2008-09-01, 10:06 AM
Some people are suggesting Magician fullscreen attacks should be gimped in some way and their other skills should be beefed up to counter it.
I already touched on it a little why people are opposed to this, but I'll mention it again.
The way Magicians work is often AoE based. This is how it works in MapleStory as well, with each subsequent job getting a better AoE (although FP gets DoT in 2nd job instead, but that's a whole other story). But the point to notice is that in addition to stronger AoEs being harder hitting, they tend to get higher ranges as well. With MapleStory, this can be a problem. To give a noticeable improved range over the 3rd job Mage AoEs, they basically HAVE to make them fullscreen.
So that explains the range, but what about high hit count, the hard hits and slow speed?
The fact that it hits so many at once is tied to the fact that the animation is so epic and the range is so big. It would look awfully silly if the attack only hit 6 monsters on screen if the animation fills up the player's entire screen. Why wouldn't those crashing meteors be able to hit more at once? To put it frankly, these attacks hit so many at once because it would look stupid to see your screen filled with epic attacks, only to not even touch a bunch of monsters.
The hard hit and the cast speed go hand in hand. The cast rate is so low because a fast casting time on something that can hit the whole screen would feel a lot cheaper than this, even if the DPS was similar or even less. So the cast time is low to make it more fair, even if this fairness is more psychological in basis than functional. But with high cast time, there needs to be hard hits to deliver fair DPS. And I mentioned it before, the per hit DPS on the 4th job attacks are only about 1.5x the 3rd job analogues.
It's not really that the attacks are super strong, because the per hit DPS is actually only a little better. The reason these attacks are revered as powerful is that they can hit so many at once (and attack from a large distance) that their relatively poor single target DPS can be multiplied many times over until it is amazing DPS. But if it were done any other way, the attacks wouldn't make sense. If they had a smaller range, they wouldn't seem like a real advancement over their 3rd job AoE attack. If they were faster with low hits, they'd appear even more unfair (conversely, if they had a longer cast time or a delay/cooldown, they wouldn't be applicable in most instances). If they hit fewer mobs at once, the attack wouldn't make sense to have such range and not be able to hit things appearing normally within the range.
And beefing up the single target skills would be counter productive to the Magicians defined function. Instead of being great AoE but poor single target, they'd be just like the other classes-- advancing at single target, but having more than a few AoE attacks that are only functionally applicable some of the time rather than all of the time.
ps for people talking about balancing the lukless build, particularly in regards to level 130 lukless wands: rather than cutting int's effectiveness, you should be advocating making luk worthwhile. Why are so many of you quick to say "make them weaker" when you should be saying "make me stronger"? I would say that luk should add a bit of magic. You make each point in luk add .8 magic, and I think it would be easy to have the gap closed up to the point where everyone would be using luk equipment at endgame (like other classes where the -less build becomes less functional at endgame, even if the -less build has advantages at lower levels). And even if luk added magic, some people might still choose to be a little weaker, be pure int for a while, and have more MP.
I already touched on it a little why people are opposed to this, but I'll mention it again.
The way Magicians work is often AoE based. This is how it works in MapleStory as well, with each subsequent job getting a better AoE (although FP gets DoT in 2nd job instead, but that's a whole other story). But the point to notice is that in addition to stronger AoEs being harder hitting, they tend to get higher ranges as well. With MapleStory, this can be a problem. To give a noticeable improved range over the 3rd job Mage AoEs, they basically HAVE to make them fullscreen.
So that explains the range, but what about high hit count, the hard hits and slow speed?
The fact that it hits so many at once is tied to the fact that the animation is so epic and the range is so big. It would look awfully silly if the attack only hit 6 monsters on screen if the animation fills up the player's entire screen. Why wouldn't those crashing meteors be able to hit more at once? To put it frankly, these attacks hit so many at once because it would look stupid to see your screen filled with epic attacks, only to not even touch a bunch of monsters.
The hard hit and the cast speed go hand in hand. The cast rate is so low because a fast casting time on something that can hit the whole screen would feel a lot cheaper than this, even if the DPS was similar or even less. So the cast time is low to make it more fair, even if this fairness is more psychological in basis than functional. But with high cast time, there needs to be hard hits to deliver fair DPS. And I mentioned it before, the per hit DPS on the 4th job attacks are only about 1.5x the 3rd job analogues.
It's not really that the attacks are super strong, because the per hit DPS is actually only a little better. The reason these attacks are revered as powerful is that they can hit so many at once (and attack from a large distance) that their relatively poor single target DPS can be multiplied many times over until it is amazing DPS. But if it were done any other way, the attacks wouldn't make sense. If they had a smaller range, they wouldn't seem like a real advancement over their 3rd job AoE attack. If they were faster with low hits, they'd appear even more unfair (conversely, if they had a longer cast time or a delay/cooldown, they wouldn't be applicable in most instances). If they hit fewer mobs at once, the attack wouldn't make sense to have such range and not be able to hit things appearing normally within the range.
And beefing up the single target skills would be counter productive to the Magicians defined function. Instead of being great AoE but poor single target, they'd be just like the other classes-- advancing at single target, but having more than a few AoE attacks that are only functionally applicable some of the time rather than all of the time.
ps for people talking about balancing the lukless build, particularly in regards to level 130 lukless wands: rather than cutting int's effectiveness, you should be advocating making luk worthwhile. Why are so many of you quick to say "make them weaker" when you should be saying "make me stronger"? I would say that luk should add a bit of magic. You make each point in luk add .8 magic, and I think it would be easy to have the gap closed up to the point where everyone would be using luk equipment at endgame (like other classes where the -less build becomes less functional at endgame, even if the -less build has advantages at lower levels). And even if luk added magic, some people might still choose to be a little weaker, be pure int for a while, and have more MP.