[1.4.9] Cornac Paradox mage guide, six category unlocks!

[Mankeli]

Sarillon suffers from the same problems that Staff of Archmage Tarelion has: 1) It's two-handed and 2) It has no crit multi.

Tarelion isn't very good on insane+ archmages because BiL + AR greatly benefit from crit multi (boosts offense too ofc) and Sarillon has the same problem with my PM build: it doesn't boost BiL. You can get short staffs with 50 % crit multi and the highest I've seen was 72 % although magewarrior might have been nerfed a bit since then, don't remember.

Also unrelated fun fact about my temporal reprieve + materialize barrier trick: time does not pass for the obstacle while you are in your safe space meaning that you can cast barrier, wait two turns, cast reprieve and then come back and still be behind the barrier.

[Mankeli]

I added one sentence clarification on how the clones work and also there is currently a nasty bug with time skip: If you get time skipped while your clones are up and the duration of clones is shorter than the duration of time skip you will die when the clones end due to having no active party members available. Bug report has been made, I'll keep you posted when it's fixed as I plan to keep this up to date anyways!

[Mankeli]

One more change: I decided to spend one point in Time Stop and put that on Contingency. Temporal Fugue would be great on contingency if you can proc it in a predictable way ie when you take a calculative risk. Then it'd just be free clones. But I'm not sure if this is reasonable to do considering the proc condition for Contingency.

Now the build is perfect. Please go win madness before 1.5

[RARaines]

Why do you have Combat Techniques as 3/5/5/0/0? I'm not understanding why the 5 are going into combat accuracy.

It seems to me that two of those points could go to turning Combat Techniques to 5/5/0/0/0 and then two points into turning Light to 1/5/1/5 or cranking Webs of Fate to 5 and either way, you save a point. Or am I misunderstanding something?

[ster]

IIRC it's because PM only has 2 good offensive spells so you will bump attack to extend attenuate duration on things

[Mankeli]

Ster is correct. It's mostly madness thing with mercy although it may outdamage your bad spells on insane too. That one bad spell gives cooldown reduction so it's worth using though. Also investing more in providence is a bad idea anyways since at 0.9 mastery you need two more points to get one more turn of duration. Healing light, WoF and Thick Skin would be fine if you don't want to invest in accuracy.

[ster]

Welp got to dreadfell on madness with this and i am The Worst Player so it's pretty good

In like a month or so i might even win it, watch this space

[Moopamoop]

If bump-attacking is a thing the build does, would it maybe be better to unlock staff mastery and spend those 5 points in the staff combat tree instead?

[Micbran]

If bump-attacking is a thing the build does, would it maybe be better to unlock staff mastery and spend those 5 points in the staff combat tree instead?

bumping is because mercy does considerable damage on madness and you want to just deal damage to proc seal fate, its not really for the damage of the bump

IIRC it's because PM only has 2 good offensive spells so you will bump attack to extend attenuate duration on things

its pretty overkill for insane tho

[GlassGo]

Never seen this before.

This is what I call smart and cunning character buiding!
Mankeli - you are the man, gentleman ans scholar with refined taste! )

Brilliant idea and guide.

[Mankeli]

Thanks GlassGo. Shoud prolly update this now that I'm back.

The biggest changes since writing this are that cornacs got a lot of new shiny points and BiL got nerfed (still worth it). I believe it was 6 class and 7 generic talent points.