Reasons why Magi are horrible?

Drauka

Wanting to change class from Apostate to Magi is creeping into my brain, keep justifying it to myself. I'll always be in the same City and House though.

So, what are some reasons why that is a bad idea? What is horrible about being a Magi, especially versus my current class? 

Eld

Magi are retarded.

Blujixapug

Vibes are boring.

Enchantment blows. Everything in it can be obtained from another mage anyway.

You need to join a House with an MC, and they're all awful. Your choices are, what, the failed "merchant" House, the Personal Space Violators in Eleusis, one of the inactive ones in Raid-dor, the "we're a mage house but we're actually about Lupus" kindred, or the "nobody told us phoenixes are a Shallam thing, and we forgot how to be about anything else" warlocks.

You need to constantly maintain crystals. Tedious.

You essentially only have a single skill, Elementalism, which despite having illusions is pretty boring.

Mage roleplay in Achaea generally blows. Despite the dozen aspects of it which could be cool if even one of them were partially explored - eg. fire magic, crystal resonance, sigils, being wizards, elementals - not a single one is really used by anyone, player or NPC. Mage roleplay is either "let's draw lines on the ground in a star shape yay! em narrows his eyes and begins to blaze with an inner elemental light" or "let's go bashing" or "we're scholars, whatever that means!".

Mizik

Well. Based on these outstandingly vague points..

- No Blackwind, so no infiltration. 

+ Cast Aerial bypasses Piety, etc.

+ You'll have Burrow lite with Sandling

+ Team Support with Reflect and Vibes

- Soulcage, if you care

- No Beckon, so welcome to the rest of the balanced world /bitter

uh.

etc

OH. And crystals get expensive as -.

Sidonia

Reasons why you shouldn't switch to Magi:
-Mhaldor needs more magi for cataclysm
-Mhaldor already has 500 apostates
-Magi can flood to stop runes
-Magi can gust away eldrithmists/smoke bombs etc
-Retardation for my harmonics

Kuruvar

Blujixapug said:

You need to join a House with an MC, and they're all awful. Your choices are, what, the failed "merchant" House, the Personal Space Violators in Eleusis, one of the inactive ones in Raid-dor, the "we're a mage house but we're actually about Lupus" kindred, or the "nobody told us phoenixes are a Shallam thing, and we forgot how to be about anything else" warlocks.

The Congregation is far from inactive now. Things seem to be being shaken up in a really good way there.

That said, this is kind of my problem with Achaea in general at the moment. None of the Houses I like accept the classes I like (except certain ones I can't realistically justify Kuruvar moving to), and I actively dislike many of the Houses I actually could join.

Achilles

Mizik said:

Well. Based on these outstandingly vague points..

- No Blackwind, so no infiltration. 

+ Cast Aerial bypasses Piety, etc.

+ You'll have Burrow lite with Sandling

+ Team Support with Reflect and Vibes

- Soulcage, if you care

- No Beckon, so welcome to the rest of the balanced world /bitter

uh.

etc

Mizik left off a few things you'll give up/gain

- No more desecretation to get rid of rites

- Soulspear

- No more griefing Eleusis extermination

- No more gravehands

- No more putrefaction

- Vivisect

+ Can portal

+ Erode (no need for hammer)

+ Geyser (no need for tentacle)

+ Deepfreeze

+ Icewalls/Firewalls/Firelash/Iced floors

+ Flood

Iocun

One downside of magi compared to apostate is that you'll feel a lack of arties much more strongly. Not so much because unartied magi is undoable, but simply because magi can boost their offence with arties so much more than apostates can, making the difference between an artied and an unartied magi much more pronounced than that between an artied and an unartied apostate.

I'd also consider apostate 1v1 combat more interesting. With magi, there are essentially two things: damage, and retardation. Of course, those two aspects can be versatile in themselves, especially retardation, but the fact remains that if someone can tank your damage, there's really only retardation left to you, which can be tough against certain classes (particularly those with strong passive attacks). There's also the fact that the strongest offensive magi abilities like retardation and holocaust affect the magi as much as his opponent, so they can really backfire. Personally, I actually consider this a really fun aspect of magi combat, as it means you have to take risks in order to get the best offence off, but I can imagine that it can feel a bit frustrating to some.

Blujixapug

@Iocun That's true, mage PK is incredibly binary. Either you can kill someone with damage, or you can't, and usually you can't. Your one other option is trying to kill them in retardation which, let's face it, will end badly for you, because anyone you're forced to resort to retardation against is better at PK than you are.

Cahin

Congregation is probably the most active house in Mhaldor.  Easily.

Drauka

Thanks for helping put my whim of changing to Magi in check.

Xith

Everything Bluji and Iocun have highlighted are true. Magi are missing pieces. Sandling really needs to work just like burrow.

But in short, it's just a different class. You go from locking and hinder/support to damage and melee and conditional ranged like Cataclysm.

Enchantment is annoying but if you have the reflexes it's fairly consistent money. People need enchanters all the time and these days resort to buying from shops. Purity is the real gem there though.

"Perhaps more than just about any other class, a magus has the

ability to attack multiple opponents at once."

This part is true, but ironically the potency in that doesn't come without additional magi. Double stormhammer/deepfreeze.

That being said, I've been gradually designing a battlemage-style class for the past couple of years, but I procrastinate because I'm at the flavor text phase and there are lots of things to write.

Skillset 1: ~52 abilities, 2 effects each

Skillset 2: ~32 abilities, 1 effect each

Skillset 3: ~26 abilities, 5 effects each + item descriptions

And almost every ability has a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person line. Not even going to do the math there. But it's got mage facets that I think Magi is missing.

Kuruvar

Iocun said:

One downside of magi compared to apostate is that you'll feel a lack of arties much more strongly. Not so much because unartied magi is undoable, but simply because magi can boost their offence with arties so much more than apostates can, making the difference between an artied and an unartied magi much more pronounced than that between an artied and an unartied apostate.

This is true, but a slight upside is that since the third magi skill is a tradeskill, you don't need it for combat.

I wonder which classes need the least and most credit investment to be viable. I think about this more as I create alts in a partial attempt to figure out what to do with Kuruvar... some classes are just unrealistic to get anything done with if you don't have the time/money to really boost them up.

Achilles

I would say the worst part about Magi is they very escape abilities and without vibes they in big trouble if they burst.

These problems are mainly addressed with artefacts however.

Iocun

The main difficulty here is defining what "viable" means. Viable to just have a fun time playing Achaea? Viable to lightly participate in combat, such as city defence? Viable to win spars at mid tier? Viable to kill lots of people without a great practice time investment? Viable for becoming the most powerful player of all?

It comes down to what your aims are and how much effort you are willing to invest.

Yue

@ Iocun's last post, I bet Magi is viable for all of those scenarios.

Super viable with small investment to join city defense and you have higher chance of scoring kills in cataclysm then a serpent does without an artie bow. Magi have some strong hindering abilities, some passive and active defence, and high damage. Get an illusion artie and work on limb breaks until you can prep retard. With bloodboil and necklace, you have pretty redic curing.

You could probably get pretty high in combat rankings fighting raja knights. Staffcast scint derp.

Drauka

Yeah, I was just looking to hear the bad side of Magi as earlier today I was only seeing the pluses. Apostate is pretty awesome and on a Drauka personal level, he's connected more with Apostate than anything else, as faith and education in the Congregation and Mhaldor is a huge priority of his. Suddenly going Magi would just be "wierd" right now, especially without any in-game influence. The only other big influences in Drauka's life has been mainly Apostates, with some Maldaathi knights, Serpents, and a Shaman. 

Just the idea got stuck in my head for a bit as a person behind the keyboard and didn't think about my character. (my bad)

Kaden

Magi hindering tends to be hard. >_> Freeze ground is almost laughable in the way it hardly ever works in my experience and anti-illusion in curing has made transfix harder and harder to get in. Icewalls are kind of nice and usually my preferred way but by mid-tier people will have ways to bypass them. You also have silly long recovery times on most of your skills. And prepping vibes takes a lot of time, but it hard to fight without 'em. Not impossible, just hard. Yeah, those are the main things that come to mind.

Kyrra

No, freeze ground works just fine. Especially with uber DKs in the room.

Nakari

Xith said:

 Sandling really needs to work just like burrow.

pretty sure it does, actually. Found out like a month ago after playing sylvan for 2.5 years that I could move underground with sandling. Felt pretty dumb after that one

Wysteria

CAST SANDLING = burrow down one level and can move about, albeit slowly, within the area no problems. Can't beat Druid of course with the Wolverine morph (?) that can go down +3 levels which I think can go under rivers.

Sena

Wolverine can burrow 9 levels deep. You can burrow under rivers/highways/etc at 6 levels.

Mishgul

Thought it was seven levels deep maximum

Simoln

Some men can burrow deeper than others.

Sena

AB file said 9 levels last time I checked.

Froh

Sena said:

AB file said 9 levels last time I checked.

Just now in a forest location: 9 burrow belows work, the 10th fails as I've "reached bedrock" (Sentinel)

 

Penwize

I really wish burrow were made more interesting, say as a method of infiltration.  Would be so cool.

Eld

Give serpents the ability to infiltrate burrows and...plant seeds and...mumble mumble innuendo mumble.

Hasar

Retardation was fun for me. Lots of fun things to do in it.

Achilles

Penwize said:

I really wish burrow were made more interesting, say as a method of infiltration.  Would be so cool.

So many banks would get robbed

Eld

Achilles said:

Penwize said:

I really wish burrow were made more interesting, say as a method of infiltration.  Would be so cool.

So many banks vegetable patches would get robbed