Mage Rework

An Inferior Support Class
Please read this thread as it gives context of why these reworks are needed.
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/mage-is-inferior-to-shaman.278995/#post-3340067

Heal
This spell is mostly unchanged but one of its abilities gets a major buff

+Purification: Players hit by heal are cleared of negative status effects and become immune to negative status effects for 1 minute.

This solves the problem of mage’s status curing effect from being too situational. As mentioned, blinds from teleports are very common but because of how short they last it is hard for mage to cure it in time. Immunity from status effects allows mage to counter those short-lasting but impactful status effects it wasn’t able to counter before.

Meteor
Meteor is too slow making it difficult to land. You could buff the fall speed but this might increase the dps too much. Making it easier to control is the goal here.

+Mind control: you can control the meteor by moving your head left or right

Meteor gets the ability mind control so it can land meteors easier. One of the meteor's major problems is how slow it is so its dps is lowered and if you miss a meteor you miss out on a ton of damage. By adding mind control to meteor landing it becomes a lot easier thus giving mage more consistent dps.
Edit: Meteor mind control will only activate while shifting because there are situations where the auto aim meteor is useful. In other words the spell only changes while holding shift it is regular unless you hold shift.

Ice Snake
As mentioned in the why mage is inferior to shaman thread ice snake is a very lacking crowd control spell. The reworked ice snake will not focus on better crowd control but bring a unique utility to the team and user.

+Fragility: enemies take 50% more damage for 2 seconds

Thematically this makes sense as when something is frozen it becomes brittle and more fragile. In addition, this solves mage’s problem of lacking a support ability other than heal and mage’s dps problems. With this buff, mage will bring something new and definitely powerful to the table making it less overshadowed by shaman. Of course, I am not a game dev so these stats might not be the most balanced however I think the idea of mage being able to buff damage is still a good one. One possible consideration if it would buff mage dps too much is that mage only deals 25% extra damage while teammates get the full boost.

 

I actually really like some of these suggestions.
I would personally like to see these incorporated into a bigger overall suggestion, but I do like the changes by themselves as well.
I mostly say that because I personally feel like mage is a class that's held up single-handedly by 1 spell.

 

Another solution is just to make Ice Snake deal more damage. That way Mage could have 2 avenues of damage instead of just 1. Shaman is also exceptionally boring due to having only 1 damage spell. Maybe ice snake dealing 250% or 300% damage would make Mage more versatile.

 

That's why too much, but also I far prefer the debuff.
First off, mage is a support class, the 50% more damage is playing into that very, very well,
It gives ice snake another layer of support, and mage as a whole finally has a second support ability instead of just heal.

Plus, it makes it combo better into meteor, which is nice.
They vaguely combo now, but with this change, it really improves on that quite a bit.

 

It also works on fire.


But yeah, these look like a good suggestions

 

What you say is true. When I first started playing Wynncraft I chose mage because I wanted to be a mighty healer and spellcaster. Mage is still my favourite class, but it has some problems. Shaman is 100% the better support class (which it shouldnt be) and mages heal is too weak. Meteor is a nice spell but it needs a small buff in my opinion. Ice Snake has a lot of potential but its a bit useless atm. You only use it to slow mobs down for meteor but I think it could be a lot more interesting than that.

I dont agree on most of your ideas tho. Mind-Control for meteor is more or less useless because it gets already placed in the direction you look at. Meteor also needs the auto-aim feature (which doesnt work well with mind-control), otherwise its unusable. Heal should get a buff and it should heal people in a larger area. Your idea is nice but it wont really fix heal imo. Lastly Ice Snake needs a complete redo. I think they should think about removing Ice Snake and adding another spell or a better ice spell that makes more damage, slows down mobs and maybe has a side effect like a small heal for teammates or something.

I agree, Mage needs a redo.

 

Mind Control meteor means that you won't need ice snake to guarantee a hit, even if they are fast you can just keep tracking them until meteor lands. Now thinking of it maybe mind control meteor should be the shift feature and it defaults to regular meteor without shift. I agree heal could use a heal radius buff and I probably should have added it to the thread. And yep I think ice snake could use a complete redo it can't hit things vertically and is visually unappealing. I had far more ambitious ideas for a complete mage overhaul but these seem the most plausible since a lot of what is being suggested is already in the game in some for or another, fragility is just curse and mind control is already on ice snake.

 

yea ok if you look at meteor mind control that way it would actually be a good suggestion. It would make ice snake useless, which shows that ice snake needs a complete rework. It basically needs to become a new spell. I personally dont like the [Shift] spells because they are kinda annoying, so your idea of meteor mind control seems good to be the "real" spell. Also yes. HEAL needs a lot of help

 

I haven't played the other classes beyond mage, so I won't pretend to be an expert on anything, but on this account, and a previous account I used to own (first started on Wynn about 5 years ago), I believe I have some decent experience to weigh in my opinion.

I think that's a perfectly fine buff, granted, I think the focus should be more on the heal than preventative measures against blinds. I learned pretty quickly I had to be mindful of where I was teleporting to once I got a party member killed by accident. But, are you saying they'd be immune to all negative effects, not just the mage's, but also mobs/bosses? If so, that sounds a little busted, as that's part of the kit designed to deliver a challenge for some of them.

I don't think meteor's speed is the problem nor does it have too much of an impact on landing it. You aim where the target will be, not where it is currently; that's something you learn pretty quickly in the early levels of playing Mage. But, part of it also goes to learning how to use Ice Snake. CoW was a monster for me 3-4 years ago when I started and I needed someone to carry me through it. Coming back to it, I was able to defeat it at level 68 with a sub-60 wand because I learned to combine the two to focus my target.

If anything, it's a lot better for it to land where I place it and I can continue running around avoiding getting hit. Even with Ice Snakes's Mind Control, I need to take a momentary pause and focus where it's going to, leaving me open. Having your only two impacting abilities both force you to stop and focus seems like an issue.

Meteor is already pretty powerful if you get the right items to emphasize spell damage and exploding. I guess adding a .5 increase wouldn't kill the meta, but it'd make it so much easier to kill stuff with a class that genuinely feels pretty busted. I abuse mana regeneration stats along with mana reset, and I don't even sweat for most bosses.

I think there should be a visual rework and a Mind Control rework - the one thing that has consistently gotten me annoyed is being a single block up or down on a field and my ice snake not being able to hit a target in front of me. If that were fixed, you'd solve 90% of the problems with that spell.

 

Keep in mind that mage also has the best auto attack though

like, compared to other classes, god tier melee attack

depending on how you take advantage of this and how you build, this can be a second offensive spell pretty much

Optimized mage play for damage output isn't actually spellspam (*ahem* class with the highest spell rating), but fast hybrid, at least in my building/playing experience.
(unless you're pure, in which case you have the meteor time to just keep casting meteor)

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Hello fellow mage main, I totally agree with these points.

Mage meteor set-and-forget is pretty useful if you know how to aim it. Pretty much will only miss if the boss charges or TPs away.

Also, teleport move spell alone probably makes mage the most fun class to play out of combat. Just grab misc. mage build with 1 cost TP and at least 6/4? mana regen, and you can freakin' fly. Forever. From Detlas to Ahmsord, or even straight vertically upwards to bypass CSST parkour. (shaman bad, slow asf)

 

About the meteor mind control. It only applies while you are holding shift because a mage would need to focus if they wanted to control their meteor. Also mage really doesn’t feel buster at all in comparison with shaman, archer, and assassin so yes the point is to make it easier for mage to kill things and to give it more utility at the same time.

 

I understand the point you're attempting to make, but I'm saying it's already relatively easy to kill most things with the class. It may not be an instant one-shot like other classes appear to do, but I've hardly met mobs that survive past 1 or 2 Meteor spells. That's barely any mana at nearly all levels.

I'm saying if anything is to be done to the class, it would be fixing the things that actually inhibit the player from using the spell i.e Ice Snake often not hitting mobs because it locks to the level you cast it, as opposed to Meteor which works well because it focuses the general area you target.

Meteor works and it works well. It's just often people don't take the time to understand how to aim with their cursor. And again, Mage already has one ability that forces them to stop running around to control it. The combo is Ice Snake -> Meteor. Timewise, that'd be like 3-4 seconds of standing within the same 3x3 block area; perfect for a boss or swarm of mobs to do some damage.

There are tradeoffs with classes. It makes sense to say, "Yeah, even though they do much less damage than the other classes, they have the potential to build insanely broken mana regen sets to heal forever." I've never paid for a health potion in my life. I don't think the other classes can say that.

 

I think this is a really good idea, especially as I had a friend complain about how hard Mage is to play.

 

I agree with the heal and meteor changes (though I think the immunity to status effects should be toned down to about 10 seconds), but I personally think the Ice Snake change is overkill. Though mage is unarguably the weakest in terms of dps, it makes up for it with its existing utility when built right. The "Curse" effect with Ice Snake would just serve as a half-baked method of buffing mage's already-incredible burst damage while hardly fixing an issue of DPS, which in my mind is offset by amazing utility with teleport (which in my opinion is the best movement spell) and ice snake. I think a better solution would be to buff Teleport and Ice Snake's AOE as right now both spells' AOE is oddly small at best and buggy at worst.

 

this is a bit annoying if II'm gonna be honest. It would be nice if instead there was a lv 100 remake of this spell where it would shoot multiple meteors, 2 lighter ones with less dmg and on that would snap to the enemy (you would still have to aim of course) that would deal more dmg.

 

Giving debuff immunity isn't as strong as most would think it pretty much only protects against short blinds from teleport, getting set on fire which is very rare during bossfights, and against the also rare 1 minute slow effect. Mage does not make up its lack of damage from its utility, it has heal which is good, teleport and ice snake. Teleport is good utility but only selfishly and has no real effect in supporting the team. Ice snake is a form of utility through its crowd control however because of how weak it is and how much better other forms of crowd controls are it isn't very significant. By giving mage's ice snake a curse like effect it isn't just "a half-baked method of buffing mage's already-incredible burst damage while hardly fixing an issue of DPS" allows mage to make a significant team contribution by buffing their damage by a significant amount like a support class should do. A side effect of this is buffing mage's own dps which is desirable because mage's dps is lacking anyways. There is the argument that mage was never meant to deal a lot of damage but this is just bad balancing. A class shouldn't make that big of a dps sacrifice just because they have a heal spell. Like JaydonTheWarrior said only 1 spell is holding up mage and I think it is time for mage's other spells to gain some attention. As for your ice snake and teleport suggestions they can always be added but I don't feel they are enough. Teleport is only really used for mobility so an AOE buff doesn't do much. Ice snake is very easy to land already and a buff in AOE while it would be nice would do little in bossfights.

I added an edit earlier stating that mind control would only apply on meteor while you are holding shift because both meteors have their uses.

Agreed, Cstack hybrid is better than spell spam mage because mage's spells dps is so mediocre.

 

As a 63 level mage I think mage is just fine. Heal and especially Ice Snake really seemed inferior but they are ok.
The heal and ice snake suggestion are actually nice. But please,
don't ever think of adding MIND CONTROL to METEOR because it sucks.
One of the reasons why meteor is a very nice ability is that you just click 3 times to cast, then you can do anything else like doing basic attack or casting other spells.
But giving it mind control means that you cannot move your view to anywhere with is annoying as you can't defence against enemies in other directions, although mage has a very high survivability but letting melee enemies surround you is a terrible thing.

 

Mind control only applies to meteor while holding shift. There are situations where you would want to use mind control on meteor lets say the auto target made it hit the wrong mob or the mob is moving fast? Simply hold shift and correct it to where it needs to go. If it already is going where you want it to then perfect don't press shift and you are good. I swear its like no one can see my edits.

 

If the mob is moving fast, you use Ice Snake. That spell is enough. It's enough for CoW, it's enough for Bob, Nagaroth, Amadel, really anyone. It's even enough for some mobs/bosses on Corkus who literally leap around multiple times in one go.

If you learn how to aim the Meteor, you won't hit the wrong mob. What people get confused with is you aim towards the ground area of what you want to hit not upwards facing them like Ice Snake. Again, if you're holding Shift, you're forcing the player to stay in one position. Since the combo is Ice Snake -> Meteor, you're asking for them to stay in place for both of them. That's literally the perfect way to kill off Mages fighting bosses because you limit their insanely high mobility via throwing Meteors at the same time.

You're not suggesting a rework, you're suggesting a nerf. If the argument is solely "but what if it misses" when really, you're not going to miss as long as you don't refuse to learn the mechanics, then I don't know what further reason is there for it.

 

Okay first of all I know how to play mage. I've played for 5 years and have 925 hours in the game with 358 of them on mage (check Ice_Bear2) in my many hours of mage I think I can say I know how to aim a meteor and mage's combo. However, I still recognize it has its flaws especially against bosses that spam teleport and charge I recall in LI against Matrojan Idol on one of its phases it spammed charge for a solid minute and was pretty much impossible to hit even with ice snake and meteor. I've had plenty of moments where the meteor didn't land where I wanted to even though I was aiming it properly due to its auto targeting system. The changes to meteor I'm proposing can ONLY be a buff. It was never intended to be a major buff but it is a buff none the less because it gives players more control if they feel they need to be more precise with their meteor. Unless you are a mage who constantly holds shift while casting meteor this mind control meteor will only happen when you want it to. Mind control for ice snake is the same as it is now, the meteor changes don't affect it, in other words you don't have to hold shift for mind control to apply on ice snake.