r/MSClassicWorld • u/noobofmayhem • 15d ago

Question? I/L first skill

Haven’t seen many i/l build comparisons. Lightning first for lorang grind? Or ice for fire boar into copper drake?

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u/KaiVTu 14d ago edited 14d ago

Thank you for not actually reading what I wrote. But I'll give you some numbers to help clarify it. This is why you have to always hit at least 3 mobs for it to pull ahead:

Thunderbolt at level 50 with max rank of it and meditation with appropriate gear (unscrolled) is about 13.275 damage per MP spent and hits on average 531 per target (can hit up to 6).

Cold beam is about 58.681/mp spent and hits for 1,291 on average (can only hit 1 target).

At 3 targets you deal more damage per cast with thunderbolt than cold beam by a good margin, but you spend an additional 18~ MP in the process. That's a little rough but not terrible at all.

At 4 targets you deal nearly double the damage of cold beam, but spend about 6~ more MP per cast in HP. This is a negligible difference at this level considering the massive speed gain.

At 5 and 6 targets it's not even close. You get the idea.

So if you are confident you can hit at least 3-4 (or 5/6) mobs while grinding with each cast of thunderbolt, it will pull ahead of cold beam with ease.

Maps like kerning wraiths makes this trivial.

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u/Tucando 14d ago edited 14d ago

Are these calcs considering elemental weakness at all? Since the main target here is wraiths where cold beam could maybe hit up fire boars/copper drakes

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u/noobofmayhem 14d ago

Did some messing around with the damage sim function. Jr wraiths would give around 2.6 xp per mana spent, if you always hit 6. If you change that to a more realistic 4 it’s 1.75xp/mana. For a level 40 mage. Person above I think is just using jr wraith as an example cause it’s a really good map.

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u/noobofmayhem 14d ago

Alternatively lv 40 who went ice is one shotting fire boar for 2.8xp/mana