Where to farm RoGs with my Ani ?

Creep spec is pretty much all about the turret damage, and consequently when farming you want to keep all your turrets in combat as much of the time as possible as this is your most efficient way of doing damage with your power bar in this spec

So once I have my main pet where I want it, and have set my GT for the turrets where I want it (usually within 750 units of the main pet one way or the other), then whack out my shroom stack. If I am doing yellow/orange mobs I tend to get into a rhythm of using the debuff bomber to pull and orange, and the insta con debuff to pull a second with main pet on aggro to add its damage in. The aim is ideally for no mobs to hit the main pet such that I dont have to heal it and if each mob spend 2 ticks getting hit by 15 shrooms before it gets to my main pet, the healing is minimal and often just keeping the health regen going on the main pet will be enough. Then its just a constant double mob pull, with occasional heal for the 2 mins of the turrets. In this patchset, the damage from the turrets has its aggro transferred to the main pet AS LONG as the main pet is within 1000 units so you can plan the mob pathing (mainly) because you know where they will be running and hence having main pet on aggro gives a high chance of a snare effect, even if just for one tick which means more shroom damage. There is a school of animists who dont use a main pet at all since then the turret aggro doesnt transfer anywhere and when a mob kills a turret it just de-aggroes (this was changed in a later patchset since some of the aggro then was transferred to the animist rather than the main pet) but personally this always feels uncontrolled and too chaotic for me. Some make it work though,

Reds and purples I will sometimes put a baby tangler down (from my leftover points in arb spec) as sometimes you get lucky and all the turrets nuke, then the tangler roots, then the nukes and then the root again, but whether this works is a bit arbitrary, but the aim is as before, not to get main pet hit/killed. Reds purps might take 3 -5 ticks to kill, but even if I am only pulling one at a time, the second is incoming before the first is dead.

Verd specs killing power is in the pbaoe. If the main damage you are doing as a verd is coming from the turrets, then you are probably better off being a creep spec. I have seen many verds solo oranges by pulling 3 to main pet, with no turrets up at all, but usually some damage mitigation shrooms, 3 pbaoes and the 3 mobs are dead, heal pet, rinse repeat. With tinderboxes this can be a very efficient way of farming especially if you find mobs which take big damage from the pbaoe and dont do big damage to your main pet. doing mobs like dullahans for example would be a big no no for me since they hit like trucks. Personally I find soloing reds/purps as a verd to be much much slower than doing it as a creep spec. Drag a healer along with you though and its a very different matter, but then you arent solo any more

Another consideration for me is whether buffpots are needed. I feel no need to use buffpots on my creep animists at all, only benefit they give me is a slight casting speed, but since all my damage is from pets, the rest of the benefits of being fully buffed are ignorable for me. As a verd, I would be fully buffed to max out the pbaoe damage

For me, I just find I have the versatility to farm pretty much whatever I like with 45 creep 28 verd 10 arb. If I was being truly honest about it then probably 45/29 would be more effective for the times I used the pbaoe on greens/blues, but Ive always wanted to have that level 7 tangler from arb. I can handle helping one or two people level in my group if needed, but primarily I am a solo farmer spec like this.

I fully understand the versatility of 39 verd/37 creep. If you are going to spend half you time soloing and half your time running drinkers groups or other verd based xp groups, then the full efficiency of this spec means you only need one animist to do it all. You are 75% as effective as a full verd spec and 60% as effective as a full creep so the sum is definitely greater, but only if you regularly use all that utility. If you spend more than 25% of your time grouped, but less that 50%, this may be the spec for you

50 verd, 19 creep 7 arb. Basically a fully functioning PL tool with a druid and ment backing you up you are a pbaoe bomb machine. Can it solo, well based on the top 3 classes for soloing on hib for farming are creep ani, arb ani and verd ani, then yes it is still better than 99% of all classes. Enough creep to get all the insane aoe pulling tools and a massive bomb to blow them all up, just a juggling act of how many you can pull and bomb without it going horribly wrong. I have one, but if I am solo farming, I get my 45/28/10 creep ani out.

50 arb, 19 creep 7 verd. Basically the spec for doing DS as an ani. 7 verd gets the aoe blade turn bomber, 19 creep to reduce the mana cost of turrets a bit. Main pet does a fairly hefty cast damage as long as no mobs are on it. Your primary damage when doing oranges and below should come from being a spec nuker with a spec nuking pet (almost like playing a light specced enchanter) Main pet, couple of turrets and then probably 2 spec bombers and an yellow/orange is a gonna, even a red isnt lasting long. purps start getting into resists dangers though, so then you start needing more turrets, and then I would rather be on my creep ani again, but that doesnt mean that this spec cant solo purples if it wanted to, just not as effectively as I can do it on another spec.

I am not a god level animist by any means, but it has always seemed to me, that if I find the need to put up more than 5 turrets, then I should really be creep specced, but that is just my opinion. Creep spec also seems to fit into my preferred lazy way of solo farming

when I am purely after cash, I pretty much use my verd skills (with a creep aoe pull) and farm greens though so from that pure perspective a split spec or full verd may well be more effective than a creep. But thats for pure cash, for stuff (salvage and rogs) I am sticking to my creep spec

And as for teh sprint-sitting question, it has been alleged since the start that if you are sprinting when you hit the sit button, you get a couple of ticks of double power regen. Whether this is proven to be coded in, or just a myth where it feels like you get a big instant power tick on your first sitting tick, I have no evidence either way, but the general principle is that if you arent doing anything, even if its just for 4 or 5 seconds, you should be sat down for increased pow regen anyway, regardless of whether there is a magical bonus on the first tick if you are sprinting. In pve you dont really lose anything for doing it