Bishop Comprehensive Guide

Introduction

Class Overview

Bishop is a holy themed support mage class and is part of the OG Explorer branch. It offers excellent support for its party through damage buffs, healing and extra lives. Bishop is a relatively simple class to play, with strong survivability and decent personal damage. These make the class great for beginners and thanks to many QoL updates over the years. The class scales well into the end-game, being one of the two top-tier supports greatly sought after for the hardest bosses in the game.

Pros and Cons

Should I make a Bishop as a Boss Mule?

Short answer: No, unless you really enjoy the class theme.

Long answer: No. The class is too hexa dependent to perform well on the low frag counts most mules would get. Bishop's overall damage output is also, as of current patch (Crown p1), considerably low.

The class enjoys great mobility with teleport, and also has very good survivability, but at its core it’s not worth making a low dmg support class as a boss mule, unless you plan on creating it to trade supports for your main in the future. However, even when considering that point, Lynn performs much better on both the damage and support for that aspect.

What about Open Job Advancement?

Short answer: Not a thing anymore.

Long answer: While it technically still exists, the fact that it resets ALL of your HEXA matrix is by itself far too big a cost for 99.99% of people. Even Janus and Hecate aren’t spared, and your origin will be reset and must be unlocked again. The only thing that will remain is your hexa stats. At the time of writing (crown p1) a new bishop will need 48k total sol erda fragments, and 1.6k sol erda to finish their hexa matrix. So while it’s comfy to have the option of being able to swap classes while keeping your gear including weapon and secondary, it’s an extreme price to pay.

Class difficulty and overview

Bishop overall is a relatively simple class but offers rewarding optimization that differentiates great bishops from those that simply press their sequence. The class has no combos or cd skips, and is equipped with about 2-3 short cooldowns to keep track of. Your main attack heals you and allies in your path, burst skill offers big damage reduction and cc-immunity, and teleport is widely considered one of the best mobility skills in the game, so you are covered on both survivability and mobility.

In bossing you use your main attacking skill, Angel Ray, for the majority of the time to attack while weaving in Peacemaker and Genesis whenever they are up. Bursting involves preparation by summing your offensive fountain and debuffing the boss, maintaining the Peacemaker buff while consuming all your Divine Punishment(DP) stacks and weaving in door and Genesis. It’s key to consume your DP stacks while your buffs are up but also know when to stop so you don’t handicap your next burst.

In parties your job becomes more interesting. You offer very strong support and healing capabilities and knowing how to save your party members and position yourself during bursts can have a huge impact on the run. It's critical to position yourself at the center of your teammates so they can reposition if needed while remaining inside Benediction and your other buffs range. Some bosses may also require you to pay attention to dispelling debuffs or maintain your healing fountain and cups for your teammates.

Tl;dr: The class doesn’t feature many buttons being around the middle of the pack APM-wise. Bishop has auto healing, teleport remains a broken mobility tool, Angel Ray competes with Marksman for its long range, good iframe (eform), dmg reductions. But has some cooldowns to pay attention to, in addition to their debuff and fountain(s), and positioning. And partying can make the job slightly more complex.

Brief Skills Overview

The first step of learning a class is, well, reading what your skills do. Listed down you’ll find the core skills you will be using as a bishop, categorized into roles based on what they do. While the skills aren’t complex, you’ll often find many of them fulfill multiple tasks and knowing this can help make your life much easier.

 – Teleport (tp), your main mobility tool. Has a toggle to deal negligible damage on tp.

 – Mana Wave, the explorer-mage air hover skill. (Similar to Blink, but no cd)

 – Righteously Indignant

The core of bishop’s identity, whether this toggle skill is on or off, defines how many of your skills behave.

It allows the Bishop to toggle between Benevolence (Support) and Vengeance (Attack) mode and swapping between them changes the functions of certain skills. Depending on the boss, bishops will either stay permanently in Vengeance mode, or primarily in Benevolence mode to support their party members, and swap back before bursting, or to replace Fountains.

In-Depth Skill Explanation and Tips

Notable Passives

Active Skills

Common V-Skills

Hyper Skill Passives

With 5 points to allocate, we naturally take the ones giving us and our party damage first. Then we improve our holy symbol with extra drop rate and experience for ourselves, leaving us with one extra point.

Which option do I pick?

I personally take Shell - Persist over Enhance because I don’t find the 10% to 15% damage reduction difference noticeable, but the Persist can help with tanking an extra pattern. For those who never use Holy Magic Shell, Holy Symbol - Preparation is better than nothing, however, it’s important to note that endgame bosses tend to completely ignore your abnormal status resistance making it a dead upgrade.

V-Matrix (Fifth Job)

For those new to 5th job, welcome to your new job. It’s much more powerful than previous jobs and contains 3 main aspects to it. 1) Boost nodes – upgrades to your skills from previous jobs. 2) common shared skills 3) class specific skills.

• Special nodes are small temporary buffs you can slot in, and use points to extend their lifespan. (Excluding event specific nodes, e.g. Roro, Mapea)

The most important part about the 5th job is that it sets you up with the foundations of your class, and brings you closer to the final(™) job advancement, 6th job.

• If you are unsure what to upgrade and how to spend your points, you can’t go wrong with first unlocking everything and then evenly upgrading your boost and job specific skills first.
• For those very low on points, focus upgrading the boost nodes first to their max level as it is a requirement later in 6th job to unlock your mastery nodes.

You gain points by opening Nodestones. These are obtained from farming or events. There are multiple types of nodes each giving a different amount of points. Here’s a short table of how many points you gain per type:

• To unlock the Seren and Will skills you must first obtain and use their respective nodes on that character and meet the requirements (Obtain Esfera symbol for Will, Finish Cernium questline for Seren)

Main Boost Nodes:

• Shining Ray boost is not used and therefore unnecessary!

Decent Skills

Every class in the game makes use of the same 3 decents: Decent Speed Infusion, Decent Sharp Eyes, Decent Combat Orders. Bishops additionally use Decent Hyper Body. Here is the order of priority in which they should be obtained:

Since we got our own Adv. Bless and HS, those are not necessary, but should be obtained eventually when points are abundant for their passive stat bonuses.

Node Leveling Priority

Here is the suggested priority of skill nodes for Bishop mains:  

• It is recommended generally to keep most V-Matrix skills leveled more or less evenly, despite this priority list, if the intention is to eventually max everything. This is because the cost to upgrade nodes increases every ten levels (10,20).

• Our best special node is Fatal Strike I. (not including special even nodes)

• For farming, character building can be useful however ever since Mystic Frontier, Roro nodes are far superior and commonly available.

Hexa Matrix (Sixth Job)

Welcome to the final(™) job advancement. You are finally level 260 and done with the tutorial.

6th job is split into 4 node types you can unlock and upgrade to make extreme power gains, enhance your abilities and change their functionalities. Additionally you’ll find some skills to provide massive QoL upgrades and new skills to enhance your bossing experience.

The 4 types of nodes are:

1. Mastery cores – These enhance your basic skills from the first 4 jobs.
2. Boost nodes – Usually provide flat fd% gains to your class specific 5th job skills.
3. Skill nodes – Unique new skills. As of now only 2 exist: Origin, and Ascent skills. (see future content)
4. Common nodes – New skills which revolve around providing massive QoL. These skills are shared between all jobs or between a branch of classes. (Values however may differ, excluding Janus)

Skills overview and Explanation

Mastery nodes 

Starting off with the mastery cores, we get a big bossing upgrade with our first one enhancing our main attacking skill and introducing a new mechanic Angel of Judgement to deal even more damage.

Core 2 enhances our mobbing and feathers which are relevant for both bossing & mobbing.

The 3rd node introduces a new mechanic to our debuff, placing down a relic which refreshes the debuff. Quite helpful for when the application misses and also has introduced a new farming method. The second part of this node makes our fountain slightly larger with a new look. And the last part Enhances both Bahamut and our Angel Ray.

Core 4 enhances Genesis and Door’s damage, and gives us a new final attack skill which procs on almost all our attacks boosting both dpm and burst damage.

• To even unlock these cores, you are required to advance their respective V-Matrix nodes to at least level 40.

You can see some of the more interesting animations unlocked in the table below:

Boost nodes

Our boost nodes are relatively straightforward. We get Benediction, AoB, Peacemaker, and DP boosted.

The boost effect is a rising FD% gain to the skills damage starting from 11% all the way up to 60%.

• The focus here is very easy to see. We prioritize Divine Punishment and Benediction, and at the very end of our hexa journey we return to finish PM and lastly AoB.

Skill nodes

As of now (Crown p1) there are only 2 origin nodes in GMS; The main origin skill, and The Ascent skill.

Common nodes

These nodes don't fit neatly into a category like the others, with each node providing completely different abilities. As the name implies these nodes are common to either all classes or a branch of classes (i.e. explorer mages)

HEXA Stats

As of now (Crown p1) there are only 3 HEXA Stat cores released. The priority of stats to maximize is:

HEXA Stats need to first be unlocked in order to allocate stats into them and be upgraded to their max level (20). Each level costs sol erda fragments, and has certain probabilities to upgrade either your main stat or one of the two sub stats. Some helpful things to keep in mind:

• The main stat is rarer than the sub stats because the stat it can give is much higher.
• At certain main-stat breakpoints, the cost to upgrade raises, (lvl 3: 10->20 per upgrade)
• You can only have one type of modifier per main-stat line. Meaning, if I have for example two high main-stats across 2 nodes I cannot unfortunately slot MATT into both of those. Hence you want to slot into your better main-stats the modifier with higher priority.
• It is generally not worth rerolling until the very end-game when you already completed your hexa matrix.
• As the main-stat increases, the probability to upgrade it again decreases. Hence obtaining high main stat values is incredibly rare and expensive. Most maplers will sit comfortably on lvl 3 or 5 and clear all the content in the game.

Because sol erda fragments are so accessible these days, I’d recommend unlocking HEXA stat 1 and 2 ASAP after unlocking your M1, M2, M3, and M4. And HEXA Stat III whenever you have the frags to unlock it.

HEXA Upgrade Priority

There’s no set order to upgrade players have to follow. If one wanted, he could immediately upon unlocking their 6th job max Sol Janus, or level up each skill 1 level at a time.

So while there’s no obligatory path, there are calculators to help see what upgrade you should follow to maximize your theoretical damage based on fragment costs.

Here’s a path guide generated by Maplescouter, optimized for FD gains, to help you structure your upgrade journey. Additionally, here is a useful tool for general HEXA skills progress tracking:
[Updated for Sengoku] HEXA Matrix Tracker by Subluxe/Stiff

You can always find the most actual information on scouter in case this flowchart becomes outdated in Maplescouter.

Inner Ability, Legion, Hypers and Familiar badges

Inner Ability

A perfect Bishop Inner Ability (IA) optimized for bossing would look as follows:

• Attack Speed +1 is required to reach attack speed level 10. This greatly increases out main attacks damage, makes the class smoother to play and boosts survivability.
• Boss Damage and 8% Abnormal damage are the lines providing the most damage so we take those. +21 Magic attack can be a decent settle for Abnormal damage.

• An alternative preset would be 20% Boss Damage/+21 Magic Attack/8% Damage to abnormal status targets for those who boss often with Attack Speed buffers (Evan, Zero, Buccaneer, Thunder Breaker, etc.) because that becomes Bishop’s highest DPS IA. (Note: Kaling and Baldrix may separate you from your AS buffer)

Buff Duration?

No longer relevant. It used to be mandatory for Infinity, however it has been changed into a passive skill making buff duration on IA obsolete.

How to build my perfect IA? (New Players Guide)

1. Reach Legendary inner ability by either rolling with honor or with Miracle Circulators until it tiers up.
2. Use Miracle Circulators to obtain (preferably) Boss Damage, or Abnormal damage.
3. Lock in the line you got in step 2, and roll with honor (ideally on a 50% inner ability Sunny Sunday) to obtain the other two lines.
4. Use Black Circulators obtainable from almost every event shop to increase the line numbers to their respective maximums.

Farming Inner Ability

For their other two IA presets, Bishops usually choose to run one of these two farming IAs, both are viable and come down to personal preference.

It’s recommended to get at least one page with Item Drop Rate +20% in order to maximize drop when opening loot boxes.

Legion Grid

Bishop’s legion needs are overall low. The class comes off the bat with a very high Critical Rate (70% from 3rd job passives alone) saving us from building that, and also a debuff that provides 44% IED in addition to ied passives, which means that Bishops deprioritize building IED in favor of other more important stats.

* When mobbing, the priority is to be able to one-shot. Once you can one shot monsters and comfortably grind, you max EXP Obtained and then fill out the rest. So the priority is the following:

Here are sample legion boards for bossing and mobbing:

• Nice to know: KMS has recently (Overdrive p1) announced they will be revamping the legion system to completely remove the tetris system in favor of points allocation. See Future Content for more info.

Legion building and characters priority (New Players Guide)

Below is a list of characters in a rough priority order, get them as you can using events, free burns, challengers world, etc. Manually building and brute forcing legion can be a big source of burnout and isn’t recommended.

1. Mercedes
2. Crit damage blocks (Hayato, Mo Xuan, …)
3. Renn (Movement Speed)
4. EXP (Zero), Mesos (Phantom)
5. Boss and Abnormal Damage (DA, Sia, Erel, …)
6. IED
7. Flat INT Blocks (These do not scale with % from equips and are  therefore quite weak)

Leveling Mercedes to 250 for legion should be prioritized alongside the critical damage blocks that are useful for every class, because it allows for everyone to burst at the same time without needing to wait and reduces the long cooldown of origin skills. Some other useful blocks to prioritise are: Boss Damage, Abn. Damage, IED, Mov. Speed(Ren) flat INT boost blocks.

• If you are unsure what class gives what legion effect, I recommend checking out the maple wiki.

Legion Artifact

Already sorted according to priority, these focus on damage first, and provide help with meeting stat criteria other characters in your account might need, such as low crit rates.

• While the focus here is clearly damage, if your artifact level is still low, I recommend taking Drop Rate first, to help obtain important items and boost your frag and familiar progression. The priority for Meso and EXP depend on how much you farm.

Link Skills

Bishops use nearly the same Link Skills as every other class, while keeping in mind that Bishops can always have Empirical Knowledge equipped without using any of their link skill slots, and Bishops with moderately progressed accounts do not need extra Crit Rate.

Here is the current (Crown p1) BIS layout for bossing:

A few notes on the bossing link skills:

• Unfair Advantage(Cadena) – only useful if the Bishop is higher level than the boss due to its conditional effect.
• Focus Spirit(Lynn) – if you are missing critical rate. However it is usually better to utilise other sources (fam badges, hyper stats, legion) first.  
• Survivability – Hybrid Logic and Unfair Advantage can be situationally subbed out for Spirit of Freedom(Resistance) or Grounded Body(Ren).
• Light Wash(Luminous) – If IED is very low, almost never needed beyond the very early game.
• Bishops benefit from Hybrid Logic(Xenon) slightly more than other classes due to some skills having INT scalings.

Here is a sample set for mobbing:

Combo Kill Blessing can be subbed out and the mobbing page is generally much more flexible allowing you to pick the utility you need.

Hyper Stats

As you obtain more points as you progress, there’s no set hyper stat to present you with for easy copy.

However, there are some sources you can use to optimize it such as maplescouter.com.

Hyper stats are often used to fill in certain stat requirements the player is missing, such as reaching 100% critical rate, raising IED, etc. So hyper stats are used to fill in what the Bishop is missing.

Most important points to reach are:

1. Critical Rate should be at 100% after exhausting other “free” sources such as decent sharp eyes, legion blocks (NL, MM), etc..
2. IED should meet or be close to certain checkpoints for different bosses, here are some rough goals to follow:

1. visual 80% for Chaos Root Abyss and below,
2. 90% for Normal Lotus and Damien and below,
3. 92% for Hard Lucid and Will and below,
4. 94% for Chaos Tenebris and Black Mage,
5. and 95%+ for Grandis bossing,

3. Arcane Force Breakpoints to help you progress if you are not at the max for the boss you are facing.

For mobbing, most Bishops would add points into Critical Damage, Normal Monster Damage, Damage, until you can comfortably one shot the monsters. After that you max Bonus Exp, and throw the rest again into the various dmg points.

Here are some example loadouts at Level 285:

Familiar Badges

As wonderful as the familiar system is, many badges are currently unobtainable through normal means(farming). Being a Magic Attack class, Bishops do not have easy access to the maximal amount (3) of magic attack % lines, and will need to open Familiar Booster Packs () to obtain their 3rd badge with magic attack%.

• Familiar Booster Packs are RNG packs you can either buy from the familiar store or randomly from Mystic Frontier (MF) and pray you hit the good cards which are not farm-able. Buying them is quite expensive, coming at 2k points which is honestly a very poor use of familiar cards and MF points, so best to leave the 3rd matt badge for once you are done with fams.

The BiS Familiar Badges are:

• Familiar badges have certain limitations to the lines that can be applied simultaneously. For example you can have up to 3 lines of Damage+1% equipped, but only up to 1% All stats. This layout has been optimized to include the most useful lines.

For Wave Badge you will be looking for Seruf which is the only card unobtainable in that set, the rest are farmable. Beach Badge needs 3 monsters: Lorang, Clang, and Tortie.

Here is a more realistic set of the easiest badges to obtain:

• Fill the rest with the shortest obtainable badges and then get two more to unlock your 3rd familiar slot if you haven’t yet on your account as it's incredibly helpful. (Starter badge, Oppressor badge,..)

Pet Autobuffs and Buff Favorites

Many folks have been asking about what to autobuff and for inspiration for what types of buffs people are favoriting.

With the Maple Warrior and Speed Infusion becoming passives, we can fit everything neatly into the 6 slots, so this is what I take:

Here are my buff favorites, I have them ordered by:

1. Iframes & dmg reduction
2. Ror + peacemaker are important cds to see
3. 30s + 60s
4. Farming
5. Toggles

Equipment

Oz Rings

While not relevant for long (see Future Content), the recommended rings for Bishop as of now (Crown p1) are RoR + WJ. They are both stronger than the Continuous ring and are easier to pull off.

• Please make sure to use the ring swap skill in your beginners tab to swap between your ror and wj far easier than by swapping presets.
• The skill becomes visible once equipped with an oz ring and a substitute ring has been equipped into your special oz ring slot.

CD Hat?

Generally speaking, Bishops do not require cool down reduction lines on their hat. However, -2 does provide the player with more room for mistakes during longer boss fights. It’s also excellent for fights where the boss likes to waste a lot of time by moving around a lot or has time-consuming mechanics.

-4 hat is generally not recommended, unless the bishop has a permanent party that also uses a -4 hat and they wish to match their rotations.

That being said, bishop does still benefit from cd hat by having lower cooldowns on its Genesis and Peacemaker. Making the differences between the hats not large. Hence the general advice to bishops rerolling their hats is to settle on the first 3L decent potential they find.

• Note for farming: A -4 hat or -3 hat + Tengu Wings allows you to simply hold Peacemaker to hit every spawnwave consistently. This has the benefit of being lazier and covering a bigger hitbox than Big Bang. Do inform yourself however on the cost of acquiring a -3/-4 hat, as it can be a very expensive investment for newer players. MathBro's Cubing Calculator 

WSE Potential?

The way Magic Attack works in Reboot and the existence of Familiars, means Bishop's best lines are 9/0/0. Meaning 9 lines of Magic Attack %.

• You can always check for yourself the best potential for your own specific set of circumstances by comparing the two potentials using Scouter. While you shouldn't blindly trust the website, it does provide a great estimation to go by.

Wand or Staff?

This question comes up often – the answer is always Staff.

Wands provide Bishops with 5% Critical Rate at the cost of a lot of MATTK, but Bishops do not need this Crit Rate. The attack speed of the weapon does not affect spell casting speed.

Sub Weapon / Shield (WIP)

Bishops generally use the Deimos Sage Shield, until they can get their hands on the Astra Arcane Shield. At the very early game it’s fine to equip whatever Holy Book you can until you are ready to craft the Deimos shield.

The Deimos Sage Shield is crafted from a recipe that drops from Normal Cygnus. This shield is the preferred sub-weapon for almost all mages because it can be Starforced, unlike other secondaries that can only obtain a potential. Because the Deimos is so easy to craft, many Bishops craft multiples so that they can cube their spare with cubes from bossing without losing their current potential.

Once you reach level 280 you can begin the Erion Enhancement quest to obtain the Astra Arcane Shield sub-weapon and evolve it. This new secondary features a higher item level, strong base stats and the ability to starforce it beyond what is possible with the Deimos Sage Shield. Most importantly perhaps for bishops with an already very powerful subweapon is that you will be able to transfer your existing potential to this new sub-weapon.

The Astra missions require you to defeat weekly grandis bosses to obtain Traces of Battle required for its evolution (similar to how Genesis and Destiny liberation work). Additionally, it requires Vestiges of Erion (the 2nd currency needed). Erion frags are dropped from extreme and hard grandis (HSeren & CKalos are excluded, NJupi included) bosses and daily Grandis missions.

The Astra Secondary evolves in 3 stages (as of now) as we complete its missions. It gains a bit of base stats and most importantly it extends its Starforce limit.

• Stage 1: Starforce limit: 15* (Base stats: INT: 40, LUK: 10, MATT: 47)
• Stage 2: Starforce limit: 20* (Base stats: INT: 45, LUK: 15, MATT: 47)
• Stage 3: Starforce limit: 30* (Base stats: INT: 50, LUK: 20, MATT: 47)

Note 1: The Deimos Sage Shield SF stats are already incorporated into the base stats of the Astra shield, so we will not be losing damage from transferring. (This was done using a special scroll in KMS, GMS has chosen a different route.)

Note 2: The initial transfer of Deimos Shield into Astra Shield will incur a mesos cost based on the Deimos shield SF level. (It was 10bil mesos to transfer a 20* Deimos into an Astra in KMS)

Note 3: You can revive a destroyed Astra infinitely at 1bil mesos cost per restore.

• Rolling INT WSE & Souls – In the far past Bishops used to be much more dependent on their INT due to many of their skills scaling off of it, and Benediction used to be drastically stronger than it is today, hence some people used to go for INT on their emblem for example to make the most of it. Most of these have been removed and changed, so now, in Bishop’s current state, purposefully rolling for INT is not recommended!

Critical Rate

As stated along this guide again and again, bishops generally are fine without building critical rate due to receiving so much naturally from their base job skills and passives. Here’s a rough breakdown and a list to check if you are somehow missing your 100% crit.

From this point you are missing only about 6%-14% depending on your legion. If you have legion artifacts for crit rate (20%), you are already way beyond the 100% needed even if you don't own a MM or a NL.

If you are missing crit rate still, here are the sources you can use to fill the gap (it’s vital that you actually get to 100%, don’t sleep on this):

• Lynn Link skill (+10% critical rate)
• Legion blocks
• Hyper stats
• Legion Artifacts (up to +20%)

Eventually you’ll obtain all sources listed in the table above and will be able to use Legion artifacts to fill the gap and save the points and link skill spot for more damage which will be your ideal set-up.

Ignore Enemy Defense

Ignore enemy defense (IED) is one of the most important stats for your bossing. Every boss in the game has a certain defense value (usually either 300 or 380) which will dictate based on your IED how much damage you will deal to that boss. As a small example to showcase why this stat, that isn’t even taken into account in your Combat Power, is so important consider the following: You are rocking 90% IED, and are attacking a boss with 300 defense. This means the boss will be cutting your total damage dealt by 30%.

The general rule of boss defense (also known as PDR and MDR) is: Grandis bosses usually have 380 defense, and below grandis bosses typically have 300 defense. (Ex-Lotus is an exception and has 380). This means IED is more valuable for bosses with higher PDR.

While we get IED almost from everywhere, it’s important not to overinvest in it when you can choose between it and over stats. The reason here being that IED is multiplicative and the more you get of it the less impactful new sources become. This also leads to larger IED sources being better than multiple small ones (for example two 20% ied sources will give you less than one 40%). Here are some nice breakpoints to work around based on recommended values typically suggested by the community:

• Note that ‘Game Stage’ is a made-up progression point by me, meant to help you roughly categorize your point in the game, everyone has their own meaning for those.

People will usually transfer from their precious Gollux set to pitched between the late- and end game and lose a good source of IED (30%), which will have to be made up with Events, legion, high pitched set, high guild buffs, legion kalos champs, etc. It’s also important to note that it’s not worth getting IED lines on any of our WSE equipment after the very early game.

Also note that visual IED is quite misleading, as there are a lot of hidden effects and debuffs that do not get taken into account, like VNode IED, Hyper stats, Link skill debuffs, debuffs, party buffs, etc.

For the curious here’s the formulas for calculations:

1. IED% = 1 - ((1 - source_a%) * (1 - source_b%) * ...)
2. adding ied% source: IED% = 1 - ((1 - ied% without source) * (1 - source%))
3. subtracting ied% source: IED% = 1 - ((1 - ied% with source) / (1 * source%))
4. FD penalty due to PDR: 100(1-(1-(pdr/100(1-ied/100))))

1. Example with 95% ied on 300 pdr: 100(1-(1-(3*(1-0.95)))) yields 15% fd penalty.

Burst, Bossing, and Culvert

Burst & DPS Rotation

The average burst in 90% of scenarios will look about something like the following:

• Disclaimer: This is meant to present you with a rough idea of how to play the class. Not to be the perfect min maxy way to dish out your damage.

During Benediction, DP stacks should be used as they are coming up, on as many burst buffs as possible. The FD given by various burst buffs is in this priority:

Benediction > Arcana Override > Blood of the Divine > Angel of Balance > Goddess + Epic > Terms and Conditions (AB Link)

Off-burst, Bishops aim to keep up their Angelic Wrath debuff, and Fountain of Vengeance summon while DPS-ing the boss with Angel Ray and popping Terms and Conditions, Peacemaker, Genesis and Door off cooldown. After their main burst, Bishops can “mini-burst” every 60s with Terms and Conditions and ~2 Divine Punishment stacks, ensuring that 5 will still be up for main burst. At this time Door and Genesis will usually come up so pop those as soon as they do to keep them in sync. This is also a great time to refresh your summon and debuff.

• Keep in mind that Divine Punishment provides some damage reduction during use, so this can be used to your advantage!

Skill Sequences

The burst sequence has been optimized to allow for benediction to potentially last a bit longer. For more info see the bishop discord.

While it’s still relevant here’s also the mini burst sequence: (Sequence makes oz rings more reactive)

Note you should ideally use WJ when your Goddess and Epic Adventure have about 15 seconds remaining in order to maximize your damage and pop AB Link as it comes up.

An alternative method would be to swap to WJ as soon as RoR ends and use it as it comes up to benefit off of a potential benediction extension.

Generally Bishops skill usage timeline will look something like the following (Taken off of Chuchu.gg):

The red lines represent the burst sequence every 2 minutes, Yellow box shows DP being used for burst, and the 2 following stacks that regenerated while benediction is still active. The Green boxes show our “mini-burst”.

• Note this was done on a dummy, in a real fight you will be teleporting much more and popping ascents strategically and not just randomly during off-burst.

Should I be using Genesis in bossing?

Tl;dr: If your HEXA Genesis is at least level 10 press it off cd. Otherwise no. (note you can’t telecast genesis, so be more careful popping it)

Let’s break down the argument for using Genesis so you can see why you might want to be using it.

1. Genesis has an action delay of 420ms on as10. Hexa Angel Ray has an action delay of 420ms (although it’s currently bugged in GMS and has a 450ms delay but lets ignore that for now).
2. Maxed HEXA AR deals 334%*14(=4,676%), maxed Genesis deals 990%*10(=9,900%)
3. AR can be telecast, Genesis locks you in place.
4. Angel Ray also generates a stack towards Angel of Judgement which deals 822%*10 (=8,220). At maxed Bahamut, you require 8 attacks to proc AoJ, meaning 1AR = ⅛ AoJ (= 1,027%)

So we see the math ends up being 9900% of Genesis versus 4676%+1027% (5703%) of AR. With roughly the same cast time, Genesis ends up being a very worthwhile skill  to press off cooldown.

• Action delays: Action Delays | mason's maple matrix 

Peacemaker

Tl;dr: Let peacemaker fly through the boss instead of instantly popping it.

Peacemaker (PM) is one of our key skills for both bossing and mobbing. It’s a 2-stage skill. Pressing PM first launches a projectile in the direction you are facing dealing 770%*4 to monsters it touches or heals party members for 35% of the bishop’s max hp. The max total contact limit is 6.

The second part of the skill is Holy Light, which happens when the bishop presses the skill again while the projectile is still flying or automatically once the projectile has reached its flight limit. Holy Light causes the projectile to explode in a large AOE dealing 770%*12 damage. Exploding grants the bishop (always) and its party members in range of the explosion a 23% damage buff for 12 seconds.

So what’s important to know about this skill? For starters from the numbers alone you can see that if the projectile can manage to hit the boss at least 3 times you will literally double your damage (on large bosses even 4 is possible). However, The projectile can also proc Genesis IV (which proc feathers too) meaning even more damage. This results in 3 contacts to be more damage in practice than the explosion. Hence you should ALWAYS let your peacemaker fly. As the explosion radius is quite massive it generally always hits the boss unless it moves in the opposite direction.  

Culvert

As far as I could gather, Bishop has 2 meta culvert rotations at the moment. I tried to detail them as much as I could without going overboard. For more details I recommend going over to the bishop discord and asking for specifics.

Here’s a video of me giving an awful demonstration of the two methods: https://youtu.be/mToIKX1OrGA

Disclaimers:

• Note: This is not completely comprehensive and may miss some details.
• Note2: There are more min-maxy sweaty rotations for culvert. For those I recommend heading over to the bishop discord and asking the pros.
• Note3: While these are pre-hecate, hecate shouldn’t(™) change much until you max it.  If the culvert changes I’ll do my best to update this guide. However, always seek out the bishop discord for the most up to date information.

Specific Boss Strategies

Bishop’s kit offers many unique privileges in boss fights. It’s quite simple, and yet very versatile.  The key to Bishop's smooth gameplay is definitely in its tele-casting combined with built-in healing on Angel Ray, which is also a very quick and long ranged ability.

While early game bosses nowadays are eclipsed quickly and their mechanics get quickly ignored, some of these might help out new players unfamiliar with the bosses.

• Eform is a powerful 3 second iframe during which you are able to move and attack normally.
• When healing isn’t sufficient, you can place down your real fountain for 20 charges of 40% max hp heal.
• In dangerous situations, for example when eform is on cooldown, shell can be used to tank an unavoidable pattern.
• DP can be used to tank almost anything while still attacking.

Papulatus

• Holy Magic Shell protects Bishops from the FMA when the lasers touch

Lotus

• Holy Magic Shell can be used to mitigate some damage from floor lasers in P1, making it so that it is no longer a one-shot
• Divine Punishment can also be used during floor lasers in P1 to avoid getting one-shot
• Mana Wave acts as super stance—Bishops are not knocked out of the air if they hit debris or Lotus’ push, though they are still stunned and maintain the direction they were facing when stunned
• Bishops can use Holy Magic Shell to mitigate damage from the spiderweb stun FMA in P3 to save themselves and party members from losing a life

Damien

• In P2, Bishops can use Divine Punishment from the ground and hit Damien when he is up casting red fireballs—in P1, Bishops may consider jumping up and using Big Bang
• Divine Protection can protect Bishops from the arrow key popup inflicted by the blue claws from the sky

Will

• In P1, Bishops can cast Holy Magic Shell preemptively for tests (cast early, at xx:50) and protect themselves and party members on the same side from the screen crack
• Holy Magic Shell can protect Bishop and their party members from the effects of Poison in P3, allowing everyone to safely stack together for buffs and barriers (including Benediction)

Gloom

• Bishops can use Dispel reactively and Divine Protection proactively to deal with the many status effects inflicted by the balls falling from the sky and the mobs in darkness
• Be careful when using Heal, because it will kill anyone with the Zombify debuff (including the Bishop themselves)

Verus Hilla

• Immediately after getting hit by Verus Hilla’s knockback, Bishops can teleport downwards to prevent being flung too far.
• Bishops with enough abnormal status resist and some good ping can have a very brief window after her bind move and right before the fling to teleport behind her.

Black Mage

• Bishop’s various methods of healing can heal through Black Curse—for this reason, Bishops can comfortably play with white aura in P4 for more DPS, with a Holy Fountain, Heal, and Angel Ray healing
• Holy Fountain (and Holy Waters) can bypass the potion block outside of Black Mage’s bubble
• The skill lock from a curse death can be Dispelled from the Bishop themselves and from the Bishop’s party members.
• Bishop can dispel P2 Blind from themselves and nearby party members
• Mana Wave can be used to dodge rollings and up FMA.
• Divine Protection can help mitigate various debuffs in p3.

Seren

• Bishops can learn to TP while ducked to avoid the bananas in P1 by casting TP and basic attack with the right timing. (not really necessary, but could be nichely helpful)
• The stun inflicted by the laser in Noon can be Dispelled if the party member is not gauged at the same time, and the stun from being gauged cannot be Dispelled
• The healing debuff in Sunset can be Dispelled
• Holy Fountain and Holy Waters can be used in Sunset as a form of healing
• Divine Protection is very potent here as Seren has so many debuffs. Additionally DP protects you from debuffs while it's being channeled.

Kalos

• Bishops and other Explorer Mages have the easiest time surviving when playing from the top platforms in P2, due to Mana Wave, which allows Bishops to avoid clumping with other party members and to avoid being hit by dives
• The stun effect from left tower laser can be dispelled off of party members (especially important in higher difficulties)
• The sweat effect from the shiny balls exploding and dark screen debuff from arrows can also be dispelled.
• Heal is extremely helpful in higher difficulties as angel ray alone may not be enough to heal you.
• Shell can be used preemptively to help you and nearby players survive a dive.
• When Kalos is diving the bottom floor, you can stand in the middle platforms and be safe, however if he dives middle, he will hit top platforms as well. Using this to your advantage allows playing middle platform when soloing quite easy as you can safely teleport downwards to dodge almost anything.

Kaling

• In P3, Bishops should be trying to upkeep de-buffs on all perils and Kaling that are being hit, especially if there are multi-target classes in the party
• In P3, for the cheese strategy, Bishops will place their fountain close to the border between two zones to visually mark that border and dictate where the party will stack. It also allows party members to heal comfortably
• In P3, chalices can be placed often for the person tanking Kaling
• Bishop can stand right underneath Dog’s chains while facing Bird, to take advantage of Angel Rays unique hitbox to attack Dog, Bird and Kaling at the same time. (See Future content)
• 

• Bishops can stand underneath the tear in the map (Right side of dog) to allow feathers to hit Dog while hitting Tiger.
• In P2 you can stand on the middle right most platform’s left edge to be safe from the test explosions. This spot is generally considered one of the safest locations in this phase and played around a lot when soloing.

Limbo

• In P3, the shark can be e-formed to extend burst for better uptime
• Divine Protection can help mitigate debuffs when being yeeted into the corruption zone.

Training

Bishop training is generally pretty relaxed. Most Bishop training rotations utilize Erda Fountain, Fountain of Vengeance and Sol Janus to cover large parts of the map, making most maps very easy to fully clear, even without moving. Additionally, Bishops have Peacemaker, Heaven’s Door, Genesis, and Big Bang to cover considerable parts of the map. The two main methods to farm are 1) using the enhanced Big Bang proc from Hexa Mastery 2, and 2) Using a -3/-4 CD hat and hold down Peacemaker until you need to replace your summons.

A fun Bishop trick is that the HEXA Angelic Wrath summon can proc Sol Janus: Dusk (but not Dawn). As such, low levelled Janus Bishops can farm fairly passively with just the HEXA Angelic Wrath summon and using Dusk to cover the map.

Cooldown Hats

For Mobbing: Reducing the cooldown of Peacemaker with 4 seconds of cooldown reduction and Lv 200 Mercedes legion block (typically achieved through a -4 seconds of cooldown reduction on a hat or -3 with -1 from Wings of Fate) allows it to comfortably come up for every mob spawn wave.

Map Suggestions & Videos

With the Introduction of Sol Janus, practically any map became viable with the right summon placements. Having their own summon (Fountain) Bishops can generally go to maps other classes might have difficulties farming on to benefit from higher burn levels.

As Peacemaker has a slightly larger hitbox than enhanced Big Bang, it might open some maps for easier grinding when utilising a CD hat.

Please see the #bishop-training forum on the Explorer Mage Discord server to see map rotations. Or explore maps on your own using this tool: https://maplemaps.net/

It’s highly recommended farming at maps with the highest mob spawn counts for your area, and remaining within similar level ranges for maximal EXP.

Bishops can functionally use any map in arcane river and grandis. The choice of specific maps depends highly on your level and janus level. It’s generally recommended to choose a map where the monsters are between +1/-1 from your own level.

Nowadays people fly past arcane river straight into Grandis. While you generally can’t go wrong with following the in-game guide suggestions, here are some easy popular maps you can go with, although I recommend at least taking a look at each map as you’ll likely spend a lot of time in that region.

See this video by Plaudible: MapleStory - [NEW AGE] Bishop Training Guide 260-300 (EXTRA LAZY)

Future Content

I’ll keep this segment brief to serve as a small sneak peek into what content has been announced in KMS we can expect to come to GMS. When it arrives to GMS I’ll do my best(™) to update the guide with more detailed information. Of course you can always seek out the KMS livestreams and KMST footage yourself or ask the bishop discord to find more information yourself.

An excellent source to check out future content is the orange mushroom blog

Credits

Written by Zeni. If you have suggestions or see anything needs correcting, please reach out in the bishop discord at #bible-study. I do my best to keep this up to date to help as many as possible.

• Big credit to Angella (Kronos NA Reboot) for making the original bishop guide doc this one was strongly inspired by and based on.
• Many skill icons were taken from the Orange Mushroom blog, and the official Maplestory Wiki.
• Many thanks to the Bishop Discord for the help over the years and always answering questions when they come up.

Changelog

Last edited: 30.07.2026 – V1.0.9

1. 16.06.2026 – V1.0.0
2. 23.06.2026 – V1.0.1: Added descriptions to nodestones revamp.
3. 28.06.2026 – V1.0.2: Added OJA and hexa upgrade order notes.
4. 29.06.2026 – V1.0.3: Updated Sol Hecate, Buff favorites, Familiar Badges, added Crit Rate section.
5. 02.07.2026 – V1.0.4: Updated sequence to include seren+will, added genesis explanation section, updated V-Matrix section.
6. 05.07.2026 – V1.0.5: Updated Familiar badges, added Peacemaker section, added boss changes to future content.
7. 12.07.2026 – V1.0.6: Added Angel’s Pledge information from KMST, and Astra information from GMST.
8. 14.07.2026 – V1.0.7: Added IED section.
9. 26.07.2026 – V1.0.8: Created the Astra Secondary/Shield section.
10. 30.07.2026 – V1.0.9: Added the class difficulty section and slight intro rewording.