Nice catch

Thanks for adding the Rosemary Gloves bonus to the magic damage formula. I'll have to add that to my website's formula page.

On an unrelated note, I glanced over your staff mage guide and was mildly intrigued by the idea of maining a staff, but your last few remarks seem to invalidate the whole scheme by recommending carrying all the wands regardless. Any mage worth his salt should have all wand types and a good staff regardless (so as to be able to use everything), so what exactly is the point of encouraging staff use aside from the as-yet-undetermined usefulness of Shockwave?

Also, there is virtually no damage penalty (-5%) for using a speed-casting Crystal Lightning Wand, and it comes with some mana usage reduction included. Highly recommended instead of mana reduction upgrades.

No problem. I wanted to try to use your formula to see my hail damage if I managed to max out my reforges, but ran into the missing reforge and Rosemary Glove values in it so I decided to just test them myself.

In regards to my staff guide. I wrote that while half asleep so the points made might not be the most well thought out, but I'll try to explain my thoughts on the matter.

I'm not sure if you agree with me on this, but I think Thunder is the most versatile magic skill to date. Ice Spear tends to interrupt the flow of battle in parties (and I'm a human... that MP cost) and Fireball is too slow to spam a lot. Luckily, Thunder happens to be the best intermediate spell for a staff as well. The damage boost from the bonus 13%~16% damage on a staff in comparison to a wand is unexpectedly significant (which I now know the reason for from your formula) to the point that it's all I really use if I can get away with it. Now that Counter and Windmill can be instantly loaded, even in one on one situations with monsters with magic ping, I just spam Lightning Bolt and Thunder. With the Demonic Staff, I've been able to critical hit with 1.3k damage bolts and 4k damage single charge Thunder strikes. My experience tells me that this is a significant improvement over wands, though I don't have the numbers for wands anymore.

The last section was written just to point out that the staff has its weaknesses. You'll notice that although I suggested using different wands for different kinds of spells, I didn't explicitly state what situations require what magic spell (except for Ballooning and Rafting) as I expected the reader to decide that for themselves.

I agree that any decent mage should have every wand type, but I also very rarely ever touch my wands. My most used wand is probably the Tikka Healing Wand, honestly. My second most used wand would probably be my MP cost upgraded Crystal Lightning Wand for rafting. Recently, I've been using my Crown Ice Wand in the Snake Energy event to Ice Spear the small fry and Fusion Bolt the big snakes. As for the other wands, I rarely use speed Fireball or wand Thunder. I also don't consider the speed-cast Crystal Lightning Wand to be worth much because it only takes off less than half a second per charge. I suppose that's about 2 seconds of saved time for all 5 charges, though.

tl;dr I spam Thunder and the staff is good at that. I also barely use wands despite carrying every type.

I've always put Thunder forward as the king of magic. People used to constantly give me shit for it, especially when my magic guide talked up Thunder big time. I'll never understand how anyone can claim Hail Storm is better, given its terribly slow startup and single-target focus. Ice Spear results in too much aggro if you happen to screw up or just get unlucky, and Fireball is slow as you said. Thunder forever, mofos.

I'm surprised you actually bothered with the Infinity Staff, but then anybody who expends a lot of effort on a relatively small improvement tends to boggle my mind. A 3% increase from Trinity/Andris doesn't seem worth it to me.

When I use magic, I only use my staff if I think Hail Storm is called for. The incredible inflexibility of the staff drives me insane. The Hermit Staff in G18 will probably make me fall in love with staff use, but right now, having to elementally charge a staff by bolt spamming leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, especially when the charge level deteriorates too quickly for the staff to remain useful for advanced spells for very long. (Yes, advanced, not intermediate... old-school beta terms ftw.) I highly prefer my S5/S6 elemental wand collection to my S6 Trinity.

I don't use magic a lot in combat anymore just because Fighter is so damn broken, but from experience I can tell you that the 16% speed increase on the Crystal Lightning Wand is well worth it. It was even better before charge times were shortened across the board, but it's still noticeable, and especially while rafting those half-second increments can be everything.

Hahaha, I'm glad we think similarly on Thunder. For the Demonic Staff, I was just looking for something to do with my money since I happened to have way too much for my own good. I didn't expect to get any good increase in the damage. Bragging rights ftw?

Unless the Hermit Staff has higher damage than the Demonic Staff (why would it?), I will probably continue to use my Demonic since managing charges is already second nature to me.

I'm going to continue sticking stubbornly to my ways in any case. Screw the new skill sets (except Gunner, that adds int lol)