The "Bishop Ult vs. AM Ult" thread

I've never been to KMS but I can speak for MapleSEA. They don't have NLC and they still Ult. train. Maybe it's your opinion that ultimates weren't meant to be trained with but in order to get a reasonable % an hour without ultimates, nexon would have to revise the mage/bishop skillbook cause CL, Angel Ray and Paralyze aren't cutting it.

I was under the assumption that in nearly all the other servers Arch-Mages trained with their Demon, Summon, and CL/Paralyze while Bishops still Genesis spammed because it was far cheaper and they don't really have an alternative. I guess that isn't such a great idea after all and I kind of enjoy the cheap pots myself. Sorry, I was a bit tired when I wrote that.

Genesis to Meteo/Blizzard base attack is the same like Ice Strike to Shining Ray. After AMP both Blizzard and Meteor are 100 basic attack stronger than Genesis. Raising it to 7000 would not level the playing field, it'd just be BS to charge us for an AMP that we do not have. In third job, Ice Strike is weaker than Shining Ray before AMP but Shining Ray does not cost twice as much. It's the same thing here, just on a larger scale.

It sounds to me more like you guys would like nexon to make the ultimates unusable in training without giving mages/bishops anything else to work with in return. That does not seem very fair to me. We can not Shining Ray our way to Lv.200. Be reasonable, that's not balance that's just nerfing out the mages/bishops entirely.

Yeah, sorry, 7000 would just gimp Bishops like you said. I guess I'm just a bit irked that Arch-Mages and especially Holy-Mages can train twice as fast solo as anyone else can do in a good party. Supposedly the balance to this should be that Arch-Mages are horrible at bossing, but I disagree with this. Mages would be perfectly fine damage doers if it weren't for Onyx Apples.

It is a little rash to jump to things like 7000 MP Genesis and expensive pots without thinking about it a bit. I think I like Afrobean's suggestion quite a bit actually. Give them all the same base, make amp not affect any of them. Ideally though, it would be just what you said. Remove them entirely and replace them with other mob skills that help them train quickly. Big Bang could have served this purpose if they didn't make it suck so much.

As far as balance goes, Onyx apples are only a factor at bosses. But removing the Onyx apples entirely is not the *only* way to balance mages. They could instead buff the apples up so that they give a reasonable amount of m.atk. If they simply -took out- the Onyx Apples, bosses such as horntail would be too difficult for most people to defeat and you could forget the time temple boss. In KMS, which does not have apples, adjustments to the bosses to make them possible to defeat are already being made.

Of course removing them isn't the only way, but I think it's the best way. If you make Onyx Apples give say... 700 magic, you'll have tons of 3x-6x using one of them to kill several monsters way above their level and get absurd exp (assuming they can hit said monsters.) Anyway, I would much rather they be removed so that skills such as Enrage and Concentrate have more of a purpose.

You talk as if no one else has defeated HT because they don't have apples. As it is now, my HT runs take around 50 minutes on average. Apples give NLs about 90% more power while they give everyone else around 70% more power. Even if the runs took 80% longer (this assumes half the damage is done by NLs), an HT run would only be 90 minutes without apples. I don't know about you, but I think that's a perfectly fine amount of time to kill what is supposed to be our strongest boss at this point. In addition, it makes Arch-Mages relatively a lot less worthless. Reducing the bosses HP is hardly necessary even without apples. I have no idea why they did that in kMS and I strongly disagree with it.