The first of the many indepth guides for the sub-classes of Dungeon Fighter.
Today will be: THE WITCH!
Role: Damage, gathering monsters, support.
Damage Type: Mostly fixed damage, 3 scaling moves.
Signature skills: Enhanced Magic Missile, Black Manteau, Broomstick Control, Lollipop.
Strengths: AoE damage, gathering mobs, air juggling.
Weaknesses: Lower damage roof, single targets, spells will fail all the time without friendship mastery learned.
Overview:
The witch was the last class to get their awakening skills in DnF, it was also one of the last classes added into the game, besides thief. While most classes take a more serious stance to fighting and exploring dungeons, the witch on the other hand gets along with slam bosses with a fly swatter made from a cat, acid rain, an exploding doll and other magic machines. The strongest role the witch will play in a party will be to gather monsters up and use their strong AoE spells on the freshly gathered recruits.
While this sounds all fine and dandy, there is a downside, she can completely fail on casting a spell, changing the spell into something totally different, for better or worse. This is the core of the witch, chance. Her spells can work as intended, with normal damage and effects. They can fail, lowering damage done or even making the spell do no damage. To the great success, jackpot, which will change the element of the spell, increase damage and even add new effects to it. Every time you use a witch skill, you are rolling the dice but how can we tip the odds in their favor? Well, with mastery skills, not only do they help your spells work more often, they also add or extend spells under that branch so it's important to learn these skills. As was touched on before, most witch spells have no element to them unless they receive a jackpot, like acid rain or Enhanced Magic Missile.
The witch can also fly around with the iconic witch weapon, the broomstick. This broomstick lets her glide in the air for a few seconds, dashing and pressing jump will make her ascend into the air as well as give you a 6 hit, limited to 4 in pvp, air combo. An air dash is also enable for extra speed. A few moves are also usable in the air, one being broomstick spin and the other belonging to the pluto spell branch, Devolution Flyswatter. One thing to note about Devolution Flyswatter when used in the air, the attack speed is great enhanced, taking half the time it would from the ground and can even be used on backstep.
Don't expect to be soloing the hardest dungeons with this class, as you'll often be unable to beat boss HP regen with your skill damage. That's not to say you can't solo, but don't expect speedy runs like the ones shown online with other classes, at least not till a lot later on.
The witch also has strong AoE skills to lend to the fight. The main ones being Acid Rain and Lava Potion, in addition to her third tier magic spells: Gravitas, Florae Collider, ICE CAR and Flame Furnace. While these skill will drain a lot of mana from you, they do their job well and that is to blow the crap outta of anything in range.
General skill builds
A lot of witches, even if they don't intend to get the light friendship skill, take EMM. It's the core of all witch damage with amazing tracking and damage with a cooldown of 6 seconds, you should be using this as often as you can. The next is Black Manteau for controlling and moving mobs, as well as breaking super armor or to get away from a mob's attacks. As you plan a witch out, you need to see what spells you would like to learn and learn that element friendship to maximize it's power. Most people go two elements and focus on that, some like to take three or two and a half, it really comes down to how much you are willing to put up with your spells failing.
The strongest PvE elements would have to be fire and light with ice. Fire and ice for Acid rain, lava potion, Jackyl and Flame Furnace. Light gives you EMM spam, normal magic missile and maybe Collider. Dark is kinda in the middle area, it has flyswatter for summoning monsters and Gravitas. This element is more centered for PvP but it still has good PvE power. The element dust skills are a nice skill to help you buy time for more powerful skills to cooldown, since they change your melee attacks into magic and go on to beefing them with extra range and power.
One of the problems with witch, much like elementalist, is that you need to really focus on one aspect, PvP or PvE. This class is suited for PvE play, so trying to make this a strong PvP character will demand a lot of work and time from the player to bring out the most in this class. You will also find that lower level PvP will be easier since most classes, except gunner, will lack a lot of their core go to moves to fight again you.
Support skills
Ancient Library is a great skill to learn for yourself or help party members with mana problems, like launcher or elementalist. While it's not a required skill in most builds, it's for the person looking to save money on potions or maybe to help out people in need. Later this skill will also give an INT bonus, so it can also be used to help your damage as well as restore mana.
If you are looking for another supportive type spell to help, look into ancient memory. Right now, this skill's time and INT amount have been reversed, so for now it gives a flat 20 INT boost and all levels help to extend the time, however, later on it will always last 20 seconds but leveling it boosts INT gain.
Lollipop should always be learned to max level, as it helps lower failure rate for a set number of spells and is cheap at only 100 SP to master. You, will, ALWAYS get this skill on any witch you make for this point on.
The last support skill is disenchant, this skill has limited PvE uses and is more of a PvP skill, if this is taken for PvP, levels will: Expand the cast range, strengthens the slowdown on the dispelled people, ups the STR/INT buff you receive, the amount of buffs it can dispel at a time, the cooldown and cast time. If you are looking into learning this skill, level 7 is a good level to stop it if you lack the SP to spare.
Stats to gear for: Cast speed, INT, weapon enhancements.
Since Witch is a set damage class and a spell casting mage, cast time gear as well as high INT are the stats you will want to look at. Weapon upgrades should not be done till later on, as you will get very little return on investment, the only skills showing improvement from them would be EMM, magic missile, broomstick spin and melee damage with dusts.
Cloth is recommended over leather for casting heavy witch play for the cast speed and Max MP it gives, leather doesn't not offer a lot to a casting witch, even if they gain a mastery on job advance. The easiest ones to get are the level 35 and level 40-45 +magic crit purple cloth set, they aren't expensive and they do add more crit chance then the leather armor mastery does, sounds pretty win-win.
You can also opt for +MP regen gear, like the gentlemen robe(400k-900k), Scholar bracelet(2-4 million), shoulder warmer (500k-1 mil) or level 15 purple pants with +15 MP/min. While these are not required and easily replaced by using mana potions, you will quickly drain that Mana pool with acid rain and lava potion, so if you happen to get a hold of some of the pieces to use, think about using them, maybe swap to them if you see your mana pool getting low or if you want to idle as you solo for some extra regen.
Use a broomstick, it's a witch-only weapon and enables them to fly and air combo, it also does not add mana cost or cooldown time to skills like a staff would. It keeps the attack range of a staff as well and comes with a fast attack rating to boot, nifty. For some Magic missile builds, a witch can swap in a high upgraded staff for extra power, in case you were totally afraid you would be stuck with only one weapon for the rest of your life.
PvE info:
Anything goes here. Summon builds with maxed flyswatter, AoE with fire and water, melee with battle mage skills and element dusts, magic missile spam and even item witch. Take what you like and level them, it's hard to go wrong here and if you intend on using this as a PvE character, you will not be let down with the supporting power this class can give. You'll have to settle for farming lower roads without help but it's not that bad. A witch can make everyone's job 10x easier with her grab and Jackyl alone.
PvE Tips:
-Black Manteau can grab people that are standing on or a little to your back.
-Black Manteau is also a special grab, in that it can move things that aren't normally movable, or grab stuff that even a grappler can't, like the Golem tower boss.
-EMM can also track people that are near and above you.
-Don't level Shuru too much, use the points to pump jackyl, that is where the damage comes from. Enjoy his jackpot face, you'll love it.
-Careful using swatter without dark friendship, those hunters hurt a lot.
-Broomstick spin is not really worth leveling at the moment, one level is fine to use for escapes.
-Set damage means you gotta level those skills for damage, don't delevel your core skills too much.
-Magic festival is a great PvE skill to learn to speed up your cast speed and lower cooldown, MM builds love to use this to max their spamming power.
-If you do not use normal Magic Missile all the time, don't take it past 5. Use it all the time? Pump that sucker.
PvP info:
This is where it gets tough. A witch's main goal in PvP is to lock people out of areas, they are not going anywhere unless you let them. Witch also lacks a lot of good wake-up attacks and should just walk up/down once they get up, unless weapon uppercut seems like a sure dodge/land, in fact, a lot of people expect a witch to wakeup with uppercut, careful not to get stuck in another combo. You NEED mana shield max as well as at least 1 level of phase shift, as all pvp mages do. Cloth is the best armor to really use here, that 30% cast speed ain't no joke, even two rare avatars can't match that, while 2 normal attack speed avatars can cover the attack speed loss from dropping leather. Lava potion, acid rain, Jackyl will be your main weapons at poking and keep people off you as much as possible. Some witches can't learn both lava and rain but be sure to at least have one of them to use as a safe zone, but don't let your guard down, they still want you and will attempt to get you inside if they see you taking it easy, it's only there to discourage them from entering/passing, not stop completely.
Enhanced Magic Missile(EMM), which is a main tool for PvE, gets a massive nerf to it's first hit tracking, massive as in the person as to be right in front of you or it will fail to get a target but once it does find it's first target, it'll act like normal and fly all over the place. This can be a good and bad thing. Good because for summoning type classes, like mechanic or summoner, you can use the summoned units as the first hit and punish those bastards. Bad because, if they are not a summoning based class, you'll just have to toss it out there and hope they run into your range by the time you cast, it's more of a warning shot then anything to keep them on their toes, you can use this at the end of an air juggle if they aren't scaled too bad, with enough cast speed that is.
Using Death/Snow dust makes your hit box bigger, remember that. Dash jump into air pokes will trade, a lot, slayers and fighters will give you a lot of trouble since they can trade with upward slash/muse upper and send you flying, as they are only sent a few feet into the air. Priests will also do this, don't fly over their heads, instead bait them into using launcher by stopping your forward air movement just out of range of their attack then land and fire off ranged attacks, if it's a monk, air hop pokes are ok, just look out for ducking body blow and be on your guard once that priest patch hits.
Black manteau has invincibility after start-up, you can use this to evade steyr's 2nd hit on male gunner, the C4 blast from spitfire or anything as long as you got good timing, however, this will go away with the witch balancing patch and change to super armor instead. This grab also has some bullshit built in and grabs from well out of it's animation range, lag will be your biggest enemy here, as even if they were within the normal grab range, they will just walk out as if nothing happened and punish the recovery time.
Jackyl, all day, everyday. This should be out as often as you can get it out, the range on the explosion is a bit bigger then the taunt range of shuru level 5, it really gets people afraid to stay near you. A great opening attack to hide in as you cast mana shield. Another great thing about it, even if it's a failure, people will react to it by running away, it's nice to keep them honest. In addition, the cooldown time for it is lowered in PvP, making it spam-friendly. It can also be used to pull summoned items away as you go to deal with the real meat and potatoes. Even if you don't go into fire, this is one skill you'll need for pvp, get shuru to five to unlock Jackyl then level Jackyl to 1, at least, your PvP witch will thank you.
About Tier-3 spells, don't use Florae Collider unless you are totally sure it will hit or need to buy time and know they lack a range attack to get you AND make sure phase shift is up, because once that spell ends, they're coming for you. Gravitas is a great skill to use after launching people into the air with uppercut or to just random toss out to keep fear in their eyes, that jackpot can do 50%, no problem. Flame Furnace can be canceled any time with jump, so if you miss a target, stop the spell and keep them going, a good skill to keep people in corners. Ice car is a good skill for slow fighters, like exorcist or summoner but avoid on faster movement classes.
Learn to do short two-hit air combos, land then do another two-hit combo. You'll need to dash then jump and attack as soon as you see the dust kick up to keep yourself as low to the ground as possible to keep chaining these attacks for a long juggle.
If you intend on making a heavy PvP build, know that leveling skills to the max isn't really needed for all skills, so you can use those extra points to help other skills out, like leveling weapon uppercut, phase shift, friendship skills, or even learn more new stuff, like disenchant or Hodor.
Quick Rebound, always, you will be knocked down, protect yourself from meaty and relaunches with this. Careful, people may want you to do this. Indomitable Spirit can be replaced with casting speed, if you cast fast enough, you'll never be stopped in the middle of it. Skip the +crit skills. Take backstep if you want to surprise people with a flyswatter, if you don't care about that, you can skip it. SKIP ALL CANCELS ON WITCH, THEY ARE USELESS.
PvP skill Check List: What to have at the very least on a PvP witch.
Jackyl lvl 1
-Requires Shuru 5
Acid Rain/Lava Potion, one or both
-Lava requires Jackyl 3
-Rain requires Snow dust 3
Mana shield MAX
Phase Shift lvl 1
EMM, level to taste.
-Requires Magic Missile lvl 5
Black Manteau lvl 1
Lollipop MAX
Quick Rebound
Friendships, don't want failures all over the place now do we.
Pictures and shiny stuff will be added later.
