As an RR6 animist I'm going to highlight some pros and cons of the animist on Uthgard so you can make an informed decision on if this is the right class for you.

PROS

1) The biggest pro of an animist is they are a wonderful solo farmer. Most of the animists I know have a lot of plat. If you like doing things on your own time and hardly having to move, an animist is a great choice. You can take breaks whenever you want. You can camp a boss and log in every once in awhile to kill the boss when you have free time.

As an animist you can farm many bosses solo for regular drops and ROG drops. Regular boss drops can go for 500G-2 plat, while sheeroe drops can go for 500g-3p. You also get salvage entirely for yourself, where-as if you are an enchanter you likely have to rely on other people (waste time building groups), and also split the loot.

You can solo farm every boss in Marfach and Dodens besides the Black Lady & Chieftain in Marfach, and the spirit summoning boss in Dodens. And 3-4 animists can farm every boss in summoner's hall for some of the best loot in the game. Glacier giant, too.

ROG Drops can sell anywhere from 15g-15plat depending on how good they are. Most so-so rogs you can sell for a couple hundred gold, and they are common.

2) Vent shrooms allow you to navigate easily through PVE mobs because they aggro the vent shroom then go back. A main pet quickly put on passive will act like a vent shroom, but has double the health. The vent shroom can be casted 500 units farther than the main pet. Using this tactic you can get anywhere, including the bottom of summoner's hall solo.

3) You are a great keep defender. Shrooms are wonderful at defending keeps.
You are a decent keep attacker. Shrooms up on keep walls is a great way to manage enemies that are hiding in keeps.

4) With a stack of shrooms + MCL you can 1 hit most people if they walk into the range, and with RP you can wipe out many people. Soloing a FG of high lvl 40 xpers is possible, where-as if you are any other class on Hib it is basically impossible. Soloing a small group of 50s is doable as well.

5) You are the fastest solo powerleveler 1-40.

6) MoC Lifetap is a guaranteed kill in RVR most of the time.

7) The lvl 50 FNF shroom instant fires which is great for outplaying in RVR and interrupting.

8- Your AOE bomber generates almost no aggro, which is great for PVE when pairing with a focus puller.

CONS

There are a LOT of bugs with shrooms.

1) Your FNF shrooms will stop firing with no way to determine how many will stop. This will be your most frustrating bug, but don't worry there's a lot of other bad bugs to hate as well. By the end of the shroom's 2 minutes duration, consider yourself lucky if a third of your shrooms still fire. You will die a LOT because of this. When you learn to monitor how many of your shrooms are broken, it gets a little easier, but no less annoying.

If you have a stack of shrooms ready to kill a group in RVR and the shrooms slay a stray green mob first, you may notice that your stack of 25 working lvl 50 shrooms now consists of 20 broken shrooms that don't do anything, and 5 shrooms that fire.

Killing guards in a keep? Keep summoning shrooms because they will keep breaking. This happens in RVR fights too, so have fun with that.

2) Your shrooms will pull mobs through walls in dungeons. This means you have to learn where to setup shrooms not to get mob wall aggro. Oh, and that FG you are hoping will run around the corner into your shrooms? One just got hit by a shroom through the wall and now they know you are there.

If a FG is attacking a keep and you sneak outside of it and start shrooming up, you're likely going to be disappointed. Your shroom will shoot an enemy through the wall and now they are all coming to kill you. Expect to die a lot because of this.

3) Because of #1 and #2, don't pull bosses if your stack pulls a random mob through the wall first, likely too many of your shrooms are now broken and you won't be able to kill the boss.

4) If you run far away from your shrooms and come back, your shrooms will not fire.

5) If you zone in and out of a dungeon, your shrooms will not fire.

6) None of your bomber spells interrupt enemy spellcasting. You have to use lifetap most of the time instead.

7) Verdant path is useless. Go Arboreal. Creeping is a possible spec if all you do is solo pve at 50. Do not go creeping before lvl 50.

8- No more shrooming in trees. One of the animists biggest strengths is now bannable. Perhaps you can hide shrooms behind trees, although it will be less effective.

9) Shrooms don't fire vs stealthers most the time. If you get backstabbed or PA'd, your stack of shrooms will likely not save you. They will watch you die, however. If the shrooms are out of firing range when you get jumped by, they are more likely to work when the visible stealther runs into shroom range. So pray that you can make it into shroom range before dying. Standing SOLO at AMG is usually out of the question because of this bug.

10) There's a lot of waiting around in RVR. No speed. No stun/mez. You can't dictate the fight. It is almost always up to the opponents on when they want to come to you.

I'm just making this thread to educate players wanting to make an animist so they don't regret it later. It's still a fun class if you can look passed the many frustrating cons. If you want a less buggy caster with the ability to spec for either PVE or RVR, try a mentalist or an enchanter. I prefer my mentalist (fastest character I've ever leveled).

Animist was my favorite class.

Some more:

PRO:

1. You kill a lot of players while dead. It gives extremely low RP because of the dead penalty and the shroom RP penalty, but it made my day when after a battle and the enemy won, they start regrouping and then some of them walking into range of my stack and melt instantly thinking it was now all clear. Never release while your shrooms are still up because it is fun to watch.

2. If your group knows how to play with an animist, you can literally stop a zerg or at least kill twice your number, even in open field battle.

CON:

1. Reduced RP for shroom kills. Animist go up RR slowly. Skullbone being RR6 is a huge accomplishment.

2. If your group does not know how to play with an animist, you are very much reduced in effectiveness (especially creep spec). You will cry at the wasted opportunity.

3. Everyone tells you where to shroom. Learn to ignore them and trust your instincts (unless it is someone like Skullbone or Psilo). The exception is if it part of making a coordinated plan. But in a dynamic open field battle with groups or zergs, you will know best. Shrooms are very visible so even people who never played an animist get a sudden uncontrollable urge to try to play your character for you.

TRICKS: (I never solo'd so assume in group or zerg)

1. One trick... if your group has another group mezzed, shrooms won't break the mezz. Put up a full stack of shrooms in the middle of them. As your teammates break the mez, they will die instantly, one-by-one. It is very fun to watch. You get reduced RP for these kills, so discuss with groupmates how they want to do it first.

2. Make buddies with Nightshades. They can get ground targets for you on keep takes that might take you a long time to get yourself.

3.Usually, but not always, it is best to make several stack of shrooms just out of AOE mez radius of each other. Stacks are nice because the melt the enemy player before they can be healed, but if you make a single huge stack the entire thing can be mezed at once.

Blue has fixed the issue detailed in Skullbone's Con #1, in large part due to Skullbone's documentation of the bug. It's such a big part of how an animist functions I wanted to post that info here.

However, in fixing Con #1, Blue has also fixed a bug that was listed as Pro #7 (lvl 50 turret instantly fires on cast).

djibouti wrote:Blue has also fixed a bug that was listed as Pro #7 (lvl 50 turret instantly fires on cast).

This is the second time a coder "bugfixed" this...

This is a feature to benefit from using the lvl 50 shrooms
1) huge spikedamage on first target on sight/range
2) avoidance of getting rupted by debuffs and rupt in general


https://www2.uthgard.net/tracker/issue/ ... ncorrectly.

Forest's Core, in the Animist's Creeping Path base line, will no longer be instant casting its spell; it will now have a three second cast time.

http://camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Pat ... rsion_1.68

Lvl 50 forest core = unique
Seperate their shroom-code from others and vise versa^^

GreenP, I fear I may have misunderstood Blue's post. On a second read I'm thinking he just fixed a casting animation. I don't have a level 50 animist to verify this information for myself.

Here's what he said:

Posted by Blue at Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:49:40 UTC
I noticed a bug on highest tier Forest's Core. They had no cast animation at all as they used an instant spell with cooldown opposed to the lower level versions.

https://www2.uthgard.net/tracker/issue/1710/iframe

I just checked with my ani.
Everything as i expected.
We are screwed.
yay.


To clarify: Since the lvl 50 shrooms should fire a instant DD instead of a casted spell there is no logic for any sort of "casting animation". Instants spells dont use an casting animation, all we see is the result/effect on their target/s.
Thats how i read blues post and i knew... they accidently broke something else :p

GreenP, well damn. I see that now.

https://www2.uthgard.net/tracker/issue/1592/

I don't know how to reopen this issue. I suppose we might have to make a new one.

I was able to do some tests and I notice:

1) Lvl 50 shrooms no longer instant fire at the start

2) Lvl 50 shrooms still cast their spells a little faster than the non-50 shrooms (intended I think)

3) FNF shrooms are now interruptible when attacked. I am not 100% sure if the non 50 shrooms were interruptible before the update. The lvl 50s were not and I believe the non 50 ones weren't either because I never noticed it. Mobs can now lock down a shroom by attacking it over and over and it won't fire. You need the other shrooms to kill the mob. Don't know if this is intended or not, but this would likely mean that people could spam AOE/GTAOE on the shrooms keep them from attacking entirely (but I only tested it with mobs).

4) Shrooms aren't firing through the walls in dungeons anymore . The occasional shroom that would have fired through the wall now gets a "Forest heart cannot see the target" message. The shroom then properly attacks when you pull the mob into view. I tried in 4 different spots in dodens that would have 100% pulled mobs through the wall and nothing got pulled. Someone on the bug report mentioned that they will fire through the wall if the shroom is really close to the wall but I didn't try that.

5) I haven't tested shrooms vs stealth to see if that is working properly now.

Plywood wrote:CON:

1. Reduced RP for shroom kills. Animist go up RR slowly.

This is an important con to mention! 50% less rps when your shrooms do 100% of the damage. You will get a very minimal amount if you also die before your shrooms kill the target because you get less RPS when dead as well.

Skullbones wrote:

Plywood wrote:CON:

1. Reduced RP for shroom kills. Animist go up RR slowly.

This is an important con to mention! 50% less rps when your shrooms do 100% of the damage. You will get a very minimal amount if you also die before your shrooms kill the target because you get less RPS when dead as well.

I think the less rp when dead got removed some weeks ago?

holsten-knight wrote:

Skullbones wrote:

Plywood wrote:CON:

1. Reduced RP for shroom kills. Animist go up RR slowly.

This is an important con to mention! 50% less rps when your shrooms do 100% of the damage. You will get a very minimal amount if you also die before your shrooms kill the target because you get less RPS when dead as well.

I think the less rp when dead got removed some weeks ago?

Oh, nice! That's good news, I didn't know that. I haven't played the ani since making this thread and have been on the solo mentalist who doesn't get kills after death.

djibouti wrote:GreenP, well damn. I see that now.

https://www2.uthgard.net/tracker/issue/1592/

I don't know how to reopen this issue. I suppose we might have to make a new one.

It does look like we will have to make a new issue.

It sounds like blue didn't know that the level 50 shrooms were actually supposed to insta fire, so he thought it was a bug and took out that feature. So now we do have better working shrooms, but they have less DPS than expected due to the fact that they are not insta firing, which reduces the initial DPS as well as reduces DPS by being interruptible.

Skullbones wrote:

djibouti wrote:GreenP, well damn. I see that now.

https://www2.uthgard.net/tracker/issue/1592/

I don't know how to reopen this issue. I suppose we might have to make a new one.

It does look like we will have to make a new issue.

It sounds like blue didn't know that the level 50 shrooms were actually supposed to insta fire, so he thought it was a bug and took out that feature. So now we do have better working shrooms, but they have less DPS than expected due to the fact that they are not insta firing, which reduces the initial DPS as well as reduces DPS by being interruptible.

I asked him about this directly and he said they will be sticking with the 1.68 version on this particular issue.

djibouti wrote:I asked him about this directly and he said they will be sticking with the 1.68 version on this particular issue.

Haha. Together with the "beeing interrupted when attacked" this is a nerf instead of a fix. What a joke. Just spam low lvl aoe spells on a stack of shrooms and we're done. Main pet still stops attacking after a whiled. No interrupt on bombers and the verdent Pbaoe still is fubar.

Satiah wrote:

djibouti wrote:I asked him about this directly and he said they will be sticking with the 1.68 version on this particular issue.

Haha. Together with the "beeing interrupted when attacked" this is a nerf instead of a fix. What a joke. Just spam low lvl aoe spells on a stack of shrooms and we're done. Main pet still stops attacking after a whiled. No interrupt on bombers and the verdent Pbaoe still is fubar.

Oh wow.... I agree that this is a nerf overall in RVR and hasn't made me want to bring the ani out to RVR like I was expecting the fix of this bug to. This fix has made animists better at farming/powerleveling since half of their shrooms don't break every pull, but it is an RVR nerf. What a shame.

Some of the most fun I've had on the animist has been shrooming up the lord room / tower for defense. But the shrooms always get hit with weak GTAOEs and what not so that isn't much of an option anymore. The other fun thing was shrooming up trees which is bannable now. I'll stick with the mentalist for RVR.