Buff Mages please

As we all know, there are several useless skills in basically every classes arsenal. I think the existence of these various “dummy skills” is generally poor design. Even a powerful, meta-defining such as mages do not deserve these kinds of skills. Which is why my suggestion is to rework one of the earliest dummy skills available in the game: Energy bolt.

I imagine anyone reading this thread knows energy bolt as the skill that any prudent mage would just put 1 SP into and forget about. It’s worse than magic claw in every way. However, considering how similar the two skills are, there would be basically no point to buffing it as it is. Currently they both share the same niche. So here’s my suggestion:

For reference: (courtesy of Nises formulas)
Magic claw: 810ms atk speed, 40x2 dmg

Energy bolt: 810ms atk speed, 55 dmg

Suggestion:
Energy bolt: 690ms atk speed, 60 dmg

Generally speaking, mages have the slowest attacks in the game. Most physical attacks hover in the 600-700ms range, while the majority of mages lower job attacking spells have 810ms attack speed. This change would give energy bolt a unique spot in the mages toolkit as a fast early game attack. With this change, Energy bolt would still be around 10% weaker DPS than magic claw, but would attack 17% faster. This means if you can already reach the damage tier needed to kill a mob in 1/2 shots, energy bolt would be optimal vs magic claw. However, vs bosses and mobs that require higher dmg to kill, magic claw would still reign supreme.

The numbers can be tweaked to make it more or less powerful, but ideally energy bolt would be preferable to IL and FP mages who receive stronger second job single target skills. Magic claw would still be better for clerics who lack such options.

Pros:

• Gives an otherwise useless skill it’s own identity
• Noobs who max energy bolt don’t have to delete their characters
• Faster grinding option for baby mages/single target point farmers
• Still keeps magic claw relevant in the mage toolkit
• Impactful gameplay change given most people create mages

Thanks for those of you who read this far. I’d appreciate your feedback below

 

Sorry to break it to you, but I have never farmed HHG1 on any of my characters, the fact that this suggestion is a buff to that is completely incidental. I am looking at this through the lens of early job and early job only. Though for the sake of argument, even with spell booster and this change, night lords and corsairs would still have distinct advantages over mages in this department. In the first place, I don’t see why it’s a problem that a class specifically designed to be good at farming is better at it in one specific, niche way.

I explained the distinct advantages this skill would have over magic claw early game in the original post, and the fact that the loss of overall damage could be tweaked by the balance team to a point they deem fitting. For example, if it dealt 65 instead of 60, it would only be around 4-5% weaker than magic claw (which personally, I think is a bit much).

I also don’t think the fact that “others skills are bad too” justifies dismissing this idea. Those are issues in their own right, and some of them I am considering making suggestions about in the future as well. At the very least, I think we can both agree that in its current state this skill is useless, and that the game would be better designed if it weren’t useless.

The reason why I specifically mentioned noobs don’t have to recreate their characters is because that is precisely what my noob friend did shortly after realizing his mistake in maxing energy bolt. New accounts have a lot to spend NX on: pets, cosmetics, inventory slots, a shop, owls, smegas, not even to mention AP resets. It is literally more time:NX efficient to just recreate your character, so why waste your NX on an digging yourself out of an early game noob trap? My suggestion aims to remove this dilemma entirely.

If you really care about rebalancing useless skills, wouldn’t this be a great first step in the right direction? I really feel like we both have the same end goal here. I simply chose this skill to suggest because it’s one of the first examples of “dummy skills” in the game and I actually had an idea for it I thought was creative and would be interesting to see in the game. I just want you to ask yourself if you should really dismiss this idea just because mages are already a powerful, functional class.

 

Maybe we just see the game differently, because I just don’t understand why exactly you think this is so bad. These players choose to play this way because of the circumstances of the event, and I don’t think it really hurts anyone else. Sure, even I think it’s silly, but it sounds like your problem moreso lies in the way the events are designed. Perhaps you should suggest a new way of playing the event if you believe it is such a problem

It’s not as if my opinion is due to any lack of knowledge, I talked with others and weighed all these things before making the suggestion at all. The conclusion I came to is that I don’t care if someone decides it’s fun to grind snails all day for AP resets on a mule. And rejecting this suggestion would do basically nothing in part to curb this behavior. Could I ask you to also look at this in the lens of the half year in which no events are ongoing?

 

Assuming they’re using maple weapons and no SI:

Bowmaster:
330ms hurricane spam

Xbow:
690ms normal attack

NL:
600ms lucky 7

Shad:
660ms lucky 7 OR
600ms normal attack

Corsair:
390ms double shot

Brawler:
450ms double shot or 390ms w/SI

DK:
660ms normal

2H sword:
720ms normal

1H sword:
660ms normal

1H mace:
720ms normal

Beginner:
660ms normal (w/fan)

Bishop:
(As is) 810ms magic claw
(Post suggestion) 690ms energy bolt

IL/FP:
(As is) 720ms magic claw
(Post suggestion) 600ms energy bolt

So really, this change wouldn’t really break mages in this regard, just more or less put them in line with other classes. They also do not have the luxury of midair casting, and have to reach 3rd job to reach 600ms. For a class based around farming, I don’t think this change is particularly alarming.

 

Along with some of the skills Floris mentioned, there’s good bit of underwhelming 3rd job skills such as shadow meso or inferno which can probably use a closer look in a more traditional way. Steal is interesting too I think, you could rebalance it in a number of ways. I have thought of making it it’s own single target skill, a finisher, even a weak mobbing skill. Final attack as well definitely needs a frame data improvement, but maybe also a minor mobbing element or small damage buff.

I could go on all day about this topic, but I’d like to think through the ideas a bit more before I actually suggest them. I appreciate your curiosity though