Magic Fighter Guide (Int-Agi Knuckle MD)... Wip

After few months of glory, Reunion base Knuckle MD is getting hammered down with the nerf. We kinda see that coming as asobimo is known to make some horribly imbalanced skills to be later adjusted. For Knuckle magic warrior, this means that we can't hang onto reunion sword as a sole damage dealing skill. As such it renders physical attack stat combination like Agi-Str and Agi Int, ineffective since if you want to use physical skills as your sub damage dealing skills, or you want them to be your main dps skills such as Goliath and rush, and soul hunt, they're not quite compatible with Reunion sword that needs enchanted burst stacking. This makes Reunion sword better fit with magic attack route, which is Int-Agi or Int-Str. But for now, I want to focus more on Int-Agi, and will refer it as a "magic fighter", not quite the same as a " Monk priest" But you can think of it as a derivation of it.

Spoiler: Introduction

Magic Fighter, which I'm referring to is Knuckle main weapon class with magic device sub which have stats combination of INT>AGI.With magic attack as it's base, it uses combination of magic attack base skills to do close range damage, with enough motion speed to not having to use godspeedwield. Paired with multiple survivability skills from martial, crusher, magic warrior, and other skill trees. This class have formidable offense and defense with some added versatility.

Spoiler: Chapter 1: The power of Magic

Being INT based class, it uses attack skills that derived from matk. With the introduction of spellburst few years ago, magic, in which have some advantageous properties, such as being unevadable, can't miss, nor graze, also gained the ability to do critical hits with critical damage. The magic warrior skill tree also offers additional physical crit and crit damage to magic crit conversion ratio,with spellburst and weaken ailment, you can get 75% conversion rate. The introduction of new skills on the skill tree also allows auto element and 100% critical damage conversion rate for magic warrior skills. As for those offensive magic skills, I'll list out some notable ones, that has enough firepower. You can pretty much use whatever magic base skills you want. So it's not limited to these skills. If you have enough sp.

1. Nemesis
From priest skill tree, this skill have great synergy with knuckle class with its asura aura. For every asura hits you'll gain a stack which makes it really compatible with nemesis. Every hits you take will also increase the stack so there's a merit in facetanking attacks. The skill mutilplier scales with INT. Skill level increases link duration as well as increasing the skill power but the skill multiplier itself doesn't change so if you're short on sp, you can do at least level 4 nemesis to get enough link duration. Nemesis also generates physical proration even though it uses magic attack and proration for it's damage calculation. Additional melee, additional magic, and reflect stat will also give you additional nemesis stack so if you're lucky enough to get them on your avatar it gives a small boost to your nemesis stacking. But they're not a priority compared to magic Pierce or other damage related stats.

2. Enchant burst
From Magic warrior tree, this skill is a requirement to be able to instant release reunion sword. In order to do that you'll need a minimum of 30 seconds of enchant burst buff. This is achieved by increasing the enchant burst stack, which is obtained by using magic mode enchant burst(name turned into enchant grip), using enchant sword, or defending against attacks with siphon barrier. You need a minimum of 2 stacks to be able to gain enough buff duration to instant release reunion sword. To gain the buff, use enchant burst on physical mode and it will use up up to 3 enchant burst stacks. The buff will also turn enchant sword into enchant burst sword which have 1.5 times the power of normal enchant sword. You also get additional effect.

3. Enchant burst sword
Buffed up version of the enchant sword, you get 1.5 power of the normal version, with additional effect of added critical rate on physical mode, and added magic pierce on magic mode. The magic pierce buff is up to 24%, which means this skill makes up the lack of magic pierce you may have. A good sub dps skill to have.

4. Union-Reunion sword
Combining atk and matk in it's base damage formula, it's a big hit skill that can crush even high defense/mdef enemies. Dual bringer raises either of your weaker stat between atk and matk to the one with higher value. This essentially doubles your base damage, as compared to other skills. Union sword, the first strike of the skill, have 24 m range, whilst Reunion sword, the 2nd hit, offers big damage with a range of 8m. To unleash the reunion sword, you need to point the move pad towards your target enemy. Enchant burst buff at a minimum of 30 second will make union and reunion sword instantly casted. But with the use of union-reunion sword, you'll make the enchant burst buff disappears, even if it still has more than 30s on its duration. Before the nerf you used to be able to spam it becauss enchanted grip gives you 32 seconds of enchant burst buff, but after the nerf, enchant grip will no longer give you the buff. They will also remove damage reduction on the reunion sword animation, so you may need to pay attention to when you unleash it. Reunion sword on physical mode offers guaranteed critical hit while on magic mode, it removes one thing which is the weakness of magic attacks, which they can be guarded. Magic Reunion sword can't be evaded, can't graze, and also can't be guarded, which make it one of the most powerful skill in the game

5. Magic cannon
From Magic skill tree, magic cannon has high fire power, but require time to charge it up. Most skills in which have cast time will increase the charge%. But there are skills without cast time that can charge it up. Three of those skills are ether flare, enchant sword and resonance. At about 1k cast speed, ether flare will charge up m. Cannon by 20%, enchant sword and resonance will charge it up by 10%. While resonance isn't ideal for that purpose since it has 30s cool down to be recasted, a combo consisted of ether flare and enchant sword will charge up m. Cannon by 30% each time it's used. So it's a decent skill to have. The weakness of magic cannon is that it require the main weapon to have element awakening so you'll need to have multiple element of knuckles. It also require a huge 35sp so it's not quite a priority if you use neutral knuckles. For current level cap, you can't exactly have everything. Might be worth adding once we get more skill points and 9th anniversary knuckle.

6. Magic: Lances
From magic skill tree, magic lances have decent damage with its close to 25 skill multiplier if all 5 hits connects. While it require cast time, enchant spell, a skill from magic warrior tree allows it to be casted without casting. With the maximum shortest cooldown of 8 seconds. The problem is that the hits are rather slow. Magic lances catalyst registlet shortens the time between hits so you can unleash 5 hits in about 10 seconds. Magic lances multiplier also scales with INT, so it'll get stronger as you gain more base INT, it also has quite high skill power at the value of 700. Using stargem also save up 20 sp so it has a decent value to use stargem on. I'll explain more about enchanted spell Magic lances later.

Spoiler: Chapter 2: Offense with defense is the best offense

While getting the highest damage possible within small time frame is great, there's a merit in having defensive capability enough to instead, lengthen the time window to deal damage by ignoring most attacks. If you can take the brunt of the hits, you will also survive more battles. Magic fighter have multiple layer of these defensive/sustain skills. Here are some of them.

1. Asura aura
The ace skill of knuckle class. This skill provides wide range of ability. At the cost of 0mp, when you turn it on, it gives you long invincibility frame that's really useful to avoid all deadly attacks that couldn't be tanked head on. When it's activated, you will gain max ailment resist, up to 95% damage reduction on all type of attacks, +75 critical rate buff as well as 30% damage buff on all type of attacks. You do need to have high enough current mp to get the most of the effects. The damage reduction value drops by 5% for every mp bar. And the ailment resist starts to drop at 1k mp and under. And while the asura aura is up, your attack mp recovery will be turned off. With that being said you can still gain mp with other means such as mp return skills like shellbreak, soul hunter and enchant grip, as well as cast mp recovery skills like, chakra, mp. Charge and warcry of struggle. And you can also equalize your mp compared to your HP with resonance. There may be some changes after the adjustments but the only thing confirmed is a small nerf of i frame and a critical rate buff on off aura asura stacks. This is the primary skills that makes knuckle class, very resilient. The weakness of it is that it uses mp for every hit taken so you don't wanna face tank every single attacks without proper mp management, it also increases mp cost of non martial and crusher skills by one mp bar.

2. Magic skin
Alongside asura, this is also a damage reduction skill that straight up reducing damage instead of going through diminishing return of resistance formula. You gain up to 50% damage reduction on magic and physical attacks, along with death prevention ability(has long cool down tho, and can only save you from 1 hit of fatal damage). It also give you the damage reduction as if the sub magic device was a shield. If the death prevention is triggered however, the damage reduction will also gone. The damage reduction is based off the current mp so you'll need some mp sustain to keep it up.

3. Terrablast
Another layer of defensive skill, it gives you damage reduction in a form of HP shield. This HP shield lasts for 10 seconds and can reduce magic, physical, and fractional damage by 90% of the original damage as long as you have enough shield reserve. The HP shield is based off current HP lost so it acts like a pseudo health bar. What's great about it is that this damage reduction is applied after all the damage reductions from resistances, asura and magic skin. So you can tank big hits. And being based off HP, the more HP you got the more shield you have. This skill is also a good save tag skill since it has huge 800mp cost.

4. Siphon barrier
While the previous skills are passive and semi passive defensive mechanism, siphon barrier is an active one. You have to manually use it at the moment of damage received. It gives you up to 90% physical and magic resistance. It's not a straight up damage reduction skill since the resistance damage reduction steps is applied, but when you paired it with those passive defensive skills. You can defend yourself against high damage physical and magic attacks. It also increases enchanted burst stack when you succeeded in defending magic and physical attacks. The interesting thing is that it differentiate between the source of damage you receive instead of the hit count. For example, if you get hit by multiple shark wave from a single source, it will only be counted as 1 stack, but if you get hit by different aoe source at the same time it will be regarded as different attacks, meaning you gain another stack. If you get hit by a floor aoe and a meteor aoe at the same time you get a stack for each of em. Additionally, once you succeeded in defending against a magic or physical attack, you get some mp back, with increased amount on magic attacks. Ig siphon barrier is learned you get an mp recovery buff that lasts few seconds. The amount is decent

 

Reserved