2 Fb mages and a IF (in General)

Well that is the team i am running, i was wondering if i should train DM or AS?? Advise me please...

ummm uhh no.

err what I ment to say is this, your team has some problem,
your IF needs to live in melee to be effective, your FB mages will be doing damage to it and each other each round of melee they live.

Take a look at some of the IF teams up high to get an idea of what works...

As Novice says, on a multi minion team FB is not always a good idea. If you can't beat your opponents in ranged you will end up helping them kill you with your friendly fire.

If you are using an Ice familiar you need to ensure it lasts into melee. So an AS enchanter and maybe a MM mage might be a better set up.

FB is a short battle set up most of the time - that is best to kill people quickly. Whereas Cone Of Cold doesn't really come into it's own until round 5 or 6 at least.

Johnny and Novice both have excellent points. And I second all they've already said.

Anyhow, let's look at your question. DM or AS?

To make that question more clear, you're asking offense, or defence?
You can have only one of these to help you.
So which should you choose, well, if you insist on keeping your character as it is, DM. But I really wouldn't recomend it. AS would do almost nothing for you, FB would chew through that much HP in the extra round or two of melee that it'd get. CoC wouldn't get to do much damage by the time it's dead, even with AS. DM however would help your FBs, just hurt your CoC's chances.

So what will I recomend?
Perhaps get rid of the IF and get a SF, put it on your 2nd mage and hopefully the first of your FB mages dies in ranged after doing a lot of damage, you then have melee where the second mage and the SF have maybe 3 rounds of melee before they die.
The other idea is to take a strategy devised by Mythology in the early stages of CB2. What did he call it? Something to do with a burning tower/wall... something like that. Get a FF and have an all out agressive strategy. Three (or if you'd like, get two more minions and have five) fireball mages all going crazy for a few rounds doing massive damage. If all goes well, very few opponents should live more than 4 rounds against you. Making you a very solid favourite against most. Believe it or not, the simplicity of this does not make it a weak strategy. Instead it's surprisingly got very few tactical flaws. A lot less than a lot of strategies I've used on my own characters - And I make a point of having a lot less weaknesses than most.

Just my two cents though.

Th problem with running a 5 mage team is that you are AMF meat. AMF really comes into its own against multiple mage teams, just as DM comes into its own against multiple DE teams. So the strategy, like all strategies, does have a weakness - particularly when you consider that MOST teams train AMF.

On the other hand a team with 5 fireballs would spectacularly chew through teams with no AMF or Balrog Flame and be a glorious thing to watch! Or a 4 fireball team with a a Tattoo of Balrog Flame for another really hot team!

Burn, baby, burn!

You're forgetting two things.

1: An AMF trained equally to DD is only 50% as effective. (plus you can bet on it being much, much smaller than that)

2: 5 DD attacks is very much similar to one. Indeed, they come from different minions, but they're still just as good as if you added them all together and made it a single mage.

Yes, it's beatable. Anything is beatable. But it's 10x better than just about anything you'll find on any other character.

I tend to believe that one mage is better than 5, at least if you want to be able to do any clanfighting (which most folks seem to want to do when they start).

The concentration of XP into your DD spell is a huge advantage, and allows you to fight as though you had some decent NW on your team. I honestly think highly of teams using familars for damage exclusivly, using other minons as enchaters...

If I had a meca-sized IF, I'd train AMF/AS on a chanter and let the IF do the killing, better yet, do what everyone else is going to be doing and get an RoS.

Minion 1 AS, 2 AMF, 3 DM, 4 CoC and token (say trained to 10) prot, from there start training Haste, GA, or additional AS on the middle chanters, add decay to the enchanters to watch DM teams torns to shreads

*sigh* I'm getting old. I no longer have any idea what half these new acronyms are. And the really sad thing is I'm not sure I care.

:-(

yea, usually with a 2 minion team u should just train hp no AS anyway right?

Correct. I myself, use AS - GA - FB - BL/VA tank .. in which case, works well. But in the 1-2 Minion teams, train just HP. In the case of FB Mages, about 80% FB 20% HP

As for the mention of a Steel Familiar .. I say go for that. I did that with my single FB mage, and it worked great.

Further more ... after some time I threw in a GA enchanter, obviously. It helped ALOT and that alone has won serveral battles .. however, as the levels are getting higher, so are the DM enchanters .. something to think about there.

DM on lower levels isn't much .. but as you progress, DM will start to show up more and more, and all it takes is a good DM/Tank team to shut me down.