#70
by Zodiac777
When I chose the mage class, I did not think to myself, “hmm, I know what, I’d love to be a support character, who “heals” everyone’s mana”. Nope, that didn’t even cross my mind one bit.
Sorry for long entry…
I’m currently level 100 and here are my stats:
Strength 5
Dexterity 5
Focus 403 (518)
Vitality 112
Mana 3133
Health 773
Firebolt 25/25
Ice shards 21/25
Cloak 23/25
Lure of fire 10/25
Lure of Ice 5(6)/25
Eshield 21/25
I have a ring to raise sacrifice to 4/25, lure of soldiers 5/25 and lure of assassins 6/25 (I equipped these if I am going to join a group for bosses). All the others are at 1/25, I have bought sigils to compensate for lack of skill points in these spells.
As you can see, I only have fire bolt maxed; ice shards, eshield, and cloak are not far behind.
If I ditched this build, and went for full support, here are the spells that I would need to use, and I think that a fair few non-mage classes don’t really understand what energy well or sacrifice spell actually does.
* Lure Soliders, Lure Assassin (wouldn’t bother with lure giant)
* Lure fire/ice (for the players that use fire/ice offhand weapons and for the hapless mages, who cling to the notion that their ice shards and fire bolt are doing great damage against a boss, who then subsequently keeps evading).
* Energy well – this isn’t a healing mana spell, but rather increases the amount of mana that a player has in total
*Energy boost – restores mana over time (yeah right!)
* Sacrifice – our healing mana spell! – I think OM created this spell with the intention that it couldn’t be used to heal mages mana, but rather to heal other characters who have small amounts of mana. However, this is certainly no natures touch, It comes at a price of taking away my mages life to give mana, that’s right, a portion of my lame 773 life. Also, bearing in mind that I cannot actually tell whether other players need their mana replenished.
* Fire of Cloak, for some added DPS
* Freeze spell (maybe?)
Not sure if I’ve missed any others.
The first thing that comes to mind is that where the hell are all the skills points going to come from? I can only max out 1 so far at my level. There are just too many skills for so few skill points.
If I go for maxing the support spells, then I won’t be able to put any skill points in firebolt/ice shards/incinerate at all. More importantly, I won’t be able to put any skill points into eshield. So here is a scenario, which I can see potentially happening. I have my new support build, I manage to get in a group for levelling, after telling them that I can’t do any attacks, but I can support! After laughing, they tell me that we are levelling the area beyond “trees”. So I attempt to follow, and guess what, my crappy little HP of 773 aint going to get me there. I’ll be dead in seconds. How am I going to get there? Also, how will I stay alive when I cast my lures, as this seems to provoke aggro in itself.
The other important factor is that lure soliders/assassins, sacrifice etc, are all found in OW somewhere. I bought mine. You can't truely be suportive until you can find or buy them.
IMO, the developers didn’t take into account the number of skills across classes, so if I am levelling up a rogue, who has fewer skills, then fine, the current system works. For the mage and druid, we have many more skills (albeit most of them are s***, for mage that is), but still we get 1 skill per level. This is just does not work for caster classes. I think the developers need to be more innovative when it comes to mages and druids levelling skills. Why not give us one extra skill point every other level or something?
Should the mage class even be designed to attempt at trying to heal energy? If so, then developers, make it so they do it properly, make it like life natures touch, and give us mana bars that we can see. I can’t help but compare this with another MMO game on portable devices, that I’m sure we all know about; I haven’t played that game for a long time now, but the mage was pretty much fun to play (although I seem to remember they had energy regen issues as well), the druid in that game had a high level spell which replenished all mana.
Maybe OM need to change the format of skills, so that not everyone skill needs to have 25 levels or whatever it is to max it, but perhaps some spells or other abilities should be just be a just one point needed or fewer points needed to max it out completely (like what happens in this other said MMO).
Or perhaps, have different pre-sets, so that we can store different play styles, depending on the circumstance. There is no way I’m paying rebirth or whatever it is called to change skills.
I haven’t played my mage now for a few days, out of disgust and anger. I just cannot see either style of mage offensive or supportive working the way it does at the moment.
