Maximizing Persistent Stacking

A guide on optimal Persistent Spell stacking by Dirich.

## Introduction

This guide can be useful if you are playing catch-up in persistent casts when switching T2 class, or if you want to focus on persistent stacking during Persistence Week (whose weekly bonus doubles the stacking of Persistent Spells).

Note that in most cases you completely forego the chance of profits when you employ these strategies, and that spell casts are related to FPS, as such stacking on Kongregate is way worse than stacking on Steam (by about a factor of 2 if you have a good PC, at least for what concerns casting evocations).

### Preparations

This guide focuses on how to maximize stacking in terms of equipment, spell bar, pet to use and Attribute points distribution. Still, upgrades are useful (e.g. Pet Experience ones if you use , Character Ability Power for , etc), hence you should start from what is specified in this guide and use any remaining Attribute Point, unassigned Spell or Item slot and any other free choice you are left with for the purpose of maximizing profits (and thus maximizing upgrades bought).

Simply use the relevant class guide to complete the run preparation and perform the setup up to the first small burst and source maximization via . Afterwards perform a second burst to complete the run setup.

### Spell Caveat

The spell order matters. Never modify it.

### Pet Caveat

To anybody with access to T3 pets, it should be obvious that anywhere  is suggested,  should be used instead. Albeit in most cases the advatange is mainly in farming dust, since we already are at maximum stacking speed.

## Arcanist

*Updated as of V1.40 "Fall From Grace"*

To maximize the casting rate of  as an , run the following set of spells. The order of the spells (left to right) is important.  can be substituted with  or  if lacking levels.

The remaining three spells should be set to: , , and , and should not be set to autocast.

Use the following items:

: Doubles the castrate for the active portion of JMS.

: Doubles the castrate for BOTH the active and passive portion of JMS.

 & : Increases pet charging speed which results in more shards being applied to the pool.

: Increases wisdom by 50, ergo providing more shards passively to the pool. Better early on when you don't have a lot of Attribute Points to spare.

Pet options for JMS casting

: Gives shards that go directly to the Shard Pool. Use if Arcanaworg is unavailable.

: Charges up an ability to give shards once per second for 10 seconds. Best available pet for filling the Shard Pool.

The Numbers

The maximum JMS Cast Rate is 240/second with both Magnifier and Rubedo engine equipped. JMS eats through about 8-9e5 shards at 240/s cast rate, Once you reach the  you will already have all of the available Shard Pool Capacity upgrades (Last one is at e642 mana). At max Shard Pool capacity, you'll have ~18 seconds of JMS casting at 240/s before it starts to diminish.

Since JMS has two separate portions (Active and Passive) calculating them is a bit strange and is as follows:

 doubles the active portion from 60/s -> 120/s.

 then doubles both the Active and Passive portion giving us 120/s -> 240/s & (60/s -> 120/s) with the Active being outside the brackets and Passive being inside the brackets.

Adding in the Week of Persistence, this goes to (120/s -> 240/s) with them now both being 240/s castrate, you will no longer see any brackets at all.

## Archon

*Note:* any profit run will guarantee you to maximum stacking. This section is mainly for those that are too lazy to even setup a proper profit run for .

The  class is the easiest to setup for maximum stacking. In fact, you don't even need to perform the mini bursts and the source maximization phase.

What you **absolutely** should not do is to ever put  on the bar: it needs to stay at 0 (fake and real) casts!

*Indicative* e*xpected casts per minute:* 3.6e3  (as soon as  has been stacked a bit).

*Note:* you can achieve the same result by playing  normally, but with this guide you are immediately at maximum casts per second, while when playing normally you will need a pet of high enough level (to generate enough Autoclicks per second to ensure that  is never lacking charges).

### Attribute Points Distribution

* 150 Intelligence (necessary for )
* 0 Insight
* 0 Spellcraft
* 200 Wisdom (gets up to 250 thanks to )
* 0 Dominance
* 0 Patience
* 0 Mastery
* 0 Empathy

### Equipment

No upgrade is really relevant.

## Necromancer

With the advent of realms, especially if you follow my Realm Rush guide, you will find yourself at e550, i.e. with  available, and no stacks in .

The best thing you can do to initially stack  is to use . After a certain threshold, thanks to , you can switch to  without losing  stacking speed, so you can start to efficiently stack  too.

### Attribute Points Distribution

For most Attributes the distribution is fixed.

* 150 Intelligence (necessary for )
* 0 Insight
* 200 Spellcraft (necessary for )
* 0
* 0 Dominance
* 175 Patience (to get perks up to 175)
* 175 Mastery (for )
* 175 Empathy (for , but it's not really that critical)

### Equipment

*Before reaching the*  *threshold (check the Shaman section), of circa 3e7:*

*After reaching the*  *threshold (check the Shaman section), of circa 3e7:*

Only Character Ability Power matters, and you don't even have to worry to but more than an enchant level 1 or 2 to get  shard generation interval to 0.03. Even at e550 mysts!

### Realm 2+ Shaman Prestacking

If you have bought all 10 levels in Forefathers' Work memory upgrade, you will be able to reach 1e8 stacks on  in 4 days. Still, this is way too much: you should switch to  stacking after 2d.

## Shaman

The  class is the only one with two persistents: , whose purpose is to help level up the pet, and , whose only purpose is to massively speed up  charging time.

Keep in mind that in the beginning the issue is charging, over time it will switch to discharging, but for a long time it will be an issue of balancing the two.

The consequence is that there are two item sets (and pet choices): one for when  stacks is not high enough, and one for when it is. This  threshold value is currently unknown exactly, but we know it is between 2.27e7 (the value at which, when using , you will finally be stuck at max charges all the time when using the equipment with ) and 3.2e7 (note that getting from 2.2e7 to 3.2e7 is a matter of less than a week if you use , while getting to 2.2e7 is more like a couple of months).

There are also two spell sets, depending on what you want to optimize the stacking of between  and .

The suggestion is to focus on stacking  until you reach the threshold previously discussed.

Note that  is definitely worse than  at charging , especially at lower mysts and casts count, where you have less Autoclicks and less self charging buff respectively (later on  catches up thanks to really high Autoclicks, alebit  remains better for all reasonable mysts). It is highly suggested you start with  if your  is far from the threshold.

The following values are from tests where  persistent cast count was 2.4e6 (which means I'm still not charging fast enough to reach full stacking potential).

*Indicative* e*xpected casts per minute (optimizing for* )*:* 835 for , 246 for .

*Indicative* e*xpected casts per minute (optimizing for* )*:* 1.01e3 for , 180 for .

After the  threshold is reached, you can maximize  and  at once. The results are for 4.02e7 persistent casts of .

*Indicative* e*xpected casts per minute:* 1.69e3 for , 771 for .

### Attribute Points Distribution

For most Attributes the distribution is fixed.

* 150 Intelligence (necessary for )
* 0 Insight
* 200 Spellcraft (necessary for )
* 175 Wisdom (to get perks up to 225 thanks to )
* 0 Dominance
* 175 Patience (to get perks up to 175)

When  stacks are over threshold or if you have :

* 175 Mastery (for )
* 175 Empathy (for )

When  stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for :

* 175 Mastery (for )
* 0 Empathy

When  stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for :

* 0 Mastery
* 0 Empathy

### Pet

If you have , use it.

When  stacks are over threshold: .

When  stacks are under threshold and optimizing for , especially if the stacks are at or over 2.27e7: .

When  stacks are under threshold and optimizing for : *Irrelevant (there is difference between pets, but it is minimal).*

If you are under threshold and optimizing for  you should use the pet you prefer for whatever other purpose you might have, like using  to collect more crafting dust. Still, if you really want to know, in order from best to worse it is:

 >  >  (if properly leveled and after 2 days) >  (if properly leveled) > , , ,  (if around level 200) >  >  > others.

When under threshold the issue with  is that it needs both  and , but until you are under threshold sacrificing  to equip  results in a stacking loss. With only  the shard generation interval of  will not go under 1 second, and as such it is worse than (a properly leveled)  (which explains why the latter is the pet used when optimizing for  while its casts are under threshold).

When over threshold  is way better than  (comparison made at 6d of pet time) and doesn't require days to become effective, only some minutes of levelling, unlike the latter.

, only needs  to be better than , as such it makes you bypass all the issues.

### Equipment

When  stacks are over threshold (enchants for Character Ability Power are important):

When  stacks are under threshold but you are using :

All that matters is the shard generation interval on , and for that you need a lot of Charater Ability Power.  has the same issue but it doesn't need as much Character Ability Power.

When  stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for :

When  stacks are under threshold and you are optimizing for :

The interesting bonus, in preference order, are:

Pet Experience (depending on pet) > Summoning Efficiency > Character Ability Power.

Unless you are over the  threshold, then only Character Ability Power matters (you should use a Pet Experience set to level  before starting to stack).

In practice, time is what will bring the best results. Because of scaling from accumulated Autoclicks or direct time scaling (for class and, potentially, pet).

### Spell Bar

When  casts are over threshold:

When optimizing for  stacking and  casts are under threshold:

When optimizing for  stacking and  casts are under threshold:

*Note:* if you do not have 100% crit with the last spellbar, depending on the exact amount you have it might be ideal to replace  with , to increase your crit chance ( charges with crits).

## Temporalist

This  is the weirdest class when it comes to stacking persistent.

A surprising fact is that Time Distortion is irrelevant for this stacking, you could run with  to keep it to almost 0 and nothing would change (granted you would need  or  with  and  to ensure you always have more spell charges than you can cast).

*Indicative* e*xpected casts per minute:* 4.88e3  (at the beginning it will stack slower due to  bonus being low, so I measured this number after the first 4e3 stacks, when the stacking speed in the short time frame finally saturated for me).

### Attribute Points Distribution

* 150 Intelligence (necessary for )
* 0 Insight
* 200 Spellcraft (necessary for )
* 175 Wisdom (to get perks up to 225 thanks to )
* 0 Dominance
* 0 Patience
* 0 Mastery
* 0 Empathy

You can put 0 in Wisdom if you accept that you need to use  (or  if you have it) with  and  to generate the spell shards necessary to maximize the stacking.

### Pet

*Irrelevant.*

All pets provide the same stacking.

### Equipment

No upgrade is really relevant.

### Spell Bar

*Note:*  can be substituted with , but having them both does not provide any additional casts, as you can already reach the theoretical maximum.

The additional two incantations are not necessary, but you need Accumulated spell casts to improve the ability of , so they need to be on bar at least until your total incantation duration reduction makes  duration go at, or under, 0.5 seconds, so that each real cast counts double. This happens once you have 1.77e5 casts (check the item description).

### Quirks (irrelevant section, just a for fun read)

If you use a level 200  , on a character level 247 ( generates 75 Compressed Time per cast), add  to the Spell Bar, the suggested items but switching  with  and adding,  and , the  items (except for the ring) and filling the rest with Character Ability Power items, while also adding  to the spell bar, the following inexplicable things happen:

1. Using both  and  results in faster stacking than just using the former, even though if you think about Compressed Time generation it would look like this souldn't be the case.
2. When using  as pet, you an achieve way better stacking than with other pets, unless your Evocation Efficiency is too low, or unless it is too high! If you are not within this 'sweet spot', the stacking will be very similar to the other pets.

In #2 I am not sure if there is only 1 sweet spot or multiple ones. While using a lot of Character Experience items, I have found a lower and a upper bound:

* Evocation Efficiency Upper Bound: between 2.27e59% and 2.63e59%.
* Evocation Efficiency Lower Bound: between 3.74e56% and 5.92e57%.

When satisfying all these conditions stacking with  results **consistently** in 2.3e3  casts per minute, while with any other pet the amount of casts is 1.83e3 casts per minute.

The setup in this example is faulty as it doesn't use . But it shows that there's weirdness going on.

In fact, from time to time I've been able to achieve 4.35e3 casts of  per minute when the test outcome would usually be 3.7e3. I did it with multiple pets and using many variations of equipment. **Even with the exact setup currently suggested** (while also casting  though)!

In short, from time to time we get more casts per minute than we normally get, but I have not been able to identify the cause of this, and, as such, design a setup to consistently increase the cast per minute.

## Oni

YO, ok. This ain't Dirich. Dis is Amocia, AKA Swordeater. Y'all better be happy. I was told to take credit for this... so, here you go! Big giant board of text to credit me.

's setup is pretty complicated... There're multiple phases of efficiency. I did a lot of testing back when our lord and saviour , praise be him, came into our humble wizard lands. And as such! There was already a perfectly well-made guide on the discord... which I'll now convey to all of you. I also made a smaller additional guide and testing for when defense stance was added so that'll be in here too, that's phase 2 and phase 3.

DO NOTE: This is also the exact setup on how to best start the  grind train a-going to get 60 casts.

Note: You'll want to get some incantation casts going to buff up your class ability first! Either via the use of  or

### Attribute Points Distribution

* 150 Intelligence
* 0 Insight
* 200 Spellcraft
* 0 Wisdom
* 0 Dominance
* 175 Patience
* 200 Mastery
* 200 Empathy

### Pet

 is our first pet, use the pet maximization set from the Oni guide to skyrocket him to high levels to get more , cause we're so angry that this takes forever. And as soon as we can't level it more switch to  cause we ain't no stinky sub-e60 myst wizard here, we're the cool bois. Ok, so, this will sound weird to y'all, we won't use  after 180%  charging on  we'll switch to /.

### Equipment

OKAY, so, a lot of y'all be like "what is this mess". Ok, so, sit down. Relax, take a snickers. You're you when you're hungry. Ok, so,  is replaced by  WAY too late for us to care. We'll be in phase 2 and it doesn't matter in phase 2 at all, it's better for profit though. When you switch to  switch to  back cause you get more from it.  would be good for when you're sleeping or something.  use these boots after  switch.

### Phase 1 Spell Bar (Meditation Stance)

Once you reach 120%  charging on  switch out  for .

Continue to Phase 2 once you get 826,098 (8.26e5) casts of , this equals 20% charge per evo cast.

### Phase 2 Spell Bar (Defense stance)

The reason why we no longer have any other evocations other than  and  is due to the charge per evo cast being divided by amount of evocation spells on the spell bar. This way we can maximize the profit (in  casts) in defense stance, do note, it won't be a smooth casting rate, though, it'll be faster than phase 1.

NOW, onto phase 3 once you get 40% charge per evo cast at 6,422,688 (6.43e6 for rounding) casts of

### Phase 3 Spell Bar (Defense stance)

Now, this is real simple. Just begin to swap out useless incantations... WHO NEED them anyway?!

Begin with adding  at 40% evo charge, then  at 60% evo charge,  at 80% evo charge, and  at 100% evo charge. I'll list out the casts for the different charges here:

20% - 826,098 (8.26e5)

40% - 6,422,688 (6.43e6 for rounding)

60% - 2,1316,620 (2.14e6 for rounding)

80% - 49,930,995 (5.00e7 for rounding)

100% - 96,625,702 (9.66e7 for rounding)