Noob alert!

[Carza]

Wish I had read the forums and the stickies before I started this game. I'm a noob mage, been on the game for a week. Bought the season pass and dropped glories on storm gear?. After reading this thread I have got a few items and bought the sash for 10 glories. Have 25 glories left, I guess the question is I have low level trinkets do I spend them on getting a decent legendary one? Oh..... And the CT thread and math Fry's my brain. Plz some one dumb it down.

Mobile phone only........

[NoSuchReality]

So the game is easily playable without a set sash, trinket or bracer of mastery up to about TL110. You can play 3 or 4 different sets up to clearing TL100.

A lot of stuff on the forum and discord is geared towards late game (TL130+), speed running for ANB, or optimizing you character after champion level 1500.

Easiest play, IMHO, doesn’t require glory, find or craft an Elemental Lord Regalia set. A Grand Magisters Command weapon set.

Learn to effectively use shock, shatter, mob management, and managing the map and boss summoning.

[Carza]

Easiest play, IMHO, doesn’t require glory, find or craft an Elemental Lord Regalia set. A Grand Magisters Command weapon set.

Learn to effectively use shock, shatter, mob management, and managing the map and boss summoning.

Have a few ELR items boots, pants and GMC, gd low level trinkets doing 6,05M DPS but finding it hard to get past TL 66

[NoSuchReality]

Post your toon details page we can Look at it and give pointers. Fill in your Set up with crafted rare level piece to complete the sets. Double check the damage parameters on your weapon set, it is, IMHO, the single most important stat of them all. A poor base damage stat is punishing.

[Carza]

Okies this is what I got so far, bearing in mind 1wk old,

[NoSuchReality]

In general movement speed is very important for trials. Without it good movement speed, managing the mob, keeping safe distance from elites and escaping Elban and other Boss attacks is not possible. Most players use movement speed on both pants and boots. It appears neither your pants nor boots have it based on your movement speed. This is a huge hinderance to clearing trials.

I can't tell from the image, but you should verify the equipped tome is a Glacies Tempestas. To fully leverage the Grand Magisters Command set, you need to have Frost Bolt as either your primary or secondary attack (one finger or two finger attack). You then need frost and fire spells. Easiest to use is Frost Nova to learn with Immolate. To evoke the shock and shatter effects.

At the moment your Ability Rate is low, the new sweet spot is about 1500. You also may want to switch to in Integralas Mantle as it gives an AR buff. Having all six pieces of Elemental Lords Regalia also shortens the cooldown on your frost & fire spells.

Ultimately, clearing trials boils down to casting your big spells.

Your Haste is a little low, but passable to clear mid tier Trials.

Your Crit Rating looks good but is out of balance at the moment. CR controls how often you crit hit. CD, (crit damage) controls how much damage you do on the crit hit. You've got quite a few points in CR, but very little CD.

[Carza]

I can confirm it is a Glacies Tempestas, albeit only a rare, I have frost bolt, frost and. Fire dots,and beam, buffs are mage armour, power and haste, all lvl 7 atm just gem farming to boost them to 10.

On the crit inbalance I play a lot of diablo 3 so my thought here was to get the percentage up on trigger before I put into dmg.

Thanks for all this, it's a steep learning curve to begin with, and there's a lot of info to absorbe.

[bojck]

I have a few tips:

1. If you are not playing the current ANB event, don't wait any further : ) There's a lot of info in the forum about ANB. In brief, you can 'unlock' a character using a fraction of the gems it normally takes. You gain xp faster, craft cheaper, level-up skills with 'books of learning, and can take up to 2 items out of the event to your main. Check it out!
2. Buy all recipes from the recipe vendor for 50k gold every 3 hours. All of them, not just the mage ones - it takes a couple of weeks.
3. Farm xp and materials in trials. Do short runs (2-3 minutes max), with xp on all gear and ideally with an xp booster. I'd suggest to use nova, immolate and DfA, frostbolt and arclightning as primary; glass cannon, fleet footed and celerity/power infusion as passives. +fire damage on gear, Igniters' sash, ELR armour, GMC weapons.
4. Check the mage tutorials :P
5. Did I say check ANB? It can save you thousands of gems.
6. Have fun : )

[Carza]

I blew ANB already as I said at the begining of the thread wish I'd have read this before jumping streight in. But hey onwards and upwards, at least I have a big cache coming in at season end with purchasing the pass. And thanks for the tips bojck coming from the mage God makes me feel warm and fuzzy

[Mayteam*]

Fellow new guy tacking on a question: It appears that crit % and crit damage add to the overall damage as does haste. How does that come into play when not using regular attacks, but rather abilities? E.g. it appears that the crit % and crit damage would increase nova or immolate even though it says "x% of weapon damage." Does the haste also stack onto that? As haste doesn't help with casting more Nova's etc. I was wondering for an ELR mage would you need haste at all other than for the basic attacks?

[bojck]

That's a good one - your best bet is to test the abilities you intend to use in training grounds, as you already figured.

For pushing with ELR with frostbeam, all your damage comes almost equally (if you have beam bracers) from
1. Frostbeam
2. Thermal shock caused by casting nova after beaming - this multiplies the applied stacks of Frostfire (from the sash)

Both are affected by haste! Beam is kinda special - damage is applied frequently, say every 1/10 of a second. It is applied more times with more haste. Also every time it has a chance to crit.

DfA is similar - every 'missile''s damage is calculated separately and can crit, but it is not affected by haste (neither are stacks of fire damage from Igniters' sash).

At least that was in the previous season - these things sometimes change silently across versions, so have to be checked in training grounds just in case.

[Mayteam*]

Thanks bojck. Have enjoyed some of your videos and thanks for your contributions! Your explanation helps me understand why you are using the frostbeam vs. DfA approach when it appears from base descriptions that Shatter and DfA would do more damage. Now if only i can avoid running back into the mobs ....:-)

[Carza]

Overall damage is based on DPS (Damage Per Second) and is pooled with power, haste, crit% and crit dmg, with weapon dmg/enhancements.
Haste determines how fast you cast spells.
Crit% determines when it procs within that second (higher the % the more likely it will be a crit)
Damage higher the more dmg you do in that crit

Correct me if I'm wrong, which I know I guys will the game mechanics if like diablo will crit on all abilities and spells.

But I digress, haste is, from what I can see, is for spell casting not abilities.

[Mayteam*]

Haste is for number of attacks per second - e.g. frost bolts per second. With abilities (spells such as frost nova or immolate), the time to cast abilities gets reduced by ability rate and not by haste. Therefore the question whether the haste, though it doesn't allow casting of more immolates, since it increases damage - is that still a function of the actual damage? I went to the training grounds and took off all gear and offensive champion points and equipped with
a beginning staff (4-6 dmg) and no champion points in offense. Ranged from 25 to 33 points per nova cast on about 19 casts. Added 100 points to haste - and had the same range per nova cast - so after about 30 casts of nova in training grounds, it looks to me like haste has no effect on the nova damage -and I assume all abilities? Any advanced players out there know the answer?

[JohnnytheKid]

Fellow new guy tacking on a question: It appears that crit % and crit damage add to the overall damage as does haste. How does that come into play when not using regular attacks, but rather abilities? E.g. it appears that the crit % and crit damage would increase nova or immolate even though it says "x% of weapon damage." Does the haste also stack onto that? As haste doesn't help with casting more Nova's etc. I was wondering for an ELR mage would you need haste at all other than for the basic attacks?

Should leave this question for more experienced players, but I was under the impression every attack has a chance to reduce ability cooldowns. So, the more attacks a second, the faster your abilities would be ready. Therefore, haste would actually benefit abilities, as you could cast them sooner.
I would like if someone with more know-how could comment on this to confirm, but that's what I always thought.

[NoSuchReality]

Alacrity is the chance per attack to do an extra cooldown. In the current version this was nerfed from 2 seconds per proc to 1 second per proc to counter the reduced global cooldown.

CR is the crit hit chance and applies to all damage causing attacks, casts and effects. DoT effect included. A once time ability has CR% chance to hit for Cd% damage multiplier. A time based attack has CR% chance to hit for CD% multiplier for each time check. Area of effect is, who the hell knows.

you can test in Arena to verify.

[bojck]

Alacrity was reduced once more in 1.5.32 - from 1sec to 0.5

[NoSuchReality]

Is that in the release notes? I thought the amount was left alone, the trigger rate much like cooldown was nerfed. We went from 2:1 before, then with the current update, the trigger was cut. (I think) We still get one sec per trigger, but it procs half as often and we have less time in which to proc.

Net effect is a shorter cooldown on the clock but actually longer effective cooldown due to less procs.

[bojck]

in the what It's not listed... But anyway, alacrity's effectiveness is reduced. Luckily this isn't a dealbreaker for the current mage meta

[Feisty]

I am new to this game, any tips are welcome. I have a question. My toon just reached 31 what stats do I concentrate on?

[bojck]

at level 31 your priority is to finish story mode, then do some gold farming and start buying crafting recipes for 50k gold each (buy all of them). For now you can't go wrong with stats - if you die too easily, add Vitality. For the offensive stats do a mix of haste, ability, pow, crit rating, crit damage.

[Turgeon]

Yeah and start buying recipe as soon as you can withgold only

[Feisty]

Thanks bojck, appreciate the tip