How do you cope with Mages being so squishy?

[Nynax]

I agree with this completely. It's one thing when you out gear everything and your CC's work as expected. It's another thing entirely when you are fighting some rares with appropriate levels of gear. I find it incredibly frustrating that my frost mage has to stand there and get smashed in the face because my slows don't work. By comparison most other classes still have their entire survival toolkit still available.

Sound's like Fire really is the way to go for rare's then.

Seriously that scorch run speed is crazy fast....It'll take forever to kill shit however.

[Jurani]

eat your mage food between fights

[Coffeh]

I thought crz kind of eliminated the empty world feel. Shouldn't there be players all over the place? Meaning not being great at soloing doesn't really matter.

[Deleted]

~5% leech on your gear + prydaz/blink chest makes soloing the 100m+ hp elites on Argus easy in fire

[Zenfoldor]

Sound's like Fire really is the way to go for rare's then.

Seriously that scorch run speed is crazy fast....It'll take forever to kill shit however.

For a rare, I'll, hero, prepot/flask/augment fully buffed and have the 20% damage buff from my follower. If you have the lego belt, sub 30% scorch/pb spam hits harder than anything we've got. I can usually burst down to 70-50% before the rare makes contact with me. You only have about 20% of the mob you have to actually kite around well(plus the <30 percent that you will easily burn off with the scorch belt). If you ice block after your shimmers are on CD that gives your cd's more chance to get back up and you can usually destroy any rare as fire very easily.

That shimmer heal is so OP on argus.

The only boss I've had even a little trouble with is the wolf boss that jumps to you and does a growl/telegraph attack. I ended up not having hero for him and had to do a bit of kiting and pulled some adds. Still didn't die, kited around all kinds of wolf adds at full health, just took a bit longer to get him to 30% using scorch+pyro builder.

Fire has passive healing for every shimmer and it's really strong, they have ice block, and they have the get out of death free card 1 time every x minutes. Add the passive 20% damage buff from followers and it is very strong on argus.

I prefer to run with DB helm and belt since that combo is probably the best all around for rares + trash, but the bracer/belt works too. I'd imagine sephuz+belt or any of the defensive legos would be fine as well.

PS: It helps to have shadowmeld, but invisible will also work if you see things aren't going as planned, don't be afraid to restart the fight. You'd be surprised how important that opener is when soloing rares. Facetank time is limited, so the opener is your biggest dps source.

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I thought crz kind of eliminated the empty world feel. Shouldn't there be players all over the place? Meaning not being great at soloing doesn't really matter.

There are, there are just a lot of rares.