Fire/Poison & Ice/Lightning Arch Mages

Welcome back to Class Design Diary! We are almost done with the previews for the Explorer classes, but I think the next few entries are still pretty exciting and will grab your attention. To the Explorer Magicians!

To start off, our observation during Beta was that the Explorer Magicians were amongst the least played classes. Now that we are nearing the very end of the Beta, some of the reasons for the lack of popularity have become more obvious.

Firstly, Magicians were really only special when they had overpowered stuff going for them. Pre-Big Bang, every player would know of the no-cooldown Full Map Attack farming meta, +50% EXP Holy Symbol mules, etc. But come post-Big Bang MS, in versions such as our server's v117, Magicians no longer hold any dominant niche. Every class has tools for mobbing now, Nexon eventually restricted the overpowered stuff including no-cooldown FMAs, and then we specifically nerfed Holy Symbol's potency. Both of those were identity-changing for the Magicians. The Explorer Magicians were definitely not the best damage dealers either, which has been the case since the classic pre-Big Bang/v83 days. Furthermore, the later non-Explorer Magician classes in v117 outdid the Explorer Magicians in almost everything: mobbing, bossing, impactful buffs, etc.

And if anything else, we also think their playstyles were simply not that fun for the player. So our rework direction is aimed at improving all of these.

I will be introducing the Fire/Poison Arch Mage and the Ice/Lightning Arch Mage together as a pair, and I'll call them F/P and I/L from here on. We designed them to have analogous skills with each other, but that does not mean that they are polar opposites of each other.

Specialized Skills

The Specialized Skills for both F/P and I/L are personal damage output buffs which come from activating their skill requirements.

F/P's Specialized Skill is a skill imported from the GMS RED Update, Elemental Drain. When F/P is near enemies who are debuffed with Damage-over-Time (DoT) effects, Elemental Drain increases your Damage by 3% (up to 5% when upgraded in 4th Job) for each DoT in effect. This stacks up to a maximum of 5 stacks.

When I/L uses ice-based spells, enemies will be slightly frozen and gain a freezing stack. For each freezing stack, your Maximum Critical Damage on that enemy is increased by 3% (up to 5% when upgraded in 4th Job). Similarly, it stacks to a maximum of 5 stacks.

So the overall idea for using their Specialized Skills and maximising personal damage is to actively maintain as many stacks as possible. For I/L, that usually means having a skill rotation involving consecutive ice-spell casts. For F/P, on a single-target enemy, you are looking to stack as many types of DoT (up to 5 types) from your spell arsenal. You can also stack the exact same DoT on up to 5 enemies, as Elemental Drain counts each instance of DoT applied to enemies near you.

Magic Booster 2nd Job

In line with the modern classes' skill organisation, we shifted the Magic Booster skill from 3rd Job to 2nd Job for all Explorer Magicians, including the Bishop class which is not covered in this entry. This shift gives us more room for optimising skills in the 3rd Job advancement, and a slightly improved quality-of-life experience while levelling in 2nd Job as well.

Ignite & Chilling Step

We also added a unique field skill for both mages, as we thought it really adds to the class fantasy when playing the two classes.

F/P gets Ignite, which creates a wall of fire that deals DoT to monsters which come into contact with the fire. There is a 50% chance of leaving behind this wall of fire when using Fire-based spells specifically.

I/L gets Chilling Step, leaving a patch of the ground frozen that slightly freezes monsters which cross the ice. The activation for Chilling Step is slightly different, however. Instead of casting Ice-based spells, there is a 50% chance when using Teleport specifically to leave the patch of ground you landed on frozen.

Thunderstorm 3rd Job

Onto 3rd Job. If you have been reading our Class Design Diaries, you'll know we usually remove generic-looking or generic-feeling spells that are common to the main class type, in order to build unique and distinctive class identities. This means that we removed Fire Demon and Ice Demon, because they were just creepy smiley balls of different colours and temperatures.

F/P's existing 3rd Job offensive spells were mostly solid skills which remain relevant even until 4th Job. What we didn't like was I/L's offensive toolkit.

The main offender was Thunder Spear. Single-target spells, especially before the 4th Job advancement, just do not feel or fit well with the Explorer Magician playstyle. It was also an atrociously slow spell with a 1.3-second base cast time, meaning that even with a higher skill damage value, you would do more damage using other spells instead. So we removed it, and aimed to bring in another lightning-based spell as a replacement.

So we gave I/L Thunderstorm, literally a storm cloud that follows the player around and smites lightning bolts upon mobs that cross into its path. This spell synergises perfectly with I/L's main 3rd Job mobbing skill, Ice Strike, since the player-centred AoE hitbox of Ice Strike often requires I/L to teleport into the middle of enemy packs.

Glacier Chain 3rd Job

We also brought the 4th Job spell Glacier Chain down to 3rd Job, in order to provide a mobbing spell with a more regular hitbox.

Teleport Mastery

Earlier, you saw that I/L had Chilling Step, a teleport-based field effect that leaves the ground frozen. Honestly, this concept would work well with F/P too, wouldn't it? So we changed Teleport Mastery to have a new Fire-based effect as well, where teleporting onto enemies now inflicts a DoT on them. This DoT also activates F/P's Elemental Drain.

Inferno Aura & Absolute Zero Aura

While F/P and I/L are obviously the offensive magic counterparts to the support-oriented Bishop, it is still unclear why the two classes had no party buffs or support/utility skills. There are no signs that the mages were meant to be designed as solo-oriented classes, and the classic Magician archetype is one who always provides support from the backlines. This was also the incriminating reason why the Explorer Magician classes didn't have much appeal to bossing parties or expeditions.

So we decided to come up with a custom-made party buff skill that aligns with the two mages' offensive identity. And what screams "magic!" more than the concept of auras?

F/P gains Inferno Aura, while I/L gains Absolute Zero Aura. As literal auras of fire and ice, they inflict debuffs (DoT for F/P, freezing stacks for I/L) that count toward their individual Specialized Skills. But the auras were not designed as offensive skills at all. Their main feature is the unique party buff they bestow. The heat from Inferno Aura agitates and speeds up cooldown-based spells, giving the party 10% cooldown reduction that slightly hastens and reduces all skill cooldowns in the party. The chilling cold from Absolute Zero Aura slows down the buffs' expiry, granting the party 10% increased buff duration. Cooldown reduction or buff duration might not sound like much to you, but for classes with long-cooldown spells and important damage buffs, these 10% increases will go a longer way than you think.

The catch is that these two aura spells are mana-intensive to keep up. They will promptly drain your mana at 100 MP per second, so you might have to consider extinguishing the aura, especially when your party isn't going all out.

Meteor & Blizzard 4th Job

Finally, the penultimate 4th Job advancement, where the mages once shone brightly.

Since we talked about FMAs earlier, let's get that out of the way first. FMAs are greatly underused, and sometimes not even keybound by F/P or I/L players, thanks to their 30-second cooldown. But it would be such a waste to not include the once almighty FMA spells in the Arch Mages' rotations. Hence, we added an additional effect that interacts with the existing FMA spells, Meteor and Blizzard respectively.

When you cast Meteor or Blizzard and the spell goes on cooldown, F/P and I/L gain an innate chance-based buff: a 60% chance of dealing an additional 220% damage whenever they land any of their subsequent attacking spells. This change alone should create greater incentive to cast the FMAs and get them on cooldown.

Paralyze & Flame Haze 4th Job

Next, we have introduced new attacking skills for each class to augment their role as spellcasting damage dealers.

F/P gets an element makeover for Paralyze, changing it from Poison to Fire element.

They also gain another new Fire skill, Flame Haze. Flame Haze is a cooldown-restricted ball projectile that, upon striking an enemy, leaves a Poison Mist behind where the enemy was standing. Note that while Flame Haze summons a Poison Mist, it has its own DoT component separate from the Poison Mist. F/P's 4th Job playstyle is still centred on stacking DoTs to launch a devastating Mist Explosion, so aptly used Flame Hazes will greatly ease the DoT-stacking phase.

Chain Lightning 4th Job

Now for I/L, let's start off with good news. We have buffed Chain Lightning's horizontal chaining range to be slightly further. This should make mobbing less of a pain, especially when Chain Lightning refused to latch onto other mobs in its previous iteration.

Frozen Orb 4th Job

I/L also gains a new ice spell as well as a new lightning spell in 4th Job. With the ice spell Frozen Orb, I/L lets out a huge frozen ball of ice which shoots ice shards at up to 8 enemies, dealing damage continuously while slowly moving forward along its path.

Lightning Orb 4th Job

The new lightning spell is, well, also an orb. It is a burst-cooldown spell, very creatively named Lightning Orb. Lightning Orb creates a large, unstable sphere of electricity that, when held down, continuously zaps enemies for huge damage within its large hitbox. The skill can be held down for up to 3 seconds, but has a hefty cooldown of 90 seconds. Use this offensive juggernaut of a spell wisely, especially when all your stacking bonuses are up, to maximise damage output.

The class fantasy

With all these changes, we hope that we have dealt with the areas the two Explorer Magicians were lacking in. Not only are these two classes premier mobbing classes, they also have the tools to deal respectable damage, especially in bossing, and they give unique offensive buffs which no other class gets.

But more than just reassuring all of you that we've patched up their weaknesses, the main point of F/P and I/L's showcases is their arsenal of multi-functional spells, which we want to build up as their class identity. Almost every one of their spells has multiple functions: wide-reaching attacks that set up follow-up attacks, supportive party buffs that have offensive uses as well, summons that do damage and inflict synergistic debuffs, FMAs that improve the damage output of regular attacks... The player who endeavours to understand the class's skillset to the extreme will be the one who can draw out the fullest potential of these intricately designed elemental Magicians.

Here is our class fantasy for the duo of Magicians:

There's a reason the Fire/Poison and Ice/Lightning Arch Mages are revered for their intelligence and wisdom. They spent decades researching their elements, imbuing their minds with manifold ways of using their magic that mere mortals would never have conjured. No other class knows the limits of its fullest potential better than the Arch Mages, as their foes often realise too late that there is more to their magic than meets the eye.

We haven't forgotten about MapleStory's darling, the beloved Bishop. Stay tuned to see what we've done to the class!