Suggestion of making Royals better (Perhaps)

Just providing my opinions, so feel free to leave a comment down below. Your feedbacks may help.

• Hp washing :

I have a suggestion in my previous feedback thread: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/about-surviving-in-boss-runs-mob-hunt.154526/ , take a look if you can. My suggestion is to make DEF and MDEF stats useful, making 1 DEF/MDEF to block 1-2 dmg, instead of 5 stats to block 1 dmg. However, as one of the GMs said it nearly can't be done, however the amount of the DEF/MEDF can be changed on the equips. So the result is, make the DEF/MEDF on the equips multiplied by 5 or even 10, or just add more HP while leveling up since it is way easier to comparing to deal with the dmg reduction formula stuff. HP wash should be optional, not necessary.

• Neo Tokyo contents :

1. Lv.115 weapons (Flairgrave/Speargrave/Judgement): For now, I think Neo Tokyo is still not an attractive place to grind after patch 65. Some people wanna exceed more than just dragon weapons. Making a unique weapon for themselves may be a motivation. Make the weapons untradable so the economy issues won't exist. However, are the dragon weapons useless after it released? I have an interesting idea to solve it. That is, make the dragon weapons "Inheritable". For example, if I have a perfect clean Dragon Battle Axe (2H axe), while we use it as a material to forge a Flairgrave/Speargrave, the result of it also is a perfect clean Flairgrave/Speargrave (2H axe). If the dragon weapon is a perfectly scrolled one, the Flairgrave/Speargrave we made is a perfectly scrolled one as well. Sounds good isn't it?
2. Auf Haven : The biggest issue of it is there's no efficient way to pin Auf Haven except Buccaneer's snatch skill after the patch. Sadly warriors(Except paladin) became freaking useless in Auf if they are "rushless". Although the KB number decreased to 75k dmg, which makes paladins, shadowers got chance to join the party, there is still a big problem. The mass stun/dp/sed makes them hard to pin it, since the buffs were gone so they need time to rebuff, or the stun makes them stop pinning Auf and keeps moving right. To fix this, Either make the rush available again, or nurf Auf by decreasing the rate of stun/dp/sed.

Edit: 1st stage Royal Guard's avoid is still too high. Warriors and Buccs are suffer from it. Whats the point of -10 avoid from patch 65? -50 avoid is more like a thing.

• Job changes Ver.2 :

Job balancing still need some improvements. No more "R> Strong NL for Bosses".

Warrior:
Hero:
Brandish: Make the skill range increase downwards a bit, just like shadower's assassinate did in patch 65. So heroes can deal dmg more efficiently in Dunas and Dunas V2 (Won't swing in a miss sometimes).

Enrage: If this skill can't stack with atk pots, what's the point of this skill existing? I mean, this skill got CD right? Make it stackable won't overpower heroes.
considering of balance, add more CD to it, or decrease a bit of wa it gained should be good.

Page:
Threaten: Fighter got rage, Spearman got HB, then page? Useless as hell in 2nd job. Make it effect to bosses like before should be ok. -atk to bosses means less HP wash, and -def to bosses can benefit party.
Blunt Weapon Mastery: Just like Axe Weapon Mastery, increase the mastery by 75%.

White Knight:
Total Crash: make it able to cancel reflect dmg buff should be good. Useful in Dojo, Dunas and Auf.

Paladin: Skills remain the same. Instead, upgrade the dmg gap. And also, Buff the 2H mace weapons into normal speed, just like the axes did. BW weapons need more love.


Thief:
Night Lord: Instead of nurfing NL itself, nurf the weapons should be good enough. Why the atk speed of claws is fast(4) instead of fast(5)? Not fair isn't it? Or just make it to Normal(6) so they will also need SI to reach the fastest atk speed.

Shadower:
Assassinate: This skill is a 4 dmg line skill right? However, the animation of its 4th hit is too slow that every shadower macro it with Boomerang Step, which only lands 3 hits from assassinate. I don't think there's anyway to improve the animation that makes it to hit completely 4 hits faster (Or actually there's some ways? IDK), so either change the animation if possible, or upgrade the dmg gap to make this skill works better. BTW, is assassinate long enough to reach HT's hand? If not, make the skill range even more forward. Time for shadowers to shine in HT.

Archer:
Bow Master:
Concentrate: Same situation as hero's Enrage skill.

Marksman:
Marksman Boost: Only +5 wa at full lv comparing to Bow Master skill is not enough. My idea is to make Strafe skill +1 arrow after Lv.21 of Marksman Boost.
Penta shot of Strafe makes MM better, and unique.
Snipe: Make Snipe able to deal dmg while weapon cancel buff on boss again. 200k dmg per 5 sec is not unbalance at all.

Edit: Make MM's DPS higher than BM while having full buffs is fair enough I think, since BM don't need SI.
Pirate:
Buccaneer: Upgrade dmg gap makes Barrage + Demolition combo more better.

 

I really like this idea at first especially considering it would make sair's ship more than a plastic "toys R us" ship you just finished gluing together but the more I think about the less sense it makes.

First of all I always assumed it's less that GM's are unable to find a way to decrease hp needed to boss; I mean they can just lower whichever boss is "problematic" in this regard, and it's more of them not wanting players to be literal demi-gods in boss runs (as they become through heavily washing) as it makes the game extremely dull.
Furthermore it would disincentives entire economical (mesos sink) portion the server is sadly based around I.E buying int gear , leech , APRs effectively making the game's economy even more inflated

Assuming it's untrue; what impacts would your change have to the game besides bossing?

Leveling wise wouldn't it make you way way way more durable than you're supposed to be? I mean assuming you make it so the armor / m.armour from def increases so much that you take 1k less damage from max level equips, you use those eqps from lv 80-90 for the most part what would you take during training? Right now I'm getting hit by himes for 1800, a flat reduction of 1000 would make them hit me for 800. This would mean I have to burn way less potions on them which again is a mesos sink. Wouldn't immensely increasing everyone's health in such extreme manner without an offset (cost) be detrimental ?

• Class specific

1. Pirate: specifically regarding; corsair wouldn't your idea make it so the ship might as well be unbreakable?
2. Dark knight: Wouldn't taking that much less damage make bereserking extremely easy?
3. Shadower: assuming those changes go through wouldn't that be doubled for them during mesos guard? Even if you tone pirate equips armor / magic armour what excatly would happen to NL you know the class that shares equips with shadower and has the highest cost to wash?

Personally I'd think the best solution would be adding more avenues to get max HP that you can grind for at lv 140~150~. Things like dojo belt , medals or a quest that has a high cost mesos wise (like the HP increase quest they added 2 years ago~) or time wise.
This way, you'd at least have to put effort in obtaining said items in order to get your health instead of passively making everyone tanky , OR you can skip it by remaking another character with intense washing.

also remove mages&NL make mapleroyals great again

 

As a late washed washing NL with legendary collector medal, I'm biased for sure.

Buffing the HP and MP stats of medal (Quest Completionist, Legendary Collector), belts (black) by min of 1-2k HP/MP would be great. I know technically an unwashed player with HB can still go for all bosses except Toad, Shao, a few bosses in Neo Tokyo and maybe a few more like the boss. But this buff will encourage more players to take part in getting those 2 medals and reduce the dependency on hp washing.

I do believe Legendary Collector medal deserves some buff, and if buffing wa/ma is out of the question, why not buff hp/mp instead?

Also for future proofing in case PB is not a myth.

 

It is optional.

 

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nah cmon let's be real, it's currently necessary if one wants to partake in all of the content that's offered

 

You can hit 200. You can partake in what most would consider essential or mainstay bosses. All classes, regardless of washing have access to all grinding maps if they so choose. The FM is of course available- you can trade, scroll, buy and sell. All major components of the game are available, bossing is just one bit.

If someone wants to be able to boss (everything) they should plan on a higher HP class and if needed have some HP equips or HB or they may choose a lower HP class and do so accepting that their class may not be ideal for bossing and may have trouble getting parties, or may require extra time/money/energy to be able to be used in an optimal fashion. Optimal being at low enough level to "leech" exp (IE 135 at zak, etc) and to be helpful if that's your goal.

There is a pro-con to literally everything- washing (or not washing) is just another piece of the puzzle. If someone doesn't want to wash they don't have to. If we removed washing today (and offered NO alternatives to be as close to what GMS had- the game would still work. Plenty of people bossed on low HP classes- I know for a fact it's possible, I did zak, HT, and CWK on my MM back in the day. It's not easy, but that's sort of the point.

People have a weird aversion to HB here and it's because washing is possible but that doesn't magically make HB not exist, or make washing required- people choose to make washing a requirement when there is little to no in game "gates" if you will to force it.

edit: Before someone mentions Toad, or something- not every boss is designed to be done by easily by every class.

 

It is "technically" optional (the best kind of optional), sort of how buying NX was "optional" in GMS since its a free game but in reality, you weren't getting anywhere without it. If I were a new player and joined based on the "HP washing optional" premise and then hit 14x-15x and realized I can't do 1/3 of the bosses, I'd be pissed. You see threads like this regularly, I'm sure.

My friend who just joined and I were actually just discussing this last night, so all this is coming from a mix of veteran and new perspectives. A couple things we discussed that are potential links to the problem;

Reliance on HB as a basis for the "HP washing optional" claim- Based on the Krex tests (which aren't perfect but its all we got), in a perfect world, DK and Hero damage is almost exactly the same, yet DK requires far more effort to achieve that DPS (and absolutely must HP wash to 18,750 HP, though its not too difficult). I see fewer and fewer DKs regularly at boss runs, or at all, and I can understand why. Why would one put in double the effort while attacking, need a more expensive/harder to find weapon, be required to HP wash to a certain point to achieve their maximum DPS, and have their party buff devalued by HP washing to make a DK when a Hero does the same DPS with none of those drawbacks? If its not worth it to make/take a DK, then theres no HB.

Locking worthwhile HP items behind boring grind walls (Dojo)/Making players sacrifice damage for HP (Ergoth's Bane) and giving insignificant amounts of HP for doing so- Grinding a Black Belt and putting in all the effort to do GPQ while wasting damage stats for a measly 1k HP is not really a solution. Even adding in HP quest (which was a much better idea I think) you can get 1.5k HP, which does not allow you to hit any meaningful HP breakpoints without still heavily washing.

After looking at some other private servers methods of making HP washing truly optional, my friend and I found one that we think would fit Royals perfectly; add HP quests for killing early game bosses that don't require washing so that you can grind out extra HP playing the game naturally the way most people do (bossing), such that you have the minimum HP to do endgame bosses within 10 levels of the minimum. Make it a drop system so that these bosses (Krex, Zak, Pap) drop an item that can be exchanged with mesos, NX, or some other resource to gain some HP, and make it repeatable up to X times. Each job would get different amounts of HP relative to their needs.

Players who don't wish to wash wouldn't have to, but would only be able to get the minimum HP to not get 1 shotted essentially. Players who did wash still have the advantage of having much more than minimum if they want and can do bosses earlier, while also being able to participate in the new Bossing HP Gain system.

 

well, that's why i said "all." i don't know much about game development and stuff, but it does seem ridiculous to offer content that's not possible for all your players

i acknowledge HB exists but it still does not solve all the hp problems. an unwashed level 200 archer has 6.5k hp. even with the hp quest and the best hp equips in every single slot (let's say +2000 hp), that unwashed lvl 200 archer would still only have 9k hp. this still locks him out of toad and neo tokyo, which requires like 9.7k hp before hb.

i understand this argument but it's literally not possible for an unwashed archer to even venture into toad or auf haven. possibility is my issue, not difficulty

so yeah. hp washing is optional. but it's still necessary

 

Getting "HP washes optional" idea is just as same as "Getting Bachelor/Degree is optional" to get get a job. You can get a job afterall but you know, its harder. Will you rather get this mind set to your juniors, getting higher qualification in education is optional? Or as much as you dont have to be?

 

Can we at least reframe the HP wash debate? Instead of all this pointless semantics about what can and cannot "technically" be done, can we just recognize the simple fact that HP wash in its current form has a significant impact on how the overall playerbase engages with endgame content? Like sure, HP wash is optional... in the same way playing this fucking game is optional. Pointing out that obvious fact is neither a helpful nor healthy contribution to this discussion. And sure, you can technically accomplish any goal in this game without HP wash. But that applies to any custom feature of this server. You can technically reach any destination in this game without fast travel tickets. You can technically enjoy a paladin class without balance changes. Yet we continuously discuss these issues to devise and implement ways we believe would best serve the community beyond the technically minimum standard because that's the whole point, isn't it?

If the staff have no plans or desires to introduce any further changes to the HP wash mechanic, that's fine. But whatever their thoughts are, can they at least come out and make some sort of an official statement on their views to engage with the community in a meaningful way instead of inducing these petty debates over and over again? I'm just so tired of beating this dead horse for literal years on end now.

 

iEatmoKids for forum moderator

 

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As a shadower, i have some opinion on the skill change, shadower cancel 4th hit of Assassinate is not because the animation is too slow (4th animation is very fast), it's due to the 4th hit is a freaking dash, all it can do is bump your face into the boss and take tons of damage without making any addition damage (i know 4th hit has 90% critical chance, but there is no addition critical damage, serious?? ), but at least they buff the first 3hit (still...SE doesn't affect first 3 hit), it's a useful skill right now, appreciate about that!

If there exist some technical issue so staff haven't fix SE buff with Assassinate, we could consider some optimal solution, why not buff those trash skill instead?

Shield Mastery skill in 3rd job is the perfect candidate imo, currently this skill only provide 100% shield def at max level 20, but why we need def since it's a trash state? if we modify the effect, make this skill provide 50% shield stat, things would be different, shadowers will do whatever they can to increase their Dragon Khanjar's W.att, a 50% buff sounds a lot, but even a perfect scrolled DK only provide 43 W.att, with the skill buff, it only provide additional 21 W.att, for high level shadower, 21 W.att means roughly <10% damage boost, not very significant buff, but it would make people put more effort on this class.

Another skill can be buff is pickpocket in 3rd job (I believe this is been announced long time ago as one of the new source skill change), combination of pickpocket and meso explosion is a funny playsytle, and make the meso drop from pickpocket proportional to the damage you done, so player will spent their time to improve their equipment for this skill.

All these trash skill improvement won't make shadower OP imo, but enhance the unique feature of this class.

 

I was going to write a whole big thing but I'll tl;dr everything.

• People Zak'd and HT'd just fine without massive HP washing on GMS.
• Toad was designed for warriors (content only available to certain classes is a hallmark of nearly EVERY mmo to respond to the other person about that).

The outlier is some of the other bosses- namely Neo Tokyo. Rather than radically change the HP washing system, or the HP gains on level, or all that jazz (which in turn makes all of the other content obsolete/makes the natural HP for warriors not unique)- I think a better focus is to just work on adjusting the Neo Tokyo content so it's more in line with natural progression like Zak to HT is.

However- again- no matter what we do- people will still prefer to wash over just bringing a DrK to boss. There are simply things we can't account for because people want to play the meta. I say that because I think even if we tuned content to be doable with HB (like older content), nothing will change. People will still wash because they don't want to bring a DrK (whether it's loss of exp, loss of damage, whatever). As someone mentioned- why bring a DrK when you can just play a hero. Well- the whole point is because DrK are tough to play but bring valuable party buffs- which people will spend enormous amounts of time and energy to avoid lol.

I think that is sort of the core of why Matt is so resistant to big changes like completely reworking the HP system. The issue isn't the content even as it currently exists, it's the meta and what people want/are willing to do. He'd probably be more willing to change if people weren't actively avoiding major in game methods of giving people more HP. There's a huge difference between unwashed people struggling to boss at reasonable levels with HB and people just not wanting to bring HB and either wash or want to be given more HP.

edit:
To answer OP- I think there's limitations on what can be done with Def like you mentioned, and I don't know if it's possible to retroactively change def on items/give people more HP based on their level ups (there's a LOT of variables, for example warriors with their HP skill/Buccs with theirs. Theres variation, so the only option if it's even possible is a flat lvl x HP buff, which is messy.)

 

This isn't GMS though. We are 7 years deep and Royals has evolved into its own completely separate entity based on GMS. Making comparisons to GMS at this junction just doesn't hold weight anymore. We could sit around and talk about what was in GMS for pretty much every issue and if we based everything off of that, we wouldn't have some of the awesome changes that makes Royals what it is today.We should be focusing on what is happening here and now, not what happened a decade or more ago in a totally different meta.

As far as Dark Knights are concerned, I believe the problem is a double edged sword. Its fine if they are hard to play if the return on investment is worthwhile. As we know, Dark Knights are just a really difficult Hero right now, which means less people are making them. People care about damage here, that is why we had custom job balances. Hell, even with 30k HP they still can't use Berserk at all bosses to reach their maximum DPS without literally jumping through insane hoops like @sparky95 has shown with his Anego strategy (I think that was him, correct me if I'm wrong). For being required to HP wash to some degree, being capped at a level 85 weapon that is Gachapon only, and having to micromanage HP and pots every second that you're attacking just to be equal to Hero is not worthwhile. This in turn creates a shortage of Dark Knights, placing an even higher emphasis on HP washing since HB is not always, or even likely to be, readily available. This is all of my own observation in boss runs and playing the past year, and I'm not someone who will turn their nose up to a Dark Knight joining a boss run by any means. There just aren't that many around and less and less people are making them or playing them to endgame.

People actively avoid the current methods of gaining HP because they are band-aids on an amputation. Ergoth's Bane requires a guild willing to even do GPQ, and then you must complete the challenge so you can sacrifice damage stats for a measly 500 HP. Black Belt requires 12 days of max grinding Walking Simulator for another measly 500 HP, though at least it gives useful stats as well. HP Quest is an awesome idea, but you can only fully complete it once for another 500 HP. Using my 146 Marksman as an example, he has only washed out the extra MP from naturally leveling and is sitting at 6.6k HP. I found an old thread about HP gain per level so this might not be accurate anymore, but Bowman gain 16-20 HP per level, we will call it 18 HP. At that rate, even with +2000 HP from equips/HP Quest, I will never get to do any content above Zakum without HP washing. I don't think anybody is advocating for 30k HP bowman at level 155, just enough to not get killed in 1 hit.

 

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Keyword being based. It is not GMS, and not all things that applied to GMS apply here. You literally say so in the very next sentence. Summing up everything that is different in Royals as "some balance changes and QOL changes" is heavily minimizing the vast amount of work that has gone into improving upon the original GMS foundation. Of course we can look back to see how things worked to plot our course for the future,, but we are not striving to copy that, but to build upon it. That's what you do with a foundation.

Yes, and we should try to give options for both parties to enjoy the game, not just the one you like. Nobody is trying to change your precious meta, just giving alternatives to be able to achieve the minimum.

And that's why you could never be the admin of the top Maplestory private server for nearly 7 years. Do you even have an actual argument to make? Can you please elaborate why we shouldn't offer any alternatives to HP washing, and back it up besides "but muh GMS"?

 

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