Mage skills are spread across four skill trees: Passive, Fire, Ice, and Lightning.
The Passive tree deals with passive skills, buffing skills, and non-elemental attacks.
The Fire tree deals with ongoing damage, and generally has a higher damage associated with each skill. This is mitigated by the fact that most monsters will have over 50% fire resistance later in the game. Still, it is a powerful tree early game, and for PvP duels.
The Fire, Ice, and Lightning trees deal with each of those elements. Fishing can be found on the Fire tree, although it is a waste of a skill point. The Mastery of each element is crucial, as it provides up to an extra 30% damage for that element, and also offers up to 15% resistance for that element. You'll notice that each element looks quite similar to each of the others. Each element has certain ideals behind it, although these are not of much importance.
The Ice tree deals with slowing your opponents, although you won't notice this until level 16. From level 27 onwards, you'll have the ability to completely freeze monsters for a short amount of time.
The Lightning tree, supposedly, is meant to be a little less powerful, but quicker. I'll leave such a judgement to you. Later game, however, lightning isn't as often resisted as fire, and carries the ability to augment your further lightning attacks and non-elemental attacks with additional lightning damage at level 92.
[Origin:Original] [Author:Admin] [2010-06-22]