Build:The Revenant

Full Build Details
 Introduction  To my surprise the basic frost battlemage has never been recorded on this wiki. So here it is. It's a fairly obvious build. Get gear that increases frost damage, get frost weapons and throw out some frost spells. What makes this build obvious is the Crimson Plate Set. It gives us a heavy armor that boosts frost damage much more than any set does for any other element. Combine this with some very good frost weapons in the game and you've got a really solid basis for a build. The heavyness of the set, steers us towards a melee warrior. But that's boring, so let's make ourself a cool battlemage! (See what I did there?)

 Skills  There are really two skill trees that include some sort of frost damage. The Philosopher has the Sigil of Ice and the Kazite Spellblade has the Infuse Frost and Elemental Discharge combo. Depending on your preferences you can go with one or both of these trees. If you want to make a more melee oriented warrior you are best off taking just the Kazite Spellblade and combining it with some melee skilltrees. This will allow you to use either a polearm or a shield. You might want to take the Skycrown Mace if you go this route, because of it's high attack speed.

But again, that's boring. And there are much better cooler options to explore here! Because all the synergy is here to make perfect use of the best chakram in the game. The Frozen Chakram not only does high damage, half of which is frost. But it also applies Elemental Vulnerability in three hits. Which is amazing and a debuff most builds struggle to apply. And if you are going to take a chakram as an offhand, and you are building a frost mage, you might aswell take the Philosopher tree.

These two trees together give you four frost spells. Two close range explosions and a projectile in the Sigil of Ice, and another projectile with Elemental Discharge. Meanwhile you have your chakram skills, which apart from doing ice damage, also apply Elemental Vulnerability and deal high impact damage from relative safety. And your heavy armor makes you fairly resistant to damage, meaning you will also do fairly well in melee range.

 Third breakthrough  So now that we've put together a fierce array of frost attacks, what do we do with last breakthrough? You could go several routes. But since we will have no problem doing damage, we should probably focus on survival at this point. With our skillbar being fairly crowded allready, preferably some passive buffs. And there are four possible trees that accomplish this. Two of which i consider superior. The Rogue Engineer and Wild Hunter both offer passive buffs. One the ability to dodge better, and the other some extra health. But besides the passive buffs they don't synergize very well at all with our build.

Then there are the Cabal Hermit and Warrior Monk. The first one makes all of our boons better. Which would increase our frost damage by another 10%, our physical damage from Discipline by another 15% and all of the defenses that our boons give us by 10%. That is not insignificant. It will protect us better against all kinds of elemental damage and gives us a modest damage increase. The second one will give us extra stemina which is nice, plus Master of Motion will give us 10% extra protection against all elements, physical damage and impact damage. And since we always need the discipline buff for our chakrams anyway, that's nice synergy. And if we like we can even take Counterstrike for a really good block skill.

Over all I like the Warrior Monk best. But it's entirely up to you!

 Gear  Because we are going to be casting quite a few spells, but are wearing heavy armor, the first thing we need to think about is our mana consumption. The ugly Crimson Plate Mask needs to go, as it gives a 20% penalty on our mana cost. Fortunately we have a hat that fits perfectly with both the look and concept of this build! The Red Wide Hat gives a 10% increase to frost damage, 20% reduction in mana cost and even 5% reduction in stemina cost. The perfect hat for a frost focussed battlemage.

The weapon is a fairly easy choice too. The Hailfrost Set all give a 10% boost to our frost damage. Which of the one handed weapons you prefer is really up to you, but they all have the same attack speed and the mace has the highest damage. The attack animations are different though, so pick what fits your playstyle. Do keep in mind that the Hailfrost Set items continually lose durability as they melt away in your hand. And the only way to repair them is to apply a Cold Stone. Which you always carry around for your Sigil of Ice anyway, so that's easy enough.

Lastly the backpack. It really doesn't matter. I picked this one because it looks fairly good with the rest of the outfit, and a bit of barrier is nice to have, to make you a bit tankier. Pick whatever you like here.

 Combat  Alright, so how do we actually fight with this build? Even though we wear heavy armor and are using close range weapons, we should keep in mind that we are playing as a mage, rather than a warrior. So we want to make sure we kite the enemy whenever we can. We might not be all that fast, but we do apply Slow Down with almost everything we do. Besides that we want to use a combination of spells, chakram attacks and melee attacks to continually damage our opponents without taking too many hits ourselves.

Before combat we obviously apply our buffs, our frost infusion and place our Sigil of Ice. We then lure our opponent with an Elemental Discharge. Then we hit the enemy with a few chakram attacks while we kite them back towards the sigil. If you get an opening to apply the Chill Hex you should absolutely do so, the animation is quite short so you can quite easily dodge away after hexing the enemy. If you've done it well, you will have applied Elemental Vulnerability and Chill Hex by the time you get to the Sigil of Ice. You can now start throwing your full might at the enemy. Hit them with a Mana Push to hit them with an ice projectile and destabilize them. Whenever the enemy's Stability is below half, you can hit them with a few melee attacks untill they are knocked down. Whenever you feel you might get hit, simply pop Mana Ward to do huge ice damage and become immortal for 3 seconds. When the enemy is knocked down, fall back and use spells and chakram attacks to get their Stability below half again and repeat.

Most enemies won't live to even see both Elemental Vulnerability and Chill Hex applied before falling to your hugely boosted ice damage. But if they do, they won't last much longer.

 Ice damage calculation  Just for fun, let's calculate our damage output.

Gear: Boots 11% + Chest 21% + Hat 10% + Weapon 10% = 52% increased ice damage Buffs: Imbue 25% + Boon 20% = 45% increased ice damage Debuffs: Elemental Vulnerability 25% + Chill hex 25% = 50% increased ice damage Total: 147% increased ice damage

Let's look at some of our spells and attacks:

Elemental Discharge does 60*2.47 = 148.2 ice damage Frost Push does 85*2.47 = 209.95 ice damage Frost Burst does 100*2.47 = 247 ice damage Frozen Chakram does 22.5*1.15 = 25.88 physical damage and 22.5 * 2.47 = 55.56 ice damage for a total of 81.44 damage Hailfrost Mace does 24*2.47 + 24*1.15 = 86.88 damage

This means that after applying your debuffs, you can kill an Immaculate with 775 health, with three spells and a chakram pierce.