Help with Embermage

[Knightmage Bael]

I'm getting owned on Casual with my embermage. She's too squishy. If I put any more into vitality it'll take away from my damage, but I get swarmed by mobs and it eats away at my health. At the same time I cant find a -single- item or gem which will help to steal or regenerate health.

I put 4 point into focus and 1 into vitality (I have no idea if thats good or not). I'm currently lvl 21 with
4 points into lightning and fire brand,
5 points into ice brand,
5 points into prismatic bolt
2 points into prismatic rift
1 point charge mastery
2 points into hailstorm
1 point into frozen fate
1 point into magma spear, because it was the one I started with, and its too late to take it back now. (It also does a lot of damage, and very spammy, with long range. seems to scale with my build which is nice.)

Still I cant regenerate health at all. I swear healing is easier on every build BUT the mage, which is sooooo counter intuitive :/ why aren't there any healing spells?

[Tiomasta]

First, Vitality is crap anyway, don't worry about not putting points there. It gives way too little. Items are what actually make you take more hits. You want armor that gives you +HP, or "-X% Damage Taken". Only these matter, extra armor/resistance and the other stuff is illogically weak and useless by comparison. Stacking +HP easily gets you over double of your natural HP, much better than just getting some armor that only slightly boosts your damage, too.
Then you put a couple of HP regeneration gems. That is regeneration gems you want, regeneration armor is much weaker.
This goes for every class btw. This is what's recommended, regardless of your class or wanted tankiness, this is just what you do in this game.

Haven't found a single regeneration gem yet? Well that's bull. Keep crafting 3 gems together so it gives a random one, hopefully this one. Keep checking the shops for regeneration armor meanwhile, having no regeneration at all is so annoying.

Don't forget to always have some health potions, they aren't too expensive to buy from the town shops.

Are you using a shield? You seem to be doing a Prismatic Bolt mage. It doesn't scale by your weapons so it doesn't give a crap about the stats of what weapon you hold, so the best is to use an one-handed weapon with +CastSpeed to boost the consecutive firing rate of that skill (wands can have this attribute) along with a shield in the other hand.

At level 28 I think, you'll be unlocking Death's Bounty. That's probably exactly what you want, it's a debuff that makes enemies leak out HP and mana for you as you kill them.

And if you wanted a respec in skills or stats, you could just download that Rapid Respec save file editor.

[MTB-Fritz]

I'm getting owned on Casua

......I dont know what to say.......


Casual is auto-attack pwnage basically, you dont really need to do anything besides using your wand / staff / whatever. Keep your finger on a potion (if you even need that) and you ll be good.

Are you spending stat and skill points? Are you placing your skills on hotbuttons to use? The embermage has TONS of AoE abilities which dont even need perfect aiming (blazing pillars for example are fire and forget)

Regarding healing you have 3 options

1. use health potions
2. collect +health regen gear or use +health regen gems
3. there is a geneal spell called "heal self" with various tiers

You could always use another class you are more comfortable with to collect some items / gems you need on your embermage and send it to him/her via shared stash.

[Knightmage Bael]

Well, I dunno why I keep loosing so much health. As I said though, I have zero health regeneration. My mana regen though is pretty nice. I can constantly fire and rarely run into dangerously low zones.

Yeah, I've been trying to get some health regen gems, but no luck, even from the transmuter. I did find some clothes that give health regen, but only 1.5 per second LOL. Still better than nothing I suppose.

Also wands with cast speed? I should look for that. I really just expected to go into casual to learn how to build this well, then go into a higher difficulty. I have a lvl 10 engineer on Elite atm (not really using that character much lol). So the fact my health is always running close to zero is baffling.

[Tiomasta]

Wait, are you still trying to use Magma Spear, instead of spamming Prismatic Bolt all day? If you are, that would explain why you have trouble. Magma Spear deals bogus damage per hit but has a chance to apply an unstackable DoT, that increases power and chance with rank. If you're trying to kill things with the hits of it, at rank 1 damage where it hasn't even got high DoT chance or DoT damage, then no wonder...

[Knightmage Bael]

No I'm usually spamming hailstorm and prism bolt.

I only sometimes use magma spear.

[Tiomasta]

Hailstorm...? But is Prismatic Bolt your main one? As in, 90% of the time you're using only Prism? For everything? Single-target AND AoE? Because that's what you're supposed to be doing with a Prismatic Bolt build, you shouldn't be spamming Hailstorm. The point of it is to initiate a fight by marking the group with Hailstorm, to give its 40%/60% weakness debuff to power up Prism along with Hailstorm's free high freeze&stun chance after enough ranks, but at low ranks it doesn't have any high numbers of those, and raw damage is Prism's deal for both single-target and AoE. At that low of a rank Hailstorm even has a 2-second cooldown which I'm hoping you fill with casts of Prism, and it always eats your mana without filling charge unlike Prism.

Prismatic Bolt even has more range than either Hailstorm or Magma Spear, too '>_>

[Knightmage Bael]

Of course. Time in between hailstorms is always spent using prism. I find it doesn't have longer range though. I can cast hailstorm down wherever my mouse is on the map, really. Its especially useful for sniping people on top of hills, where prism will seem to run into stairs and walls and stuff. Hailstorm doesn't have that problem.

[236800954213315784]

You either have downs or trolling.

[MTB-Fritz]

Originally posted by Tiomasta:

Wait, are you still trying to use Magma Spear, instead of spamming Prismatic Bolt all day? If you are, that would explain why you have trouble. Magma Spear deals bogus damage per hit but has a chance to apply an unstackable DoT, that increases power and chance with rank. If you're trying to kill things with the hits of it, at rank 1 damage where it hasn't even got high DoT chance or DoT damage, then no wonder...

I regularily use Magma Spear on higher difficulties to kill stuff. Even tho its only 33% of weapon damage its enough (ESPECIALLY on casual) to one-hit everything but bosses and champions. The DoT mechanic is great even at level 1 so theres nothing wrong. In addition it pierces targets and hits EVERYTHING in its path to full range....simply awesome for a lv 1 skill.

Hailstorm on the other hand does crap damage and its biggest advantage lies in its slow down / crowd controlling mechanic. Well and you can project it indirectly which helps.

Prismatic bolts I dont like simply because its mostly useless in close quarters but costs a lot of mana.

Lower level gear will not have much more +health regen then what you describe Archmage_Bael but it stacks so if you have several pieces you ll end up with +10 or more per second which is nice (but actually worthless if you throw yourself into crowds of course).

There are of course "tanky" Embermage builds but I doubt you ll stumble across one accidentally. Instead of trying to play your embermage like your engineer (it sounds like you do) move and evade enemies (called "kiting"). That alone will ensure you ll get almost no damage at all (paired with even small amounts of +health regen this will get you through casual)

[Knightmage Bael]

Yeah I've managed to get some blood embers, and applied them. So now I dont feel completely helpless. I usually look for health regen first in any character I make.

Of course, kiting is hard when they charge you. Been using that frost-teleport ability to help, then hailstorm, and prism bolt. Though, the mobs still die a lot, there's just a lot of them, and everywhere, haha.

I try not to be up front with my mage like my engineer, who gets in people's faces a lot :p.

[Lantadyme]

Honestly when i was playing my embermage, i was getting dominated pretty hard in the beginning ( on normal/veteran difficulty) but then all of a sudden things jsut got. easier. its more of a matter or time with some classes where ur dps out weighs the time it takes for them to kill you. Ive experienced this with both my embermage and my zerker.

Specifically in terms of build goes, id focus on one of the 3 possible trees, I personally did the lce tree so if you want my build spec'c i can post them.

in terms of Stat point allocation each stat ( vit, dex,str,foc) have a soft cap which putting anymore points into it would be useless. what i did to help out my embermage was put 4 in focus and 1 in vit until my Base vitality was 100 then dumped the rest of it into focus. dont worry about not having enough focus/vit late game because most of your stats late game are gonig to be padded with end game gear/stones/enchantments.

P.S. when you hit level 28 invest in frost wave, such a good skill and amazing for clearing. once u see how far it reaches it will become your main skill(and i believe it out reaches/dmg magma spear) can nuke anything in seconds with Hailstorm+frostwave combo.

add me if ya want love to help ya out more ^^