Long ago, in a Sanctuary far, far away, three witches concluded that magic was might and plotted to show everyone how devastating archmages could be.

This will be the tale of three sorceresses and their probably futile struggle against an untimely demise. Infrequently updated whenever I have time and attention to spare.



tl;dr (too long;didn't read): So it was too long and you didn't read. That is perfectly alright and wholly up to you.

1. Concerning Archmages

The archmage, also called tri-elementalist, refers to any sorceress build that includes attacking spells from all three skill trees. While it is a common practice to have a point in static field to weaken high life targets like act bosses, or use teleport to land a mercenary and sometimes the sorceress herself close by for a melee strike, actually spreading out the skill points among the three trees isn't. The obvious reason is that it is far easier to achieve high damage if you focus on one or two elements for your main attacks and rely on a mercenary aided by support skills and your equipment to deal with immune enemies. While the archmage can choose to focus more on one of her skills to be on par with a dual-tree sorceress, she will generally have main attacks that are weaker than those of her specialized colleagues. On the other hand, the archmage will always have a main attack ready that the current enemy is not immune to, and most often not particularly resistant to. This makes the archmage builds have a lot of potential but also require a great deal of knowledge of the sorceress skills and the vulnerabilities of particular monsters to be truly effective.

Challenge accepted.

The archmage is a particularly gear-dependant family of builds. A vast amount of skill charms and high end armor and weapons would be required to bring the under-leveled skills on par with dual tree sorceresses. Not to mention the fact that she still has to be able to survive all the dangers of Sanctuary, everything from extra fast undead dolls to lightning from gloomy creatures of the swamps. Un-freezable minotaurs long to smash her to tiny pieces and charging claw vipers can hardly wait for dinner to be served. In addition, since she has several maxed but unsynergized skills, her spellcasting will be mana-intensive and particularly uneconomical.

Knowing this, one is not surprised to find that the relatively few known archmages of the single player forum are almost exclusively softcore and twinked characters, for obviously no sane player would choose an archmage as an untwinked hardcore character.

As with single or dual tree sorceresses, the most popular mercenaries are town guards, serving either as a defender of a casting sorceress or a comrade-in-arms for the combative enchantresses. A small part of the sorceresses employ rogues or barbarians, while iron wolves are almost non-existent. The sorceresses teleport ability allows her to counter the more severe effects of town guards dim-wittedness, and both the auras and the combat abilities are of great help. For the archmage in particular, who will likely want to devote as much equipment as possible to increasing her skill levels and meager damage output, the arguments for making use of a resilient human wall to hide behind are overwhelming.

Because no archmage in her right mind would ever think of hiring an iron wolf as her mercenary, would she?

This post was edited by Maltacus on Apr 26 2024 03:13am

2. The Infamous WWW


Wilma, Wanja and Wilhelmina are three infamous students of the sorceress academy. They are ambitious, dedicated, organized and attentive. If they would ever turn those abilities towards something more productive than tormenting their instructors with pranks they would surely be a steady pillar of dependability for the Zann Esu to lean on but alas, such is not the case. Frustrated beyond belief, the ill liked and overly bureaucratic professor Theodora Tape (nicknamed "Red Tape" for her dependency on ineffective and needlessly formal forms) sends the three on an important and hopefully fatal quest to acquire quill rat quills to be used as pens. The quill rats have lately become rabidly aggressive and attack anyone on sight anyway. However, in order to be able to obtain the quills the hunter must not destroy the quill rats by magic or other things that would burn or melt everything to pieces. Conveniently, professor Tape also seems to have forgotten to inform the WWW of the fact that the moors close by where many quill rats dwell have become infested with foul dead rising from the ground.

PICTURE TO BE ADDED

Turning a deaf ear to the complaints of the WWW, professor Tape assigns them the task of clearing the moors from all walking dead as a project, suggesting that they learn some proper spells while they are at it. Either the three will put in some serious efforts to study or most likely not return, which both would please the professor. Either way, the WWW will be out of her way for the moment. Fuming, Wilma, Wanja and Wilhelmina discuss the situation. That is, they plot their revenge on professor Tape. Wilhelmina theorizes that the spell ice blast could be used to instantly freeze the bath water of the professor and an added bonus is that is deals substantial damage to enemies and freezes them, and could also melt their corpses so that undead can not rise again.

PICTURE TO BE ADDED

This post was edited by Maltacus on Apr 26 2024 03:28am

3. Concerning Skill Choices

There are several ways to pick skills to focus in for an archmage. She might want to focus in only fast cast skills so that she can take full advantage of improved cast rate from her equipment, or only focus in skills with a cast delay so that she has almost no need for faster cast rate and can dedicate all equipment to skill levels and mana and so on. Both approaches make a lot of sense. Furthermore, she could choose skills that are as similar to one another as possible, so that she can use mostly the same tactics and playstyle no matter what damage type she delivers. Fireball and glacial spike is one example. The WWW will however take a mixed approach and each pick one fast cast spell, one area bombardment spell and one support spell with a longer duration that can be cast and deal damage over time while they do something else. In addition, they will use whatever one-point wonder spells that they have together with item charges and of course a great deal of footwork. Last but not least, each will hire a fellow mage of the flamboyantly garbed iron wolves to aid her and complement her skill choices to some extent. While built to be evenly matched each will have a couple of special strengths and aces up their sleeves.

Wilma
Iron Wolf: Fire
Fast Cast Spell: Chain Lightning
Bombardment: Blizzard
Support Spell: Hydra
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Wilmas definite trump card are the hydras. Aside from being the best spell in the whole game because it SUMMONS DRAGONS, the hydras give her the ability to attack any non-immune enemy from beyond its range and from around corners. With the least powerful mercenary and lack of freezing her best option looks to be long range combat. When cornered, Wilma will be at her weakest but at least blizzard synergizes the freeze length of glacial spike which allows short time area freezing. Blizzard in itself is also very powerful against a small group of enemies and easy to use for long range bombardment. Blizzard is like the mortar of the cold skills while frozen orb is the canister shot. Chain lightning will be both the strongest and weakest component damage-wise. It can be boosted by faster cast rate and hit a ridiculous amount of enemies in ideal conditions. On the other hand those ideal conditions are rare and the casting animation is a bit long.

Wanja
Iron Wolf: Cold
Fast Cast Spell: Lightning
Bombardment: Frozen Orb
Support Spell: Fire Wall
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Wanja mirrors Wilma in many ways but seems to be a more short-ranged version. She has the most powerful mercenary and together with the large area of effect from frozen orb the chilling and freezing will be her trump card. Fire wall has a huge damage potential and can be used to attack around corners but it will be notoriously difficult to use effectively against mobile enemies. As long as they can be frozen, her mercenary will likely ensure that they stay in one place long enough to be set on fire. Lightning is better than chain lightning against individual targets and tightly packed rows of enemies but lacks the devastating power against large spread out groups. Like Wilma, Wanjas great dread would be some extremely fast cold and fire immune enemy.

Wilhelmina
Iron Wolf: Lightning
Fast Cast Spell: Glacial Spike
Bombardment: Meteor
Support Spell: Thunder Storm
Strengths and Weaknesses:
While Wilma and Wanja have many similarities, Wilhelmina sticks out with a cold fast cast spell and thunder storm as support. Glacial spike has a small round area of effect like fireball which can be better or worse than the lightning bolts depending on the situation although the casting animation is shorter which is very useful. And of course, lightning does not freeze the enemy in their place, nor does it synergize the freeze length of ice blast to dwarf any competitor in that field, and here is Wilhelminas trump card. If the enemy is immune to that and too fast, she can stay out of reach with teleport and wait for thunderstorm to pick them off, making her arguably the safest of the three. She also has the mercenary with greatest damage potential, complementing the thunder storm with fast lightning area attacks. Meteor will obviously work great if the enemy can be frozen long enough for it to fall into place. Otherwise it can still cause huge damage but the question is how successfully she can aim it against a mobile enemy.


Since the sorceress is so focused on direct damage she has fewer one-point wonder skills and support skills than the other classes. The archmages will have to make use of all she can as well as skills from items if she can make room for it among all other properties that she requires from her equipment. These are likely to be the most important.

- Teleport, the sorceress most game-changing ability. Unrestricted mobility as long as the mana bulb can handle it. The archmage is likely to use it a lot to stay out of harms way and get in the best firing position for her spells.
- Static Field is the ultimate tool for disposing of act bosses even though it requires a dangerously short range. The rune word Memory, quite affordable with Lum as the highest rune, is of particular interest to potentially boost static field range to make it useful in many more situations.
- Telekinesis can be cast rapidly and knock an enemy back but the knockback is unreliable. With lots of faster cast rate it could be an excellent tool to keep individual enemies pinned against a wall.
- Ice blast, even when unsynergized, can be enough to keep the enemy frozen with a lot of fast casting and thus opens up for corpse control even if you deal damage mainly with another spell.
- Energy Shield, even when uneconomical due to lacking telekinesis points, can be a life-saver.
- Frozen armor, for no sorceress looks complete without it and the minor freezing might be enought o help the sorceress escape a second hit.
- Lower Resist charges can obviously be of great value since there will be none immune to three damage types but quite possibly highly resistant to the third. It can spawn on staves, and an arch-angels staff with this suffix and some skill bonus from the staff itself is possible to buy and nothing to sneeze at.
- Weaken charges, obtainable from the practical Smoke runeword or gloves, or a wand if one has to be that unstylish, is a very cheap way of increasing your survivability.
- Corpse Explosion from the Black runeword makes for a huge damage bonus in the right situation and corpse control when enemies can't be frozen.
- Grim Ward charges, which are pretty rare and something of a novelty, could be useful if the sorceress could find the space to reach one corpse in time and of course as corpse control of cold immunes.
- Weapon damage and effects, while being a vulgar thing and not something the archmages really wish to lower themselves to if they can avoid it, can be quite important, especially to prevent enemy healing since the sorceress does not inflict poison damage. With no attack rating, something lowering enemy defense and preferably being fast and ranged would be preferable to stop the healing, or possibly slow the foe. A last resort for the truly desperate spellcaster.



This post was edited by Maltacus on Apr 26 2024 03:40am

4. Rogue Scouting

The chilled screams echo across the sorceress academy, after which the villainous professor Theodora Tape sends the WWW on a field course in forestry and survival...or not...with the Rogue Scouts. Wilma, Wanja and Wilhelmina are less than enthusiastic but at least rogues are somewhat civilized and enchant their arrows with cold and ice. Two entire weeks without a comic book or a cup of hot chocolate for as far as the eye can see.

The geology and climbing lessons has less than optimal results as climbing is apparently far less fascinating than trying to tear the cliff side down with telekinesis. Had she known, even professor Tape would surely have lamented the failure in this regard.

[IMG]https://i.postimg.cc/fW7Ybcbq/2w1.jpg[/IMG]

During the dark hours, valuable training exercises of nighttime navigation and orientation can take place. For the novice rogue scout, even finding the way back to the camp at night can be a daunting task well worth practicing for. The WWW does however have a novel take on the task and mark the way back with an easy to follow illuminated path next to the cozily burning shrubberies, lending anew meaning to the term "trailblazer".

[IMG]https://i.postimg.cc/zXJKHybz/2w2.jpg[/IMG]

When not avoiding or botching character-building outdoor exercises, the minds of the WWW are fervently at work with inventing a fitting way to exact their revenge on professor Tape. The darkness has given some inspiration. Perhaps it could be possible to knock out the professors lamps with a long range attack that is luminous enough to also momentarily blind her, after which she could be lured into all sorts of traps.

This post was edited by Maltacus on Apr 26 2024 04:17am

5. Detention

After having her lamps shot to pieces by lightning bolts and consequently stumbling out of her room disoriented, only to fall into the inconveniently placed bowl of wastes from the kitchens, professor Theodora Tape decides to take stern action and issue the WWW with detention, having to clean the dungeons from old crates, dust and feral skeletons left from the old quadrowizard exchange students from the Rathma cult. Wilma, Wanja and Wilhelmina immediately prepares their counterattack. Among their growing stashes of assets are detailed building plans for the academy. Nobody else has realized the potential for mayhem that these drawings have in the wrong hands and the WWW has undertaken huge efforts to produce accurate and detailed copies of all strategic areas. Of particular note are the locations of the sewers and drainage systems of the staff wing, which are situated above certain section of the dungeons.

Using measuring equipment borrowed from the willingly and unknowingly contributing mathematics classroom the WWW is able to find the spots in the dungeons directly underneath certain key points of the sewage system closest to the drains and similar open parts. If a powerful fire would be lit alongside the sewer pipe and especially next to the drain areas, the WWW theorize that the heat could be enough to boil or at least heat the waste-filled water enough to render the staff wing utterly uninhabitable. It will however likely be a lengthy process and along with clearing out the skeletons take several days. Stocked with nicked food supplies and vast quantities of magazines, the WWW begin their vigil, seeing to it that the fires made from all the old crates and barrels never die down. Wanja has mastered a most ideally suited spell for the mission, the Fire Wall.

[IMG]https://i.postimg.cc/Bbqxcb6G/5w1.jpg[/IMG]

This post was edited by Maltacus on Apr 26 2024 04:19am

Some more posts needed to be able to fix the images...

Did it use to be 15 perhaps?

Hope so.

Just another post...