Ive recently started an Animist, and the tooltips for all the spells dont really seem to explain what they actually do!

How is the best way to play, is it just to plonk down loads of Forest's Advocats's (lvl 5 in Creeping Path, that seem to attack everything they see..not sure if its working as AoE or not), or is there a better way? Mana seems very high (only two turrets I can cast), and to stop myself from wiping, I just put them in an area where there is nothing there, then manually go out and hit a mob and pull it back.

Any tips or suggestions?

Hi,
it `s been a while i leveld my animist. I used creeping path and later aboreal because creeping that is meant to be the main shroom specc isn ´t that good anyway here. Verdant is nice but the shroom-bombs damage is crap here too as the spirits because the damage is only int based what is not live server like.

your primare spell is your lifeleech from aboreal line, in the first level you should use that together with main shroom. In level grps your primary goal is to cap shrooms so you spam loads of lvl. 5 shrooms to make it easier for your grp to hit targets. While your shrooms cast you don´t regenerate enough mana, so its better to have loads of lvl. 5 shrooms instead of 4 big ones and then no shrroms because you have to regen mana.

I dont remember the target range shrooms cast but it is nice to build a range macro to see where to plant your shrooms so they dont pull everything what is in range around ,-) , keep your shrroms away from dungeon walls because they may cast through and pull mobs.

If you dont know in grp where to set your shrooms ask, maybe they know the best place where you can set them because they are experienced with that. You dont have the shroom release spell at uthgard so be careful where you set them, if they are set they cast until they die and if you set them bad you can easily wipe a group ,-).

Like mentioned above in my opinion aboreal is the way to go here because it is the line of your lifeleech that you cast in the battlegates and the damage of it is really underestimated . The tanglers are nice to in pvp it´s a good deal to set 2-3 in front of you in the beginning of a fight to root pets and maybe tanks that don t charge and it ´s a nice for kite grps but most hibs unlearned how to kite because they are mainly off tank build.

Ok, one point to solo shrooming in pve, you have to put ofc your main shroom and some small shrooms at the beginning of a fight and then fill up with bigger ones you wil lget a feeling for it while doing it, start with small camps where you have enough room to run away if it is necessary, you pull higher mobs with insta debuff to have a chance your main shroom will get agro first, lower mibs you can pull with your lifeleech, then you ru nand hide behind your shrooms. If the mob is strong or you dont have enough shrrom power you run circles but keep in range of the shrroms that kill the mob while you run to avoid hits ,-)

when you shrromed up you have to hurry and pull single mobs into the shrooms, con of mobs should be yellow or blue to have a nice pull speed, you have to get a feeling how long your shrooms last when you realize your shrooms die or damage gets down you have to take a break, regen mana and shroom up again, it ´s better to regen then to cast 2-3 shrooms meanwhile the other shroms die because there timer went off.

I´m not a solo animist expert i mostly played it in grp and that ´s is alot easier then to solo.
last tip,- avoid dungeons or small spots when soloing where you can t run away when bad things happen, because the shrooms pull what they want to pull ,-) good luck.

regards
Megrim

First make a quickbar full of differnt gt ranges. 0 250 500 750 900 is a good start. A distance of 500-750 between pulling shroom and shroom stack is close enough, but ofc that applies more to open areas so you don't pull surrounding aggro. When I lowbie leveled I put down around 6 higher lvl shrooms and single pulled with insta debuff. Higher lvl shrooms = 1 shroom level below the highest one. By the time shrooms started dying my mana var would be ready for another round of 6-7 shrooms. You could use a fnf shroom to auto pull mobsinto yer stack, but that req a lot more shrooms that you might not havethe mana to sustain with the constant aggro. But its a lot more fun

What Jerrian said, in my opinion, is mostly accurate. I would, however, spec Creeping until 20 and then start putting points into Arb.

Creeping spec will reduce the mana cost of your baseline spammable shroom allowing you to drop more shrooms per mana bar. It also has a nice main pet that casts snare/DD. This guy has saved my ass in a pinch before with that snare nuke.

At 20 Arb is nice because it makes your baseline LT hit more consistently and you also get tanglers/DD dumbfire pet and DD dumbfire pet aoe. To clarify, you won't need to respec from Creeping to Arb at 20. You want points in both trees

Thanks guys, makes alot more sense now.