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Interesting new insights (for me) on elementalist dragon mage


belgarathmth

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Hi, Sacred 2 never ceases to amaze me in how I keep learning new tricks in it, even after years of playing.

 

So, I started realizing with my current caster elementalist dragon mage, that his two best spells, Destroyers and Gust of Wind, were interfering with and diminishing each other as a combo.

 

The way Destroyers work, as a centralized Area of Effect damage effect that starts at your center and spirals outward, you need enemies in a big cluster for maximum damage. If the Destroyers don't immediately explode upon summoning and their initial spiral of movement, they spread out in random directions and diminish the total damage output of the spell.

 

I began to realize on my current run that my Gust of Wind, which I had in a combo with my Destroyers, was winding up *reducing* my damage output in trash mobs. That's because of the undesireable knockback effect of the Gusts. Upon a single casting of the combo, the Destroyers would explode the mooks in the mob, and injure the champion(s), but then, the Gust would blow the champions (and any surviving mooks) out of range of the next Destroyers cast, for a net loss of effectiveness.

 

This "insight" only applies to my latest character build strategy, by the way, which is to leave Destroyers and Gust of Wind as close to level one as possible, while building Elemental Lore, Elemental Focus, Ancient Lore, and Concentration to mastery. The goal is to spam Destroyers as the heart of the build.

 

You want mob enemies right up in your face to do that effectively, not blown back. Meanwhile, a combo that includes Destroyers and Gusts of Wind, combined with a Tornado thrown in occasionally and some Mind Blast/Maelstrom combos for debuffing, works well against bosses.

 

Also, I have always dreamed of having a Concentration master caster dragon mage, for the having of all three dragon mage buffs.

 

As a side issue, and question, I am not using the Protector spell currently, because Runes of Protection and Familiar are just too good to not use, even for an Elemental dragon mage. But, I plan to include the Protector buff as soon as I master Concentration. For its final mod, should I choose to have two of them, (which follows the Rule of Cool), or should I get the one Protector to buff my defense (which follows the Rule of Practicality for a squishy toon)?

 

And finally, is anyone else here also a fan of Titan Quest? Because the dragon mage build I just realized and described is analogous to the famous Titan Quest spirit mastery Ternion Attack build, which also requires a "squishy" caster who can and wants to go toe-to-toe with enemies in order to maximize its effectiveness.

Edited by belgarathmth
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LOL - uh, yeah, so this idea worked pretty well until I started to get into the swamp and desert on gold. The Destroyers couldn't do enough damage on their own, even when I was optimizing their targeting.

 

It turns out that my elementalist dragon mage *needs* the extra damage from the Gusts of Wind. I am also finding that the knockback kind of helps to offset his general squshiness, and reduce his health potion consumption, and he was starting to drink a lot of them without using his Gusts.

 

I've always thought that a very good indicator of how well your toon build is doing is its rate of health potion consumption. If you almost never need them, to the point where they are collecting by the hundreds in your inventory, you are doing great. If you start to deplete them about as fast as you're collecting them, then you have a yellow light on your build or equipment choice, and you should try to change course. If you are constantly clicking the drink health potion button, and, Maker forbid, actually needing to buy them from vendors, then that is a definite red light that should tell you to do something different, *immediately*.

 

Anyway, I don't think it was a horrible idea, but upon testing and experimentation, I have to reject my original hypothesis. Awww.

 

Sorry, I get excited about new ideas I want to try, and I want to share them with friends who play the same game. Sometimes I guess I'm a little premature in submitting my hypotheses for peer review.

 

I have a feeling that if our forum traffic weren't so slow nowadays, there would have already been several master players in my thread here pointing out all the flaws in my hypothesis. Oh, well. Thanks for reading if you did. :)

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@Flix, thank you, that was very helpful information. I didn't realize before that the Destroyers were often wasting explosions by ganging up on one weaker target in a mob and doing total damage to it far in excess of its hit points, while often the champions I wanted them to hit were taking no damage.

 

I had noticed while I was playing with using the Destroyers without Gust of Wind, that sometimes they did not seem to be doing as much damage in mobs as they should. Now I know why. So, I'm back to using Destroyers and Gust of Wind in a combo, and I've also found that it helps with targeting and damage output if I move a little bit between casts.

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