In Discussion Content Rose Garden Nerf/Adjustments

I think we are focusing way too much on the meso gain. I do not think it is healthy long term for RG to be a powerful method of meso farming, and I agree with the sentiment that the meso portion of Rose Garden must be toned down; no other content invokes FOMO more than RG has in the months following release. At this point, we can confidently say that it's not because of the 'novelty'. That is, if RG has remained unchanged since release, we would still be fighting over channels (or well, we'd all be burnt out.)

We should focus on adding more depth to RG. It should compliment other content, and players should have multiple goals to choose from when deciding to invest time in RG. For example, bosses provide multiple rewards: untrades, EXP, profit. One may be motivated to recruit HT runs to grind an HTP, or simply to make profit, or all three. Or for example in CWK, one may run to only loot MoN, while giving up bonus stage to the other party members.

Here are some ideas to add more depth to the Rose Garden.


Enhance VL Chaos Scroll (VLCS) - There are multiple options for this.

I will use Auf Helm as a comparison. VL Belt as an end game item requires a significant time investment which is slightly different from auf. Auf scrolls and white scrolls can be bought. Additionally, auf scrolls and auf helmets can be farmed daily with relative ease (Duo/Solo runs). Finally, there is a statistical guarantee with auf helms; every passed 10% is guaranteed stat gain.

However, VL belt requires a consistent group of ~18 runners to run twice a week, and you must be consistent in crafting the VLCS (1x Parchment, 500x Burning Energy, 1x CS), given that parchment is one-of-a-kind and burning energy requires grinding. Not only do you have to loot a decent belt, but you also have to soul it (500M meso, 1x Medallion, 500 Totems). Then each VLCS has a chance to lower or raise the stats, with most players opting for white scrolling each VLCS attempt. This end game item will most likely result in pure attack gains and no secondary stats. Coupled with the required funds and effort, clearly VLCS caters to the hard core end game player base.

The burden may be alleviated by making parchment stackable, but one could also make the argument that VLCS 60% success rate is quite low for the current design regardless.

I suggest finding a way to enhance the VLCS via powders and a white scroll to something like 80%/100% depending on the effort required.

Enhance Potions
(Shiny Flower Powder is a spice )

Golden Onyx Apple: Combine onyx apple and powders to enhance the onyx apple's effect. This can be in the form of +110 attack and +150 magic attack. This gives less progressed players a reliable way to make up a bit for a lack in damage. I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to do so via naricains, VL pots, or gelts. I thought about a duration increase instead, but I don't think that is fitting/addresses anything. I didn't give much thought to the magic attack, but I recall @fuzzything44 having thoughts on tma pots in general.

Golden Peach: Combine peach ( ) from Mu Lung with powders to gain an item which increases maxHP % for a duration of time. This functionality should already be in the game in the form of Dojo item pickup buffs. I'm not sure if the client will recognize map restrictions for this kind of use item like it does for monster cards, but it's worth a try if one wants to restrict this item to the Lion King's Castle area (though, depending on the % gain, I don't think this restriction is necessary.) The purpose of this item is to accommodate players who have not yet gotten their HP over the required threshold for high HP bosses (VL in this case). It's an item which is grindable, but one would still be motivated to progress their character enough to not have to rely on it. And let's be real, hyper body is a shit requirement and leads to very clumsy situations, particularly in VL (I recall a VL run long ago where a night lord, of the prince variety, was jumping awkwardly in the corner waiting for his HBer to exit the jail room so he can avoid having to be reborn.)

One could consider a new accuracy potion but, I'm not sure if the maple pop market should be disturbed. For that, I would propose an accuracy potion which has increased duration and modest accuracy gain. But personally I would like to see a rework of cleric's bless to actually be useful.

Ifia's Ring - A Rework

Probably one of the more controversial items in the garden. I think this item should be removed from the King Castle Golem's drop table and instead made craft-able. As I said earlier, it'd be nice if RG caters to multiple desires from players. One desire being, 'I want to grind RG to get a decent new ring'.

I propose the ring be reworked in the following way:

One obtains Ifia's Ring , a no slot, 1 all stat ring with +50 HP and +50 MP. Basically, a clean ROA with no slot. This can be done in several ways

1. After x number of rose garden runs, along with the bouqet, the gardener Cecilia finds an old ring the castle golem dropped.
2. After x number of bouqet hand-ins, Ifia rewards the player with one of her old rings.
3. Idk, any other creative idea.

Then, one crafts a Noble Ifia's Ring which requires some number of powders. Noble Ifia's Ring is just as Ifia's ring is now (so same stats, same godly potential, and 1 slot) with perhaps slightly increased HP/MP, or maybe some other stats like accuracy, avoidability, or speed/jump. Personally I'd probably add avoidability.

The objective here is to make the ring more in line with other items, like the ring/earrings from EPQ, LPQ glasses, and so on. Right now, the scale is tipped too far over to the side of RNG. Instead, we can make it a bit better by saying to the player 'if you purposefully aim toward this ring, you will be able to make one for every x hours of effort', in contrast to now.

This rework encourages and requires:
a) Consistent participation in the first three stages.
b) Mandatory participation in the bonus stage; a more significant time investment than simply daily running the boss quickly.

Ifia's rings already exist in player inventories and such, but I think swapping them for a Noble Ifia's ring in a server check is a small price to pay for a rework. The rings do not have to be rerolled, if possible, other than rolling any additional stat that is added (Acc, speed/jump, more HP/MP, etc.)

Side note: I did like an idea of making Ifia's ring a ROA sink, but I'm not sure how that would work without it just being a sacrifice of trash ROA, or hard requiring a clean ROA, which I think would be too expensive.


Other

1. The first map should be slightly reworked to better accommodate F/P mages. See @Phanta 's posts here and here.

2. No, bees should not automatically target you. The whole point of the bees flying and spawning randomly is to reward player attention. Increasing the timer, or adding 'rose' objects that they target may be acceptable (this is possible). Their speed is a bit frustrating.

3. King Castle Golem should only drop three things in my opinion. NX, burning energy, and totems. Speaking of, the burning energy amount added in the last server check is puzzling, what is the justification for this single digit figure? The boss takes at least 10 minutes to down if we include stages 1 and 2. That does not even come close to golem party rates or RG third map rates.

4. An item exchange - I pitched this idea some time ago, but it does not make sense here. I don't think we need yet another item exchange in the form of potions/equips/scrolls. People keep pitching this idea, but are not descriptive of what the exchange would provide exactly.

5. Give the etc. drops some purpose.
Frozen Rose Petal
Loose Chain
Dried Rose Vine

Some ideas include:

• Adding them as ingredients required to craft the enhanced scroll/potions/Noble Ifia's Ring. Cecilia needs some fertilizer from the rose petals/dried rose vine. Or loose chain is needed to 'fortify' Ifia's ring.
• Perhaps the following 'item exchange' solution would work: x number of etcs in exchange for some randomized amount of burning energy. Think of it as 'harvesting' the energy from the garden or something. With this burning energy would be removed from the mini golems in RG. At this point we have rough estimates for how many mobs a player can down in 30 minutes inside RG, so these numbers shouldn't be too hard to decide. (I'd guess the average lies somewhere around 500-600 mobs with a slightly large variance.)

With any changes to these etc. items and how they are used, one should consider making them untradeable.

6. Ring scrolls - I'm not sure where these should go or if they should be moved to somewhere else. I think RG can only fit so much.

In Conclusion

I think overall RG provides some good ideas and a good template for a piece of content that rounds out the area of LKC. I've had some other ideas here and there, but I decided to outline some main ideas here that I or others have had, and I tried to be as specific as possible in how they should be implemented. Of course, I've left many things open for interpretation, and many of the ideas may be modified/improved upon. The goal of a RG rework in my mind is:

• I used this word a lot, but add 'depth' to the content. Currently, it feels very shallow and as someone described it adequately, it feels like a mobile game daily cash out. I'm proud of the content we delivered, but it can much better; there is unrealized potential.
• Cater to multiple goals players may have: currently RG is simply a money machine to most, if not all players.
• Building on the previous point, make it so using things like powders or totems is a decision process. A player asks themselves 'do I want totems for totem gach or do I want to craft?' or 'Do I sell my powders for pure mesos, or do I use my powders to grind for Ifia's ring/enhanced items.' If you notice, in all my proposals the powder is a crafting ingredient. I think it is necessary that powders have several uses.
• Ultimately, the monetary power of powders should be decreased a bit with some compromise, and shifted over to something like totems which are more randomized (and provide money in item form.)

My post mostly neglects how mage mains (all 5 of them) might feel about the content for mages, but I can only contribute/address so much. I hope that my ideas and intentions come across clearly. Feel free to build upon any of these ideas or fix what you think might be broken, or just reject it. I hope this post proves somewhat useful. Thanks for reading.

 

I'd recommend 100%, otherwise people will still end up WSing and it's just going to be extra expensive. Would definitely be a nice addition, belt is already hard enough - let's give more incentive for people to go for it.

Seems fun, although it can't take too many powders or else it'll be more expensive than gelt/demon elixir costs (yes, gelts are untradable but I still put a meso value on them of ~20m). 150 tma is too low in the current meta - I'd just use cheese instead. But mage scaling is weird and would need an entirely separate conversation if significant reworks were to actually happen.

STRONGLY against this just because that was so absolutely hilarious. Sure you can argue it's good for the game and makes content more accessible and all, but that was such a funny moment.

Reworking bless seems hard - making it 40 acc would then compete with amorian baskets, reducing their value. Maybe that's fine, maybe there's other ways, but IDK. It'd be nice for bless to be useful but I'd prefer to have bishops support in more active ways than just buffs. Maybe add a bit of accuracy (40-60) to the gold apple?

I'm personally fine if the ring stays in the drop table - it's still pretty rare to get. It should definitely have a way for players to specifically target crafting it though.

As for ROA sink, one option (which may or may not be possible) is to have it keep the stats of the ROA, but gain 1 slot (and to work with legacy rings, probably 1 allstat). Use a 1/1/1/1 failed roa to craft? You get a 2/2/2/2 1 slot ifia. Use a 6/6/6/6 roa? You get a 7/7/7/7 1slot ifia. If it's too hard to deal with unscrolled roa (2/2/2/2 2 slot ifia), maybe require it to be fully scrolled to craft. This is also how I think reverse/timeless weapons should work (with a way to reset the level if you rolled bad wa gains when leveling).

I'm not an FP so I don't have many comments on this but I'm responding to everything else so I didn't want it to feel excluded.

Bees do move too fast. Almost as fast as the 190% speed lv 200 mount. As for "rose" objects, they already do target specific areas, so it'd probably just be adding a visual cue to those places they target without any actual coding changes? Wouldn't make a huge difference for hardcore players but would make things a bit more forgiving to players doing garden for the first time/casually, so I'm all for it.

It's possible for strong attackers to down in <10 mins. But that's still such a low amount of energy, I think around 10 weeks to craft 1 VL cs from the boss. I literally throw away all my energy and think it's too low. Imo boss drop table is fine as-is, with ring/nx/burn/totems/earring/rose earring/scrolls. Most of the items are pretty rare so it doesn't feel too full to me, and the rose earring is a nice thematic touch, even though it's useless as an item.

This is one of the things I disagree with. Personally, part of the charm of this game is that not everything is useful and some items exist purely for flavor reasons. If made untradable it would also force people to farm in maps they're bad at/don't like which IDK if that's something we want.

They do fit thematically with Ifia's ring. Not really sure where else would be good. Maybe keep them here for now and move to some new content added in the future? At least the drop rate was significantly reduced with removal of boxes, that helped a lot.

It being purely a money machine is probably one of the biggest issues with it right now. If the ring was removed I bet 90% of people running it would still run.

Bit unclear here - I'd recommend reducing bee rates, instead of reducing powder NPC value. I'm sure some people have a ton of powder saved up and it'd be kind of mean to nerf that suddenly. Imo a 25-30% reduction of bees (and then cap removal) would likely put this content in a good state for meso generation

Mage main here, seems fine although I'd probably only run for the ring (I still do want a 7 int one, 6 is a settle!).

 

I agree, though my wording could have been clearer there. If a WS is required, then yes the enhancement should make it 100%. Otherwise, a less expensive enhancement cost could justify a smaller boost to 80%.

Yea, I didn't give much thought to the tma. As for how many powders, in my mind the number was around 2, but this depends a bit on if there will be any changes to bee rate/powder value.

Indeed this crossed my mind. I'm a fan of stuff like 'transposing' (for example, like how sweetwater items in GMS worked.) I just do not like how it is a boss drop right now. Like I mentioned, I think it is too rng dependent with how it is obtained along with the stats. There should be a way to make it less painful to the player but preserve the time investment required.

To my knowledge they are just behaving like regular flying mobs. That is, they spawn, pick a platform, fly over to the platform, then hover over it for some amount of time. Matt definitely knows more about this than I do. What I meant by being attracted to rose objects is that a custom mob can be made with the same image used for the rose reactors in stage 1, and then they can be set to be targeted by bees, but not take damage from them. Though when I think about it more, I'd probably just scrap this idea, since it'd require a client edit or two to get a perfect result (for example, the only implementation of this I know of would result in the rose objects having HP bars over them.) Actually, this could be remedied by them having vertically high transparent pixels to push the HP bar up and out of the map. So, it might actually be feasible. I'm rambling at this point, lol.

Of course.

Honestly, I may have went a bit over board in suggesting my point number 3, that KCG should only drop nx totems and energies. The earrings completely slipped my mind. I don't mind those being there. But I do maintain that the ring should be adjusted. If I'm in the minority on that point, then so be it haha.

These are good points. I don't think I'm qualified to really have an opinion in this regard, but I wanted to bring visibility to a suggestion that I thought was overlooked. If what you say is correct then that's fine. On first thought though, I think it's possible to slightly rework Map 1 without buffing it for the other jobs. But yea, I'm not going to put my money where my mouth is and come up with a design. It seems that this disparity forced a different playstyle for the player whose post I linked and they enjoyed it, so it may be okay to leave it as is.

I'd probably base my number around what number of burning energy I'd expect belt grinders to need per week (for example, 2 VLCS is 1000 burning energy, so it would be reasonable to obtain 10% of that in a week?) It is arbitrary, but I'd say a range of 10-15 (so 70-105 per week). Or, just remove them, as I agree, the boss is lackluster and a glorified castle golem. The single digit figure just feels off-putting; I had to do a double take when I did the boss after the server check.

On a side note, there was the idea of exchanging totems to burning energy (lore wise, or aesthetically this would look natural). Would serve as an additional totem sink, but then obtaining totems and burning energy from mobs seems kind of redundant, and it's probably best to keep them separate. I could go either way on that, but it's not something I'll advocate for.

 

I know this is probably irrelevant, but most of the comments here are fairly against the mesos income factor of the bees, so I wanted to mention this. As a pretty casual (one character, far from perfectly funded) player, the fact that I have any sort of stable income (which is not based on luck from boss drops / gach gambles) that doesn't force me to create a mage character which I have no intereset in actually playing, level it to 4th job, possible fund it, and dedicate hours of my life to selling leech (which is pretty hard to do even if I had the time to) is a blessing.

That being said, I understand the potentinal for abuse if you RG from multiple characters and make a shitload of mesos daily.

 

Out of pure curiosity, do you still RG post nerf for the mesos or have the nerfs pushed you away from it completely?

How does this compare to other potential single client content such as APQ, potentially CWK (If you're a SE/Bottom attacker I can see you getting in CWK somewhat easily while single clienting), etc.

"Bit unclear here - I'd recommend reducing bee rates, instead of reducing powder NPC value. I'm sure some people have a ton of powder saved up and it'd be kind of mean to nerf that suddenly. Imo a 25-30% reduction of bees (and then cap removal) would likely put this content in a good state for meso generation"- @nut

Couldn't Matt just remove the shiny powder drop from bees with a server check/update and write in a new powder drop with a new NPC value? Can even keep the same name and just change the post server check values perhaps?

I know when I returned from my 3 year break, my legacy return to town scrolls would warp me from Heartstopper farming map to Haunted House, while my post break scrolls would warp me to NLC

 

I started RG about 2 days before the nerf, so I kept going afterwards. I get 18~21 bees (im a pally lvl 18x). I don't really run cwk because im a paladin, and I haven't apqd in a while but when I did i wouldn't get 10 apples daily, so it's a better income.

 

After the recent nerfs, man it feels so bad running rose garden now. I dont know why its like they try to make everything in the game beside selling leech feel unrewarding. I feel like there is an overlying issue where everything feels so bad in comparison to brain dead leeching people on a bishop. Boss runs take so much time and are almost always dry. What is the point of being high lvl and strong if I can barely make money through my strength? The one thing that felt rewarding was rose garden and even that's been nerfed and is comparable to just selling skele leech on a bishop now. It's like we are forced to make money only through bishops and leech and every other class can waste time bossing and trying to compete with the most mind numbing method of making meso in the game.

 

Don't really RG much after nerf. In fact have not RG for consecutive 4 days. Ever since the first nerf I think it is no longer crowded anymore. There is only 2 occassions I not able to find an empty cc after rotating 20 ccs after 1st nerf, including during Anniversary Event, and I mostly do that during Asia after work hours.

I still don't get how RG makes people less likely to boss, afterall everyone spend their mesos on gears and what gears can do other than bossing. It did make people less likely to do other kind of farming (selling leech, quad farming etc) as they are in direct competition, but I think all different farming still have their own pros and cons and people still continue doing all kind of farming isn't it? You go for whichever suit you depending if you have buyer, have additional laptop or have high level character(s).

Exchanging bees for mesos may be "shallow" but it is something elites and non-elites can celebrate. Exchanging it for potions or VL scroll may only favour elites as most people do not care about difference between + 100 atk and 120 atk and are happy with Dojo belt.

Can we increase bees capping to 25 (+4) please?

 

Done 20-30 runs as a Lvl 170-174 NL with 5.4k clean range using 3 apples + 2 heartstoppers per run. First 2 stages take 6-10min depending on drop rng while the boss takes 10min to kill leaving me with 20-24min in bonus.

For bonus, I've only tried Room 1 and get an average ~13 bees. Got 20 bees once and 6-7 bees (just enough to cover attack pot cost) 3 times. Kinda wish the bee rate was higher. Idk if room 2/3 is better, 3 is hard cause no knockback. My rotation is something like tt (or avenger if theres enough of them) the left 2 top platforms, then right top 2, then agro bot, then tt (or avenger) top left 2 while bot gathers, then kill bot, then top right 2, agro bot, etc. I also use ninja storm 30 on the top platforms to push mobs to the edge so I can avenger 2 platforms at once. I think with the maps/spawn as they are, if my rotation was 100% optimal I could be avengering 6 mobs at once almost all of the time. If any NLs know what the best strategy is I'd like to hear it.

Bee consistency feels bad. I often go 4-5 minutes without a single bee while other times I'll get like 5 bees in 2 minutes. It's pretty disappointing to invest 40 minutes of your time and watch the clock counting down while you're still stuck at 5-8 bees 36 minutes in and none are spawning.

The funnest part for me is flash jumping to snag a bee, especially when there are multiple ones flying around at once but this is uncommon and I've never seen more than 3 at a time. Even if no other changes are made I think it would be a big improvement on the fun and consistency if the cap and spawn rate were doubled while their value was halved. Or separate the timers so that the bonus was only 12.5-15min, double the spawn rate, and keep value/cap the same. That way I could save 2 apples and take my time on the first stages/boss, or use them anyway just to speed things up if I was making enough in bees not to care. As is, 30 min of the same sweaty mobbing every day is getting kind of tedious, especially when apq has no cost, rewards me just as much per time spent, and is way more brain dead/comfy.

 

I'd be a big fan of this, running after bees to catch them is fun. I remember just running around trying to get all the bees when it first released (100% spawn rate, but I didn't know how much they were worth). Was such an enjoyable experience.

 

What?

 

I think its because RG took 40minutes each character. There was no reason to boss if you had like 3+ characters to rose garden on and RG was assured pure meso.

Rather than spend 2hrs running HT (recruiting, finding buyer, random downtime) for potential mesos

You could finish 3 Rose Gardens in that time.

During anni event, as well as pre-nerf RG, I as well as many other late game players pretty much dropped bossing. Rose Garden was amazing meso and let us test our strength in it, and we did it on multiple characters and it took hours out of our day.

After Rose Gardening for 2-3 hours and making ~500m, there is little financial reasons to do other bosses. Of course there are exp or untradeable drop reasons though.

Also now that the playerbase is getting older, most of us don’t have 8 hours+ to play anymore and in the limited time some of us have, RG is convenient with no recruitment or muling needed with amazing return value.

Nowadays you definitely see an increase again in HT recruitment via smegas/my own friends.

That being said, I think the nerfs were a bit too much. And can we get more energy please then 6-9 lol.

 

Or at least buff the ring drop rate please....

 

So i have been rg almost daily since the nerf and I gotta say it feels pretty shit. You need to get pretty lucky with the seeds / keys drops in stage 1 or 2, or you get shit time on bon and don't reach the cap. Even if you did get somewhat lucky and you start the bonus with decent time, you need to get lucky with the bees spawn (I've had 7~8 mins with no bees, pretty frequently even). I don't mind the content being based on luck, sort of like APQ, but the difference is there is a bee cap now. meaning, when you run rose garden, your only goal is to reach the cap. Anything belows the cap (considering you can reach 20 bees and have been reaching it pretty often) feels like a failure.
If you're unlucky = you lose mesos. if you get lucky = you gain.. what? extra 5 minutes? the relief of reaching the cap today?

This makes for a frustrating, unfun content. You could always say "just don't run it then" but for a non rich player with decent fund/gear you can't just "give up" on a potential 100m daily payout.
And don't get me startd about the bees/earrings drops tbh

TLDR i need the mesos, i don't have time to run consistently other content and i might still give RG up because it feels so shit rn

 

Just as you wrote this, I had a delightful run that took 3+3.5min to clear the first two stages coupled with minis incessantly spawning at the bottom in the boss.

And this was with arch mage which is decent for clearing the first two stages, I can only wonder how awful it can get with other classes.

 

RG feels so bad since the last update (reducing bees from 21 -> 20)
I think something is bugged since this change, my lvl 190 DK went from doing it in approx. 30 min average to around 36 min average.
My lvl 200 buccaneer doesn't even finish 20 bees when I was comfortably doing that with 5 minutes spare before the last update

as a funded player (50+ cgs, perf weapons and good untradeables) I don't see how the spawn rate makes sense - and should be increased
also I think spawn % is currently bugged, since no change was done beside the one I specified on top

 

You guys are still doing Rose Garden? I've completely quit RG.

I've started Ice Valley 2 farming after realizing how futile it is trying to get RG buffed to a point where it doesn't feel awful catching 21 20 Bees.

 

I hate FMing so RG is amazing for pure mesos, and I can do it without using a mage, but my regular bosser chars. I can also do it on my 200 char without needing to LHC golem for energy so that's nice. Provides all the items needed for VL item crafts (Till ya'll took out CS f3, but I guess the NX lets you gach. Well, and I guess ores). Overall love it.