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Thaumaturges Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
katamaster81899
Member Posts: 1,157 Arc User
Disclaimer: This build is going to be a constant work in progress. Don't be surprised if things change, by no means is this finished. A lot of the time, I'm going off of my memory when I write this, so there may be a few small errors. Please let me know if you catch any and I will correct them as soon as I can. I'm also trying to push this guide out before I lose my motivation, so I'm going to be rather vague in some sections, hopefully, assuming I'm still motivated after posting this, I'll finish those up and add more detail and explanation. If you specifically ask for it, I'll probably do it.
Race:
For this build, I'd recommend either rolling a Dragonborn, Human, or Tiefling toon. Humans offer additional feat points, while Tiefling and Dragonborn allow you to really maximize your crit. This is not necessary - My CW is a half-elf, because I liked the look of it. It does not have a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of this build.
Initial Stat Rolls:
I'm going to keep this simple for now, I'll elaborate more at a later point in time - Try to get the highest Intelligence and Charisma roll as possible. Intelligence provides damage, charisma provides crit.
Paragon and Feats:
First, I'll give you a screenshot of my current spec, then I'll elaborate on why I chose each feat.
Heroic Feats:
Toughness - I chose this feat because in the grand scheme of things, I plan to be wearing the HV set full time while I play, and I'm going to need to every damn drop of HP I can get in order to survive. However, even if you aren't using the HV set, I would advise that you take this feat anyways as 9% increase to maximum HP is pretty nice.
Weapon Mastery - CW's are extremely dependent on crit, as Storm Spell provides such a large chunk of our damage. 3% additional crit chance, there's no question about it, take it!
Wizard's Wrath - Additional 3% AoE damage, far better than Battlewise, and I'm not as concerned with reducing encounter cooldowns (Fight On) thanks to spell twisting, so I'd say this is definitely the best option in it's tier.
Fight On (3/5) - This is the second best option in its tier, and reducing cooldowns on encounter isn't bad, so I put enough points to progress to the next tier into this one.
Blighting Power - Additional 6% damage done when using cold powers against targets that have chill applied. Since we're going to be using 2 cold encounters, and an at-will that is a cold encounter, this feat is worth taking for sure.
Focused Wizardry - I'll admit it, I was a doubter at first when it came to this feat, but some of my friends have since convinced me otherwise. 10% AoE damage reduction, but 30% increase in damage for single target skills. My logic is that I don't need that extra 10% damage against trash mobs that die within seconds, but a 30% increase in single target powers, which I use against bosses - That's going to make quite a difference.
Paragon Feats:
Tempest Magic and Malevolent Surge - Both of these feats offered increase damage, and occur/proc quite often in combat. They're better than both the feats in the next tier, so I would recommend you take both of them.
Spell Twisting - This is one of the most important feats in this build, you'd better take it! It effectively reduces all of your encounter cooldowns by 30%.
Frozen Power Transfer OR Elemental Reinforcement - This was a tough decision for me. Both of these feats are good, and with my rota, I'd get 15% bonus damage pretty consistently from either of these. However, I found that Elemental Reinforcement performed better in short, AoE situations, whereas Frozen Power Transfer performed best in single target/boss/dragon situations. Really, this is a matter of personal preference. [Note: At the moment, it seems as though Frozen Power Transfer is bugged, and cannot stack. Elemental Reinforcement will perform better until this is fixed. Next time I respec I will be switching this feat as well]
Elemental Empowerment - You're going to be dealing a lot of cold damage with this build, and this feat procs off of cold damage, so why not take it! It does a substantial amount of damage when it procs, I'd say it is worth it.
Assailing Force - Thaum capstone, need I explain further?
Bitter Cold - Your target will pretty much ALWAYS have a stack of chill on it, so this feat is an extra 6% damage.
Chilling Control OR Severe Reaction - I'm not a huge fan of either of the feats available here, but these two seemed to at least offer SOMETHING positive to my build. Chilling Control is better for those who are worried about the minor repel caused by Severe Reaction. Severe Reaction can be handy for its AP gain, but it does have a minor repel effect on enemies that strike you. However, this effect is minimal because mobs have so much CC immunity in dungeons.
Icy Veins - Finally, the other most important feat in this build. Icy veins grants you an insane amount of control. Basically, whenever you use an encounter, all of the enemies around you recieve 5 stacks of chill, which is one stack short of freezing them. If used with CoI or IT, it's basically an insta-freeze.
Boons
Rotations:
I find these two rotations to work very well in PVE content with multiple enemies.
Icy Terrain, Steal Time, Sudden Storm
Spell Mastery: Conduit of Ice
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
Icy Terrain, Steal Time, Conduit of Ice
Spell Mastery: Chill Strike
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
When in single target scenarios, such as boss battles, demogorgon p2 and p3, dragon runs, tiamat head phases, I use the following rotation:
Conduit of Ice, Ray of Enfeeblement, Disintegrate
Spell Mastery: Chill Strike or Icy Rays
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
There will be a follow up post regarding gear, what stats to stack, weapon enchantments, when to use Chilling Presence vs EotS and companions. Just give me some time to write it!
Race:
For this build, I'd recommend either rolling a Dragonborn, Human, or Tiefling toon. Humans offer additional feat points, while Tiefling and Dragonborn allow you to really maximize your crit. This is not necessary - My CW is a half-elf, because I liked the look of it. It does not have a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of this build.
Initial Stat Rolls:
I'm going to keep this simple for now, I'll elaborate more at a later point in time - Try to get the highest Intelligence and Charisma roll as possible. Intelligence provides damage, charisma provides crit.
Paragon and Feats:
First, I'll give you a screenshot of my current spec, then I'll elaborate on why I chose each feat.
Heroic Feats:
Toughness - I chose this feat because in the grand scheme of things, I plan to be wearing the HV set full time while I play, and I'm going to need to every damn drop of HP I can get in order to survive. However, even if you aren't using the HV set, I would advise that you take this feat anyways as 9% increase to maximum HP is pretty nice.
Weapon Mastery - CW's are extremely dependent on crit, as Storm Spell provides such a large chunk of our damage. 3% additional crit chance, there's no question about it, take it!
Wizard's Wrath - Additional 3% AoE damage, far better than Battlewise, and I'm not as concerned with reducing encounter cooldowns (Fight On) thanks to spell twisting, so I'd say this is definitely the best option in it's tier.
Fight On (3/5) - This is the second best option in its tier, and reducing cooldowns on encounter isn't bad, so I put enough points to progress to the next tier into this one.
Blighting Power - Additional 6% damage done when using cold powers against targets that have chill applied. Since we're going to be using 2 cold encounters, and an at-will that is a cold encounter, this feat is worth taking for sure.
Focused Wizardry - I'll admit it, I was a doubter at first when it came to this feat, but some of my friends have since convinced me otherwise. 10% AoE damage reduction, but 30% increase in damage for single target skills. My logic is that I don't need that extra 10% damage against trash mobs that die within seconds, but a 30% increase in single target powers, which I use against bosses - That's going to make quite a difference.
Paragon Feats:
Tempest Magic and Malevolent Surge - Both of these feats offered increase damage, and occur/proc quite often in combat. They're better than both the feats in the next tier, so I would recommend you take both of them.
Spell Twisting - This is one of the most important feats in this build, you'd better take it! It effectively reduces all of your encounter cooldowns by 30%.
Frozen Power Transfer OR Elemental Reinforcement - This was a tough decision for me. Both of these feats are good, and with my rota, I'd get 15% bonus damage pretty consistently from either of these. However, I found that Elemental Reinforcement performed better in short, AoE situations, whereas Frozen Power Transfer performed best in single target/boss/dragon situations. Really, this is a matter of personal preference. [Note: At the moment, it seems as though Frozen Power Transfer is bugged, and cannot stack. Elemental Reinforcement will perform better until this is fixed. Next time I respec I will be switching this feat as well]
Elemental Empowerment - You're going to be dealing a lot of cold damage with this build, and this feat procs off of cold damage, so why not take it! It does a substantial amount of damage when it procs, I'd say it is worth it.
Assailing Force - Thaum capstone, need I explain further?
Bitter Cold - Your target will pretty much ALWAYS have a stack of chill on it, so this feat is an extra 6% damage.
Chilling Control OR Severe Reaction - I'm not a huge fan of either of the feats available here, but these two seemed to at least offer SOMETHING positive to my build. Chilling Control is better for those who are worried about the minor repel caused by Severe Reaction. Severe Reaction can be handy for its AP gain, but it does have a minor repel effect on enemies that strike you. However, this effect is minimal because mobs have so much CC immunity in dungeons.
Icy Veins - Finally, the other most important feat in this build. Icy veins grants you an insane amount of control. Basically, whenever you use an encounter, all of the enemies around you recieve 5 stacks of chill, which is one stack short of freezing them. If used with CoI or IT, it's basically an insta-freeze.
Boons
Rotations:
I find these two rotations to work very well in PVE content with multiple enemies.
Icy Terrain, Steal Time, Sudden Storm
Spell Mastery: Conduit of Ice
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
Icy Terrain, Steal Time, Conduit of Ice
Spell Mastery: Chill Strike
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
When in single target scenarios, such as boss battles, demogorgon p2 and p3, dragon runs, tiamat head phases, I use the following rotation:
Conduit of Ice, Ray of Enfeeblement, Disintegrate
Spell Mastery: Chill Strike or Icy Rays
Dailies: Oppressive Force, Icy Knife
Class Feat: EotS/Chilling Presence (depends on your crit chance), Storm Spell
There will be a follow up post regarding gear, what stats to stack, weapon enchantments, when to use Chilling Presence vs EotS and companions. Just give me some time to write it!
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Post edited by katamaster81899 on
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There are a ton of good artifacts for a control wizard. A lot of it depends on your budget, what alts you have, and what your current stat distribution is. There are two artifacts I would recommend using for their in-combat powers:
Before we start choosing the rest of our artifacts, there's one other thing we have to consider: Artifact Sets. My build utilizes the lostmauth set. I would highly recommend that you use a Lostmauth's Horn of Blasting as another one of the 4 artifacts you can slot at level 70.
That leaves two more slots for artifacts chosen based purely on their stats. Here's just a few of the artifacts that will work well with my build. Some of these will work well for you, some may not. Personally, I use the Lantern of Revelation and the Sigil of the Controller, as I prefer the critical strike on my artifacts. I'll explain how to choose which artifact is best for you when we get to the section of this guide dedicating to stat distribution.: (These artifacts were listed off of the top of my head, let me know if you think I missed anything, I'll go through the collections page to double check at some point this week)
Artifact Equipment
As of right now, while there is quite a variety of artifact gear sets out there, a few of them outshine the others in regards to damage for this build. Here's the Artifact Equipment I would reccomend:
Weapon and Armor Enchantments:
Alright, I'm going to keep this one simple because... it is simple! For weapon enchantment, this build is designed to work with one specific weapon enchantment. Vorpal! Ideally, a Perfect Vorpal or better, but the best that you have will work. I do not recommend trying to switch this out for any other weapon enchantment - Control Wizard are extremely dependent on crit to proc storm spell, therefore we are going to have extremely high crit chance. That makes vorpal by far the best enchantment possible for our DPS. However, @thefabricant will also argue that a Trans.Feytouched enchantment will perform about 10% better on thaumaturge CW - I don't have one to test with, so I can't confirm this, but if you want to give something else a try, that is an option. Just keep in mind that if you have more than one T.Fey in party, it will not work properly.
Now, you have a little more freedom when it comes to armor enchantment. I personally prefer a soulforged enchantment, I've had one since I started playing way back when, and I've stuck with it - for those of you who do not know, a soulforged enchantment automatically revives you when you die, and restores a small portion of your health. It has an ICD between 60-90 seconds depending on the rank of the enchantment. Other viable options for armor enchantments would be negation enchantment, which would improve damage resistance, and elven battle enchantment, which reduces the effect of slows and immobilizes on you, and improves stamina regeneration. The only reason I suggest elven battle is for the more squishy CWs wearing high vizier gear, this enchantment will give you more dodges in each fight, giving you greater survivability.
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Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
Companions:
Companions are probably the most customizable part of this build. It all depends on your budget - you can blow 10 million AD on companions, or spend 500k. Will there be a difference between the two? Of course! However, it's not gamebreaking, probably more like a measly 5-10% damage NOT including the augment/bonding companion I'll be discussing first.
Augment or Bonding Companion? What's the difference, and how do I choose?
Currently, there are two mainstream options for your summoned companion. Augment companions, and bonding companions. Augment companions add all of their stats to those of their summoner - it's basically an extra 3 gear slots and 3 runestone slots that apply to your character. They cannot engage in combat, and cannot attract any aggro. There are quite a few different augments out there, some are cheaper than others. Bonding Companions are summoned companions with bonding runestones placed in the runestone slots. Bonding runestones offer a chance for a percent of the companions stats to be added to those of the summoner whenever the companion uses a power. The percentage of stats gained varies by the rank of the bonding runestone.
Now, both of these options have their own pros and cons. Augments companions are extremely consistent - you'll always get the exact same amount of stats from it, and they never attract aggro. Bonding companions will cause your stats to jump around, sometimes you might not be getting any of your companions stats, and other times, you'll be getting 285% of your companions stats. They can also attract aggro.
So that leads us to the question: Which of these options is right for you? I'd say it's a matter of budget. In order to get better returns from the bonding companion than the augment, you need to have at least 3 greater bondings, if not perfect or better. If you cannot afford that - go with the augment, you'll get more out of it.
Here's a list of companions I'd recommend you use as a bonding companion. They are all very good at proccing bonding stones often, and most of them have useful active bonuses as well.
Now, pretty much all augments are good, but generally, the best ones will have two offensive runestone slots, and one defensive slot. This will allow you to put a high ranking Eldritch slot in the defense slot, providing you with more stats overall. I'll talk more about gear and stuff for augments when I get the rest of this guide done!
What gear do I put on my augment/bonding companion?
Companions have unique gear that can actually have better stats and more enchantment slots than some of the gear wearable by players. This gear is obtained through two main sources - Sword Coast Adventures (Gateway), and the major heroic encounters in your guilds stronghold. The gear that drops through SCA is almost always better, but some of the pieces tend to be rather expensive. Most of the time, you can find a cheaper version of the item in the auction house that has one different stat than the one I recommend here. The best companion gear for a companion is the _____ of the loyal avenger (fill the blank with necklace, ring, talisman, whatever slot you are filling). This item will provide power, crit, and arp, and has both an offense slot and a defense slot. Other than the ring and belt, they are pretty cheap on the AH, the ring and belt tend to fluctuate in price a bit more. I think the belt is cheaper than the ring.
Filling the other four companion slots:
Once again, this part is entirely dependant on your budget and your playstyle - choose what fits you best!
Here's a few of the companions I would consider to be decent enough to equip for their active bonus. Some are better than others, some only become effective once upgraded, and others might only work for certain playstyles. This list is definitely not all-inclusive - if you have a question about any that I have not listed here, please ask - if it's decent I'll add it to this list! (* before companion means I have not personally tested them, or had someone I trust test it for me).
Enchantments:
In this section, I'm going to discuss what enchantments to put in the offense/defense slots of your gear. I'll also somewhat discuss stat caps and curves while I'm doing this, and hopefully, I'll have enough reserved posts to elaborate upon that later on.
Offensive Enchantments:
Defensive Enchantments:
- Dark Enchantment - provides lifesteal, if you can get over 10% lifesteal, it makes dungeons and content in general far easier, it'll proc quite often given how many ticks of damage you'll get from multiproc encounters, storm spell, and boon procs.
|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
I just hit level 70! I've specced to the feats and powers above! But now what?!?
Congratulations! You've gotten through the most horrible 10 levels in the game! You've now made it through the hell the Module 6 brought upon us! (or at least the first part of it
Gearing up:
First things first: If you don't have all level 70 blue gear or better, open up the AH, and buy some cheap rares with good stats. Typically, I find that the "Cruel", "Smiting", and "Vicious" prefixes have the best stats. Look for gear with Power, Critical Strike, Armor Penetration, and if you want, Hit Points. Make sure that the gear you buy has an enchantment slot. This will give you decent enough stats to get some t1/t2/t2+ gear.
Next, as soon as possible, buy the following two pieces of gear from the auction house:
There are multiple easy ways to get some basic IL 115+ gear (T1) once you hit level 70. If there are two options offered, the reason is most likely because one has armor penetration, and one does not - If you are not using a bonding companion and your arpen is under 6k, choose the option with armor penetration. If you are using a bonding companion, I'd say that 5k arpen is enough
Earning AD: (Unfinished)
Now, I just told you to buy some stuff, but I didn't explain how to get that AD, did I! Let's fix that! There are quite a few ways to earn AD just buy playing the game. You just need to know which quests to run, and what things to queue for!.
- Daily Dungeon - The first two dungeons each day, either leveling or epic, both reward a small sum of rAD.
- Daily Skirmish - The first two skirmishes each day reward a small some of rAD
- Weekly Campaign Quests - The weekly quests that are part of each campaign reward 4500 rAD each.
- Invoking - Invoking gives you AD, you get more for each progressive invocation you make. The more characters you do this on, the better.
- Demonic Heroic Encounters - Demonic HEs, added module 8, are one of my favorite sources of AD for undergeared alts. These heroic encounter drops seals of elements, and have a chance to drop Salvageable rings. Lots of people run these encounters in WoD and IWD, so you don't need to be super strong to complete these encounters.
- Draconic Heralds - The hourly heralds run in WoD have high chances of dropping resonance stones, which can be sold on the auction house for AD.
Post still in progress|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
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Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
Before I go into this, here is a sneak preview of my character. Not all of my gear is BiS - I haven't had as much time to play this module, so some things could be tweaked to provide slightly more crit and arpen.
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Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
Undefined
Demon Lord of this layer
Could you please explain what's wrong? All I've done so far is explain what feats I chose and why, I don't exactly understand what there is that could be wrong. If I have provided an inaccurate description of a certain feat, let me know, I can fix that. But I suspect you're just trolling, just like you were in Smulch's thread
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Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
The issue for me with severe reaction is that it repels the attacker away - If I'm using an AoE rota, I want all of my enemies grouped together as close as possible. Severe reaction will inconsistently repel attackers, and cause them to be slightly more scattered. I agree that chilling control is sub-optimal, but I felt that it was the best of the three available options.
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Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
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Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
That too ^^
|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
(if gateway is wrong, and in-game artifact is different, my apologies, I stand corrected).
|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
You prefer blink dog over Air Archon? And I had never heard of the Siege Master companion until you mentioned it, that's definitely being added to my list - do you know what its bonus at epic is?
Also, other than the stronghold map, it looks to me like the air archon is a cheaper alternative to the Siege Master except its bonus can actually be boosted by other archons. I put all 4 archons on my list as a cheaper alternative for lower budget players, but even two archons would make air archon better than siegemaster, yes?
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Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
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Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
According to some tests my friend has run, the owlbear had more procs than they had non-crit hits, so something else appears to be proccing it as well. Whenever I manage to get my hands on one, I'll try to figure out what, and if it is WaI
|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
Erza Moonstalker | Lara Moonstalker | Julie Marvell | Erza Moonhunter | Annie Hellangel | Jenn Moonstalker
Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
Join the Greycloaks
Ana-GWF SM Destroyer | Farseer-CW MoF Renegade | Leon-GF SM Tactician
Adrik Battlefate-DC DO Virtuous | Cassi Woodsheart-HR PF Trapper
Yep, that's my current thought, if I ever manage to get my hands on one of them I'll post my testing results.
|| Axios Guild Leader || Neverwinter Trade Forum Moderator || Infernal Paragons ||
Check out my foundry, titled "Akro's Gone Wacko", featuring our ex-CM Akromatik!: NW-DL8J7BY5T
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Thaumaturge's Time To Shine: A Complete Guide
Feats:
Boons:
Ok, now, ill explain some of the differences:
Combat loadout:
I normally use CoI (tab), steal time, disintegrate and icy terrain. I use disintegrate because of its short cooldown so I can use it to consistantly proc spell twisting so I can just spam encounters.
Learned Spellcaster vs Prestidigitation vs Focused wizardry:
Focused wizardry is good for boss fights where you use single target, its good for pvp and its good if you using abyss of chaos. It is bad for trash clearing. People often make the argument you don't really need any bonus on trash clearing and thats true, but for how many boss fights do you run a single target setup anyhow? At the end of the day, its a choice that comes down to preference alone in my opinion. Prestidigitation is good for boosting the party, focused wizardry is good for boosting yourself.
Elemental Reinforcement vs Frozen Power Transfer:
For my setup, I hardly ever use at wills more then 1 or 2 hits, because I am constantly spamming encounter powers. Due to how disintegrate synergises with spell twisting, I almost never get that third cast of chilling cloud which means that I cannot keep up the stacks for the damage boost. True, I also do not get the benefit of having sudden storm to proc the third 5% damage bonus, but I average a 10% damage boost from elemental reinforcement vs a 5-10% damage boost from Frozen Power transfer. How effective is 1 vs the other, not counting encounter spamming? Well, in boss fights, frozen power transfer is stronger because the fight drags on and you get to spam at wills more often, for clearing trash, elemental reinforcement is better because you don't need to spam at wills, you can jump straight into combat, drop your icy terrain (or steal time if you are using HV) and get the bonus.
Severe Reaction Vs Chilling control Vs brisk teleport:
Ok, if you are taking Icy veins, this means that any time you use an encounter power you applying 5 stacks of chill anyhow, which essentially removes the utility from chilling control, which means I would never use it. This leaves brisk teleport and Severe Reaction. Brisk teleport doesn't really do much, only granting a bonus to movement speed. People don't like severe reaction because of the repel, well, things are so control resistant I hardly see the repel moving monsters anyhow and the stamina gain is useful, which is why I choose severe reaction.
Icy Veins Vs Abyss of Chaos Vs Uncertain allegiance:
Icy Veins is good strictly on trash clearing, the way you utilise it is you enter with icy terrain, freeze opponents instantly and get the 96% damage bonus for your next attack, which would be oppressive force/something else. Abyss of chaos is good for longer fights and it also has interesting synergies with focused wizardry and the lightning enchantment, allowing for creative build design. Uncertain allegiance is good for the party. I am planning to test how abyss synergises with the pseudodragon, I will get back to you on that one later though.
Icy veins vs Frozen power transfer:
An interesting alternative build I have been considering is this:
Basically, the idea here is that you get more from thaum but you do not get icy veins. This build relies on using sudden storm and it allows you to potentially get 15% from frozen power transfer and 15% from Elemental Reinforcement. The way you would take advantage of this is open with icy terrain into sudden storm (monsters now frozen) then continue with other abilities from here.
Control Companions vs damage companions:
This is another interesting thing I have been considering, control companions increase the duration of your freezes which potentially increases the period of time in which you get the full benefit of chilling presence. I am not sure if it is worth the sacrifice, I am currently testing it though.
Hope this gives you something interesting to look at and is some food for thought
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