Quote from Darkboy132;1275907:
- I don't have to explain how I still despise Mana Recovery. Renaming it to Inspiration sounds really stupid.
- Lightning Rod is extremely broken. At Novice I'm critting a full charge at 17k, now its at r7 and its doing 24k. My rank 1 Hail does 20k fully charged crit, and my rank 1 Meteor's sweetspot does 50k crit, while still being useless for the most part. Good bye Hail Storm, get off my hotkey bar.
- Why the hell did they lower Meteor's MP cost, but not the Mana Necessary variable? That means you still need 200 MP to even be able to cast it, despite only using 80 MP now. That change is pretty worthless, but I still find it absurd how its beating Fireball in terms of MP usage.
- Sanic Fireball, Thunder, and Snap Cast are pretty brokenly fast. Thunder's reduced standby time seems to have crippled it greatly, though I'm not sure if I can make a proper assessment. However, 7 second Fireballs (with only really high Int and Magic Weapon Mastery) is ridiculously too much to where it outdamages Act 7 too greatly, and a one minute instant cast with no mp cost and all charges is absurd; making them all significantly faster to the point where they can outrun bolt spells destroys Magic's drawback of being slow.
- Icebolt, okay, I don't use it still. Making it restore MP seems really unnecessary since it uses less MP at higher charges.
- Lightning Bolt is still useless.
- I still don't use Shockwave because its just a "GET THE FUCK OFF ME" kind of skill with a really high MP cost and sourspots. If it were a "GET THE FUCK OFF ME, I'M CASTING MY MAGIC!", I'd use it a lot more despite the drawbacks.
- I don't use Fusion Bolt.
- Instant cast magic shields are great, I guess? I'm still troubled that I can't move with them.
- Making int magic and meditation easier to learn is pretty ridiculous and insulting to dungeons and pre-Reno people's very hard work.
TL;DR, magic is a pretty broken skillset.
let me preface this by saying that most of the playerbase gets REALLY BUTTHURT when magic is ever strong because they don't use it, they don't enchant for it, and they feel butthurt that they can't simply adopt the skillset the same way you can segue from melee to range to puppet to ninja.
with that said everything in this paragraph is wrong.
Lightning Rod is a strong skill but it is no way comparable to Bash or new Final Hit. It's honestly more comparable to Lance Charge, except Lance Charge is arguably better STRAIGHT UP, especially when reforges come into play which is compensated for by being somewhat easier to use. And the Hailstorm buffs make it far more usable than before, to the point where I'd use it in a lot more situations - for one thing, if you hit something with Hailstorm, you can use it again in about 2 seconds for the same amount of damage provided you don't get hit.
Meteor beats Fireball in MP usage, so what?
The idea that you'd call the int magics "brokenly fast" while comparing it to Act 7, which does upwards of 3x more damage as Fireball and loads in 1.4 seconds, really shows your knowledge of how magic works (and inb4 cooldown, Lightning Rod does less damage than 3x Climatic Crash in a bigger AOE in a shorter load time on a similar cooldown) Once again, we have physical skillset users wanting to impose drawbacks on the skillset that they would prefer not to impose on themselves.
Icebolt is kind of useful if you're low on pots/not wanting to use pots and wanna recover MP on trash mobs.
Lightning bolt buffs are just QOL.
With the new Shockwave CD, it's up pretty much every fight and is actually a strong, fast, hard-hitting AOE.
The fact that int magic was so hard to acquire was one of the worst travesties in the game. Back when int magic was legitimately the difference between a successful run and a wipe and mages were a VERY valued and rare commodotity, it made sense. It stopped making sense when random physical DPS classes could vomit out the same damage in a fraction of the time. Also you could get the skills anyway by getting a beginner char to r1 and using a hero card