Arcane Tempest Questions

[Credinus]

I'm hoping I could get answers to three quick questions about the Arcane Tempest ability for Magisters. I did a bit of searching and couldn't really find any info on the ability at all, so here's my three questions:

1) Does this count as a spell for anti-magic field purposes or is it treated like SLA's?
2) What level spell is it considered (re: will it be stopped by mantles of invulnerability)?
3) Do all force damage/crit/evocation modifiers affect the ability?

Thanks in advance for any help on these.

[Azre]

I'm hoping I could get answers to three quick questions about the Arcane Tempest ability for Magisters. I did a bit of searching and couldn't really find any info on the ability at all, so here's my three questions:

1) Does this count as a spell for anti-magic field purposes or is it treated like SLA's?
2) What level spell is it considered (re: will it be stopped by mantles of invulnerability)?
3) Do all force damage/crit/evocation modifiers affect the ability?

Thanks in advance for any help on these.

It's basically an Acid Rain spell (purple though) that deals a significant amount (yet pales to draconic burst) of force damage per tick.

1) SLA's do proc anti-magic, particularly past life magic missile.

2) Not really sure.

3) Yes.

However, the ability takes a long time to cast even with quicken, by the time it finished casted the mobs moved away or had their chance to make saves.
The cool-down is also significant, making it very inefficient to use.


I was expecting something akin to Isaac's Greater Missile Storm. Which had potential, but sadly this ability was a huge disappointment. (for me at least).

[Credinus]

Thanks for the answers. I'm still 4 AP away from picking it up; being that I'm one of the few evocation archmages left, I'll certainly take this one as a complement to my force damage. As soon as I get it, I'll head to Tor to test it against a mantle of invulnerability and post the results here (a lot of my hopes for the ability hinges on it being able to do so).

I wonder if the spell cooldown reduction affects it? That could at least drop the cooldown on it by a little bit. From what you've posted, it sounds like the ability really needs a cooldown/cast time reduction and a radius increase to start making it worthwhile for anyone besides evocation AM's.

[Azre]

Thanks for the answers. I'm still 4 AP away from picking it up; being that I'm one of the few evocation archmages left, I'll certainly take this one as a complement to my force damage. As soon as I get it, I'll head to Tor to test it against a mantle of invulnerability and post the results here (a lot of my hopes for the ability hinges on it being able to do so).

I wonder if the spell cooldown reduction affects it? That could at least drop the cooldown on it by a little bit. From what you've posted, it sounds like the ability really needs a cooldown/cast time reduction and a radius increase to start making it worthwhile for anyone besides evocation AM's.

Would love to know the mantle thing. I had really high hopes for it, was gonna respec to force, had this idea that it was magic missile on steroids, like Isaac's missile storm.

Last time I tried it, however, it had the casting speed of an unquickened symbol and a 3 min cooldown.

I really hope they fix it soon, after all it's a tier 6 ability.

[Credinus]

Would love to know the mantle thing. I had really high hopes for it, was gonna respec to force, had this idea that it was magic missile on steroids, like Isaac's missile storm.

Last time I tried it, however, it had the casting speed of an unquickened symbol and a 3 min cooldown.

I really hope they fix it soon, after all it's a tier 6 ability.

Still working on unlocking it, those last two AP are taking longer to get than I expected. However, I will say that according to the tooltip, it's a 2 minute cooldown now. Still fairly long, but maybe the evocation familiarity enhancements affect it and it can be reduced to 1 minute 42 seconds. My bigger concern with it is the likeliness that it doesn't use loaded dice, much like Arcane Bolt and Arcane Blast. That would leave it as a very mediocre epic moment most of the time. It'd be reasonably easy to get caster level 30 on it (20 base class + 5 magister + 3 evocation from ED + 2 arcane augmentation), so its base damage could do anywhere from 240 to 1440 damage over the 8 seconds, assuming the target is kept within the cloud that whole time. That's a pretty significant spread, and having an epic moment that has the potential to do outright terrible damage is a bit saddening. It's also sad to see that the Magister ED was completely ignored in today's patch, when people have been quite vocal about it being one of the most lackluster ED's overall. We can only hope that Update 15 improves both the Magister destiny and the Archmage prestige enhancements, because I, for one, am tired of wizards being reduced to two-trick ponies (instakill or CC, or else you can't contribute enough to the group to make up for the dungeon scaling you add).

But yeah, I'll certainly post the results of the Mantle test as soon as I manage to unlock it. I'll post some damage results as well; currently running with full force damage/crit%/crit damage enhancement lines, superior kinetic lore, +96 impulse spellpower, +45 sigil spellpower, and +10 alchemical bonus from a clickie; if all of that doesn't make this spell take down virtually any group of trash mobs, then nothing will.

[Credinus]

Well, I haven't tested against a mantle yet, I'll do that tomorrow. But here's some really bad news:

Arcane tempest has a reflex save that isn't mentioned ANYWHERE in its description.

And it seems to be a pretty low one; the first batch of Drow with the Draegoloth in the Demonweb entrance were saving against it, and my 9th level spells evocation spells have a 44 DC on them. That leads me to believe that it's not counted as a 9th level, and can't be heightened. I set myself up for as much damage as I could, using a rank 3 (+45 spellpower) sigil of battering spellcraft and everything. The result? Crits for about 2k damage, regular hits for anywhere between about 700-1k damage, reflex saved hits for around 300 damage.


So... Don't bother wasting the AP on this worthless piece of junk capstone. Let's tally up the pros and cons of it:

Pros
1) Only 1 AP needed on a prereq, which compared to the rest of the Magister tree, is definitely a pro.
2) Damage type is force, meaning very few mobs with resistance and maybe 1 or 2 mobs with immunity (assuming it goes through mantles).
3) Reasonable AoE range; despite how small the cloud appears, its actually damage radius seems to be about twice its size.
4) Appears to cast at caster level 30 regardless of bonuses (my other evocation spells currently cast at CL27 and tempest was casting at CL30).

Cons
1) Damage type is force; yes, that was listed as a pro, but it's also a con because with the exception of artificers and divine casters with blade barriers, speccing for force doesn't give you a lot of spell amplification in the late game since most arcane spells with force/untyped/physical damage have low max damage per CL caps.
2) Has a reflex save, and being that it doesn't seem to be counted as a 9th level spell and can't be heightened, means that half damage/no damage casts are likely.
3) Long casting time and can't be quickened.
4) Doesn't use loaded dice which can result in extremely low damage hits.
5) Overall damage only about 50% better than a cyclonic blast under the same conditions.
6) Long cooldown; it seemed like this was reduced by the spell school familiarity reduction, but I'll have to get a timer out to verify tomorrow.
7) Questionable casting accuracy; much like the sigils, the spell doesn't always appear where you are aiming for.



Ultimately, you're better off throwing those 2 AP on just about anything else in the tree, aside from the summon since the living meteor swarm is also a pile of junk.

[Credinus]

Alright, I completed the test in Gianthold Tor and Arcane Tempest DOES go through mantles of invulnerability, at least. So it has that going for it...


The only things I can see to make this capstone useful is the following:
1) Reduce base cooldown to 45 seconds
2) Increase duration to 12 seconds
3) Remove reflex save
4) Allow quickening

As it is, it really doesn't do anything a combination of Arcane Blast + Cyclonic Blast SLA + Chain Missiles SLA can't. If you get REALLY lucky and all 4 hits crit, you're looking at about 8k damage; I've seen energy burst crits for that much and it's not even a capstone. Most of the time, you can expect to get about 2k-2.5k damage out of it, which is less than to cylonic blast crits.