Magic requires a lot of dedication and isn’t hybrid-friendly if you choose it as your first skillset to start with. How you play is up to you, but personally I believe that having a solid melee base will save you a lot of suffering early on. Being able to at least hold your own in Adv missions using pure melee is a good point to start doing magic, in my opinion. This is meant to be a guide, not an instruction manual, so keep in mind that how you play is up to you.
Why start as warrior first?
- Can actually level yourself and not have to rely on a party to run through missions or wasting time and effort hitting mobs with half-assed magic
- Much easier to get stronger quickly as a warrior than as a mage
- Can easily hunt down skill pages yourself
- Cheaper to play as a warrior, meaning more gold saved to spend on gearing yourself up as a mage and buying rare pages off auction/other players
- Melee skills are mostly generic, meaning they’re always available to use. Windmill and Shadow Bunshin stick out the most in the context of melee-mage hybriding.
- You can run through missions with melee and blast the boss to death with your efficiently trained magic skills
- Let melee do the hard work of getting levels and AP while you just sit back and pour the AP into magic skills instead of actually leveling with said magic skills.
Bolt Mage
Pros:
- Can be used with or without a wand
- Having bolts ranked makes you more flexible regardless of your current weapon
- Builds lots of int early on
- Good for beginner mages
- Amazing 1v1 damage with either fused bolts or CC4 firebolt
Cons:
- Lots of crit is required if you intend to challenge higher end content with bolts
- Bolt damage can be difficult to boost past a certain point
- Damage to Time ratio is pretty terrible on enemies with medium to high amounts of tankiness for fusion bolt users (in the time it takes to load ice-fire 5 times, you could fire 5 CC4 firebolts)
- Damage to MP ratio is garbage for CC4 firebolt users
- Bolt spamming in general destroys wand durability really fast
- Bad against multiaggro (it’s decent in most boss rooms, but getting to the boss room with just bolts can be quite difficult, however)
In short, bolt mages deal strong burst damage but it either takes a lot of time (for fusion bolts) or lots of MP (for CC4 firebolt). Also, gearing for crit rate can be rather difficult, seeing how wands tend to contribute little to no crit on their own and enchanting for crit can use up precious enchant slots that could be better suited for +MP enchants as well.
Early skills to rank are firebolt+icebolt and Magic Mastery, along with unlocking Fusion Bolt. Ice-fire provides good early game damage to start with and is fairly AP efficient. To cover the entire bolt mage skillset would include all 3 bolt spells and the 3 element masteries, and Bolt+Fusion Bolt Mastery and Magic Mastery for a total of 9 skills! If you started as a Warrior then this would be less of an issue since you have melee to back you up, but as a completely new character, I won’t recommend going down the full bolt mage path.
Recommended weapons for bolt mages are the Crown Ice Wand (205, max magic damage) for bolt fusion and the CC4 Fire Wand/ego for chain casting.
Ausar’s extremely aggressive Thunder build — requires solid melee foundation
(if there’s one thing I can completely claim credit for in this guide, let this be it)
Everything is listed in the order that I ranked it. This is my own build that I followed, your mileage may vary.
- Lightningbolt to r3 (mainly for activating Mana Summoner ES, otherwise you can get away with r5)
- Magic Mastery to r1. I went straight for master title as well (all int magic is required, this is where having a melee base will help immensely)
- Thunder to r1 (I’ll explain my logic below).
- Mana Shield to r6 (capped)
- At this point you can rank Composing/Musical Knowledge whenever you can
- Lightning Mastery r1 (preferably mastered for the title)
- Will probably aim for Fireball r1 next….
You might wonder how this build will function without much int. The trick is to allow the naturally high base damage of Thunder to carry the damage output instead of relying on your int. Obviously, this won’t be a good idea in the long run, but the goal here is to maximize efficiency and get the most bang out of your AP. Also, since this early build prioritizes MP over int, it’ll make training other magic skills much easier as well and makes Mana Shield much more useful even if you aren’t equipped for magic, although it doesn’t play nice with Windmill (it’ll subtract your some of your MP and still drain HP too).
Once Lightning Mastery hits r5, Thunder becomes extremely efficient, and even more so once it hits r1 and have mana reduction gear equipped. The 42 MP cost for the first charge is honestly pretty outrageous, but with the proper skills and gear can be lowered to the point where spamming 1 charge becomes feasible. My main intention when I was thinking up this build was to get around the disadvantages of early stages of magic, which is the lack of power and speed. Magic is supposed to be slow and there’s not much we can do about that, so we try and make it so the burst damage is high enough to make it worth waiting for the magic to load instead of just running up to the boss and smashing it or something.
Thunder is also an extremely safe opening move. At r1 it carries a 6 second stun which is plenty to keep loading more Thunder and stunlock mobs with ease. If you so choose, you could have a pet attack the stunned mobs and knock them back while you continue charging, which is less taxing on your mana compared to spamming 1 charge of Thunder. Thunder also works well in parties that don’t rely much on positioning. Spamming it in a party of archers works well as it holds enemies down while they aim, but it doesn’t work quite as well with players that rely more on positioning, such as Flame Burst and Windmill spammers. It shows its true worth in a party of Thunder mages, however, since it stacks and a group of players unloading Thunder on a mob is basically an assured victory.
mabi.pro General Guide 