This was sooner than even I was expecting.
Last time, we saw the in-progress Elementalist mastery and its tools to let you mash buttons to victory. This time we’re going to take a more conservative approach with the Elementalist’s main cooldown skills.
First up, we have a fairly straightforward one: Breath Fire!
Being one of only two skills in the Elementalist mastery that features % Weapon Damage and being on the lower-end of Energy Costs in the mastery (you’ll see), Breath Fire should be popular to hybrid builds as much as pure casters.
Next up we have Ice Wall, whose summons totally weren’t stolen from Moosilauke!
Ice Wall allows for tremendous battlefield manipulation as you can block off chokepoints and assault enemies from beyond your bulwark. Do note, however, that charging enemies - like Rotting Soldiers - can run through, and in some cases push apart, your wall of ice, so don’t get too cocky with this. Otherwise, Ice Wall is nontargettable and lasts until its timer runs out or you re-summon it.
Lastly, we have Stormcaller:
For a tremendous amount of energy, you can rain down electric death upon your enemies for a decent while. The skill applies its damage every 0.1 seconds, meaning it’ll strike 10 * its duration times against a scaling number of targets. Doesn’t pack a hell of a punch up front, but will annihilate groups of enemies over time. I’m considering buffing its damage and nerfing the strike frequency if it slows down people’s computers too much, but it runs fine on mine.
But there’s more to show than just this. The Elementalist is a very active mastery, involving substantial energy costs but also significant means to regenerate your energy. Part of this lies in the mastery itself, as I alluded to with the Terror Knight mastery:
You’re still here?
Oh, what, you want to try out the mastery for yourself rather than reading about it? Why, of all the nerve. Fine, here you go: the mastery ported over into the vanilla Grim Dawn campaign. Note that the balance of the mastery is meant for Zenith, not vanilla GD; in some respects it’ll be too weak, in others it’ll be too strong. Also note that there will be ZERO itemization support for the mastery in vanilla GD.
Big thanks to DeMasked, ASYLUM101, and Elfe for helping me figure out some problems with the skills!
Changelog:[spoiler]-6/12/2016 7:08PM: v0.3
Updated animation for Ice Surge to be a little cleaner around the edges, appearing much smoother in usage.
Stormcaller now strikes every 0.5 seconds, rather than every 0.2 seconds to reduce lag and nerf its effectiveness. So as not to nerf it into the ground, the base skill now features a 50% damage multiplier as well.
-6/10/2016 3:59PM: v0.2
Fixed UI bug caused by previous change.
-6/10/2016 1:36PM: v0.1
Stormcaller has been moved to rank 6 (32/50) from rank 4 (20/50). Damage increased by 75%, but strike frequency halved (so around a 25% loss in damage over time, but more upfront power).[/spoiler]
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