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Ice blast at level 1 seems to be about the same as maxed ice bolt, but in my opinion you can see a notable difference once you hit level 59 to get ice blast level 2 (both in damage and the slow). Plus it looks cooler =P
Anyway, everyone's entitled to their own spell sequence. My 'golden rule' for spell sequence is to start out with ice blast level 2, then cast MM1 every other spell and FB1 every 3 spells making it look something like:
ice blast (2) => MM1 => FB1 => MM1 => ___ => MM1 => FB1 => MM1 => ____ => etc
where "____" can be lightning bolt (max), magic burst, or magic blast (immediate casts). This way you are doing the most damage possible w/o any lag time/wait time for spells to cd. plz note that i am only level 59 at the moment (or back to 58 after BR quest removal) so i have no experience with fear/nova/inferno yet and are thus not included.
So basically I'm doing the same sequence that Patch does, however I find magic blast to be more of an "immediate cast" spell rather than a spell that has cast time, thus is included as one of the "___" spells. The reason for this is because unlike fire/ice/lightning blast (i'll explain more below), you can "animation cancel" magic blast and treat it like you would casting magic missile/fire/ice/lightning bolts. By "animation cancel" I mean you could take out the lag time it takes to cast by simply telling your character to do something else (like take a step away from the mob) in the time you are casting. By telling your character to process another action that's not another spell (like walk), you can ignore the "second half" of the spell animation (where the mage jumps in the air shooting that blinding blast) and cast another spell immediately. Please note you can't just tell the mage to cast another spell after magic blast to "animation cancel" because the spell you are casting after magic blast won't trigger until after the entire animation of magic blast is done (you are not cancelling anything).
Another example of "animation cancel" is using lifetap. Lifetap is also considered a spell that has cast time. But like magic blast, you can tell your mage to do something else almost-immediately after you cast lifetap. Most noticeable way to see this in my opinion is going into your mushroom house to rest the moment you cast it. You'll see that the animation is still finishing up but you're already in the house.
Ice/fire/lightning blast is something I haven't been able to "animation cancel" with (and thus are not used in my 'golden rule sequence'), but I believe the reason for that is because all the animation happens in the beginning, and by the time you want to "animation cancel" you have already gone through the entire cast time and there's "nothing left to cancel." For magic blast, there is no animation in the beginning, so you could abuse that and tell your mage to do something else to "animation cancel" and allow you to use up that time to cast another spell.
I know this is hard to explain in words, especially cause of my bad English, but this is how I see things. Of course, I am not saying this is how the game works and could just be me since I have bad graphics card on computer. Mix my ghetto computer with lag on server and I could easily be mistaken that the 0.7 cast time for magic blast looks like immediate cast. If someone could try this out and confirm with me that would be great ^^
In terms of HP/SP cost, I agree with Patch in that SP consumption is not a problem while soloing because you will be using up a lot, if not all, or your HP stones before you even get close to running low on SP stones (of course this is as a lvl 59 mage w/o fear). The only time I watch my SP consumption is if I am duoing with a cleric in which case I do not waste SP casting ice blast and just stand still spamming immediate-cast spells (and lifetap if the cleric doesn't mind).
Hope this helped more than it did causing chaos and confusion >.<
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holyfridge - 54 cleric (retired)
horyfridge - 6x mage (active)
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