Small question about Hailstorm

It's a typo, I guess no-ones bothered to submit a ticket yet. Either that or it's too minor to be fixed.

It should read base magic attack +1794.9. There is no weapon damage modifier.

Actually, at the lower weapon levels the difference is not as great as people make it out to be.

I am currently level 39. My weapon has about 240-350 matk and my total matk is about 1000-1300. Those are all rough numbers but just to give you an idea.

One of the peculaliarities I have realised concerning the way damage is calculated is that You have the weapons matk, your base matk which includes the matk modifier of rings, the skill damage modifier and finally the targets mdef.

Until my base matk and weapon matk become higher the % of weapon damage plus base matk really have a smaller bearing on the total damage than I originally thought. Let me give you 2 examples:

1) My lvl 1 sandstorm actually does more damage than my lvl 7 stone rain. Why? Because both use the same base matk so that stat is negligeble and the % weapon damage differs by 5% which if taken off of about 300 matk on average is not a significant amount. Also consider that with the range in damage of my weapon that number might actually be in favor of the lower % on odd occassions. The major difference between the 2 if you check hereis that stone rain does 1321.1 damage while sandstorm does 1702.7 damage.

So now that leads to my second example and also the answer to why the damage of hailstorm is not so bad (at least at my level):

2) Gush lvl 8 vs Hailstorm lvl 5. Both share the same base matk however gush has 90% of weapon damage. If I take my average weapon damage as 300 then that gives 270 damage. Add that to 1000 and you get 1270 damage from gush (ignoring base matk since its taken as negligeble in this comparison and also ignoring monster mdef since it should be same for the same mobs if we were testing) vs 868.4 damage.

Now if we take both examples together we see that sandstorm does 381.6 more damage than stone rain while gush does 401.6 more damage than hailstorm.

What this means is that vs fire mobs there is nothing wrong with throwing in a hailstorm especially since the 33% chance to stun is actually not as bad as I first believed. The only drawbacks of hailstorm are the cast time (which in total is actually shorter than using sandstorm or stone rain) and its wide radius of effect (which is a plus or minus depending on the situation).

I would not level hailstorm over more important skills however to me hailstorm is not as bad a skill as many people on these forums have made it out to be. As such my hailstorm is actually lvl 4 and I use it whenever I fight fire mobs.

Don't however go levelling it because of my observations. You may find other skills around this level far more useful e.g. Distance Shrink and Stone Barrier. I however am on a PvE server and seldom do mobs get close enough to hit me unless they are archer type mobs. Even then I am seldom in danger of dying unless I get heroic (e.g. fight 2 mobs at once which is madness for a wizard). So I only have lvl 1 distance shrink (I actually use this to speed up my flying lol) and lvl 4 stone barrier.

Hi all, first time on this forum, but I use to be on PW MY-EN, so I'm not new to the game.

Just wanted to say that I like using Hailstorm once in a while. the thing is, the better your equipment gets, the stronger your spells with %Equipment add-ons become. Because of that, spells like Hailstorm will always do less damage, specially in the end-game.

However, it's an AoE... I know, not the greatest... But If you manage to get 3 mobs in the blast range, that's 3 times the damage! Of course, they might all aggro, and that's bad, but then it gives you a good reason to push them all away with Pheonix!

I just love AoE spells... lol