New Elite Class: Elite Mage for Chuck

[GrauGeist]

I see some people play Cleric / Frost / Tbird as anti-AOE. But eh, power through.

[RedYoshi45]

@pointless
Priestess isn’t weak! She was amazing to use together with Samurai and Cannoneer back when I just got her, and she is still great to use because the healing happens while you attack, whereas for example for the Spies’ healing you’d need to choose a bird to put it on, the Spies can’t attack in that turn and the healing turnout is usually rather low when fighting single enemies or when Chuck isn’t raging. Priestess is one of my favourite Mathilda classes!
Whereas I always had lots of trouble using Cleric effectively earlier in the game.

I do think Elite Cleric will be next but we’ll see. Nothing is definite yet.

[Pointless]

@smwforever45 OK, if you are building your team around Priestess, she can work (as you clearly did by including multiple-attack Birds in the Team). Problem is exactly that, a Bird with a niche use that doesn’t allow much in the way of flexibility. While the same can be said (to an extent) about Cleric, her Healing Shield is generally more useful, simply due to all the AoE out there. You don’t have Thunderbird, so haven’t been able to complete the Cleric/Thunderbird objective, but I would like you to see what that combo can do against opposition including Wizard and Spies…not pretty.

[Anonymous]

Elite Mage in the arena:

[GrauGeist]

Priestess may not be “weak”, but she’s not really playable at the highest level. At no point have I ever wished I had Priestess, although I have though on occasion that Sweet Witch would have been good.

[Anonymous]

Agree with @smwforever45. Priestess is pretty good. Back when the Druid healing bug was around, I put Priestess in her place. Only because of the debuff though. I never EVER used Spirit Link and TBH, she’s pretty decent without it.

[GrauGeist]

Why would you ever take Priestess over Witch? Witch hits harder and is far better at healing the banner.

[RedYoshi45]

@graugeist Because Priestess is available earlier and cheaper than Witch is. Plus, it’s not just about the arena.

@partshade Spirit Link is a good second ability! Use it on all your allies, again in conjunction with Wizard or multiple hitters like Samurai, it will heal ALL your allies for 1k+ health each round, WITHOUT the Sweet set. In PvE, that’s the best healing any class could provide when not raging, on par with the Spies.

[Anonymous]

@graugeist Because I perfer actual healing over a temporary Vitality buff. It’s just my play style.

@smwforever45 I know how good Spirit Link is. I just don’t use it because it’s so hard to keep going. I waste too many turns keeping all my birds attached and it’s so easily disturbed by Dispel as well.

[RedYoshi45]

@partshade
I agree with you on having permanent healing. That’s why Druid and Priestess are two of my favourite classes. Bard hits hard but heals little which is why I use her less.

[GrauGeist]

Huh? Witch gives a permanent heal of 5k to 7k, depending on your banner *AND* it raises the cap by 20%.

Spirit Link is this messy contraption. Any fight that allows me to use set up a Spirit Link web means I could have healed the banner for 13-20k and raised the ceiling from 25k up to 30k.

[RedYoshi45]

@graugeist, this isn’t just about Arena. Plus Priestess heals everyone who attacks, not the banner. With Spirit Link you could make your birds heal the banner but that’s bad to use in the Arena. Priestess’ usefulness is pretty much restricted to PvE. I thought I had said that.

[GrauGeist]

In PVE, I don’t need Priestess, either. Healing weapons on Bomb and Red, and/or Paladin do just fine.

[abcdefg]

In PVE I like Princess because if you have the spirit link on all birds then it heals them to full HP(3*35%=105% so heals for full) even if all birds are very hurt

[Pointless]

Simply not a feasible situation, regardless of how it looks on paper. There has been a lot of talk regarding this use (or attempted use) of Preistess.

[JJAtelier]

@smwforever45

Frankly speaking, the Priestess is a good class by balance design but when it comes to pure stats and impact in Arena it falls short for a few reasons.

Firstly, there’s too much synergy required to gain that “value” with the heal since your loosing tempo when you could be dealing damage instead of Spirit Linking. It’s a really slow line of play that can potentially lose games if you’re constantly trying to dominate through health advantage.

Arena for the most part has always been about attrition. You need to constantly apply pressure in order for the AI to do something dumb such as using their ineffectual secondary ability to heal or buff teammates. In this sense, its just a painstaking process to get the spirit link off on your entire party before you starting leeching health via the Pristess’ mark. Why bother healing when you know that your linked bird could be K/O in the next turn? Would it not be better to just chunk the banner low enough instead of preventing an inevitable K/O? These conditional high value abilities such as the Priestess’ kit and similarly to Spies as you mentioned prior all suffer the same problem that will hardly make them Top Tier picks unless the Arena meta slows down.

Make no mistake Priestess is certainly useful especially in the Chronicle Cave where there are multiple waves to plough through, but that’s because health advantage is essential for PvE since your birds are permanently K/O’d on any given level. Other than that, there’s hardly any advantages to advocate for using Priestess in Arena when compared to Witch.

[GrauGeist]

Priestess isn’t even good in the Caves. Healing Wizard & Healing Bomb / Paladin hit harder and better.

[RedYoshi45]

Let’s face it, everyone’s got their own favourites and strategies for levels. While you guys are looking for a combination that works for everything, I like variation. I find Priestess and Marksmen very good with fitting combos. Of course you can’t combine Marksmen with Wizard or Witch since the bonus effect will be minuscule. But combined with multiple hitters (Samurai, Stone Guard, Priestess, Cannoneer) Marksmen becomes very effective.
Same as Priestess. Of course you waste a turn by linking the healing, but in PvE this isn’t as dramatic as in Arena IMO, plus this wasted turn WILL pay off especially if your birds are low on health. Again, combined with other multiple hitters, the healing is enormous and definitely better than what any other Mathilda class can do on healing in PvE (in Arena Witch outclasses her of course, but I am not talking about Arena!!!), and the healing effect gets better the higher the health of the attacking bird is. With Red in your team, and Red having 4.5k health for example, this is 3×450 HP healing for every bird when Spirit Link is up and running. That’s the equivalent of three Pretty Fruit Cakes! And yes I did use the class like this, to great joy, because even when your Priestess is new and mastery rank 1, the healing will still be 10%. (On the other hand, of course, the healing also won’t increase with higher mastery, which may be a single disadvantage I see. Then again, higher mastery on the attacking birds does increase healing.)

Healing Wizard is great but only when facing groups of enemies (against single enemies, the healing effect is small). Healing Bomb IMO is WAY worse than Healing Chuck because Bomb doesn’t have an AoE class (the AoE effect of Berserk does not heal, and when Bomb rages it doesn’t heal him either, I noticed). Paladin can be good if you have him and he has a good enough mastery rank. However, Red’s base attack is quite weak compared to the other birds (even Mathilda almost beats him!) so I do use him more often now that I have a complete set for him, but still not as much as Wizard or Spies for example. The others are simply better IMO.

[Pointless]

Scissors provides AoE and Sugar provides healing, so if either if those is what you’re looking for in Bomb, then get/use those Sets. Either way the damage is there on top of those effects.

[JJAtelier]

@graugeist I don’t doubt it. Having individual heals is better.

Since we’ve all been suggesting @smwforever45 to prioritise chilli and premium classes. There’s not really enough sufficient gold coins for him or any new players to gather the most effective set items to from the GPM. Yes there are those puny blueprints weapons available but even those are quite tenuous and quite frankly a waste of materials that should go towards set enchantment.

If he wants to play a slow game with his current resources in PvE that’s fine albeit somewhat inefficient.

[Pointless]

Yes we are getting ahead of ourselves, specifically in the context of @smwforever45 but the situational question was put forth, so we answered.
Of course continue to save for Golden Chili, nothing is of higher priority right now.

[RedYoshi45]

Hey that’s what I’m doing anyway. I have no other choice if I don’t wanna spend a lot of real money. XD Halfway there for the Golden Chili.

Oh and I’m not a new player. I just spent LC’s in the wrong places at the beginning of the game and I took a long break from the game after I was stuck at Islands in the Sky.

[WhiteAsIce]

Elite Mage is actually a DOWNGRADE from Archmage. If you have the Archmage upgrade, it is not a good idea to transform it to Elite Mage. I use my Archmage as an example:

Archmage’s Storm does 61% damage. My Chuck has a base damage of 1786, so his Storm does 1089 damage.
Elite Mage would raise his base attack by 10%, so the base becomes 1964.6.
The modifier of Storm on regular Mage is 55%. Elite Mage’s Storm would deal 1080.53 damage, or 1081 when rounded.

This means that Elite Mage would only deal 60.5% damage compared to Archmage’s 61% damage. You basically lose a little damage for 10% more health. Since Chuck has such little health anyways and gets killed in 2 hits in the Arena, some people will prefer to squeeze more damage out of him than give him 10% more health, 10% of the lowest health in the game.

[RedYoshi45]

I’d prefer 10% extra health over 0.5% more damage. This health can really decide some matches, unlike the little bonus damage.

[RedYoshi45]

Also, I like Mage more for his shield rather than the Storm. The shield deals more damage with increasing health so 10% extra health will increase Mage’s defensive value.