I smiled, not because I loved killing or anything. At first, I couldn’t even muster fighting the ai monsters of this world. Everything just felt too real, well it was real after all. I smiled because I was actually able to perform one of my max damage rotations on another level 90 player. The little high school boy inside jumped for joy, while the mathematician reminded me that this was only the beginning. The rotation I had just performed took hours of practice in this world and the previous, and surprisingly- was only possible to perform in the least played class in the game.

The developers had always stated that the Battle Mage class had potential, it was just that we weren’t playing the class properly. When we asked them to show us how to play the class, crickets would sound as they would then suddenly stop responding in the message boards. So the community had written it off as a flawed class and proceeded to dub it the worst in the game. And when a couple of the biggest KLO YouTubers name it the worst class in the game; you better believe it won’t see any more play.

Now then the real mystery, is how did I make the “weakest class in the game deliver a burst of damage that was unheard of for a solo player? Well, first we have to understand why the class isn’t played, to begin with...

The purpose of the battle mage was a simple concept. It gave players the chance to experience the best of both worlds. Some players find it very hard to choose between the brutality of the warrior class and the skill and proficiency that comes with the mage. So, the battle mage class was introduced a couple of expansions ago to do away with such indecisiveness. Now it all sounds great and all, but here’s why it never took off:

The BM class allows you to pick 1 skill tree from the mage class and 1 from the warrior class. But the only handicap is that you have to split the points evenly. So, essentially you could only put 40 points into each tree. Now if you’ve never played an MMO, you wouldn’t know that usually, the most powerful/stylish skills tended to be towards the bottom of the skill tree. The beginning often tended to hold multiple passive abilities to help boost your innate strength. And of course, there were still some strong abilities earned in the early game, but those were just to get you to keep playing, while the late-game abilities gave you a reason to max out your character, and then gear hunting made you never quite the game. Thousands of gamers play tested the class for hours on end, but they all came to the same conclusion, without the endgame skills this class was worthless.

So, how did I do it?

Well, I’m not going to lie and say that it was easy and that I couldn’t believe how ignorant they all were. Because honestly, it had actually come to me while I wasn’t trying. This account was just one of my smurfs that I had the most fun playing on. I don’t know what it was about it. Maybe it was the difficulty that the class provided or the uniqueness of playing a class no one else did. Well, slowly but surely I gradually began to see ways to improve the class.

Now, the first step was choosing the right class trees.

So technically since you had 3 different trees to choose from each class, that made the possible combinations a grand total of nine. The mage has the destruction, summoner, and utility tree. While the warrior class options were, the swordsman, berserker, and knight tree. Now each skill tree held its own strength and weakness, as I have described with the mage class. While the strength varied astronomically within the mage skill trees, the warrior trees were a bit better rounded. The swordsman tree focused on rapid attacking critical strikes and footwork that increased evasion. While the berserker revolved around brutal deadly attacks that strengthened the lower your hit points were. Or the knight is an all-around solid choice focusing on a great defense and solid consistent damage. The Berserker had the highest average damage overall, the swordsman had the highest 3-second burst, and the knight was the all-around safest choice in a duel that actually lasted any longer than the initial burst any one class brought to the table.

Now, when the class was first released the initial playtesters played the class as many others would when released to the general public, a berserker with the destruction tree. It seemed like the smartest choice at the time. The combos were quite simple but extremely effective. First, they would activate the skill flame body that would slowly burn away at their hp, but in return would increase all damage dealt overall by 20 percent, which would then trigger the berserker's passive turning all consistent damage into a sharp rise in attack speed and a 10 percent damage boost. They would then release a barrage of spells that consisted of backlash destruction spells. Backlash destruction spells were a bit more pertinent dealing roughly 20 percent more damage than the average destruction spell, but would deal a percentage of damage back to the user. Now if the opponent is somehow still alive, what remained was an enraged Berserker that was geared to the brim with items that would trigger a stasis in which the user couldn’t fall below 1 hp for as long as 10 seconds if equipped with legendary gear. This at first seemed insanely strong, but like most things, the first opinion is usually wrong. After multiple attempts at the arena, the method proved to be quite ineffective. If a player wielded a destruction mage you could do just as much damage if not more, paired with the right gear of course, and you would never be within 3 feet of the opponent. This was the berserker mage’s biggest downfall, it put all of its efforts into damage, forgetting all defensive gear causing the class to fall from a well-placed snare or stun if combo-ed correctly.

After that failure, many different combinations arose, and many different ways to fail were thus found. But the one combination that was never fully battle-tested was the utility tree mixed with the swordsman class!

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

So, why does this mixture work? And why am I able to achieve such high damage numbers? Well, to start things off I took advantage of the amazing passives both trees offer. What many players fail to understand is when having to choose between skills, the passive skill is often better than another random offensive ability. Simply because overall damage that can be applied to all of your sources of damage is greater than an extra burst damage skill that only applies just that, extra burst. In the swordsman tree, I picked up the ability Keen Edge which increased my weapon damage, Runic Blade which also increases my weapon damage, and Crit Strike which raises my crit modifier from 1.65 to a monstrous 2.0. In the Utility Mage tree I took the skill Nice Staff boosting my weapon damage by 15%, a lot of people had overlooked this skill simply due to the name of the ability, which to be fair was understandable. If the ability simply stated staff damage it would have been useless to me, but the ability simply stated weapon damage, which had made all the difference. The last passive that dealt with increasing my damage numbers overall was the skill, Old Man's Clock, which simply lowered all my cooldowns by 10%. Which didn’t sound like much, but when paired with my 2 rings that also provided a 5% percent cooldown reduction on all abilities; the numbers began to make an insane difference. Now my choice in skills had made my weapon damage a whopping 25% stronger just off passive abilities alone turning my subpar longsword into the equivalent of one of the top ten swords in the game when it came to raw damage at least, and let's not forget that most of those are two-handed blades.

Now here’s where my real problem arose. Yes, I had a weapon capable of dishing out massive auto attack damage and with a good chance of critting extremely powerful blows. I pretty much held a sword in one hand that I could swing fairly quickly yet held the force of a two-handed broadsword, but how was I going to hit my opponent? Many classes like the berserker or another other DPS class had plenty of ways of getting in and closing the gaps needed to deal their DPS. Well, this is where the utility tree really begins to shine. As said before my Evasive stat was off the charts, this is due to a passive in the utility tree that doubles my already high evasion stat, now couple this with several illusionary abilities, like Smoke screen and Double team. I was not only hard to innately hard to hit, but I could on top of that cast spells that made it like shooting in the dark.

Okay, so now that we’ve covered how I get in and do damage, how exactly was I able to get so much damage out? This is where the build gets fun. Mixing these classes together made for some very fun and outright powerful combinations. What surprised this wizard was my bread and butter(essentially my go-to combo). The rotation for this was, Double Cast, Multistrike, Ice touch, or another crowd control ability, followed by two basic attacks. Now let’s break it down. The Wizard class the lanky man was playing was speced in destruction magic, meaning out of all the possible gear and ability choices he was the most squishy; i.e, less health. Meaning I was fairly confident that this would be enough to kill if it had been let's say a warrior or warlock I would have changed up the rotation and even have been forced to pop an elixir or other possible buffs.

The first ability of the rotation is double cast, a simple ability found in the earlier levels of the utility tree. It simply does as the name implies, the next ability you cast after casting double cast is caused to apply twice. With that now active, the next ability multistrike, which quickly struck the opponent with three strikes, the first hitting for your normals attack damage, the second doing an additional 1.5% damage on top, with the final third strike hitting for whatever your critical hit modifier. The first strike hits 400, the third deals 600 with the last dealing 800. This gives us a grand total of 1,800 damage, and if applied twice this would give us 3,600, which should be a bit more than half the average wizard's health bar, but once armor and other resistances are taken into account, the numbers seem closer towards the lower side of 3,000. From this point on the opponent will typically, well rationally speaking they would try to escape using a dash or teleport ability or attempt to heal if possible. That’s why we follow this with ice touch, an ability that is again found in the disregarded Utility tree, a very pertinent ability, that if used within its small radius leaves its victims in a stunned state for a whopping 2 whole seconds. Now, stuns in LKO are more often than not on the lower side of a second, if a second and a half at the maximum. This MMO, well when it was merely that, was heavily combat-focused, so stuns, lasting any longer than a second were complained against until the devs nerfed the ability to a no longer usable iteration.

Then why is ice touch still unfazed, to begin with, the range is horrendous, you literally had to touch your enemy, but the main reason was due to the fact that people just hardly ever saw it. As it was, the Utility tree was never popular, and even when it was used, this tree had some hard competition.

In LKO classes have what we call class trees, this is where we see the abilities, but each set of abilities is split up into branches. Every 5 levels that you level up, you would get a new ability to choose from 3 options, this being a branch. Well on the branch where ice touch was located, as was another very popular and powerful spell that goes by the name of Lightning fury, essentially a wild barrage of lightning strikes that can sometimes lead to erratic damage charts. Which is all good and all, but I preferred to know exactly how much damage I am going to output.

So, from here after we have applied ice touch on our opponent, we have a stunned opponent who has now taken an extra 200 damage, not much but we are in it for the stun and passive ability. This spell also marks our opponent with a D.O.T called ice shackles. Giving our two next auto attacks bonus frost damage if they struck within the duration of the stun. If activated these dots would hit for 600, then all we have to do from here is finish the rotation with two fully stacked auto attacks that are not only going to trigger the ice shackles but are guaranteed to critically strike thanks to a ring that holds charges of crit, that we will talk about later when we get into my choice of gear. Each auto-attack dealing 800x2 then we factor in the 600 from the ice shackles and the initial 200 damage.

2,400 plus the 3,000 from earlier gives us a rather shocked player that didn’t have an opportunity to strike. The devs would be getting an earful on Twitter.