Building the ultimate Mage (in General)

How would you do it?

First of all, which DD? A Ranged one, to start pumping out punishing Damage as soon as possible. Or a Melee one for the massive hits generated? If Melee, how do you plan to live through Ranged?

Which minion count? Single to concentrate most XP into your DD, or multiple for Kill slots.

Which Tattoo? RoBF for AMF backlash reduction. DD Familiar over training DD on the mage?

What items for your Mage? NSC or stacking AG/BoE/CoI/SB to get the most plus to your spell level?

How would you build yours?

decay + nsc + ef

single minion

Mine would look like:

Fireball / DM w/Hal / DM

Full plus to spell level as AMF is usually dispelled.

Oh wait, that's what I'm doing right now - and it works well. Has some weaknesses, but - that's to be expected.

2 minions

CoC mage w/ RoBF
PL absorber w/ TSA

I agree with OB's version of the ultimate mage

Put a crossbow on that PL minion for giggles.

I'm going to give a CoC/decay combo a try for my next NCB. 4 minions.

Wall up front training HP and his own SS.
CoC mage training CoC/small GA wearing BoE/NSC/Spellboosters/CoI
Enchanter training AS/DM/Decay wearing BoE/corn/spellboosters/NSC
Enchanter training AS/AMF wearing an RoS

Going to try to have 50-60% of my exp dedicated to HP, that way CoC can fire for as many rounds as possible to just wipe people.

I hear that heavy CoC mage and PL battery is pretty fun

CoC is just asking for death by AMF

And GA.

Not with 470AC EoD XD

You really couldn't run this down low but single minion wall gear with CoC. Ratios would be somewhere around 50-50 to 40-60 either way. Probably use a TSA instead of AC. You could also train a small amount of str and throw on an exbow.

This is more for funzies, but I always wanted to do a ToA mage with a big SoD and CoC (or SG now that it is in the game). I don't think it would work all too well (GA and AMF ouch) but it would be fun :)

Sorry for the double but I never really read into SG that much until now. Doesn anyone know if the AMF backlash takes into account the added damage from AC or just the trained effect? If its just the effect then I have made a serious error in judgement by looking over that spell!

Just train effect. It makes it very nice when fighting against AMF.

oooo thats nice. It makes SG something I really need to look into again since if the AMF damage isn't nearly as high as CoC I don't need to worry about dieing from it quite so much.

EF ended up being the best tat for my team setup -- I tested everything except a jiggy. I just need about $200M CB$ worth of forging to see how this whole thing really works out ;) Anyone want to do it for the $10.8M I have? :D

The perfect mage is Zenai's tat as an EF, my now deceased NSC, Mikel's boots, a +200 MS, and my char with all XP into AS and three minions freshly hired training whatever floats yer boat.

Mages are in fact... mostly dead.