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Monday, February 9, 2015

Mage: Ice Mage


By: Caliban
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.

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