Chiyoko's beginner mage guide

## Why Mage / Foreword

I started playing as a mage (in HC) and never changed. Mage is an extremely fun class when played active. Mage can be a bit tricky to get the hang of and i definitely had a learning curve while playing mage. All my learnings are put into this guide and hopefully will help you become a successfull mage.

Tho be warned if you decide to play a mage: Idleing it is painfully slow and u got to put more effort in for the same exp / min comapred to one of ther other classes.

## Loot filter at start

Start out with not using any loot filter until you got urself full equipped with stuff & potions (see potion paragraph).

#### First loot filter

For start the loot filter should not be too strict, so you get a few items going. As you further progress, the loot filter gets more and more strict. This is my loot filter for the start (parts copied from beginner guide [Player Guide 1#Loot Filter Menu] - credits to that):

1. **Create a new custom filter**
2. **Default override Setting**
	1. On the Default override set the Minimum Rarity to **AA** to find all unspecified items that have a rare affix for disassembly, increasing to **AAA** when it's no longer useful.
3. **Armor, Jewelry, and Weapon Overrides** - These overrides are examples of finding difficult affix combinations rather than rarity
	1. For each of the following filter, set Minimum Rarities to **F**
	2. For each, start Minimum Affixes at 3 and select from the list all affixes for your build (minimum 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes)
		1. If you find too many items then increase Minimum Affixes to 4, then to 5, etc
	3. I use the following affixes:
		1. "Armor" override
			1. increased life
			2. increased magic find
			3. fire, cold, lightning and poison leech [not as important, can leave that one out]
			4. increased movement speed
			5. shorter skill cooldown [not as important, can leave that one out]
			6. increased intelligence
			7. increased vitality
			8. increased life regeneration
			9. any resistance [not as important, can leave that one out --> Resistance start getting important at world 9 upwards]
		2. "Jewelry" override
			1. increased life
			2. increased magic find
			3. adds ? - ? weapon elemental damage [all elements]
			4. shorter skill cooldown
			5. increased intelligence
			6. increased vitality
			7. increased life regeneration
			8. increased total attack speed [not as important, can leave that one out]
			9. any resistance [not as important, can leave that one out]
			10. all resistance
		3. "Weapon" override
			1. adds ? -? elemental damage [all elements]
			2. increased weapon elemental damage [all elements]
			3. elemental leech [all elements]
			4. increased weapon elemental damage and + mana
			5. increased attack speed
			6. increased total attack speed [not as important, can leave that one out]
			7. mana gained on kill
4. **Essence Override** - this filter is for finding items with (mostly singular) rarer affixes to disassemble for your items with good non-implicit affix combinations.
	1. Create a new "All Items" override
	2. Start Minimum Rarity at **A**
	3. Set Minimum Affixes to 1 affix and and select from the list all affixes for your build
		1. If you find too many essences then increase rarity to **AA**, then to **AAA**`
	4. Affixes are all of the affixes u chose above
5. **Magic Find (and Movement Speed) Override** - Magic find essences work on (Armor,Jewelry,Shield) and they will be used up quickly to drop rarer affixes (or increase movement speed (Boots,Cloak) ).
	1. Create a new "All Items" override
	2. Start Minimum Rarity at **F**
	3. Set Minimum Affixes to 1
	4. Choose both "?% increased magic find" and "?% increased movement speed"
		1. If you find too many magic find essences then increase rarity to **E**, then to **D**, etc.

### After unique rod

Once i find my first unique glacial rod, i kick out all offensive elemental affixes with fire, lightning and poison and just keep the cold affixes.

The glacial rod is the single best weapon in the game and i usually just jump from glacial rod to glacial rod.

Beware that this can be risky, if the next rod just doesn't want to drop. I therefore save other offensive elemental essences incase i find anotehr staff with anotehr element that boosts my attack.

## Gear priorities

For the weapon get as many damage as u can. Most improtant is to amtch the affixes with increased elemental damage and adds ? -? elemental damage to the element of your staff.

Back and Boots need movement speed asap. Its a huge quality of life

For the other gear i look for increased intellgience, increased life and increased vitality over everything else.

Squeeze increased magic find in, wherever you can.

When you find a unique glacial rod, upgrade it and use it. Its the single best weapon for mage currently in the game.

## Potions

I use a low cooldown health potion to be able to spam it while aoe bombing.

A low or medium cooldown mana potion to use during the aoe bombing

Third potion is of your choice.

## Unlocks with opals

Mage is best played active. Therefore my priority to unlock slots is as follows:

1. All active spell slots
2. Second passive slot
3. Second passive learning slot
4. Third passive slot
5. Third passive learning slot
6. Third Potion slot

Get the active slots as fast as possible. Having more spells available for mage is HUGE and desperately needed.

## Stats

Go full int / vit.

Priority is to oneshot the grouped mobs with blizzard / elemental seal / poison cloud combo.

To do it safely you should be able to kill the normal mobs with just blizzard while standing in the elemental seal. Likewise just poison cloud while standing in elemntal seal

Push vitality to stay alive while grouping and AOE-bombing.

## Active and passive spells

### Active Spells

#### Setup

I use the following active spell setup:

1. Poison Cloud
2. Elemental Seal
3. Teleport
4. Blizzard
5. Thunderstrike
6. Ice Blast

With 3 active slots open pick the following:

Poison Cloud, Elemental seal and Teleport

#### Adding more spells

After that add (in order): Ice Blast, Blizzard, Thunderstrike

#### Upgrade path

I first upgrade Ice Blast to level 1 or 2 of the passive part. Ice Blast is awesome as it triggers while walking and can help clear a path and make it way easier to group a lot of mobs. Plus its very good single target damage against uniques

After Ice Blast i go for Blizzard level 5 active side. If you prefer, youc an also do poison cloud level 5 active side instead of blizzard. I prefer blizazrd beacuase the unique rod has ice leech and that helps a lot with it (more HC viable)

Third level elemental seal active part to lvl 5.

After that either go for poison cloud or blizzard (whichever you havent) level 5 active part, Thunderstrike lvl 5 active or just dumb everything into elemental seal basic upgrade.

### Passive Spells

Passive wise u can be lenient with mage. For the active playstyle there is not much that mage heavily needs:

1. Ancient Knowledge
2. Mana Flow
3. Evasive Maneuver / Rapid casting

Leveling Priority on Ancient Knowledge and Mana Flow.

Leveling Evasive Maneuver is not really important for start

## Playstyle

The best and fastest to level mage and to progress is to play him active.

Active in this sense does not only mean pressing some spells, but grouping mobs up and AOEing them down.

Ideally you should aim for a ~ 2min 30 Second clear of a map when farming it.

I play mage as follows. Beware that i got all skills unlocked. If you dont have all skills, make smaller groups and aoe them down sooner.

1. Run through the map grouping mobs together. be careful not to get stuck, teleport if needed
2. Once the group is big enough (or u got n uniques in the group) search for a good corner
	1. Number of uniques is dependant on how hard u are pushing. If you are pushing to your limits, having 2 uniques might break u. So better stop at 1. If you are chill farming u might be able to handle 3 or more uniques at ease
3. Run into the corner, while running into it cast Blizzard (or poison cloud) as shown in the image. Afterwards cast elemental seal overlapping blizzard or poison cloud as shown.
	1. This boost your AOe dmg from blizzard 7 poison cloud
	2. Still deals damage with elemental seal
	3. Perfectly overlaps so you get the range and melee mobs
4. If your first aoe spell nearly runs out and mobs are still alive / stuck wehre the aoe doesnt hit em, cast the second one (poison cloud or blizzard)
5. Hit some harder uniques with Thunderstrike
6. Recast Ice blast (recasting ice blast buff resets the 4 times in 10 second counter)
7. Beware of your HP and Mana and spam pots

## Full playstyle (maps)

In the following video u can see me run a full map with the setup i stated above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edpBPFLeQBo&ab\_channel=Chiyoko

00:09 you can see passive ice blast proccing and killing stuff on the way

00:17 missclicked elemental seal --> Wanted to teleport instead

01:02 AOE bombing. good example of positioning /cast order.

01:33 perfect example of how ice blasts makes a path. I used poison cloud afterwards to clear it because i didnt realize fast enough, that ice blast had made a way already

02:05 second AOE bombing in another corner

02:23 "bosses" start here. Notice that i recast ice blast for the 4 tiems / 10 secs to reset

## FAQ

#### Why do you have life regen in the loot filter / go for life regen?

I go for life regen in order to be able to idle the game every once in a while. if you got enough life regen you can easily idle maps close to your max map. If you plan to only play active, you can remove that from the filter / gear

#### Why do you go for the passive side of ice blast? Pug says active is best.

I go for passive side because it helps with grouping up mobs by sometimes killing them inf ront of you. Also thinning out mobs while grouping is nice. If you position properly you can hit an unique mob with your ice blasts that trigger off of enemies behind it, furhter increasing the dps. I also think the procs are fine with bosses. Tho you can always opt to play it on active side, it helps a lot with golems and bosses.

Having a full sorcerer set and a lot of CDR might change my mind towards active ice blast, but i dont have that yet

#### Should I level Blizzard or Posion blast first?

The decision is up to you. I prefer Blizzard because the aoe is bigger and the ice leech of the unqie glacial rod fits perfectly into it. Poison cloud lasts longer and negates heal-effects. So it all comes down to personal preferences, although in HC id lean towards Blizzard.

Hit me up, if you got any more questions or something is missing in the guide and I will gladly add it.

Ingame i go by the name Chiyoko (any variant of that)