Sad Indeed...

Amp affects spell base, not magic attack. Its description is misleading. It's exactly the same as a 135% boost to weapon attack in normal formulae - except the magic damage formula is designed for "weapon attack" that never gets higher - i.e. once a skill is maxed, spell base never increases aside from Amp.

 Mini explanation of why Maker skill helps

With the Maker skill, you can synth your items with Luk and Int jewels (only stuff for your job, not common items). If I remember correctly, with the final version of the skill you can use up to 3, but only one of each kind in each piece of gear. The best Luk/Int you can have on the jewel is 3. Aka, free stats that consume no slots and cannot fail. You can also use stims and jewels together to get a perfect statted item with bonus stats on it (realistically), because most armors and stuff are pretty easy to make.

The reason this can't really help a lukless is because you can only use the Maker skill to make items level 50+, so even with the Zhelm and HT pendant, they cannot equip level 50+ mage gear to use the Maker skill on without "wasting int" to do so. Though, even if they did, they wouldn't get as much out of it. Luk would be useless to them, so they'd only get half the total AP off the gear that the Luk mage would get (Luk and Int vs Int alone).

So.. let me see if I have this right.

- You can only make (certain?) 50+ job-related armors/weapons/etc. using Maker
- You can only put one jewel in a given item
- A jewel generally has 3 of a stat, but there's a rare one that has 5
- Stimulators can be used in this to get maximum benefit from creating the item in the first place, essentially akin to finding a perfect drop or getting a good Gach

From what I'm hearing, it's basically going to be a 5 stat boost per item maximum, right? I'm guessing you can do shoes, gloves, armor, and possibly shields/weapons (?) with it?

I suppose if you had 15-25 additional luk, that'd be a help, but it still doesn't even come close to making the 163 staff equal, which is what makes me so angry. It's the highest level weapon in the game and it's just as terrible as the level 55 staff except it has an elemental boost.

I know this has been mentioned before, but all wands/staves that aren't lukless or Doomsday are functionally equivalent - the luk requirement completely negates the increase in magic attack because they both increase by the same number.

Personally, I find that it sucks balls that I made a luk magician at the very start of global (read: literally the only option at the time) and it ends up that I can't even make it compete because of things I could not have ever possibly foreseen.. but that's a bit off track.