These are the stats to look for on gear and the general order of importance for this build. Over the long run, you will have better damage from those upgrades. You could say this is more of a convenience skill, but buying less mana potions means having more gold for gambling item upgrades. Mana doesnвЂ™t regenerate fast enough for you to spam skills without it. Many skills get bonus damage based on your magic weapon damage, so this skill indirectly boosts your skill damage.ДЄdvanced Spellcasting saves you from having to carry a stash of mana potions in your inventory all the time. It increases your Staff or Wand damage by 60% at max rank. Magic Weapons Expertise is also really important. Critical Strikes is +22% to all damage, the biggest buff the Alchemist gets from a passive skill. The passive skills you can get in basically any order except for Critical Strikes, Magic Weapons Expertise, and Advanced Spellcasting. It will protect you from thousands of damage points. Ember Shield scales really well with your attributes. At the higher levels, you will have trouble with monster damage to your character. Use it on monsters that arenвЂ™t moving around much (behind walls, on upper/lower platforms).Д®mber Shield is the last skill you get. This is basically a meteor that comes down on monsters, but the cast time is slow. The last damage skill you get is Ember Strike. It should be used as an alternate to Ember Lightning, because some monsters are resistant to lightning damage and fire damage will be effective against them.

It being fire damage, it does not slow enemies down like Iceshock.

Pyre is a replacement for Iceshock with similar functionality except Pyre does more damage and fire instead of ice. Ember Lightning does well against all monsters really, but you wonвЂ™t have enough mana to use it exclusively when it first becomes available. Ember Lightning will be your best area damage with Ember Lightning for champions and bosses. These two skills will mostly be ignored once you get Ember Lightning and Ember Lance. Iceshock will also slow enemies down, so it can be used for some crowd control of the monsters. Early in the game you will be using Ember Bolt for your single target damage and Iceshock for area damage. With this build you are taking all of the fun caster spells and will be able to deal with any situation. I keep focusing points in the earlier active skills but also have access to the higher level spells for certain situations. Most skills work really well with just one point. When I get high enough level to access one of the new active skills, I immediately put one point in it. SkillsД¤ Defensive Spell Mastery (help with pet skills)ДЄt any time I like to be working on both an active skill and a passive skill, though I make one exception. Retribution does a lot of damage to all those monsters attacking the pet with up to 80 percent melee damage reflected. With my other characters, my pet always seemed to get beat on all the time. Ranged damage is the AlchemistвЂ™s main weakness. Silence is nice to limit monsters from casting spells. I could have gone with Fireball and Frost again for more damage, but I wanted a little bit more variety. Frozen enemies move very slowly giving you time to move around.ДЇor the pet we have some defensive spells. Fireball in particular does really good damage at high levels, so it will last you a long time. Without it the monsters will have too high magic damage reduction that your spells and skills will all be glancing blows.ДЇireball VI and Frost VI are nice spells to supplement your skills. SpellsД®lemental Overload VI is critical for skills and spells that do elemental damage. Dying in Torchlight doesnвЂ™t have a big penalty. At high levels, you will probably need to start to putting a few more points in Defense every level to survive.

If Defense wasnвЂ™t required for gear, I would put 5 points in Magic every level. Even armor that requires mostly Magic still has some Defense requirements. Level 36+: Alternate 4 Magic, 3 Defense and 3 Magic, 2 Defense as needed for survivabilityДЇour Magic points per level will ensure maximum magic damage. Level 1 вЂ“ 35: 4 points in Magic, 1 point in Defense each level But of course itвЂ™s easy to die when you get surrounded by monsters.

Your character becomes a glass cannon just like the Sorceress in Diablo 2 with flashy spells that fill the screen and kill everything. In this build I take all of the skills from the Arcane tree and a few passives from Lore tree. I generally like to use a class the way it was first intended before branching off with more hybrid builds. With this build I wanted to go with the typical caster character.

Torchlight 2 embermage fire build