Mage Combat Improvement - 2016

Ohm

So mage is in a very weird position right now as far as combat is concerned.

- Resources - Apart from mana and health - you are managing FIVE other resources (4 attunements and crystal). These resources are cumbersome to manage and often counteract each other.

- Too many gates - mage combat as is - has very few passive components (flamepillar, firecircle, icicles) - however, they need conditions to be met to trigger. For being such an active class it has too many gates.

Want to stack afflictions/ build attunement using crystal - great you have a 30 second window before it starts hurting you

Want to stack attunement - you can only stack five times and most useful skills will cost you >3 

- Lack of passive pressure/ defense - Given the gates and the lack of passive pressure makes mage really difficult to play in both team and individual situations. It is not really a damage class or an affliction class - so ends up being terrible at both approaches. Further even though skills like lavablast and decompose do decent damage, the lack of passive pressures or defensive abilities always make it an uphill battle against most classes which almost always have some kind of passive pressure building. 

- Poor high end skills  - OVERTUNE is a prime example of this - it is a trans skill - what does it do - 15% all resist for 10 seconds?

- AoE/ Team contribution - Here again - mage has LoS use of remote skills. LoS is rarely usedful and has limited usage. Sure I'm all for flavor - but this serves little purpose. 

Honestly, I think the class needs little boosts in multiple areas to be viable again. The concept is interesting but needs to be simplified by either relaxing some gates or providing incremental boosts to skills. Many people have expressed interest in playing the class. But just the sheer complicated system and lack of top end anything make it terrible.Its almost a clas

I'm sure many other players understand combat -much- better than I do. And I'd love all their inputs and suggestions. But I'd just like to be able to have a more significant role in combat using my beloved class than what I am restricted to. 

Iluv

I think at this point Mage needs a complete overhaul but I do have some classleads thought up for the meantime. When is the next classlead round?

Khizan

If they'd make mirrors work through logoff so that an internet hiccup wouldn't waste a full mirror, I'd mirror and play around with Mage some, but as it is right now I am not convinced that the main problem is not player error. Not to be insulting or anything, but Magick is the circle that keeps trying to insist that Runeguard is a weak class.

The biggest problem I can see without using the class myself is the competing water/fire and earth air attunements making it hard to vary your approach. 

Ohm

-deleted-

Garryn

Khizan said:

If they'd make mirrors work through logoff

Fixed that about a week ago.

Garryn

Ohm said:

- Resources - Apart from mana and health - you are managing FIVE other resources (4 attunements and crystal). These resources are cumbersome to manage and often counteract each other

Not going to comment on the rest for now, just noting that there effectively only are 2 attunements to track - fire/water and air/earth are linked, so you can treat each pair as a single resource that can go from -5 to +5.

Iniar

I don't like Mage.

As a damage class, it is impressive; when you contextualise what it can do against the rest of Imperian classes, much less impressive.

As a dueling class, it is solidly behind Hunter, Bard, Druid.

The hinders it has access to are behind costly pay-walls unlike other dueling classes.

The affliction stack it employs are shallow.

It has little in the way of protecting against prio xeroderma 1.

Decompose is relatively ineffectual, and trumped by vitality.

As a support class, it has near zero team utility. Compared to its supposed anti-thesis in the demonic circle, Mage has nothing close to the escape/range/team-heal/flexibility options.

As a leader class, it will disappear in a flurry of axe strikes.

Score: 4.5 / 10.

If this is the class for the circle's namesake, it is a poor standard.

Ellen

I tinkered with the water route of Mage a bit fairly recently, mostly just testing against @Gurn to see how quickly I can kill something as hardy as a Runeguard. The offence of a water Mage is what you would expect to see of an attrition class, as it relies on achieving many passive damage sources (Icicles, Sunallergy, Healthleech, Nausea, Addiction), with Decompose being more akin to Incinerate than Brainmelt, serving to finish off an already mostly-beaten target instead of being its own win condition.

The problem with this is that Mage does not have the other tools that one would expect of an attrition class. No real way to chase tumbles or flips, no real way to resist affliction pressure, no limb armour to extend limb prep time, questionable resistance to damage pressure, and an auto-lose against mana pressure. The mana costs of the class are so great that, as soon as I had someone hitting back and forcing me to sip health, I was at near-0% mana by the time I could beat them*.

I think that Bard is the most mechanically similar class to Mage. By comparison, my Bard can be doing consistant 200-300 damage We combos by the 15 second mark while also enjoying superior defences in every department.


*this mana drain is mostly due to using the crystal aggressively. This is mandatory; without it, even as Wise with the +eq artifact, the class becomes untenably slow

Iluv

H:465(80%) M:385(57%) <eb db> 0 59 0 [0h/0m] AFF:3 MENT:1 F: 0 W: 4 E: 0 A: 0 <Abigail>

Your aura of weapons rebounding disappears.

You have lost the anti-weapon field defence.

You focus on your crystal, sending your strength to augment its power.

You feel weakened and drained from the attempt.

Damage Taken: 185 unblockable (raw damage: 185) -185 unblockable

You focus your spell through your crystal, which glows brightly as it enhances the spell with the 

Penetration effect.

The magick of your crystal is fully depleted.

Abigail is now lightly attuned to the water element.

[SYSTEM::Water Attunement 1]

You concentrate and meticulously trace a circular shape in the air. Following your hands, a globe of 

raw energy slowly forms, holding the raw strength of the elemental water.

The globe begins circling around Abigail, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed, and Abigail's 

body begins to vibrate in synchrony with their movement. The globe rotates faster and faster and 

Abigail lets out an anguished scream as her body starts decomposing.

You have slain Abigail.

++++++++++++ TARGET DEAD! ++++++++++++

++++++++++++ TARGET DEAD! ++++++++++++

rt [BATS]: Abigail has been killed!

inr all::queue eqbal get body

You gain 84,460 (pk) experience. You need 99,879,470 more for level 124.

You put 84,470 xp towards a drop of blood. You need 184,750 more for the next comm.

You gain 845 faith.

Abigail backs away and eases off.

Equilibrium Taken: 4.45s

H:280(48%) M:286(42%) <-b db> 0 59 0 [-185h/-99m] AFF:0 MENT:0 F: 0 W: 0 E: 0 A: 0 <Abigail>

Fighting someone through starburst.

Iluv

Garryn said:

Ohm said:

- Resources - Apart from mana and health - you are managing FIVE other resources (4 attunements and crystal). These resources are cumbersome to manage and often counteract each other

Not going to comment on the rest for now, just noting that there effectively only are 2 attunements to track - fire/water and air/earth are linked, so you can treat each pair as a single resource that can go from -5 to +5.

I like to call this feature elementally challenged.

Mathiaus

What if they made the crystal work how daegger's balance does for diabolist? You won't get charges but instead a separate balance time for when to use it, and then they could essentially make artifacts that increase speed for it for the $$ aspect.

I'm sure if you got into the details of making certain abilities less balance intensive, but mage's crystal isn't a necessity for afflicting as much as it is for building on attunements.

Then you can also change certain abilities (such as overtune) to possibly give the crystal shorter balance times or stack an extra wreathe when used, if met by certain parameters (let's say a health threshold for now).

Also, maybe move around how certain attunement blocks out other attunement on certain affliction abilities? I understand how it nullifies being able to use the bigger attacks more frequently and effectively, but certain affliction ones would be more beneficial if they could be used in conjunction with one another, that way an affliction mage isn't so bottle necked into purely using weariness icicles.

Ellen

Mathiaus said:

What if they made the crystal work how daegger's balance does for diabolist? You won't get charges but instead a separate balance time for when to use it, and then they could essentially make artifacts that increase speed for it for the $$ aspect.

I'm sure if you got into the details of making certain abilities less balance intensive, but mage's crystal isn't a necessity for afflicting as much as it is for building on attunements.

This is largely incorrect, at least for water mages. Water attunement does a fairly good job of handling itself once Icicles is in play. Furthermore, the crystal is the only access that a Mage has to Numbness, which is important for gaining affliction pressure. It's also the only (non-icicles) way to give Weariness to save the Icicles effect from fading. Introducing a balance time like daeggers have would only serve to stop you from using the crystal in bursts, which would slow down the class startup considerably.

The only thing that I think needs to change in terms of the crystal mechanic is to take away the 10% mana drain that accompanies every charge. Eliminate it, heavily reduce it, or tie it to the crystal CD like the health drain is, and you'll instantly fix one of the most crippling flaws of the class.

Ohm

Decompose

Another skill that could use some re-work.

It costs 3 water attunement and scales damage based on physical afflictions on the target.

However, if the target doesn't have any afflictions it doesn't do ANY damage.

It shouldn't fire in the first place if the target doesn't have any physical afflictions if that is a required condition for it to do any damage.

You might as well make this an insta-kill at that kind of cost if you have more than 4-5 afflictions.