Information November 2023 Balance Changes [Explained]

Ok sure. When I get home.

 

I think the main issue is the confusion with this part

This has confused a lot of people into thinking that by adding LUK instead of INT they would be losing damage even if their TMA was the same in both instances, when if in fact you look at the formula there is no differentiation between INT and LUK --- only 5 stats per level that's it. As long as your magic continues to go up by 5 every level regardless of whether you added INT or LUK your damage will still increase slightly.

I think it would be a lot less confusing if it was worded differently like this instead

Also there's 2 different types of LUK mages. 1 is the kind where newbie mages added a lot of LUK not knowing how to optimise their stats build properly, memer/hipsters who want to stand out from the rest by wearing high lvl mage EQs with high LUK requirement for the looks and people who just want to relive the OG days playing as a LUK mage back in the 2000s. These people tend to have subpar TMA compared to the "normal" LUKless mages.
The other kind is those who actually considered what it takes, what they'll have to sacrifice(eg. untradability, scarcity of materials, higher costs) to attain higher TMA than their LUKless counterparts and still chose to go for it.
Most LUK mages would unfortunately be in the former group.

The next thing that raises concern for casual players is the level of funding to be considered moderately funded at level 170 with 1350 TMA. If you're decently optimised with your EQs as a LUKless mage, you should still require maybe 3.2b+'s worth of equipments which at level 170 it is very achievable as most players should have surpassed that amount even without selling leech.
However I think that aside from leech sellers who invested heavily in equipments to sell petris/skeles leech and have high TMA, most casual non-petris/skeles leech selling or petris/skeles self leeching mages would not have invested as much in their equipment partly due to how TMA scales poorly which this update is meant to address. Some of these players might have chosen to funnel their funds into an attacker char instead. We can wait for a few months to see how it unfolds, perhaps more casual mage players would be driven to invest higher amounts of mesos into their mage gear. If need be staff can adjust the formula accordingly after a few months of observation to further buff the damage done by casual players.

For one example of how casual players are like, recently I befriended a lvl 15x bishop casual player who started playing in 2017 and after speaking with her I found out that her bishop's gears are probably less than 200m in total and maybe even below 100~150m. I believe that she is not alone.

It's also an irony to me that players who only use their mage to sell skeles/petris/5-6f leech or self leech at skeles/petris/5-6f like mules are more likely to be benefiting from this update than casual actual mage mains (when I say mage main, I mean majority of their playtime on ML is spent on the mage. being a mage main does not necessarily result in them spend all their money on their mage gears --- they could be a mage main who enjoys playing mage and spends all their mesos on chairs instead of gear upgrades).

 

i think leech sellers are more likely to wear common sets of gear that benefit their "attackers" rather than mage specific, and not all leech sellers wash to the same extent for bossing. the majority of time leech sellers spend is also likely their mage, which makes it their main rather than mule. in the same strain you don't call endgame shadower-only players mules either l0l

 

I want to add to this that the difference between LUKless and vanilla mage build is so small in Legends that, by my calculations, prior to this patch a poorly optimized vanilla (LUK) mage would have at most 3% lower TMA.

With a well optimized build vanilla will be better than LUKless, but this is heavily predicated on a lot of limited and hard to get items. A particularly egregious example: BiS earrings are Ele Pierce. 2nd best is probably the untradable Octopus Earrings from summer event raffle. Then there's all the expiring event stuff that vanilla mages depend on. The build is extremely precarious and it's effectiveness tends to change throughout the calendar year.

Prior to this patch this didn't matter because the difference was so slight that it was totally negligible, making vanilla mage a viable side-grade or play style change rather than strictly better or worse. The formula change makes these slight differences extremely pronounced to the point where vanilla mages are maybe way stronger and maybe way weaker.

 

I spent 900m on MW20

 

ok i don't really have a "side" to this mage debate (and overall i think its quite good), but i DO wonder, given that unfunded mage single target is terrible to BEGIN with (even more so than funded ones, which at low level is still terrible) why did balance team feel the need to nerf their already terrible single-target damage? did it really bother you that some lvl 125 bishop did [insert terrible dpm] at rav or [insert low level boses]?

again, though, i do appreciate mage diversity in bosses, and i think its the right direction, overall. but slight tweaking should be fine?

 

I would imagine the thought process looked something like this:
- We want to up mage scaling so that there's incentive to gear them and they can be viable in bosses
- But if we just up the numbers across the board, then it opens the door to just multiattacking with several ungeared naked mages, since most of their damage comes from base INT on level up
- So the numbers need to be tweaked in a way that increases damage on the upper end without opening the door to abuse on the lower end
- Most lower level mages are reliant on their ult rather than single target damage anyways, so changing the scaling formula to have a lower floor but a steeper slope fits the needs of the above

 

This should answer fartsy 's question as well.

I am level 153. The 170 numbers were an estimate based on me adding 5 INT per level. Currently this is my setup:
helm: zhelm 32 int 13 luk
overall: dark enigma 23 int 3 luk
shoes: timeless cabatina 10 tma
gloves: dark pachone 19 tma 3 luk
earring: 17 tma single earring
eye: 7 int white racc mask
face: angry mask 6 tma
cape: crimsonheart cloak 4 int 15 luk
shield: 18 tma esther shield
weapon: ele wand 7 183 tma
rings: tier 5 mb ring, ellin forest ring, fishing ring

At the moment I am not getting negatively affected by the change, but if I level and dont upgrade my equips a lot I might be. I do need to do some easy upgrades though like getting tier 10 ring and Targa helm to get rid of this awful Zhelm. After that I'm looking to switch to a Timeless Myst Blue or a Blue Bazura and then I will upgrade eye accessory and earring. I might do earring and eye accessory upgrade before OA, but getting a 100 LUK OA would be a big deal because not only would it have more INT on the clean OA but it would also let me reset LUK down cause I could equip the Cabatina and the OA with 96 LUK. Most of the mesos went to MW20, wand, shield, and HTP in that order. The gloves, OA, shoes, and cape were all under 100m total.

 

U used an illustration from the best point in time from the latest change i.e. changing to a lvl 130 ele wand (The last big tma increase for most mages) to show a positive case for an unfunded mage. That is very disingenuous. Why don't you show what happens when the mage keeps this gear for another levels? Or lvl 120 to 129?

 

yea you look like you're doing just fine, 153-170 is like 85 int so that's another 8-9 bonus tma from mw20 not including any gears or echo

 

i want to thank you for providing examples like these btw. i think it helps set more concrete examples than just formula (which, in theory, should be enough but im dumb).

As for your question, to me right now that sounds reasonable, but when i first started out, my bishop did not have 136mil in funding because i was busy buying Genesis and MW (but maybe accounting for inflation it did? o.o idk lol). i think the point is not "how low you want to go" but rather....why at all?

and i guess the answer to that is "high level naked mages doing a lot of dmg in NT" and i suppose that could be a possibility, i can imagine someone having 3 arch mages and macro-ing their single target dmg there.

idk exactly how worth it'd be pre-change vs post-change and maybe "naked" mages only having a wand on them, etc. Also i feel like people with 3 arch mages wont have any problem spending like 500mil each character to bring them up to "decent" condition SINCE they most likely already have a pog wand on each of them. another solution would be to not allow macro-ing single target skills. just throwing ideas.

Also i think other concerns people have are 1)counter-intuitive nature of the scaling formula 2)noob luk mages being nerfed. I think. x.x (oh man im getting knees-deep into this discussion omg)

 

Sounds like ultimately maining mages is still a passion project that you would do regardless of this change. If that is the case, whatever buff brought about by this change is just for a handful of mage mains who would have done so regardless. It is not going to encourage more people to main mages in endgame. Meanwhile most casual low-mid level mages who did not want to dump a few bil into int gear gets an unnecessary nerf.

 

People have gotten a lot more secretive with their strats and I wouldn't be surprised at all if people were multimaging afk content like nib and nameless with their naked I/Ls.

 

I heard you are an endgame player, are you going to reroll to IL?

 

That's kind of a weird strawman, no? Just because I don't play something doesn't mean it's not viable. I don't have a Markman or a Paladin and they're both considered in a pretty good spot balance-wise.

 

Don't take it personally, I'm just asking you whether you think the buff is enough to convince endgame players to switch to maining mage.

 

That's up to the individual. I'd imagine the players who already have invested in their mage are more incentivized to run boss content now though.