Information November 2023 Balance Changes [Explained]

You'd think.

 

Why would IL or FP be using NT wand? And 958 tma is not mediocre for a lvl 120. Maybe you can share some stats as staff? On the average mage tma at those levels?

Also weird that you say you don't want to screw things up for mage ult spammers? I thought slowing down mage farmers has all the server has been doing the past few years. And now suddenly its the mages who want to enjoy some early non-farming stuff that gets nerfed out of nowhere?

 

That is precisely part the problem. The new formula removed base int's contribution to dmg and instead it converted it to some penalty whereby u are supposed to increase ur tma by 5 per lvl by whatever means.

Imagine a player seeing his 'magic' in stat window goes up when he adds int and realises his dmg went down aftwards. How stupid is that? Bear in mind only a small number of players, especially among newer ones, keep up with forum updates.

 

That's not how it works as far as I understand it. Your damage would only go down relative to what it would have been pre-patch but it still definitely goes up relative to your previous level as long as you're not like pumping STR.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong though I didn't actually do a deep dive into the formula.

 

Yes it does. The 'damage from leveling' portion now completely disregards INT as a base stat. It somehow just blatantly assumes that Z goes up by 5 per level without consideration of any AP input from player.
INT is now only used in the 'damage from gear' portion with the (magic - Z) which becomes negative if anything less than 5 int or tma is added.
Hence the penalty where e.g. you forgot to add INT, your damage goes down due to the higher weightage from the 2nd portion.

On your point I don't see how the damage going down vs pre-patch is a trivial issue. Is it really a significant increase to the handful of perf gear endgame mages that it is worth dragging down a large portion of low lvl mages? Are mages single target dpm now on par with other attackers given similar funding? Doubt so. Meawhile we chose to actively worsen the new player experience.

 

that's not applicable to 4th job mages tho, which 4th job mage still add luk? your idea of "luk mage" is still penalized by the old formula for trading int for tma.

 

Penalised by the old formula relative to pure int yes, but not relative to lvling up. Your dex sin sacrifices damage vs dexless, but the dex sin does not lose dmg by adding dex upon lvling up.

 

yea i can agree with that and it's kinda counterintuitive.

 

Can we have some actual dpm numbers from bossing mages and luk mages instead of theory crafting doom posting? Servers been up for a bit, and although I know there's not many of them I hope to hear from our bishop and AM friends and see how the changes are on live

 

Considered on the low end of “Moderately Geared” on all 3 Mages.

Bishop: Damage went up slightly, about to what Echo added before (roughly 5k on lines).
F/P: Damage went up by slightly more than what Echo gave beforehand, about 5k on minimum lines but hitting noticeably harder max lines. Pushed my minimum above 50k, which makes NT1 more doable and a possibility. Tried later with MW30 + Echo, hit consistent 61k mins on Para and 88ks on BB.
I/L: Lowest level, saw the most massive jump of about 11k damage on max CL. Went from 34ks to 45ks instantly on minimum lines with MW20 + Medi, and it can probably pin Nameless on Echo even at mid-14x.

I am the type to gear once and forget, so my “gains” are mostly just going to come early, which is what this shows. Though I can always use things like MMF, Shortcakes, and other pots to get higher gains later.

 

Whats the point of having some samples here where most people are funded and not representing the portion being nerfed? We can clearly see the negative impact is more on the lower levels with less gears.

Fwiw my IL 171, 13xx tma is slightly buffed after the changes since I am 'moderately geared'. But the buff is not to any extent where dpm is remotely close to non-mage attackers. Meanwhile we can clearly see those lower lvl mages being hard done by because I rmb my mage definitely did not have >850 tma at lvl 120.

 

I dont think you start leveling angel ray until way after 150

 

And heres me leveling it quite early, so I could help guildies do rav and pap with my measily dpm. iirc, at one stage, my AR was higher than gen...

 

Can any Luk mages explain to me why they're so concerned? I thought the point of Luk mage is you invest more mesos and have higher TMA than normal Lukless mages? If your TMA is the same or higher than Lukless then your damage won't be impacted different than Lukless, no?

The only way you'll be punished is if your TMA is lower than your Lukless counterparts, in which case I'm not really sure why you're a Luk mage in the first place...

 

yea a 1500 tma luk mage used to be worse than a 1500 tma lukless, now it's equal so idk why the uproar. it's actually a relative buff to luk mages

 

I'm a luk mage
I have no idea why people are panicing
This is one of the best changes mages could have wanted, and its in its absolute best implementation (selectively reworked to not include ults - although I would LOVE for it to also include ults although I can't say I'd recommend it in the current state of the server).

"But you're just punishing us new players with no gear "
Well, yeah. Just like all other classes work? It's complete fucking nonesense that you could have been butt ass naked and I'll use my archmage main of 3 years worth of funding and we'll do almost the same damage. It's still like that in most useful scenarios (ult farming) which you could use to fund yourself if you ever choose to pursue an end game bossing mage.

 

I'm all for including more different jobs into boss runs and this change is fantastic in that regard but not using the new formula for ultimates is just wrong.

Are mages supposed to be the best at farm/grind while also as viable for bossing as other jobs?

No balls.

 

Would you say the buff is enough to put ur luk mage on par with non-mage attackers to be viable, sorry meta, in general bossing?

Would you recommend a new player to main a mage and invest billions in gear?
If it is a hard yes, then maybe it is worth fucking over new mages in the early game since they can at least look forward to great scaling later.

 

Not sure where you got the impression that most of the concern is from luk mages... the main concern is that the fornula is completely unintuitive (taking away direct contribution of lvl up int to dmg) and also punishes a segment that doesn't need to be punished (lowly geared mages who already have the single target lowest damage). I'm pretty sure nobody is against buffing top end mage dpm, but the new formula is an extremely janky way to do it.