Archmage midgame advice

[solanthus]

Hello all,

Currently playing a shalore archmage and things are going well. Here is my character:

https://te4.org/characters/217986/tome/ ... bc79a78ed7

The site is actually out of date; for some reason my game client would not sync with steam last night. I have since levelled to 23, unlocked Wildfire finally, and acquired a few critical items in Dreadfall vaults such as a tier 5 staff, some decent short staves, Elemental Fury, and some other goodies.

So far I have very few issues and have not died, generally the only close calls are when I get sloppy resting when a vault is still open. However, I have a few questions...

1) I already have significant (close to 100%) +fire damage, as well as about 60-70% fire penetration. Is elemental fury even a good item for my build? Since the elements that are not fire will not benefit from any significant penetration. I have felt like recently even fire resist enemies were culpable to my fire attacks - even some level 45 elite fire drakes in a vault were barely an issue.

2) Given that I did not know when I would get the Wildfire achievement, I planned a build without Wildfire. For that reason I currently have Temporal and Celestial/Light going. I wasn't sure what I was going to spend my final cat on, but I had planned on taking Water to get Shivgoroth form and possibly going Meta, I think Meta is better than another inscription? However, now I am very tempted to go Wildfire at 36. I am already fire-based. Thoughts?

3) What should I be lookong for to offhand with a short staff? Or is 2h generally preferred? I have a very powerful 1h staff but not sure what to pair it with.

4) I see in guides that BiL from the Light tree is supposed to be amazing. However, I am running into issues running my shields synergistically. I tend to have time shield on autocast on sight, and usually reinforce it with Reflection Rune before engaging. If there is time I will pop Aegis as well pre fight. I do not normally run the sustain that causes your heals (forget the name) to turn into a DS though, because it seems to overwrite my beefy time shield + rune. Is this because it overwrites shields that have lower duration? And if so, how do you guys normally run your shield routine?

I also notice that Barrier kind of sucks, and apparently I can't use Rune Reflection if Barrier is up? If I cast Barrier when Rune Reflection is up, however, it seems to replace it. For this reason lately I haven't used Barrier much or use it as an emergency shield. Is there a better way to use Barrier?

Thanks for any advice
Solanthus

[ster]

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=42019 just follow this guide tbh

1) elemental fury is bad with very few exceptions

2 ) Take both Wildfire (fire dam/pen, self harm immunity, cleansing flames) and Meta (disperse, stone wall reset, quicken spells) imo. AM doesn't need inscriptions like pleb classes.

3) Daggers or mindstars with stats relevant to you (wil/mag/cun, fire dam, spellcrit, spell power, crit mult, healmod). Of note are Life Drinker and Telos Bottom Half, both guarenteed artifacts.

4) The sustain that makes your heals into damage shields is super good with high heal mod/crit/crit mult and you should be using it. Normal damage shields are overwritten by stronger ones so rune of reflection will be mostly useless but enemies have too much HP to kill with reflect anyway. It's better to have a stronger shield. I'm not sure about "shield routine" as i've never actually played Archmage though.

Regarding proper BiL use either cast it before a fight to get a stronger shield to Aegis with or cast it when your shields are about to run out of time if you don't think they'll break from taking damage.