Celtic Heroes

I am a level 189 ice mage and have most of my strength in blast and shards. Everytime I get an evade i wish I could hit back with something else instead of just standing there waiting for my skills to reload. Has anyone ever tried dividing up all the available skill points between say ice shards, ice blast, frostbite, fire storm, fire blast, and cloak of fire. This way a couple of evades would not have the same impact but wonder if the overall damage would be much less? You can still use lure of fire and lure of ice together but would of course have to choose between fire or ice attunement.

Anyone ever tried?

I am a level 189 ice mage and have most of my strength in blast and shards. Everytime I get an evade i wish I could hit back with something else instead of just standing there waiting for my skills to reload. Has anyone ever tried dividing up all the available skill points between say ice shards, ice blast, frostbite, fire storm, fire blast, and cloak of fire. This way a couple of evades would not have the same impact but wonder if the overall damage would be much less? You can still use lure of fire and lure of ice together but would of course have to choose between fire or ice attunement.

Anyone ever tried?

Yes, sort of. I used the four major skills for a while, with an emphasis on the fire attack skills (since that is what I did in update 3, before we had attunment). I found that it wasn't particularly good. I was having difficulty with 2 stars of my own level and the nuke skills were much less useful. Getting gear for such a hybridization was always challenging as well. Admittedly, I was in the 130s to 150s when I was doing it (as compared to the high 180s), but I scraped the update 3 and moved into the update 4 "pick and attunment and go with it" philosophy. Dropping 3 stars is fine and, with a timed eshield and few evades, soloing 4 stars of level is possible too.

Let me know if it works better if you try it at a high level. I'm curious to see what your experience is.

Given that the majority of the damage of spells are governed by skill points rather than focus. It would be better to max a few skills rather than trying to use a lot at a low level.

Here are some things from my fire bolt damage formula post (http://celtic-heroes.com/forum/viewtopi ... 49&t=55462) that will answer your question:

Fire Bolt Damage = [0.01743(Skill)^2 + 0.5615(Skill) + 0.7813] * sqrt(Focus) + [0.005163(Skill)^2 + 0.154(Skill) + 0.2253] * sqrt(Fire Magic) + 0.04939(Skill)^2 + 3.601(Skill) + 13.15

Your skill level is squared. Also mentioned before, skill level does three things: increase the multiplier of focus, increase the multiplier of fire magic, and increase fire bolt damage directly. Because the skill level parts of the formula are quadratic equations (ax^2 + bx + c), you actually get increasing returns the higher your skills get. This explains why the damage of a fire-and-ice mage suffers greatly compared to a pure fire or a pure ice mage; a few maxed skills are far more powerful than many non-maxed skills.

So, always use a few maxed skills and not many weak skills.