I decided to be an Arch Mage not Bishop, but am kinda confused about my decision. Im not sure if its going to be such a big problem not to have HS. Are Arch Mages really that terrible, or still worth it? All I actually care about is farming well. I thought Arch Mages are stronger than Bishops.
Arch Mages are indeed stronger for just grinding away on maps than Bishops. Whether they are terrible or not, who cares if you are having fun? HS only gives +10% exp when you are solo grinding. Only with 2 or more Party Members will this increase to +50%. Either way, my friends and I dont even bring HS when we're bossing even though we can bring like 3-4 bishops and one of those Bishops serves as Door Mule for Zakum. We are lazy fucks and dont give a shit. With very few exceptions Mages are more seen as tools. They are incredibly good at being tools for specific maps to Leech or Mage Farm for meso, each with their respectice requirements. I've seen your post about IL vs FP and Ill post something there later. For the sake of selling leech, what Archmages do better than Bishops is f.e. selling Petri Leech. However you'd still need an HS mule to be able to sell that. If you are planning to be a Mage Main, welcome to the club of us 4-5 people. In my personal quest to find out how much (IL) Archmages really suck, I've tried out several things. First of all, not only have Archmages in general higher damage due to Elemental Amplification and the Elemental Damage Boost from the Elemental Wands. Also they have better Single Target DPS than Bishop, IL mages have Chain Lightning wich has the highest Single Target DPS from all Mage Skills. This is mostly noticeable n Rose Garden (170+ daily solo-content). What also, at least IL, mages can do fairly ok is Zakum. You'll blast the arms away with Bliz/Meteor. Chain Lightning is 'not that bad' damage for the body. Teleport also makes its fairly easy to dodge the stuns. The issue arises at the end of b2 when Zakum starts summoning Lightning/Ice Resistant mobs and you'll be pulling all of them in your face. Because of CL's dogshit vertical targetting you'll end up not being able to clear them. Big Bang can clear them fairly well, however you need a little charge and each skill lock or stun will make you lose your charge. Note that during all of this the SE and NL's in your party are melee hitting the mobs instead of hitting Zakum. Also, not claiming IL mage is any good as an Attacker. However, when you go Scarga and Targa. Due to Targa's weird hitbox with its long running animation you'll basically guaranteed to hit both with CL. Wich y'know, it something. For all Mages, any boss/mob with a Push Skill (such as Chao, Eph, ScarTar Rose Garden Boss). After getting hit you are instantly actionable, meaning you can teleport straight away and cancel all momentum. Aka not giving a shit about this. Last noteworthy thing that Archmages do really well is LHC (150+-ish content). Some people have been spreading propoganda that Mages result in getting less totems for each run. Wich is not accurate. You are getting less Totems per mob, but you are killing more. In my experience, if you have a capable party this is simply not true. Also a Mage is grouping up all the mobs all the time, significantly reducing the time that the pushers need to be pushing mobs to group them up. Items tagged as Event Item receive a -80% Drop Chance Debuff if the mob has received more than 80% of it total damage from either a Mage Ulti (Gen/Bliz/met) or DK's Dragon Roar. For the sake of saving the economy LHC Totems have been tagged as Event Items (same for the RG Golden Bee). However in practice, even with this severe targetted nerf. Mages are by far the best class to farm Event Items with. The last thing I didnt mention is the maps that resist all 3 Mage Ulti's, Ice/Fire/Holy. Maps such as NT or Ellin Forest. Mages are still (likely) the best class to farm these maps by a thousand miles. Yet, what still hurts me to realise every time is that the Skele Map is still Top3 best exp and Top3 best meso. IL mages can go to the last map of ToT wich does yield better exp (about 10% more) than skele, but for only about 30-40% the meso/h and while Skele is such a small packed map that is so easily to navigate. ToT requires much better Telecasting and pathing to make the map efficient. While all of this above is 120-150+ content and probalby not meaning much to you right now. Mages are considered one of the best first classes to pick up. They are incredible for many reasons and very good at what they do best (Farming maps!). By the time all of this above starts making sense to you. You'll be drowning in meso and can easily affort your 4rth mule to level 135 and do whatever content you felt missing out on. So, to return to the question of why play an Archmage over a Bishop. The list of reasons why is very small. You're giving up a freepass to enter many random boss runs with your HS mule. NPC-ing your inventory while farming costs ~5k meso for a Magic Rock instead of a 1.5m Regular TP Rock. If you simply look at exp/h and meso/h than Skele is likely your easiest choice to make, wich Bishops excel at due to their Holy Weakness. The niches that Archmages have over Bishops are small and/or insignificant. You can better rush your 4rth mule through the Ellin Forest Quest Chain. And there very few relevant maps where the Fire or Ice weakness is a thing. (LHC Bearwolves being weak to Fire is one of them!). I don't anyone really knows why Archmages are generally considered so bad. The 4 or 5 of us are just having fun, not giving fucks. Regardless, who the fuck cares if you're having fun. Whatever you are capable of in this game is by far more determined by your buddy list, guild (alliance) and discord groups than whatever class you are playing. Don't be a dick, make friends. Have fun, waste all our meso on booming gear with dark scrolls and cry about your gacha luck like the rest of us. Glhf!
This really shouldn't be true if you have 1-2 mages in the party. After that then you might start getting less totems overall but good luck finding >2 archmages for lhc anyways. Iirc it's only a -50% drop rate. And this means that if you only have 1-2 mages in an LHC party, their ultimates should really never deal more than 80% of a mob's HP (and if they do then the rest of the party is extremely weak/not rotating correctly), meaning the drop reduction won't even apply to the totems, so you get the higher kill rates without the drop rate nerf. As a side note, it used to be 50% dmg for the (50%) drop rate nerf but we managed to convince staff that it would really kill mages in regular lhc runs and 80% was better - mages could reasonably join lhc, while 6 mage solo lhc farming was nerfed
Pretty sure that would be Paralyze. Chain Lightning is a bit faster but Paralyze is stronger, unless you're counting multi-target DPS.
Thanks for the replies mates, appreciate it. I understand being an arch mage means no HS and to me felt like a big disadvantage, but the whole "who cares if you're having fun" idea is the most important point of it all. Yes, I enjoy arch mages more and thats whats most important, to enjoy the game, to "have fun", so I am happy with my decision to play arch mage instead of bishop. I might have to make a HS mule, but maybe not. Arch Mages have also spell booster, which is supposed to make you attack faster, but I am not sure if its faster than bishop's Genesis. Anyone can confirm?
"Genesis Regular: 2700ms Meteor Shower/Blizzard Booster2: 3060ms (-420ms) Booster1: 3270ms (-210ms) Regular: 3480ms" Also Genesis is the only Bishop skill (Explosion being the other mage skill) affected by SI iirc but Idk how much.
