Most of this is also correct except the part about matk being diminishing return, 300 to 400 for example with fireball adds 1200 to it's base damage, 800 to 900 also adds 1200, before fire mastery or any other multipliers like combo cards of course, matk adds flat min/max but each spell has a different coefficient so some benefit less than others, like icebolt for example will only get 40 max from that same 100 matk.I also doubt that spirit weapon update really fixed magic, magic still has it's own problems that are neglected. Most of monsters in end-game content has high magic defense and protection. Intermediate magic is notorious for drawing aggro and scattering monsters. Magic is crippled with its damage calculation as well, going from 800 to 900 magic attack will gain less than going from 300 to 400 magic attack.(The higher you get, the less you'll gain!) Magic enchants give pathetically low magic attack compared to max damage enchants, etc.
Elf mag spam is the best dps in the game, but archery is broken in NA due to aim rate being tied to latency and mabinogi using in order encrypted TCP packets to communicate with the server, 90% on KR is 90% but 90% on NA is only 90% if you're in Oregon (California before servers were moved to amazon cloud), the further you are the more desynced your client aim meter and the server side aim meter become due to the repeated latency add from TCP acknowledgements. In KR you're generally going to have 1~3ms of latency to the server, so little to no desync occurs and you'll see any korean elf gameplay video archery will hit much more than the vast majority of NA player's because of that. Personally after 7 years of playing an elf trying to use archery with 48~68ms of latency, I find archery to be completely unusable. A large part of why I play a giant now.Aren't elves supposed to be stupidly OP in Korea? Perhaps the giant update was to give them more parity there.
Also props to Maia for being one of the only people to understand you can play on other characters of other races instead of crying for nerfs on the forum every update.
I could go on and on but honestly for everyone that thinks X race is "op" play it or Y race "is trash" don't play it, leveling up is trivialized by blaanid beginner quests + baltane missions, training skills is trivialized by talent level bonus skill exp, ap training, training seals, and constant training events/training potion handouts from events so there's 0 excuse not to play another character, I shelved my 25k total elf with basically every skill r1/cap to play giant and my giant's already 27k with everything r1/cap besides magic craft, act 9, and rest in less than a third of the time it took to get my elf there due to the HEAVY casualization of the game that TRIVIALIZES character progression in comparison to how it use to be. Yes I know you can get 40k+ and all skills in less than a year but I'm a casual deal with it.