Phantasy Star Online 2 (Part Five) ~ All You Need to Know About Games

Mag

A Mag is an artificial life-form that is found in the world of Phantasy Star Online 2. It is kind of like a pet in regular MMOs and likewise, you will need to feed them constantly or they will starve and not provide any support like healing or attacking.

Basically, to obtain your first Mag, you will need to be at least level 5. Once you satisfy this requirement, look for Koffee at the quest counter to pick up the Mag License Client Order. Complete the client order and you will be awarded with your first Mag. But do note that each player is only allowed to have one Mag and any extra Mags will require Arks Cash.

When you first obtain your Mag, it will be in its infancy stage. And depending on what items you feed it with at this stage, it will evolve into different types of Mags.

Raira

Fornaxs

Repus

Antria

Raira - High Level in Striking Support (打撃支援)
Fornaxs - High Level in Range Support (射撃支援)
Repus - High Level in Tech Support (法撃支援)
Antria - High Level in Ability Support (技量支援)

So for example, if you wish to have a Raira, all you need to do is to feed your Mag with items that increases the level of its Striking Support. Continually do so until your Mag reaches level 30 and it will evolve into a Raira.

Your Mag is sort of like a trash can and will eat just about anything from weapons to armors to consumable items as well as photon art disks. However, all these items will affect your Mag's stats differently so it would be wise not to just randomly feed it.

Phantasy Star Online 2 - Feeding Your Mag

To feed your Mag, all you need to do is press "F4" to access your Mag's information window. From there, select the Mag and then click on the first option. You will then see a list of items that is currently available in your inventory that could be fed to your Mag.

Next, hover your mouse over the potential item you wish to feed your Mag with. The corresponding effect of feeding that item to your Mag will be reflected on your Mag's stats window. If a blue bar is shown in any of your Mag's stats, this means that eating the item will result in a decrease of that particular stat. Alternatively, if an orange bar is shown, it will mean that eating the item will result in an increase of that stat. Usually, I will try to gather as many items as possible while running through an instance and then pick an item that does not decrease any of my Mag's stats to feed it with.

The bar shown with a percentage is actually the Mag's energy bar. When you feed it with items, the bar will increase. But at any time, you can only feed it with a certain amount of items and once this bar gets close to 100%, you will need to wait for a few minutes for it to drop down before you can feed your Mag again. If it ever drops to 0%, your Mag will cease to provide any form of support until you feed it.

And if you take a look closer at your Mag's stats, you will notice that your Mag's level is actually the sum of all the levels of your Mag's stats. If you decrease any of the stats, your Mag's level will decrease. Likewise, if you increase any of them, your Mag's level will increase. And as far as I know, there are currently two stages of evolution for a Mag, once at level 30 and then at level 100.

The most prominent feature of a Mag is perhaps its ability to perform a unique attack called Photon Blast. Your Mag will gain this ability once it evolves for the first time at level 30.

Phantasy Star Online 2 - Photon Blast Ready

To use the photon blast attack of your Mag, you will first need to assign the skill to your hotkey bar. After doing so, just run around the instances and fight monsters as per normal. When the attack is charged up and ready for you to use, the circular icon beside your HP bar will start to glow. At this point in time, you can then press the corresponding key for the skill to activate the photon blast (in my case its "2"). However, I usually keep the photon blast for emergency usage or boss monsters only.

For more information regarding Mags, please refer to:
PSO2 Open Beta: Intro to Mags

Item Shopping via Visiphone

Phantasy Star Online 2 - Visiphone and Storage

The last thing that I think you would need to learn in order to handle yourself well within PSO2 would be how to shop for items sold by other players.

First of all, find a Visiphone (the purple "?" icon as shown in the picture on the left).
Next, press "E" to interact with it and then select the first options you see in the lists your shown with until you reach the window as shown in the picture on the right.

This is the item search window where you can select the parameters of the items you wish to find from the sea of items sold by other players. And since I don't understand Japanese, I usually just use the first drop-down and filter by item category. Do play with the other filters as well if you wish, but I suppose they're meant for fine-tuning your search.

In this above example, I did a weapons search and the system retrieved a list of weapons sold by the other players. As you can see in the picture, there is a wide variety of weapons that are being sold and the list is sorted by selling price.

In this list, there are a couple of weapons which are lit up while the others are greyed out. Those lit up weapons are actually usable by my character while those greyed out ones are either not suitable for my profession or I still do not satisfy the requirements to equip them.

The top-most button in this window is the refresh button. Usually I would click on it if I find that the item I wanted to buy seems to have disappeared. This usually happens when someone else have already bought the item and your list is no longer up to date.

Once an item catches your eye, click on it to enter the player's shop and look for the corresponding item. From then on, just purchase the item as you would when buying and selling at the NPC vendors. After successfully buying the item, it will appear in your inventory and you can then equip it as per normal.

With that, I have told you all that I've learnt about Phantasy Star Online 2. I wish you success and hope you will have fun in this game.