Different archmage builds, advice needed

[Red]

Hm... That seems like an interesting class concept there.

"Frozen Light"
"Cold Sun"
"Radiant Ice"

[spastic]

I presume Donkatsu is talking about after casting time shield, damage shield, and then aegis? I got up to 3-4k easy with just a shielding rune and time shield and aegis.

[Delmuir]

I presume Donkatsu is talking about after casting time shield, damage shield, and then aegis? I got up to 3-4k easy with just a shielding rune and time shield and aegis.

Can time shield crit? If not, that doesn't sound right… a good shielding rune at game's end won't have much more than 700 or so, same as time shield.

[donkatsu]

Spellpower is very important for Aegis scaling, since it affects a whopping FOUR multipliers. Semi-godmode characters have very low spellpower, like half of an actual endgame character if I recall correctly, so you should be beating semi-godmode shields easily with a real character. That might be your real problem; not stacking enough spellpower. Even with diminishing returns from the tiering system, any number that gets increased by a power of four is bound to have a very large impact. I believe the linked character had spellpower in the 80's.

[spastic]

I just posted this elsewhere:

I used a shielding rune with 413 damage, which got buffed by 70% thanks to Shielding. My time shield was 613, also buffed by Shielding, and it stacked with damage shield. Then I cast Aegis, which is 103% bonus. I'm already at: (413*1.7+613*1.7)*2 = 3500 damage shield with no crits or heal mod tricks, and with a not particularly good shielding rune.

[Pigslayer]

However, does anyone have advice for a Stone or Lightmelee mage? I've never seen any solid advice on how to build those two.

Build stone mages like you'd build corruptors: stack spell crit, crit multiplier, phy damage, etc. Spell proc gear, like black robes and life drinker are nice with earthen missiles. You'll want cooldown reduction gear, since stone mages have relatively long cooldowns on their attack spells.

[Groggeneral]

My last win was with a pure Ice build, so I can give quite a few tips for it. Early game for pure Ice is atrocious, the lack of a 3 cooldown beam really hurts so just constantly keep floating points in either flame or manathrust. Investing 5/5/5/5 into water tree actually gives a good chunk of damage, most of this comes from spamming all your abilities running around and watching things die to all you dots. Shivogorath Form is actually stupidly good, stun immunity and cold affinity, yes please . But basically spam Shiv Form every battle, tank damage in your glacial vapors, kill everything.

That's my experience at least for early and midgame too. My archmage died yesterday because I popped in a shield too late (damn Ziguratians!). I think people need to develop a more balanced view about the skilltrees. Ice is not purely about dealing damage, but it also incorporates abilities for survival and long-lasting fights, making it an even more interesting choice if you want to deal with more AoE spells. People rightly say that burning shock is great, but Shivgoroth form + vapour + tidal wave freezes enemies (ie. immobilize) while constantly healing you so much that you usually won't even notice that enemies deal damage at all. Plus freeze can be used both as a healing tool and a damagedealer (in Shivgoroth form, you won't get freezed because of stun immunity but will get a nice heal).

As Forger said, the early game is best accompanied with beams (fire and arcane work fine as always)

670 base healing from Arcane Reconstruction
x1.8 heal mod
x3.2 crit multiplier (quick approximate based on gear)
x0.66 Arcane Shield
x1.68 Shielding
x2 Aegis

= Actually comes out to about 8.5k shielding. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole trick. There's no way Shivrogoth healing can compete with that, and you can't heal from cold affinity if you have a shield up, so it's mutually exclusive with the massive Aegis shields.

Nobody said you'd have to decide between shields and shivgoroth. You can have both!