ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi, I hate when I get frozen in the game. SO - I want revenge. How do I build the ultimate Ice Cold Queen?
Is it viable? Do we have high damage cold talents or spells?

Try Chill of the Grave necromancers, they're pretty fun. Unlike Water Archmages, unfortunately.

You could also do an Alchemist specializing in Frost Alchemy - it's not a super great damage type to run, because a lot of stuff resists it (Daikara, Dreadfell), but Ice Core looks like a pretty great talent (if not super interesting).

I didn't find Ice Archmages to be unfun, but I wouldn't dispute that they are the weakest Archmage variant by far. I for one enjoyed blasting frozen fools for 100% damage when I tried one out. Shivgoroth form is also pretty cool, no pun intendend. So that's another possibility.

Then there's Necromancers, as already stated.

Lastly Wyrmics get an ice tree as well - you could get a freezing melee attack, ice-retaliating armor, ice walls, and a frost breath. But wyrmics have a more multi-element feel, you can't really just specialize.

Ice is a little neglected outside of addon classes unfortunately.
Alchemist can work, but I believe they lack any resistance penetration so you'll have to rely on your golem for many mobs.
Necromancer is ok, but Chill will kill all your minions so it's probably best to run a pure nuking setup. Chill is a strong AoE nuke and you get the Ice tree like Archmage, but your only sources of freezing are random chance from Cold Flames and Ice Shards. Getting Essence of the Dead can help though.
I'd probably go Water/Ice Archmage. It's one of the weakest Archmage builds, but even a weak Archmage is still strong. You can still grab Disruption Shield/Stone Wall/Time Shield and other strong utilities, Freeze inflicts very high burst damage, and Shivgoroth Form is great thanks to the resistances and affinity. Also it's the only one of these classes that can still freeze stun immune targets.

Razakai wrote:Ice is a little neglected outside of addon classes unfortunately. ...

Thanks for a great answers!
Yea - I suspected that Fire is more cool than Ice .. I do hope ice/ water gets an overhaul soon. Perhaps I'll give a Cold Archmage a shot. Fire Archmages are almost - almost over powered..

achoice wrote:Yea - I suspected that Fire is more cool than Ice .. I do hope ice/ water gets an overhaul soon. Perhaps I'll give a Cold Archmage a shot. Fire Archmages are almost - almost over powered..

Ice/Water got an overhaul pretty recently, when the wet status effect and immunity reduction got introduced. "Neglected", as Razakai called it, is not how I would put it. He's right that the weakest Archmage is still pretty damn good. As Shivgoroth form mostly takes care of friendly fi- err, ice damage, you can go Temporal instead of Meta for your other advanced tree.

Cooldown reduction is really nice on frost mages. But yeah, Time Shield is just so good it's hard to pass up.