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Artifice Discussion
Since there's no real gigantic topic about Artificing to match the rather popular Knight threads, I'll make one!
My initial analysis is that playing an Artifice mage is like playing Tristana bottom lane. Your early game (pre-prep) is absolutely horrid. I find that, more often than not, if you can't get your prep in quickly, you're more than likely to just die if your opponent pressures you hard and fast. Below are two sample spars I had with a Serpent (Cresil). Granted, my curing might not have been completely optimal, but I did try.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/10ea40c4
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/3d188bbd
That being said, once you do get your opponent prepped, and you begin your breaking (assuming they don't whore tumble), Magi have amazing salve pressure, especially with Timeflux. Depending on their priorities (and if they don't have passive hinderance), once you start scorching/freezing someone, you force them to either remain prone (prioritising the burns/freeze) or get a kill if you don't mess up your execution (prioritising legs). I'm still working on my technique, but here's a log of me killing someone with sub-optimal priorities against scorching:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/c57e887f
A few things I believe could be fixed:
1) We have very little hinderance before we go for breaks, making Magi extremely bad against several momentum classes (Apostate, Priest, Serpent, Occultist, etc). It would be nice to have some breathing room against these classes.
2) The margin for error with this class is -very- small. If you screw up your execution, you have to start from square 1, and in cases where you're fighting someone who has fast, heavy aff/health pressure, that can mean disaster. I believe that the main culprit with this is the increased amount of hits a Magi needs to break limbs. Yes, the balance got decreased, but in a lot of cases, especially for Magi, you hit for prep once, then have to mitigate affs/go on defence, so while it seems that the lowered balance time makes up for the increased prep hits on paper, in practice it's just adding -more- time to a magi's kill setup, and creating a bigger window to punish the mage for screwing up.
That's all I have for now. I will definitely do more testing, and if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve, please let me know. This is just my opinion on this, and I know I'm not the best at analysing the myriad options available in combat. If I'm missing something critical, feel free to point it out!
(Also, obligatory @Makarios, @Tecton tags)
My initial analysis is that playing an Artifice mage is like playing Tristana bottom lane. Your early game (pre-prep) is absolutely horrid. I find that, more often than not, if you can't get your prep in quickly, you're more than likely to just die if your opponent pressures you hard and fast. Below are two sample spars I had with a Serpent (Cresil). Granted, my curing might not have been completely optimal, but I did try.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/10ea40c4
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/3d188bbd
That being said, once you do get your opponent prepped, and you begin your breaking (assuming they don't whore tumble), Magi have amazing salve pressure, especially with Timeflux. Depending on their priorities (and if they don't have passive hinderance), once you start scorching/freezing someone, you force them to either remain prone (prioritising the burns/freeze) or get a kill if you don't mess up your execution (prioritising legs). I'm still working on my technique, but here's a log of me killing someone with sub-optimal priorities against scorching:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/c57e887f
A few things I believe could be fixed:
1) We have very little hinderance before we go for breaks, making Magi extremely bad against several momentum classes (Apostate, Priest, Serpent, Occultist, etc). It would be nice to have some breathing room against these classes.
2) The margin for error with this class is -very- small. If you screw up your execution, you have to start from square 1, and in cases where you're fighting someone who has fast, heavy aff/health pressure, that can mean disaster. I believe that the main culprit with this is the increased amount of hits a Magi needs to break limbs. Yes, the balance got decreased, but in a lot of cases, especially for Magi, you hit for prep once, then have to mitigate affs/go on defence, so while it seems that the lowered balance time makes up for the increased prep hits on paper, in practice it's just adding -more- time to a magi's kill setup, and creating a bigger window to punish the mage for screwing up.
That's all I have for now. I will definitely do more testing, and if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve, please let me know. This is just my opinion on this, and I know I'm not the best at analysing the myriad options available in combat. If I'm missing something critical, feel free to point it out!
(Also, obligatory @Makarios, @Tecton tags)
0
Comments
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
There's no reason to golem sear without dehydrate up, especially if you're using efreeti. Break arms instead and hope they fix the staffstrike bug where it'll try to break limbs that are already broken. That way you will at least get some semblance of hindering to slow them down just a touch.
Destabilise is an amazing concept but too much of a double-edged sword in retardation, and some of them are just weak. I haven't yet thought of a reason to use the double-edged aff ones. Maybe tumble cancel? But spreading retardation is easier and less risky. Will experiment.
Kind of wish destabilise didn't have the windup of having to focus vibes first in group fighting, as it's entirely possible Magi will die in that time.
My main concern with the class is that there's no way I've found to transfix outside of retardation (and even inside of ret it's unlikely vs good curing). I think having some way to transfix would really pull the class together, as Magi's only real hindering comes at the cost of prep (leg break + prone). Spamming reflection to stay alive is frustrating for everyone
No way to bypass parry at all. Transfix would fix (lol) this, but as is, it's a frustrating wall.
Prep time is a concern in today's fighting scene where kills are so fast, especially considering Magi's lack of hindering.
Inferno should be visible on LOOK for coolness.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/37693d83
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/7f4343a3
Log is against not optimal curing and with my less than optimal combinations that I have since changed.
It is also worth noting you can combo golem destroy with staffstrike or other stuff, too.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
I still need a lot more practice with the class to be able to judge balance related things with enough experience, but all in all, I think Magi's in a good spot. Could use a little love with transfix and dealing with tumble, but as far as core mechanics go, Magi seems solid.
Re: restoration break arm/golem smash arm, I think that would be fine to do if survivability wasn't a concern. It would require prepping arms 4 times in order to slowly bypass parry, on top of prepping the other limb(s) you want to break. I don't think that's realistic, classes are too powerful to expect to survive while doing that. Maybe I cure suboptimally and Priest's hindering spoiled me, but I feel like Magi is an ideal opponent for locking classes. Except when the Magi is a jerk and just spams reflection, but who wants to fight like that?
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
In retardation, if people can't fight in it, that's more their problem than anything else, because a lot of people do enjoy fighting in retardation.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."
-Albert Einstein
Isn't transfix every 40 seconds kinda like breaking all four limbs with arm break/destabilize plague every 15 seconds? You can probably also still transfix off of plague. Plague herb aff hits/golem impurity paralysis, transfix, transfix. Well, with QW + diadem at least.
Afaik curing scald requires curing blindness first, which is something of a route to transfix. But not what you're asking for.
Technically, you can destabilize stridulation for a temporary breather, too.
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
Ok, let's see.
Scald was the intended avenue for transfix. Its a bit different to the kind of thing we usually do, so it might end up to be a failed experiment. We'll see. It works that way to try to force people to maintain salve pressure, rather than hit/shield hit/shield etc.
As for a transfix destabilise, I'm personally not actually opposed to something that works in that way, primarily due to the inate windup of having to re-embed then re-destabilise likely making it impractical to use outside of emergencies. Not something we're planning on at the moment though I think.
Hard to say much more than that at this point. With all the knight interest magi seems to have taken a bit of a back seat in terms of people playing around with it. Until we see some more people using it, hard to say what needs work and what's fine.
This is with basic blindness upkeep. It's basically a choice between having scald stay on you (50% less potash) or getting tfixed once. Also note that you have to prep/break/prone to get a scald as well, so you're kind of wasting a prepped limb to have someone entangled for 4 seconds. That's not very optimal in a 1v1. The group combat applications of scald are pretty nice though.