I am following a guide for Runemaster leveling posted on maxroll.gg
It says to use Frost Wall shortly before Runic Invocation to make Hydrahedron do more damage.
Before I would cast Mana Strike, Fireball x2, Runic Invocation and that would summon the Hydrahedron. Now that I’m using Runic Bolt, if I load up a lightning Rune and two fire runes, and then use Front Wall a few seconds before Runic Invocation, like the guide says, it adds an ice rune and then I have to cast Runebolt 6 times to get back to the runes I need. Is that normal, or am I missing something?
I used the same build. What you have to do is cast the frost wall, then cast the 3 bolts while walking towards the wall. Just cast it some distance ahead of where you’re walking. After you pass through the wall, you should teleport (if off colldown) for further bonuses and then do invocation. Teleport is optional.
Also, for regular mapping you don’t really need the walls. Hydra is more than enough. You only need the wall/teleport for bosses, maybe some rares.
Thanks, I guess that means I can’t pre-load the runes like I was doing since now I have to cast Frost Wall before generating runes. I think I’ll take your advice and just skip Frost Wall while leveling. Thank you for the tip!
Yeah, I had the same issue when I switched to bolt. You can still pre-load them, just not with the wall. Also, it should be noted that you can pass the frost wall and do the bolts and hydra afterwards. The bonus is specifically for invocation (and glyphs) so it won’t affect the bolts. You have 5s after passing the wall, so plenty of time.
Even though you don’t really need to cast the wall for most of the campaign, I would advise you to still use it for some time to create some muscle memory for when you’re fighting bosses or when you go do monos. Use it for a couple of levels until you get the rythm right and after that use just when you need it. Remember that teleport also give you a boost to the next spell, so I tended to use mostly pre-load, tele, hydra and keep moving.
One of the things I changed in this build is add echomancy from the runebolt tree it costs 2 points but boy its a saver when trying to keep up the LFF rotation.
Spec your Frostwall to Fire (you want a Fire wall anyway since you are probably stacking Fire damage)
Ensure you have 1/1 point in Epilogue skill in Flame Rush
Your rotation is now…
Runebolt (as often as you want for its buffs, but once is enough) → Lightning rune
Frostwall at a distance ahead of you → Fire rune
Short Flame Rush through Frost Wall → Fire rune
Flame Rush will automatically cast Hydra when it ends as you now have LFF runes. If you stack Cooldown Reduction, you can reduce Flame Rush’s cooldown to 1.7 seconds (possibly less?) so you can repeat the above to make a Hydra every 1.7 seconds, while you Flame Rush all over the place making it almost impossible for enemies to track and hit you.
If you find this clunky (indeed it is rather tricky to get only a single Fire rune from Flame Rush), you can take Immutable Order skill node for Invocation and set the order on your skill bar to: Runebolt, Frostwall, Flame Rush so you always get LFF rune sequence. This makes the build super easy to play. Invocation now has a long cooldown but that doesn’t matter as you only ever cast it via Flame Rush.
There is one drawback of Immutable Order though… you can no longer use the Rune Powercore node on Invocation to build Runic Energy because your rune order will never change. This in turn will mean you can never build up more than 2 or 3 Runic Energy because you are casting Hydras so often it can never build up more than that through time. (I’ve found this doesn’t really matter as the sheer frequency that you are creating Hydras reliably trumps this drawback).
