Ice Magician or Priest

It is all depend of you,it is just which one you like the most.

Priest have more supportive pt buff that the i/l mage. Priest also is pot saver than other char due to it can using heal to kill mob in gs or mp3 without using any pot.

For i/l mage, it can froze the mob and using the lightning to strike the mob.It also can do much more damage than priest due to it have Element Amplification to double up damage but it will also double up your mana usage.

If you think you cant be a good support on a party, I recommend to be i/l mage. It is fun that you can froze the mob

 

If you are going for leisure fun, go for what you feel like playing. However if you are intending to play for a long time, essentially bishops are most well sort after among the 3 magician classes; typically because they are crucial and a must have in most end game bosses. When you eventually reach to that stage, it will be very challenging and fun even because you will be one of the most important support in the team. Not so much for AMs (arch mages) since after 4th job, AMs mainly go solo/duo for grinding/leeching and not so much on end game bossing. Some still participate but very rare. Fund wise, Priest can earn you a chunk if you grind at GS2 for that few levels since you basically do not need pots at all. However AMs are fun though since they have flashy and one of the strongest AOE skill at late game.

 

Can I ask why you ruled out Fire/Poison? Knowing the reason might help to rule out one of the other two.

Ultimately, it's just a case of personal preference. Speaking very broadly, though, Cleric/Priest/Bishop is generally considered to be the best class for your first character. They are the best at making money and benefit the least from funding of the three mage types (I think, at least; this is probably debatable).

 

Go bishop because of holy symbol

 

I honestly don't know why Fire/Poison is so unpopular. Either there's something I'm missing about them that makes them worse than I/L at very high levels, or people are put off by the fact that they don't get a mob attack at level 30. While that is true, poison breath more than makes up for that. F/P is also the mage type that benefits the most from funding (although it is more than doable to start one without funding) so maybe that puts people off as well?

If you just don't like the sound of them, though, then that's a good enough reason not to play one.

If it is a toss up between I/L and cleric, I'd be inclined to tell you to go with cleric on the basis that if you do decide to quit your first character and start a new one, a cleric will serve as a really useful buff mule, where as an I/L will not.

 

To me it seems pretty simple that if you're playing to enjoy and you don't like being support then you should choose I/L or F/P- I don't think F/P are necessarily worse. They used to be a lot more popular but I think because of Neo Tokyo some people feel like they're 'useless' now at high levels. It's not that you can't play solo as a cleric but you might just enjoy having better damage and cooler attacks.

Honestly though, it's not worth spending all this time trying to decide. Just make a character and be whatever and then either it'll grow on you or you switch. That's what I did IIRC I went archer because of my first decent dice roll and I grew into it.

 

Priest is preferable if you're a support type of player or looking to earn mesos.

I/L on the otherhand is good if you're looking for a more offensive playstyle for bossing too.

I personally mained a I/L arch mage back in the official servers which i used for solo and expedition raids with friends.

 

why does it have to be either or? Why not make both and see which you like better as you play them?

 

Tell me any other jobs that can fart in people's faces

 

If you're not interested in partying up with others often then definitely go I/L, priests are primarily a support class and really struggle on their own.

 

Make an F/P so you can fart in the fm

 

Master the art of solo playing and it becomes a piece of cake.

 

My first character was an I/L actually, and it's now Lv 172 so I'd like to say I know my way around the class a bit.

I made it quite far into the game through straight grinding and selectively befriending priests and selling leech exclusively to priests, as I was pretty deadset on being one of the first lvl200's with no HS.
It's doable, yes, but was it cheap?
Without an HB mule and before I had blizzard 30, Blizz20 uses 8000 mp per cast. Considering I also didn't know pure int was meta in this server at the time (my dumb mistake), that took well more than half my mana pool early.
Blizzard 30 back then also cost roughly 450m or 550m or so (my memory is hazy about maple 1.5 years ago). INT gears have never been cheap, etc.
To an extent, I/L and NL's were both considered the most expensive classes at the time to fund, and they both happen to be my mains.

Even as I was selling leech, after you total in pot costs for 2 hours of leech, I really wasn't making THAT much out of it.
my tldr: I kinda do wish that I made a bishop instead. You save a lot of money, you're self-sufficient on HS, and it helps quite a bit.

That said, ever since the release of Shaolin and with PB coming up, I/L isn't a BAD idea per se, you help hard carry people through Oblivion in ToT, you do massive damage at Shaolin to speed up leeching process, and my god was 3rd job grinding actually pretty fun.

Just my 2cents.

 

I can't ever really recommend a bishop for selling leech when it takes over 1b funding to do less damage than a ice lightning with 50m funding. Bishop is the better class if you are looking for a HS/Bossing Mule, however.

 

I would disagree with this, I think purely looking at the damage is too surface level. More important than damage itself are the magic thresholds required to 1hit various mobs. For example let us look at the 3 most lucrative maps for leech
Skeles
Petris
Ulu2
Having leeched at all 3 of these maps for an enormous amount of time, I can confidently assert the average meso/hr does not differ too greatly. The hierarchy for eph is Petris > skeles > ulu2, and the price for leech follows this same hierarchy. However, the quality of the loot goes backwards, Ulu2 > skeles > petris. So in the end you earn about the same with all 3 methods, with petri being slightly better than the other two by a couple mil/hr. Now let us consider how bishop and mages can leech each of these 3 maps.
It is slightly easier for bishops to hit skeles compared to mages due to the holy weakness, but you wont be seeing many mages do skeles as petris is more lucrative (albeit more leech buyer dependent). 1 Hitting petris is nearly impossible for bishops ( you have to be high 19x with very good gear), so mages have the clear advantage here. Furthermore, the magic required for mages to 1hit petris is about the same as the magic required for bishops to 1hit skeles. As for ulu2, it is hilariously easy for a mage to 1hit this map, most 130+ mages can 1 hit this map with ease. For bishops it is significantly more difficult, but pretty doable with mid level gear and level ~16x.
With this in mind, the advantage of mages over bishops is essentially due to petri leech being slightly more profitable/faster than skele leech. Of course this is a legitimate advantage, but surely you can see how someone who does not want to deal with MP washing and HS mules would prefer to make a bishop to sell leech instead.

 

Ok, how much funding do you think it would take a person to get a bishop that can 1hit ulu2 (the first leech spot that actually earns a decent amount of cash) vs an archmage?

An archmage not only takes nearly no funding, but also doesn't need high level. If someone is making a mage purely to raise mesos to fund another class, making a bishop is a terrible return on investment because you would need to spend ALOT of mesos in order to 1hit ulu2, and you would probably need to spend even more than that to 1hit skeles, unless you are willing to just grind to an insane level.

But at that point, why not just make the archmage to begin with where you can start selling 1hit leech alot sooner and make mesos alot faster?\

Now if you are making a bishop because you want to use it as a bossing mule or if you just enjoy the class, thats a completely different story. By all means make a bishop. However, if you are looking to just make a bishop to earn mesos, you are MUCH, MUCH better off going for arch mage + HS mule.

 

I'd say you would probably need a couple hundred mil for the gen30 and lvl 16x to 1hit ulu2 as a bishop.
Those are some fair points, and as someone who has a level 200 bishop + the equivalent of a 18x archmage I would agree that if Mp washing and muling is fully utilized mage is the superior option in terms of money making. However, let me point out some of the things you brought up.

You mentioned that it would take a greater initial investment into a bishop before you can sell comparable leech as the mage counterpart. This is certainly true, but it should be noted that as you get to a higher level, you can sell off your int gear once you dont need it to 1hit stuff. As a result you arent really losing anything by investing in gear, you can get your initial investment back (in fact my bishop was nearly naked at higher levels).
As for mages being able to sell leech earlier, I would point to the option of selling 2hit skele leech at level 130+ as a bishop. This is somewhat of an underutilized tactic by modern bishops (everyone is lazy and goes to shaolin!), but if done properly it can actually be quite good exp+money (albeit less than ulu2). The fact that bishops don't do 2hit skeles anymore is truly silly, but thats a topic for another time....
Another thing to keep in mind is that bishop burn half as many MP pots. So in the case where the bishop and the archmage can both 1hit ulu2, the bishop is superior. Even with 30k mana, bishops will save roughly 300-500k an hour or so on pots.

The main point I am trying to get at is that while you or I have no issue making HS mules and MP washing to 30k, these extra complications can be intimidating to some players, particularly new ones. Given that the edge that mages have over bishops is fairly minor, I think its perfectly reasonable for someone to make a bishop for leech.