Thoughts on mages

I play for the earth mage and after disabling the Root spell the investment in all mage skills seem useless. With the amount of current interruptions the spell earthquake lvl 70+ just does not worth of being included in a deck. The obsidian arrow does not seem to deal any damage and "armor penetration" looks like a joke. The only spell that can deal damage in PvE is stone first because it does not have a cast time. All defense spells and skills look like a joke. Wearing clothes armor, wand and shield with Defence Stance, light armor avoidance glyph and sheilds deflect allows you to run away sometimes but the damage coming from archers makes fighting against 2+ impossible.

 

That is NOT all mages that is the Earth tree and all because Root got shut off? it because was way WAY overpowered?

And all the spells you say are not worth anything seem to be working just fine for me. My Dexer uses Earth for it str boost, and EQ is AWSOME for crowd control. Obs Arrow is insane stacked as another ranges skill with my archer . . .

So sorry I don not see your negatives? How is your attunement? What are you other skills, stats, buffs?

If what you see isn't working change some skills, stats, . . . .

Sorry Root was you single leg to stand on but need to be a little more diverse they work just fine

 

Yep, NPC archers continue to be the most dangerous foe's you'll face, regardless of armor. The effects and damage of ranged skill are incredibly powerful compared to any other school/tree/magic.
Eventually, it'll come down to nerf archers or buff everything else. History has taught me which side of the roof that particular egg is going to fall...

Also, all crowd control will continue to be broken/OP until the crowd control resist buff gets fixed.

 

I've had incredible difficulty in combat since fire/death got nerfed. I never really used root, so can't comment on how effective that was (apparently, it was brokenly overpowered). I've been using earth/water/sun and it's okay, but man, I wish I could go back to taking on red spiders and similar.

 

@Chris , anyway broken or not, archer mages are using disabling shot + ice Arrow that is a better way to immobilize the monsters and the players without the possibility to counter it !
Disabling shot and ice Arrow have their effects stacked (or combined) so at the end you cant move at all, the bad thing is that you have no possibility to counter it in pvp and not to mention its working great on bosses...
That sort of "combo" is way too overpowered... Can you just make them "one replace the other" and not stacking (or combining) ?

Im not in the combat scrum, it certainly has already mentioned somewhere, i dont know... Anyway, the "combo" of those 2 creates a real inbalance...
I hope you see what i mean....

Keep up the good work!

 

Do you have any advices?
I am playing a pure mage with water and earth too. I stopped using root some time ago and I am doing ok most of the time. EQ, stone fist and obsidian arrow are really cool but now I am trying to fight elite skeleton archers and have big problems. They interupt my casting, especially EQ and moonbeams. If there are more then 2 archers I can only try to get away. Most of the time I try to lure one or two away and kill the with ice arrow and obsidian arrow. But its difficult to lure them away so I am dying a lot. I testet a lot of defensiv glyphs from light armor, shields and so but I found none of them really helpfull. Air Shield is nice but the archers make so much damage that my focus pool empties in seconds.

 

Dont fight archers from distance, come close to them and spam earth fists. Stop fleeing !

 

Yes thats the normal way I would fight them. But it doesn't work. 2 Archers and +some other Skeletons just make too much damage for me. I have 400 HPs and they make 40-50 points damage per arrow, sometimes more. I make sometimes more than 100 damage but they just keep shooting like machine guns. No way to stop them. Moonbeams are good, root too but even when casting root I got disrupted. EQ would be really good in this circumstances because of the damage and the stun, but even if I can cast it the stun don't seem to do much. Maybe I am doing something wrong?

 

mmh .... no no nothing wrong there, maybe add some fire spells and defensive stance, try to stack the glyphs. Make archers your priority target, they must go down quickly.

 

That might be a viable tactic if ALL melee attacks interrupted archers/mages. But as they don't, what's the value in closing? So you can die closer to them?

 

If you have a deck with lots of unlocked slots and glyphs like stone fist or ice fist you can make a lot of damage in a very short time. You can kill a lot of things like that before they even know what hit them. But that doesn't work for mobs with lots of hitpoints.

 

Earthquake has a pretty high stunr ate and can hurt.
Obsidian arrowhas a chance to ignroe armor, which means things with shields and such have a harder time blocking it.
Root was too strong and now a creature's strengh stat is a factor in how easy it is o root. Hard stuff cant be rooted.
Earth magic is designed to work well with warrior types in heavy armor, and gets stronger with your STRENGTH stats as well as intelligence.
Your shield isnt going to be as effective if you dont have high strength.
Attunment also makes a big diference

 

The value in closing is that you can attack them. Earth magic is defense and melee focused.
Using a skill tree that only has 1 ranged attack and 2 melee attacks, your not effective at range.

 

As a single player, taking on two elite archers at your level will always = oOoOoooOooOo I would get s summons or a pet to take on the second one or your primary target to help out.

Undead Summons don't eat up Focus but their health Decays, And Obs Bear (the best pet avail "feasibly") prob won't survive but might get you enough time to take them down and then you can res it? Other summons eat up ALOT of focus so until you have that licked (train focus) they may not help a mage.

Best advice do NOT take on two or more Elite Archers, sorry they are just too hard for you at this time :-(

 

Focus is not a problem. I am running out of glyphs long before I run out of focus. I don't draw the gylphs fast enought. I hoped Mind wipe would the solve the problem but it didn't. Now I am experimenting with chaotic feedback. It's getting better now. Summons are a nice distraction but die so fast. Are the undead summons better than the earth elemental?

 

The undead summons die on their own over time, but they seem to hit hard. The Chaos Demon is pretty good at staying alive so far, heals fast too.

 

I don't have any spells at level 70 yet and i can take on packs of archers as a Wizard, you just can't stand there, you have to actually move around and use some tactics on the ai, I must admit to being frustrated by the targeting issues though, that is the biggest hurdle for me, getting my silly little avatar to target the enemy i want. I feel like I'm fighting O'malley from Red vs Blue.

 

Question:

Release notes state:

• Reducing the duration on all move speed debuff skills based on strength of the target by 1 second per 50 strength.

Is it reduced by 25 or 50??? 25 would seem to make more sense.

@Chris

 

From a melee and archer perspective, the duration of the lower level root is not all that helpful if the enemy is free before one can activate the next skill. All it does is delay a mob getting in melee range for a brief moment.