As the quintessential Glass Cannon, almost everyone who decides to play Wizards faces a tough survival problem. Therefore, I have collected a few tips that all Wizard players can use to survive tough boss fights. Although this guide is mainly aimed at Wizards, other classes may find it useful as well.

Getting Gear

Of course, the easiest solution is to get better gear. Anyone can give you this advice, but let’s look at something that is actually available for free, or at least a lot less Cabal Online Alz than you would have to invest in just getting new gear.

Focus On HP Steal

As a Wizard, you have 3 class-specific survival skills, 2 of which restore your HP, and one that absorbs a lot of damage.

One of the biggest mistakes people make here is to start panicking when their HP is low, and then use all of these skills at once. The way I recommend using them is as follows.

First, when you are engaged in a tough boss fight and take damage, your goal is to compensate for your HP loss long enough to defeat it. As I always tell people, HP Steal is Wizard’s best friend. It’s basically the first step to survival, because it will restore part of your HP as long as you keep attacking.

Use HP Potions Wisely

If HP Steal doesn’t make up for it, use potions. If you’re facing a really tough enemy, the level 3 potions sold by Grocers and Alchemists in each town aren’t always enough, so you might want to carry some level 4 potions with you. You can get them from DP Cube in Port Lux, or trade directly with other players.

If HP Steal and potions still aren’t enough, then it’s time to use the regeneration buff. But remember that you can’t exceed your health limit, so it’s important to get hurt a few times before using it.

It doesn’t last long, so you can use Mass Restore after using it, or at the same time, if the enemy is too strong.

Spirit Shield

If your health is still dropping, then you can use the emergency trump card - Spirit Shield. Normally, you should use it when the situation is critical, especially when you are only 1 hit away from death. It gives you a temporary extra health bar that you have to drain before you can take damage again. During this time, your main health bar can still be filled using HP Potions and HP Steal.

Wing Protect

Last but not least, after you get Wings, you’ll have Wing Protect, which completely blocks 1 hit, or at rare grade even 2 hits, no matter how much damage they do. This can be used as a last resort for survival.

Now, I also want to point out that getting hit with your Spirit Shield on or Wing Protect on will make you immune to status effects like Silence, Suppression, etc. So it’s usually worth using them if you’re expecting special attacks.

Now that you understand how these skills work, there’s one more thing to consider: Spirit Shield has a much shorter cooldown than either the regeneration buff or Wing Protect. So another approach is to use that one first, and then use your other skills during the cooldown to survive another 60 seconds. How you use it is up to you.

Boost Your Defensive Stats

Of course, skills alone won’t make you invincible. You’ll eventually need new gear to get bigger defensive stats. I can't give you any specific advice, but it's probably a good idea to try to maximize your HP, Defense, Damage Reduction, and Ignore Penetration. Ignore Penetration works outside of PVP, too.

It’s important to note that Defense Rate and Evasion allow you to completely avoid damage from certain hits, but they’re chance-based. There’s a chance you can block every hit, or there’s a chance that all hits hit you and you die.

As a Wizard wearing Martial Sets, your base Defense Rate is pretty good, so it’s worth trying to improve your survivability with things like Passive Skills, Merits, and even Buff Potions. And if you avoid hits, you’ll get some time to recover more of the lost HP.

Evasion, on the other hand, is primarily granted by Dexterity stat, and Wizards have a very low Dexterity stat. Sure, it can drastically increase your useless blue stats, but it’s impossible for a Wizard to get enough permanent Evasion to make a difference, since it’s chance-based. Still, Evasion Potions are useful, they just last a short time.

Last but not least, as I already mentioned, you should try to get enough percentage value of HP Steal to make up for your damage, and try to get as much HP Steal as possible even on non-critical hits.

Vampiric Earring, Rune, Talisman, and even a pair of Shoes or an Amulet can increase it. This is a very powerful non-PVP stat that counts how many times each attack hits each monster. There are many places where you can basically recover all your health from hitting random monsters around the boss just by doing a little baiting.

Range Advantage

There is one more thing I want to emphasize. As we all know, Wizard is a ranged class, and its most powerful skill has a range of 6 in BM2 and 7 in BM3, and many bosses simply can’t reach that far.

Fortunately, Blink also makes Wizard the most mobile and fastest moving class. So add these two together, it’s the so-called hit-and-run tactics.

In short, in many cases, if you keep doing this, you can completely avoid taking damage. So, hurry up and try to see who can stand till the end in the boss battle!