Hey I know this has been discussed to hell and back but with the rebalance and a new wave of MA players (myself included) I think now is a good time to talk about this again. I think it would be good to discuss the breeds briefly and what advantages or disadvantages they have, and possibly even a "best choice" along with why you choose that as your best choice.
For myself..
I see very little value in nanomage as a breed for MA, so I want to get that opinion out of the way. I think the NM 5k absorb has a lot of potential to be a really amazing tool, but on such a long cooldown I see it as more of a duel/pvp item and I don't think a 5k absorb will make or break an MA's pvm on such a long cooldown, either you can do the encounter without this - or you cant. The trickledown to nanoskills might be nice but would it make NR2 reachable? If not then it has basically no bearing, unless you consider ado brain an option. Overall this is my least appealing breed choice for MA right now.
Aatrox is okay but with the low sense.. I think the leveling experience would be very unenjoyable due to difficulty with armor and lower base stats overall in important areas (evades/ma/etc) but of course Mongo Rage is appealing although less than it used to be, and the drawback to mongo rage might not be worth it for the MA profession when our core defense is high static defense only barely supplemented by healing or other alternative minor defenses like through debuffs or chances to stun. Not really feeling aatrox, but the high base HP probably makes this breed the best choice for PvM tanking.
The real discussion is in my opinion between Solitus and Opifex.
Right now I play a solitus, but as i'm approaching 220 i'm thinking of breed changing. I'm weighing all the pro's and con's and i'm just not seeing the value in solitus unless im AI 30 and even then I'm still making a choice. As far as base stats it seems they would have equal gains from body dev and nano pool, they're equal on nano% cap and in terms of breed stats, opifex takes the clear lead in agi/sense while solitus has a very minor lead in intelligence (less than 30 pts) and a somewhat significant lead in stamina but opifex is gifted with the highest base stat cap on any dark blue ability, leading over aatrox by 80 and nanomage by 16.
Opifex has a clear base ability advantage in my opinion, stamina is so plentiful when twinking and the IP costs are far, far lower. Not to mention the green skills scale down on some of our most important combat stats, and at equal levels of HP i'm just not seeing any real downsides to opifex in this area. I'd also like to mention that as a leveling MA gated by Agi/Sense for many cool items - its quite frustrating that we dont have agility on our infantry symbs, notably however we do have stamina, so opifexs high agility/sense would comp for infantrys lack of agi/sense in their symbs while retaining the stamina needed to bring our opifexs up to par.
Truly, the only advantage I can see in solitus is the Sphere breed perk. But I don't think sphere outweighs Xuyun or CoLI, and you would need the full 30 AI points to get access to the sphere perk - so it seems to be the case in my opinion that Opifex is the clear choice of breed for literally an MA experience through 1/0 to 220/29. At 220/30 you are only now granted the ability to make a choice, and that choice is do you forgo CoNC and NR1 in favor of sphere?
I have decided to opt for CoNC and the possibility of NR1, knowing that this will be IP intensive it seems opifex is the only way to go for this build, which leads me to believe that in any non-sphere setup, opifex will always serve as the better breed when compared to solitus, and by an extension the rest of the breeds - unless you have made the choice to setup your character for solitus sphere perk.
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Thinking of buying a breed change for my solitus MA of course. Haha. What does anyone else think? Is there anything introduced in 18.7 that I'm really overlooking? Still new to the profession so don't claim to be an expert. These are just my opinions so far.