I went to go duo with a se in Ketra today after the patch while waiting for the fortress siege to start.
And to my utter dissapointment I noticed that the mobs seemed to be taking an unusually large number of spells to kill. Taking a closer count, I found that orcs which needed 5 spells to kill before, now needed 6, orcs which needed 6 spells before now needed 8 to 9 spells instead; and anything which needed 7 spells to kill before is now almost a third of an mp bar. Reveiwing the damage dealth per spell, I found that hydroblast+5 with both surrender to water and ice vortex was only maxing out at 1500 on most of the mobs. This is a pretty huge change from my point of view which should have been noted in the patch notes, though of course it was one of those hidden changes which the devs realized was a dumb choice to have made and so hid it behind a vale of obscurity.
I heard that the surrender debuff was weakened (and maybe the vortex one too). I haven't tried to go out and hunt on my MM, but I figured it would be true.
Buff yourself with Holy Weapon, your Vortex/Solar flare will do an extra 50 damage or so, which is better than nothing but definitely doesn't compensate.
On a side-note: nukers will be back in business next update (Kamael Plus), so there is hope for us. This update, however, was mostly a nerf for nukers :(
pretty rare i care about mages but thats a pretty crap change
NC also changed the lvl of mobs so ketra is one of very few places you can hunt as a nuker at 76+
nukes work differently now. Think of it as spliting nuke dmg in 2 parts, one part is the nuke itself and the second part is the nuke elemental dmg. In the old days, surrendering a mob produced 30% more dmg from a specific nuke, now surrendering a mob only produces 30% more dmg on the elemental part of the nuke.
It sucks for pve but it helps on pvp because resists work the same way (ie resists limit dmg on the elemental part of the nuke not the total thing)
hmm yeah it is odd.. did some tests. Surrender is now only 10%, lvl76 vortexs are 15%, and lvl77 ones are 7.5%. Resist tho only reduces damage by 7.5% however.
Anyone OEed hydroblast with any of the new OEs, and which one produced better results?
yeah this nerf really confuses me...
First they nerf surrender so the only time its worth the mp in pve is if you have to nuke a mob more than 10 times (in the 30 seconds the buff is on btw.. so you'd better have a lot of re chargers for wherever you happen to be lvling). Then they nerf resists for pvp... so in the end... you've effectively nerfed pve for nukers (and made pvp different...). Of all the fast levelers out there, I hardly think nukers need a 20% dmg reduction.
Oh and you've completely screwed sorcs again (lvl76 vortex being much more mana efficient now in pve comparatively to surrender + lvl77 vortex), and semi screwed sps (no quick reuse holy nuke). gfg nc.
However given the new way elemental attributes work with, I wonder how this is going to work out with elemental aligned weapons ( positive elemental aligned attack vs negative elemental aligned defense through surrendering and vortex ). And with the new functionality that seed of wind / water / fire will have on CT1.5.
At first glance this looks worse than before for PvE, no doubt, but I am curious about how it will turn out in the end when we have all said factors involved ^^
Obviously worse for bo0th pve and pvp. If you can no longer reduce your enemies resistance to your element as much, then it is quite obvious you are hitting them for less. The only positive note about this is that with opponents being able to get 110% resistance to 3 elements, only 1/3 of your spell is going to heal them instead of 100% of it.
And the change I noted at Ketra, wasn't just because of the reduction in surrender + vortex spells, it was an all around increase in Ketra m defense. A regular hydroblast was hitting for 1300; this is complete crap considering the costs of the shots and the very limited mp pool as well as the fact that mages have the lowest p defense, armor and evasion.
After spending more time in Ketra (because I'm a masochist which explains why I still play the mystic 3 years later even though it is such a horrid cvlass) I discovered even more interesting things.
The Grand Seers are able to bring me from 100% hp to death in one magic crit but my won magic crit only takes away half of their hp if I am lucky.
The 2 destroyers who were aoeing 30+ of the highest level Ketra orcs before C7 are still aoeing the same 30+ mobs after C7 while I went from just being able to kill 3 groups in a row before having to regen mana (if I started at full mp) to often having to bsoe if I aggro a single group of Ketra orcs because of their new ridiculous magic defense and continually high p attack ( since they use shots but don't give more exp for some reason).
And with the new "solo" island being full of mobs that are all resistant to water, I can choose either being banished to buffbot for my Kamael or else going back to Fotd where all the mobs are either blue/light blue/ or green if its the two top leveled vampires.