Paradox Mage Build/Play Strategies

[KiTA]

So I'm in love with the Chronomancers. Temporal Warden is fun (although next time I'm definitely going pure Bow TW) -- although right now I'm playing a Paradox Mage.

My problem is that there are so many good abilities (and others that appear bad at first glance but are apparently awesome) that I'm not quite certain where to go with my character.

Early on, I really like Turn Back the Clock -- at level 4, it becomes a double bolt, which does double damage and double debuff. It's quite absurd.

Chronomancy / Gravity doesn't seem to stack very well as far as damage goes, but the CC ability is quite nice. The level 4 ability, Gravity Well, just completely shuts down an area of the battlefield, which is just fun.

Chronomancy / Matter is great damage except that Carbon Spikes seems to be quite meh, and Destabilize tends to kill me more than the enemies.

Chronomancy / Paradox has Paradox Mastery, which basically seems like a requirement to keep one's paradox levels in check, especially if you're going to use the Sustains. None of the rest seem all that useful, however.

Chronomancy / Timeline Threading has the buff spell at the start (Gather the Threads), but I might just be missing how awesome that is -- it didn't seem to really help much. Rethread is a great attack that burns paradox and causes all kinds of status effects, which is neat. I haven't gotten to the point where Temporal Clone and See the Threads are usable -- are they any good? I presume Temporal Clone's size limitation increases with level? See the Threads seems like a neat idea, but not sure how much it stacks up -- my Tome2 experience suggests that if you're in a situation where you need 3 chances to survive, well, you probably shouldn't be in that situation.

Chronomancy / Speed Control is kinda a given -- especially Celerity, which allows a person to kite things. I don't know if Slow or Stop stack very well, but Haste was fairly good on my TW.

Chronomancy / Time Travel has Static History, which is a given, but the other talents in that particular category seem completely worthless.

Ditto Chronomancy / Chronomancy. None of them seem particularly useful at all.

Chronomancy / Energy has our sustains and a few neat tricks, although Energy Decomposition seems really weak. Entropic Field seems pretty good. Energy Absorption is pretty nice, as is Redux for the "oh god just die" moments. Apparently Redux + Static History and Redux + Energy Absorption is just absurdly useful, however?

Chronomancy / Spacetime Weaving is nice, but it all scales on Willpower, not Magic, making it a bit of a tossup. Dimensional Step is pretty much a requirement to get out of danger, The rest were pretty good on my Warden, but haven't pumped Willpower on my Mage to get them.


So, yeah. There are a ton of different abilities, and I'm just not quite certain where to go with all of them. Anyone mastered the Paradox Mage class and care to give advice for early/mid/late game?

[jilladilla]

just some advice im going to put in your list:

gravity well + slow = fairly high area damage over time

energy decomposition blocks all damage types other than physical and mind iirc, its effectively antimagic shields little brother, except that it can't be shut down (except for those weapons that kill magic buffs)

[KiTA]

Well the problem with having both sustains up is that you end up with 175 base paradox, and, er, that's pretty high.

Of course, that's cause I usually pump my stats into Magic until I hit the cap, then directly into Con. Should I be splitting that between Con and Willpower?

[Frumple]

Um... yeah. More accurately, you should be putting as little into con as you can safely manage until both magic and willpower hit the 60 cap. Both the chronomancers have willpower as their primary (TWs) or secondary (PMs) stat, and in the case of PMs you'll be wanting to max willpower either immediately after or alongside magic. I'd personally suggest maxing magic and then going 2/1 willpower/con until will's maxed as well. Alternately, after maxing magic beeline con until you can 5/5 thick skin and then switch to going all in on willpower until will tops off. Con's considerably less useful for a PM once you've finished thick skin.

Anyway, iirc you should be able to run pretty comfortably around three or four hundred paradox, especially once you've got paradox mastery (think that's the name, anyway) up and running. 175 is actually a little low... a lot of your talents are going to hitting on the low side with that little in the bank.

[donkatsu]

Confusion is getting a deserved nerf next beta, but for now, Temporal Fugue is pretty much the only defense you need. At like, 80% confusion power, that's effectively 80% resist all for 8 turns or however long it lasts, which is insane. To put it into perspective, Thick Skin is considered a must-have 5/5 talent for every class, and that's just 15% resist all.

Mostly all I did to win was Temporal Fugue, then Redux, Ashes to Ashes, and just sat there while everything flailed around helplessly as they withered away. No need for nuance or anything, until you run into the one confusion-immune boss in the game (and he's not even mandatory), or the final bosses who I believe have 50% confuse immunity. Seriously, right now it's all about Temporal Fugue to utterly cripple your enemies, followed by whatever offensive spells happen to tickle your fancy.

Lategame, Cease to Exist and Echoes of Time become nice offensive tools. Cease to Exist for -60% resist all on your target, which is doubling your damage against things with 40% resist all to start with, and Echoes because it's your only spell that casually deals 3000-4000 damage against those high HP bosses, and big numbers are fun. Temporal Clone is good against rares and that's basically it, so if you're nervous about running into a tough rare you can just whip out the ol' TC on them. Gather the Threads is not a must-have, but it can be kind of nice if you're not very good at managing your Paradox and using Static History in a timely (haha, get it?) manner. If you use See the Threads right before killing a boss, you basically get to re-roll the artifact that you get, increasing the odds of getting useful loot.

[KiTA]

Er, yeah. When I say cap, I mean the per-level cap. I haven't gotten to the point where I capped out my base at 60, that's a bit beyond where I've gotten with TOME 4.

But yeah, the problem I have been having that I was trying to rectify with extra Con was turning the corner and suddenly taking 90%+ of my life from a spell. Some of the tier 1 bosses are especially bad for this. If it was TOME 2, I would be off hunting for vaults et all for resist gear, but there's no way to do that in TE4.

[Frumple]

Eh... thing to remember with the tier one bosses that have some ranged dakka is they tend to not be able to keep it going. They'll chunk off 90% of your health, then just kind of ineffectively walk toward you while you regen/heal it all back up. Shade and the inquisitor's about the worst of them (Crystal can be dodged, mostly.), and it's the rare build that hits them without enough tank to survive the first volley (after which they die ). It's scary if you're not used to it, though, heh.

Which is basically saying con's not very important early on, heh. Or at least that I don't value it very highly in the early game, anyway (YMMV, obviously). Sometimes a little, sometimes not, it's generally not a high priority until I'm well on the way toward maxing my primary stat and got a decent investment in the secondary.

[edge2054]

Time Skip is kinda buggy right now.

But aside from that, how could you consider it worthless You can remove a dangerous enemy from the field with it and nuke them!

Carbon Spikes... people underestimate armor. That's all I'm going to say on that.

*edit* And glad you're enjoying the classes

[KiTA]

So did I do anything wrong here:

http://te4.org/characters/160/tome/8a3d ... 8ad798c83b

[Frumple]

Plenty that seems kinda' odd to me. Why 5/5 dimstep, 5/5 space-time mastery, 3/5 banish, all so early? 2 or 3 points in dimstep and maybe a point or two into banish is plenty for the early/mid game, especially if you've got a teleport rune for longer range escape. Going two/one into dimstep/banish and nothing else in that tree would have netted you a full eleven talent points to play with! That's a lot of dakka you could be getting instead, and you don't really need that degree of investment in that tree until much later... if at all.

It's somewhat representative of the more basic problem with that build I'm seeing; as a general rule, you don't want to invest in a talent just for a damage increase when you can get an entirely new talent first. Talent investment is generally better spent investing in new tools, or opening up new effects on talents that have breakpoints. Single points in the first three or four gravity talents would have pretty much completely negated melee threats, ferex, and a point slipped into stop and slow (particularly slow, as not much resists it) would have given you some nice general purpose debuffs.

General good practice is to go ahead and get at least a point in everything you'll want, and then start investing heavily in stuff -- there's exceptions (archmagi and flame/manathrust, PMs turn back the clock; low level stuff with a breakpoint that heavily improves 'em, basically, or really core talents, like celerity on a chronomancer or augmentation/shield wall/berserk on their respective classes, as examples) but in most cases you're going to benefit more from building a talent base and then building particular talents up. You get a feel for what you do and don't need, but a big part of getting used to a class is trying out lots of their kit and getting used to how all the parts move together.

Dying with 200 paradox as a PM is probably a bad sign, too, especially if you're going heavy on damage talents. You probably want it to idle around 250, 300, and seeing it spike into five, six hundred in desperate situations is what I recall as being pretty normal. Part of that is because you seem to have been twoshot by a solipsist -- for later consideration, utilize your celerity (more points in that one never hurts, ignoring the "unlock new stuff" thing above) to keep yourself at least nine (iirc, either that or eight) squares away from those things. Mindsear and several other of their talents are comparatively short ranged.

Still, there's probably more and more detailed advice to give, especially from the folks more familiar with paradox magi. That's just the general notes I can give, some of which might be a little inaccurate for PMs

[phantomglider]

Onething I notice is that you are Higher and have leveled neither Overseer of Nations nor the Gravity tree. A big point of Higher/PM synergy is that Gravity Spike and Gravity Well both go out to range 10 and then have an AOE on top of that, so you can actually hit the people revealed by your extended sight range. I used this extensively with my dwarf PM winner back when Heightened Senses stacked with Infravision, and it made a number of places markedly less dangerous. Gravity tree is also pretty key to the Temporal Rift, which gives you the Rune of the Rift, which is helpful as a way to manage your paradox further.

If you don't get a Seer escort for Arcane Eye, at least a point in Precognition for the scouting is pretty important.

Your Constitution has had no points invested in it. PMs have -4 HP per level, and while they do have the tools to deal with that, it's also nice to have more HP as a buffer just for the "halp I went around a corner and got squished" situations.

I'm going to express moderate disagreement with Frumple on his talent point distribution and paradox maintenance points. It's true that pushing talents to 5/5 is often unnecessary early, especially damage talents, but I think 3 or 4 is usually a better place to leave them (Not to mention that Spacetime Weaving is a generic tree and those points couldn't have been put into blasting anyway). Some talents also scale so well with points invested that if you're using them it's irresponsible to have them at less than max - Temporal Fugue is one such, as leveling it increases range, duration, and confuse power. Resting paradox level is also a matter of preference; I like to have it well below the point where failures start (200+Will paradox) because of the consistency. My winner generally ran around with it at 120 or so, but he didn't have Paradox Mastery and typically opened fights with Redux-Gravity Well which pushed him up to around 200.

Also, the proper response to "I'm confused and heavily injured" is to dimstep to someplace where whatever it is that hurt you can't see you.

[KiTA]

Yeah, that rare death was one of those things I have trouble with, it was right next to the stairs up, I dim jumped down the hallway, turned around to shoot it, and it killed me before I even realized I was in trouble.

Rune of the Rift? What's that? I've been skipping out on the Temporal Rift as my PM, as the Time Elementals are a bit... much... for me. Should I not be doing that?

Been playing with a Yeek PM lately. Extra squishy! Probably doesn't synergize well, as I get what, 3 HP a level?

[phantomglider]

The Rune of the Rift is a reward for beating the Temporal Rift; everyone gets it, not just PMs. It basically casts Time Skip on the target, but the kicker is that if it hits it reduces your Paradox by a decent amount (I think 60) and it has a shortish cooldown. You can see why it's an attractive option.

[KiTA]

Hm, tempting. But with only 3 slots early on...

Teleport
Wild Infusion (Physical)
Regeneration / Healing

One would have to go. Hmmm...

[bricks]

While Paradox Mages certainly have cool locked trees, I'd suggest getting an extra inscription slot with your first category point. From that list I'd suggest nixing Teleport in favor of Rune of the Rift. Spacetime Weaving provides much better teleport options, assuming you can handle the paradox-related failures.