New to this game. I don't understand the CW skills at all.

flyyaway

So I am looking through the skills I want to equip on my control wizard, since there are so many and so few slots. And I am thoroughly confused. Lower level skills seem to do much more damage then higher skills. Am I missing something? Examples below.

So I first look at my "At Will" skills.
Magic Missiles, which is equipped at level 1 gives 171-196 damage.
Storm Pillar, which I can only get at 35 points does 17-20 damage.
Why would I ever equip Storm Pillar? I do realise that Storm Pillar can also hit other foes. But if you're fighting 2 mobs, I would rather hit each one at a time with 171-196 damage then both of the same at only 17-20.


"Encounter Skills"
Chill strike = 850-973 damage available immediately
Icy Terrain = 76-86 damage and is only available at 30 points.

The only thing I can think of is the description of damage is relevant only to the grade of the skill. For example my Chill strike is at Grade 3, while my Icy terrain has not even been selected yet. Please tell me if I grade Icy terrain to Grade 3 it will have much more damage then the Chill Strike?



And not only this, what's with the "Class Feature" skills? They look like passive skills, yet you are expected to give up precious skill slots on in your HUD for them?



Can someone please explain like I am 5?

nasuradin

Storm Pillar is a charged aoe when fully charged it leaves a bolt of lightning that shoots lightning out for a second or two at nearby enemies, and it would be used as your right click at will in place of ray of frost, so you would still have access to magic missile for single target/small groups, and storm pillar to shoot into large groups. Not everybody bothers with storm pillar though, it can be skipped.

Icy Terrain isn't actually a direct damage skill its a crowd control skill, it ices the ground an slows things down, they also begin stacking chill debuff on them, so when they are shot with Ray of Frost, or if you use Conduit of Ice with spell mastery (meaning its in the tab slot)which causes it to stack chill, and then slap Icy Terrain under it, several things can freeze up at once into a block of ice.

Passive skills you can carry in 2 passive slots and have no impact on the number of encounter or at will skills you can have at one time.

Class feature is the lvl 10 tab slot, every class has a different tab mechanic, as mentioned above, control wizard's class feature is spell mastery, every encounter spell the control wizard has, also has a bonus spell mastery effect, when an encounter spell is slotted into the tab slot, the spell mastery effect is active, for example Chill Strike slotted into spell mastery turns it into a small aoe.

This also means control wizard is the only class who can in fact use 4 encounter powers at the same time.