Buff f/p mage skills vs bosses

You know damage cap doesn't apply to poison mist right? If you spawn a 2b HP monster it'll literally do 2.5% of its HP

But yeah you can't really rely on mages to do damage. You'll be doing like 3m dpm even after buffs (which is pitiful)

 

isnt it mages job to kill the monsters that the boss spawn?
btw i didnt even do zakum yet. so just asking...

 

It's viable but you usually bring a Bishop iirc because they can heal, dispel, Holy shield and HS. (talking zakum btw)

 

during weapon cancels, melee classes go up and kill the flying mobs.
some of the flying mobs are resistant to fire/ice, but yeah mages could go up and kill them. Mages are GREAT bossers in HT. amazing crowd control and cleaves all body parts. (not trolling btw)

 

only bad thing, is risking spamming attacks, and you get dispelled by HT and die, so you have to spam magic guard

 

Keep in mind that i/l mages have it hard too, seeing as they also have seal, and half their whole element (ice) has no effect freezing bosses. It's the same deal with ice demon. Won't affect bosses, and so will not make them weak to fire.

But the buffs are kind of different. Fire demon actually has a poison-like debuff that deals 2.5% of the mob's max HP per second at max level.

Weirdly enough, Slow actually affects bosses. Unfortunately it doesn't really help in boss fights! Most notable exception is bigfoot.

Some problems with changing the mechanics of ice/fire demon is that they apply two very specific debfuffs that will very seriously impact the balance of a boss fight. Also, the debuffs literally change ALL THE OTHER weaknesses. For example, try using fire demon on a dreamy ghost, then paralyze. Dreamy ghost will take 100% damage from poison element attacks, when it was previously immune! Now try fire demon on a monster weak to fire. It will no longer be weak to fire (but is now weak to ice)!

I'd like if the elemental attributes worked differently, to only affect the appropriate weakness as advertised... the whole problem with this and the tweaks specific for bosses is it means they'd have to create a dozen different versions of these debuffs, and I doubt it's possible.

Anyway, as a f/p arch mage, your bossing skills should be fire demon, paralyze, and elquines. Fire arrow is second rate! Also worth mentioning is that I recently made a suggestion to buff mana reflection. I think a buff to this skill is far more doable and may actually be the help you need in bossing.

 

It also helps a lot for 2nd body of pap! And Headless Horseman for 3rd job mages.

 

Yeah. Unfortunately the "big" bosses everyone care about are like, stationary blobs.

 

I don't know how this idea of "mages can't boss" got perpetuated, but they actually have very good damage at HT, the main endgame boss on the same. A strong mage can do upwards of 3-3.5m dpm on a single target with meteor/blizzard. If you can hit 2 body parts at any point in time that is 6-7m dpm which is quite respectable even for a strong attacker class. If you can hit 3 parts thats 9-10m dpm, which is comparable to most NLs on apple. If you hit any more than 3, your dpm can only be matched be warriors cleaving multiple body parts, but the advantage mages have over warriors is that they can continue to cleave even after the arm+wings are dead. There are 8 body parts in HT, lets assume you can only start casting meteor/blizzard after the legs+tail die, in which case there are 6 body parts left. 3 of these remaining 6 bodyparts can cast magic cancel, let us make the assumption that at any point in time each of these heads are either magic or weapon canceled (which is not true). Then on average a mage would be able to hit 4.5 body parts during this phase. This means that before the wings/arm dies a mage will be doing ~13-15m dpm. After 1 side is cleared there are 3 body parts left, 2 of which cancel, so effectively 2 body parts to cleave during this phase, ~ 6-7m dpm. It is only during the preheads and the very end of the body that a mage's damage becomes unspectacular, and even then you could prolly spam paralyze/chain lightning for ~4m dpm. If we make the approximation that preheads + final phase of body lasts for about half the run, then we are left with the crude approximation that mages do ~4m dpm for half the run, and 10m+ during the other half, which does not sound like a weak class in the least.

Now I could try to do more detailed calculations to give a better estimate for a mages mean dpm (use rate of magic/weapon cancel to calculate the probability of any particular head being magic cancelled, collect data on how long each phase of a typical HT run takes), but hopefully the scrambled numbers I gave above gives an lower bound on a mage's dpm that should be enough to convince you that they are not "bad" at HT. I would be curious to see a mage to an @dpm 60 in HT.

The only 2 major downsides I see are,
1. The pot burn would be quite bad given that they would need to spam 7k mana spells to do this amount of damage.
2. The possibility of being dispelled and instakilled.
For #1, it should be noted that this extra cost somewhat cancels out with the fact that they don't really need apples to do the type of damage I mentioned earlier.
As for #2, this can be fully overcome with a combination of hp+mp washing and knowledge of dispel timers. With a tier 10 ring, a lvl 18x mage would only need ~800 hp or so to tank a hit from HT.

 

For one thing, there's issues with the sequence of attacking HT. Last runs I was on (and don't think this has really changed), they only attack one body part at a time if possible, in order to avoid "waking" the other parts up and having like 6 different things spamming attacks all at once. Makes it much more difficult to fight and keep buyers alive. If you go in there and start meteoring the whole HT, you're going to have a very pissed expedition team who loves to rely on their single-target tactics.

Second issue is the positioning. Generally everyone crowds one side/spot. This makes it easier to buff/heal each other and perhaps save from seduce. If you stand right under HT, right where the wyverns spawn, you're going to be in some big trouble before you even knew what hit you.

Third: when you are spamming meteor, you are stuck there and vulnerable for quite some time.

Fourth dispels: I don't think there is a timer, so good luck. Your uber DPS drops to 0 when you can no longer cast spells cause you're dead. A mage will never get enough HP to tank a direct hit from HT when dispelled. I'm talking about the 5.5k damage hits. lol

Fifth apples: Naturally apples will boost your matk as well, so why not use them too?

The math sounds good on paper, but honestly ask yourself this: With so many people who have so many freaking mages (all kinds of mages are popular for leveling, especially bishops), and all the years upon years maplestory has been out, don't you think there is a reason everyone relies on nightlords + sharp eyes and heroes with brandish? It's because they've worked and been enormously successful, and I don't think you're the first guy who came up with the bright idea to just spam meteor (like on everything else). Obviously, seeing how unpopular the idea is, it didn't pan out.

This isn't to say mages can't boss, but they have always had the reputation of being suboptimal. Low single DPS, shafted by dispels, and bringing no desirable party buffs to the table.

Comparing what a level 18x arch mage can do to 3-4 targets to what a level 14x NL can do on just one is kind of sad...

 

Is this with SI and SE? I think you need like ~150k average hits to hit the 3m mark with SI.

I think there's a timer or something close to it. I don't personally do HT enough but Fishy and Bonzai should know more
And it's just not worth giving mages apples imo since they don't scale as well as other classes. From what I've seen, stews are pretty nice. Either way there's damage cap issues that limits the potency of apples if SE is present.

 

yeah,theres dispel timers we are aware of. so we know when to starting spamming magic guard.and then once the dispel happens, you a window gap to use ur ultimates.Using ur ultimates on dark wyverns 1shots them,so it kills them before other attackers get dispelled.

 

hi as a mage that has HT'ed quite a few times in my life I can say that it is not an easy task. But the more that I HT I get used to the timing of dispels and when I should use my ultimates and when I shouldn't. When in fear of dispel, I tend to use chain lightning instead of ultimates so I'm not stuck between blizzes. Also I disagree that a mage can't get enough HP to tank a hit after dispelled. I am currently working on achieving that having 3.5 hp clean, I would reach 4.1k hp with monster ring and I am planning on washing the rest.

 

I was right all along... just saying \o/

 

why is mage in HT

 

What's odd to me is why F/P gets ice summon and vice versa with I/L. F/P should get ifrit and elquine for ice mages. Fire demon should increase fire weakness by 1 stage (ice demons adds ice). And this effect should affect bosses. F/P uses paralyze for single target so fire demon won't make paralyze busted, again same with chain lightning. The added fire weakness will help the mages respective summon do decent passive damage.

 

it's part of the lore if you read the quests that give you those skillbooks. The point of the summons in lore is that in order to use both fire+ice magic, one must use a surrogate i.e. a summon

 

There's lore in this game?

I've always found the mechanics of Fire Demon, and Ice Demon to be strange. I can't help to feel there's a missed opportunity there in creating a very interesting mechanic... especially as bossing as an Archmage could be an engaging combination managing summon/buff/de-buff uptime.

 

Selquin above provided some great explanations for Archmage's (in-theory) potential in HT. However, I can't shake the feeling that (in-practice) if I show up and proceed to Meteor all the arms there's a decent chance of getting yelled at.