Theorycraft: Elemental Support mage

As we know, asobimo has released an obvious gear directed to magic crit builds. The 100% critical on top 1000mp enable you to use a more efficient stat points toward CRT and huge maxmp reserve.

First of all, no finale. With how finale proved to be quite troublesome to use for recent event bosses, the thoughts came to me that you can go partway with finale, and utilize magic crit and elemental advantage that is difficult to achieve with finale-centered mage. It also opens up potential synergy with support skills and the upcoming minstrel skill so I'll write this in case anyone interested in trying it out. As I myself don't have the funds to do so at the moment. So let's get into it.

Spoiler: The general idea

The main and sub weapon would be a staff and a magic device. Using spellburst and element slash, you can incorporate 3/4 of your physical crit rate and crit damage into magic skills.

To achieve this, we need a total of 135 p.crit. 100% crit rate of the curious dress would make it that you need to put approximately 145 stat into CRT, without adding any crit from other gears or xtals. As such you can also boost your matk with xtals on the rest of your gears.

Next, is the elemental bonus. You can craft elemental staffs with damage to ele% stat to get a total of 39% extra damage for elemental bosses. Weaken have 25% mdef debuff on the enemy so it should somehow compensate the matk reduction from the lack of int% stat on yout staff and armor.
With this, you would have a total modifier of 1.91 from magic critical and element bonus.

Spoiler: The status point distribution

Next one would be the stat, as I've mentioned in the general idea, you would have to put 145 points into CRT. 255 pts into INT to maximize your matk. And the rest of stat can be used as you deemed fit.
You can put them into dex for more cast speed and matk. Vit for higher max HP.

Spoiler: The gears

for the gears, it would be something along this:
Weapon: an original element staff with element, damage to element% and matk%. Xtals would be usamasa the necromancer for budget xtal, as you would have to get all elemental staffs. The cspd% also isn't too shabby.
Sub weapon : a magic device that have element weakness of the enemy so you can get 100% weaken chance.
Armor: Curious dress with Noeliel, and/or iron empress xtal, for 5% matk, physical resist and extra cspd%.
Additional gear: I still haven't decided yet, something that gives you flat cspd or matk %and/or -aggro% would be good. Ill look up a bit for the specifics, feel free to give me suggestions. Xtal would be ancient empress ll for 1 slot, Choco ooze II for 2nd slot.
Special gear: Dark knight amulet for -25% aggro, machina right for budget 2 slot ring
The xtals could be venena and/or lalvada

Spoiler: The combos

The main damage dealing combo would be:
Combo1(700mp): reflex >magic:storm(smite)>element slash(cons)>magic:wall(smite)>closer
Combo2(700mp): element slash>magic:Burst(smite)>closer
Use combo 1 twice in a row and then use combo2. These combos have a huge magic proration. In case the physical class in your party couldn't keep up or does self proration with impact+phys skill spam, you need to rely on the tank to prorate. It would be ideal to get a 1mp glass cannon DPS halberd to your party to cope with it.

As we can see we don't actually use impacto on these combos. You can scrap it (yeah, quite ironic, a mage with no impact) to save some skill Points
This cycle of combo have a total cost of 2100. Use resonance accordingly on top of mp charge+maximizer. Make sure you have 2k max mp for optimum recovery from resonance.

Skills:
-maxed out spellburst
-maxed out mp charge+maximizer
-maxed out wall, storm and burst
-maxed out element slash, magic warrior mastery and resonance
-any support skills you want, brave aura, quick motion, enhanced bless, etc

That's all for now. I'll update it later after I get a curious dress and some tests. A complete build might follow later

 

I actually had a build very similar to this before the rollback(minus the support skills and including impact). Definitely go for it! I was reaching over 500k at times critting with burst. Its main weaknesses I found were to be the HIT stat being needed for element slash to land weaken on high difficulty bosses as well as not being able to crit consistently on neutral element bosses(since spellburst is kinda bleh on its own).

As for additional gear mysterious hood(NPC Version) is great. ^^ I use it on all of my burst mages. I wouldn’t recommend ancient empress as your additional crysta though since it will actually decrease the damage unless you are 8 or more meters away and since burst has a max range of 8m, anything closer than that will have decreased damage. I’d maybe suggest gespenst II since every stat on it will benefit this build(MP, accuracy, CRT, CSPD)

Good luck!

 

i just tested build with 200 crit (using curious dress), spell burst, element slash. but after the weaken landed on boss, my magic still not 100% crit.

 

i did use a combo element slash> magic burst( 8 stack for instant cast, but sometime not crit

 

btw any idea about how long does weaken last?

 

Its 5 secs. But, hmm if its not 100% I wonder if SB and weaken don't stack, 135 crit should be enough if they do stack additively. If its as bk said, then you might really need to push for 400 crit with SB alone

 

so weaken does nothing? since my build 200 crit rate, it should be 100 crit rate with weaken

 

From my experience the spellburst and weaken effects do stack since with around 120 or so critical rate I was able to crit with burst nearly 100% of the time while before spellburst was added, I had around 150 critical rate and still had some troubles critting consistently. The mechanic in general seems to be quite buggy though so that could be why people have different experiences. After a recent update the weaken ailment method stopped working for me the way it did before entirely which is another reason why I haven't rebuilt my magic crit character