One of the problems with Horntail as a source of revenue is that there are essentially only 3 reliable drops - Maple Warrior 20, Genesis 30, and Triple Throw 30. Since Night Lords are no longer a meta class now that Buccaneers and Paladins are viable (lol), the price of Triple Throw 30 has dropped substantially recently due to the lack of demand. It's common to owl Triple Throw 30 and see 2 pages and sometimes even 3 pages of Triple Throw 30s available for sale in the free market. It is possible to sell HTPs but this is unreliable because buyers often dc or they log off and peace out. Due to the waning incentives to challenge the current endgame boss of MapleRoyals, I've come up with a solution - introduce Stance 40 for the Warrior class. Each skill point that is put into Stance above 30 will add an additional 1% which will nicely cap off at 100% with 40 points put into Stance. Stance is an incredibly frustrating ability at times and despite having a 90% chance to not be knocked back, it often feels like Stance doesn't even exist and people often meme about it. By introducing Stance 40, players will have the opportunity to remove this incredibly frustrating RNG which will greatly enhance player experience by improving Warrior quality of life and allowing an additional source of income for other classes that participate in Horntail parties.
What about the passing rate? Since Stance 30 is 50% and Stance 20 is 70% success rate, would Stance 40 be 30% success rate?
I don't see heaven's hammer and time leap 30 prices increasing. I believe the 'main cause' for depreciating prices for books to be because too many people do HT these days and less mesos in economy due to chair gach. There doesn't need to be a book 40, probably doesn't make sense why only stance can be levelled to 40. Not only does it take coding effort, the multipliers could simply be reworked such that stance 30 is 100% if the admins decide to buff warriors in this direction. Also, I believe the economy would re-balance itself. Cheap TT book > playing nl is attractive > more new players decide to make one . .................. .....> HT runs less profitable > less HT runs = more demand for TT book We just need to reach a new equilibrium
Im wondering if this is the point in royals life span we decide to introduce reverse items. Its obvious horntail needs new measures to keep it as a viable part of end game. But i also feel the armor and weapon meta has gotten pretty stale, with an ever increasing abundance of perfected items, and general over abundance of max stated clean items. since i doubt well ever see the maker skill added, this is a perfect opportunity to look into adding level 120 weapons and armors to potential horntail drops as the only way to obtain them before was via maker skill. We could set the drop rates to be small 1-3 items per run to stretch out the life span of items and making horntail once again an important means of end game progression I feel like this covers two potential issues we have. Fixing the lessening importance of horntail by introducing uncomon yet highly sought after weapons and armors, and resetting the ever increasingly stale end game gearing process
making stance 100% is a bad move imo and will make the game super easy . HT is basically the only boss the 10% failure of stance actually matter , it doesn't make sense to me to make HT even easier and less challenging than it's already is ( and has been for a while now) . from my experience, HT is still a very good source of making money , and one of the best sources of exp aswell , it shouldn't be changed in my opinion . i do want to see a harder boss introduced to the game to have something more challenging than what we have at the moment , but that's for another discussion
have it at 95% so its not broken pls. as a drk/hero, i shld hv the right to blame my death on stance failing. Spoiler pls idw ppl to find out im nub sed
As a player that have a lvl 177 hero, im against this suggestion. Gms bbb didn't have a 40sb to anything as far as i remember, no real justification to do it now. And making warriors an unmovable pillar is undoubtly a bad idea, as its the only really challenging part of HT a sed warrior has to deal with. Taking it out would make our gameplay even easier than it already is. My biggest problem with this entire suggestion is that its two seperate suggestions that have nothing to do with eachother. One is your personal disadisfaction with the profitability of HT, but let me tell you, HT profitability naturally flactuates, and trying to buff it when its low will cause it to be overpowered when the market recovers. Second suggestion is removing the only threat a non drk needs to deal with. Which I'm personally against. A new SB is just you trying to forcfully merge those two things together even though you don't have any real justification to do so.
This is my observation and my hypothesis. I am not tackling stance 40. Just HT in general. I may be off-topic and I do apologise to OP for that. The reason why HT feels so shit now is cuz.... The power creep in Royals is stronk. Back in the day, not everyone has expensive equips. For example, wa12 capes 2 years ago cost around 5.5b and right now they are pfff 3.5b. This means players have more spending power due to items becoming relatively cheaper by meso per time unit spent on the game. An hour of ulu2 leech 2 years ago was 40m/hr and right now it's easily 60+. With the average power of the population being noticeably stronger than it was before, heck even a year ago, Horntail did not become harder. This results in more people successfully slaying Horntail. Asking for exclusive drops is a decent improvement, but a temporary one. These exclusive drops will become the so-called tt gene mw drops we have now. To make drops such as tt gene and mw feel special and HT more rewarding, it should follow the equip power creep. I understand that it is darn hard to quantify such a creep, but that to me is the way to make the strongest boss less of a god damn joke. It's a EXP mob with different parts. Not a boss that rewards. HT now is so disgustingly unrewarding. I loved every bit of it last year because it was actually almost comparable to selling leech knowing how meso hungry I was. I made sure time spent from the time I log in to the time I logged off had a good meso per unit time. Now it's just bad. I HT for exp not for meso reward.
I very much agree on the concept of power creep, but im not sure it accurately applies to this situation. 6 Man parties were a thing even towards the end of old source. Maybe we could lower the drop rate of the books? Thats an artificial way of increasing the value of them, but I think that will end up being too feelsbadman when you dont get anything for a run. I feel like dropping items that are extremely desired, but also very rare will atleast keep people interested in running it each week, and when you do get one of these drops, it will be a big boost to your groups money making. We could finally admit that Horntail has slowly become overplayed and outdated and look to add more difficult bosses like Chaos Zak or even an unnerfed version of Pink Bean. Id like to see a new high level tier of gear to aim towards creating as well.
Increasing number of hackers and botters as well as mass account sellers are causing a negative influence in this context, over saturating the population of end game players who run HT on daily basis. If the server was hack/rwt free, we'd have far less strong HT slayers. Look at the rate at which end gamers accumulate over those who quit after achieving everything. The balace is quite off. I see autoban as the only core solutuon to this problem.
Unless you see all updates made by the original maple devs as inherently bad, I see no reason to not look into quality of life patches. Stance 100% was put in and it never broke the game, but I remember how good that day felt Mounts also stopped cancelling Power Guard, because that's super evil and serves no purpose (had to slip that in). I'm happy to see QoL updates
