything other than a Fighter?
Geof,
The problem with these marks on a fighter is the lack of meta magic feats and a damage boosting Ap line. Unless we give the marks a passive boost to lighting damage..
I would say most of the marks need a review pass. This one I would change the second mark to be a Abundant Leap like effect.
But the main thing that needs to be looked at when it comes to the third mark, is they need to rework the targeting on the Call lighting storm. It needs to spiral out from you hitting one (random) mob of the closest, say 5 or 10 targets. So you can SEE what it doing… Right now it might kill every mob it hits first time, but if you never see the mob or the bolt does it matter?
I’m playing around with the Storm marks on a monk right now, mostly for flavor (guy’s an electrical storm in a robe, ya know…) So far Gust of Wind is helpful with Cloudkill and Wall of Fire. Call Lightning will be taken soon. Electric loop’s damage is too low to be used much, stunning effect is okay for lower-level mobs.