Techknow:Mage Macabre Guide
Contents
About
My guide on the Macabre Olympiad guide anyone towards completing it on a Mage Human or High Elf. Why another guide? The quest will have you go through so many monsters that are element resistant and immune, which requires mages to be versatile in magical elements. Unfortunately this makes Mages weak due to spreading skill points everywhere and take much longer to kill monsters than other races that focus on a single melee element. I am going to figure out a way to optimze a Mage's skills, spells, and equipment to beat this quest.
There are a lot of details I found that I feel are essential to Mages not in the main guide that I will go over here.
Despite writing this guide I feel it will not give anybody who is reading this a significant edge. At the moment I have a level 26 human mage and the farthest I gone in the 17th map until I got stuck and killed by a Cacodemon (but I dodged death and lost no XP!). It took me 4.5 hours to get to that point - this is truly a marathon!
Challenges
To further justify this guide I will outline the challenges a mage will face in the Olympiad.
Skills
As a level 26 Human Archmage, my character has 101 skill points to spend, 20 Mediation, 100% Extra Mana, and -5 to skill weapon skills but staves and whips. So here is how I allocate them:
| Skill Point Allocation | ||
| Skill | Before | After |
| Find Weakness | 17 | 17 |
| Lore | 10 | 13 |
| Water Magic | 12 | 10 |
| Earth Magic | 11 | 11 |
| Dodging | 9 | 5 |
| Fire Magic | 5 | 10 |
| Air Magic | 6 | 6 |
| Spirit Magic | 7 | 7 |
| Mind Magic | 2 | 2 |
| Life Magic | 4 | 4 |
| Strength | 3 | 3 |
| Spirit Travel | 6 | 0 |
| Merchant | 5 | 0 |
| Evocation | 2 | 2 |
| Sneaking | 2 | 0 |
| Death Magic | 0 | 10 |
Sneaking and Merchant don't help me at all in killing monsters, and if I die I have to start all over so I also do not have to bother with spirit magic (I can use an amulet of lifesaving if I am fast enough to save XP). I only really need dodging against diamond golems, all other monsters should never be within melee range, so I will reduce it somewhat. Finally I noticed with Icestorm which uses Water Magic it doesn't save another spell cast against enemies that die on 2 or 3 full Icestorms so I can reduce that a bit. I free up a lot of skill points for Lore, Fire and Death Magic to get Dragon Breath and to replace my rod for a more powerful DB that doesn't have a cooldown.
