The beginning of mages era?

According to Akakuro's translation of the new livestream, apparently new magic skill, Magic Fall has a chance (a pretty decent chance in my opinion) to inflict Armor Break ailment and Dizzy ailment. These ailments are extremely useful for bossing in nightmare and ultimate modes as well as event bosses since they tend to have more def/mdef and evasion/guard rate.
The other skill, Magic Cannon, is a charge type skill and unlike earlier speculations, you can activate it at any charge you want instead of waiting until it hits 100 charges (with the cost of damage dealt if you activate it too soon, of course). Although the animation seems kinda slow, this can be fixed with GSW, swift tag, or high ATK/motion Speed builds. Lastly, speculating on devs' previous stream, mage's new passive skill seem to reduce MP Charge's cast time by 1 sec (they were using magic device so not sure if that also applies to staff but if it does, that means you only need to wait for 1 sec for MP charge with 1000 Cast speed and using staff).

As for magic device users, Suzuki mentioned that they are planning on creating a new skills tree strictly for magic device only. The new T5 magic skill, Chronos Shift, which seems to be magic device exclusively, also looks really promising.

With all these new skills, mages seem to be on par with archers (whom are heavily favored and seek for in parties nowadays) with straight line AOE (Magic Cannon vs Crossfire), able to inflict Armor Break for grinding high def/mdef bosses (Magic Fall vs Snipe), and high MP generation (1 sec MP Charge vs Decoy). Will mages eventually replace archers in the future? Well realistically, I don't think so because magic damage sucks balls but I do think mages will have way more roles in parties than before instead of just braindead spamming Finale or 1-hit-and-it's-over glass cannon Burst builds.



00:06 to 02:15 Magic Fall and Magic Cannon
19:40 to 20:15 Suzuki mentions of magic device skills tree



13:12 Chronos Shift
14:15 2 sec MP Charge for magic device

 

in my opinion, the dizzy ailment doesn't quite sell the skill for half the mage population because as it is, javelin with light ele already gives 75% dizzy chance with staff and yet, not many finale users, who don't need elemental advantage, use it because they're mainly dishing out damage and magic doesn't miss. although the armor break might actually make it a hit. i can definitely see it working for support or burst builds though since it can build up stacks while giving some good ailments. this might be a step in making ailments relevant again especially for magic users, something i'm looking forward to because i love damage+debuff.

also, i missed the part on MD skill tree so that looks really interesting. really looks like they're trying to beef up support builds and MD. except that means leaving knux in the dust once again sadly.

 

knuckles got Crusher skills, and in this regard i wouldn't expect MD skills to be much different.

 

ahh that's true. didn't think of it that way.

i guess the difference here is that for crusher skills, it's mainly damage focused, so the fact that knuckles are still lacking in that department makes crusher skills kinda poor (tbf it's decent but it could be better) for MD skills, the only way for it to redeem MDs current state is for support to be made relevant since it's supposedly a support skill tree.
tbh i kinda don't mind how MD turned out so far because it's useful for magic blade skills at least, but MD main is another question.

 

Makes me wonder if Crusher T4 would mitigate some of the stability reduction of Annihilator.

• I think when you mean mage you mean 'mage', you are referring to any build with an INT stat. Staves with STR can work too, now, with the addition of Nemesis and Dark power skills.
  • Not a lot of skills gain directly from INT, and those that do are not that good. Coupled with the fact that Magic proration rates are higher than other types, it means that it takes longer to reach the same consistent damage output.
  • This is why auto spell builds are not the greatest thing ever since the cumulative magic proration lowers effective damage output.
• Now with Soul Hunter, even the normal ATK-type players are using their own skill spam to their advantage. A build with lots of consecutive normal attacks, or even skills that deal with rapid proration, is good to have in any build for mages.
  • This brings us to Knuckle type INT builds, the secret child that is better at Magic than Staves sometimes. The disadvantages that Knuckles have are :
    • No MATK 3% from the Mastery Skill
    • Finale and Burst have lower multipliers for sub MD builds
    • Holy Light has more multiplier for Staff
  • On the other hand, with Annihilator, KnuxMD can gain a lot of MATK.
    • Take for example the Ferocious Beast claws. The base wATK can be as high as 530. Yes, there is a lack of MATK 12% stat on the Knuckle itself, but everything else can be statted.
    • +B refinement gives a lot of base MATK itself from the wATK, and half of Knuckle's wATK is affected by MATK% stats.
      • With +S, that number rises even more.
      • And combining THAT with annihilator, the MATK you can get from normal Knuckle builds is nothing to boot at.
    • 
      
    • 
  • Just normal, simple equipment can surpass 4000 MATK. With better equipment and crystals, you can pass 5000 MATK too.
  • The 60% stability of Knux is not that dangerous, as Staves also have 60% stability, and magic stability ends up being 80 % anyways.
  • Adding some rapid moves like Combination can really alleviate the proration issue.
• The skills are also getting a bit more variety, even without Tier 5. You might think there is only Finale, and for the most part, yes, Finale does a lot of damage. But with a little broader outlook, you also have :
  • Nemesis - an unreliable but powerful skill, also INSTANT CAST
  • Thunder Release - It gains from ATK or MATK - whichever is greater, and hence can be also used as a skill.
  • Holy Light auto spell
    • For Staff, the multiplier is around 9 or 10, and with Holy book, you can use sub knux to deal proration in between, or something like Dagger for Gatling or throwing knife.
    • One could use Sub scroll to perform Shadowwalk + Flashblast spam.
    • The many auto casts and the manual casts of Holy light, along with some other magic skills can ramp up damage quickly.
• I wonder if Psycho Thousand hands apply to Magic Casted skills too.
  • Because if it does, then it will be insane as hell. You will be able to cast a skill, then get out of the way and spam a lot of normal or physical attacks. You can escape quickly too! Much much better than Mirage evasion.
  • You could perform Finale, and if there is an AOE, you could just leave it there and go fight another enemy, so you're not only a sitting duck, but you can do other stuff while your afterimage casts the skill.
  • Even BURST might be probable. You don't even need ridiculous CSPD! You can just cast the skill, get aside, and do something else like recharge or go to another monster.

 

Hopefully chrono shift is with Sub MD too,

Because of psycho thousand hands, I'm on the fence of maining a staff sub knux or continue knux/md

It's one hell of an insane skill. I hope it works with mirage evasion tho with it being a higher priority.

They need a t4 evasion skill that allows dodging during animation and then knux would be nigh untouchable by chaining psycho and mirage. (One can dream)

Otherwise, staff has that magic cannon skill. Can you imagine casting that, dodging, getting in close and beating em up whilst the psycho clone cannon blasts em? That's pure anime goodness right there.

*Dangerous Anticipation*

 

Lmao. It turned to knux thread once again. ^_^

 

You made a good point that dizzy ailment is not favored by the majority of magic users but in my opinion, that's mainly because the majority of them use Finale instead of Burst. I mean if you look at it, what's the point of using elemental gears when you mainly use Finale for damage? The first thing is the cost of making the staves. Since Finale always deals neutral magic damage, there's no point in making a staff for each element. Either you make just a neutral staff or you make a staff for each elements and those who do don't use Finale, they use Burst and because they use Burst, they would rather use whichever staff that has the element that counters the boss's element than just light simply for inflicting Dizzy. Secondly, since our Max MP is limited to 2000 and Impact+Finale combo costs you 1000 MP, they both work well with each other. First you cast 2 Finales, then you heal your MP with Maximizer, cast another Finale, Maximizer again, then cast another 2 Finales, this way, you don't feel like you're wasting any MP (2000-1000*2+1500-1000+1500-1000*2=0). If you decide to add Javelin to the equation, you would have to find a way to work around it so that you don't waste any MP. You could put consecutive after Finale in your combo but that means you would risk your mobility and magic proration, which is not worth it. Lastly, Javelin's ailment lasts only for 10 seconds, while casting Finale already costs you around 5-6 seconds, it's simply not practical.

Not sure if you know but Dizzy not only halves the enemy's evasion rate but also guard rate and magic doesn't miss is true but enemies do guard it so mages benefit from Dizzy as well. In my opinion, inflicting Dizzy is more useful than having guard break, which you can only gain a little amount from xtals and equip, because it benefits the entire party and gives better chance of preventing the enemy's guard/evasion rate compared to the 2 stats guard break and anticipate. Dizzy is especially needed for bosses with high guard rate and evasion rate like P. Avatar. Some party leaders there sometimes invite only light staff or 1h/2h with Meteor Breaker for the sole purpose of inflicting Dizzy so the other 2 halberds in the party can freely spam gatling knife.

Thus, Dizzy is not favored among magic users not simply because it's useless for mages, it's just the only way for mages to inflict Dizzy require them to sacrifice a lot of things which in turn make it impractical to do so. This new skill, Magic Fall, is about to change all of that so I'm really excited for it to come.

 

Imagine if Psycho Thousand hands applies to Magic Casted skills and sub magic device can use Chronos Shift as well. You just simply cast Finale, leave it there and let the clone do the job, punch the enemy some more for proration, then insta cast Finale again with Chronos Shift. Basically casting 2 Finales without locking yourself to one place lol. This sounds too good to be true.

 

pretty sure tier 5 skills are main weapon only. they specifically made individual skills for each weapon type, so it's highly unlikely they can be shared.
and it is good that way, so MDs would finally gain an ability that cannot be used by staves and the other weapons.

 

Yeah, and that makes Knux main mages strong IF Psycho can be used for Magic skills.