Archmage [Fire] - Shaloren

How to build the best character...

Introduction

Disclaimer:

This guide uses the wildfire skilltree meaning that it has to be unlocked beforehand.



I´m clocking in at nearly 400 hours of ToME now, and while there is something special about every class in the game, the archmage with his fire playstyle resulted to be the best. In this guide i will show you how i build him.


But first off the obvious question: Why fire and no other element?
The answer to this is pretty simple tho for new players very easy to miss:
This little talent is the reason. It grants you a permanent global speed boost of over 40% for absolutely free and combined with Essence of Speed, you transform into an absolute beast that acts 2 times a turn, sometimes even 3 times while Grace of the Eternals is also active. Playing with Ice would be another viable option, tho it can´t clear detrimental effects and the permanent armor bonus from Elemental Harmony is not really needed, as the archmage is so susceptible to physical damage, that you will most likely die even with that armor on harder difficulties. Plus he has a way too hard time against giants and undead (making daikara a chore and Dreadfell nearly completely impossible on insane or madness).

Which mods do you use?

As i´ve been asked this quite often and most of the mods i use are visible in the pictures, i will link them here (and where they are relevant in the guide). If you don´t want to use them, feel free not to. It´s just how i like playing the game.
The last one changes the core game due to "Opt in Adventure Parties". It is the way the game is meant to be played in my opinion, but yeah, some people actually like the constant death and stupid running around the main map, going unnecessary routes, due to the adventure parties.

Not changing the core game:

• Charsheet Talent Improvement - by Sebsebeleb
  
• Somebody Shut That Dog Up! - by kebab kemmander。

Changing the core game:

• ZOmnibus Addon Pack - by ThatWhichIsMe

Changelog:

[29.05.2015] - Added a bit more information
[28.05.2015] - Minor Improvements
[27.05.2015] - Guide goes live

Positive - Negative

Positive:

• Very good sustain
  
• Extreme damage
  
• Very high global-speed in late-game
  
• Awesome control over detrimental and positiv effects on you and your enemies
  
• Good AoE
  
• Many "get-out-of-trouble" skills

Negative:

• May hit allies
  
• Susceptible to physical damage
  
• Dependant on sustained talents

Very good sustain:
This sustain is not perfect, as your health pool is not that large, meaning that if an enemy catches you by surprise, there is a very high chance that you will die (on insane or madness). However, to prevent this you got the universal arcane eye skill with this class.
Once you prepare yourself with magical shields, your sustain is nearly endless (counting 5 shields, 2 with extreme absorption). Like this, you´ll be able to tank more hits than every other class, even the tanks.

Extreme damage:
Starting from the early game with the fire skill, your damage is increadibly high. The only downside is, that you can´t deal with enemies which are resistant to fire (crystals) early on. Later on, pretty much every skill you can use will deal insane amounts of damage, many over time so you can re-position yourself until your cooldowns (which aren´t that high) are gone.

Very high global-speed in late-game:
As you will have a global-speed of over 190% later on, you can nearly act twice each game turn, making you constantly able to reposition (especially as your skills use DoT effects) and/or bump out increadible damage.

Awesome control over detrimental and positiv effects on you and your enemies:
As your a shaloren, you can cleanse yourself of many detrimental effects (and reduce your cooldowns). Furthermore, standing in your own fire (which always happens) also removes detrimental effects.
You can apply many detrimental effects to your enemies, like frozen or stunned, and remove positive effects off them when they stand in your fire (which always happens).

Good AoE:
Nearly every skill is an AoE skill, allowing you to efficiently deal damage to a crowd of enemies. This does not mean however, that you should. A mob of ranged enemies may just as well kill you as you might kill them, so unless there is no other choice or you´re sure that you will survive, you should always take cover first and get out of the vision of some of the enemies before releasing your skills, which will often even hit the unseen targets.

Many "get-out-of-trouble" skills:
As every mage, teleporting away is standart for the archmage. He can also push his enemies away with a rather low cooldown, really assuring space between him and his enemies.

May hit allies:
This gets extremely annoying if you are on an escort quest, as it is very easy to hit and most likely kill your escort. It also includes yourself, meaning that you can´t use that many of your skills early on and have to wait until you reduce the damage taken by your own skills.

Susceptible to physical damage:
As you won´t wear that much heavy armor, physical damage really chunks away at your healthbar. This means that you usually have no change against enemies in close combat and makes archers one of the most dangerous enemies in the game.
If you take just a few arrows you may find yourself rather quick without health, shields or an escape mechanism.

Dependant on sustained talents:
This means a lot of effort to gain the mana needed to sustain all these talents and the more important thing: enemies that strip you off your sustained talents render you utterly useless. Once this happens, make sure you don´t kill yourself with your skills and calculate if you can kill your enemy. If not, you should quickly get out of the situation.

Overall Skilldistribution

This is the overall skill distribution, however, you may want to change some things to your liking or your situation. More on that later.
You can also spend your last stat points as you wish, if you don´t try to achieve a specific goal, just put them into cunning.
Make sure to level constitution at least one point each level and to decline the first quest sending you to the stars (on insane or higher).

General Equip:

Mana should always be a priority, as this build has a lot of expensive sustain skills. Otherwise always make sure to get some additional life and +XX% fire damage.
If you find something that can dispel darkness, it´s best to keep it in your inventory as you may need it in the future.
As always, if you find something that let´s you breathe underwater, keep it.

Infusions:

One skillpoint should be use to get one more infusion slot, which ultimately leads to these infusions being used:

Reflection Rune

It´s the best rune you can take, so if you find it (make sure to check the stores, they sometimes have it for sale) you should always grab it.

Shielding

Shields are your main way of survival so having another is the best tactic, especially in combination with the skill Shielding.

Manasurge

While i would really like to have a healing infusion for another synergy with Arcane Shield, not having mana is far more dangerous than not having health. In the lategame the heal wouldn´t be that effective too, as you won´t get many chances to actually survive a hit to your health bar.

Wild

Frozen? Stunned? Pinned or in any way disabled? While the skill Cleansing Flames can take care of most of your detrimental effects, if you get frozen without standing on your fire or just can´t wait a turn to get out of the situation (which will happen more often than wished for) this infusion will save your live.

Additional Skill Options:

Armour Training

This may seem a bit strange for a mage, but there is some equip in the game where it makes sense to skill some points into strength (referring to the unspent points in the skill graphic above) and putting one point into this skill just to equip that equip.
If you do so, you can take the skillpoint from Displacement Shield and put it into Armour Training.
For additional information, look up the skill on the more detailed information below.

Shivgoroth Form

I know that this is a fire build, but this skill should still be considered. It gives you another heal with Freeze and protects you well against foes with a lot of ice damage, like necromancers for example. I can say from experience that it´s worth it tho the cost to take it is pretty high. You can leave Freeze on level 1 and then take this skill onto level 4 if you want to grab it. This gets way more effective with the Elixier of Focus, as each point in Freeze will make this combo way better.

Escort Rewards:

Vision

If you get the chance to pick this skill, do it. It is incredibly useful to see a map of your surroundings, for a better use of the Arcane Eye.

Chant of Fortress

As you are a high range character, with the ability to push unwanted enemies away, this talent is really useful. Combined with Thick Skin, it significantly reduces the amount of burst you receive thus extremely increasing your surviveability.

Spell / Fire

This will be your main skilltree in the early game. It let´s you dish out consistent damage even that early on and, other than Fireflash, isn´t that mana consuming.

Flame

This is a great early talent! It has a medium amount of burst damage and then deals additional damage over 2 turns, which just so happens to be the cooldown of it. Your enemies just won´t stop burning!

Flameshock

I can´t stress the usefulness of this skill enough. It deals nice damage, the burning effect differs from the one seen in Flame, thus you can apply both of them to the same target at the same time and it acts as a defense mechanism against everything, that tries to use skills.
A 7 turn stun usually means utter despair for your enemies and gives you enough time to either burst them down, or apply enough Dots and then get out.

Fireflash

Here comes the mana burn! Due to that, and the fact that you basically always hit yourself with it, makes this skill rather unusable in the early game. Make sure to grab one point in it for some extra burst in bad times, but wait on leveling it, until you have the synergy with Wildfire,

Inferno

While changing the whole ground into a burning nightmare for your foes (and without the synergy with Wildfire also for you!) may seem viable, this skill is by far none of your best
ones. In the early game, the area usually hits yourself too, so make sure to not level it too high (or at all) until you unlocked the Wildfire tree.
Even then, the skill doesn´t do a lot, as Burning Wake will usually cover the whole "turning the battlefield into a burning hell" part. However, if you find your spells on cooldown or just want to cover more ground, this skill in combination with Cleansing Flames really shines!

Spell / Wildfire

Also one of your main skilltrees although it rather acts as a support for Spell / Fire. It basically enables you to use Fireflash and Inferno efficiently and get´s rid of many unwanted effects (be it positive or negative) on you or your enemies.
At the end it will also get you off the obligation to use Manathrust and Arcane Vortex to deal with fire resistent enemies.

Blastwave

Once again another stack of burning that can be applied simultaneously making your Dots even more effective. This way you keep chugging your foes even if you have to run away.
It´s basically used defensively if a dangerous foe comes within melee range, tho it is not consistent on pushing them away.
With a range of 7 it can be used preemptively tho, meaning that if an enemy tries to reach you and you can´t burst him down, you can try to push him away, even if he is still rather far away. This way, you can try again in 5 turns if you failed to push him away (or if you didn´t).

Burning Wake

This has a perfect synergy with Cleansing Flames, basically always clearing positive effects off your foes and negative ones off you. It doesn´t deal a notable amount of damage tho in a longer fight you will apply it consistently and as it´s no real burning effect, it also applies simultaneously make your Dots once more just a tad bit more powerful.

Cleansing Flames

This is one of your best skills. It will regularly take care of unwanted effects which usually gives you a huge advantage in any fight. Take care of mental foes tho, these effects can not be cleansed and can easily disable you completely rendering you utterly defenseless if you didn´t activate your shields beforehand.

Wildfire

And finally you get rid of annoying fire resistant enemies in no time while making your other skills a huge step more viable. The sustain cost isn´t that high tho you should always pay attention if you got stripped off the effect by an enemy if you don´t want to end up like a burned coal from your own spells.

Spell / Arcane

As you may already tell, we are mainly grabbing this skilltree for the Disruption Shild. That doesn´t mean however that the other skills are completely useless. On the contrary:

Arcane Power

While this skill may seem good, as more spellpower means more damage which means better burst which would ultimately result in a better character, it is not worth investing points into it. Later on your main damage will come from % of fire damage and these meger points of spellpower won´t make a difference.
You may even consider not sustaining it in the late game if your missing some mana due to the high sustain cost of Essence of Speed.

Manathrust

Make sure to grab this very early on, directly after maximizing Flame as you won´t be able to deal with enemies resistant to fire damage otherwise. Due to that, this is one of your most important skills in the early game.

Arcane Vortex

This skill will help you with those annoying fire resistant enemies, tho not really much. Same as Manathrust, you won´t need it in the late game and it´s damage even early on is by no means impressive. If your having trouble with Manathrust and Freeze only, take it early, otherwise just wait until you can grab Disruption Shield.

Disruption Shield

As already mentioned in the introduction section, the archmage has insane shields, this being one of them. It let´s you spam your most mana consuming skills while assuring you can´t die. Once the shield procs it is no longer useful and if it didn´t get proced in a fight, make sure to turn it off before entering the next, as it will otherwise proc immediately and go on cooldown.
Also pay attention once your above 70%-80% mana while this skill is active. From that point on you should use one of your infusion shields as you may otherwise die from one hit.
Also take note that this can be improved by the Aegis skill, meaning using this with another infusion shield and then casting Aegis gives you an insane healthpool.

Spell / Water

Also a very useful skilltree fr the early game. It fills the gab between maximizing Flameshock and finally getting the Wildfire tree to an acceptable level.

Glacial Vapour

This skill is basically useless. While you may try to hit some enemies with it, it is rather extremely useless.

Freeze

Also a very good skill for fire resistant enemies early on. It assures a one hit on some of those enemies and grants an early utility by freezing an enemy that you can´t burst down. If it is successful, 8 turns are enough to regain your health or mana, reset your cooldowns, wait until negative effects wear off and/or get some space between you and your enemy. Overall really useful.

Spell / Temporal

The second skilltree to be unlocked, it has no use until quite late into the game. Tho the effects it gives then are absolutely insane and really give you the edge in any fight and shoves this class onto the peak of all classes of ToME.

Congeal Time

This skill is very nice, tho its utility in comparison to Freeze are just not enough to justify more than one points in it. You can only grab it quite late (level 20+) while its use greatly decayed until then. Its high cooldown with the slow travel speed are also a big negative. While 52% slow is very nice, missing the spell is absolutely devastating plus you don´t really need to slow your enemies, as you yourself will have extreme speed.
Its range is pretty low too, getting that close should never be your goal.

Time Shield

Here we go again, another extremely good shield. It sucks in a reasonable amount until it gives you a nice regeneration effect which won´t really take effect, as you are usually dead if the enemies manage to penetrate your shields and hit your health bar this late in the game.
Either way, as with Disruption Shield too, using this in combination with one of your infusion shields and then using Aegis gives you an insane healthpool.

Time Prison

Extremely useful. You either want to wait for some of your cooldowns to come off or you need to take care of mobs before handeling the boss or you face more than one dangerous enemy (like the last boss for example) meaning this skill saves you your life, at least for the first 10 turns.
Don´t use this skill preemptively tho, it´s high mana cost should always be considered.
Increasing this skill any higher has limited use, as it only grants 2 more turns. These 2 skill points are better spent elsewhere.

Essence of Speed

Acting nearly twice each turn is extremely effective and this skill, in combination with Elemental Harmony grants you more than 190% global speed. The downside of it however, is it´s insane sustain cost. You really should be looking for items that grant mana for the later game, tho finding those is usually no problem.

Race / Shalore

While the shaloren already give the best stats for mages, they also have the best racial skills in the entire game assure an instant pick of the shaloren race for every mage.

Grace of the Eternals

This gives you a nice speed boost in the early game and should be used at the start of a combat against dangerous foes, as the 8 turns are usually enough to annihilate your enemies. Later on it will push your global speed above 220% assure 2 moves before your enemies can act.

Magic of the Eternals

Higher critical chance and more damage with crits, what else is there to ask for burst champs. There is no need to maximize this skill early on, so take your time and grab more useful skills first.

Secrets of the Eternals

This skill is rather useless, tho it doesn´t cost anything to sustain and with a bit of luck it may actually have a slight positive impact.
The invisible power is usually never enough to not be detected. You may want to put this on auto use once available, as it deactivates quite frequently.

Timeless

This skill is absolutely insane. It effects ALL detrimental effects on you and thus will save your life more than once. It also assures that your shield combos last longer, as enemies are usually not able to penetrate your shields in time. Oh yeah, and it reduces most of your cooldowns, not that it wasn´t already too good to be true...

Technique / Combat Training

You will have to buy this skilltree, tho the price is very low. The x1.00 multiplier really doesn´t matter, as both skills that are interesting here are not effected by an effective talent level higher than 5.

Thick Skin

An essential talent as the enemies, especially on higher difficulties, have an insane amount of burst. It won´t really make you survive on madness, but on insane it at least lowers the sometimes ridiculous incoming damage by a noticeable amount. An absolutely must have skill.

Armour Training

As already mentioned in the overview, you may want to consider taking a point in this skill (thus leveling your strength stat) if you find a super awesome armor. Your armor is there to give you protection and damage meaning that heavy armor has a higher potential of doing that, as stats like +XX% fire damage are completely random and thus can occur on heavy armor as well, which grants better protection against one of your weaknesses: physical damage.
The additional fatigue doens´t really impact your gameplay. An exception being chest armor, so make sure it is really worth the trouble.

Spell / Conveyance

Here you will find most of your "get out of trouble" cards. You can grab them very early on so the utility of this skilltree is indespensable.

Phase Door

Until level 4, this skill is not very usefull, as it will end up killing you more often than save you. On level 4 however, it can be used to get some space between you and your enemies or get out of dangerous situations.

Teleport

If everything breaks and there is no way you will ever kill your enemy before he kills you, this skill will come in handy. However, it´s use is very situational and needs a bit of training to get used to.
If you did not clear the stage before teleporting, it will most likely kill you, by spawning you right next to an enemy.
Either way, you should nearly never use it with low health. It needs a bit of preemptive predictions to know if you need to teleport or not. If you can´t kill an enemy, it is often the case because you can´t use your skills due to being silenced, dazed, stunned, etc. In that sate you can´t (for the most part) teleport either meaning that it is already too late.
Look for enemy skills that can disable you and either preemtively counter them by using your shields early or by teleporting away.
Look at your detrimental effects, if you have too many Dots on you, teleporting might not be the right choice. Rather heal or shield yourself and take another hit by your enemy if the Dots would kill you by teleporting.
If you absolutely know that you won´t kill your enemy, you don´t die from Dots, you are not disabled and you cleared most of the stage, teleport may be your only option.

Displacement Shield

One skill point in here rather does nothing. The shield is too inconsistent to be useful thus it´s only used if everything else, even teleport, was not able to safe your life.
It comes down to a coinflip, while the chances are heavily against you. Either way, you may consider spending some more points into this skill, as it becomes way more consistent that way and combined with Aegis, it gives you yet another nice shield to protect you.
However, this means that you won´t be able to take Armour Training and you usually already have enough shields to protect you plus the damage of this shield is not needed.

Spell / Divination

The only skill viable in this tree is the arcane eye. Keen senses may help you deal with invisible foes, tho its detection power usually doesn´t suffice and the sustained mana is best saved for Essence of Speed meaning that if you are really having trouble with stealthed or invisible enemies, the points are better spent to bring arcane eye to level 5.

Arcane Eye

Looking around, into a vault or simply seeing an enemy that outside of your vision range. There are many magnificent ways to use this skill.
Beginning from the difficulty insane, it should be used every time before moving to ensure not ending up as a oneshot kill to some random enemy. If you spot something in the distance or around a corner, use a shield then step into it´s vision range to attack it.
This is a must have skill for every squishy character on higher difficulties.

Spell / Aegis

This skilltree is what makes your shields (and heals) so powerful and basically ensures single handedly your survival.

Arcane Reconstruction

While the amount of healing isn´t the best, it comes in very handy in the early game as you don´t have that many survival tools then and are more likely to actually survive some hits to your health bar.
Later, combined with Arcane Shield, the heal gets quite decent and you may consider using it at full health just for the shield.

Shielding

45% better shields which last 1 turn longer, and amazing tool to stay alive. As you have 4 direct shields, this skill turns you into a tanky monster.

Arcane Shield

And yet another awesome survival tool. This in combination with Arcane Reconstruction and the direct heal of your infusion gives you a nice buffer in one turn if you ever get badly wounded.

Aegis

After already increasing your shields with Shielding, Aegis really shines by giving it yet another huge percentage boost. This combined with one of your infusion shields and Disruption Shield or Time Shield will give you a larger health pool than any tank in the game WITHOUT using a turn.

Wild-gift / Harmony

This talent, received from the Sandworm Queen, really shines as an archmage. It grants you incredible utility and pushes you once more over the edge of being just awesome.

Waters of Life

It actually just serves as a bridge to the next talent, tho sometimes it really comes in handy, as poisons and diseases (if not cleansed by your flames) can´t harm you anymore.

Elemenal Harmony

This skill is increadible. As you will always stand in your own fire due to the Wildfire skilltree, which won´t harm you in any way, you will always receive the +41% global speed for free! It might also give you some bonuses fighting against elemental attacks, tho the fire bonus is what makes the skill a must have.

General Tips

I noticed that quite a few new people are interested in this too which may not be too familiar to squishy characters yet. So i thought i´d share some general tips which come with experience playing the game and most of which can be found in the forums.
Most of these tips are specifically suited for the archmage, so take that in mind before applying them to other clases.
These tips are suited for the insane or madness difficulty. They obviously can be applied to lower difficulties as well, tho you might not want to exactly follow each and every one of them if you´re just playing on nightmare or lower.
As mentioned, these tips are directed towards newer players and might seem boring to experienced people.
One thing beforehand: forget the auto-explore button exists. You won´t want to ever use it.

Decline the first Quest

While having an additional area to level in is always nice (that´s why dwarven doombringer is extremely good, as he gets 4 additional dungeons), you will probably not survive this one. I played it countless times and made it once. This frustration on repeatedly loosing a new character is just not worth trying the dungeon. I´d always recommend skipping it. You don´t need the lantern you get from the boss as you will switch it out as soon as you find one with additional health.

Use Command Staff

This may be obvious, but before starting, always use your command staff skill and change the damage type to fire. Make sure to also always sustain all talents you want to sustain, which may not be every sustained skill you have. Early on, you should never go below 120 mana.
And even if you have let´s say 220 mana you should always see if it´s worth sustaining a talent for 40 mana that grants your heals more power while you only have one heal and Disruption Shield would actually use that mana to shield you. See for yourself, tho it´s usually better to wait until you have more than sufficient mana and leveled the talent a bit.

Getting Disabled

Look at this situation. You are left with nearly no health, are slowed and stunned so the enemy will most likely kill you within the next turn or two. Either way, don´t panic. Look at the skills you have available and make the best decision. Flame is nearly off cooldown and you can still use Glacial Vapour. You can´t run away as the enemy will easily catch up to you and kill you.
So you could try to go all in tho through the stun, your enemy will most likely kill you beforehand. Meaning the only choice you have is a phase door. It´s basically a coinflip as you can´t choose where to go this early in the game, but at least you are better off that way than trying to kill your enemy. Still you should always anticipate situations like these and try to prevent them, which brings us to the next point.
For additional information: As described in the Teleport skill, this would have been a horrible time to teleport (if you had the skill). You don´t have much of the level explored and no talents to safe you meaning that teleporting will most likely result in certain death. If it gets to this, Phase Door is definitely the better choice here, especially if you could choose the direction.

Inspect Enemies

Especially in the early game you should always inspect special enemies to see if they are archers, mages or have a gap close. After that, look for stuns, sleeps, dazes, freezes, etc. It´s not cheating having this information, it just makes the game way more in depth. If the target is ranged, make sure to use a shield before stepping into their vision range if you don´t want to end up an instant kill.
I strongly recommend this mod for this, as it makes looking at the talents so much more comfortable.

Frozen Enemies

While it is always good to freeze enemies as it gives you more time to prepare and cool down your talents, you should keep in mind that enemies get significantly less damage while frozen and no status effect can be applied. That means that you usually want to apply your burns before try freezing the enemy and then look at the number of turns it is frozen. If it´s only frozen one more turn, it´s probably best to wait until then with your Flame skill, to get the maximum damage out of it.

Calculating the Risk

While i usually go through all the dungeons before tackling their bosses themselfs, it´s always better to evaluate if it´s worth trying to push further into the dungeon. The situation in the example here is definitely NOT worth trying, even if it means loosing the escort without even trying. In any case it´s never worth dying for an escort. If a close combat enemy stands right next to you and the only way out is through your escort behind you, just trough him to be ripped apart.
Also never forget that you can ask the escort where it´s portal is and that you can block it´s path to rest until all your resources are restored as seen in the pictures below (in the right picture the portal is north while the escort definitely wanted to go north, meaning i was able to fully rest before going on).

Using Arcane Eye

NEVER go ANYWHERE without knowing what´s up ahead. It means spamming your Arcane Eye until your fingers are tired but never go into an open area or around a corner without using this skill.

The correct Approach

Knowing from where to come from is essential. In this example it would probably be a complete suicide to come in from the north, so i went back and looked for a way into the monster horde from the south.
Generally, the approach on which you have more distance to your enemy is always the better one.

The End

That was it from my side, i hope you liked this guide. If you have a good idea or see something that i forgot, i can always be found in the comment section!

I´d appreciate it if you´d rate this guide. If you rate it down, please tell me how i can improve this guide!

Thanks for reading:
Yiasmat

[hardluck57]

Any chance of updating this to include the skills trees from newest version?

Otherwise fantastic, even if it is outdated.

[H-K 47]

the only thing i think you missed is what to spend prodigys on

[777]

Also, items that cause your damage to pierce shields are not that uncommon. A small amount of pierce will let you take a negligible amount of your own fire dmg, and trigger the boost. I always try to incorporate that into my gear when playing this build.

[Yiasmat]

You can look at it as some kind of leeway if something is about to kill you. I always have a shield up but if a fight lasts very long i might not always be able to pump my shields to the maximum, meaning that if only one is active, it can easily be broken and hit my healthbar.
Thats why i focus on getting a lot of health to have at least 1k+ in the lategame.
Once my enemy hits my shield down, the harmony will kick in to give me more chances to either restore my shields or get away.

[Daniel]

Very well written guide and helpful. However when i tried your build out I found that the elemental harmony bonus only applies when you actually take fire damage. That wouldn't be a problem because you're always standing in your own burning wake and the damage taken is negligible, but... I always had shields on. Disruption shield, especially, I only took it down rarely, when i had too much damage accumulated on it and was afraid of the severity of the manastorm if it broke. It's a big hassle to take down disruption shield and put it up again because of the empty mana bar requirements and way too risky near enemies, so I just never enjoyed the speed boost. How do you deal with it?

[peter.huebner]

I haven't unlocked wildfire yet. So currently I'm making characters who can increase the fire damage total on my account fast ... my Cornac archmage had an infusion for the first cat point, and spell/temporal by level 10. That extra shield really makes a difference when tackling the higher level starter dungeons. By level 14 he has Aegis and Disruption Shield as well. Should be all set up for playing on through Old Forest, Maze etc ... and may have made the million fire damage by the time he gets to Dreadfell. I am not really expecting to take this character much past there, if I want to get to endgame I'll probably roll a Shalore Elf, but in the meantime, getting temporal at level 10 has worked a treat for me (and less xp penalty does speed things along nicely too, of course).

[777]

Cool, makes sense. And yeah, dancing around your burning wake without the last wildfire skill has been... fun :)
Was forgetting the second temporal skill is another shield. Could def use that!
Anyway, thanks for the guide, and the reply!

[Yiasmat]

I actually take Temporal first to get the second skill of it as soon as possible. The reason for that is, that i simply don´t use ANY Wildfire skills until i have the last one which means i can safely grab Temporal, get the second skill, save up skillpoints and get Wildfire with all skills immediatly.

It´s just a preference tho, Wildfire first is very good too but on my latest Madness/Insane runs i really preferred the extra shield (and the saving grace, the third skill of Temporal, which let´s you basically reset your cooldowns).

Then i take Inscriptions and finally Harmony.

[777]

Nice guide! What order do you spend your 4 category points? I assume Wildfire first, of course, then what do you prefer?
I imagine the 4th inscription slot if you've found reflection, but if not do you take Harmony or Temporal next?

[DigitalToastGaming]

I'm gonna try this one out tonight!