some points I have observed throughout the time I spend in royals: Archmages are often unwanted in the boss fight. And archmages usually end up as the leech selling mule Bishops have the options to sell leech or join the boss run Bishops are less and less welcomed due to the bishop mule I am interested in hearing your opinions on the mage balancing in terms of bossing, leeching, or any other fields! How can we improve the gaming experience for people who want to main the mage?
Magician, the class itself has been nerfed, so many times. at this point, its just sad. The updates punished again and again your hardworking and dedicated players on too many number of occasions at this point. Summon farm Nerf Potions Nerf 1/1 adjustment Infinity skill bugged and unable to be fixed Ulu1 / Petri Map Nerf Bliz/Meteor/Gene Marco Nerf Trio Duku Nerf I wonder did i miss anything, I probably did. Well i don't want to touch too much on how badly it punished the players or how the staff priorities on handling the economy issue is all over the place, but I'm glad we now finally know that auto ban should definitely be the server's priority 0. Spoiler: Shiyui summed it up really nicely in her farewell thread. this is before marco nerf too. --- Archmages current biggest problem. Their levels. The server's current meta is to require the mages to stay low level, to provide the best EXP/H. What does this result in? - High level mages does not have anywhere to go. In 2021, most of our playerbase wouldn't want to buy petri leech from some lvl190 archmage right? So what does these players with high level geared archmages have to do? a beautiful answer, Remake. Yikes. Or hey, lets look at another alternative to continue use this character that is crippled since its 19x. Oh yup. its definitely multiple mage farming. More MP, more potions saved right! Wait! Quad ulu is difficult and i hate multi-clienting? especially with its potion and marco change! is it rewarding? Spoiler: For players interested information of quad ulu 1 Hour on perfect 4 mage + looter client rotation = 150mil-155mil flat RNG Factor, its simply "gacha-ing" for the rare drops. Potion cost = x4 mages worth, it ain't cheap, there are times where you farm a full hour just to repot. yes. Is it worth it? well compare it to skeles leeching with 130mil split and approx 65mil NPC /hour and 1x mage worth of potion. Their jackpots? 12/56 RC = 600mil 84 KC = 570mil Nope. Multimage farming in our current most favorited map Ulu1 takes way more effort & characters, and is not as profitable as skele leech/petri leech. How do you feel after hearing this? Yup. once again your 19x Archmage feels sadge, doesn’t it? Changes that should be considered. Being a higher level geared archmage should be rewarding. Better geared mages = Better farming opportunities. Spoiler: Just an example A high level mage area would probably be Neo Tokyo. Who farms there? There's so many buffs to that map, what for? If designed to allow single TC mages to make 150mil~160mil/h in these maps. Why not. Perhaps improve the silver coin and more things to craft. Which results into a high demand, approx for a single mage farm to gain 100 silvercoin / hour. with a 70mil NPC & slide a NPC into kamuna But for gods sake. Don't screw it up like paladin's crash in update 71 alright? Leave the multimage farming as it is, but make a competitive option with similar mesos/h ratio for our single high level mage players so there's more room for creative gameplay. Inb4 multiclient mage nerfed, high level mage areas still aint as rewarding, you'd just be seeing a major backlash our community again. ---- Changes to maps thread has been discussed quite alot here. Destroyed park 2 Map layout right now is just simply difficult to telecast. Spawn rates are also ridiculously low. Adjusting Dukus to be freeze immune, adjust the platform into a TC layout. Requirements to make this leechers work at around lvl155-160 approx 6b fundings. If information on regards to exp /h in these maps after patch 65.1 are required to rebalance this map. This thread posted by @Meiyaru might be a interesting read. —— Bossing The bishop class is usually played as a support role, and all things support is where this class shine. Horntail Would you not want to recruit a bishop main that brings SED + SE + CR mules. With practice, bishops can control all these while clearing spawns & dispelling heads actively. Bishop mains basically shine by having skill & knowledge of this boss. All attackers can single client since you have a bish main. Idk about the others, but i’d give this bishop full split + first priority in NX. Auf Bishop class shines pretty well especially in core blaze & mob clearing stage, utilise doom & aggroing the mobs. Bishop indeed falls off in auf. The main job for this player is to keep SE & His/her teammates alive. @sparky95 made a pretty good suggestion to changing auf mechanics to sed both left and right, instead of just one side. This change might make it that active attention is required. Overall, Royals is not all about bossing, there are lots of different parts of gameplay such as providing leech, farming certain items, crafting, making mesos and supportive gameplay. Each class should only excel in certain parts, buffing archmages into a dps class is just like buffing NLs with a new large aoe mobbing skill (eg. Sudden Raid) w/o cd. able to sell leech & farm. Doesn’t seems right to me. To sum the end game parts to this classes. Instead of buffing their skillset for bossing. - Bishops, able to support well in bossing - Archmages, able to exclusively farm end game maps with difficult crafting materials efficiently. --- TLDR Changes that can be made. Neo Tokyo Maps only have elemental advantage to Holy. Require F/P & I/L 1500+ TMA to 1hit Destroyed Park 1 spawn rate rate increased, platform adjusted to give approx 42mil exp/h Split in perfect TC leech. Lv110+ Mana Reflection when proc-ed, doesn't get KB-ed. (60% stance) NPC added to Kamuna, using mystic door in NT map would bring you to Kamuna
Chain lightning feels wonky in bosses. It should bounce and hit up to 6 targets when things are in range, but how the bounces currently work: In zak: I see 3, maybe 4 targets hit. In HT: I see similar results. Paralyze DPS makes it pretty underwhelming as a single target ability. I do want to experiment with mages using ice/fire demon with a paladin to see what the outcome is. Edit- my approach here is to see what is currently happening before I explore ideas to improve it. Maybe the community can help me gather this data. How is blizzard/meteor damage in boss runs for example.
Mages are healthy balance-wise compared to other classes since picking mage has its own benefits and doesn't lack drawbacks. If there is a genuine interest from the community to join boss runs as a mage a tweak to single target ability can be considered, conservatively. As for me, I still see the demand for active bishops even in optimal runs but if your experience is different I think it should be brought to further discussion. Like Vincent mentioned, Since mages interact with elements it would be interesting to see if there are other unexplored off-meta party compositions that can stand on their own in comparison to the current meta.
I personally never seen an active bishop in my auf runs because of the safe spots in royal guard and core blaze, and then the semi-safe spot in auf itself. I am always the one bringing bishop mule and it’s really not difficult to mule if you pay a little attention to it. I think bishop has lots of potential in auf, however, the class remains as a hs/ress mule in reality
Speaking off the 1st point as an I/L who's done bossing before, I don't really think that it's the fact that we're unwanted but more of that people care so much about "time". They believe that bringing in an archmage will slow down the run and also lag the map because of blizzard during arms. I have done zak many times before with my I/L and we've finished runs all under 25 min per run. For me, I don't use chain lightning until body and for arms I use blizzard, the reason as to why I don't use chain on arms is because each damage bounced off of each arm reduces after the 1st target you attack. So by using chain on arms, you actually kill slower compared to using blizzard on the arms. I ultimately gave in after hitting 200 realizing that I won't be able to boss with randoms ever if I don't make an attacker(which I did after I hit lvl 200). I would love to hear from other archmages though on how they feel about not being able to boss though, cause I was very lucky to even join zak runs with randoms before who had no issue with me being an "attacker" in the run.
I disagree with this, assuming by mages you are referring specifically to I/L and F/Ps. In the current meta, there is absolutely no incentive to create or level a mage and it exists solely as a farming mule. There is no sense of progression - in fact players are actually penalized from leveling their mages (less exp split for leechers) if they want full utility of their characters. There is no end game goal, map, or function for these mages to exist and this is reflected by the lack of end game mage gears in the market. Compare the amount of perfected 219 Ele wand 5/6 or 211 Ele wand 7/8s to perfected weapons in any other class. Unless you are looking for an iron-man playstyle, there is simply zero incentive to create an I/L and F/P mage other than to farm or sell petris leech.
Looking at archmages, i think the downside to it is their inherent inability to deal large damage to single targets in a game where bosses are mainly single target (Targa/Krex/Toad/Grandpa/Core Blaze). However it is worth noting that bishops is able to solo the fairy boss in elin forest as the boss had a elemental weakness to holy. Honestly this largely surprised me (and a lot of people as well) because now bishops can kill the boss and get free 5Ks. So if you’re really seriously consider adding some mages to bosses (which i would be in favour of), applying that same notion of the above to other bosses, one alternative is to increase the DPS of mages on a single mob (be it through increasing casting rate - idk if that’s possible -, increasing damage multipliers as suggested by vincent, increase bosses weakness to a certain element, or a mixture of the above) would certainly solve the issue. A potential side effect of elemental weakness is of course paladins, but then again, it’s just benefitting them so why not Love to listen to other opinions of the subject as i’m pretty sure i recall some tread about this somewhere
That's a fair point, I do agree that their current role in this meta is not as satisfying as it can be but that's due to many players choosing to optimize their playtime and picking more efficient bossing classes. Since we also have to cater to players who rely on selling leech as their income and those who summon farm I think if any tweaks are considered they should be directed on single targets that would play into the dynamic of our end game bosses HT, AUF, and hopefully at some point, PB but not necessarily buff the AOE abilities such as Meteor and Blizard since its a slippery slope that will lead to many unaccounted outcomes that we can't predict with testing.
So... we bouta nerf the only area our money making mages excel in to cater to a niche group of players who wanna duo shao using chain lightning or?? Nah. No way that happens, right? Aiight cool.
I don't have any feedback for the leeching meta, but I think a lot of simpler solutions are probably the way to go there I do have a some concepts for archmages (that would benefit BS as well). I think they deserve a more solid place at the bossing table if that's how folks want to play them. They should be closer to average funded archers in the charts, at least. Demon skills Stronger base dmg. Both are fairly weak currently and are just used as set up skills than attacking skills because of how op their same element ulti counterparts are Demons giving bosses a short bullseye like effect on bosses to concentrate 1v1 damage for their counterpart spell, paralyze/CL. Short duration so you have to keep it up to keep the effect going to get the most out of it Demon could potentially ignore magic cancel at some %? DOT vs bosses, short duration If a boss is resistant/immune to ifrit/elquines elements, let demon change summon damage to neutral for a passive dmg boost from them over time Mana Reflection Increased reflected damage. Small, nice dot boost Infinity could work as a party skill, giving the party infinite or reduced mp cost, ignores mp drain, increased m.def, +10 m.att, ignore m.cancel. it's a short effect with a long cooldown, handful of nice party perks could make it more valuable Big bang Fix the charge cancel glitch, possibly lower charge time Give it a % chance to push mobs, like the 4th job NL skill. Would give arches/bs extra utility and ability if they want to shao/cwk/auf Element composition Buff base damage Two lines? One for each element? Lower sp cost? Or lower another skill's sp cost to give comp more flexibility to max. Its a 1v1 skill, but magic claw still beats it in almost all situations. 3rd job should get a bit more buffed 1v1 if they want to do early bossing stuff like pap/bf/hh Staffs An alternative high level staff(s) to compete with the ele wand meta. Has high raw magic attack but neutralizes all elements. Could be used for bossing
Summon farm "Nerf" was inevitable after crazy meta that arised with players [alt tab summon clicking] (especially with few individuals that were waiting for computer parts to make this even more broken at stoppers,golden tooth... ) without this "nerf" who know how more broken the market would have become today even posts about makeing unions to sell at set price failed multiple times for obvious reasons same goes for : Ulu1 / Petri Map Nerf Bliz/Meteor/Gene Marco Nerf Trio Duku Nerf (trio duku low lvl mages with low lvl gear that 2hit nerf) so much contradictory in what we want and because of that the balances and changes are all over the place yea because low lvl "gearless" mages + multiclient generates much more meso,exp,items then going in higher lvl areas and on top of that investing in gear and skillbooks then "we" say is postive that multicilient is there and don't want to change or limit multiclient farming and bossing and we can't have both as you suggest players will allways go to cheaper more powerfull broken meta instead of funding and geting high lvl mage like is the case today we can see well how rewarding is or not skele and petri were desrteted when 3 gearless mage duku started to go full power quad-duo ulu1 and ulu2 were full,players were fighting about buying and selling maps there why noone did skele and petri if the rates were that bad ? we have yet to recover from that duku fiasco that generated alot exp/meso/items and raised the powercreep so much so much more that changed and reshaped the mages scene (quiting,selling decent-perfect mage gear to start another job or make new low lvl mage without gear that 2 hits) but if they nerf that more to make players fund single mage and high lvl there will be threats like you said major backlash TLDR first we need to decide (or if we can't decide let us know) what this game wants to look like is it going to be nostalgic maplestory we had , mulestory mutation, some mix of that two or something else then fit/shape mages (not just mages can be for all other things) if is maplerstory i think it is when it comes to mages i want mages to be used and fited properly in all aspect of the game with their uniquenes not as mules-third wheels
As a person who spends 95% of their time on mages/bishops, I think I'm qualified enough to speak about this topic. The fundamentals of a mage (FP/IL) is to farm. In terms of min-maxing in bosses, no one will prefer a mage over any other class even with their elemental amplification. The downside of a mage is being unable to boss efficiently while the upside is being able to farm with low requirements. Look at this from another approach, my suggestion is to not make them more relevant in bosses, and instead allow them to farm higher relevant end game content that might be on par with selling leech. The reason being like what @Snake mentioned, that are no perks of being a high-level mage. Disclaimer: I'm a bishop main and what I propose may sound bias, so discount it by however much you feel that is required. The fundamentals of a bishop is a utility support mage. On the first point, they technically "join" the boss run by providing utility such as HS and the door that saves 1.5m, and occasionally dispels debuffs/defence/holy shield. Since the fundamentals of a bishop are to support by providing utility, I do not think angel ray doing x2 lines or big bang doing more damage is defined as "support by providing utility". Instead, I believe that something along the line of reworking a skill/attack to debuff the boss might be another way to look at it, i.e something similar to threaten, but not the same to make it unique. An example of something like "Angel ray/Bless reducing boss defence by X/X% for Y amount of seconds" to let the team dish out more DPS, and maybe make Y amount of seconds short so that people can't abuse this as a mule. This rework might take away what is deemed as nostalgic. On the second point, this is also visible in other bossing classes that are not mainly NLs. Nothing much to say other than people who put in more work by multi-clienting should naturally get rewarded more.
I fully agree with you. Bishop has its role in the supporting and I absolutely love it! I found bishop the most interesting class to play before the seduce mule meta took over in HT. It actually took me quite a while to master the art of bishoping in HT but I love it! (sorry andy for indirectly killed you multiple times ) The one thing that I am concerning is that the bishop as a supporting class is less and less welcomed in the end-game boss runs. I understand the rationale of seeking maximum profit by bringing a bishop mule (one less split, eh? in fact, I bring bishop mule to my boss runs all the time). While it does increase my meso gains by a lot, I personally found the gaming experience less joyful, as the bs mule essentially took away the uniqueness of supporting. I am speaking of this in my own experiences, as I have never had an active bishop in my auf runs and only a few active bishops in my HT runs I wasn't advocating for high DPS mages bossing class. I listed it out as a starting point for the discussion because I remember seeing someone suggested it before! It's an open discussion for everyone
Sadly there is no case for the high lvl mage today. The only place high levelled & geared archmages belongs is a member of the many mages that is used to multimage farm. Spoiler Now, what if share with you that using a single high level mage and to farm is more profitable? For players, they’d do whatever to get best mesos/h. Generating mesos from mobs endlessly and NPC-ing might not be the best case scenario, but what if its silver coins & crafting materials as their main income? Be it liquidating the 31wa buffed MTK or flairgraves they can craft, putting up in the market for players bid on it. Resulting in exchange in mesos for gear. There is a handful of potential items the server has not implemented but can be easily looked into, and improved upon. Well, theres definitely a wall for the player to overcome before they can proceed to farm example silver coins. 1500~1600tma archmage requirement for the most efficient map to farm in, to craft the new BiS. How many AM in our server has this TMA. Easily less than 50. How many of our veteran players are even capable of making one? There is a end game potential in this class, but if no changes are made. Currently AM will only be the part of the mage army after PB release. where you’d see x4 I/L at OB2 farming for piece of time/mithril ore/luk crystals while using a bishop as the looting + door mule. —- Oh joon, your just gonna open multiple mages spend 30bil on each to multimage farm the best map then? This is were the speed limit that was recommended somewhere in the multiclienting thread might be useful. Royals are able to set restrictions on these broken maps like cake/GM events. Trying to bypass will be obviously punishable offense. Easily monitored by GMs so these end game farming maps will not be abused. Time limit of 3hours per character. If u wanna farm more? Go make another AM. Now our players with 6AM doesn’t feel punished for having a abundance of them. What royals need is new content, new mechanics to counter the meta, not to rebalance/rework classes. They are already beautiful as it is. Contents, new maps, new mobs that will shift the meta back to single clienting which is superior might be a good move. Just my opinion. What do players love? New content What do players hate? Nerfs.
i agree with all that,sadly there is nothing for high lvl mages ye let alone single clienting but there is another issue with add new content and that is not much content left to be added ( if we count PB as done soonTM) evryother possible new content will be prone to further rebalancing the items that come there and noone wants to open that can of worms.
We do have some new content in mind and I am very optimistic about it! The content development does take time in reality but I am just as excited as yall are! Unfortunately, I can't disclose much as it will ruin the nature of "surprise"!
If the development team is looking at some new mechanics to improve mage’s use in bossing, i think the idea of having some form of damage reduction to enemies attack or increase in damage dealt while some skills are active would really be an interesting way to incorporate mages in without losing out on the damage capability of a full team of attackers. An elaboration: (For damage reduction) Reworking 4th job summons: • Each hit of the summons reduces the physical & magical damage output of units by a certain %, lasting =/< 6secs This is not a replacement for HB as the % decrease should not be more than 15% but at the same time alleviates the need for HP washing. Downside to this is that DK would be severely buffed as a result which makes heroes less of a choice indirectly and marginally decreases heroes ability. (And since mages don’t have a feature like stance, they can make use of their large effective HP pool to stand close enough for summons to hit but not too far so that people can mule this feature) (For damage output) Reworking chain lightning & Paralyse • Increasing it’s base damage and multiplier, by what margins, i am unable to provide but significant enough at a mid-high tier range (prob upwards of 90k on chain & 120k on paralyse without elemental weakness, hence potentially more) • Adding a defense reduction % feature to the boss which lasts =/< 3 seconds This will be not easy by any feat of the imagination. This will seriously require tons of data on mid tier + end tier damage ranges. But in general, the defense reduction should be comparable to bringing an additional attacker in a full party incl bish but since the mage themselves are attacking, thereby providing more dps on the boss. I’m not sure if this is even possible to do on the client with such a rework, but it does “make up” for the lack of a bossing element to mages and make them a very very interesting choice when fighting bosses in large parties. Kenny maybe you could let us know what is in the realm of possibility so that we can have a more targeted approach as to what the development team is looking for in terms of feedback and what are the things not likely to change etc.
It sounds to me that the best plan is to mix a bit of both. 1.Reward high-level mage farming potential and stop nerfing farming QoL methods. This gives reason to level up mages, gear them, and farm things for Mesos/exp. 2. Give an Archmage the utility/power to be balanced in boss runs. There's a lot of potential within the mage skillsets that are just useless, underpowered, or not functioning properly. repairing these can make them viable and more engaging in endgame content. I really like what @Aestel said about the primary function of mages, I get it. But I know A LOT of mage mains that have the most OUTRAGEOUS magic attack gear, and they want to boss so badly. Back in GMS, mages bossed with Paladins. It was designed that way as they synergize pretty well all being elemental classes. Nobody does that in this server, and repairing/buffing mages can add an alternative to the current meta. And prepare them for adjusted current or future content to appeal to the strengths/weaknesses of multiple classes. Just giving mages the tool to even start is a huge benefit for the class and allows them to enjoy content with a character they like. - - - There's a lot of great ideas floating around for skill changes, I think most of them should be entertained and tested. If only we had a bunch of like, testers? that like, tested things. that would be cool.
