アンスウェラー

Yet another round of expert skill changes and once again, Cave does things strangely…

Mages

First off, magical/demolition/whatever rush. Current cap is 7-9 and yet there isn’t any skill above 4-0.

Where art thou, maryoku/magic rush? It’s quite insulting that gunner/melee do better maryouku/magic damage than mages.

The new skills in magic control are pretty useful though. The two mp reduction passives adds ~50% reduction together. My megido now cost 9mp, down from its original 20mp cost. MP reduction works for rushes too and by extrapolation, other spells/skills.

The new toggle adds ~+10% damage/-10% cast time to skills of a particular element, with -20% damage to the opposing one. My kamaitachi is pretty much instant cast now.

Toggle works with all skill that has a damage type by default. IOWS, it’ll work with fire shots etc from magic bullet, but not work attack/spin/normal shots etc… 400 kahaku were sacrificed to test this.

Frankly I rather they add a way for mages to deal decent maryouku/magical damage rather than increase damage to our 4 main ones via toggles.

Even without the toggle, I can already 1 hit gandharva and my highest recorded damage so far is ~8000 against Jikokuten with fragrances.

I’ll probably reach a state where I can 1 hit gandaharva without fragrance, considering the trend lottery items are going…

Class 10 destructive magic is nice on paper, but hardly useful in real combat due to many reasons. Rushes are still my primary attack because 1) scale better, 2) don’t attract aggro on devils with beast AI associated with them.

On a side note, every destructive magic skill can be learned now. There isn’t a need to choose between bufula or agilao now; you can learn both.

Megidolaon, much like Megido is good on paper but lacks in practice due to the long cast/cooldown time and the fact that there are fairly little gear with boasts to almighty damage.

Basic combat simulation show de lorean > agidyne > megidolaon in terms of damage, factoring in my current gear/enchants.

Overall, decent changes for mages.

Melee

Melee got back what made them overpower in the first place: sharpshoot and gain even more power.

Both spin/rush has a new skill rank at 7-0, but you can only choose 1 out of the two skills.

For class 7 rushes. One is a normal rush, while the other can be chained 6x.

Highly doubt anyone will get either since rushes isn’t really a main source of damage for melees as it scale less than spin/attack and expert skill points are quite limited.

The 3x class 7 spin has limited uses as it is frontal only. The other spin is quite an improvement over class 1.

The new chain expert as a whole is very powerful, but half of the effects depends on you having the appropriate weapon.

Hand to hand/blunt/axes/spears are highly favored compared to daggers/1-handed swords/2-handed swords.

Class 1 of the new chain expert gives +5 p.attack and +10 to crit. In return, your devil have their p/m/rng.attack reduced by 5.

Considering that no one in their right mind uses their devils offensively in the high levels, melee effectively gain a free +10 str.

The other skill adds ~ 20-30% damage in return for some drawbacks. Numbers here are rough estimates from my limited tests.

Going back to what I said a few paragraphs back, hand to hand/blunt/axes/spears have the best bonuses.

The hand to hand toggle adds 20% to all melee damage type. In return, player take 20% more damage
The blunt toggle adds 30% to attacks (read, skills like basic/combo attack only). In return, spin damage is reduced by 30%
The axe toggle adds 20% to attacks (read, skills like basic/combo attack only). In return, spin cast time is increased by 20%. Considering that spin don’t have a cast time, this has 0 penalties.
The spear toggle adds 30% to spins. In return, spin cooldown is increased by 30%

The final skill at 6-0 adds +30% melee damage to all melee skills/weapons, in return for taking 30% extra damage, i.e. a clone of sharpshoot, except against all mobs.

Flame horn falls under blunt and there’s report of melee doing 2.5k+ damage/normal attack against Jikokuten with it.
Melee with Dubthach’s lance (inb4 Michael whines that ズフタフ == zufutafu) are reporting to be able to AE clear gandaharva in 2 spins with the spear toggle.

Even Mathias, my clan mate who isn’t really that high end equiped is doing ~1.6k an attack with an ice enchanted axe against dogs/flamis.

Stacking the 6-0 with the weapon specific toggle nets a 50-60% damage increase, propelling melee back on top.

Very well equipped melee probably elapsed past mages in terms of Ichigaya gold clearing speed now, and probably will remain so as they scale better than mages/gunners with the new chain expert.

Kind of ironic how melee used to have to sacrifice skill points into useless skills like gun knowledge/shoot to get sharpshoot, eventually have it removed from them since they scale too well with it, and now they get it back…

I don’t really have a gunner so I can’t really comment on them, but they didn’t really get much of anything out of the patch. I heard that the higher ranks rapid are quite useful, but gunners are already quite tight on skill points due to having 2 chain experts to work on, so they probably remain last on the totem pole for Ichigaya gold, but are still useful in Suginami gold, and the AE shot probably ranks them quite high there.