[1.1.3] Hot Higher Archmage Salla

[Faeryan]

First the most important, the link: http://te4.org/characters/62644/tome/bf ... 7db8083ddf

For rather long I've tried to get an Archmage going but for reason or another I always died. This time things were different and I succeeded.

Long story short, I took the first steps carefully going all the way fire with added support from 2/5 Manathrust. Generic wise I first did 4/5 both Phase door and Teleport. After that I went for racial tree and finally the shielding things.

In the beginning I got lucky with escorts and picked up light healing thing. With shielding talent I was set for a while.

Infusion wise I used my starter manasurge and wild infusion all the way from start to finish. Only after the end bosses I found mental/physical wild.

At lv10 I went for Wildfire and maxed all the talents right away. For my next two cat points I chose infusion slots. The last one from Wyrm Bile I saved really long before deciding with Temporal. I maxed every other talent except Manathrust (which I did at lv50 cause I didn't find anything else usable) before touching any temporal talents. Time Shield was pretty much the only one I actually used. Essence of speed I sustained rather late as I didn't have enough mana to use it comfortably before. Before getting the staff of absorption from the end bosses my effective mana amount was somewhere between 250 and 300. That was because I first maxed magic, then constitution and after that cunning for the Telos prodigy and finally willpower.

After getting to Ygiilkgur fortress I experienced a real power boost, in the form of stashed Crown of Burning Pain and Fiery Choker. After that I was really confident and when I finally found Molten Skin in Vor Armory I knew I was doing really well.

My attacking method was pretty much Fireflash and Blastwave everything, followed by Inferno and then Flame if things still lived. Had 3 or 4 items with fire damage activations I could use if I got low on mana or silenced.

When I got back from the east I gave some money to Urthol to make me a staff. Not carrying it with me anymore but you can check my main site account and in the vault section see my one handed staff Rear Penetrator. It was a really good find to replace the disappointing Telos staff that didn't have fire damage bonus I was hoping for. That was a really bad prodigy choice at 32. Didn't gain one bit from it. For my other prodigy I chose the mental effect immunity thing. Did it right before the end fight. In there it didn't trigger even once so that prodigy didn't help me at all either. Could have picked it at 32 and it would have saved me from a few bad situations, none of which killed me though.

Funny thing about my one handed stave - it took me until lv44 or so before I realized I can make use of my empty offhand. Equipped a nice mindstar there that gave me 14% bonus fire damage and 20% fire penetration.

As for my deaths two could have been avoided by triggering a shield, but I was careless and didn't bother to do so. One was in the room of death where I was supposed to just open the door and try a few spells against one Wyrm. Again careless with my shields two Wyrms blasted me into oblivion. My last death was with a Luminous Horror stair boss in High Peak. I only saw regular luminouses and fired at them. The next thing was me staring at Eidolon having blasted myself with 912 points of Fireflash damage. I had the fire affinity, active 98% wildfire and 70% fire resist. All I can think of was the boss had deactivated my wildfire and the 912 damage topped my HP (my max at the time was 977HP from which the luminouses might had eaten a few HP) so that the affinity didn't trigger. Still, I can't figure out how after my 70% resist it still did that much damage on me. The hit wasn't a critical, that much I checked.

All in all I could have survived unscathed had I just carefully watched my shields. Even my own Fireflash might have not killed me had I had the shields up.

The end bosses were not that big of a problem either. Aeryn took the female boss while I concentrated on the male one. When the first portal popped an Uruivellas I movement infused myself into closing another portal and phased for the third. One of the bosses rushed me and I had to heal and pop the last of my shields before teleporting away with 0 mana. Ended up near a portal so I closed it and then ran from the boss while half dead all my resources used. Finally my manasurge cooled down and I could blast few more spells. Managed to kill the boss and it shot me from lv 48 to 50 replenishing my mana. At that point I was sure I'd win so I didn't care hitting Aeryn in crossfire and I just blasted the remaining boss after which I killed Aeryn too for the loot.
Had I planned ahead a bit I could have used my higher racial for no mana costing spells but I totally forgot I had the talent. Think I used it like twice during the whole game.

In the end all I can say it was a pretty solid run. In the future I need to start paying attention to details to prevent stupid mistakes like all my deaths and running out of mana.

The main thing in my game were Wildfire talent that gave me resistance to my own fire damage and Fiery Choker that gave me fire affinity. All I had to do after that was to make sure I hit myself with my own spells to keep in health. Don't think I even had to heal with heal spells more than 10 times after maxing wildfire talent.

Few antimage monsters proved a bit troublesome at times but I managed to evade them so that I could regenerate mana and cool down my activation items. Status wise the magic was no problem as my magic save was high enough to prevent bad statuses. Physical wild got rid of few physical effects on me but the mental ones were a bit of pain. Relentless Pursuit helped a bit with them when I finally got it.

Atamathon wasn't too bad either. I phased behind a tree and AoE'd his location while running/phasing behind another tree when he got close. He hit me a few times but none got through my shields.

Think I might try angolwen boss or try the infinite dungeon once I strip all the usable gear from this char to be used with my future chars.

[tylor]

Very suboptimal build, IMHO. My first instinct when I play Archmage is to grab all the shield skills and use them together. You only got Temporal, and very late. It's a miracle that you did not die more.

[Faeryan]

I actually felt like I could have done without shields talents totally. That's how rarely I got hit.
Most of the time I was blasting stuff from farther they could see and once they were inside ranged attack range my DoTs had pretty much killed them.

Might be suboptimal on defense department, but killing stuff before tha fight even started was pretty neat to me.

Now I just need some time to forget this char so I don't get bored when trying with higher difficulty. Wildfire Mage definitely has potential for it.

[Faeryan]

Finally managed to gather enough courage to try and take on Linaliil. The first 4 or 5 resurrects were a pushover but then things got a bit complicated.

With my shields popped had a stopping power of 3.6k and 1k HP on top of that.

Linaliil has 4 prodigies among which there was a Dragonic Body. It has a cooldown of 17 turns and heals around 10k HP. It will trigger around 8k HP I believe.

I let her kill me 4 times before I called it quits. If only I've had had more shields to pop I might have been able to take her down. When she was around 5k HP I either had my shields gone and ready to die or flee to safety and let her Dragonic Body to cool down.

Time prison and Congeal time would have been a big help but her spell save of 100+ was a bit hard to top.

I'd need to check whether i have Blood of Life available and equip my Ring of the Dead to see if I can grind her down.