Guide to Archmage
By Xallista
The following guide will focus on the aspects of mana stacking, maximizing lightning damage output, and transitioning into Mind Over Matter + Archmage combos for extremely high sustain and dps.
Ascendancies
Stormweaver
Bloodmage
What skills should I focus on?
For leveling, your skills shouldn’t matter that much, focus on what feels good for you and has synergies with the weapons you drop (ie, +2 to fire spell skill gems).
Flame Wall, Sparks and Ember Fusillade are all great choices.
Later into the game, you will want to start specializing in lightning skills and lightning damage. The main combo of the build will revolve around the two following skills:
Ball Lightning
Provides a projectile that will land multiple iterations of archmage procs and will grant us with fast and efficient Shock buildup, in theory should be the highest spammable dps skill we can use since Arc has been nerfed for single target.
Supports
- Spell Echo
- Wildshards
- Overcharge
- Deceleration
- Arcane Tempo.
Lightning Conduit
This skill will consume your shock and provide you with a ridiculous damage multiplier by doing so (extra synergy with Stormweaver), with a Cast on Shock setup it has potential to be fully automatized.
Supports (cast on shock)
- Lightning Conduit
- Concentrated Effect
- Elemental Focus
- Considered Casting
- Energy Retention.
Curse slots like Enfeeble and Temporal Chains are quite useful and are recommended to be used. Originally they were going to be automatized with Blasphemy, but since Blasphemy has received a considerable nerf approach with caution. Conductivity is not required since the skill trees already provide us with considerable Lightning Resistance Penetration.
Utility slots remain open and flexible depending to your needs, this is just the skeleton to make the build functional.
When do I pick MoM?
Whenever your build has enough mana to sustain itself properly despite the 50% less mana regen penalty, so don’t be afraid of experimenting with it.
How do I obtain Archmage?
We don’t know yet for sure, but according to certain whispers it’s possible we only get access to it in the very endgame, the build should still function just fine without Archmage even if it will provide us with a massive damage boost, not running Archmage will also make it easier for you to run MoM, so think of it as a plus.
What stats am I looking for in my gear?
- Armors: Energy shield bases. Mana, Life, Resistances.
- Jewelry: Energy Shield Belt. Mana, Life, Resistances. +Lvl to spell skill gems on Amulet.
- Weapons: +Lvl to lightning spell skill gems, Mana, Spell Damage, Critical Strike modifiers, Cast Speed.
Life and resistances are the strongest generic defensive layers any build can get, even if we’re a Mind Over Matter build, having high enough life can potentially save you from a 1 shot.
Resistances are extremely important to be maxed out before endgame mapping, please beware entering maps without proper resistance values.
Archmage is supposed to start in a4 from what i read on reddit I believe.
Awesome concept anyway, I’ll try my luck with CI but what you theorycrafted there is really cool. Hope it works like you want it (I personnaly am not sure that the additionnal mana cost from archmage is gonna be converted via lifetap, but who knows)
Are the early levels in this build gonna be a slog? It seems like you won’t really access any damage nodes until late 30’s maybe even 40’s. What looks to be the focus early on here?
This looks like great concept but there should be a focus on mana recovery as well right?
To increase survivability