I started playing DR on Thursday night I think. It's all pretty blurry. Let's just say I'm addicted to this game, anyways, I'm level 27 with ~150 shadow damage and I forgot how many intelligence. So far the shadow spells are dealing out insanely good ammounts of AoE and focus fire damage. I've mostly put in 3 int and 2 endurance every level.

Sometimes I get some +fire damage on the side (only if it won't hurt my shadow damage).

What I'm trying to say is playing a mage is by far a great experience. If you're wondering about rolling one, do it. It's fun.

that beat my Level 16 starting Saturday morning ... but I played Golf sunday.. so that cost me 5+ hours of DR!!

My mage is coming along nicely.. one thing that helped A LOT was adjust my hotkeys. Assigning a spell to the left mouse button is great.

Left Mouse = FIRE
Right Mouse = ICE
1, 2, 3 = AoE spells, Lightning/Poison/Fire

(This means I never attack with my weapon.. which is fine. I just use that for stat buffs or for show)

Get the mobs to surround me by nailing them with lightning. Then Blast them with poison & fire. Fire off a couple more Lightnings.. maybe slow down a boss with Ice.. then right back to AoE Fire and Poison.. Rinse and Repeat

Yeah right now I have Fireball in left mouse and Shadow Bolt in right mouse. Fireball does just *almost* the same ammount of Shadowbolt but it's mana efficient and shadowbolt is not. I use fireballs only when the target is standing still and I need to be mana efficient with no mana potions. I almost never run out though.
1: Shadow Lightning
2: Gaseous Cloud
3: Ring of Fire
4: Shadow Word: Smackdown
5: Shadow Mastery (+130 shadow dps at 32)
6: Lightning Mastery or whatever (chance on shadow lightning hit to arc another)
7: passive stat buff
8: passive stat buff

Right now I'm level 32 with 196 shadow damage and just over 300 int now. I have ~11k mana.

Fun stuff. What I do is start off with shadowbolts or lightning then hit my AoEs. Keep firing Shadow Lightning everytime it's up and cast THREE Shadowbolts in between lightnings. AoEs everytime they're up as well unless there is a more reasonable ammount of mobs left.

It's possible to only cast two shadowbolts in between lightnings but I've found that in some cases of lag it's more safer to cast after three.

I would like to try a different type of mage but maybe only when the new character slots come around. I'm sure a fire magic built mage could do some INSANE fireball damage.. If sporting the same ammount of +dmg butwith fire magic instead. Hehe. I may roll a tank instead though. This game is fun.

Im only lvl 21 atm but my Shadow Lighting is hitting for a lil over 1500. I set a goal when I started that I was going all for the Highest Damage possible. So far I have every single one of my points in Int and am having no problems with surviving.

I usually enter combat with a Shadow Smack, then Lighting, Richeous stomp(or whatever its called)then more lighting.

I can't wait till lvl 30!!!