Build:Ethereal Battlemage

Full Build Details
 Introduction  The Ethereal Battlemage can be played as a pure caster, or as a hybrid melee caster. It all depends on your playstyle. I will attempt to lay out te interactions between skills and point out what makes certain combinations powerful. It will be up to you to decide how exactly to apply these concepts.

 Skills  The Ethereal Battlemage has a large array of skills at his disposal. Too many to put on your skillbar. So depending on how you like to play, a selection must be made.

Caster The mage part of battlemage, comes mainly from two abilities. The ethereal projectile from elemental discharge, and the runic trap. These two abilities do a large amount of damage and impact on their own. And vary few enemies have resistance to ethereal damage. So for most smaller enemies, you will only need these two abilities. You can also use the ethereal skeleton summoned by Conjure to distract and apply even more ethereal damage

Buffs, boons and hexes All ethereal damage originating from you, is enhanced by your gear and mist boon. This means that ethereal damage from both your elemental discharge and your melee attacks, deal 55% more damage. All ethereal damage done by external sources, is not influenced by your gear and boon. So your runic trap and skeleton, don't get buffed by your gear! That is why we rely on the Haunt Hex to increase all ethereal damage to the target by 25% and the Elemental Vulnerability debuff that is applied by your weapon, to increase elemental damage against the target by another 25%. Because both of these debuffs are attached to the enemy, they increase the damage from all sources. Even traps and summons.

Staying alive While the spells above allow you to deal large amounts of ethereal damage in various ways, you will also need to stay alive long enough to cast them all. To this end we have various options. Some more mage oriented, some more melee oriented. You do good impact damage with your opening salvo and more impact damage with your melee range Mana Push and Moon Swipe. So since you already find yourself in melee range quite often to apply the Elemental Vulnerability debuff and knock your foes down. And your medium armor makes you relatively durable. You might consider taking some block skills. Brace is a nice free block. And Mana Ward is also a really great option to allow you to swing your scythe around without any danger.

If you aren't great at timing your blocks, or just prefer to be more of a mage. You might consider bringing Dez and Egoth, allowing you to heal yourself after you take damage. Instead of preventing damage.

Or if you are confident in your ability to knock down enemies and roll out of the way of attacks, you can use those two slots to mix in the Sigil of Wind to do some lightning damage with Spark or Conjure and add an ethereal bolt to your Mana Push.

 Gear  In terms of gear, the scythe and backpack are relatively easy to craft fairly early on. Look up the recepie and hunt for the ingredients.

The armor on the other hand, is quite hard to get. You have to rely on getting the pieces from random loot drops, and have to then improve it through the legacy system. So if you aren't willing to farm this particular armor set, here are some points to consider:
 * Any damage increase from your gear, only effects your Elemental Discharge projectile and melee attacks. Which is only a small part of your damage. So extra ethereal damage isn't mandetory.
 * Your are in melee range more often than most spellcasters, so some good damage reduction is useful.
 * You are really mana hungry, so any mana reduction is really useful.

Depending on your playstyle you could run with the Golden Lich set, the Tenebrous set, the Antique set or even the Runic set. As long as it doesn't have a heavy mana cost debuff on it, it's viable.

 Faction  Lastly the Sorobor Academy is the faction that allows you to gain the Infuse Magic ability. Which is an awesome ability and really really great to have in this build. You can however make due without it and use Spiritual Varnish instead. They are relatively hard to come by and you would go through them really quickly as it's a core part of the build to apply your weapon enchantment. But you could do without if you wanted to.

Combos
Put down a runic trap and lure the enemy with an Elemental Discharge. Once the enemy is close enough, apply Haunt Hex and hit him with a Moon Swipe and one auto attack. If this doesn't already knock down your enemy, end the combo with a Mana Push. Your enemy is now vulnerable to Ethereal damage, Weak to elemental damage and knocked down. This will give you room to put down a second Runic Trap and hit them with another Elemental Discharge. This second round of attacks will do 50% more damage due to the hex and vulnerability.