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I/L mage balance thread

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by Shivering, Jan 9, 2021.

  1. Shivering
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    Shivering Wolfspider

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    Shivering
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    LF> feedback/suggestions from other players on what they think of I/L's currently. I'm going to list my own personal thoughts below.

    Common misconception:
    1. I/L can do ob4; they don't need shaolin. I've seen this thrown around a lot. This is not true. ob4 has been and always will be significantly worse than Shaolin in terms of raw exp gained. Right now as a duo mage you can gain 120-130m exp at shaolin and can get 100m soloing the map. OB4 on the other hand caps you out at 70-80m. Sure, I guess if you like spending 90 minutes to do what you can do at 60 and enjoy that style of gameplay maybe you consider I/L's viable. This also ignores the fact that you need 1410 TMA which is not achievable till around 180 with decent gear, to achieve this really suboptimal EPH at ob4.
    Training progression for a standard F/P or I/L Mage once they hit 120:
    • 120 - 1 hit ulu2: 1-2F/3-4F/skeles duo with mage/bishop. This stage of your mapling career takes about 4-7 hours to achieve. Shaolin mobs are unaffected by freeze, so I/L just do less damage than F/P. If an I/L duos at skeles this is the only time for their maple career they will see blizzard freeze a mob outside of obscure scenarios like they decided to grab an HTP post-120 and needed to kill some cornians for dagger.

    • 1 ulu2/1 hit petri/duo at shoalin with another mage: F/P will 1 hit ulu2 before I/L (6 levels worth of TMA before) and this holds true for going into petris as well. I/L just do everything 6 levels later; freeze has no benefit as you will 1 hit mobs. If you decide to train at shaolin during this time period you will have no benefit over F/P as you're blizzard does not freeze mobs.
    This is basically it. This is how you play mages from 120-200. Obviously there are people who like to engage in suboptimal EPH or meso making abilities and will say there are sub-optimal alternatives. Unfortunately, that would probably be the minority (I hope).


    Pros and Cons List on Balance of F/P and I/L mages in 4th job:

    F/P hit TMA thresholds before their I/L mage counterparts in exchange for I/L's getting freeze component which is now nullified with the recent shaolin changes.

    F/P have no reliable mobbing ability outside of meteor. This basically means if you made your mage to do APQ you're going to have a hard time farming keys. Personally that's the only scenario I can think of where F/P will struggle compared to I/L mages. There is already an existing trade-off for this as well as F/P do higher single target DPS as paralyze does significantly more damage than chain lightning.


    Balancing suggestions:

    Obviously staff is very against adding the freeze component back into an I/L mages kit at shaolin. So what is an alternative compensation buff? Feel free to post your own opinions below. Thanks for your time if you read this and thanks in advance for your suggestions/feedback if you post below.

    My suggestion would be to raise the basic attack damage on blizzard at max level by about 15-20 points to even the playing field a bit between the blizzard and meteor skills.

    As for me personally, I don't really care if you balance I/Ls or not because I have hit a TMA threshold where this is all irrelevant to me on my own I/L. As for gameplay experience I have experience playing both I/Ls and F/Ps and own a 189 I/L and a 169 F/P currently. This thread is mainly for those lower level I/L mages and new players who join who hopefully don't regret their decision to make an I/L in the future because currently there is almost no reason to make an I/L over an F/P outside of nostalgia reasons or if you really value farming those APQ keys without using your ultimate skill.
     
    • Agree Agree x 8
  2. RegalStar
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    RegalStar Nightshadow

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    Make Vergamot weak to lightning all the way through. There's no logical reason why this thing switches from being weak to lightning, then to fire, then nothing, when all that happens is that it loses some weapons.

    Also, remove Ariel's lightning resistance. This one makes more sense, but it just punishes I/Ls (and paladins) needlessly.
     
    • Like Like x 4
  3. akashsky
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    akashsky Horntail

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    I really do not think that ice lightning mages need any change. The main balancing factor between the two classes is mobbing vs single target, which I think is already a fair trade-off.

    Sure, ice lightning mages do less damage, but you can close this gap with gear or leveling up a few times. An ice lightning archmage can kill anything in the same number of hits that a fire poison can. You just need to have slightly better gear or level - which along with worse single target dps is what you trade off for having better overall mobbing than a fire poison.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  4. Cak33
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    Cak33 Headless Horseman

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    while i have played neither classes, it feels like a BM vs MM thing.

    BM -> stronger at very high levels
    MM -> stronger at early levels

    F/P -> stronger at 4th job
    I/L -> stronger before 4th job

    everyone looks at lvl 170+ anywz so, being stronger earlier seems suggestively irrevelant most of time :/
     
    • Disagree Disagree x 1
  5. whatdatoast
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    whatdatoast Windraider

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    I have done nearly all bosses on my IL so i'll give my perspective on that. The patch that nerfed SI and buffed CL and paralyze actually made mage rather viable at bossing (especially since most bosses are lightning weak).

    I just did some dummy dpm tests on my mage (lvl 175, 1390 tma) and got about 4.1m dpm without summon, single target. On 3-cleave I got 7.2m/9m dpm (with/ without summon). My average geared BM (lvl 163) got 6.5m/7.3m dpm (with/ without mw20).

    So we can see that on single target on a lightning-weak boss (x1.5 dmg), it's comparable in dpm, and in 3-cleave situation (cwkpq, jiaoceng), it’s not terrible.

    Ok so now the various bosses:

    Area Bosses
    Ones with lightning weakness: Kacchuu Musha, Black Crow, Anego, and Lilynouch.
    So nearly every boss worth camping for is lightning weak and is a pretty easy solo. The only one that is lightning strong is Dodo. None of these are poison weak (and some are even poison immune like samu).

    Scarlion / Targa
    Scar is strong against ice/lightning and weak to fire, but targa is immune to poison and weak to ice.
    IL can reasonably join scarga as cleave (with ult or CL). F/P are kinda shafted here.

    NeoTokyo
    IL is great for every NT boss. It's strong against Verga B2, Dunas (no DR), Nibergen (lightning weak, and only weapon cancels), Nameless (lightning weak). I have even whited some parts of Nib depending on how many WCs there were. Being able to pin nameless (50k kb) at lvl 16X is also pretty useful, when you can't find a paly. Unfortunately for F/P, Verga, Dunas, and Nib are all poison immune.

    Temple of Time
    IL are definitely the king of grinding at ToT. Memory/Qualm mobs are weak to lightning, and Oblivions are weak to blizzard. F/P are also decent at ToT, Fire is strong against Qualms and poison is strong against oblivions and Lyka. Pink Bean is strong against neutral and no neutral to lightning/paralyze, so mages aren't too bad. And hey, Ora whited pb, so mages can't be that meme at bossing, right?

    I'll skip meme content like zak and HT for now, since mages have been shown to be decent there already.

    So in conclusion, F/P are massively shafted by nearly every form of fun bossing, and IL are better in most circumstances, despite paralyze being a bit stronger. I think some bosses should lose the poison immunity. But as it stands, I think the main trade off for IL is a weaker ult (20 magic less than meteor) in exchange for being able to do all the meme content legends has to offer. F/P are also better at HT/Zak/PB.

    Also according to the lib Blizzard is 550 and Meteor is 570 magic attack. Does that translate differently to tma? Otherwise it's only a 4 level differential.
     
    • Informative Informative x 8
    • Agree Agree x 2
  6. fartsy
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    fartsy Zakum

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    fp buffs pls ;_;
     
    • Great Work Great Work x 2
  7. OP
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    Shivering
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    Shivering Wolfspider

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    The only bosses I’ve done on my I/L are zak and HT so definitely appreciate the insight you provided in your post. Right now I feel like both mages have 2 core abilities: their farming and grinding ability which is meteor/blizzard and then their bossing ability which are CL/paralyze.

    To answer your question, yes although the attacks themselves only have a 20 damage differential when you run them through the dps formula it comes out to about a 30 TMA difference which amounts to a 6 level differential assuming similar gear (it’s more like 6.6 though because F/P get a free 3 TMA for the same price on their wands).

    Meteor/Blizzard comparison:

    I think I addressed this a lot in my main post so no need to repeat a lot of the worlds but right now IL are really lackluster in this category. When I made an IL it was for the superior grinding option because they get to freeze mobs they cannot 1 hit; that just isn’t there any more which to me sucks. Personally, I would much rather see I/L lose another 20 base damage on their ultimate and have a 12 lvl damage gap on blizzard compared to meteor, than see the freeze component taken away because it is very core to their identity.

    Chain Lightning/Paralyze comparison:

    It’s actually sad when I look at your numbers because when I think of what an F/P should be I think of someone who trades the freezing ability of an I/L for raw power. This means a stronger ultimate ability and a stronger single target ability that should reign supreme in bossing.

    Maybe I’m alone in this but it feels like the mold or archetype these mages were designed to fit into where F/P has a stronger ultimate and stronger single target damage whereas I/L makes up for this by having an ultimate that freezes and a superior mobbing option didn’t quite materialize because of the unique resistance features these bosses have.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  8. Discor
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    Discor Slimy

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    well i have to add that I love my I/L arch mage but if i knew the stuff i know now there is no way in hell i would choose to be I/L.
    the freeze component is kinda meh at best, there are mobs not bosses mobs that are immune to it and you do half the dmg,
    not to mention the ones which are just immune to ice dmg in total( which was a fun surprise for me).

    maybe I am missing something but from what i see if you want a mage the best choice is a Bishop since you have great grinding mobs with
    weakens to holy attribute and they are south after for bossing and the have amazing and always needed skills like HS, door and Resurrection.
    Then comes the F/P which is like I/L but stronger and if i remember correctly mobs in ToT oblivion are weak to poison which should make it a good place to grind.
    so what does I/L arch mage have ? correct he can freeze , but it becomes completely useless after lvl 125.

    First a little about me i am a luk mage and very not efficient i do not sell leech i take my time with the game, and i see a lot of stuff that annoys me from time to time:
    1) I constantly see trades on the forum to nerf mages which makes me sad, i mean since i discovered that a lot of bosses dispel MG i understood that as a mage if i wish to boss
    i need to do hp washing and that just to survive the constant dispelling and not to be a good dmg dealer since mages 1 target dmg is bad, so the only good thing a mage has is his aoe which ppl on this forum hate and demand to nerf it.
    2)the monsters which immune to ice T_T or are strong against it especially if you need to kill it for a quest, if we talk about fair lets add to some mobs immune to normal dmg and strong against norm dmg.
    3) the fact that some maps were changed so that the ult would hit only one platform, god damn it makes me want to cry, i mean blizzard is a 1 manna bull per cast and i have to use it on 3-4 mobs just because it is "unfair to other classes" who do double the dmg but to just 1 enemy.
    4) the ult takes 5 seconds it is a small but constant annoying thing for me, oh and the fact that after the cast i cant move but the mobs can and they hit me after i used the ult does not help.

    overall being an I/L arch mage is fine and in ML every one makes his own story, i mean there are strength mages, and there are a lot of positives to the I/L WIZARD compared to his counterparts, but if we compare the mage classes 4th job I can think of no reason to make I/L especially if you are the efficient kinda guy.
     
  9. yurain
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    yurain Windraider

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    I just want to say this is very un-GMS like, which disregards the usual ML's philosophy of being GMS-like that we usual see in patch notes.
    This change was for the sole purpose of nerfing the 5-6 leeching that IL is having I am pretty sure there can be more ways about this.

    I hope this is a temporary change same as the multi-client changes (stopped, then allowed again in HT and zak), and allow for time for more ideas before a more appropriate change.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  10. Oradious
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    Oradious Mr. Anchor

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    Sure, let me go around obv spamming paralyze and 2 hitting every mob for that pog 10mil eph.

    Mana bull heals 60%, ult costs 7k per cast. If you are using 1 mana bull per cast, it means you only have ~12k mp, which means you didn't wash, so stop complaining. It's no different than those people who need HB to survive HT and then go "wtf how did i die" when HB is gone.

    Ult takes 3060 ms (or 3.06 seconds) to cast with booster, not 5 seconds.
     
  11. asdfjkliang
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    asdfjkliang Selkie Jr.

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    #buffchainlightning
     
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  12. Discor
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    Discor Slimy

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    i never played as a F/p but don't they have as skill which covers the whole map with poison? i remember being on some maps which were fully covered and all the mobs were dying constantly.

    ok you got me it is 2 casts per mana bull if you mp wash, so much better:yay:.

    feels like forever man:sleep:.

    i do not say we should change the game or anything just wanted to ad my experience of someone who has only 1 char which is I/L arch mage,
    I think every one has the thing they love about the charterer they play and the things that make them sad.
    nothing is perfect in ML....except Bishops and the 30kHP and 30KMP NL:notworth::notworth::notworth:
     
  13. Vowels
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    Vowels Slimy

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    hey nice thread, regarding archmages class identity I can identify two types:
    • Archmage that sells leech: Identity revolves around ult, ulu, shaolin and optimizing eph. Funds themselves until they reach a magic threshold, some cap their level.
    • Archmage that boss / does another content: Identity is more than ult, single target is important, tries NT, HT, PB, etc and optimizes dpm. Funds themsleves without a limit, doesn't cap their level.
    A player can do both but it's fair to say the vast majority exclusively sells leech to fund their attackers. These archmages are mules because they were created to generate mesos that can be used by the player's main account / leech the player's main account.
    I recognize that there might be some archmage players that exclusively sell leech and don't have an attacker so they just do mesos to play monopoly, but these are a minority.

    Nothing wrong with that we all want mesos but since we are talking about the balance of the archmage class I think leech is already in a pretty good spot and if there's a opportunity to do some buffs it shouldn't be on ults. Honestly leech gameplay and it's massive mule population is a curse for the class, I would like to see I/L and F/P getting a buff on other skills that incentivizes and rewards other kinds of gameplay
     
    • Agree Agree x 5
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  14. Toon
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    Toon Capt. Latanica

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    NT part 2 is also week to lightning. IL is much more versatile. The only mage change i can think of is removing poison resistance from some bosses
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  15. whatdatoast
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    whatdatoast Windraider

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    If we're talking about QoL changes, a longer range on CL/Paralyze will help with bossing a ton!
     
    • Agree Agree x 1

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