Mage Guide by Pug

**\*note\* - with the addition of new uniques in season 2 - this guide will likely be outdated and I will not be playing enough to make accurate enough updates to it, so read at your own risk :)**

Grats on picking the most fun class in the game!  I’m sure you have questions, and I hopefully will answer them in this guide.  Note this is less of a general player guide, more of a class specific guide, so I won’t be covering stuff like how to craft, setting up filters etc.   That information is laid out nicely in the player guide on the wiki.

### \*FILTER UPDATE\*

You can download my "Pug Mage Starter" filter from the filter menu (Pet loot chest > Filter button > Find Filter > search for that name and click download). The filter has everything you need set up to start farming from level 1 - you just update the rarity on the All Items/Boots/Cloak/Jewelry filters as your needs change. I added all of the potions so you can easily hide them as you see fit.

## Strengths:

1. Highly mobile
2. High aoe damage
3. Able to deal damage \*while moving\*
4. Strongest active class (largely due to #3)
5. Attacks and spells always hit
6. Simpler stat distribution compared to other classes(due to not needing any dex)

## Weaknesses

1. Harder to obtain any meaningful evasion or armor, may feel squishier than other classes due to this.
2. Currently the slowest class to play idle
3. Heavy reliance on mana potion (so early on only having 1 potion slot is painful)
4. Cooldown reliant/weak auto attack

## Race

The best race for mages, in my opinion, is Demon. High elf is a great choice with it's great 35% bonus xp, however Demon has a whole 80% more Life(40% more forcefield) and 8% more base dodge at the cost of 15% elemental damage, which hard to argue against. Having that much more life will allow you to (more safely) fight higher level enemies, making up for that bonus xp loss a little bit.

## Attributes

There are two paths you can choose to take here, one is extremely simple, the other is a little more challenging, but still just as simple purely from an attribute perspective.

**Int/Vit**

Int will be your damage stat, pump this as long as you’re not dying.

Vit will keep you alive, pump this as long as you ARE dying :)

That’s it!

The perks of this route is gearing is much more straight forward, just get life and vit on the majority of your gear (more details below)

**Int/Mindpower**

You also have the option of investing into mindpower since the mage set is light armor and it will be easy to dedicate some affixes to forcefield.  Forcefield regens quickly, but only starts to regen when you don’t take damage for 3 seconds (2 second with the Sorcerer's set)  This is feasible if you’re playing actively and are able to kite well enough.   The other thing to note is that forcefield scales much higher than vit. So if you dedicate enough to it, it might also be viable for idling…but note that the higher level you get to, the bigger enemy packs are and more quickly the forcefield will deplete without having a chance to regenerate.    You also cannot leech forcefield… up to you!

Alllll that being said, I have seen some **crazy** numbers with forcefield only mages in terms of how high they've been able to clear stages compared to their level. Whether it's completely overpowered or it was simply the person running around like crazy for 15 minutes trying to survive, I'm not sure. I have not tested it yet myself, but at the very least it is confirmed viable/likely quite good.

Gearing becomes a bigger hurdle with this path, more on that later.

Otherwise, avoid spending points into dex or str (they do literally nothing for you),as well as con or agi (these are too difficult to maintain high defensive stats with these alone) You will be able to farm higher stages with just stacking int and vit as opposed to int/vit/agi or whatever.

## Gear

### **Armor (vit focused)**

Movement Speed on cape and boots

Total Attack Speed on gloves

Magic Find on every slot you can fit it

Life % on every slot

Int % on all non-jewelry at least

Vit % on all non-jewelry

Reduced Cooldowns as desired (though the more the merrier!)

Mana Regeneration(not mana on kill) - as needed, the lower your cooldowns, the more you will need.  Please note that the more mana you have on jewelry, the more powerful mana regen affixes become.

Elemental Leech on belt (matching your weapon’s damage)

Mages can easily stack Single Element Resist in their third suffix slot.

**Mindpower Differences**

If you're going mindpower instead of vit, you obviously can drop life and vit from your gear completely, this opens one suffix and one prefix on each piece of gear besides jewelry. What you're going to want to do to is to have some gear dedicated to using **flat forcefield** affixes, alongside local **forcefield %** affixes. Meanwhile the rest of your gear will have **total forcefield %**

The tricky and unfortunate part of this gearing path is that it relies fairly heavily on those flat forcefield affixes. And mathematically speaking, an equal number of gear pieces with flat forcefield/forcefield% to pieces with total forcefield % will yield the highest returns. That means keeping 5 or 6 flat forcefield affixes updated to relevant levels. ( If you're a new player, it's worth noting that flat number affixes get outdated rather quickly in this game.)

An alternative would be only keeping 2 or 3 flat pieces and the rest total, or even stacking up total % as the third prefix on those pieces as well just to give it a bit more of a boost, but you wouldn't be reaching maximum values possible (also sacrificing magic find and/or cooldown reduction). Without testing it myself yet, I am not sure if you need the maximum amount to be viable (or overpowered lol) but you can't have TOO much effective health in this game (at least until end end game I suppose lol)

### Jewelry

#### Neck

Life Leech Rate / Life %(or total forcefield %) / Magic Find (+Mana if needed, though you would have to replace MF or Life, Leech Rate is too important) - Crit Damage / Total Attack Speed / All Resist or Total Crit Chance if needed

#### Rings:

Mana / Magic Find / Life%(or total forcefield %) - Total Crit Chance / All Res / Int

### Weapon

Currently the only unique weapon for mages in the game is Glacial Rod which has implicit stats that boost cold damage and provide additional cold leech.  This means that you primarily want to focus on getting cold damage affixes only.  Until you get this weapon, you can feel free to try out other elements, just make sure to stack the flat damage of the element along with the increased element % of that same element. Element % increased damage without a corresponding damage source does nothing for you.

### Ideal weapon affixes:

* Adds #-# cold damage
* % Increased weapon cold damage
* %increased weapon elemental damage/+mana
* Increased critical strike chance
* Increased critical strike damage
* Increased attack speed

## Active Masteries

You want to focus on the main thing that is killing the bulk of the enemies for you, thus generating the most xp.   That would be either poison cloud or blizzard.  The active masteries for both of these skills will lower the cooldown on them, which is the most important aspect.  Poison clouds slow is nice to have, bliz can slow as well but only with additional point investment.  Blizzard is larger and does more damage, but has a higher cooldown

After this, elemental seal’s masteries are powerful.  The active will increase the size of the circle which will allow more mobs to take damage from it, and give you more space to kite enemies around inside of it while maintaining the damage buff it gives you.  This is crucial.

You can consider the idle mastery if you would rather the seal follow you around, but the lower skill power really hurts.

After this you might have a weakness to uniques or bosses, so max out ice blast as your third choice (could also be your second instead of seal if you’re struggling already)  The active will increase the number of bolts shot with just one point.  Very much worth it as soon as you can afford it.  The # of bolts only goes up on the first active point, so it’s up to you if you want to add more for more pierce chance.

Ice nova can be a fantastic panic button, use it if you’re not comfortable kiting safely - otherwise it’s a waste of a skill slot if you don’t need it.  It’s better to get used to not needing a panic button :)

**Main Active Skill combo:**

Using Seal then Thunderstrike, then Ice Blast and Infernal Blast together will lead to the most explosive damage burst possible as a mage, get used to this combo and use it liberally

A note on Mana Shield:

I dislike using mana shield personally, mana is a very precious resource and any point where mana shield is going to make a difference for you, it will also be chunking your mana down with a vengeance. You may survive a hit that would otherwise kill you, but then you're stuck with your mana potion on cooldown and no mana to kill the thing that will now one shot you if you get hit again. That being said, with enough mana regen affixes, it can be built around and become very useful. ...But then that is one less damage spell to use and you really want as much damage as you can spam out :)

### **Active Masteries TL;DR**

Poison cloud or blizzard > elemental seal > ice blast > thunderstrike > teleport

## Idle Masteries

Ice blast’s mastery shoots often and isn’t reliant on cooldowns, so it should 100% be your first choice. Also the way monsters engage you when you are simply auto-moving makes ice blast strong as well since it will hit multiple enemies rather frequently.

After this, chain lightning’s idle skill along with the general skill is rather strong.  It can help gather multiple packs potentially depending on how far the jumps go, which will help with the next mastery

Blizzard can be auto-cast - this can be lackluster depending on how many enemies are around you at the time of casting, but it can pay off more often than not.

Poison cloud cannot be auto-cast and isn't viable for a truly-idle build.

Thunderstrike is kind of weak since you won’t be targeting priority enemies with it for the shock effect (+50% damage taken) but with enough cooldown reduction it will cast often enough that it will eventually hit uniques once everything else is dead with some reliability.

Elemental Seal's idle mastery is awfully nice, however it does not last 30 minutes like the other buffs, I would only spec into this if you are paying attention and don't mind refreshing it every time it falls off.

Tornado is worth considering if you want to invest heavily into it, with both idle skills AND the general skill maxed, it’s….not bad.   But that’s a lot of points for a not bad skill.

### **Idle Masteries TL;DR**

Ice blast >>>chain lightning > blizzard > tornado > thunderstrike > infernal blast

## Early Levels (1-1k)

Hoo boy do you move slowly and your skills take forever to come off cooldown.  You want to focus on the basics here to ease that pain.  Focus on getting gear/essences for magic find and movement speed first and foremost.   Damage, int, vit, life, and cooldown reduction of course are important too!
Most importantly play around with all of your skills to get a feel for them and pick ones you like/fit your playstyle.

Skills I recommend at this point are teleport, chain lightning, poison cloud, ice blast.

Teleport will get you some distance out of a sticky situation, or better yet, let you gather more packs more easily to aoe down with poison cloud.  Chain lightning feels great at these levels since enemy packs are relatively small and one cast can clear them out for the most part.  It also has a relatively low cooldown compared to other skills.

Once you hit level 1,000 you will unlock passive skills.  The most important first opal purchase for any class really is a 2nd passive slot.  Notable passives are Ancient Knowledge, Mana Flow, Rapid Casting and Evasive Maneuver.   Early early game the Hubris INT passive is really strong, but quickly loses value as you level and get better gear.   The % int is additive, so think of it like having an extra affix on one piece of gear with that much % increased int.

## Level 1k-10k

Hopefully at this point you have some movement speed on your gear, so you might start to see how fun and effective it is to gather a bunch of mobs up and aoe them down.  If you’re playing idly, keep doing what you’re doing :)   It’s going to be a slow journey.

The more mobs you gather, you’ll start to notice the less effective chain lightning is, since it’s not quite hitting everything.   If you’re really gathering large packs, you’ll want to switch up some skills.

At this point I would recommend going both poison cloud and blizz. Along with elemental seal.   Popping all 3 of these skills and letting the pack of mobs run into it will almost certainly kill everything in it.   At this point, you might want to consider getting an extra active slot so you can still use teleport and ice blast together.  Ice blast is vital for killing uniques and bosses.

Once you hit level 10,000 you will unlock masteries, and you can finally spend the points you kept getting and weren’t sure what to do with or where to spend them! Refer to the masteries section above.

Here’s where your build will change rather drastically depending on if you want to play actively or with idle skills.   I listed what I feel is priority at the end of the masteries section in more simple terms, you can read the walls of text if you want more detail.

## Level 10k-1 Billion

Keep on keepin on.  Prioritize high rarity movement speed, magic find and cold damage flats in particular. (along with any affixes listed above of course)  If you feel like you’re slowing down at any point, the primary culprit is going to be your weapon.

## Levels 1B to aa or ab Levels

You really need to have capped resists at this point.  If you somehow make it to ab levels without resists, you will hit a pretty hard xp wall that won’t be friendly.  You are probably fighting things half your level and barely getting any xp.  Remember, stick single resists on your armor until you get some AAAAA or S all res essences for your jewelry.  This should be your #1 priority for Relics of Reorientation until it’s capped, dare I say even more important than flat damage!

## Levels ab to Stage Cap

Here you will start to feel the pain of not having other defensive options easily available to you.  Luckily you can still do damage while moving, so as long as your vit is high enough, you can progress smoothly.   Keep on stacking that vit, at this level having a 1:1 int/vit ratio is nothing to be ashamed of.  I would even consider going 1:1.5 int:vit eventually.   Your weapon will make up most of your damage, so keep that thing topped off with 20x or 25x flats from helheim(if you can make it high enough) and you’ll be fine desperately dumping points into vit.  As your gear comes together more and more, you’ll notice the gap between your level and enemy level will keep widening.  So xp rate will continue to feel nice as long as you don’t just get one shot :)

Please note, again, that I have not tested mindpower only properly so I'm unsure on what the ratios would be for that build, but a pump-mindpower-until-you-stop-dying rule of thumb is likely still one to go by.

## Life after Stage Cap

Portals are your life - and at this point you can make your own decisions.  I like to have both poison cloud and blizzard along with elemental seal to take care of the bulk of the portal enemies, and the ole trusty seal -> thunderstrike -> infernal blast + ice blast to deal with bosses and uniques.   Aim to get enough cooldown reducton that you can fit two casts of infernal blast and ice blast inside the 4 second window of thunderstrike and you can spam away to your heart’s content. You can even get to the point where you just have 100% uptime on thunderstrike's shock effect which will be massive for kiting and iceblasting scary portal bosses.