21 réponses à ce sujet

[Incantrix]

that you specialize in. 

 

Currently, I've been having a lot of fun using Ice+energy barrage. Loving the shatter combo's!

[Bayonet Hipshot]

You can use every element and do just fine.

[actionhero112]

Ice + Fire. 

I go heavy into winter primarily. The inborn cross class combo is too good to give up. Plus with a pact belt, shatter combos do extreme amounts of damage. Immolate is always good for spamming to decrease cooldowns with clean burn, plus you have unlimited mana anyways so I basically never auto attack. 

 

I don't go into lightning beyond energy barrage because of the weakness glitch. I love unlimited mana. Don't take away my unlimited mana. 

[mesiasmith]

Winter's grasp + Stonefist

 

Pull of the Abyss + Fire Mire

[The_Prophet_of_Donk]

Ice + Fire. 

I go heavy into winter primarily. The inborn cross class combo is too good to give up. Plus with a pact belt, shatter combos do extreme amounts of damage. Immolate is always good for spamming to decrease cooldowns with clean burn, plus you have unlimited mana anyways so I basically never auto attack. 

 

I don't go into lightning beyond energy barrage because of the weakness glitch. I love unlimited mana. Don't take away my unlimited mana. 

Unlimited mana?

[sundriedrainbow]

Rift Mage's main mechanic is Weakening all enemies (via Veilstrike, Stonefist, or Pull of the Abyss, pick your poison and/or toggled upgrade) and then casting AOE spells on them.  Weakened enemies take more damage and restore your mana because of passives in the Rift Mage tree.  With the right combinations, you can basically just rotate between Immolate, Winter's Grasp, and Stonefist, with Veilstrikes and POTAs to maintain weakness.

[Arvaarad]

Lightning. It scales beautifully. On bosses, who are typically immune to sleep, the rift mage gets mana regen to sustain them through the fight. On trash mobs, a couple sleep detonations will render mana regen irrelevant, because now everything is dead.

Plus, it seems thematically appropriate to give lightning to the guy whose name means "pride".

[Avander]

Lightning. It scales beautifully. On bosses, who are typically immune to sleep, the rift mage gets mana regen to sustain them through the fight. On trash mobs, a couple sleep detonations will render mana regen irrelevant, because now everything is dead.

Plus, it seems thematically appropriate to give lightning to the guy whose name means "pride".

 

I know lightning gets a lot of hate because of the weakness regen issue, but I find it to be the most powerful element because:

 

1.  So few things are immune to it and

2.  Static cage+upgrade are amazing cc that destroy trash before the mana regen even becomes a problem.  

 

I play nm with ff turned on so firemines and such are a no-no.

[Dabrikishaw]

Ice and Fire.

[Lumix19]

I used Ice and Fire before I got Trespasser and the Belt of the Inferno Pact. Then I just used Fire.

[Bigdawg13]

Lightning. It scales beautifully. On bosses, who are typically immune to sleep, the rift mage gets mana regen to sustain them through the fight. On trash mobs, a couple sleep detonations will render mana regen irrelevant, because now everything is dead.

Plus, it seems thematically appropriate to give lightning to the guy whose name means "pride".

 

I'm not sure you mean what you said.  If a boss is immune to sleep, and you rely on Lightning, your mana regen is really bad.  It does not "sustain" you anymore than a non-specialized mage's regen. 

 

In regards to the trash comment, what I've found with trials on, everything is not dead and I'm running into a lot more sleep immune mobs.

 

I know lightning gets a lot of hate because of the weakness regen issue, but I find it to be the most powerful element because:

 

1.  So few things are immune to it and

2.  Static cage+upgrade are amazing cc that destroy trash before the mana regen even becomes a problem.  

 

I play nm with ff turned on so firemines and such are a no-no.

 

I was kind of curious about this claim.  So I pulled down the resistance charts and started filtering the data.  I don't think this includes DLC.

http://dragonage3.wi...ife.com/Enemies

 

# of enemies with high resistance to a element type:

 

Fire:  7

dragonlings, gurgut, phoenix, varghest, rage demon, wraith, and behemoth

 

Lightning: 7

Corrupting Spider, Giant Spider, Poison Spider, Wyvern, Pride Demon, Wraith, and Horror

 

Cold:  17

Armored Mabari, August Ram, bear, black wolf, bronto, druffalo, great bera, gurn, hyena, mabari, quillback, despair demon, wraith, red templar knight, arcane horror, corpse, and revenant

 

Bottom line, I don't think it's any better than fire, and cold is an obvious loser here.

 

Enemies immune to sleep:  14

Giant, High Dragon, Bruiser, Prowler, Despair Demon, Fear Demon, Pride Demon, Rage Demon, Behemoth, Horror, Shadow, Arcane Horror, Corpse, Revenant

 

I don't know about you, but that last list is the nasty one.  It's the one full of enemies that are hard to kill and most likely to kill you.  They are also the enemies you really don't want to be running away from because you are mana starved. 

 

Personally I still think Lightning is a bad tree.  As long as it ruins the mana regen I doubt anyone will ever convince me of it's value for a rift mage.  You'd need an enemy immune to fire and cold and probably spirit too before I'd consider it.

 

Ice and Fire.

 

My favorites too.  The new toggles for ice are really fun for a Rift Mage.  And I never realized it but the AoE upgrade for Winter's Grasp has a new spell fx animation that is really cool.  I've been meaning to look for a list that show which spells have a new FX when you upgrade them. 

 

I used Ice and Fire before I got Trespasser and the Belt of the Inferno Pact. Then I just used Fire.

 

 

How does that work again enemies with high resistance to fire?  Do you just spam stonefist?

[Avander]

 

Enemies immune to sleep:  14

Giant, High Dragon, Bruiser, Prowler, Despair Demon, Fear Demon, Pride Demon, Rage Demon, Behemoth, Horror, Shadow, Arcane Horror, Corpse, Revenant

 

I don't know about you, but that last list is the nasty one.  It's the one full of enemies that are hard to kill and most likely to kill you.  They are also the enemies you really don't want to be running away from because you are mana starved. 

 

I believe if an enemy is immune to sleep you get the mana regen bonus when attacking with lightning (ie it doesn't remove weakness), at least it seems that way when I play.  Could be wrong though.

[Bigdawg13]

I believe if an enemy is immune to sleep you get the mana regen bonus when attacking with lightning (ie it doesn't remove weakness).  Could be wrong though.

 

That's a hot topic. 

 

Old Link:  but at least it's results from in-game testing instead of the alternative

http://forum.bioware...2#entry17995515

 

 

• You can't apply Weakened to anything with Guard up. If you had Weakened up before it acquired Guard, it seems like Weakened wears off normally (it doesn't instantly disappear when they put up Guard), but I was not able to test this enough to be sure.
• You can't apply Weakened to anything with Shocked that is not also Asleep. You instead attempt to apply Asleep. This does not consume Shocked. This happens even if the enemy is immune to Asleep and you will NOT get Weakned instead. So: definitely do not apply Shocked to Asleep-immune bosses if you want to maintain Weakened.
• If you use Veilstrike against a Shocked and Asleep enemy, you do get Weakened applied successfully (The other two will wake up the enemy first, causing the Weakened effect to instead re-apply Asleep).
• Weakened applied to Chilled or Burning targets seems to work normally.
• Using Stonefist on an already weakened enemy, you do not appear to get the benefit of Weakened's mana-regeneration for Stonefist itself. It does seem to refresh the mana-regeneration effect.
• Using any Weakened effect while another one is already on the enemy will sometimes this can result in "Weakened" itself dropping off the enemy when the first effect expires while the mana-regeneration effect continues, but it's not consistent. Letting Weakened (or psuedo-Weakened) drop all the way off I was able to apply a new Weakend consistently with no evident cooldown.

So, the only time you can apply weakened to something that has shock, is with veil strike and it must be asleep. 

 

Example:  let's say an enemy who is not immune to sleep, is shocked.  Stonefist will put them to sleep and not apply weakness.  Once asleep, use an upgraded veilstrike and now you have an enemy with both sleep and weakness on them.

 

Example 2:  now same situation but enemy is immune to sleep.  Now every single attempt to apply weakness will try to apply asleep.  But the enemy is immune.  I.E. your mana regen is toast until shocked falls off and you apply weakness again.

 

Now I'm still trying to sort this out, but IF you apply weakness first (before shock) on any enemy, you should continue to get mana recovery from RM passive even if you shock the enemy.  But you can't re-apply it without veilstrike (and only then if the enemy is not immune to asleep).

[Avander]

 

Now I'm still trying to sort this out, but IF you apply weakness first (before shock) on any enemy, you should continue to get mana recovery from RM passive even if you shock the enemy.  But you can't re-apply it without veilstrike (and only then if the enemy is not immune to asleep).

 

Hmm,  that's interesting and it tracks with my experience, in general I lead off every fight with stonefist (and have it set to preferred on AI), then static cage then barrage then more spells.  Usually at this point the enemy is dead.  I have noticed I seem to get mana starved on giants when I do this, and that would track because giants are immune to weakness, but I could be imagining it.

[Bigdawg13]

Ya know, I never thought about it but a rogue with upgraded spinning blades might help with this issue.  They can move status debuffs off of a primary target onto near by targets.  IE they could remove shocked from something. 

 

I'm not sure if this spinning blade upgrade requires other nearby targets.  But if you had it on a rogue and disabled in tactics, you could manually switch to it to use to remove shocked.

[Arvaarad]

Now I'm still trying to sort this out, but IF you apply weakness first (before shock) on any enemy, you should continue to get mana recovery from RM passive even if you shock the enemy.  But you can't re-apply it without veilstrike (and only then if the enemy is not immune to asleep).

 

Oh... that explains why I never noticed the issue. Veilstrike was my go-to weakness application due to the FF effects of Pull of the Abyss. When I applied Pull of the Abyss, it usually went before autoattacks (when the enemies were far enough away that PoA wouldn't affect my party), so weakness got applied first.

[PapaCharlie9]

Ice, ice, ice, ice, and a little fire.

The level capped RM I'm running through Descent for the first time ever:

1) Fade Step/Frost Step
2) Veilstrike/Punching Down
3) Stonefist/Shatterstone
4) Immolate/Wildfire
5) Ice Mine/Chilling Array
6) Winter's Grasp/Winter's Ruin
7) Pull of the Abyss/Devouring Veil
8) Barrier/Elegent Defense

[PapaCharlie9]

Cold:  17
Armored Mabari, August Ram, bear, black wolf, bronto, druffalo, great bera, gurn, hyena, mabari, quillback, despair demon, wraith, red templar knight, arcane horror, corpse, and revenant
 
Bottom line, I don't think it's any better than fire, and cold is an obvious loser here.

I used to worry about that, but when I realized that Winter was a sub-par skill tree, overshadowed by just about all of the others, it didn't matter. Still, I used to insta-sell any cold staves I looted (except for my RM IQ, then it was insta-sell electric staves).

Now with Patch 10/Trespasser, it's a bigger issue, since there is more incentive to run with Winter skills.

[zeypher]

When in doubt go with fire. Works well in most games.

[sunnydxmen]

ice in spirit.

[sunnydxmen]

also fire burn baby burn.

[Elhanan]

Carry a few extra staves with varied elements. This seems to help a bit with spells like Energy Barrage which uses the staff element as the attack form, I believe.