The "Bishop Ult vs. AM Ult" thread

im all for a small bishop nerf. i can play my bishop and 2 hit skeles, but as much as its fun dominating, id rather see myself with more versatile attacks, not jus standing around pushing 1 button all day. bishops do have a better time at bosses , infact who doesnt want hs at a big boss? but for arch mages? chain light should be buffed to do about 70k on neutral and 90k on light weak bosses. that wouldnt make mages broken. in fact i bet the avg 13x nl can hit up to around 70k with jus TT+sp alone. no apples at all.

im saying we could bring bishops slightly down, cuz they pretty much excel at training and bossing, and arch mages slightly up.. i mean jesus the only skills a arch mage really needs to max is blizzard or meteor. make the other skills more useful ffs, not just bring it to blizz,pot,blizz,pot. buff all of the non ultimate skills by like 4x and then you've got something.

I definitely agree. Though then what you're doing is displacing Heroes and Bowmasters by breaking the ArchMage classes even further, making them the best in the game at training and upper, not high, tier at bossing.

Afrobean posted something on SW a while back for ArchMages that I really liked: actually make some of their skills effective on bosses. The whole point of the Magician branch in this game is to provide unique skills and effects in a game ruled by who can throw more stars, shoot more arrows, and do it all with stronger equips. Magician's are MEANT to do other things, to provide color to the recipe, if you will.

For that reason Afro's idea of making skills like Seal, Fire Demon, Poison, etc., work on bosses is FANTASTIC. Take Seal for example. On normal monsters it renders their magic casting capabilities null, making them essentially walking touch-damage dealers. On bosses, you could make the skill work where it has a lower % rate of working (somewhere around 40% at max, like SE) to prevent a boss from using certain skills for a certain period of time. For example, take an ArchMage at Horntail with max Seal. They use it, the 40% chance works, and for 10 seconds Horntail can't use Seduce, can't Def up or Mdef up, can't stun, can't dispel, and can't summon.

Of course that might be too large of a list for bosses, and the threshold of balance and broken engineering can quickly be crossed by increasing an effective time or increasing % chance of working, as more ArchMage's would mean more times a boss is rendered useless. But it's an interesting concept to build upon, and I'm sure ArchMage's that can do SOMETHING of that kind to prevent mass deaths of main Ranged/Melee classes at bosses would be quite appreciated in high-magnitude runs.

Similarly, you could use a Fire Demon thing where the skill has a % chance of working for an x amount of time, eliminating resistances and giving the boss Ice-weakness. Or the skill could do a reduced DoT effect on bosses, increasing a Magician's DPS without having them have to summon hulking creatures.

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We don't HAVE to raise or lower or change "broken" skills as they are now. The key thing to note, and this is me playing the devil's advocate, is to question what would happen if we DID make ultimates on cooldown time table, make them weaker, but make Magicians a "6-mob max killing machine." Question whether you would WANT to take that kind of incapacitated Magician in a training party over another Night Lord, or another Bowmaster, or whatnot. In reality while you may think it would be best to "unbreak" these skills as they are, doing so may actually make ArchMages and Bishops SO unwanted for training parties that there cease to be any left in the game.

If you want to change something so drastic as this, you must cover all of your bases. Think beyond the benefits you may receive for balancing out training amongst classes and see the realities of party formations. Would doubling the base power of a single-target spell actually help it? As addressed earlier Night Lords on apples can still out-DPS this kind of damage change, and that' simply because weapon damage formulas are so much more advantageous than magic damage formulas, a topic totally beyond this post.

I guess in the end just THINK about what you are proposing and just how such a proposition may affect tons of parts of the game, because right now I see a lot of ideas created out of hatred for broken Bishops, unchecked in how devastating they may actually be.