Mythril's Advanced Mage Guide

Mythril's Advanced Mage Guide

A detailed guide/analysis for Mages on maximizing their effectiveness. Much Mage conventional wisdom is challenged and even refuted.

Introduction

This guide is an analysis on creating a mage that

• Maximizes damage
• Maximizes experience
• Maximizes use of Ability and Skill points
• Minimizes HP and MP consumption
• Minimizes meso spending

Skill Points Distribution

The conventional Mage wisdom for distributing skill points up to level 30 is sound: Put first skill point into Bolt (lvl 8). Put 5 points into Improving MP Recovery (lvl 9-10). Put all points into Improving MaxMP Increase until it is maxed (lvl 10-13). Put all points into Improving MP Recovery until it is maxed (lvl 14-17). Put all points into Claw until it is maxed (lvl 17-24).

This will bring you up to level 24, with 2 extra points. You will have 20 total Skill Points to distribute before you reach level 30. Conventional wisdom says to put all the remaining points into Magic Guard. I offer an alternate viewpoint - put it into Magic Armour instead! Here's why.

Magic Guard takes some damage received from your mana instead of health. As a mage, you will get hit regularly, so this sounds pretty good. What you will find, however, is that your mana is constantly low - Magic Guard works against you. Even with your maxed MP Recovery, you will find it painfully slow to recover, especially as you level higher and have more mana points. You either spend alot of time sitting on Pio's chair, or consuming alot of mana pots. Your time and money is better spent elsewhere.

I recommend the following:

At level 24, put the 2 points into Magic Guard. We need 3 in Magic Guard before we can put points into Magic Armour. At level 25, put 1 point into Magic Guard, then start pumping Magic Armour until level 30. This gives you only 17 in Magic Armour, but it's ok, it will help us much more than Magic Guard.

If at this point you're probably saying "Well, I could just buy mana pots". I agree, you could, but we want to also minimize the amount of money we spend. Mana pots cost about TWICE the MP they recover, whereas health potions cost about the SAME amount of HP they recover. For example, a Red Potion recovers 50HP, and costs 50 mesos. In contrast, a Blue Potion recovers 100MP and costs 192 mesos. This trend continues through all the potions.

A mage has very low HP, so it doesn't take alot to recover HP. Sitting on Pio's chair recovers 50HP every 10 seconds. At level 23 for example, your mana recovers about 80-100 every 10 seconds. Your HP is 340, but your mana is 888, so it takes 50-60 seconds to recover full HP, but takes 90+ seconds to fully recover MP. Also, as you do quests and kill monsters, you will find that HP pots are very abundant, whereas mana pots are not. Clerics don't even need HP pots if they have Heal.

Magic Armour will further help reduce the HP lost in battle.

To be fair to Magic Guard though, I will say that it is useful under the following circumstances:

• When fighting magic-based monsters, as Magic Armour only only boosts weapon defense, not magic defense. You can counteract this by wearing items that have the most magic defense.
• When fighting monsters that do ALOT of damage to you, especially when it's more than the HP you have. You can counteract this by NOT fighting single boss monsters, or fighting above your level (see the Training and Experience section for my reasons why).

Now that you're at level 30, you'll need to make some tough decisions about SP distribution. Here are some thoughts about the different skills.

Skill Mana Consumption

For all mages, the amount of mana consumption per cast doubles after level 15 for Heal, Holy Arrow, Fire, Poison, Ice and Lightning. Here's the first tough decision: do you stop a skill at lvl 15, or max it? That really depends on you, but let's break it down.

Heal, Holy Arrow, Fire, and Ice are primarily targeted attacks, that is, they work best on a particular type of monster. Heal and Holy Arrow work best against undead (zombie) and devil-based monsters. Fire and Ice work best on Ice and Fire-based monsters, respectively. On Victoria Island, those are few and far between, and are isolated to small areas.

If you choose to max these out, be aware you'll be spending a lot of time in a few particular areas. Conversely, these targeted attacks work particularly poorly on the same-based monster. For example, fire works poorly against fire-based monsters. Heal has no effect at all on most monsters. I recommend keeping these at or below level 15.

Lightning, on the other hand, is not particulary good on anything (perhaps slightly better on water-based monsters), but is not particularly bad on anything either. It's middle-of-the-road. Until you max it out, that is. Then it kills EVERYTHING dead, and I highly recommended you max it out.

Heal is an odd skill. It heals you (and your party) of course, but also hurts undead/zombie monsters. Primarily though, you will use it according to its name: to heal you and your party. Above level 11 or so, it will fully heal most mages, but not warriors (and why do you have a warrior in your party anyway, cannon fodder?). I recommend this stays at 15 or less. If you plan to hunt zombie-based monsters, make sure you couple it with MP Eater, as described in the next section.

MP Eater

Heal and Lightning are multiple-enemy attacks, whereas Holy Arrow, Fire, Poison, and Ice affect only one monster at a time. For heal (used as an attack on undead/zombie monsters) and lightning, MP Eater is a must. Even at level 9 MP Eater, if you kill multiple monsters within 6 hits, you literally can keep attacking almost indefinitely.

For the other skills, I would not recommend MP Eater. Maxed out, MP Eater has a 33% chance of reclaiming MP. If MapleStory math is like real world math, and if you're using a single-monster skill, it's not every 3rd monster that you'll get some MP back. Rather, it's a 1/3 chance per monster. Read that again, and realize the difference - you have a 66% chance of not getting MP back for each monster you kill. You could miss indefinitely with those odds.

But with a multiple-monster attack, the math works in our favour. For every 3 that you kill, you get MP back from one of those monsters. Heal and lightning hit 6 monsters at once, that's 2 monsters for which you'll get MP back. I've proven this to myself with my level 41 Cleric, Heal level 15, MP Eater level 9, in the Kerning subway, against Jr. Wraiths. My claw and Holy Arrow kept draining MP, but when I used Heal, my MP kept recovering and I rarely went below 1900 out of 2200 MP. I could literally kill Jr. Wraiths all day long, as long as I made sure to hit at least 3 each time. You also have to be able to kill them within 5 or 6 hits, otherwise MP Eater is not as effective.

Ability Points and Distribution

For a "standard" mage that wants to equip all available armor and weapons, you will want to put points into both int

and luk. On Victoria Island, the items that can be purchased at the Ellinia Weapons and Armour shop are as shown

below. The standard Mage recommendation for luk to be 3 above your level are not necessarily true. MOST of the

time, it is in fact only 2 above your level. That's one more point you can put into int, for a little more damage. Use the

guide below to put EXACTLY only the amount of luk needed to equip the item.

Wands

• Wooden - requires lvl 8
• Hardwood - requires lvl 13, 40 int, 15 luk
• Metal - requires lvl 18, 55 int, 20 luk
• Ice - requires lvl 23, 70 int, 25 luk
• Mithril - requires lvl 28, 85 int, 30 luk

Staffs

• Wooden - requires lvl 10, 32 int, 13 luk
• Sapphire - requires lvl 15, 48 int, 18 luk
• Emerald - requires lvl 15, 48 int, 18 luk
• Old Wooden - requires lvl 20, 62 int, 23 luk
• Wizard - requires lvl 25, 78 int, 28 luk

Hats

• Brown Apprenctice - requires lvl 10, 32 int, 13 luk
• Moon - requires lvl 15, 48 int, 18 luk
• Wizardry - requires lvl 20, 62 int, 23 luk

Tops

• Training (Male) - requires lvl 8
• Split Piece (Male) - requires lvl 18, 55 int, 20 luk
• Armine (Female) - requires lvl 8
• Arianne (Female) - requires lvl 13, 40 int, 15 luk
• Split (Female) - requires lvl 18, 55 int, 20 luk
• Fairy Top (Female) - requires lvl 28, 85 int, 30 luk

Bottoms

• Training (Male) - requires lvl 8
• Split (Male) - requires lvl 18, 55 int, 20 luk
• Armine (Female) - requires lvl 8
• Arianne (Female) - requires lvl 13, 40 int, 15 luk
• Split (Female) - requires lvl 18, 55 int, 20 luk
• Fairy (Female) - requires lvl 28, 85 int, 30 luk

Overalls

• Plain Robe (Male) - requires lvl 13, 40 int, 15 luk
• Doros Robe (Male) - requires lvl 23, 70 int, 25 luk
• Wizard Robe (Male) - requires lvl 28, 85 int, 30 luk
• Doroness Robe (Female) - requires lvl 23, 70 int, 25 luk

Gloves Shoes

• Basic Boots - requires lvl 10
• Nitty - requires lvl 15, 48 int, 18 luk

Earrings

For a "luckless" mage, you are putting all AP into int, therefore you will not be able to equip anything that requires

more luk than what you started with. UnluckysparX has a decent luckless mage guide detailing what equipment you

need/should get, however I will refute the Skill Point distribution and Training tips.

I also recommend that in between levels, you put all ability points into int, and at the last moment put enough into luk

to equip the next item that you want. For example, at level 18, you need 20 luk to equip the female split top and

bottom. At level 28, you'll need 30 luk to equip the female fairy top and bottom. For the in between levels of 19-26,

put all AP into int, to maximize your damage during this time. Then at levels 27 and 28, put all 10 points into luk so you

can equip the next item.

Maximizing Training and Experience I've often been told to train on monsters that I can kill in 3 or more hits, to get more experience points (EXP). What I'm

going to tell you is, DON'T.

If you are training for the express purpose of leveling up, you want to actually minimize the number of hits required, for

the maximum EXP (If you are fighting monsters to fulfill a quest, then this doesn't apply).

For example, my level 41 cleric takes 2 hits to kill a Fire Boar for 60 EXP. Claw takes 20MP to cast (maxed out).

However, it takes me 1 hit to kill Rock Face, for 45 EXP. In 2 hits, I get 90 EXP, versus 60 for a Fire Boar. So for 40MP

I either get 60 or 90 EXP. Now, which would you train on?