In Discussion Content Rose Garden Nerf/Adjustments

Just nerf the rates for mages just like other LHC maps and it should be fine. Bring the drop rate down to what aoe attackers typically get: 20~30 bee etcs?

 

Imagine crying cuz no mage

 

BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH

 

I'm going to provide some insights into the design process, as well as my thoughts as a player. Take this post however you will. Note that I am one person, others were heavily involved in the development process with varying views and thoughts as well.

In my mind there were two main goals while designing the Rose Garden.

1. Address several recent player issues with VL content. There were several player complaints about farming totems and burning energy to upgrade their VL belt.
2. Address a long running desire from many players over the years for a lucrative, single client experience in the general game. With that in mind, I personally pushed for Rose Garden to be a solo experience. I did consider pushing for at most a duo experience, but it complicates the balancing more than I'd like. I'm not in favor of any modifications to the Rose Garden in terms of 'party size'. Some jobs will perform exceptionally (mages), others will struggle (NLs), and as some have pointed out, this is a good thing. Especially on the mage side of the spectrum. I'd like to see similar content in the end game to this Rose Garden in the future where party size is expanded, but still intimately small (2-3 players), so this is a good test bed.

The motivation for capturing the bees was to require some level of player engagement and attention, as they must be chased and captured within a time limit or they disappear. It was my intention that it would not be possible to aggro them, as mage ultimates somewhat trivialize bee capturing. Perhaps some see this simply as an advantage of the class, so it's not that big a deal (paladins, dark knights, and heros, and corsairs share this advantage to some degree as well). I'm quite satisfied with how this mechanic turned out overall, and did not expect it to become one of the main mechanics when I first proposed it early on. You'll have to excuse me for gushing a bit. I'm very happy that the devs were able to make this and many other things work properly.

Ultimately, I believe that the content is very good, and I'm ecstatic that many people seem to be enjoying it. However, it would be bit naive to say that the Rose Garden should remain completely unchanged. As a side comment, I think this content would have to be significantly altered from what it currently is to become anywhere near what Ellin Forest became (still, I think people are exaggerating in this thread about Ellin and it's not a fair comparison, but that's a discussion for another day.) As @Raimie said, 'nerf' is not the correct term, however tweaks and adjustments are necessary, in my opinion as a player.

1. King Castle Golem - There are two versions of King Castle Golem (KCG), one that magician characters will face and one that all others will face. As several have noted, the mage KCG is much weaker. I don't think they need to be identical in HP values, but the mage KCG should have an HP increase to about double what it is now. I think that is sufficient. Ultimately the boss, while aesthetically cool, is boring. We could make the fight... slightly more engaging in some ways I guess. For example, the area attack (rocks falling) could be slightly tweaked.
2. Rose Garden Box - Toward the end of development this item didn't sit too well with me. You get it as a reward for reaching and defeating KCG every day. However, it's weird... why is a player getting rewarded for defeating KCG from not only the drops of KCG, but also a box which gives equally good, if not better rewards. It's not unusual in the sense of content where you get rewards from the boss, and also a quest (think like area bosses), but in pretty much all such existing scenarios, the rewards are a) not daily, b) usually crap, especially in the context of end game. Furthermore it feels to me that Ring 30% scrolls will become very common, but I have no data to back that up and haven't thought about it deeply. At any rate, it would make more sense to me that this item gets repurposed into something that rewards the player for dedicating themselves to the content. The simplest example would be something like rewarding a Rose Garden Box every two completions, or requiring some number of mob etcs (taking care to make them untradeable to enforce the intended design). Often when designing content I want to tie things together and give things multiple purposes. Earlier in development I've thought of using the Von Leon medallion, where it is 'melted down' into some number of keys which are used to open the box. That last note is to just give an idea or insight to the development thought process, or at least my own thoughts. Admittedly this point I'm making advocates significant change to the current content design but I can't help but voice my discomfort. As a small note: with any change to the box, I'd probably shift Ifia's Ring over to be dropped by KCG itself.
3. Channels - The content is not only new, but very lucrative. I've never had difficulty finding a channel other than around 0:00 and 12:00 server time, which is quite natural. Outside of grief (purposefully holding a channel for no good reason, which I doubt will happen) and map selling, it's nice to see come crowded content in our little MMO corner. Feels... dare I say... nostalgic. Some players have floated the idea of making it so the three stage portion opens up once a player enters the bonus stage, freeing up the channel. This would require multiple instances per channel of the bonus section. If there is high demand for this setup and good reasoning, then feel free to push for it. When I first heard this idea I was more indifferent to it, but if 'map selling' actually becomes a thing, I would like to see a rule which disallows such a thing. But then in that instance, such issues would better be solved technically (map instances) as opposed to rule enforcement.
4. Multiclient - I'm not sure how many people are able to successfully multiclient the Rose Garden, and for those who can, what 'successful' means. Of course these kinds of things are on our minds when designing content. Naturally one can tell by the aforementioned bee design, as well as the map structures (long maps preserved from GMS). Realistically these maps and mechanics are still simplistic. My experience with Hidden Garden III shows me that Rose Garden requires less telecasting than something like leech, in my opinion. I think that's true of all three maps, considering multiple hits (at least 3) are absolutely required to kill a mob, barring the miniscule benefit of summons. Client restrictions can be put in place, but those are often easily bypassed by the motivated individual (as we've seen from event bosses over the years.) Okay, so we put a rule in place to cover those gaps to dissuade players from circumventing the restriction. I don't know how I feel about that, as I'd rather guide metas and player strategies through content design, but that often is a pipe dream. I don't really have a solution here, but balancing the content based on multiclient will for sure destroy it.
5. I would like to see the summon restriction on looting lifted within the Rose Garden, as there is no benefit to it there and it's quite disruptive to looting burning energies on a bishop. Even if all mobs dropped something lucrative, I doubt summon farming would be feasible at all.
6. Mob EXP - The EXP gain is too high. The philosophy among the staff team, and one I somewhat agree with, is that there are already many ways to gain EXP in the game, especially with the LHC update. They are all locked behind party content, but that should be the point, especially when so much early game content gets skipped over by things like orbis etc, leeching, and so on. I believe a competent melee character can get around 60-80m (?) EXP in a full bonus run, adding KCG EXP on top (25.6m without HS) pushes that to 100m. I'm a bit conflicted on what to do here in terms of the EXP. I'm not against Rose Garden having decent EXP, but I don't think it should be good in everything. Feel free to disagree.
7. Mob Spawning - Building off the last point, the mob spawn is significantly higher (well, double) in the bonus maps (you can tell the difference by looking at the pre-bonus maps, which are the same maps...). I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, as the current bee rates we're seeing from players are not too crazy far off from the income we expected players to receive from grinding. But, it is something to note.
8. More noticeable bee notification - I suppose one can add a notification to the chatbox and make the on-screen notification more noticeable but... I've never really had an issue with it. @Matt added a buzzing noise that occurs when a bee spawns. I don't know how well it sounds coupled with all the other sound effects, but it's a cute thing to point out I suppose . It might be possible to make the bee notice something similar to the seduce warning boxes you see in bosses, but I'm not too knowledgeable on how those function (e.g. can they stack, can they be implemented for bees.)

I don't know if this content will die down significantly over time. In its current state there is some truth to the sentiment that you'd be dumb not to include this content in your daily rotation, or high up in your priority list (at least, for a large portion of players.) I don't see that sentiment being part of a honeymoon phase. But yea, it's reasonable to think that it will become more easy to find a channel during peak times in a few months.

On the flip side, I feel the claim that it makes bossing 'literally worthless' or any adjacent claims are... grossly exaggerated? Many bosses provide you with potential profit, guaranteed EXP, unique untrade-ables (last I checked, Rose Garden does not provide helms, HTP, MoN, etc.). Further, there are ways to maximize your gains such as muling, teaming up with more experienced/resourceful players, or changing your strategy (for example, a lot of boss parties tend to apple when, in my opinion, it's not really necessary or beneficial.) Personally, as an example this content has not put me off my daily Auf duo, and I have very limited play time. I agree with @Nerd 's opinion.

Also, there is a ton of bossing to be done in the levels below Rose Garden (170 and under). I also imagine a lot will not always do the bonus farming on all their characters (NLs will probably prefer to just do the KCG portion and leave.)

These are the things off the top of my head and from running the content for about a week. I wouldn't take this post as an indicator of what change may come, if any. Once again, these are my opinions as a player with some insights from development sprinkled in.

Overall I'm elated that so many players have found the content rewarding and fun, and it clearly shows from the numbers themselves. At the end of the day, @Zancks said something to me which I agree with: "What's the goal? Happy players". While it is so often naturally the intent, it's easy to forget that. I think we smashed that goal with this update, and keeping the long-term health of the game in mind, we should work to maintain it.

Thanks for reading.

 

Thank you for the insight! Understanding the reasons why the content was created as such definitely helps to appreciate the content as well as help push the content to a direction where would be 'balanced' in the long run!

 

Agree that the boss fight is quite boring, after a few attempts i figure out that the boss only tele to the spot behind you so what i only have to do is hold button →move left →hold button →move right till the boss die. I watch a clip about rose garden and the boss can tele to upper platform too, so why not make it randomly tele to any spot of the map? About the rocks falling should make it 100% stunned if touch you cuz quite sure u can dodge it.

About making loot by summon kill lootable, if u somehow make it lootable inside RG why not make it lootable all maps except heartstopper map? I could be wrong on this but if this can be changed pretty sure many ppl will be happy.

 

Thanks for adding it, bee hunting is a lot of fun.

imo you could even go up to 3x, or maybe 2x and nerf it for attackers a bit. Mages SHOULD take longest on the golem to balance their farming capabilities

They already have. Just check owls. Maybe this will encourage people to scroll wedding and krex rings more, maybe they need to be rarer, or maybe it's fine that they're easily accessible now.

I don't do rigorous exp tests since I don't care about exp on my bishop and my pally is 200, but I think bish has been getting around 150m/run? Maybe 200m? And I could cast hs for 10% more. That's close to party LHC rates.
For reference, selling skele leech gets me just over 100m/hr.

I think the best solution here is making it so that summons need to do 50% of the mob's HP or so before items are unlootable, as another feedback thread suggested.

Bees (for me) are perfectly noticeable if I have sound on and am not watching a video on the side. I actually try to keep track of active bees to see how many despawn on me.

I think the easiest multi client is likely just finishing the regular quest on one character while doing bonus on another, since regular quest is all loot able items it takes a lot less interaction than bonus. Which is still quite powerful, letting someone do pretty much nonstop bonus after bonus. Still, inputs from people who have tried to multi client it would be best. I really don't want this to get nerfed because of a couple people running it on like 5 characters at once earning billions of mesos a day

 

i don't think there's a need to balance the content based on multiclient, just simply restrict it. the current rates on its own are fine tbh and maybe just needs a bit of fine tuning. i was able to get 44 bees today on my warrior which is comparable if not better than most mages ( i appled ). the problem is just the ability to multiclient this. i think if it is left unrestricted, it's gonna be best way of farming and most likely widen the gap between those players that already have multiple high level mages and those with no mages at all, and then with all that mesos injection that this content is pumping out daily, items are gonna start getting inflated, forcing new players into the trend of needing to make multiple mages in order to keep up with the rising economy.

i personally haven't tried multiclient mages in this content, but someone i know already tried it and told me its easy and he got 60+ bees in 30 minutes

buzzing noise? idk about yall but i hear a cat meowing

 

The rewards are too good for 1 hour:
+ 60m exp
+ 100-200m powder
+ boss drop: 50 totems / 6k nx / ifia earring
+ reward box: ifia earring / chaos / ring 30s / more powder


Edit: exp is actually ~100m and the run only takes 45-50 mins

 

To be completely honest, as other people said I don't think the rewards are too good, as in a sense I think it's made to be competitive with mage made mesos. I think in retrospect, bossing is just too unrewarding and if as @nut suggested only exists to grind untradeables, I think this new questline only brings that severe disconnect in reward structure that we've all ignored and lived with until now.

 

Fair points but please do not buff boss HP for mages they are not bossers and is allready boring enough to spam their ultis (burns alot pots too i guess thats fair trade of), non-mages HP boss maybe should be a bit lowered as they are skiping the bon (most of them not all) as they are not good mobers so that can be their trade of
thanks for the new content work!

 

dude, some comments here are a joke, when finally Archmages and Bishops can fight against a boss with good reward and takes less time than a normal attacker to kill it, ppl want nerf it.
Anyway is a trash try to find a channel after reset cause there's a lot of ppl using 6~8 mules daily.

 

If I could catch bees while riding a monster rider, I would be happy to have only a melee attack character

 

Well, mages are meso printing machines and attacker classes are supposed to be better at bossing.

This new content lets mages kill the boss in 1/2 the time of an attacker while attacker classes can farm mage-level mesos. Seems the roles are being reversed.

 

This being the first time this has ever been the case on MapleRoyals, I don't really see a pattern of reversal here. Mages are meso printing machines if you play your character solely to leech/farm, when it comes to bossing only one of the mage types are used and more often times than not they are muled in instead of a actual player

 

To add onto the two comments above:

Mages also still outfarm attackers on average in bonus map. But the difference is, its the first content where funded mages with good TC rotations are heavily rewarded.

Prior to this, outside of funding to skele one shot, there wasn’t really a huge benefit going past that outside of HT Dark 1 shot. And of course, butt naked clean e-wand level 130 AM being good enough for endgame farming.

And it’s too hard to sell leech while trying to advertise your TC skills without sounding like a load of bullshit

• ex: S>Skele leech 150/75m lvl 168 BS Perf TC Rotation as good as exp from 14x BS!!

Yeah maybe tweak the bees a little, but at the end of the day I think giving funded mages a place to flex is good

 

The original goal was for people who want to single-client make some decent money (balanced by only allowing 1 run a day) instead of needing to multi-client mage farm or leech. The goal was not to further buff people with multiple high level mages/accounts to make even more money then previous multi-client mage or leech (with no limit to how many accounts you make to run it).


In any case I think time will tell, if in 2 months people that play 1 hour a day decide to use that time to only do rose garden, and people that play 5 hours a day decide to run rose garden 5 times on 5 accounts, then we have a problem.

 

The channel struggle seems to depend a lot on time zone.

I don't see how bloating the mage version of the boss is going to do anything but waste time.

You could instead make the boss require more presence of mind to defeat (i.e. "skill"). Make the falling blocks faster (but make the hitbox slightly narrower as it's quite deceptive) and always stun. Make it spawn aggressive minions that cast Seal (but not dispel or DR please, that's way too nasty to unwashed mages ).

I'm not fond of the crazy teleporting idea though, let me put Big Bang to use with the current readable teleport

 

Bossing will always be worse than farming over a large spread outside of weird outlier situations. You’re bossing because its rewarding yet interactive community content, farming is not fun. If you could make 1:1 ratio mesos from bossing to farming, I would imagine almost all people would not farm. If you even made the bossing to farming meso ratio to even 4:6, people probably wouldn’t farm. And VL just got buffed too to help promote more rewarding community driven content.

Bossing rewards for the most part are purely community driven profits, we decide the payout.

I’m guessing two scenarios with Rose Garden:

• Bees pure meso and the demand of stronger mages may make bossing more profitable (demand for gen/mw).
• By dumping a crap ton more pure meso into the market it may drag up prices again

Or

• Result in the decreased demand of gen/mw20 (gen more affected).
• The community may deem it not necessary to earn 10-20 bees on average more on a mage, and be content with doing bonus room on regular AoE attackers without caring about MW20.
• Gen hits low prices but MW20 will stay stable enough at 2b~ because MW20 is so important

Personally I would only advocate on nerfing CS rate in box and buff Ring rate, as CS prices are already nose diving to 420, and it would be nice to give some more power elsewhere.

I hope staff doesn’t repeat Von Leon and do rapid balance changes that don’t fix the problem due to the hot handed negative feedback from the community, resulting in several VL balance changes within a 2-3 month span. Let it ride out a bit.

 

What's the downside?