Fire AND Ice High Elf?

[Whiskiz 3]

Newer player here, I was doing some High Elf theory crafting and wondered what a HE would be like taking both Lores of Fire AND Ice instead of Lore and Focus of one (and Experts Touch for the one Aspect of course.)

 

Fire OR Ice:

-Increased max level of Combat Arts through the Aspects Focus (Though won't this fall off at some stage especially late game and/or not be as effective early, and finally, wouldn't it be worth the trade when considering what you can do with Fire AND Ice?)

-You have Extra CA Regeneration via the Aspects Focus (Isn't CA Regen later on very easy to come by, especially with the 3rd Aspects "Grand Invigoration"?)

-You have Extra CA Regeneration via Experts Touch.

 

Fire AND Ice:

-You can throw out Fire AND Ice, one example being spamming both single target high damage skills from fire and ice in a combo on bosses (Incendiary Shower and Glacial Thorns) in almost the time it takes to cast 1 or the other, while possibly casting Nimbus every now and then to give extra damage, keep any adds cleared, to slow the boss and to provide a big attack value debuff if wanted/needed.

-You get to use both Cascading Shroud and the fire demon buff (Once Concentrate is mastered way down the track to be able to use 3 buffs)

-You can modify and so use either the fire or ice skin buff as needed, once you learn the areas and enemies damage types. Important mid to late game I'm guessing.

-Surely not alot of enemies would have both high fire AND ice resistance so later on down the line you can work with enemies weaknesses much, much better especially bosses that have extreme resists in one or the other.

-It gives you twice the variety of skills and double the size of build, variety being the spice of life and I must admit fairly lacking in Sacred builds unfortunately, especially in a game where you play through it at least 5 times, on different difficulties. At least. Still awesome though

-You can use the strengths of both Aspects together for better effect (fires damage with ices utility)

And most importantly:

-You can have 2 combo's one for each Aspect to throw all offensive spells out, very quickly throwing out 6 big damage big skills, covering Area of Effect, Single Target and anything inbetween for trash and rares. Throw 6 big skills out, run around, throw another 6 big skills out, run around, another 6 big skills instead of say a Raging Nimbus every now and then with a Glacial Thorn spam for Ice Area of Effect or just trying to spam Blazing Tempest for Fire Area of Effect. Etc.

 

The main factors I guess it'd come down to is:

1 - how much better being able to throw out the entirety of both Aspects at the same time is, as opposed to spamming the best single skill for the situation somewhat faster.

2 - If its better to be able to throw all that out or have alot more extra CA regen in the one aspect (from Focus and Expert Touch) and to have the potential for higher level Combat Arts via Focus.

3 - How important having (the potential for) higher max levels for Combat Arts is, from having an aspects Focus.

 

Thoughts?

 

Edit: The amount of CA regen you'd be losing from one Aspect is 33% from Experts Touch and 65% from dropping Focus + Mastery bonus amount but around 100% CA regen and higher max level Combat Arts for all of the above. For the potential to do all that and things like eat Glacial Thorns runes up to Incendiary Showers Regen Time and as mentioned above, basically shotgunning bosses with those in a combo in the time it would have taken to spam one of those each time (Guess that kind of makes up for the CA Regen loss)

Edited August 27, 2016 by Whiskiz

[Hooyaah 2,823]

I believe that you have an interesting build plan. The only thing I might mention is that you now have to support two disparate aspects and forge/wear damage modifiers for them, as well as splitting the modifiers that enhance those aspects and their respective combat arts. Also, more skills are being selected for those aspects leaving fewer remaining for other skills that are important for protection and increased CA regeneration time and finding/buying items.

 

Example: You selected the following, Arrant Pyromancer, Arrant Pyromancer Focus, Mystic Stormite, and Mystic Stormite Focus, so you now have six left to choose from. Delphic Arcania Focus is important to increase your HP regen and CA regen times.You also mentioned using more than one buff so there you have Concentration. Ancient Magic* should be a wise choice as it will aid in devastating foes who are well protected from fire and ice damage. You mentioned combos, so now you have Combat Discipline. You want the lady to be well-protected if you want to get her through the Niob level comfortably so you should have Spell Resistance, Armour Lore (will also speed regen of CAs upon mastery) Constitution is also important to keep the lady alive during extended bouts with tough adversaries. But wait, not only have we have run out of skills to select I just mentioned eleven skills.

 

*OK, agreed, we remove Ancient Magic and forget about the few opponents that have high ice/fire immunity. We still need some nice modifiers for forging and wearing and we don't have room for Bargaining and Enhanced Perception to get cool drops. So, therein lies the rub. The main difficulty in having a fire and ice mage elf is in the using of two additional skills when the game only lets us have ten and now ten seems to be to few.

 

One possible solution is to gain full damage mitigation and modify the section of your script files that would make Cascading Shroud a permanent Buff. However, if you want to play the game "naturally" ten skills leaves indeed too little wiggle room in selection just the right skills.

 

There is a thread with a link where you may download characters with no skills selected and these toons are ready to go at level 200. You could work out your build details with one of more of these and that way save some time finding out what works best for you. As Flix once said, "It saves a lot of time." If you don't wish to look for the thread you may simply click and go investigate the download here:

 

http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/300-sacred-2-unskilled-characters-level-200/

 

[Androdion 884]

Great posts here.

 

As someone who has played a lot (!) with the HE class I can say that Hooyaah is absolutely correct when he states that the problem about a fire and ice build is that you have too many skills you need to pick up in order to make it feasible. I'll go even further and say that the only aspect that is really indispensable in a HE build is Delphic Arcane. I mean, it's the one aspect of the class that really works all around and makes everything else work in terms of sinergies between CAs and buffs. Grand Invigoration in particular (and its development) is something that just has to be used! That fact alone leaves you with basically half the choices for your skill set filled up since you'll also want to survive via Armor Lore early on and via Spell Resistance later on (seriously, playing without it in Niob is sick!). The rest of the stuff is optional because it "only" intensifies damage dealing/resistance breaking. I've played with and without Ancient Magic/Combat Discipline and it all really depends on how you've built your char to survive.

 

Basically what I'm saying is that the build can be done, and at the same time it can't. In detail, you can have it work well enough to be fun but not well enough for it to be game-breaking. That's my view of it because once you spray out in to too many directions you do gain versatility and adaptability but you loose the sheer force that can only be mustered when you focus heavily on a single aspect.