Ryzom

Melee is easier to solo than Mage - no dout about that, especially for "pure" mages.

The key to gaining good XP as a solo mage is to pick your targets carefully. You want to hit low HP mobs by preference, or those with a low damage output. For good XP hit low hp/high damage mobs (like Ragus) at range - so they are dead before they get to you or mid hp/low damage mobs like bodoc/capy's etc. (of the appropriate type). Avoid high hp/high damage mobs like gingos - they can be soloed, but the XP isn't worth it.

Get sap crystal and enchant your staff with your best damage spell with the biggest time penalty (and low sap) or even better get a higher level mage to enchant it for you! This can make a major difference to your damage output.

The only thing I've found really screwed up with magic is the stanza costs (far too high) which forces you to specialise far too early on and penalises early mistakes horribly (I am cursing taking root rather than stun and can't touch kipees or plants). This is on the list of things to be fixed for patch 2 though so shouldn't be a long-term problem .

I am a level 50 melee, 40 mage. I can spell mobs to death or spell them then melee, depends which exp group I am trying to boost. I use Stun and Cold vs Kizoars (lev 56) and most of the time have little problems with a single mob (adds can be a problem).

What the original poster did not consider is using HP to power your spells as well as sap. I use around 50/50 HP and sap so I have effectively twice the pool to draw from. I have self heal HP at 500 so if the mob does get to me I switch to melee, or I can cast the last few spells for a kill and take the hits.

I have recently got enchanting and I can see that changing my methods quite a bit. Enchanted spell casting is very fast and no failures, but takes some time to power them up.

Melee certainly seem to suffer less risk due to armour mitigation, but no way are mages under powered.

Put them in a group and they are GREAT, that gives me all of my sap and all of my HP to draw from... not to mention time and range modified spells. I dream of groups!!!

PS Get agro too soon and die! No worries - hand out wands with healing spells enchanted into them, as long as someone survives and time allows we all get back up (before the fight of course).

Thoughts on this to date:

1 - Mages even by 80 well outdamage 80 melee.

350 guaranteed hit (well, almost) with a DD every 2s or less, maybe 20 shots.
250+ dot tick guaranteed hit with NO sap cost

I have yet to see a melee outdamage that over the course of a fight. For those of you meleers who are gonna post 'blah my axe does 6xx with crit97 etc etc' ya, so do alot of other people's...your average damage is still lower than a mage of equal level.

2 - Mobs that mages can solo by 80 HAVE to be feared/other spell

We are total glass cannons. Our only soloing ability lies in either dd/dd/dd/dd until target reaches you and (hopefully) dies before you do or dd/dd/fear (or other non-damage spell like root). By the time you hit 80 the pure dd route means you can kill mobs for maybe 500-600 xp only per, while you CAN kill 3k mobs with the second method. However, there are big problems with it...

3 - Mages are harder (and much slower) to level

Four reasons here:

1) You have to level up defensive magic too keep the sp pace and more importantly the spells necessary (such as fear). That's 2 sets of xp = 2x the time.

2) Using the dd/dd/fear-type-spell routine is tricky at best, suicidal at worst. Although there are tricks for a mage to sucessfully pull mobs from a pack every time without drawing aggro, the fear or root part of your combo could be resisted....game over, welcome to the graveyard. Fear also manages to blitz the mob all over so fast that while your casting the 2 DDs that follow, the mob may just be next to a bunch of his friends when it hits, regardless of what it sais on your radar, that happens and its...game over, welcome to the graveyard. (That siad I have managed to beat four mobs on me at once (once) as a mage, so cc (crowd-control) is theoretically possible for a mage...but in reality 90% of the time it means your dead.) Melees don't have this headache at all.

3) Even soloing, having to use the dd/dd/other spell route reduces the total xp into offensive magic - melees get 3k melee xp on a 3k kill solo...were lucky to get 2.2 on offensive out of 3k.

4) One 3k kill eats all your sap. I don't actually know how true this is of melees with their stam, but soloing nowadays for me (even with 1100 sap and the top regen and self sap heal) means 10% kill-time, 90% downtime for regen. This doesnt happen to me in group situations as I use no sap cost dots.

4 - Post 100 things get better?

The ability to combo spells at 100 may well enable mages to be far more effective at soloing. But since I'm not there yet, I can't comment.

5 - Mages are definatly group/duo friendly

Whether its group, duo with a melee or duo with another mage, a mage gives wayyyy more to the group than any tank past the initial one. We are definatly build for hiding behind a tank; our tricks simply can't be matched by a melee in group, full stop. Oddly, I've found by far the best combo is mage/melee, not mage mage, but that may just be me.

6 - Look at your spell %ages later

If you take a look further up the trees, you see something worrying (at least it scaired the hell out of me). Ligntning 1 for example has a 5% (FIVE, no typo) chance to cast sucessfully. If that figure isn't level dependant, I'd say mages past 100 wil become a rapidly extinct class.


So there we go! Flame/digest/post what you will! =)

Many that posts that there is not any problem with magic power has already leveled their melee a bit to get lots of more hp. If you want to be a single class (no problem with melee) you do at all have as much hp to draw from or can survive as well in battle.

Without the extra hp, or the option to switch over to melee when they get close, things gets a bit different.

pcheez wrote:endasil, when u hit lvl 101 off mage, u will change ur opinion.
Do u know of any meleer who can deal 800 dmg / blast from 50 m away at a rate of 3 secs/ cast which means approx 4 blasts if we consider one is stupid enough not to use an affliction missile blueprint, thus dealing an average 3200
damage in a few seconds b4 the mob even gets to him ?
didnt think so

Okay, i shall stop spamming this place until i reach 101. That mages are worthless at low level and rules at high level is something i don't mind.

endasil wrote:Many that posts that there is not any problem with magic power has already leveled their melee a bit to get lots of more hp. If you want to be a single class (no problem with melee) you do at all have as much hp to draw from or can survive as well in battle.

Without the extra hp, or the option to switch over to melee when they get close, things gets a bit different.

You are complaining about something that is in your power to change. Most mages won't play a pure mage, simply because you can more efficiently build a more rugged and robust mage with some melee. Being purist about magery, when the choice is yours, and then complaining mages are underpowered seems a bit odd.

The thing is that a purist melee works excellent, but a purist mage works much worse.

ahem, well when u hit mage lvl 101, u get double atysian missile. Now work with me here, lvl8 acid 230 dmg......now combine 2 and we have 460 damage.
Add a small magic piece of wood,that lets say gives only + 50 % elemental power. We now have 690 dmg ..... a blast.
make sense?

Purist magi cannot work well, since sap credit stanzas cannot cover the entire spell cost,at higher levels at least.There fore, a mage must work up melee a bit so he will have some hp to draw on since casting time credit and range credit are quite inefficient if used in dire measures (eg 8 sec casting time, 10 m range....)
as well as the need to be able to survive a hit or two when a mob reaches him/her

endasil wrote:The thing is that a purist melee works excellent, but a purist mage works much worse.

But a melee character with some magic skills is even better! The more rounded your character the better you get. All this comparison of purist classes doesn't mean a great deal out there in the sticks. Do what you have to, to become efficient and successful and powerful. The mechanism is there for it. I thought a big part of the beauty of this game is that you can adapt your character in all departments to get a fuller experience. If you want rigid pure classes perhaps another game is more suitable?

I'm not saying don't do the purist thing, whatever floats your boat, I'm just saying comparisons and sweeping generalisations about one pure class over the other seems a little out of place in a game such as Ryzom.

cjhsb wrote:....
6 - Look at your spell %ages later

If you take a look further up the trees, you see something worrying (at least it scaired the hell out of me). Ligntning 1 for example has a 5% (FIVE, no typo) chance to cast sucessfully. If that figure isn't level dependant, I'd say mages past 100 wil become a rapidly extinct class.

It is lvl-dependant.

Those % always show the cast chance with your current lvl. If you are lvl 75 in elemental it's no big suprise that you have a low cast chance for a lvl 125 spell