[1.0.0] Pyrokar the Higher Fire Archmage - winner
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:34 pm
http://te4.org/characters/18250/tome/42 ... bc90384850
Didnt use any item from the vault - just put one in and out again to show it off in the chat (x
This one -> Axe of Awesomeness
I finally succumbed to the call of all those artifacts that grant fire damage and played an archmage who specialized in the fire trees.
Since i wanted to try out the Aether Permeation prodigy i was more or less forced to make him a higher and pretty much only raised the Born into Magic skill. Other than that and the lack of an extra category point taking the class was pretty pointless (ill continue this in my rant about Aether Permeation further down). Overseer of Nations used to increase your lite range but that was removed, which i didnt know when i started to play.
Like with all of my characters i didnt plan much more than Higher + fire trees + Aether Permeation = Win(?) and the build i envisioned when i was still in Trollmire was different from the one i had while i was shoving a certain paladin in a portal.
As with every Archmage i played i invested in Flameshock and Illuminate for obvious reasons. Illuminate wont blind for long but it affects everything around you and lights up tiles so you can see 10 tiles in every direction. Very useful if your light isnt enough to hunt down ranged enemies that attack you from outside your LOS.
I used Flame and Manathrust as the low cooldown spam spells cause of Born into Magic. Getting lightning as well would have been a waste of points.
Inferno got leveled pretty late after i got Cleansing Flames and Fireflash was my crowd killer for all of the game. The extra vision range from Overseer of Nations allowed me to catch whole groups with Fireflash and Inferno before they could notice me.
I left Blastwave at 1 cause the knockback and Burning Wake it caused were more important than the bit of extra damage.
After getting Wildfire i regularly nuked myself with spells that caused Burning Wake and thus Cleansing Flames to get rid of status effects that werent worth a wild infusion. It saved my life at least once. For example when both my wild infusions were down and i was at 4hp and diseased.
Getting Meta instead of the Temporal tree wasnt a tough choice, cause while Essence of Speed is tempting, since it would make your character 45% stronger for just 5 (8) class points and a category point, if you used it effectively, you would still have your most useful skills on cooldown most of the time since cooldowns arent affected by global speed.
On the other hand Quicken Spells reduces all spell cds by 30% and with boots of spellbinding or a pickaxe of quickening thats 40% which allows you to use your spam spells every 2nd turn.
Furthermore shield runes and Arcane Reconstruction are also spells and lower cooldown benefits you greatly.
Meta also contains Spellcraft, which allows you to inflict the spellshocked debuff on pretty much everything. Spellshocked lowers resistances by a flat 20% (even to -20% all) and could thus double your damage on high resistance enemies if you lack penetration.
Disperse Magic is also very useful for the last battle and numerous other dangerous bosses.
Metaflow allows you to get all talents off cooldown. That includes shield runes, Arcane Reconstruction, Teleport etc. Its another lifeline for an Archmage and you can never have enough of those.
I didnt use any shield runes even though i played an archmage for 3 reasons.
1. Using healing infusions with 5 points in Arcane Shield not only heals damage that might have gotten through your displacement shield and slowly killed you while you waited for Arcane reconstruction to come off cooldown it also creates a shield of similar strength (it works with shielding).
2. Healing infusions have even with Quicken Spells generally lower cooldowns than shielding runes.
3. I hate using shields since you need to use them before getting hit and they ~will~ all be on cooldown when you need them the most.
The last bit of staying ability of this build comes from the fact that Arcane Reconstruction can crit. It healed for ~700 without spellsurge and with 100% crit rate and ~200+ crit multiplier that meant after using aegis a ~4k 4 turn (from lvl 5 shielding) damage shield with a cooldown of 10.
Now from the 3 deaths i had one was just stupid, one was Linalil being ridiculously overpowered and one was a crazy rare Champion of Urh'Rok.
The first caused by nuking myself with Fireflash after something disabled Wildfire which lowered self inflicted damage. I just wasnt paying attention and the death message remarked that i killed myself in a display of "extreme incompetence" ... touche (x
Linalil is just overpowered. She has pretty much every prodigy she could possibly get, tons of sustains, a crit rate of 100% i think, Essence of Speed etc etc. The worst thing about her though is that her cooldown for Flameshock is -5!!!. You cant do anything if she decides to spam it without pause. Oh and Draconic Body + 10k+ life ...
After getting killed once i of course tried again at lvl 49 and won! Her Spydre silk robe was mine mwahahaha. ^^
That Champion was a cursed + something. I didnt check. Maybe i should have. All i know is that it attacked me a lot in 1 turn and filled my screen with dozens of status effects.
I had to run from some luminous horrors in Nur and got my revenge later by killing one just with fire spells.
The Master ... uhh cant remember that fight at all so i guess it was really easy.
The Ambush was fun though since Fireflash + Illuminate meant killing every single orc other than the boss in 2 turns. (:
That worked perfectly for surviving the first rooms of the Prides too.
Limmirs quest bugged out on me and i fought a heroic battle against 2 imps for 300 turns and saved him. Of course i didnt find a plain amulet.
Forgot to get the last rewards from the alchemists.
Saved Melinda without much difficulty thanks to the Fireflash and Illuminate combo which killed whole rooms easily.
Failed the Charred Scar run by about 4 turns /=
The last battle was really really easy. Thanks to effectively 50% resist all they could not hit me with some obscure damage type and suddenly kill me and the paladin (i keep forgetting her name) is much more durable in this version - she even has draconic body. The only difficulty was that i was unable to use my aoe spells freely since that would have killed her pretty fast. Disperse Magic probably trivialized the fight a bit though i tried to use another disperse magic i still found in my toolbar and started the epic fight by rummaging through my backpack, putting on some gloves, making an angry face and equipping the old gauntlets. They never saw that coming!
My opinion of Aether Permeation is kind of low. Sure its 50% resist all but the price i had to pay for that was higher than i had thought.
Firstly there is just 1 non ring ego which gives arcane resist without also being arcane disrupting. Of course i didnt find a single arcane ring. So that leaves only artifacts. The crystal set would have been nice but since i was a fire mage my fire damage would have taken a big hit. I got lucky with Aetherwalk and the Hat of Arcane Understanding.
Now if you add the Girdle of Preservation which only added 10% arcane resist thats 3 equip slots taken up in addition to taking the for this character otherwise useless Higher race and 7 generic points + 1 prodigy point for 50% resist all.
Well its not even 50% resist all if you subtract 15% from thick skin and 8% from the Frozen Shroud. So all that for 27% resist all.
You could have the exact same effect but with better resistances by wearing the Girdle, Ureslaks molted Scales, the Crown of the Elements, and an armor with the sky or dragon ego.
Oh and Aether Permeation doesnt work with Premonition and i really didnt want to hit myself with manathrust every 5 turns.
I was unsure if it converted all damage to arcane so i got Premonition from escorts and thought about getting Spellcraft to 5 if it didnt work with Wildfire.
Now the 2nd prodigy was Secrets of Telos.
...
Why doesnt it have fire damage? Nooooooooooo
I didnt use the losgoroth form at all in fights cause my max health was too low to benefit much from it and my healing infusions worked well enough. Resonance is really useless 99% of the time.
In the end i still chose it over Tarelions staff cause of the damage affinities, the high crit rate, the critical multiplier and the spellpower on crit. Spellblaze Echoes + the Spire meant +66 spellpower after casting 3 spells with 100% crit rate.
Oh and Resonance doesnt work if you just stand in your own Burning Wake.
All in all a pretty foolproof build (later i only shielded myself or used debuffs against rares and higher). Just Flameshock and Illuminate then a 2nd wild infusion, Wildfire, Meta, another healing infusion or shielding rune. Put the rest of the points into the skills i indicated earlier and if you take care to see if Wildfire is still up before casting Fireflash nothing should be able to kill you.
In retrospect i probably would have taken Cauterize and Draconic Body for ridiculous staying ability.
I forgot which stats it has but for Aether Permeation using the top half of Telos staff and a crystaline dagger/mindstar + crystal armor (forgot the set bonus too) could have been interesting.
Didnt use any item from the vault - just put one in and out again to show it off in the chat (x
This one -> Axe of Awesomeness
I finally succumbed to the call of all those artifacts that grant fire damage and played an archmage who specialized in the fire trees.
Since i wanted to try out the Aether Permeation prodigy i was more or less forced to make him a higher and pretty much only raised the Born into Magic skill. Other than that and the lack of an extra category point taking the class was pretty pointless (ill continue this in my rant about Aether Permeation further down). Overseer of Nations used to increase your lite range but that was removed, which i didnt know when i started to play.
Like with all of my characters i didnt plan much more than Higher + fire trees + Aether Permeation = Win(?) and the build i envisioned when i was still in Trollmire was different from the one i had while i was shoving a certain paladin in a portal.
As with every Archmage i played i invested in Flameshock and Illuminate for obvious reasons. Illuminate wont blind for long but it affects everything around you and lights up tiles so you can see 10 tiles in every direction. Very useful if your light isnt enough to hunt down ranged enemies that attack you from outside your LOS.
I used Flame and Manathrust as the low cooldown spam spells cause of Born into Magic. Getting lightning as well would have been a waste of points.
Inferno got leveled pretty late after i got Cleansing Flames and Fireflash was my crowd killer for all of the game. The extra vision range from Overseer of Nations allowed me to catch whole groups with Fireflash and Inferno before they could notice me.
I left Blastwave at 1 cause the knockback and Burning Wake it caused were more important than the bit of extra damage.
After getting Wildfire i regularly nuked myself with spells that caused Burning Wake and thus Cleansing Flames to get rid of status effects that werent worth a wild infusion. It saved my life at least once. For example when both my wild infusions were down and i was at 4hp and diseased.
Getting Meta instead of the Temporal tree wasnt a tough choice, cause while Essence of Speed is tempting, since it would make your character 45% stronger for just 5 (8) class points and a category point, if you used it effectively, you would still have your most useful skills on cooldown most of the time since cooldowns arent affected by global speed.
On the other hand Quicken Spells reduces all spell cds by 30% and with boots of spellbinding or a pickaxe of quickening thats 40% which allows you to use your spam spells every 2nd turn.
Furthermore shield runes and Arcane Reconstruction are also spells and lower cooldown benefits you greatly.
Meta also contains Spellcraft, which allows you to inflict the spellshocked debuff on pretty much everything. Spellshocked lowers resistances by a flat 20% (even to -20% all) and could thus double your damage on high resistance enemies if you lack penetration.
Disperse Magic is also very useful for the last battle and numerous other dangerous bosses.
Metaflow allows you to get all talents off cooldown. That includes shield runes, Arcane Reconstruction, Teleport etc. Its another lifeline for an Archmage and you can never have enough of those.
I didnt use any shield runes even though i played an archmage for 3 reasons.
1. Using healing infusions with 5 points in Arcane Shield not only heals damage that might have gotten through your displacement shield and slowly killed you while you waited for Arcane reconstruction to come off cooldown it also creates a shield of similar strength (it works with shielding).
2. Healing infusions have even with Quicken Spells generally lower cooldowns than shielding runes.
3. I hate using shields since you need to use them before getting hit and they ~will~ all be on cooldown when you need them the most.
The last bit of staying ability of this build comes from the fact that Arcane Reconstruction can crit. It healed for ~700 without spellsurge and with 100% crit rate and ~200+ crit multiplier that meant after using aegis a ~4k 4 turn (from lvl 5 shielding) damage shield with a cooldown of 10.
Now from the 3 deaths i had one was just stupid, one was Linalil being ridiculously overpowered and one was a crazy rare Champion of Urh'Rok.
The first caused by nuking myself with Fireflash after something disabled Wildfire which lowered self inflicted damage. I just wasnt paying attention and the death message remarked that i killed myself in a display of "extreme incompetence" ... touche (x
Linalil is just overpowered. She has pretty much every prodigy she could possibly get, tons of sustains, a crit rate of 100% i think, Essence of Speed etc etc. The worst thing about her though is that her cooldown for Flameshock is -5!!!. You cant do anything if she decides to spam it without pause. Oh and Draconic Body + 10k+ life ...
After getting killed once i of course tried again at lvl 49 and won! Her Spydre silk robe was mine mwahahaha. ^^
That Champion was a cursed + something. I didnt check. Maybe i should have. All i know is that it attacked me a lot in 1 turn and filled my screen with dozens of status effects.
I had to run from some luminous horrors in Nur and got my revenge later by killing one just with fire spells.
The Master ... uhh cant remember that fight at all so i guess it was really easy.
The Ambush was fun though since Fireflash + Illuminate meant killing every single orc other than the boss in 2 turns. (:
That worked perfectly for surviving the first rooms of the Prides too.
Limmirs quest bugged out on me and i fought a heroic battle against 2 imps for 300 turns and saved him. Of course i didnt find a plain amulet.
Forgot to get the last rewards from the alchemists.
Saved Melinda without much difficulty thanks to the Fireflash and Illuminate combo which killed whole rooms easily.
Failed the Charred Scar run by about 4 turns /=
The last battle was really really easy. Thanks to effectively 50% resist all they could not hit me with some obscure damage type and suddenly kill me and the paladin (i keep forgetting her name) is much more durable in this version - she even has draconic body. The only difficulty was that i was unable to use my aoe spells freely since that would have killed her pretty fast. Disperse Magic probably trivialized the fight a bit though i tried to use another disperse magic i still found in my toolbar and started the epic fight by rummaging through my backpack, putting on some gloves, making an angry face and equipping the old gauntlets. They never saw that coming!
My opinion of Aether Permeation is kind of low. Sure its 50% resist all but the price i had to pay for that was higher than i had thought.
Firstly there is just 1 non ring ego which gives arcane resist without also being arcane disrupting. Of course i didnt find a single arcane ring. So that leaves only artifacts. The crystal set would have been nice but since i was a fire mage my fire damage would have taken a big hit. I got lucky with Aetherwalk and the Hat of Arcane Understanding.
Now if you add the Girdle of Preservation which only added 10% arcane resist thats 3 equip slots taken up in addition to taking the for this character otherwise useless Higher race and 7 generic points + 1 prodigy point for 50% resist all.
Well its not even 50% resist all if you subtract 15% from thick skin and 8% from the Frozen Shroud. So all that for 27% resist all.
You could have the exact same effect but with better resistances by wearing the Girdle, Ureslaks molted Scales, the Crown of the Elements, and an armor with the sky or dragon ego.
Oh and Aether Permeation doesnt work with Premonition and i really didnt want to hit myself with manathrust every 5 turns.
I was unsure if it converted all damage to arcane so i got Premonition from escorts and thought about getting Spellcraft to 5 if it didnt work with Wildfire.
Now the 2nd prodigy was Secrets of Telos.
...
Why doesnt it have fire damage? Nooooooooooo
I didnt use the losgoroth form at all in fights cause my max health was too low to benefit much from it and my healing infusions worked well enough. Resonance is really useless 99% of the time.
In the end i still chose it over Tarelions staff cause of the damage affinities, the high crit rate, the critical multiplier and the spellpower on crit. Spellblaze Echoes + the Spire meant +66 spellpower after casting 3 spells with 100% crit rate.
Oh and Resonance doesnt work if you just stand in your own Burning Wake.
All in all a pretty foolproof build (later i only shielded myself or used debuffs against rares and higher). Just Flameshock and Illuminate then a 2nd wild infusion, Wildfire, Meta, another healing infusion or shielding rune. Put the rest of the points into the skills i indicated earlier and if you take care to see if Wildfire is still up before casting Fireflash nothing should be able to kill you.
In retrospect i probably would have taken Cauterize and Draconic Body for ridiculous staying ability.
I forgot which stats it has but for Aether Permeation using the top half of Telos staff and a crystaline dagger/mindstar + crystal armor (forgot the set bonus too) could have been interesting.