Input needed: Ice magic-Battle chemistry or Hammer-Battle chemistry.

[INXS]

Undecided which one of the 2 setups to dive into. Any advice, pros/cons is much appreciated.

[Tagamogi]

Both my ice magic and my hammer skills are at 20 (new to ice, didn't like hammer), so take my opinion for the little it's worth.

Battle chemistry is great at aoe but doesn't really have any single target damage abilities beyond the combat refresh. Assuming you are going to focus on damage instead of healing, the bombs have a fairly long cooldown (15-16 sec for acid/nature/poison bombs, 45 sec for freezing mist), so you are going to spend a fair amount of time with your other skill.

Ice magic would allow you to double-down on the aoe, and potentially set up a little bit of ice damage synergy with bc's freezing mist. On the downside, if you encounter any mobs that are immune to cold, you could be in trouble. Bc's bombs are great but can take a while to bring down a single high hp target.

Hammer would give you a different damage type to handle more magic-immune mobs, but doesn't have any potential bc damage type synergies that I can think of. I guess you could have a problem with crushing immune mobs, but there seem to be far fewer of those than cold resistant/immune...
I think hammer/bc might be a bit more flexible in different situations than ice/bc, but my impression of hammer is that it also has fairly long cooldowns, so you may prefer a skill with more spammy abilities as your primary skill instead.

( I use knife/battle chemistry myself. I picked the combo essentially because knife had just come out at the time I wanted to level bc and stuck with it to 70 because I like it. I like to think my poison bonus is useful for both of my skills, but I suspect most of my bc damage actually comes from the fire dots supplied by my gear. )

[OpieFisher]

Been playing with 70/74 geared up Ice Magic/BC a lot over the past 4 months and I like it a lot.
Going for AoE damage and crowd control and I have my bars set up like:
(Ice Magic) Chill-Blizzard-Tundra Spikes-Ice Nova-Shardblast-Ice Armor
(BC) Freezing Mist-Mycotoxin Formula-Toxin Bomb-Acid Bomb-Haste Concoction-Healing Mist

Wanted to have something damaging coming off of cooldown constantly and the ice magic pairs really well with BC as far as that is concerned.
Blizzard is nice for what I'm trying to do because it's a ranged AoE lets you slow the front of a pack down enough to hit a group of mobs with one of the roots easier.
Tundra Spikes is a real MvP both grouped and solo mainly for the shorter cooldown than freezing mist,lets you handle adds a lot easier and deals decent damage on top of an AoE stun.
Nova mist isn't the best damage in the sense of burst damage but it's very cheap power-wise
Shardblast isn't the best damage either but only costs 1 power after you get it modded out and resets the timer on Ice armor so you can refresh the armor over time/power over time buffs.
Ice Armor sets up Shardblast but also has a ton of armor/power-over-time and +cold damage mods for a bit of synergy and survivability.

Solo there's a lot of positioning you have to do to not get smashed,but I feel like there's plenty of tools there to keep you safe.
Honestly your single target damage isn't bad at all and it just gets better as you start adding more to the pull.

Group-wise I find myself being much more conservative in so far as you have to be careful about just going to town.
If you get too much aggro that isn't rooted or stunned you're just brown bread, and you'll absolutely kill yourself on accident on stuff that reflects damage like manticores if you just mash away.
That said between the the roots and the ranged snare you have a lot of say in what happens if stuff goes bad with pulls.

Not gonna get super deep into the bc side other than to say the damage is pretty decent and list some stuff folks might not know about bc.
Your golem shares some of your mods,haste concoction mods work for both you and your bitty buddy for example.
You can buff with one set of armor and swap it for your combat set as long as BC stays on the bar before and after the swap. (My buff/run set is psych/bc,run up with toes on swap out for iron skin then swap out for my ice/bc combat set.
You can buff your pet same way you can buff yourself so stick Iron Skin or Toes on the thing if you want.
I got my golem programmed for 1. triggered-healing injection 2.not triggered-invigorating mist 3.full rage meter-Rage Mist. Got trigger on the sidebar but most of the time I leave it on the injection,if you do the same just be ready for slightly wonky aggro sometimes.


If you decide ice magic ain't for you at least you can make ice cream off the back of working it up.
Beats learning cheesemaking in my book.

[INXS]

Tagamogi OpieFisher thank you for sharing your knowledge, think I'm going to give BC/ice m a try, thanks !