Deck Building

1) correct. if you want to stack 5 floating... you need 5 in deck AND 5 in your hot bar in different slots.
2) correct. However, slugs are not disposable, you have to wait for it to expire. A card you don't want cab be dismissed before the timer runs out
3) cards in your deck, but not on hot bar do indeed slow your rotation. Also if you have 2 on hot bar, others slots need to be completely blank. Can't stack 1 with itself or 1,2 +1+2+1 to get 5. Need one in 1 thru 5 OR 1 and 2 with at least 3 empty.

 

You don't need 5 on the hot bar. Once you've combined from 1 to 2, for instance, 1 can pop back up again.

 

Greetings all and @jacksweather. So here is my understanding of your question and my guess at an answer of 20 vrs 26 cards. First off this assumes you do not have any empty slots for random drawing. An empty slot will draw from all cards in the deck where as a slot with 5 cards will draw in order only those 5 cards. So if you have 20 cards in your deck you will also have 6 slugs. Slugs draw randomly to all slots. If you have 26 cards and no slugs but you only assign 20 of the cards to unlocked slots and have 6 not assigned to any slot they will not be drawn at all.

As @skeggy Media said slugs appear if you have not used enough glyphs in the deck and the amount of glyphs required goes up as your level goes up this should only affect you for a short time as soon you will have so much trained you will not have the problem to meet the minimum glyph requirement.

Also create several decks and set two of them to be main and alternate and then swap between them while playing to see the difference in draw rate and function.

 

To clarify, If you have 26 cards and no slugs but you only assign 20 of the cards to unlocked slots and have 6 not assigned to any slot they will not be drawn TO THE HOTBAR, BUT the drawing process of the assigned 20 is slower, (kinda implying the unassigned cards take up a drawing turn and are automatically discarded).

 

So someone just said the order of the cards in the hotbar affects the draw order, does the order of the cards in the deck affect the draw order at all?

 

It is my understanding, and someone please correct me if wrong, but the draw order and timing for a dynamic slot with glyphs assigned to it is determined by the order of the glyphs in the slot and the cool down timing of that glyph. It is possible for a glyph be drawn but its cool down has not been reached so no glyph is displayed until the timer for the next draw, how fast your cards are drawn and discarded, has passed. The six glyphs you have in your deck but not assigned to any slot should not be part of any draw so should not affect timing. This is assuming you do not have any empty slots that draw from all cards


So using the picture below the first 5 slots are drawn from the glyphs listed in the slots. No other glyphs can be drawn to these slots, except for slugs if you have any. The last 4 slots are locked so only those glyphs will be drawn. Slot 6 is empty and will draw from all glyphs and slugs in deck. If I put 1 glyph in this slot and leave it locked then any glyph not listed in any of the slots will not be part of the draw and should not affect timing. If I am wrong on this please someone correct me.

 

One advantage of having unlocked glyphes is that you can use those more frequently without having to worry about CD and the resulting higher mana cost. If you add something to increase your draw speed multiplier and you are fast enough you can even stack your glyphes faster than by charging the skill. If you have one skill which you will use all the time, having them unlocked will result in a higher use. Although you can pre stack a spell and use it when needed, instead of charging it up.

For me it is in healing, if you are in need to cast a lot of heal spells in a short amount of time or doing UT and want to cast as many banish undead as possible ( for more detail see my healing guide ).

 

Really? That has NEVER worked for me. I will test again.

 

Well now I have to test again too....

 

Right-click or ctrl+key to dismiss an unwanted glyph, slug or otherwise.

And one thing that most people don't know about dynamic decks is what happens when you have two different sets of dynamic glyphs that sort a different type, such as combat vs healing. When it's time for a new glyph to appear, it checks to see what slot it can go in. If there is no open slot that will take it, it sits there for a few seconds before it is thrown back for another try. This is a lot longer than the usual delay after placing a glyph into an empty slot.

So say you had two healing glyph keys (set for healing touch and healing ray only), and three or four combat glyph keys. When both healing keys are filled in and another healing glyph comes up, it blocks you from getting more combat glyphs, even with other keys empty.

The way I fixed this was to have three slots for the two healing glyphs, then if I'm doing more combat than healing, I just stack the healing glyphs to open a hole. This can really get my combat glyph speed up. Sometimes I even get as far as both to 5 stack, but by that time the stacks are getting old and ready to expire, or the mob is already dead. And sometimes I do this on my four "combat" keys too. If I don't want to use fire arrow on something, I'll start stacking them as they appear. Remember, when a glyph is in your hotbar, stacked or not, it won't be in your deck.

 

So if I'm understanding it right, ANY time you have a glyph that doesn't have a spot that it is supposed to be slotted to, it slows down EVERYTHING even if you have empty, unrelated slots available.

Is this intended? Why would this be? This sounds horrible!

 

I'll admit that I think it is true and intended, (the dealer is wondering where to put the card, and it takes him a hot second before just dumping it) But I will also admit that I haven't had much an issue in terms of slowing down. My Pull & Offhand attacks are both on the same 1 unlocked slot, with a total of 6 glyphs combined in my deck of 22, and I don't feel slowed down all that much.

 

Certainly not a professional dealer then.

Might explain why big decks are under powered. Let Chaos return! Free the dealer!

 

Your 80 glyph decks are surprising to me, you get decent efficiency from those? I've come to limit myself to decks with 30 glyphs maximum, including my 4-5 locked slots (so 4-5 locked slots + maximum 25-26 unlocked glyphs in my draw pile most being the same thing (6x of my main 2 dmg skills give me already 12))

 

It's not that good, I need to rework it yet again. I just like having lots of utility glyphs in a single slot, sounds like I'm screwing myself that way though. Going to have to trim them out.

 

Maybe you should try, without requiring a "buffbar" having 2 decks which can help you move from one to the other, with having your utility glyphs mixed between the two, with a more situational mindset? Basically stuff like Blind & Fireflies become IMO useless if Im Fighting 3+ enemies at the same time, so I keep those on a boss bar, where I will be fighting a single target or something similar, meanwhile AoE skills become redundant in some scenarios (especially where you only fight one enemy, and he can run out of the AoE field). Also, most buffs last for like 20+ minutes now, so I have the infamous buff bar that I only jump to once every new scene or every 20 something minutes, so i dont need them on my alternate bar, I just have a deck for those and from time to time I stop, go in my deck builder, equip it, cast, remove it.

Like I said, maybe try to think more "Situational" and less "I might need all this", I've come to realise I fight off mostly the same things, so I can pinpoint a deck or two for each scene I visit, with an all around deck in case I try someplace new. (meaning I don't have 20 farming scenes, Lately I have The Rise (Mages room 1deck, The "Barracks" and Archers Room (1 deck), The Lich Room (1deck, same as my UT deck), and Dragon Room (boss deck)) then I also have UT, same as my lich room deck from The Rise. The Savrenoc Stronghold (Most mobs I use the Barracks deck from The Rise) and then Reapers (Boss deck), and finally Sieges (Barracks deck from the Rise). Rarely go out in other zones, but most of the time, they fit in one of the categories above, thus I already have a deck for them!