Ice Mage

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Description
The Ice Mage is a wizard with access to everything cold and the production of crystal.

Stats and Skills
The attribute changes you get by choosing this class:

The abilities you get by choosing this class:

Overall
The Ice Mage is an unfortunate case where other dedicated spell sphere classes simply outclass it. Just about everything the Ice Mage can do, the Pyromancer does better (the only exception being Ice Storm) - literally, all the Pyromancy Spells are not only more useful by far but also directly do more damage. It gets worse from there as well, as Fire is far more capable of damaging buildings than Cold and Pyromancy even has access to summoning Fire Elementals. By comparison, Ice Magic has no summoning spell - so the Ice Mage must fully rely on the inferior damage spells and couple of somewhat underwhelming and out of place tricks to get by.

Races
Frankly, thanks to the lack of anything useful in the Ice Magic sphere, there really are no races which really get along with the Ice Mage. If you like crystal, it may be a decent idea to simply invest most of the hero's skill points in that instead.

The best pick has to go to the Barbarians simply because there is an Ice Magic synergy. Other than that, the Ice Magic spells are just bad.

As said previously, almost all the damage spells are inferior to the Pyromancy damage spells, but may be enough to get on by with some mana regeneration boosting research. Out of the spells, there are basically only three particularly useful ones: Ring of Ice, Ice Floe and Ice Storm. Out of those, Ice Storm is by far superior thanks to being the only Ice Magic spell that can actually contend with anything in the Pyromancy spellbook (does the same damage as Armageddon but costs 5 less and does cold damage instead of fire). Storm is pointless other than to nerf Pyromancy spells, which is a niche ability at best. Ice Armor is also pointless unless the hero is actually capable of fighting in melee (chances are, they won't be since wizards are always very frail). Calm almost gets a troll face award for mismatched spell placement, but given the current amount of creatures with psychological effects, it may very occassionally be useful. That said, White Ward from the Healing Magic sphere is so much better it's unreal. Freeze would be a decent spell if it didn't cost so much. Most of the time the Ice Mage will find that using damage spells is probably a better idea rather than slightly aggravating the enemy however. Wall of Ice is a pretty basic spell which for some reason is only accessible at a pretty high level of Ice Magic and Ice Floe is a bit bugged as equipping any item will change the damage type to the equipped weapon's damage type, which makes the spell either abusable or much more pointless than it should be. Lastly, Freeze Magic is basically for when the player is willing to go a bit suicidal and nerf all spellcasters including the caster for a bit. This spell's usefulness is debatable, as it could be used very well and timed to prevent enemy spellcasters from being able to do anything. The only problem is that it does the same for the caster and the caster's side, so it is a very difficult spell to use correctly.

Counters

 * The Ice Mage rarely gets along with the race they are playing with, so playing against one shouldn't be all too difficult. Anything that resists cold can be used to take an Ice Mage down without any fear from damage spells. Ice Floe is more tricky to get around, but if the Ice Mage doesn't have much speed, cavalry can be used to chase down and eliminate the hero.