Shattered Kingdoms

Damage taken by flamestrike while leveling often seems high because you generally train on NPCs that are higher level than you.

That's GM flamestrikes against..Are you a caster or a centaur?
I talking about making it useful to bridge that gap between journeyman and vet. So far, it seems like a waste of mana.

Also, lol I know what art does. Did some more testing. Its just strange to me how one red flame and one yellow flame message can only take a centaur NPC who is slightly tougher, down to a few scratches. It is not effective for leveling.

So, like any other spell, its effectiveness can be enhanced and diminished given situational variables. I think flamestrike does an excellent job of serving its purpose.

The situational variable here was that it was against a centaur NPC. And it took a whole mana pool to kill him.

Fight it again when you are a tough challenge for the centaur.

By then I should have better spells for damage.
I guess I just got my hopes up. Like oh nice! flamestrike! this should speed thi- Aww. :|

If it took an entire mana pool to kill the centaur then your mana pool might be low.

Generally, flamestrike is less than half as mana efficient for damage than spear of faith is on a single target: However, if it takes 80% of your mana pool to kill one NPC with flamestrike, then it also takes 80% of your mana pool to kill three to five grouped targets with flamestrike, and that's where the XP train gets going. In addition, when you -very- first get flamestrike it does pretty minimal damage, because it increases with strength in level and you're also going to fail it a lot as you learn to cast it.

That said, for a mana heavy build, flamestriking even single NPCs is usually better than meleeing NPCs down just because spell damage gives more XP than melee strikes. I often find myself flamestriking even 1 or 2 NPCs in between flamestrike and spear of faith just because it's actually faster than hitting something with a mace.

If you can get friends, there's also a higher level area with multiple grouped NPCs that is useful for master+ PCs level with flamestrike. It's just really situational. I would say that if you sleep on every tick, flamestrike is better for leveling even on single targets than meleeing is. Spear of faith absolutely blows it out of the water though for single target XP.

I'm at Wise with 4 into mana trains.

How high level are you and how well trained in flamestrike are you?

Flamestrike is worthless for leveling now that certain code changes have changed how moving about in groups work.