psychic build discussion- pure mag vs light armor

Alexenokin - Lost City wrote: »

you forget that most light armor has +%crit modifiers, so at endgame you'd have quite a bit of crit... i think LA wizards have like 2x% crit?

la have +5% crit with give 15dex maybe 6%.. arcane have too 10%+ later so i think la dont have double amount of crit rate,maybe +50% more (if arcane have 12% then la 16-17%).

i think light armor sucks later cause magic hurt more so i think both vit or pure mag with ~good eq better.

Alexenokin - Lost City wrote: »

how big a difference would that be in terms of overall damage output?

because here's the thing... sure, non-crit damage for light is less than pure mag

but light armor will crit exponentially more often than pure mag

crit = double damage (more or less)

so in the end, which would do more damage?

Exponentially? No.

The problem an LA Psychic is going to see at end-game is this: There's getting to be more crit gear that either build can use. Especially with the attendance quest. So let's say for example you equip a ring that gives you 3% more crit. The fact is, that 3% extra crit rate actually benefits the pure user more, at least in terms of DPS.

DPS is rather important to us. We really don't hit harder than wizards end-game, we just hit more often because most of our spells take 1 second or less to channel. We can out-DPS a wizard, but we won't get the damage per hit they do in the end-game.

That being said, LA offers no real offensive benefit to a Psychic. Even if the crit rate difference were "exponential" it would also need to be to even the DPS difference. Since pure builds can have a fair crit rate too, that makes it harder on the LA. LA builds will really need to squeeze every crit percent they can if they want to out-DPS a pure Psychic. But if you consider the gear costs, wouldn't it be more efficient to devote that money back into a pure Psy to make the DPS even more outrageous?

But wait, what about the defensive benefit? Yes, let's break that down too. But first, a comparison with Wizards again:

Wizards have a skill called Stone Barrier. This doubles their Earth defense, but more importantly, it also doubles their physical defense (or pdef for short). An LA Wizard with Stone Barrier on can actually have a pretty decent pdef total. Obviously not as much as HA melee classes, but still pretty darn nice for a magic class. Since they can double their pdef (even more with sage/demon version), it makes sense for them to want to start off with a higher amount of it.

But wait... Clerics do it too sometimes. Well let's think about that. Clerics have a party buff to raise pdef. And another one to raise mdef. Since there is an issue of diminishing returns, it can be seen as a defensive advantage for a cleric to be in LA. I know what you're thinking, "the cleric's buffs are usable on anyone! so it should be an advantage to us too!" Well, it can be. If you're with a cleric 100% of the time. This isn't going to be the case unless you marry a cleric and enslave them afterwords. But, even for a cleric the LA advantage is not nearly as good as it is to a Wizard. And remember one other thing: a cleric does not necessarily need to have high DPS. They certainly can DD well, but they don't need to. So any loss of magic attack for them isn't as harmful as it is to a full DD class. Yeah I know, it affects healing potency too. I'm just saying, it doesn't hurt them as much.

Psychics do not have such a defense boosting skill innately. Sure, we do get White Voodoo. But WV is not based on your defense directly. WV will offer the same damage reduction bonus no matter what your original defenses were. Yes, the total reduction for physical attacks will indeed be higher if you're wearing LA. But the difference between them isn't as big as it is to a Wizard.

And even still, we don't use WV all the time. Only when its necessary. That being said, an LA Psychic is still hella squishy. Personally, I don't see the need to gimp my damage if I'm still gonna die easily afterwards. Killing with speed efficiency is one of the biggest advantages to being a Psychic, I personally want to maintain that.

Sorry for the wall of text.

Edited for typos and one other point: Maaaaybe our 79+ skills will make things different for us. Maybe. But I'm not relying on that. For now, we need to be DPS beasts. And pure magic users do that best.

What do i raise my stats as if i was a light armour psychic?