Mana Strike is a fun skill, one of the only Melee skills available to the Mage class. With a 0 mana cost and even free mana generation, it’s also one of the only skills in the game which don’t have to worry about mana sustain.Mana Strike has a couple of core tree nodes which make it really interesting to play. The first is Teleporting Strikes, which lets us attack INSTANTLY at INFINITE RANGE (i.e. anywhere on the screen). This is much better than spells like Fireball which have travel time.

The second set of strong core tree nodes are Mana Spark+Celestial Precision. These nodes let us scale our Mana Strike damage and crit chance off of our Mana pool. The really huge thing about this is that it turns Mana from a utility suffix into an offensive suffix - and offensive suffixes are extremely rare in this game.

Being an attack, we can also very easily stack Attack Speed on multiple slots, such as weapon, gloves, and amulet. We get 30% attack speed from passives and 30% more from the MS tree. Overall, we end up hitting incredibly fast, instantly, at long distances.

On top of this we can use the Mage’s extremely strong defensive options, Fire Shield and Ice Ward, to get layered defenses. For example, my current char (level 49) has 50% all elemental prots and 50% void prot with pretty mediocre gear, as well as 59% block chance and 38% dodge chance. This comes on top of very high ward gain and ward retention from the ward on hit, ward on kill, ward on block, and ward on dodge the class has access to.

The damage is quite good, I hit 3-4 times per second and deal 200dmg on non-crit, 500dmg on crit, with a total crit chance of somewhere between 37% and 50% (big range but the way Celestial Precision applies hasn’t yet been clarified).

Mana Strike Specialization Following this order from first specializing to level 20: 2 pts Swift Strike, 2 pts Rage Sap, 1 pt Teleporting Strikes - Gives us excellent range 3 pts Sprite Blade - Additional area of effect for clearing packs 3 pts Mana Spark, 1 pt Celestial Precision - Fat base damage and bonus crit chance Finish off Swift Strike and Sprite Blade - Complete these for better clear The final points are your choice, I finished off Rage Sap and put 1 point into Spark Charge to improve damage and clear. Putting 1+ points into Repulsing Strikes gives some effective defense against charging enemies.

Fire Shield and Ice Ward Ice Ward and Fire Shield provide us with excellent layered defenses and some offensive power. Fire Shield also lets us capitalize on Passive bonuses such as Spellbound Weapon. Fire Shield 1 pt Master of the Elements, 2 pts Warding, 1 pt Plasma Shield - some defenses and a big %increased damage. Finish off Master of the Elements and Warding. 5pts Lasting Defense The remaining points are your choice. Ice Ward 1pt Frozen Aegis - Incredible defensive bonus, and even base mana regen seems to make the downside non-existent. 4pts Eternal Ward - EW is our main source of ward retention outside of Int stats so it should be prioritized. 2pts Expansive Aegis - Block is a good defense for us, 3% per point is worth 1 Block Chance tier on shield 2pts Defender of the Elements, 2pts Mind Block - Gives us some ward gain and some block protection, synergises very well with the skill as a whole. 5pts Swirling Barrier - ward regen keeps us healthier Remaining points are your choice, I went with 3 pts in Iceskin and the rest in Defender of the Elements. If you have a very good shield (i.e. 70%+ block chance total with Ice Ward + shield) you can consider Impenetrable Ice, it gives very large defenses. The build also uses Innervate for Ward gain and Teleport for movement when farming, neither of these have trees currently but build will be updated when they get trees.

Passives 10pts Arcane Warden - attack speed is our highest priority and ward gain on hit is a big bonus. We also need 10pts allocated to get Ice Ward. 6pts Storm Duelist - shock chance is a big dmg bonus vs tanks for Arena (i.e. Effigies) and 2 Agility gives us some extra APS. 5pts Capacitor - just a straight damage/APS bonus for this build. 1pt Spellbound Weapon, 3pts Enchant Weapon - lets us capitalize on the constant Fire Shield casts, and gives us some bonus flat lightning damage. Spellblade - required to get into the upper sections, the actual bonus is pretty meaningless for us. Finish off Enchant Weapon and Spellbound Weapon - more dmg 10pts Mind Slayer - gives us a very fat Ward bonus if we are killing a lot This gets us to ~51? The rest of the points are up to you, IMO the best options are actually in the Sorceror tree, 25pts in Scholar and Wisdom will net you 5 Intelligence (=50% Ward retention), 75 mana (=11 flat lightning and 7.5% base crit), and 70 health (pretty meaningless). After these, Ward Draught might be good defensively, or more points in the third level of Spellblade to get some stats (extra Agility or Attunement mostly).