Flux's Expert Mage Guide: Difference between revisions

This strategy guide to playing a high level mage was written by Flux back in the late 1990s, during Diablo's heyday. It was archived here, with permission of the author, in February 2009. The guide is unedited, aside from some wiki formatting changes.

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Apocalypse is a very useful spell, but it can't be learned in Diablo, so must be cast from staves of scrolls. (In Hellfire it is learnable, but you can only get the books from killing Na Krul, apoc is much weakened in damage, costs ungodly mana, and doesn't work over walls, so it's not really practical there.) Its great benefit in Diablo is that is works over walls, and is a physical attack, along the lines of stone curse and holy bolt, though both of those spells are useless against certain monsters. In other words, nothing is immune or resistant to apocalypse, including your character, though as a physical attack it can be blocked. Only Diablo casts apoc.

A mage with a bountiful or otherwise charge-intensive apoc staff can clear out major portions of the toughest monsters very quickly. My only comment on it is, "Cheap, lame, and wimpy". Mages (or the occasional rogue) who used apoc staves in multi-games I played were almost always those who lacked the skills to kill the monsters for real. Killing tons of stuff over the walls w/o any danger to yourself is not much fun, not very sporting, and not really a tactic I ever saw used much by the higher level chars. Still, for pure speed, a nice charged up apoc staff left in town and retrieved quickly for some especially tough portion of the game, (perhaps item retrieval after death) can be very useful. I would say don't carry it around normally, though, as it takes the place of 6 full mana pots, and you can do a lot more damage with those pots than with even a bountiful apoc staff in almost every situation.

==General Tips===

Blue, blue, and more blue. I usually have 1-6 blue on my belt, with a full yellow in 7 and 8, and maybe 2 or 3 more full yellow in the inventory and a few ID and infravision scrolls. Every other spot should be a full mana potion. One tip for quicker buying at the witch is to use the mouse and return keys. Point the mouse at the 150 blue potion on Adria's list, put your other hand on the return key, and alternate clicks as fast as you can. This will buy them much more quickly than "down, enter, enter". Also, for fast restocking of your belt, rather than picking potions out of the inventory and trying to click them into the small belt spots, I like to just drop 4 or 5 from inventory to the floor, close the "I" window, and then click them up, letting the auto-belt stocking function put them where I wanted them.

 

 

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