So How Does Mage fight?

Ivellios

Just looking at my professions slowly coming back to Imperian, trying to relearn at least one for PvP, and curious about mage.

I'm sick as a dog and at work so if somebody can easily explain to me what mage actually does would be great. I'm told damage/aff and taht's great but i'm looking at all the crystal binding skills and I"m going, when the hell do you use one of those with spells. 

What's the point of your spells. I read somewhere that the attuned spells suck for the ones that use up attunement, so are you still trying to build that?

Thanks for a response.

Jules

You need @Iniar maybe.

Ivellios

K.

Iniar

Mage has 3 straight finishers, and 1 not so obvious one.

Lavablast:

- does approximately 30-40% of max health

- costs 4(?) fire; therefore, use Firewreathe from Crystalbinding to help you get there (+- Heat)

- scales with Firecircle, up to 12 ticks (1 minute), up to 50-60% health

- use Lavablast when:

     (a) Enemy has less than 60-70% health

     (b) You have at least 4 Fire

     (c) You have at least 1 Crystal charge

     (d) Apply modifier Penetration (Crystalbinding) to your cast

     (e) Use a secondary spell like Batter along with Lavablast

Decompose:

- Does unblockable damage scaling to physical affs

- Requires 5-6 physical affs before it comes close to Lavablast output

- Can be done repeatedly unlike Lavablast (for a while)

- Requires aff tracking

- Primarily physical affs

- Use Crystalbinding affs to help affliction output

- Not recommended unless you have tanking artifacts

- Nearly all control options gated behind high attunement costs; not going to beat an affliction class in a straight shoot out

Submerge:

- channeled instakill

- faster with more water(?)

- therefore use Icewreathe or Spray to help you get there

Flamepillar/Sunallergy:

- Flamepillar advances Sunallergy faster than it normally does

- Protect Sunallergy = victory

Caveat: The class is pretty new to me

Ivellios

So burn people alive with fire. I don't have anything special for tank artifacts, so fire seems like the easiest choice to start.

Thanks.

Iniar

@Ivellios

Ivellios     12/15/2015 

Max damage i've been able to do with lavablast/batter with penetration was...Sir Pellerin Keth'Aera, Stonebeard says, "Damage Taken: 396 fire, mental (raw  damage: 596)" so i can bring him down to 200 out of 669 but no lower. 

I've been doing aliases for bloodboil/heat, with some bloodboil/heat/firewreathe to get to max, cast firecircle, then keep it going for a while, bloodboil/heat, some bloodboil/batter firewreathe, wait for firecircle to tick for a while, then use all fire attunement in lavablast/batter with penetration but it's not enough. 

Am i doing soemthing wrong or missing some prep? Thanks in advance.

Nope. Straight fire-combo's kill no-one on the quick finisher (lavablast) unless they're trying to tank you in the face and you're stacked with L3s.

The alternative is to play a slower finish by dragging Firecircle to 10 - 12 ticks and beyond... this semi-guarantees that Firecircle will do the job of bringing the opponent down to finish range; the major issue is that most of the classes I know of can kill people at the 30 second mark, some of them between the 20 to 30 second mark... Firecircle Level 10 is a solid 50 seconds.

It's why, in my opinion, Mage as a solo class will have to be played almost ultra-defensively; you just have to tank out the timer to 1 minute, then spray and pray. Once you hit say Firecircle level 4 onwards, you could start short stacks of nausea/healthleech to try and boost your damage down into kill-range, but I'll just say that you're going to be a long, long, long way from being able to beat Diabolist, Druid, Defiler, Outrider, much less the Hunter or trickster Summoner unless you're ultra-defensive.

The value of Lavablast is being able to pull off a damage spike in 6 hits: that's 50% maxhp at 16.5 seconds. It's not going to kill anyone solo, but that's a fine chunk of damage in a small team. The gain from Firecircle is too slow to be profitable against a solo fighter, unless you played it ultra-defensively for 35-45 seconds or so.

The water pathway on the other hand isn't really a pure water casting pathway either; it requires that you dabble in between fire and water. Primarily healthleech and nausea, +- the addition of sunallergy, and icicles, is the way to reduce the threshold of health low enough for Decompose to actually matter. (Decompose is really ho-hum; yes, it does a nice chunk (so does LNS reave) but it's never going to be close to a 100 -> 0 finisher/conditional finisher). Custom curing of Icicles will also necessitate further hybridisation into flame-pillar.

Probably the best build would be a hybrid damage-aff caster, and just choosing which path in a solo fight is a matter of choice.

I honestly don't really know, but there are options; just none of them would make Mage a stellar solo-fighter unless you're particularly stacked with damage boosters and will make people weep at your basic combos.

In summary:

  No, you're not doing anything majorly wrong. I guess you could try timing bloodboil/batter penetration hits after sips.

  The class itself isn't bad, it's just got inbuilt limitations (aka, no real 100 -> 0 finishers).

  Your best friend is time, and playing defensive will help you with that.

Ivellios

Yeah firecircle is super slow. it started at 38 damage and capped out at 70, but it went up 3 or 4 damage per tick, so that's a full solid 30 seconds of just waiting for it to build. While Pellerin reaved killed me in under 20. Yes I wasn't trying to be super defensive but firecircle seems really meh. 

And for my quick look, there weren't any amazing stall primary fire spells that can combine with heat so it's rough having it build. Maybe do the water primary spell that can stall/slow with crystal firewreathe to keep fire attunement up?

And is it just me or is crystalbinding really underwhelming? Especially the crystal regen. I don't ever see myself keeping up all the charges to get any passive regen from it which is sucky. Maybe classlead it so you always get regen but get less when you have fewer charges and 0 regen with 0 charges? Seems like it would make it a little better.

And I guess it's fair that pure fire can't just blow people straight up in 16 seconds, that would be stupider then old mage stuff. Just sorta annoying fire doesn't have a finisher, but at least I have something I can use in a team fight.

That was the fast, can code that stuff in a few minutes, now to code more. First things first, make a sidebar to track people's attunement and number of crystal charges. I can't wait.

Ivellios

@iniar

Flame circle reminds me of "old" (not sure how bard was changed) resonance where you had to keep attacking to build up any sort of offense but the build up was terrible and didn't stop people from just dps you down but if you didn't attack, you didn't get any resonance so you were screwed either way.

At least bard has therapeutics/songbird to be good vs afflictions. 

Mage doesn't seem to be great vs physical dps or afflictions. Like i"m not expecting or saying mage to be super tank, but I had 500 health, stoneskin, a shield, surcoat and I still got pretty much 2 shotted by Pellerin's reave combo when my super long combo doesn't even come closs to killing him which makes it meh by comparison.

Well guess I'll just wait till I get home and read more about the water spells.

Iniar

Yeah, I'm real iff-y on Mage being a solo class; it'd be fun against most people.

Also, don't play Bard.

Ivellios

@iniar

That's unfortanate, Mage used to be my main solo class for a while. More testing needed.

Khizan

Of all the classes you have, Runeguard is almost certainly both the easiest and the strongest and the tankiest.

Ivellios

@khizan

Oh, that's probably true, especially after being on the receiving end of flared runes with the reave move. But I'd rather put in some effort to see what I can do with mage to be a little different.

Iniar

Sorry, don't mean to be negative:

Mage is a decent solo class with caveats...

1. Don't fight a mana-kill class

2. You will probably struggle to beat a class with lots of control

The sunallergy pathway can be pretty quick; it takes 20 seconds from start to death with an active flamepillar... (2 ticks damage, 1 tick numbness) including the time cost for flamepillar, that puts us at approximately 25 seconds from 0 to death, assuming no-cure. This will probably be the preferential solo-route, given that Mage can dump a truckload of nightshade and high prio kelp affs.

Ivellios

@iniar

I'll be checking out the sun allergy path. It would be easier if the ab files were available online without me logging in. 

Ario

@ivellioshttp://wiki.imperian.com/Pyroglacia

Ivellios

@Ario

Problem is no full descriptions. Have to read full descriptions to see what afflictions you can give with each spell. 

Suralina

Ivellios said:

@Ario

Problem is no full descriptions. Have to read full descriptions to see what afflictions you can give with each spell. 

http://wiki.imperian.com/Pyroglacia_Abilities

Wysrias

Oh, wow. Those are terribly outdated. Herb-cured attunement hasn't existed in a pretty long time.

Suralina

Maybe someone should go update them, then!

(I dunno if imperian wiki is the same as MKO, where any registered player can edit, but yeah)

Iniar

@Suralina, I updated them for a while, but the traffic is so low... Like 1 visit per month - not worth my time. 

@Ivellios, @Baasche has a nice Mage spreadsheet - I haven't got the link for it anymore.

Khizan

The wiki is a waste of time with a playerbase this small.

Ario

Sorry guys. I didn't realize the wiki was outdated.

Ivellios

@Ario

It's all good. You didn't know. Nothing to beat yourself up over.

Aakrin

@ivellios

-Regeneration for unknown reasons is repeatedly shot down being allowed to simply work. Like every other minor regen buff in the game. Mage for some reason needs -everything- tied to crystal charges/attunement

-Mage is horrible 1v1.  Like Iniar mentioned repeatedly, anything we can do takes 2-3x longer than what other people do with zero effort. Also if your target is even half-way not retarded, they ignore the sun allergy approach, and simply tank all your damage. Which for whatever reason, is the pay-off of both main mage approaches

-Don't use any of the main approaches in group combat. I hate to say it, but all you should be doing is penetration/icebolt/batter. I don't understand the design of the class. Everything it does, takes forever to do, but its terrible at the long game and 1v1. The aforementioned combo does alright damage, and doesn't require tracking...well anything beyond your charges. The 16-20 seconds it takes to prep lavablast on someone in a team fight is too long. If they're going to live that long your group is doing it wrong, or you should be using submersion.

-If by some miracle you get ahead of someone else's offense, without killing yourself in the process, they're gonna walk away. Sludge recently got made into something actually useful, but its fairly lackluster and and we really don't have anything else beyond flood and walls. And if you have to wall every exit, you're putting yourself behind by like 20 seconds. GG

I've been trying to get mage useful beyond a single damage combo for two years. A sad side-effect of having a three- faction system is that when classleads come around, everyone is out for themselves. And if one faction doesn't have someone able to describe a problem in a way that the guys up top understand, they're simply screwed.

tl;dr - Play a druid (interesting, has 98% of the cricle's utility and half it's damage) or RG, which is boring as sin but a physical class and therefor its base damage values are broken.

Ivellios

@aakrin

Yeah, it's fools gold. Looks great from a far but when you get up close it's worthless. Still good for bashing. My only problem is I don't know Druid and I don't want to forget 2 professions to get enough lessons to trans a new one or spend money on learning it. I have a free reincarnate so I could be Runeguard, but then I have a useless collar. Unless collar affects runes on the tablet?

Salik

For what it's worth, there are those of us who are interested in balance instead of buffing our own classes. I might be willing to look at Mage problems next time classleads come around and help you word things.

Aakrin

@ivellios

Collar effects some etchings. Snowflake, flame, ecta. I have the same problem. I'm arti'd out for an Int class, and our only other choice is Bard. Which has its own problems.

@salik

I'd love. You can look for my 'please change mage' thread to see most of our problems. I'll answer any question you have. But the responses really threw me for a loop, as it shows prominent class lead writers that get a lot of traction, having a fundemental lack of understanding about Mage. With this lack of understanding, they write against changes, which is part of the problem