Creating The Right Symbols - L2 Olympiad Guide

Creating The Right Symbols

As you must have read in the Dyes and Symbols topic, using the correct symbols for your class is the most important thing you must do before going inside the olympiad arena, because they make a huge difference on your status, since we will be playing only with self buffs.

To make your symbols correctly, you must thing about the most important basic status that you need to increase in your class, and also about what other basic status you can give up, because as you must remember, we must decrease one status to increase another. So first let's remember what each symbol increases:

Symbol of Strength (STR): Increases your physical attack, physical skills critical rate and Skill Mastery chance for fighters. By using this symbol, you will lose DEX or CON points.

Symbol of Dexterity (DEX): Increases your attack speed, physical critical rate, accuracy, evasion, speed, success rate of shield defense and blow skills (daggers). Since it increases your attack speed, it also reduces physical skills reuse time. By using this symbol, you will lose STR or CON points.

Symbol of Constitution (CON): Increases your maximum HP/CP, HP regeneration rate, stun, shock, and bleeding resistance, breath underwater and your weight limit. By using this symbol, you will lose STR or DEX points.

Symbol of Intelligence (INT): Increases your magical attack, success rate of curses/debuff skills (by increasing your M. Atk.) and Skill Mastery Chance for magicians and healers. By using this symbol, you will lose WIT or MEN points.

Symbol of Wisdom (WIT): Increases your casting speed, magical critical chance, hold/slow debuffs resistance, and some curses resistance related with HP regeneration and HP regeneration rate, such as Seal of Disease and Scourge. Since it increases your casting speed, it also reduces magical skills reuse time. By using this symbol, you will lose INT or MEN points.

Symbol of Mentality (MEN): Increases your magical defense, maximum MP, MP recovery rate, poison/curses resistance and decreases the chance of your magical casting skills being interrupted. By using this symbol, you will lose INT or WIT points.

Also you must remember the rules for drawing these symbols, if you don't remember about them, go back to the Dyes and Symbols topic, there you can find all of them. So now let's think about symbols for a healer like an Eva's Saint for example, what do they need more in the olympiad fights? Mostly they need a good casting speed to heal themselves fast and a good HP so that they can handle strong damages from fighters like Duelists and Grand Khavataris, because they hit really hard on mage robe clothes.

This way, we can get to the following Symbols combination: +4 WIT -4 MEN, +1 WIT -1 MEN and +4 CON -4 STR, where we increase WIT points to have a bigger casting speed and CON for higher CP/HP points, decreasing MEN because against fighters magical defense is useless and all mages have many MEN points, and decreasing STR because it's not very usefull to this class, since usually they don't kill with physical damage.

Be aware that I am not saying these are the perfect symbols for this class, there are more combinations for specific fights, but in general this is what works the most, since in the olympiad games we can face any class and you almost never know who we'll be fighting against.

Now if you take for example another healer like a Hierophant, it wouldn't be smart to make a -STR symbol, since their main damage on the opponent is physical, so we would need to change the +4 CON symbol for a +4 STR or +4 DEX symbol removing -4 CON points, which changes everything. We could even take off the +1 WIT symbol and make both of them, but then you would be reducing -8 CON points, so your maximum CP/HP would be very low and you would lose some good casting speed with only +4 WIT.

You can try making this for many classes and test different symbol combinations, it's good to learn and be aware of more options, but in the beginning it's better if you focus on only one. It's helpful to consider the basic inicial status and self buffs from that class too(check the sheet in the Dyes and Symbols tutorial), which can give you clues about their stronger and weakest points. It's very useful to learn how to play with different symbols, but you must change your gameplay according to the symbols that you have made, because they change a lot your character's status.

Let's think about symbols a little more complex now, like symbol sets for Duelists and Grand Khavataris. If you look at the basic initial status from human and orc fighters, you will see that they have a lot of STR and CON status, yet we usually make symbols increasing +5 STR, +4 CON and decreasing -9 DEX points on them, so you might think, what sense does it make to reduce something that is already low, why not remove from some bigger status?

The reason we need these symbols in these classes is because of their low defenses, especially their M. Def., so they need to have a very high P. Atk. for good damage with their skills without wasting too much MP, because their skills MP cost is too high while their maximum MP is too low, and if you decrease CON points instead of DEX you might die too fast.

With these symbols, a duelist gets a low attack speed, but with an absurd damage and CP/HP, while a Grand Khavatari keeps a equilibrated damage, very high HP and still a high attack speed because of their skill called Fist Fury, that greatly increases it. I think with this you can already understand how complex and important are the symbols, and start to create your own symbols sets to play in the grand olympiad.