+1

I've tried to make a fireball machine gun build with Consuming Embers and a lots of spell cast speed and it was really bad. When I started to shift away from the machine gun aspect of it, I tried the Lord of Char modifier which says damage is increased by 100% but the spell gets a cooldown. You could think doubling the damage might be worth for a bit of cooldown. Turns out it's additive damage, so at level 70-80 when you have like 1000% damage already from stats and gear that 100% from the modifier boosts your damage by 10% instead of doubling it. And instead of casting the spell 3 times per second you cast it once in like 2 seconds (I don't remember the exact CD, but along the lines). So you can effectively do ~1/6th of your original damage after spending 2 points. Marvelous.

So yeah, I also ended up going ailments because Immortal Offering, Grievous Afflictions and Insidious Decay can carry your build.

On a side note, is there any reason to dump any points to Agility or Wisdom for any builds? I found that no matter what build you do, 2:1 ferocity:toughness seems to be the best for damage and life. Attack and cast speed doesn't do to much as you either do DoTs which don't get anything from speed or you're limited by rage/willpower. Wisdom is also useless as you can get more than enough ailment score and chance on your gear and passives alone.

wisdom is useless as you can get +300% material/elem ailment score which grant almost 30-40% chances to inflict 5 stacks... Smart -_-

Att/Spell speed score does not seem to be really effective as I don't see much more ticks when I take some and since we rely on high cd skills and our mains spells are almost instant to cast why would we take take agility...

So it's just fero/toughness as every build ever...

BTW I didn't even mention every problems we have compared to melee build like, the fact we can barely not regen our willpower when every single melee spell give you 500 rage (shout/ishmir/railgun yes because now they play with guns and shield so they can use every skill not just melee... And have the tanking of a freaking building...)
Our willpower regen spells are terrible against bosses...
So you hit with your staff and do almost no dmg... And cry...

Why do we have such high CD on spell like tear of etheliel or anomaly they do less damage than BE which does not have one and if you take the momentum rune the CD is the same as us but ONE edge does 3 time more damage than our whole spell...

We have no 1H weapon for spells so no shield in a game where 90% of the late game builds use block efficiency to survive...

We cannot have elemental dmg % on armor pieces... And personaly I just never ever find flat elem dmg amulet or belt...

There's still no rend spell which is lame cause it would be sooooo cool...

Consumming ember / electrocute / arctic spear are... Terribly bad... Like why would we use them 40k dmg for 40 willpower is everything but worth it...

So if someone finds a way to play mage without ailments tell me I'll enjoy trying it and strugle at lvl 120 because doing 100k dmg/sec against 60M hp bosses is what I have ever wanted x)

A quick rundown of the past:

In alpha we had staffs that added dmg to our spells and no useless phys dmg projectile. This damage was taken away in beta without compensation and leaving us without any meaningfull spell dmg increases on spell skills.
Armor slots are bugged and can't roll %ele dmg.
No onehand mage weapons so we are locked out of shield usage.
No melee weapon so we are locked out of dash usage.
No broken nodes like "Virtouse Stance" that works on attack skill dmg instead only on basic attacks like the english and the original french tooltip say.
Force shield armor is a very bad joke and Allresi is the way to go. (not realy a mage problem but the char is shown with this armor in the creation)
Material dmg% buffs phys dmg on weapons as well what makes the gap between magic and melee skills even bigger.
Only weapons that naturaly roll +spell dmg mods are Catalysts and Staffs, this is like telling every phys dmg dealer out there that only axes and bows can roll + phys dmg stats.

That's just the stuff from the top of my mind without thinking to much about it.

TlDR; Mages get shafted.