How to Umbramancer?

[Spiritclaw]

Hay guys,

i have a few Hours in the Game, found my personal Favorits and are about to hit the completion of all Challenges.... BUT.... there are quite a few Challenges, with the Umbramancer... i tried avoiding playing this class, because i dont understand how he works....
But now... it seems i have to play with him.... so.... how does he work? xD

best regards.

[MrBall]

So the biggest tricks of umbramancer you might not "understand" cause its easy to miss.

Offline bonus gets apply'd in "active mode" so you want to keep clicking periodically to not be in Idle mode.

Other than that i'm not great at umbramancer but with your attributes you should be able to just kinda force through them

[pac230]

Lots of other classes (all of them, eventually) benefit from having distinct build-up and production phases. Umbramancer is one for which distinguishing these phases is absolutely essential. As long as you understand that, however, it's not that complex a class.

First, Attributes. This is quite straight-forward for Umbramancer, as quite a few stats do nothing for you:

Intelligence: Need at least 50 for Ebonsand Behemoth. Important for items. High priority.
Insight: Terrible for Umbramancer. It has some small impact on one of its spells, but it's still very weak. Never take any.
Spellcraft: Need at least 50 for Arcanaworg. Excellent all-round. Max it out.
Wisdom: Not required, because you'll be using a shard pet during build-up.
Dominance: Your preferred 'dump stat'. Because Seethe in Shadows (your productive Evocation) is based on Autoclick profit, the main effect of this stat works fine. However, none of the milestone bonuses will do anything until 150/200/250. So, throw points in once Int, Spe, Mas and Emp are maxed.
Patience: Useless, because you don't use Idle bonus. Don't take any to unlock pet XP items either. Just use the pet XP items that require only Empathy.
Mastery: Need at least 50 for Ebonsand. Good stat for you. High priority.
Empathy: Ebonsand Behemoth thrives on pet ability power. High priority.

To sum up, your main stats are Spellcraft, Intelligence, Mastery and Empathy. All other stats should be avoided, except Dominance, which only gets point when the first 4 are maxed out.

These are the basics of the two phases:

1. Build-up. Your aim in this phase is to accrue as much Liquid Shadow as possible. Remember that Liquid Shadow (LS) does not decay the way Void Mana does. You will get bonuses from various sources both for your current LS total, and the total amount of LS you have spent. A secondary goal is here is to build up your click total, to unlock all the auto-click profit bonuses you can reach.

NB: You spend your build-up in Idle mode. There is no advantage to keeping Idle mode off in this phase. In fact, doing so would be very bad, because of Ebonsand Behemoth's secondary ability later.

Pet: Arcanaworg or Spellhound (don't consider Spellhound unless your can get its charge time under 1s)

Spells: Dancing Flame, Day Into Night, Onyx Hound, Condensing Shadows
You can use the other two slots for Eclipse (to stack its Accumulation, if you can afford its running LS cost), Conjure Manabeast (you want to get to at least about 30K clicks to unlock the Autoclick bonus upgrades), Umbral Rage (see below), and Dancing Flame or Seethe in Shadows if you want to burn extra Liquid Shadow.

Let's talk about the different sources of Liquid Shadows.

A. Passive generation. Very small. Forget about it.
B. Dancing Flame. Generates a minor amount of LS at almost no cost. This, together with passive generation, forms the base-line of your LS production which you build on when first using Umbramancer to get to the rest.
C. Day Into Night. This is a shard-based Evocation which generates LS. This is why you're using Worg/Hound. For Umbramancer, this is probably always going to be your strongest and most reliable source of LS.
D. Shadow Entities/Condensing Shadows. Eventually, with Desolator, this can overtake Day Into Night as an LS source. That's not likely to happen with Umbramancer, because it is far far more difficult to start getting 4 Shadow Entities per second than it is with Void Entities. Still a significant source of LS though, so you should keep Condensing Shadows running (and Onyx Hound to collect them).
E. Onyx Hound. Onyx Hound isn't a source of LS by itself (in fact it consumes them). When you first unlock Umbramancer, running Onyx Hound at a profit may be difficult. In the long term, however, its boost to *all sources* of LS (and the convenience of its entity collection) will far outstrip its running cost.

Items: Specialist Umbramancer items are good here, but note that all of Evocation, Incantation and Summoning Efficiency are useful here: Evo boosts Day Into Night; Inc boosts Condensing Shadows; and Sum boosts Onyx Hound. These boosts are all at below linear (logarithmic) rates, but they are still significant and make Umbramancer quite omnivorous in its item choices.

2. Production. You can do preliminary production phases without switching to Shadowstalker/Ebonsand Behemoth. Watch out for how much LS you burn in this phase, as if you've switched to production too early, it may take a long time to build it up again. Before you do switch pet, make sure you've filled up all the spells you're going to use in your burst.

NB. Make sure you are keeping Idle mode off by clicking during this stage!

Umbramancer has quite a busy production phase. First of all, you may want to have Flash Fire (your cheaper LS-based Evocation) on the panel. Cast Umbral Rage, and then cast Flash Fire to stop Umbral Rage from expiring, while also clicking to keep LS costs down. Once you are happy with Umbral Rage's bonus, quickly activate your other spells, and swap Flash Fire for the more powerful Seethe in Shadows. Keep clicking during the burst, until you run out of spell charges or LS.

Don't stop at one burst. Recharge your spells (and LS, but this will be much slower if you've switched pet) and go again.

Pet: Ebonsand Behemoth (or Shadowstalker, but you should unlock EB very soon after unlocking Umbramancer). Preliminary production phases can be done without switching pet. When you do switch pet, also switch to a pet-levelling item set for a while before starting production.

Spells: Eclipse, Umbral Rage, Seethe in Shadows, Empower, Magical Weapon (this works because Seethe in Shadows is affected by autoclick bonuses)
The last spot is a play-off between Critical Mass and Shadows of the Void. Shadows of the Void is a very strange spell in that, despite being Umbramancer's highest level spell, its use is of marginal value at best. It's also a red herring, because while it is boosted by Insight and Void Mana-related items, the bonuses are sub-linear, and not enough to make the stat, those items, or this spell, of any consequence. If you went high enough with Umbramancer, it might become relevant, but in practice you switch to Desolator, and it eventually gets replaced completely by a far stronger spell.

Items: Again, specialist Umbramancer items are good here, as their off-line bonuses are quite strong. However, any boosts to Incantation or Evocation efficiency, or auto-click profits (though not crit profits) can also work. Very item-flexible class.

--

Advanced techniques:

i. With enough LS, you can keep Umbral Rage running continually during your build-up. Allow Idle mode to happen. Umbral Rage's increase to spell costs effect caps out at about x10, which is a positive, as long as you have enough LS, because you get bonuses from Liquid Shadows spent.

It can be tricky to keep Umbral Rage from expiring even when you are switching modes, pets and item sets, but it can be done!

ii. Once you get Empathy 200 (pet ability power increases with pet time) you may want to run Ebonsand Behemoth as your pet for a while (say, 1 hour+) to increase this bonus. For this, you'll want a hybrid build-up mode set up, to run in conjunction with pet-levelling gear. You won't have the spell shards to run Day Into Night though.

With (i) above in mind, you'll also want to keep Umbral Rage running! To do this, cast Flash Fire on blue: it uses LS and is cheaper than Seethe in Shadows.

iii. As with any other class, after some preliminary production, you can switch to Homunculus/Simulacrum to build up your sources.

You may also consider building up just one source, Shadow Coals (Mana Gem replacement). These boost the effect of Onyx Hound (and also Critical Mass).

[pac230]

With everything from my previous post in mind, if you have already progressed well beyond the point where you unlocked Umbramancer, you may follow all this advice perfectly and still not find it to be very productive, because (for example) you've developed items that don't suit it so that your favoured other classes have outrun it.