Celtic Heroes

This is thread is for people actually experimenting or experienced with full Ice spec mages. That is the intent.

Freeze Mage.

Why- Freeze slows down the pace of the fight in way that makes cooldowns and energy usage manageable. Freeze is a level based skill and has the challenges of that, but has some advantages from that as well.

Stats- all focus. If something goes wrong you are going to die anyway. Might as well make it quick. You don't care about melee and dex will not help your skills.

Skills:

Attack-
Max Freeze
Max Chards
Ice Lure to taste

Defense-
Max Eshield

Energy- (Boost build)
Boost (Max-ish)
Points in Med if you want. You can Med during Freeze.

Rotation:
I am still working out rotations and the timing of cooldowns and Freeze. My current rotation is usually something like...

Make sure auto attack is off.
Med
Eshield
Boost
Freeze
Lure
Wait for freeze to flash. Med if you want.
Chards
Turn on auto if you want, not really needed, until Freeze is up again. It will be up before Chards by a bit, but your shield is up and you want to use all of your shield since it represents invested energy, so....

Wait for Chards and cast.
Freeze
Re-lure
Boost
Shield
Wait

You get the picture. The rotation and timings start to vary if you get evades, but it is pretty robust.

Do not cast as soon as something is up. Manage your cooldowns and energy. Use up your shield, even if you are not doing damage, since that also helps manage the cooldown times.

How many Chards will kill the beasty? That dictates how many rotations. If you are willing and able to manage many rotations then you can kill many things within your Freeze level range. Like level mobs should more or less take three-ish and maybe some melee with no evades.

The only evades that kill you directly are Freeze evades. Everything else can be recovered using Freeze. I don't cast Chards until I have a Lure set since that is a waste of energy. I have had multiple sequential Lure and Chard evades. No problem due to the Freeze-Eshield relationship.

I have some sigils and lux regen. For testing I strip off all regen, but it is still hard to tell since Freeze takes you out of combat. This also means you can med in Freeze. Of course this also means you are maximizing any investment you have made in sigils. So far, I have never been able to make this build run out of energy. I can make my fire builds run out. I am not always full at the end of a fight, but more full than empty. The only thing I ever wait for between successful fights is cooldowns.

Always use your entire Freeze.

This build does not work on one than more mob at a time. You might be able to survive, but this will usually kill you.

Death by ads and death from mob Evades are risks for most classes.

I have not played enough with Sacrifice and Well to say much. This what seems to happen.

Sacrifice seems to start with your shield. However, even with a maxed shield, you can't use a Sacrifice greater than your base health and it is a one time thing rather than energy over time. There is potential for many types of batteries using Sacrifice, it I have not expiremented with them all yet. The combination of Abundance, Embrace, Eshield and Sacrifice seems viable and I will test it out a bit later. I think this would be for long boss fights where Freeze was not specced.

Energy Well- I dunno. I think maxed to level in a Focus build this will only ever be about 10% energy. Maybe in a health intensive Sacrifice build? Maybe as a buff in other dps running out of energy?

Potentially you could make one Mage a battery and the other a cannon.

Anyway, the Freeze/Boost Mage works a treat. I don't know about the potential of the other ice skills. I have yet to see the 'ice bolt' dropped spell. If it is any good, the Freeze Mage will be very strong.

Please let me know results of any tests and experiences you have. I have also been using a pretty good AoE power leveling spec for use with a Druid and Health Tank, but that is really straightforward.

Thanks for this breakdown. Now I'm off to get a book of alt and play around a bit.

I'm using a esheild ice shards and lure that's about it it takes a long time to kill which sucks but I lke the challenge but I do plan to add 2 fire magic skills into my build maybe 3 depends on how effective the first 2 are because slow killing is very annoying.
1. Cloak of fire - this is very helpful with esheild becuz the mob is constantly hitting u while u take no damage Andy do damage to then (kinda like chillmist sheild)
2. Incenrate(I think that's the name not sure) - this will also act in the same way cloak does which I think will help
3. Lure of fire- you should understand this one lol... But I only plan to use this only if the first two do not help as much as I think they will

Im going to post this on the wiki giving you credit. Good work.

The good thing about having like 1k health is you can wait for esheld to go down before recasting, but mabye with freeze it isn't an issue.

How many sec does freeze last?

Thank md.

Freeze is only 5 seconds like Bash. I can usually work the rotation to cast Eshield when it is flashing.

I think the idea put forward by Papi to have Boost configured more like embrace is interesting. I will say though, compare Boost to Lux regen items. How much do people pay for a few points that takes up a slot that could be used to buff damage, etc? I cannot remember maxed Boost buff off hand, but it is many lux items worth. If you have lux you can put points from boost into attacks.

I am currently running an AoE flame build that works amazingly well. It is used with a tank and Druid team. The real problem is targeting. I don't have all the complaints people seem to have about the various classes since I find there are enough skills to make many, many builds for almost every class. The base mechanics of targeting though are atrocious. In an AoE scenario one of the things you want is Lures on almost everything and it is impossible to sort them out because of the way the mob mini Zerg collapses down. There is no 'target another players target' function so no good way to focus firepower. This effects almost all classes. I would want this fixed before many of the class specific things people seem to be advocating for. I recognize that I am a minority abut this with respect to all classes. You can find a thread just like the complaint threads in mages in virtually every other class section, even including warriors.

My own strategy is to first try and use all the skills and think across classes before crying broken or nerf. So far the game has been extremely satisfying for me in this regard... More so than any other game I can think of. I love it that there is not just simply a cookie cutter version of each class that everyone migrates to.

Ya, an AoE lure would be a good progression. Not quite as powerfull but have an area of effect, kind of how fireblast is to firebolt.

Well compared to other games I've played (most aren't mmo's) there usually are more viable different builds than this game.

Here if you want to solo, you would be hard pressed to make a build as workable as the common builds.

Like for a mage to solo your golden standard is (IMO)

max firebolt
max firecloak
10 fire lure
max eshield
near max shards
7 ice lure
near max incinerate

To make a mage as effective and flexible as that is difficult.

Sure for a support build you have some options, but for solo there are just variations of one or two main builds. And most people want to be able to solo to level.

And it would be nice to be able to click a button to scroll through aggro'd mobs.

That's just stupid. Don't think about "Fire mage", or "Ice mage". Do both. It's what mages are made for.

u need to MAX completely,

-Fire bolt (a MUST)
-Ice Shards
-Cloak of Fire
-Energy Shield
-Incinerate
-Fire lure (optional)
-Ice lure (optional)
-Bandage Wounds (optional)

All of these things are possible.

I have run a completely fire based mage, the Freeze Mage and several types of hybrids. All are interesting and useful in different ways, for me at least, though of course I can understand that you might feel any build other than your own is stupid.