QUOTE(Yuuki17 @ Sep 4 2013, 19:58)

Agility adds to physical mitigation formula. Edit: Oops forgot about evade also.
Strength is pretty much useless since most recent patch, except in making it easier to kill a low-health enemy to get ether theft.
I only have points in it, because when it's low cost it barely affects my other stats.
At my strengths current cost for a level, I can level it up 77 times in what would be 1 level of intelligence, so why not put a few levels in it.
I'd rather the INT than WIS. If your playing higher difficulty, you won't be killing all the monsters in a single cast. In fact, I can't even do that on normal mode.
And killing them faster is good, the less alive they are, the more alive you are.
Yeah, I figured STR is for adjusting spirit and nothing else really. Thanks.
Killing too fast frustrates me because I wind up clearing my arena mob roster and running out of MP, whereas if I carefully regulate resources I come out with near full MP/HP and can jump into the next arena. I guess it's different at higher levels, huh?
QUOTE(Lement @ Sep 4 2013, 20:08)

@Megafauna/Help Elf: mana costs will keep scaling higher as you level. Best way to reduce them for supportive is high prof, then stanced casting and IA.
@Megafauna: For mage, STR is nigh-useless, as it only increases staff meleeing damage and spirit regeneration scales slower with increasing stats that base spirit increase.
AGI is actually the best stat for mage defensively, far better than END, because AGI gives 1 point of evade per 25 points, attack speed for AGI over level(and you should have at least 50% over level with all the phase pieces having AGI), and plays half the importance of END in PMI formula, which varies but should come out as about 0.07 or so level(decreases as END/AGI increases, but mage gears don't have any END), albeit END also gives HP.
Main usage for DEX, once you have 100% melee accuracy, is mainly for the parry it gives.
Good point about proficiencies - that's another thing that hurts when you're not a mage, I guess.
Isn't it just more risky to play for evade instead of getting raw HPS? I know that you can use Spark or something to deal with the occasional lucky crit on you but that just burns up your spirit fast... It seems to me like END is just more efficient point for point (P.def, M.def, and HPS) and isn't as prone to unlucky events. Maybe I'm not seeing something.
Regarding DEX, don't you need over 100% accuracy so that you can be sure to overcome some of the mob's evasion chance? I used to have just under 100% and I missed way more than 5-10% of the time.
QUOTE(hentai_fusion @ Sep 4 2013, 23:46)

AGI increases evade which is better for mages as compared to END.
mages have pretty low hp and PMI to begin with so giving it lots of END is not really going to make it more tanky.
staff melee is now calculated based on average of MDB (INT) and ADB (STR).
if you kill a monster on CM using staff melee, you are guaranteed an ET.
I was aware of ET on kill, but for me the problem was missing melee attacks, rather than hitting and not killing. ET got a lot easier to manage once I had DEX over level, for over 100% melee hit rate. Is there maybe a better way to go about ensuring that I control ET?
Could you talk a little bit more about the low HP and PMI? I was under the impression that the only reason mages typically have low HP is that people deliberately build that way (and cloth has no END, of course.) By building high END and maxing out HP tanks, wouldn't I have high or at least decent HP?