First off, thanks a bunch for your two posts in this thread, Frank. I've referenced your first post any number of times as I'm working through the learning curve of both Dom3 generally and EA TC specifically. Between these two posts you've got a good chunk of a TC nation guide here.
Quote:
FrankTrollman said:
All of those Masters of the Elements are going to be lending assistance in a big way when you have a lot of research and a pile of gems.
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I've always recruited very few Masters of the Elements, but now you're making me wonder if I've missed the point. My thinking has been that once my economy is large enough to start recruiting the MoE's, its an easy step to recruit CMs, and CMs are so much more versatile, potent and convenient that I almost always recruit CMs.
Now the two clear things that a MoE can offer that a CM cannot is E2 and N2. Now this may be my big mistake (and I'm probably biased by SP testing), but I like to take an E1 CM, and empower to E2, and use that to get to Earth Boots and then Dwarven hammer. Perhaps worse yet, I then empower to N1, maybe even N2. At least in SP testing this is just such a lovely item constructing mage that I find it irresistable.
But maybe this kind of empowerment is massively inefficient use of gems? Still, there are some items that seem like they would be a pain to construct w/ the MoEs (e.g. crystal coin). Even given that I am likely overdoing the empowerment, I'm not sure I'm in love w/ the idea of recruiting MoEs. For example, if the big purpose of recruiting MoEs is to get E2, and avoid empowering a CM in order to get to dwarven hammers, you could end up needing to recruit an awful lot of MoEs before you got your E2 MoE.
Anyhow, any discussion on the tradeoffs between recruiting CMs vs MoEs would be welcome.