I agree with almost everything except 2 points here. I don't think laser eyes should instant kill - instead maybe just increase the duration of the debuff, making it harder to avoid rocks (and other attacks such as bird)? Also, I haven't tested but hsh should be changed to work against it if not. I don't think shoes should go as low as 120 though - at that point, they're nearly a strict powercreep of FS. 180 might be slightly high, but I don't think anything under 160 is a good idea. ------------ Strong agree bird stun should be significantly increased. Yes people might get chain stunned, but that's just more incentive to avoid it. Could potentially slightly decrease the frequency of the attack if you're worried about that, but bird is so easily avoidable it's not an issue (and might give more incentive to include bishops in parties for hsh, and more incentive to get will 10) I think as for new drops, staff is partially looking for suggestions on what they could be. In my bonus room post, I recommended a new ring. Personally I feel like gloves are in a good spot, but maybe a new face accessory would also be welcome? Or shield maybe? The best way to improve drops is specific suggestions on what to add. DCs are very scary. I think the boss hp% introduced some instabilities in ALL bosses that tend to get worse the longer the fight is. With VL being a very large file size, the issues might just be more noticeable there (also in cwk due to 5x hp bars, and auf due to long fight/large bosses). Luckily the admins ARE working on this - for anyone who hasn't joined the royals discord, Matt posted a file you can use that generates debug logs on crashes. Sending him those logs should help him a lot in figuring out the issues.
They potentially could but I feel like a new Face accessory should be saved for another future boss inbetween Von Leon and Pink Bean unless it's not a end-game face accessory.
Just wanted to update everyone a little bit. This is pretty much spot on and what devs are prioritizing as we want VL to be actually playable. Gargoyle Summons While fixes are happening, we're constantly discussing much of the suggestions brought here and conducting tests to verify if certain ideas are feasible. We're also validating if they actually solve the problems they were intended to solve. For instance, VL's summons are not in an ideal spot right now. After watching multiple runs and experiencing it myself, they don't pose as nearly a threat as we would want them to. It's also hard to say that reverting them back to the previous version will really resolve the issue in the first place (as many have contemplated). We've received note from our developers that reversing the effect of hardskin can be rather difficult to do on the backend, and we also aren't entirely poised on going through with this idea originally. For these reasons, there's thoughts to consider just taking out hardskin from the gargoyles and exploring other ways to make them more challenging towards ranged dps. Feel free to suggest any ideas for this as well! Vulture Shout Vulture shout stun duration is being looked at. Currently it only just serves to slow down runs, so we're considering to change the duration so that it incentivizes players to avoid it more often. Jail Jail was already addressed and we're looking at ways of implementing new jail ideas to make it feel less monotonous. Damage Reflect We're aware that Damage Reflect is in a weird state right now. Ideally we would've liked to have it be deadlier with a delay after the animation starts, but we haven't been able to set that skill-delay at this moment. We are still in the works of making DR deadlier in other ways so that everyone ought to avoid attacking VL during the buff. Laser We are glad that a lot of people are liking the new laser mechanic! Considering that it portrays Von Leon's "ultimate attack", it does seem a bit lackluster to be a huge a threat when afflicted. We're exploring some ways to make it more lethal, but not necessarily 1hit KO for reasons mentioned here: While this occurrence may not happen that often, we ultimately want to avoid any possibilities for unavoidable death. VL HP As we examine and participate in more runs, we acknowledge that Von Leon's hp is still a bit too high in its current state. We're looking at tuning the hp so it's not so much a dps check as it is a "skill" check. Keep in mind that VL is currently among the very late-game bosses and players should still be expected to invest a bit more into their attackers if they want to have an impact in an expedition. VL Rewards We are discussing ways to improve on Von Leon's drops to accommodate for more participants as well as making it more profitable. Nothing is really set in stone just yet. I will say I like the ideas regarding a quest or npc that rewards players for successfully beating VL. We're exploring the feedback proposed for new tradeable drops and are still open for more suggestions as we go! Thank you to everyone so far for participating on our discussion here as well as in our in-game feedback .
The other server managed to do this for DR: - Your attacks against Damage Reflect are 1 - For the first ~2 seconds, your damage against the boss won't be reflected (or is 1 dmg, can't remember) Very helpful for players to be able to react to the Damage Reflect because the instant they see the 1 damage, they stop attacking. Bowmasters/RF Corsairs are able to actually survive instead of seeing their tombstone. Maybe you guys can make Bosses that have Damage Reflect have a 2sec duration weapon cancel that pops up in addition to the reflect and make Damage Reflect not reflect damage when its 1 dmg
It's a limitation with v83 clients. AFAIK there hasn't been a way for v83 (or older) servers to do something like this.
Ill avoid double posting my previous suggestions on this matter, but now, having now a clear statement that removing hardskin is being considered, and the fact that mobs purpose is not only to promote melee(specially multitargets) but also to challenge ranged jobs, Id say that, aside greatly increase the HP(to 30m hp lets say), and the number of mobs back to 6 at least, you could change the dispel debuff(wich mainly affect melee rn) to something that challenge more to ranged, and something that you want to clear asap even if VL teleports to another place, bcause you dont want to have them on top of VL body(to block your hits) but also dont want them on your back anoying you, in other words, regardless of what happens you want to kill them ASAP. The answer for me is: Im aware this fella, can also stun melees, but anyone who cwkpqed enough knows that hes way more anoying to handle as a ranged. If you make Gargoyles to have a skill that stuns at long distance, but doesnt at short, youre creating the necesity of warriors again. Btw, no one talking about golems, its maybe bcs they fulfill their purpose now, so take this with a grain of salt, but in my last run i was thinking that, they always were barely relevant, VL eats them too fast, and they heal to little HP, so if you have to little ppl to clear the mobs, ppl just kill them if they are in the way, otherwise ignore them and keep hitting VL sounds better. maybe buff their HP, the amout of HP Vl heals aftear eating them, but delay the time he eats them from 15-20 secs? to 35-40 seconds will help to promote aswell. Youre playing with fire here, I know everyone said that its just another purposeless skill, and thats true, personally i would love to see this skill be relevant enough to promote dodge it instead of just tank it. But directly increase the stun duration is a mistake IMO. You should revamp the skill entirelly, if i was you i woudlnt touch it for the next patch, to have time to prorperly rework it. Why?.- This came from a friend who pointed out, the only way to foresee the vulture coming is by watching the lion roar, vulture takes quite a while to appear after roar, but after that, that bird is a frikin bullet. The vulture covers quite a big area, and its almost unnoticeable wich is = to say undodgeable if youre not seeing the Lion. VL teleports himself, teleport you to jail, you could be dead far from VL, or ressing someone whos far from VL, or maybe youre a bucc TLing bishops ress(wich is often do far from VL too), anyone who did VL enough times knows that you will be far from him very often, making vulture to be undodgeable. Vulture is currently a joke, but direclty increase stun duration is an overkill IMO, what it should be done is, reduce the vulture speed(if possible), increase his size(like you did with valentines event panda) and the reduce his action range to match NL TT range+1(so it doesnt hit anyone whos not atacking Vl currently) and only then increase the stun duration.
Increase gargoyle movement speed by a lot and the size of their touch hitbox by a little bit. Why? So that the gargoyles reach ranged classes faster and demand more time spent on mob control skills from melee players. Think it's an easy and straight forward change. Will need to be paired up with some other change, but I think having more chaotic mob movement is a good step.
I don't see anything wrong with having to take some caution when approaching VL. It's not undodgeable for most because you can always take baby steps and duck until you can discern what ability he's doing before you inch closer. Golem drop is very easy to tell, his attacks have large animations, and it could be advantageous to coordinate with your team to call out when he's using Vulture Shout. Also the name of this skill should hint at some advantage you can have. That being said, I mentioned already that we aren't looking to make these mechanics a guaranteed death sentence. The stun shouldn't be so long that you'll eat a golem right after, but it wouldn't be game breaking to tune the duration a bit to cause a more sizeable disruption. There's more room to adjust than you'd think because VL has pretty long animations.
This is something we've tested and are still looking into. A fear I have right now is the possibility of stun locking right off the bat, especially considering there will be multiple gargoyles attacking at once. So far it doesn't seem like that's the case with adjustments to the stun duration. We're also considering upping the gargoyle movement speed like @HikariNoPuri suggested. So far these both seem like solid ideas!
Alittle off topic. But i would love to see bishops and magic more useful in a supportive manner in VL. Not just ress and scroll farming mules. I do see holy shield chain as a mechanic that might be interesting to explore.
Some things we've been discussing and testing on our end. Nothing is entirely set in stone just yet: Von Leon Stats Reducing total HP (across all three phases) Gargoyles Increasing the spawn from 4 to 5 mobs Removing hardskin debuff Greatly increasing the mob hp (from 8m to over 20m) Increasing the skill cooldown Greatly increasing the knockback hp threshold Increasing movement speed Adding stun debuff to their ranged magic attacks Spoiler: Notes We're looking to have VL's minions be more of a threat in areas where they currently fall weak in. Gargoyles should have a sizeable threat towards ranged dps and should be much harder to handle with ranged dps alone. We're also hoping to give melee dps a stronger role here and mob control is one of their more obvious advantages that can be utilized. We find that hardskin debuff isn't currently serving the purpose we want it to, and that balancing around it is too limited. Currently, we're looking to explore options without this buff entirely. Vulture Shout Adding an extra 1 second to stun debuff Spoiler: Notes We feel that Vulture Shout in its current state is rather lackluster. We want to add something to it that doesn't necessarily shift the tides, but still be more potent and beneficial to avoid. Laser Adding an additional seduce debuff to players afflicted Spoiler: Notes It's no secret now that this ability can be dodged. That being said, even getting hit hasn't been a good enough punishment considering it's VL's "ultimate ability". We don't want him to 100% murder people, but seduce seems to be a nice addition with laser's 1/1 and blinding mechanics. Originally we didn't want to include seduce to VL's kit because it's kind of cliché. However, the combined affect with other conditions may give it a different punch that other bosses don't necessarily have. This also offers some counter-play for the occasions that one might get caught in the laser. As always, feel free to ask, comment, or suggest any ideas you may have!
Firstly, thank you. I greatly appreciate the staff for the transparency and the 2 ways communication regarding the tentative changes. I believe this is pushing VL in the right direction, where it is not just NL story, and other classes (mainly the melees) get to shine as well. This may further entice individuals who are really passionate about their classes to hard commit to their class rather than pivoting to something else NL. Moving forward, I envision this boss being something along the line of party play with a balance between diversity of classes, and not just buccs/nls as 70% of the expedition.
+1 to this, i like this a lot, so much that i think this is actually the key to making melee class useful again, and the gargoyle changes wouldn't really be needed. Currently, failing to clear the white golems on time isn't punishing at all. They heal like what, 0.3% per golem? Buffing them to like 10% heal per golem would ensure that they are a huge threat to any run if they aren't cleared on time, thus creating the need for strong AOE attackers. Also, right now it's too easy to clear them as their hp isn't that high, so if this suggestion were to be considered, their hp should be buffed so that AOE attackers are definitely needed to clear them on time before consume happens. Also, i think that they should be made immovable, they would serve as blockades against range parties, something like this mob. -They are immovable -They can't be snatched / rushed / magnet-ed And as i'm typing this feedback, i came to a realization. it actually all makes sense now GARGOYLES WAS NEVER MEANT FOR WARRIORS TO CLEAR The gargolyes with anti-melee skills like hardskin, close range skill locks & dispels, are meant for ranged to clear, and the white castle golems are meant for melee to clear so basically, you need a good balance of range + melee, but because of how easy it is to deal with white castle golems right now, you don't need melee anymore.
At this point the drops are reasonably well known, so can we have them added to card info/pet ignore/owls? Mainly owls as that'll help a lot with selling the shoes/atk pot/manuals (besides star, which is still above max meso).
It has been about one and a half month since the release of Von Leon and I am still unclear about the intended difficulty when you challenged me to do it with 18 players. Does your follow up comment mean the recommended expedition size of 18? After reading a couple comments on the thread it is quite evident that it is indeed killable with 18 players but a handful tend to struggle due to the boss being a big singe target DPS check. It is great to see improvements with mob control and such, in addition to the overall lower boss HP percentage as a compensation to the change. Observing as a regular weekly runner in the current state, Von Leon is mainly revolving around the efficient 18-20 player party composition mainly consisting of buccaneers, bishops, nightlords, bowmasters and marksmen since mob control is not too difficult to handle versus prior to the adjustments made. The elephant in the room circles back to the split distribution through the drops - whether it be tradeables and/or untradeable goods. For a supposedly 18 man recommended party size expedition, the untradeable distribution is quite lackluster when considering parchments and souls are one of a kind items and there are only 2-4 (?) belts per clear. I really hope to see changes to push players to continue to gather weekly squads to attempt Von Leon instead of letting the boss eventually be attempted by maybe only 1-2 dedicated parties weekly. As more runs are being complete, the prices of the tradeable goods are slowly declining due to a higher supply and lack of demand. Another balance change I would like to bring up is the passing rate of the Von Leon's Chaos Scroll. I think the idea of having it fail at all is straight up atrocious. The amount of effort it takes after acquiring the Parchment post run is already such a big hurdle and this is usually crafted a few times since Von Leon Leon's belt can only be scrolled with the Von Leon's Chaos Scroll. My recommendation would be maybe adding a 500m fee alongside the current crafting to make it 100% pass rate. I am excited to see how the changes affect Von Leon next patch, fingers crossed it solves melee being a tad more useful instead of avenger just clearing the mobs
I like some of the changes being tested, but I think that fast 20m hp mobs that can stun could be a bit much. I know you probably didn't mean to implement all the changes mentioned together, but my suggestion would be: 1) No stuns on mobs 2) No changes that will force warriors to rush such as fast mobs that cannot be knocked, since then you will have to deal with rubberbanding 3) Find some middle ground with the mobs and not buff their HP all the way to 20m Also just to demonstrate how big of a buff the drops need, we just got the whole droptable, and it will only add up to about 300m in a 20-man split:
I want to preface this by saying that I think the goals you have chosen are fine but I don't agree with these speficic changes. Stun I think proposed stun debuff on gargoyles will add a lot of player frustration to a boss that right now feels both fair and fun (loss of character control is annoying in general and you will probably die to this + rocks in a unfair way too). I think stun on the bird is ok since it's so telegraphed. The "random stun just cause you stood too close to a mob" isnt a fun mechanic anywhere in the game and you should just axe the concept with new content you balance yourselves. Mob control Currently mob control is a joke with multiple players in the map. This is due to the mobs aggroing to "wrong players" (not rusher) because of proximity based aggro or stray attacks. This causes either rubberbanding or the mobs staying in place which is both very frustrating and wastes a lot of attacking time on the rusher. Getting the aggro back as a rusher seems to be highly random. Sometimes you can magnet once and sometimes it can take up to 30 seconds. Some of this can be circumvented with coordinated protocols such as nonrushers running away at the summon animation. Even then you are just playing around jank and at least on bosses like shao and cwk the bosses can choose a random player to aggro from far away and keep it for a long time anyways. Because of these issues I don't want any changes that demand the party to rush/magnet before they are fixed (if they even can be). That being said, if the aggro stuff is fixable I like the concept of mob control being a part of the fight. And lastly some questions I'm curious about: Is just mindlessly whacking away at summons on the side something that the warriors want out of the fight? (This is what I think the warrior role would've evolved to on the release version of vl) And do these proposed mob changes (or any other ones made in the thread) even make warriors preferable over buccs? Bucc multitarget has much better range than warriors and similar damage on 5-6 targets.
While this change is interesting where melee classes will be well loved, I strongly disagree with increasing Gargoyles's hp to 20mil, echoing @Donn1e, to find a middle ground between enough, and too much. A single auf clone is 10mil hp.. I do like the stun concept though. Bishop's Holy Shields are required when von leon summon spawns Snatch / Rush will be needed. players who continues to attack will prevent any sort of rushing skill from being effective, so communication is needed. All mobs needs to be gathered & cleaved by melees before holy shield ends. (I believe this might be useful for some HP calculations) If the mobs isn't killed before the end of holy shield, it will result in a DPS sink Will Bucc & Shadower outperform heros/Drks since they are able to hit up to 6 targets? I'm no pro in any melee content, but I do think 4 gargoyles spawns is just right. Buccs to hit 5 targets (4mobs + VL) and Heros/Drks to cap themselves at 3. Please take a look at the chart below, made by @Tsue
