How the hell do I use magic?

From the perspective of party roles:
It's worse than everyone else. Yes mages can get attacker role but their stability with it relies on how accurate their finale cast is which no other skill tree has to do and they have no easily controllable damage multiplier like crit damage unless it's for specific bosses like sapphire Roga with built in mechanics.

Because mages are so reliant on external mechanics, they are really lackluster compared to other weapons

For breaker
Their magic attacks are far too slow and weak to the point in which normal attackers easily pass them.

For tanking:
Finale is the best aggro generator in game yet at the same time, the easiest to interrupt.

For support, no magic skill other than that mana crystal and stone barrier from wizard tree really give support whilst a warcry spammer easily out ranks them.

In parties, they stink. In solo, their damage is terribly weak even if max proration is inflicted using dagger skills and they take too long to solo anything so combo efficiency isn't the problem.

Using with Knux for CQC means you're limited to impact and javelin. With bowgun, distant bombardment with little to no method of slowing any potential advance. With sword the potential is still abysmal with there being absolutely no focus this time and a stat allocation relying on STR and INT whereas DEX and INT would be the best.

I have no idea how to use magic skills or make them more potent. Don't suggest magic pierce either, it would affect much.

 

Well.....you’re the first person to say mage builds are weak. Tbh it’s the opposite mages are the easiest to make power and the easiest to rank hog also. The only thing that makes finale not so ideal is that it can be easily evaded, however the damage of finale is very good you only need int, as much as you get. Most if not all player made meage equips follow the formula magic attack 10%int10 int 20 . And that’s because that all a mage needs. As for support I highly disagree, normally mages have a lot of unused skill points due to the fact that they are simple and straight forward, so that allows you to learn different skills like brave aura for example, however players only get support rank because they spam warcry and hey if u wanna get support spam those skills to idc, it up to you tbh. Finale aggro can be mitigated with sneak attack and as for breaker you can knuckle sub and add knuc skills for variety or arrow for bow skills . Mages are versatile and are limited only by the imagination of the user it’s not rigid like other builds .

Because of the rant I almost forgot.....mages have use of another good skill called magic burst which is very useful late game and I assure you after free resets many mages will be burst oriented as well as it’s a good farming skill..... I have a thread on that as well.

 

One does not simply "use" magic

 

Use to farm. Farm normal monsters. Farm minibosses (mk). Farm imobile bosses such finstern.

 

How ironic, everyone uses finale back on lvl 150cap. The best part about finale is the high skill constant paired with high matk. It deals high damage at the time but easily reach the bottleneck compared to other spammable class that have growth based on multipliers like elementals, unsheathe and srd/lrd%. Thats why the devs released lots of magic pierce xtals to give mages an edge on high def bosses.

As for the scalability of damage, it's definitely centered around magic:burst. Its not an placed skill and can be enhanced with element and srd/lrd multipliers. You can use the 50% pierce staff and use damage to ele% arm paired with graviceps. Graviceps negative crit won't matter at all. You get 28% damage boost. Damage to ele% for mage arm is considerably cheaper compared to physical arm that require crit and crit damage. Modifiers works best when you have high pierce. Do a 6m combat so you can make the most out of your srd setup, use a 6m power wave so your shukuchi would stop you at 6m. Backstep can be used to dodge aoes.

As for the support role, rank system sucks, you shouldn't care much about getting the rank. But the actual supporting role with quick motion, gsw and brave aura gives the others the boost they need without having the negative stats of the auras. Quick motion reduces ampr a lot, brave aura reduces accuray, none of them matters for mages, magic have the advantage of not grazing at all, albeit at lower inherent stability. Quick motion is a huge boost for physical class especially those with no gsw on them. For gsw users, they can reach 50% motion speed easier. Its all about motion speed for physical classes nowadays. This is the best support you can do aside from brave aura. Backstep really changes how much you can approach dangers. Burst also have some invincibility frame you can make use of, or even master it.

Also finale generate full aggro when interrupted, so Its actually better for aggro generation if you get interrupted

 

Magic burst is amazing. You get wide area damage and i-frames. The problem with it is that you have to spam other magic skills before it's used. 4 magic skills at 1k CSPD making it not so great for dps and the damage stinks because of Mage's natural lack of additional damage boost.

Lmao @ finale's use for tanking.

....

Sigh...

 

The thing is you can easily get cspd with some equipments. Aside from crysta and high-end equipments, npc craft and drop can make up for the difference. You don't really need to spam magic once you reach 7.7k cspd(including High Cycle and Spell Headphones) because it'll be insta cast from that point. The build requires at least 247 dex to be usable and will start to compete with Finale starting from level 200 in terms of damage. That is... yeah, still without elemental equipments.

Sadly... a lot of players only think of now. It's pretty normal, since most people get tired of a game and leave for another one.

 

That's where you use high cycle, if you can reach around 7.7k cspd, your impact >burst will be instant. And its not that hard. Lightning flame staff give you 750 cspd and 25% cspd, noeliel the ice statue gives you 30% cspd. Iron empress for 20% cspd. Usasama for 14%. Narumi hina for 20% cspd. Philosopher ring for 30%. Mage cape for 1k cspd. And finally high cycle for 550 cspd +250% cspd.

This is my cspd with lvl 8 high cycle and spell headphone(700cspd). With no noeliel xtal and no usasama xtals. Lvl 10 high cycle would give me an extra 100 cspd and 50% cspd. Then Narumi hina(20%)for mage cape. There's still a room for 114% cspd and 100 flat cspd. I also used guignol on this ss, so thats another 175 cspd. Armasite would give a - 15% cspd though, so it's more like 99% potential cspd, which is about 917cspd worth at 247 dex. 917+100+175=1192.
1192+6440=7632. Still a bit short, but there's still some cpsd boosting item that can be used. There's still 2 available xtal left for Graviceps. You can also switch narumi hina with chocho ooze 2(600 cspd). It will be over 7.7k cspd that way.

 

I recommend getting the staff from gravicep. That thing is sick with 1000cspd. Of course, it can't compare to lightning flame because it doesn't have m.pierce for high def bosses.

 

Its pretty easy the only question is how much power you wanna sacrifice for cspd, players avoided burst for too long otherwise a perfect build would have been made already and it would have been more common, but high cast speed is easy to get. In my experience playing around with the build flat cspd equips is best but they lack attack stat most of the time so the next alternate is cspd % where you will also get m. attack % as well and since you’re gonna use impact as a combo starter anyways that’s 1s less off the skill time as well. Before I forget gsw will be a thing with mages now since it works well to speed up the animation, coupled with support skills brave aura , high cycle ofc and quick motion. Mages are op but ppl are too hooked up on mainstream builds to even notice that.

 

Damage-wise, I wouldn't call mages op, just good enough to compete, but not overpowered. Even with burst, physical classes with elemental gears still outshines burst build at its full potential.

That's why I'm more intrigued to having all the auras for a full support package that couldn't be achieved with tank alone. Finale mages usually fights at 12m range, making brave aura solely for their own use. Nobody really uses quick motion aside from the full support class wannabes. Everyone except for tanks are demanded to do some damage output. Which is what finale is used for, but finale lacks the mobility for you to get closs to the melee party members to get them the auras without the risk of cancelation. And burst simply wasn't a much attractive option prior to lvl 200ish cap due to the sheer damage of finale, which is now hitting its limit of growth as predicted by many when it first came out.

Mages don't suffer the repercussions of the auras, as they dont need hit rate, ampr and even crit rate. Now that burst finally exceeded the damage potential of finale, these auras becoming more viable to use. Srd% can be easily to obtain compared to lrd% thats why im proposing a gravicep burst build. We can finally have the perfect party setup. Burst setup releases the previous limitations of mage and unlock its full potential.

 

That true I never saw anyone use quick aura, but I played around with it and it's pretty useful do yeah its ideal for mages/ magic swords builds that use burst as a dps . However this is left to ve seen since 1 hit removes them an many players shy away from those support skills because of that as well.

 

Hmm. Won't say that burst makes mages good or viable for attacker tho tbh, the easiest way to deal with the whole attacker physical dps problem would be to have magic more reliant on proration than Phys dps.

The proration damage bonus applies only to magic attacks. Whereas no proration means no magic damage bonus.

 

I'm not quite getting what you're saying. With tanks proration bonus for both physical attacks and magic attacks would be maintained.

And its not about being attacker by yourself, its about overall party performance with you being there as a mage. Quick motion is the one pivotal point of mage role in getting more dps out of your party members by buffing them with aspd buff, which means more motion speed for everyone, including tanks. Most physical members don't have the leniency of doing buffing as they don't have a mean of doing mp recovery without their decoy. Mp charge +maximizer easily cover that problem, and burst with backstep unlocks mages mobility since they can fight at a relatively longer range than melee players.

Lets see what the auras does.
Brave aura: increases weapon attack, 20% damage. You can put that in the mages contribution, meaning you get at least 20% damage out of your other two members. Assuming they are on par or above yourself in damage output. You basically contribute a 40% extra damage relative to your own dps.

Quick motion: increases aspd by 1100 flat and 250%. This is equivalent of about 6% motion speed boost from the flat aspd alone. For tanks, its a huge boost because they can't use godspeed wield. The higher the motion speed, the easier it'd be to react and interrupt without being locked in auto attack animation. And for the physical classes this allows them to have around 10%+ motion speed when accounting the 250% aspd buff. Agi build classes won't even need to risk themselves with gsw and still getting decent motion speedbuff

High cycle: aside from for your own use as a mage, cspd buff is a big deal for tanks that uses heal as their hp recovery mean. 550 flat cspd is a big deal to shorten heal cast. The motion speed boost from quick motion also accounts to speed up the heal. Heal spamming is especially crucial when you have a dead party member, the quicker you can do it the better it is. Imo reviving is a tank's job. As tanks don't need to deal damage while being preoccupied with reviving, compared to dps members doing it which cuts off some damage output.

And if you're not sure about the damage output of a burst mage, here's the example of how much it can do.

Granted, he uses top notch gears and xtals to be able to deal 580k per burst, but with a more medium budget gears, 400k per burst is still decent. Lighting flame staffs50% pierce will give mages an edge on higher diff bosses. If you're accounting brave aura damage increase of your party members to your own contribution, you're basically doing at least 40% extra damage, which can be converted to 160k extra damage damage per use. And that's only from brave aura's damage buff. There's still the motion speed increase that indirectly increase your party's overall damage output.

This is the role of a mage in the party.

 

That's cute. Physical dps are everywhere so magic proration is always high. They do normal attacks, they use physical skills. Tanks contribute to proration too unless they're the type to spam magic. My only real experience with bad proration is when another physical build spams magic proration that essentially ruins it... oh, you know what build those are.

 

Your point of it is that mages are meant to be support roles and whilst I agree given how the skills tend to point in that direction. Though at the same time, for team play, whilst mages excel at attack and support roles (unless the tank is a total piece of garbage), it falls horribly because of the primary problem with support auras and the might get one-hit removed which may be fixed this month end so I really can't say much there.

Nice vid those gears are extreme on the cost side and it seems that Staff/MD is for team oriented role as I can't see that working otherwise until again, maybe this month end.

Eh the reference wasn't really being drawn to physical attackers being available or not, it was more so to there being another damage multiplier for mages like Phys attackers.

Eh: Phys attackers have: Attack + Proration + Crit Damage

Magic attackers have: Attack + Proration + 1/2~1/4 critical effect.

Naturally, magic attacks fall behind.

 

Yea, critical damage contributes big time on physical classes. At least burst can be enhanced with both elemental and range modifiers compared to finale. The devs is pushing the elemental burst mage with the gravicep drop staff that has element, cspd and matk%. Gravicep xtal gives a huge srd %boost, maxmp and the negative crit won't be a problem for mages. The devs would probably release more of bosses with high evasion rate and crit resist to somehow give mages an edge over physical classes. Which is what magic does best , it can't miss and can't be evaded, and not missing means no graze even on higher difficulty mode. They would then release more stability enhancing gears that's paired with matk/cspd/m.pierce.

 

True, I'd hope they release more bosses like sapphire Roga who is really good for magic swordsman builds and mages (red phase, magic always crit)

Tbh, I don't really count element damage given what DW and Rangers can do. Unless they allow mages to get additional element from MD.

 

I play mage on finstern a lot of time and I even tho i had full ele gear, i still get beaten by any physical dps with same full ele gear. Finstern is supposed to be a mage favored boss but still get beaten, this really says a lot. Then what if I play mage on non mage favored boss, I would just get crushed by any dps even with non ele gear.