And you want to know how best to use it. Well, to say there are not better ways that I have yet to find, is not true, but these are the best ways I have found so far.
First and I think the foremost, a decay mage.
Whats the problem with Decay (besides AMF) the problem is its only good in melee and it is really only good if the decay mage attacks BEFORE your main damage dealers. The hard part? Keeping a mage alive long enough to make it to melee when he is in front of your main attacks. When attacking your minion order determines the order of their attacks. So if you protect the decay mage by putting him behind your damage dealers, sure he is likely to survive to melee but now you have basically ruined the true power of decay. But, no longer, now you can use a LARGE AMF to protect from magic and an AoI to keep all the physical attacks away. Now your Decay mage sits right in front, and fires before your damage dealers. Why is that a big deal, I will make a simple example.
You have a decay mage in front of a tank, you are in melee, and you are attacking a single minion. The minion you are attacking has 100K HP. Your tank does 50K damage. If your Decay mage goes first and there is no AMF, that minion is dead in one round, 1/2 his 100K is 50K from decay and then the tank kills him with 50K. Let's show the reverse, the tank does 50K, and then decay fires, the minion is left with 25K. The decay mage can never finish a minion, so you do not want him attacking last. The AoI creates the perfect way to move your Decay mage in front of your damage dealers, but yet not have to worry about him dieing as easily before the melee rounds to do his thing. Yes, adding your own LARGE AMF in there somewhere will greatly reduce the chances of the Decay mage dieing in ranged, before he can do his thing.
The other idea is a simple PL Battery. Basically speaking with enough armor etc, and training only HP and PL, this battery wearing a AoI will not have to suffer physical attacks. So all it has to worry about is magic damage, and with say a ToE maybe a MgS (unless they nerf skills to I have forgotten) to reduce magic damage, pehaps the rest in high AC items, now you have the perfect battery, just load him with HP (bolstered by AS?) and then stick him the majority of his loss of HP will come from the PL effect and very little from anything else. Do not think of it as a wall though, because he is not absorbing any physical attacks, he is ignored and offers no direct protection from them, his only assistance being a battery of HP to leverage the PL effect to its fullest.
I am sure there are other great ideas out there for this new item, these are just the first two I thought of, tried out, and found it working fairly well, my new NCB (which cannot start soon enough!) will likely leverage one or both of these ideas.
What have you found to be a great way to use an AoI?
