9.19.2014 Burning Dunes Map of Stasis

Yarmilla - Standard
Mods - Monsters do extra fire damage, no life or mana regeneration
Quantity: +42%

Currency Expended:
1 Transmutation

Currency Gained:
1 Transmutation
4 Alteration
1 Augmentation
4 Chromatic
2 Chance
3 Scrap
1 Whetstone
1 Chisel

Maps Gained:
Dried Lake Map L66
Thicket Map L67

This was my first stasis map, and while initially painful, it was a good learning experience.  The first thing I learned, which in hindsight should have been obvious, was that Clarity is useless on stasis maps.  I had swapped gems around so that I could use Mana Leech with Arc.  However, the slightest amount of firing Arc into too few monsters and I was out of mana.  The second thing was that one mana flasks were not enough.  Three may have been overkill, but there were times when after a large fight I needed to restock on zombies.  In those cases being able to burn through my existing mana then get it all back with a chug on the potion bottle worked very well to keep my undead army fully staffed.

Once I had mana management down, I could even throw down a Summon Skeletons totem down at the start of a fight and have all my mana back by the end of the fight.  One of the things I mentioned earlier was not firing Arc into a small group of monsters.  Three seemed to be the magic number where I would leech more mana back than I spent.  It makes me wonder if I should swap gems around so that I could use mana leech all the time and run a second aura.  I would lose some DPS by either giving up Faster Casting or the + to gem level from my wand, but I realized during this map run that the zombies dish out some pretty serious damage at this point.

I did suffer one death on this map, but I wasn't paying attention and stood on some burning ground for too long.  By the time I realized it and took evasive manuvers I was at the point where I could easily be one shotted, and I was.  I also burned up some of my currency that I could have gained on this map by crafting mana flasks on the fly.  However, getting two map drops, with one being a higher level map, makes up for any mistakes like that in my book.  Even though I died once, I was able to level during this run.  I've got one more energy shield node to pick up, then I can grab some more minion and lightning damage nodes.  The other thing I could do would be to run down to pick up Ghost Reaver and use a Life Leech gem.  While that would greatly enhance my survivability, it's 5-6 nodes away, so I feel like I can get more bang for my buck by leveling things that immediately boost either my or my minions DPS.