(I was considering making my own thread on this, but given that this seems to more or less be a general mystic change thread, I figured I’d put this here.)
I was inspired to think more about mystic after watching Sebchoof’s recent endgame class ranking video, where I think he described mystic’s strengths pretty well; as he explains, it has insane dps and battle control capabilities as well as speedy if you have either conflict or soul of the bearer. This means that it can excel in solo and large group situations, if played right.
If played right; mystic brings something to the table for players that few other classes can: the need to truly master the class for it to be good. Yes, more skill with knight will allow the player to stun some stuff they previously couldn’t go deep on, but mystic takes that to a whole new level. To use even just a tiered orb to the fullest, a mystic player has to keep track of curse, berserk and stasis, requiring quick reflexes and a high skill level to bring the class to its fullest. Factor in other orbs (say, the honey orb), and now a mystic has to keep track of slow and stasis, then switch back to the tiered orb to curse, berserk and stasis again to take full advantage of the hindered enemy. This combination of abilities and factors to keep track of makes mystic a class with massive potential, which can only be realized with skill that seems to be largely unnecessary in many other parts of the game.
It is true that having a good pet is often necessary in conjunction with skill to make full use of the mystic (allowing permanent curse, berserk or speedy), but after thinking about it for a while, I have come to the conclusion that that is not necessarily a bad thing. With the sheer amount of pet food DECA gives out every month, a maxed legendary pet is something which only requires time and patience for dedicated players to obtain, and as my last paragraph described, mystic isn’t for noobs anyways. And that’s okay, because classes like wizard and necromancer exist. Endgame players do still need content geared towards them, and what better way to do that than to give them a class which requires a huge amount of skill to use effectively?
To be perfectly honest (if you somehow didn’t catch onto this yet), I am pretty happy with where mystic is right now. The only real problem in my opinion is the issue of stasis trolling, or good-faith misuse by players new to the class. In thinking of possible solutions to this, I recalled discussions from a couple years ago about how overpowered knight’s stun was; ideas were put forth on ways to directly nerf it, through either shorter stun durations, shield cooldown times, or temporary stun immunity for stunned enemies, all geared towards removing permastun as a capability. Now, knight is a powerful midgame character, but starts to fall off towards endgame as more and more enemies (bosses in particular) are stun-immune, either permanently or in certain phases. The solution was through changes to the enemies, not changes to the class. Perhaps the same thing could be done with stasis? Give stasis immunity to a few more bosses (wlab boss, for instance), a few more key minions as seen fit, and mystic will become less of a hindrance to the group as a whole. Mystic will suffer a little in the process, but will continue to be a very powerful class in capable hands.
I think that such a change is all that is needed to reduce trolling. Will trolling still exist? Certainly, but to a much lesser extent. I am not in favor of changes which seek to make mystic easier to use or which limit the orb’s ability by reducing the number of effects it has, because that serves only to make the class another point-and-shoot like so many other classes. Mystic is a truly amazing class with a very high skill ceiling, and, in my opinion, ought to keep that designation.
