Death Magic on the Battlefield

[thejeff]

The problem with gearing up mages to cast SB with high penetration is that you now have to try to arrange for the few geared up ones to cast it as many times as possible. Which means loading them up on death gems, because they will overspend. And then you're still only going to get 5 before the script runs out and they do something else. All that penetration gear won't help when they start spamming Raise Dead.

Unless I'm trying to get it to work on high MR targets, I'd much rather get more mages to cast it in the first round or two, which can be easily done with a death gem or 3 each, than a few to keep casting it. It's only D2. For anybody with death mages it's easy to get quite a few of them.

[MaxWilson]

Tyrant said:
There's a pretty short list of big AE blasto spells- Falling Frost, Falling Fire, Shadow Blast, Acid Rain, Blade Wind, Nether Darts, Magma Eruption and Astral Fire. Acid Rain is clearly superior, but rare's the mage that can do it. Among the rest it just depends on what you are fighting. Shadow Blast has some advantages- it works underwater, it does not work v undead, and it's AN damage.

The paralyze effect is also potentially nice.

Cloud of Death belongs on this list, too. Sauromancers love Cloud of Death.

-Max

[Tyrant]

thejeff said:
The problem with gearing up mages to cast SB with high penetration is that you now have to try to arrange for the few geared up ones to cast it as many times as possible. Which means loading them up on death gems, because they will overspend. And then you're still only going to get 5 before the script runs out and they do something else. All that penetration gear won't help when they start spamming Raise Dead.

Unless I'm trying to get it to work on high MR targets, I'd much rather get more mages to cast it in the first round or two, which can be easily done with a death gem or 3 each, than a few to keep casting it. It's only D2. For anybody with death mages it's easy to get quite a few of them.

You make a good point here, and it obviously depends on the
situation, but i generally prefer to use 4D mage scripted SB, SB, Drain Life, SB, Drain Life. It's pretty hard to get them to shoot 5 times unless you just flat load them down with gems. But, if you have a bunch of 2Ds and you are just trying to cover alot of frontage with a big alpha strike, your way would be better and i wouldn't use the penetration boosters for that.