General

@lllllllllllllil: F/P is by far one of the easiest classes to cap damage with... unless you're comparing paralyze to chain lightning?

@lllllllllllllil: Yeah 1 more line is nice, worth the nerf! I also like the changes to Lightning Orb, now a somewhat useless skill (can be alright in very specific cases like HT) becomes an 8 line hurricane for 8 seconds, great for doing no split pierres as well as just downing bosses faster! Looks like lots of fun too, will surely change how you do your daily boss grinds. Looking forward to it! I'm not sure quite when this "update" hits, but I'm always looking forward to the cast delay changes for some skills like Blizzard & Meteor shower! I wish Ice Orb got one as well though, my one complaint about I/L is the casting speed on it, it's ridiculously slow, though you're able to telecast it so I guess that makes up for it.

I always feel like both I/L and F/P have been fairly well balanced, and good proper Maple classes all around.

@saru79: If your problem is control you will suffer more with blaze wiz..... blaze wiz have little to no utility in comparison to explorer mages. Explorer mages are well rounded classes that have utility as well as damage. After reboot i/l becomes the best explorer mage class (currently it is f/p mage with paralyze spam but you need very high int to cap with paralyze). After reboot CL gets 1 more line so you will see a damage boost. Reboot part 1 is on december 2nd so it isn't even that far.

@lllllllllllllil, I hit 30-35ms on high-end bosses with a full ice stack, which is enough I guess. I just lose all my lives quickly so I think it's more of an issue with control than damage that makes me feel weak. I played a NL for most of my Maple time so i'm a lot more comfortable dodging attacks with flash jump than teleport. Thanks for your info!

@Juniormage, I lose out on 800k range thanks to completely untradeable equips so there would be a lot of work/cubing to be done if I switch to BW. I think I'll just stick to my I/L and work on my damage and control. Your info was very helpful, thanks a lot!

I actually made the switch from Ice lightning to blaze wizard so I can tell you directly what to expect. In terms of DPM, blaze wizards and ice lightning mages are about even, but the nerfs will come alas.
You do need generally only 15k int to cap an ice lightning which is amazing, but blaze wizards need around 19ish and have significantly more hits, meaning a blaze wizard hitting 20 mil lines can compete with an ice lightning hitting 30.
All, in all, if you see yourself putting in more funding into your character go blaze wizard, and you'll see nice difference. If you plan on staying at your current funding, stay ice lightning. I can't speak for myself since my ice lightning and blaze wizard were both 2m2m but a blaze wizard hitting around 30m lines should be able to solo hellux and even solo hmag and cra (albeit duo is much easier). Hope this helped!

I/L is one of the easiest classes to hit cap damage with. You need 15k int to cap with with considering you are 250%+ boss and 90%pdr+ (cvell). You will need a considerable amount more to cap with a bw than an i/l, at your range even going f/p is inefficient because you will most likely beat a mist explosion f/p.

You must be doing something really wrong with i/l if you are not doing a lot of damage with 1.6m range, i/l do not need a lot of funding to hit cap damage in comparison to f/p, bishop, lumi etc.

Yeah, I took a look at the upcoming BW nerfs and realized it's pretty harsh. I'll just stick to I/L haha. Thanks everyone!

LOL at feeling weak with 1.6mil range... meanwhile, there are players who are more than satisfied with just a ~75k range o.o If I had 1.6mil range, I would feel like I'm on top of the world.

Anyway, as far as I know BW is getting nerf after nerf after nerf. I don't think they will be a good long-term class considering how much nerfs they are getting in the future. F/P has a terrible play style for me too because I hate how their attacks are so slow. The only other decent option would be Lumi? Honestly, my opinion is just stay with your I/L. With a 1.6mil range, chain lightning is a beast of a skill considering the amount of mobs and lines it hits.

You can already duo at the very least most of the bosses that you need to kill. With your equips, you'll still probably be able to kill everything mentioned above with some help if you do play another mage. Switch to what you enjoy playing...otherwise, you're just going to keep flipping between whatever's strongest at the moment to achieve the same thing in the end.

@saru79: I see. Well, then you would enjoy playing BW more, although I'm not quite sure about the damage. Both BW and F/P got hit pretty hard by nerfs, while I/L suffered far less (Lighting Sphere did actually get buffed), and judging by the [url=https://itzdarkvoid.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/kms-v-1-2-240-boss-dpm-chart/#more-2254]DPM chart[/url]*, it seems that I/L beats BW in raw damage, although it's safe to assume BW beats I/L in terms of hits per second.

*EDIT: Basil links aren't working still, so copy and paste it: https://itzdarkvoid.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/kms-v-1-2-240-boss-dpm-chart/#more-2254

@locust: Luminous is notoriously bad at bossing, he was designed for mobbing after all (and is an absolute god at that), so yes, you should be able to solo those bosses even faster (not taking into account the fact you have to find a new weapon and secondary, which are large part of your damage after all)

Im thinking of switching to I/L myself. My lumi has 2m~2m clean range so if i xfer all his gear to my ice mage, i was wondering if i would be able to solo cra/h.mag/hellux still D:

A capping I/L can solo everything easily, but I'm sure a capping BW can do the job just as easy if not easier, play what you enjoy!

@terfil Oh really..? My range on my I/L is just 1.2m without all my completely untradeable gear, which is why I assumed that would be my BW's range. So I guess it'll be even lower

Thanks for the suggestion, @chaosh, but I've played a FP for a few months because I switched and didn't have the mesos to switch back, and I hated the play style completely. I generally have more fun with faster attacking classes like NL, BM, etc.

Why not switch to F/P Mage, instead? It's stronger than both and you don't have to worry abount PSoK'ing equipment back and forth.

uhm I dont think you'll have nearly that 1.2m range on your bw. I remember when I was playing BW that my gear got me somewhere around 1m clean, but when I xfered to i/l I had 2-2 clean. So you might have 700k-900k depending on emblem and untradables.