Nightmare Earth Mage Winner

[Roc]

https://te4.org/characters/119657/tome/ ... 790d493223

I decided to post this because earth/stone is widely considered the bastard son of the archmage builds. And it probably is still the weakest of the five, but it's nevertheless viable and has some cool things going for it. This run was deathless on nightmare adventure.

Earthquake is silly. It's so useful that it validates the entire build almost on its own. It's a 10-range AoE spell with a radius of 5, so you can hit enemies from 15 tiles away or cornersnipe. Most enemies would die from the 700+ dpt before they ever got close enough to attack me. Best offensive skill in the build, and it's not close. Pulverizing Auger can shoot enemies through diggable walls if you know where they are, picking up a nice ~35% phys dam bonus for your trouble. As a result of these, I had few direct confrontations. Probably should have had even fewer, but I'm not the most patient player in the world and I don't use Vision / Track / etc nearly as religiously as I should.

100% spell crit, 230% crit mult, and 194% phys dam (more with Higher + Auger temporary buffs) gave me good firepower even in lategame.

I went Terrene in this run, and it was effective but I probably wouldn't go 4/4/4/4 in it again. In particular, the second talent can probably be left at 1 or 2. And the shield, while it's powerful (and saved my bacon in the final fight once), is expensive and cumbersome to set up. I feel like Metaflow or Essence of Speed would have been a more impactful use of some of these points.

Galen's Flowing Robe is silly good. In a pinch, you can pop Stone Wall and then cast Micro Spiderbots while walled to try to reset long CDs. Dakhtun's Gauntlets are also amazing - I actually found Hand of the World-Shaper in this run which is supposed to be the endgame glove slot for earth mage, but Dakhtun is just better on a build that generates so much of its offense with crits. Probably would have gone with World-Shaper had I found more crit mult gear on other slots.

In general, searching for good gear for this build is frustrating. There are very few artifacts that benefit earth mage (such that I humbly request a new toy or two for this build, if that's possible), and +phys equipment is rare compared to other types.

Overall, this was a fun run and I encourage more people to try it out.

[Delmuir]

Nice.

I've not toyed around with this much so I appreciate this post. I find the cold mage to be the worst and lightning the hardest to set up. I'll try this one next.