Here is my mage build, a warning, it's only for extremist mages. Full int with much of my equipment having massive shadow and fire bonuses.
At level 32 - 481 int(will be a minimum of 502 at 33)
I have nearly all spells for all classes maxed out...
Left click - Soul Rend
Right click - Gaseous Blast
1 - Shadow Lightning
2 - Holy Roller
3 - Fire Bolt
4 - Ring of Fire
5 - Bookworm
6 - Couch potato
7 - Mental Prowess
8 - Improved Shadow Lightning

Note: I have a very unique, and IMHO, a very "fun" gaming style. I don't recommend using a build similar to this unless you enjoy fun
I find this build to be extremely over-whelming for enemies and the major thing you must do is farm equipment so you get three main things all in one, maximum int, and then next comes shadow/fire bonuses and endurance.

But Soul Rend only works when you hit the enemy and with all Int your not... So why use it?

-Adelphi-

I'm going to agree here with Adelphi and Silica. You are probably going to want to get a way from Soul Rend as a skill on an all Int Mage. Unless you are playing a battle mage with more balanced skill point distribution you are just not going to get enough damage out of Soul Rend when the difficulty starts to ramp up in the later levels, and believe me it does.

Also I'm wondering how you manage to effectively use Shadow Lightning on anything other than a right or left click. SL is targeted, so if you use a #shortcut it takes extra time to aim/select and then fire off the spell. Right or left click makes this skill "point and shoot". You can actually circle strafe with SL and take little or no damage. Some AI changes in build .75 make this slightly harder to do now but not impossible.

At 100 I have a nearly all INT build. Base (naked) is 10-10-38-477 without passives and 10-0-38-487 with passives. My highest min/max with passives and max loot is 10-0-89-1466. That gives 3155 HP and 55,308 MANA

Fifty five thousand mana is what I call "extreme".

Now, 3000 HP at level 100 difficulty is not very usable. You might be able to get away with it if you only run the regular dungeons, but forget bosses or HDoL. It just is not enough health to survive without constant potion use. I generally need 10,000Hp or higher to stay alive so my INT is usually down about 1000 to 1100.

My skill bar at 100 is:

Left click: Ice Bolt or Ice Shards.
Right Click: Shadow Lightning
1-6: Acidic Blight, Gaseous Blast, Ring Of Fire, Unnerving Shout, Thickheadedness, Couch Potato, Bookworm Mental Prowess.

Thickheadedness is replaced with Improved Shadow Lightning when grouped. All skills are max rank.



Edited by Mama_Anarchia (06/19/07 12:50 PM)

Soul rend seems to work just fine for me since I get enough AGI from equipment to hit soul rend, I don't use it as a main attack or anything but when I have an enemy knocked down from holy roller I just use shadow lightning->soul rend ->shadow lightning->holy roller.

I think what they are attempting to tell you is even if it does appear to work for you now in a few levels it will not. Given that you are creating an all INT mage (so not sure why gear with AGI on it) at higher levels you will hit mobs very rarely. The defense on mobs will scale up dramatically faster than your AGI if you are not adding with stats and gear.

nice but um in pvp if you have less then 10k hp you might find yourself dying to much

If I am not mistaken, you just resurrected a half-a-year old topic.