How do mages work?

Elemental damage can be quite ineffective against enemies with high resistances. You can try using appropriate curses or elemental weakness to over double your damage output in some cases. At higher levels the Penetration support gems are quite potent.

It is often best to try and find as many multipliers as possible for your skills' damage. Curses, shotgunning enemies with Multiple Projectiles, burn damage, shock stacks and more depending on skill used.

Hello again! I'd like to thank you all for the feedback and assistance. I think I'm going to try the one suggested here:

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMABUIHYwj0EVAWbx8CJDwnqSycMYg2xTvhQZZJUVXGVytabWvbbRlzU3YReQN-WX6vf8aCEIt6j0aio6cIpyunXK6zwbTB88Ntz2XQ0Ngk2t3fsOL35OzmgewY

I have gone ahead and done lightning too, since I just found Arc (aka Baby's First Chain Lightning) and I'm having a ton of fun with it. Will see how it goes. :) Again, thanks all for the advice; it's been a big help.

Cool. Level a spark gem also, arc can be lackluster at times. Since you are going lightning, make sure your next 3 nodes are the one in this tree.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMABUIHYwj0EVAWbx8CJDwnqSycMYg2xTvhQZZJUVXGVytabWvbbRlzU3YReQN-WX6vf8aCEIt6j0aio6cIpyunXK6zwbTB88Ntz2XQ0Ngk2t3fsOL35OzmgewYm6Fnve5v

They add extreme effectiveness to lightning.

Well, I beat Dominus solo with my Witch.

Don't congratulate me just yet.

Don't get me wrong, this build certainly does work, overall. I've been staying very true to that tree and I've been using these skills:

Arc-Added Lightning Damage-Ice Nova-Lightning Penetration
Fireball-Spark-Lesser Multiple Projectiles
Summon Skeletons-Raise Zombie-Minion Life-Minion Damage
Firestorm (not much, but occasionally)
Conductivity (LOTS)

Basically, my strategy was to, for most fights, use Conductivity and Arc/Spark away. I was hoping to find some Pierce or Chain for Spark and Arc respectively but no dice. Hairier moments called for me throwing skeletons at enemies to absorb a few blows before they died, keeping enemies far enough away I could zap them or fireball them as required.

But uh, that's not how I beat Dominus. No, the winning combo, sadly, was:

Portal-Cast On Death

Cause, uh, I died. A lot. xD In fact, I died quite heavily just ascending the Sceptre. A lot of the problem was the difficulty spike; as I understand it, the Sceptre was added after the rest of the game, and it kinda shows. I get that it's the final battle and meant to be extremely hard, so no real complaints there. Does kinda suck that the difficulty jumps as much as it does; I breezed through the Lunaris Temple, struggled a little bit in the Gardens getting that Plum for that one quest, and then hit the wall on the Sceptre.

Chances are the problem is still in my equipment; I've done my best to maximize my defenses, but either the RNG gods aren't with me, or I'm still planning things wrong. My goal was to maximize HP, then Energy, then MP... that really didn't happen overall.



Basically, I just found whatever I could that maximized as many stats as I could. I can already hear the people going "Holy crap, why even bother trying Dominus with a setup like that?" *shrugs* It was the best I had; sorry. :/

Well, now that I've made it to Cruel, maybe I can have better luck improving my gear. I can't rely on that infinite Portal thing in the future (unless I have literally just leveled up, I really don't want to lose a ton of XP just to kill a boss). I have to confess, I still do feel that temptation to try to chase after some other Lightning Damage nodes, just to see what I can do, since, well, if I don't use elemental attacks... that's kinda all I got. Though first I'm thinking of chasing down those ES nodes and buffing the everloving crap out of it. Right now HP is at 881, ES at 556. Or perhaps MP would be good since that's only at 488... either way, got a lot to do...