New Mage damage formula

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Math terminology aside, I do agree that the new formula has a lot of unintuitive features. However, mages are generally in a better state post-change and I'd rather see incremental progress than nothing at all. The funding required to gear a mage to the break-even point is really not that much for someone interested in funding a mage.

random thoughts on formula:
I do agree that a formula more along the lines of traditional attackers, i.e. (power of gear) * (power obtained from leveling) is more intuitive. However, it comes with a whole slew of back-compat concerns: clearly since existing items/scrolls/etc are balanced around tma and not just magic attack, something like magic attack * int cannot work without unrealistic changes to all existing items, scrolls, etc.
Say you tweak this a bit by doing (tma from gear) * (tma from character base stats). You've now significantly buffed elestaffs and luk mages and probably made them stronger than lukless.
OK, well that was because "some of the TMA from the gear shouldn't count, because you could only equip it by putting some stats into luk." That puts you much closer to formulas like the one staff settled on (for now): normalize TMA against a base TMA you'd get per level from lukless build and use this as an approximate proxy for weapon attack. It'd be interesting to explore formulas with a nonzero coefficient on this term as an alternative to the tma^2 and (normalized tma from gear)^2 terms.

I just really don't think the aversion to having squared terms in the damage formula is all-too-justified. DPM for a single-target attacker operating in a hyperliquid market (as they play, their gear is incrementally upgraded with the next most efficient purchase) will generally increase quadratically over some sort of normalized time (normalization required since marginal cost of better gear increases as you get more funded). It's pretty reasonable for mages to do the same, and though the scaling doesn't work exactly the same way it's not really that different in real-world scenarios.

 

One inefficient player gets his damage stolen by the half a dozen of other inefficient players. LawdHeComin was ritually sacrificed for their gain.

I've still yet to hear any valid reasoning behind nerfing aside from just not caring about the people affected by the negatives. Being reduced to 1 damage while having hundreds of magic instead of the logical 1 damage for having 4 magic feels like a real pointless "fuck you" that didn't really need to occur. The gear and levels section of the new formula could have been a multiplier applied to the old formula, with <1 answers set to 1, and maximum values retaining their current strength. It also comes with the optics of being solely a buff, not killing unique builds, and not starting pointless slapfights in the forums for 6 pages.

 

from the nov. balance thread


what kind of funding equivalent would a normal attacker like a NL or paladin be? Funding as in sum of cheapest set of gear for those TMA values converted back to that of a normal attacker

 

TFW there are 0 “incredibly” geared mages in the server

 

If the balance team is worried about 5 naked mages soloing nib, I think there are a few other options like nerfing the elemental advtanges while buffing mage scaling across the board, or disabling single target macro? Mmm im out of ideas already! xd tough job you guys have...

I think part of the problem (maybe) is that unlike attacker gears, which only weapon- cape-glove (and shoe kekw) really matters, for mages every single slot is important and expensive.
Maybe this is to their advantage though, since for mid-tier amount of funding you can spread out the cost across different types of gear.
But for end-game-tier theres so many items to complete with each item being very expensive...

 

I wonder why would that be

 

I can't fathom trying to gear a class just to end up doing shit damage in bosses anyways

- Dark Knight

 

Okay I just thought I'd post here to give my own data point if it's helpful. So just for reference I have a very average casual bishop that is 147. This is her TMA with MW20 at level 147. I do not use her for farming mesos or selling leech, although I have leeched my friends for fun sometimes.

From the above graph it seems she is categorized as "moderately geared" which I think is accurate.



I have not put that much effort into gearing her, but I did put in some investment. I think she hits the breakpoint for buff, maybe she even got buffed a little bit!! But I think even casual mage mains should be buffed by this formula! I don't really play on my bishop but she still got buffed.

For reference this is her gear. PRICES ARE CURRENT PRICES, I bought these a long time ago.

• hat: 34int Zak Helm (self scrolled)
• face: 4int choco ice cream bar (free from event. When this expires she goes back to wearing a 0 TMA rat mouth )
• eyes: 10 int white racc mask (100mil, self scrolled)
• ears: 21 TMA red emerald earrings (90 mil??)
• cape: 17 TMA puac (45mil, self scrolled. PuAC are dirt cheap, and you can farm cape int 30s from APQ. I just kept tossing them on til a cape survived)
• gloves: 13 tma red marker (60mil)
• shoes: 3 int black magic shoes LOL (idk free i got them from zombie lupins)
• overall: 22 int dark moonlight (idk price self scrolled)
• wand: 167 tma wand 6 (~130mil. don't scroll wands they all explode)
• shield: 23 tma stolen fence (probably the item I spent the most money on! like 270mil or something)
• pendant: HTP (free)

Most of her gear was self-scrolled or I found a good deal through FM. You can save a lot of money if you get lucky with scrolling. Overall her gear is probably like ~700mil? I definitely did not spend that much though. I still think these gear goals are doable for any mage main with some investment. I do know that leech selling mages have better gear than me too (to 1HKO those petris) and they are not even affected by these changes lol.

I only make my income through bossing with friends and doing event raffles. This was back when there were no pcoins either so bossing profit was a meme too. I've played on and off for a few years. I think if there is a new mage main player, and they are serious about becoming a mage bosser at later levels, they should be able to easily hit these goals just by playing. They don't even need to sell leech or anything, but it would definitely speed up the process!

 

yeah i think (maybe bias here) most of the complaints are from the higher level mages (mains?) without sufficient gear. lower level mages got significant buffs:
example character with only 70% scrolls, no mw, no echo at 130

example character at 200 w/ mw20 and echo


i'd be more concerned about 1600 tma being considered "moderate gear" with mw20/echo at 200 and 1800 tma as "incredibly geared". maybe i should convert and use these figures next time someone talks about their gear

example conversation:
person 1: i finally finished my perfect craven!
me: congrats you're roughly moderately geared

 

Ah ok I'm kinda seeing it now. So assuming I stop upgrading my gear, my damage would actually go down when compared to before, if I got to level 200?

 

your damage will always go up bc the z value is only -5 but when you level up your mw bonus increases still. level up would be something like 1.04 (echo) * 1.1 (mw20) * 5 (int) - 5

and yeah by 200 you'll be weaker than prepatch

 

Correct, and this is why it was a buff to the rich and a nerf to the poor.

 

I thought the given TMAs for funding were just on gear/MW, not including echo or pots? ie, youd need over 13b of equips and probably a perfect wand to sit at 1600 comfortably

 

idk i want to give them the benefit of the doubt

people from the NL gear list can live in fear knowing many of them are not incredibly geared, but roughly equivalent to an endgame AM main

 

Can you classify mages who invest billions of mesos into other classes who got nerfed from this patch as poor?