You're saying my internet causes more than double the latency when I pot poison myself? This is aggravating.
:sigh:
LOL'd + rep
With the recent KR update, all speed enhancement for magic, including "elemental masteries", weapon masteries, reforges, vivace, etc. now stack.
WAIT? Element Masteries give speed?
Alright. In NA, it should not stack properly yet.
Doesn't seem that INT speed boosts even affect bolts. So maybe that's it? idk
Personally I look forward to the speed stack fix. From a PvP stance, it's a little OP in terms of killing Herro's pride? and ability to even counterattack at all barring berserker and a lot of magic PD so yea that could use a fix or maybe they'll add some skill for it or let the luck auto-evade thing affect magic too. As a wedded mage (been reading too many of Perfectio's posts) even I find that to be boring even if the point of pvp is to defeat the other opponent by mostly any means necessary spamming takes no skill xD. Either way it's not like I'm big on PvP anyway.
Elsewhere in the PvE world however the speed stack fix brings the following benefits to magic:
- You can now have a psuedo protection work around through increased speed given our non-existent prot reduction options in our own skill set(which is where most of our actually somewhat on par damage goes...)
- Bolts with their increased damage through magic weapon mastery also allow for making instant cast a bit more commonplace and useable without needing to worry about too much damage loss.
- It lowers our large cast, standby, damage cycle.
- It adds to crowd control through potentially allowing cast time to be lower than standby time allowing you to reapply stun over being left wide open and just ending up a punching bag or target practice.
- It "can" give other classes less time to go Millia on you and allow your damage to actually contribute
- It makes us a bit better at our ability to contribute damage over a wide effective range and stun
We may not be intended to be quite as fast as physical classes but our larger effective splash range sorta makes up for it. Given the actual time of combat is a bit longer with physical skillsets due to having to use some time to get around the battle field, wait for cooldowns, aim meters, or even have to use defensive skills which takes up precious seconds and makes standby time less of a design flub than large cast times. So as far as mages go with this fix we're at least making progress. Either way, it's all a matter of waiting to see what changes devcat makes now before this is released to NA that might kill whatever excitement I had at this now XD
A little extra (for cast speed stackers):
[SPOILER="Spoiler"]
I found that with most known boosts and future bard and bard enchants it's possible to have cast times close to these:
Lightningbolt - 0.34 seconds (1.7 seconds full charge) (crystal lightning or savage lightning wand for 12% speed)
Thunder - 0.9 seconds (4.5 seconds full charge) (crystal lightning or savage lightning wand for 12% speed)
Firebolt -0.42 seconds (2.1 if you use a phx - 40%)
Fireball - 0.96 seconds (4.8 seconds full charge)
Icebolt - 0.43 second icebolts (2.15 seconds full charge assuming you still use a -10% cast speed + 28% magic damage crown ice wand)
Ice Spear- 0.6 seconds (again assuming the same wand 3 seconds full charge)
Hailstorm - 2.51 seconds
Meteor - 3.86 Seconds
Magic Shields - (if you even use those are like the same speed as the faster bolts)
I rounded the numbers up or down to the nearest hundredth and I did identify an error in my math so my vivace buff used in these calculations was 1 to 2% higher than what it should have been. However, similarly to protection's new formula more points of cast speed give diminishing returns on the effective cast speed reductions so the cast times are only slight bit higher than what I listed. Also I didn't count element mastery cast speed reductions since I've never heard of them ever giving them. Either way the purpose was to show what speed stacking mages can start expecting at close to the highest lvl.
[/SPOILER]