Skill Order
Flame Ward | Glyph of Dominion | Runic Invocation | Teleport | Frost Claw
This build is based on the Frost Claw, Elemental Nova combo. Frost Claw is the swiss army knife for applying Frostbite, clearing waves of trash, regaining mana, and generating ward. Nova does not appear on the bar because it is automatically cast by FC.
The other 4 skills are chosen to support this central combo. Two of these are required, while the remaining two are flexible and can be altered according to user preference. These support skills offer defense or utility of some sort, and are not required to deal damage.
Settings
[Interface] In Settings->Gameplay, turn on Display Health Bars Over Players
[Keybinds] Try using Spacebar as the hotkey for Skill 4. Always put your traversal skill on it. Always have a traversal skill.
Mapping
Be careful when you're just starting the map and haven't built up any ward yet. That's when you're most vulnerable. Make sure to warm up your ward before you engage. Fill your 3 runes and pretty much keep Runic Invocation held down; invoking Reowyn's Frostguard is effectively free.
Master the Shoot-and-Scoot with Frost Claw. Fire a burst of projectiles and move while they fly. Keep moving in between attacks, and try not to overkill on trash. This will not maximize your dps, but it will maximize your clear speed, and help conserve mana if you can't sustain.
Move constantly to make yourself less likely to be hit by stray projectiles. Let your damage over time finish off weak enemies without further investment. You often only need to fire a single volley to kill most of a wave.
Don't stop for small groups unless there's something valuable or deadly. Instead, run past all the enemies and get them to follow you. Bunch up a big crowd and kill them all at once to get the most out of Freezing Cascade. When you're done running and turn to fight, activate Flame Ward so you don't accidentally die before dealing damage. Focus your fire on the biggest threats while also making sure everything is Frozen.
Use Glyph of Dominion and Teleport to move through the level faster. Get in a rhythm so you can keep both Haste and 5 stacks of Momentum for Essence of Celerity at all times.
Accomplish your Primary Objective in a speedy manner and get out. Grab any chests, shrines, and mage prisons you come across, but do not full clear.
Monolith echoes include an Arena objective. If you don't like those because they take too long, you can see them on the echo web and avoid them. The echo name will always include Arena.
Map layout is not random. Learn the maps, many of which are from the campaign. Try to predict where the objective might be if you get one that starts hidden. Some maps might even start you directly next to the target you need to kill and can be completed in 10 seconds. I've had that happen in the sewers repeatedly.
Bossing
Your primary source of damage is Frostbite. The first 30 stacks make it easier to freeze the target, but try to stack it as high as it will go to maximize your damage. Throughout the midgame you should find you can keep many bosses almost permanently frozen, as long as you don't run out of mana.
Stand on Glyph of Dominion for All Resists and Ward Per Second. You can use it to kite the Abomination boss with Slow.
Flame Ward isn't always available, so you'll need to learn to use it reactively when you realize you can't avoid an attack. It can take some practice to get a feel for it.
Keep Reowyn's Frostguard up at all times as usual. Warmage's Initiative can be used to hop out of boss mechanics at the same time as refreshing the shield. It's more likely to work than you might think!
Use Teleport to help you avoid attacks that would one-shot you. Sometimes all the damage reduction in the world won't save you, and you simply have to doooooodge!
Ward
Mages use ward as their primary source of Effective Health. EHP is the amount of raw damage it takes to kill you, with all your Health and Ward, Armor, Resist, and other sources of Damage Reduction counted in.
When you start seeing tick marks on your ward bar, each is equal to your Maximum Health. Ward has no hard limit, but it has a soft cap. The more ward you have, the faster it decays.
- Ward Retention slows the rate at which ward decays, and is most important for raising your soft cap.
- Ward Threshold raises your minimum ward by a fixed amount permanently. It's good to have idle ward.
Ward is primarily generated by using skills. Equipment Affixes, Passive and Skill Tree nodes are selected to grant your skills the ability to generate ward. It is possible to get Ward per Second for passive ward, but that's not how you get the big ward numbers.
- When you are doing nothing, you are at your Idle Ward.
- Your Mapping Ward is how much you can hold onto while moving through a map as quickly as you can.
- When you have a huge crowd of enemies filling your screen, you will experience Peak Ward.
- Finally, keep an eye on your Boss Ward. It can be harder to build it without any trash around.
This build generates most of its ward by casting Frost Claw and Elemental Nova. Particularly early on, Invocation and Flame Ward will dump a lot of ward at once, but they have hefty cooldowns. Only stopping for targets of opportunity, like elite enemies and large crowds, allows you to keep your mapping ward up without slowing down too much.
Some Vague Benchmarks:
- 1,000 ward - Level 60
- 4,000 ward - 100 corruption
- 12,000 ward - 300 corruption
A skill has tags; damage has a type.
Skills will typically scale with modifiers that specify one of their tags, like Intelligence, Spell, Cold, etc. Press alt over a skill to bring up a Detailed Information tooltip for the skill's scaling tags.
Spell, Melee, Bow, Throwing, Damage over Time, and Channeling are examples of method tags.
- Spell, Melee, Bow, and Throwing skills have their own types of Cast/Attack Speed
- Damage over Time can not crit
- Channeling skills only benefit from Cast/Attack Speed by letting you begin channeling faster. They do not tick more often.
Cold, Physical, Elemental are examples of resist tags. Elemental means either Fire, Cold, or Lightning. Although these tags hint at what kind of damage a skill does, they may not represent it perfectly. Damage modifiers affect matching damage, regardless of a skill's tags.
A skill will benefit from less specific modifiers, but not more specific ones. Increased Crit Chance and Increased Spell Crit Chance will be added together for a spell. A Poison Damage over Time effect will benefit from Increased Damage over Time, but not Increased Elemental Damage over Time.
Skill tags and damage types overlap, but there is a difference. You can add flat Void Spell Damage to a Cold spell, but that new damage will not benefit from your Increased Cold Damage. It will benefit from any Increased Spell Damage. A skill can have its damage split between different types, and each one will be treated separately. In this example, the Void keyword is not one of the tags used to match the skill; it is the effect. It is the type of damage that gets added.
Damage always has only a single resist type, so if a spell deals multiple damage types, its base damage is split between them. Each portion gets the appropriate multipliers. Increased Elemental Damage will not add 3 times its effect if a spell deals Fire, Cold, and Lightning damage.
Added, Increased, More
These three keywords are used to describe how a modifier to a stat will scale, either it adds a flat value or it multiplies it. Increased and More modifiers are both multipliers, but they stack differently. Effective builds are able to combine multiple modifiers to create better-than-linear scaling for their important stats, like damage and ward.
The calculation for any stat begins with a base value, which gets multiplied by several modifiers. Added stats like +10 Spell Damage (for a skill with the Spell tag) will add directly to the base damage. Damage gets its base values from the skill or effect that caused it. Crit's base chance is 5%. If a modifier begins with a + you are looking at Added scaling. It is very powerful; bases start small so improving them makes all your multipliers hit harder.
All the sources of Increased Damage will be added together before multiplying the base value once. If you get too much Increased Damage, it will start to feel like it has less and less effect. This is sometimes called diminishing returns, but it's really just linear scaling with the flat damage.
Every different source of More damage will multiply the result individually. Adding a new source of More damage is always better than adding the same amount of Increased Damage, and if you can keep finding new sources you get runaway exponential scaling.
- Final = (Base + Added) x (1+Increased + Increased + Increased) x (1+More) x (1+More)
In a sense, all your Increased Damage is just another source of More Damage; it is the standard source.
If you have two multipliers you can stack at the same time, such as Increased Damage and a source of More Damage, that would look like quadratic scaling. Three would be cubic scaling. Cast Speed and Penetration stats behave like More Damage multipliers.
Achieving better-than-linear scaling is how people are able to master high corruption and other late endgame content.
Stat Conversions
There are Unique items that have modifiers that convert a stat into another stat. You keep the original stat, so this doubles its effectiveness! This guide makes use of two stat conversions:
- Freeze Rate Multiplier -> Cold Penetration for Frostbite
- Cold Resistence -> Ward Retention
The build's key item Snowdrift boots enables the first conversion, and later you can obtain Frostbite Shackles to enable the second one.
Freeze Rate Multiplier is this build's primary stat. Frostbite Penetration is More Damage. It allows the build to scale both offensively and defensively, and it takes the place of Intelligence at every opportunity. Your cold spells have a chance to Freeze equal to the Enemy HP / Freeze Rate. FRM improves a spell's base Freeze Rate, allowing you to freeze beefier enemies, even bosses.
It does not do quite as many jobs an INT can, so the build uses Cold Resistence to shore up on Ward Retention. The available itemization makes it easy to stack. It helps that FRM affixes often come with free Cold Resist on them!
Ailments Inherit Scaling
Ailments are not spells, and do not benefit from spell damage. If you look in your C menu and check the damage your ailments deal, it will appear that they do not scale from Intelligence either.
This is deceptive, because the C menu does not show conditional modifiers that are applied during combat. In fact, due to an obscure rule, ailments will inherit the modifiers of the skill that applied them.
If you apply Frostbite with a skill that scales with Intelligence (and your skills do), then the ailment will also scale with Intelligence, 4% Increased Damage per point. Because the modifier isn't applied until you use the skill, you can't see it in the C menu.
Technically, the ailment is also inheriting any Increased Spell Damage you have, but because it is not a spell, the modifier does nothing.
The inheritance rule applies to more than just ailments, and it is transitive. It applies to any ability that is triggered by something else. If you could summon a minion that could summon a minion, the minion's minion would inherit both yours and its parent's sources of Increased Minion Damage.
