Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Pre 2.1: Most Popular Builds - Mage

As the world finishes up downloading 2.1 (hopefully you got everything except maybe the last 7MB) I'll bust out a few more class comparisons. Without further ado, the top 5 Mage builds from a sample size of 2,216:

  1. 39 characters: 10/48/3 - From Arcane, Tier 1 provides some target resistance reduction in the form of 2/2 Arcane Subtlety and 3/5 Arcane Focus. For Tier 2, 5/5 Arcane Concentration helps with mana efficency. From Frost, 3/3 Elemental Precision, which is the only useful talent for Fire mages in the Frost tree. With so much in Fire, it's easier to talk about what's not there. 0/5 Impact, 0/3 Improved Fire Blast, 0/3 Improved Flamestrike and 0/2 Improved Fire Ward. Of those four, Improved Fire Ward seems the most useless.
  2. 36 characters: 10/48/3 - Same essential build, but takes a point from Blazing Speed and puts it in Improved Fireblast instead. Neither of these talents really seem all that, so I'm not surprised by the similarity to the previous build.
  3. 24 characters: 0/0/61 - Full on Frostiness. What's missing? 0/2 Frost Warding and 0/3 Frozen Core. Both minor damage mitigators at best.
  4. 20 characters: 0/0/61 - Frostiness of a different flavor. Frost Warding and Frozen Core are filled up at the expense of 0/5 Arctic Winds, which when full would have reduced your chance to be hit by physical attacks by 5%.
  5. 12 characters: 40/0/21 - An actual hybrid build, Arcane/Frost. It's clear the decision to go Frost is to get Ice Block, and Arcane choices seem focused on improving overall damage.
131/2,216 represented in the top 5, just under 6%. How do these choices compare with yours? Clearly I'm not qualified to discuss these builds. :)

3 comments:

Kaziel said...

On my mage I'm a bit of an odd-man out. I go for a similar build to your last one: 41/0/20. Almost any arcane centric build is there as a support tree. Arcane spells, whether it's Arcane Missiles or Arcane Blast are just not mana efficient enough to be a mainstay spell, but the new talents on the high end of the arcane tree are very impressive, so combined with either 20 or 21 points in frost or fire gives you a large boost to effectiveness, while also giving a fair amount of flexibility. I decided that I would rather have slow than Ice block. That's probably the biggest difference.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. Nothing about a pure fire build. I have only met one other pure fire and don't remember who. I guess we are not the popular.

I couldn't stand full frost. Full arcane, it seems I was sucking mana like no tomorrow.

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