In Discussion Class/Skill [Feedback Request] Skill Changes and Balancing

ngl I'm a bit salty about the fact that NLs got the ability to push back boss mobs (as weak as it is even) and not archers....

We're the support class, NLs are the DPS class. Seems backwards that we would have to rely on them to push stuff for us and not the other way around. A large part of our kit is centered around pushing: we have TWO whole skills (PKB and Dragon Breath) AND a passive melee kb. I think it would have suited us much better to be a "pusher" than NLs.

I'm guessing this was just a quick fix for how ranged LHC got broken by the aggro changes? Is this the intended end state or will more classes get pushing ability? Because if it stays this way long term it looks pretty bad for archers. We're now the only class that can't push besides shads or corsairs (and we need it much more than they do because we can't attack at close range and we can't reposition well due to no mobility).

Please show us some love too....

 

Night lord mobbing increase avenger damage

Speed up ninja ambush cast time and remove animation lock.

Increase damage/ range too

 

Fixing dragon's breath to no longer slingshot mobs was a great start, but I agree that archers should be able to knockback boss mobs as well, especially if NL's are now able to do it.

 

Increase the success rates please
Shadow Web:80%→100%
Shadow Meso:10%→100%

Increase the chance of Shadow Meso will help NLs who are the worst class for RG

 

Realistically, this will not help. You cannot buff a class by buffing its least useful skill, because skill builds don't allow you to max everything. There is no Hermit skill that is worth resetting SP out of in order to max Shadow Meso.
(This is also why I think it is dumb to buff Shield Mastery for the classes that have it)

 

I don't think so.

Firstly, we can put 11 points into Shadow Meso before 4th job advancement and we can max out all of 4th job skills except Ninja Ambush at 189 level.
It means we will have 30+ extra SP, which is enough for MW30 and HW10 (5 SP from Olaf)

Secondly, we can max Shadow Meso out while 3rd job since Meso Up is useless for funded player or end game player.
I don't use Meso Up. And I don't remember the last time I casted it.

 

We could make Shadow Meso a 100% chance to do the useful thing (removing wdef up) starting at lv1 and just scale the damage up as you add SP

 

So as an endgame mage player, I've been thinking about mage balance a lot, and in what ways it's broken, and I think I've come up with a pretty solid theory around it (that also helps explain why archers are also so bad). The more I think about it, the more I can generalize this to class balance in general, and any proposed "fix" for a class that doesn't take it into account will just straight up not work - this explains why I think making rage stackable is a bad idea (in addition to consistency and powercreep issues, but those are a separate issue) even.

Let's start with two simple questions:

• What's the commonly given reason for why mages can't be buffed?
• Why are there virtually no endgame mage mains around? (Seriously, I can count them on one hand. How many auf'd mages are there on the server? 2? Now how many auf'd shads do you think there are?)

The answers are:

• Mages are too good at farming meso, so buffing them would make them OP
• Mages are too weak at bossing

Or, in simplified terms:

• Mages are too strong to buff
• Mages are too weak to main

Despite seeming contradictory, both these statements are actually true. So how do we resolve this difference? I solve it with something I call a utility curve - how much utility does a class give for a given amount of funding.

Let's take a step back and look at NL, which is a bit simpler. Unfunded NLs kind of suck. Funded NLs can be ridiculous. An NL with 10% higher range is worth... around 10% more (potentially even above 10% due to some bosses with tight time restrictions, but we'll say 10% for now) because bosses have high HP and that extra 10% damage will actually be useful on them. Since stat gains tend to cost exponentially more to upgrade gear, I'll graph it on a logarithmic scale, getting NL's utility curve to look something like this:



Pretty basic, just a straight line giving you more utility as you invest more. As expected.

Mages are a bit different:


(Note that these lines are absolutely not meant to be read relative to each other)

We can see that mages immediately have high utility (since you can mage farm with literal naked mages), and a couple jumps where you unlock new leech zones (uwu2 and skele/petri). Past that, it pretty much flattens out - once you can 1hit skele, what does additional investment in a mage get you? You're already at your maximum meso/hr possible. At this point, extra investment is for:

• Rose garden speed (but warriors can finish all bees practically before you even start on bonus anyways, so just play a warrior instead)
• HT dark wyverns (another very very small increase at 1600 tma I guess, but most of the time I don't even kill mobs on my bishop due to HT mechanics making me want to keep mobs alive. And it's not that hard for an attacker to clear them out
• I guess max hp/healing in Von Leon? But that's not really much of an issue for most bishops.
• Niche LHC farming strats, which should probably be nerfed/removed and still takes other classes anyways. Also not widely known, so not really something most people can do.

In other words, once you have the equivalent of 35 CGS on a mage, the class is done. No need to further invest in it. There's no further utility gains because it's all frontloaded to the start of the curve.

And this is why we can see mages are broken: too high of utility on the low investment part of the curve, and too low utility on the high investment. Making them worth playing would require fixing the high investment curve (which there's many ways to do, buffing damage being the most boring of which), but then they'd start high utility and go to even higher.

I'm not really sure how to decrease their early utility - mage farming is far too ingrained in the server, and decreasing it too much will make the new player experience much worse if they can't sell leech. It would have to be a complicated solution, probably involving changing most mage farming maps to no longer be worth it, and changing higher level/higher investment maps to be the new mage farming spots - that way mage farming still exists (because as much as I think it should be removed, it's simply too ingrained into the server's economy to remove at this point), but requires higher investment - you need to go further up the investment/utility curve to do it.

Archers actually have a very similar problem, although it should be easier to solve. They get a significant amount of utility frontloaded in the form of SE, and then their damage scales poorly so they get lower (but nonzero, unlike mage) utility gains with investment, causing there to be very few endgame archers. Especially MM, which have the whole snipe vs strafe issue at the high end further reducing the slope of their utility curve.

As a side note, let's look at paladins:

(again, don't reference the absolute values of other classes, just the general shape of the curves)

They start at a decent point (crash + hammer) and scale pretty decently, until they start hitting damage cap, at which point they fall off hard, as additional investment only helps your minimum range. This is a perfect illustration of why the damage cap is a bad mechanic, and why removing it would potentially be the only change needed for pally (I'd still like hammer animation speed improvements to keep it worth using at high investment, but that's a more minor issue).

I said at the start that this explains why the common hero suggestion of making rage stackable won't work. I'd hope things are obvious at this point, but this would put heros in the same place archers are now - high initial utility, but poor scaling with investment, therefore relegated to mostly mule status.

---

Here's my proposed changes for fixing bishop high end utility scaling. I understand fully that these are not nostalgic changes and many might be against them because of that, but it would be a significant improvement in my opinion:

• Change holy shield duration from 40 seconds to (30 seconds + 1 second / 100 TMA)
• Change bless effect to scale the accuracy/avoid based off TMA (this might be a bit difficult to implement, I'm not sure)
• Change Mana Reflection to be a guardian-like party buff (as in, when it reflects an attack you ignore the attack. The actual reflected damage is practically worthless anyways) with the % chance to reflect scaling off TMA.
• A minor AR buff because that skill is absolute garbage. Seriously, it's only 10% better than genesis under optimal conditions on single target, and has a significantly smaller hitbox so you often don't get optimal conditions.

This doesn't give bishops a significant damage buff, but instead increases their support/utility in a way that encourages investing in them. Which makes sense, because they're supposed to be a support class, not a DPS class!


I don't have ideas for I/L and F/P as I don't really play them, but feel free to give your input on how to give them a unique class identity.

As for fixing low end utility of mages, that would take a much more comprehensive look at leeching and mage farming maps, along with the damage formulas and mob HPs. There's simply no easy fix



Edit:

As a side note, when looking at what classes are most popular, I would recommend looking at the amount of characters of that class (at 4th job) to get the base curve, but also looking at the amount of characters with perf weapons (or even auf helms) to see what the high investment curve looks like. I think this would be a very illuminating statistic and would show just how neglected classes like mages, archers, and paladins actually are at high investment. Just pure class choice is a misleading datapoint by itself.

 

I used to suggest a way to strengthen Mage bossing capability while nerfing Mage farming capability:
Using certain skill books at levels 40/50/60 or even 70/80, we could make bossing skills and farming skills mutually exclusive, since 4th job SP is limited to only 243 points.
(And we can add the 40up skill book to high Lv map /new maps)
(I/L and F/P each have three different elemental bossing skills on 4th job. )

However, this suggestion didn’t take into account the “equipment scaling issue” you mentioned:

• A 10% weapon attack scroll clearly boosts DPS much more than a 10% magic attack scroll.
• Any solution must not affect the low-level gameplay ecosystem.

Therefore, adding a Lv. 180+ mage weapon (with a high LUK requirement) and providing exclusive magic attack weapon scrolls could potentially address this part of the problem.

 

Ok here are some inputs for some NL changes:

I started a nl afresh starting from a point of crappy gear since 2024 Q4 and recently hit lv200 a few months back - so this perspective could be valuable, from a pov of a new nl player that is: insights are from experience playing a nl with no pro cgs or equips backing me up (I define an average lv200 new NL pretty much as 30 wa cgs and wa 80 red craven)

Mainly can be summarized into 2 points:

1. NL mobbing totally sucks, and this is very detrimental for them in many end-game content such as: LHC / RG / VL.
2. I noted the direction of previous NL changes were towards making them more expensive to play; and if this is the intent then accordingly Alchemist / Meso up should be removed entirely, especially Alchemist so every class will have 10 mins appo duration.

NL mobbing totally sucks, and this is very detrimental for them in many end-game content such as: LHC / RG / VL.

LHC
- I wanted to comment more about this but it seems like it's quite widely accepted that Ranged LHC sucks in royals, and thinking about it.. yup, probably too tough to even balance out so I'll drop this point​

RG
- One of the most popular daily content in royals is RG, and as many NL players probably know, NLs rank amongst the worst jobs to do RG daily due to their extremely bad mobbing; whereas most other lv200 classes can go full stopper to get 20 bees, a lv200 NL with the same amount of funded gear must go full appo instead to get 20 bees. For context I had to use 3 gelts to get 20 bees (gg NL?)

- The solution for this currently, is that a NL must get a SE buff prior to entering RG, which makes the requirement to even do RG as a NL tough since they have to make SE mules (and park it literally outside RG), or permanently get an archer friend to be your rg slave demanding him to come and buff you whenever. This helps remedy 5 minutes out of the 40 minutes RG content somewhat, with a SE buff I'm able to get 20 bees after using 1 appo (rest stopper).

VL
- NL is just E tier in terms of clearing mobs in VL. Or maybe just F tier, which is the get f**ked tier.

​

A solution to counteract all of these is to buff Avenger's dmg.

A bonus plus point of buffing Avenger is that this would not affect bossing DPS and hence would not have any movement to the DPS charts, since every rebalance here carefully considers the impact of changes towards DPS charts (from what I can tell)


I noted the direction of previous NL changes were towards making them more expensive to play; and if this is the intent then accordingly Alchemist / Meso up should be removed entirely, especially Alchemist so every class will have 10 mins appo duration.

- Preferably just remove the skill Meso up altogether, and remove the buff duration increase for Alchemist skill
- Also, on the topic of skill removal, Ninja Ambush should be just removed. I can't see a use for it at all and have never used it in my entire playthrough till 200 (I used taunt occasionally for my daily reuel questing despite how useless and slow it is)


Any NL's here can chime in their inputs too, they are just so bad in the above contents that it's kind of obscene. I kind of regret making a NL anyway, I feel like I should have went Shad (then i can duo att client using a bucc), rip


Thanks for reading

 

I'll throw in my input, since it's been getting more and more annoying to play SE. I'll review the bowmaster changes and give some feedback. Right now playing as SE is just underwhelming in almost every regard. Bowmasters do have a few niche scenarios they feel *decent* in due to range and hamstring, but i would trade hamstring utility for being good at literally anything else. I don't play MM, but i do know they have it worse in a lot of regards, i'll let them speak for themselves (my only idea is they get a personal SI to get them up to attack speed cap). I don't think SE's should have to be mid just because 1 other class becomes really good with their buff. And the good news is to all of you who seem to be terrified that archers might actually be able to contribute decent damage for once, I think most of the necessary changes are QoL, and not straight damage buffs. There's no content that SE's truly shine, just content we're tolerated in for SE.
Let SE's eat, we've earned it.

Bowmaster

• Arrows: Implement a new rechargeable set of arrows (craftable) ** Would be nice, but not really necessary.
  
• Dragons Breath:
  • enable it in LHC ** would be nice, once again, but also not really necessary
    
  • allow it to work close range ** tier 1 pick, would be extremely nice QoL change
    
  • allow it to work mid-air **meh, not really necessary
    
  • increase its vertical range ** only necessary if change above is implemented
• Power Knockback:
  • enable it in LHC ** more balanced than DB in LHC, but still not necessary
• Concentrate:
  • give it a temporary stance rate ** Get this in the game yesterday, make it stance through the whole duration. a full strength stance, I feel, Isn't out of the question, but at a bare minimum something like 50% stance to solidify archers as being a middle ground between Warriors and Thieves.
    
  • give it an increased crit rate ** Increased crit rate should just be added standard to crit shot
    
  • let it stack with atk potions ** yes, but honestly if they gave it stance, i wouldn't mind just seeing the attack buff go away, that way it could be a true utility skill to make BM far more enjoyable to play
  • NEW: Remove cooldown ** Just let this be a new utility that BM's get to increase damage uptime and reduce the need for constant repositioning.
• Phoenix:
  • increase its damage ** I would be more in favor of a decreased attack interval over a straight damage buff. This would let it inherently do more damage, but also change targets faster when needed in open world bossing.
    
  • give it fire damage over time** Would be nice to see fire based attacks provide fire DoT's, but not important seeing as DoT's are pretty much turned off in the end game content.
    
  • let it be summonable simultaneously with Silver Hawk ** not a huge fan, too much visual clutter.
    
  • Give it a buff icon that you can cancel ** please, i hate that we have a whole attacking skill that we wish we could just turn off, but it is what it is
  • NEW: Buff attacking range ** Ever since the ability to AFK farm with summons was gutted, I don't see why our birds can't have increased range to also attack what we are attacking at a distance. Right now, birds are almost strictly a visual skill only, they just passively fly around you while out of range of most bosses we fight.
• Focus: increase its avoidability ** not that important if concentrate gets stance
  
• Puppet: Give it a buff icon that you can cancel ** Not really important since recasting puppet removes agro from whatever is on it
• Critical Shot:
  • NEW: buff crit rate by 10% ** This gives us base crit rate on par with NL's. truely the only major damage buff I think BM's should get

 

I mean, NT crafting is right there, would be an easy place to add

 

I'm just trying to focus out what I think are the necessary buffs before getting to the smaller ones. I agree it would be an easy change, but others IMO still have much higher priority. Seems that changes for classes are few and far between, and I'd be upset if the only thing archers got was a craftable quiver and then left to rot for a few more years.

 

I appreciate this thoughtful analysis and I definitely agree with it!

I think one other aspect to consider when it comes to utility is how "stackable" it is. Maybe it's another dimension on the graph or something (a 3d graph? it kinda hurts my brain lol). For example, if you add a second NL to the party, their utility curves stack on top of each other because they're now both providing that much more damage, so they are fully stackable. If you add a second SE to the party, the second one loses all their value of having SE because the SE part of the curve doesn't stack. So the outcome is a lot less utility overall. This is what makes shads and buccs so OP. Not only does their damage stack, but their buffs do too. More Shads = more smoke. More Buccs = more TLs. In fact, Buccs kinda even multiply their utility based on how many shads are present. Their utility is insane when stacked.

In the case of bs, mostly just res stacks. With the current suggestions ppl have for buffing rage for heros, I think that also won't stack.

This is important because a stackable class is also less likely to be muled. Most players aren't sweaty enough to make 4-5 shad mules for more smoke, so they rely on recruiting actual shad mains to provide the smoke. But if you only need 1 of that class to provide its max utility, it's feasible to just fill that with a mule.

When your class isn't stackable, you also get what us SE mains constantly have to deal with: "sorry, we already have SE". Despite having such a useful buff, it's actually hard to get into content sometimes as an SE main, because even in larger content like a 12 person VL run, they pretty much only want 1 SE out of those 12 ppl. This will happen with heroes too if rage is buffed but does not stack well. They will take 1 hero and turn the rest away.

 

@ImVeryJelly



Yeah very good points about stackable utility (and another reason shad is so busted) - effectively if it's non stackable your lose that massive initial starting utility so your curve is shifted downwards if your class already exists, which for classes that already have a relatively flat curve doesn't end well.

Buccs don't multiply with each other (and generally their utility isn't stackable until you have smoke to TL, or ress but VL is the least run boss), but it does multiply with smoke, and shads/buccs are already so strong...
Smoke utility, unlike any other party buff in the game, actually has higher utility the more you have, which is just wrong. Not sure how you'd fix that though, seems like a difficult client edit to limit it.

I think the downside with stackable buffs though is that people just would start making full parties out of whichever is the best, and ignoring everything else. Keeping buffs non stackable is an easy way to help class diversity a little bit by forcing people to play suboptimal characters for the buff. It just tends to break down when they're so suboptimal after losing the buff that they're not worth bringing at all (too flat of a slope on the curve)

 

smokescreen should be a map-shared skill, at least in boss maps. cooldown shared upon use across all shadowers in the same map regardless of party. shouldn't be hard to code at all.

 

not sure, if CD is shared and someone misplaces or uses a smoke at a wrong time it's gg



Small Bucc Feedback


Bucc's Energy Orb damage decreases as it bounces off enemies.
Skill is fun and sometimes helps clearing the screen (Zakum's or HT's spawns and such) but as the damage is reduced among bounces it makes the smile fade away.

Sometimes buccs deal 10k-20k damage on the last target and at this point I think dps is better or equal when using Energy Blast.
Why use energy-powered skills? because they're fun, so far only useful energy-based skill post 4th job is Drain and it's still pretty situational, not asking for a damage buff, just consistency on this funky skill

 

Thinking about Sylafia's well-argued point, I’d argue that MapleStory lacks something other MMOs provide through class specializations.

I briefly played a Priest in WoW many years ago, and you could choose between Holy, Shadow, or Discipline. Even as a healer, you had different playstyles: a pure healer, a DPS/DoT caster, or a shield-focused hybrid.

The issue in Maple is that mages are shoehorned into a single specialization—quantity over quality. Sure, other classes also get pigeonholed (Axe Hero, Polearm Dark Knight, etc.), but at least the design intent was there.

Then 4th job came along and cookie-cuttered all the mages.

• F/P was meant to be the DoT mage.
  
  
• I/L had freezes, stuns, and crowd control elements.
  
  
• Bishops were obviously designed for support.
  

But 4th job ultimates reduced them to little more than “Cherry, Blue Raspberry, and Lemon” flavors of the same magic.

So my response to the argument “Mages are too strong to buff, yet too weak to main” is this: isolate their strengths. Keep their farming ability intact and let vanilla Maple play out, but don't let them do everything at once. Make them choose. Nerf farming, but give it back as is if they choose that route. Or let them exchange it for a main focused play-style.

How that gets implemented is for someone more code-savvy than me to figure out, but here are some rough brainstorms. I don’t think these are polished or even feasible, and I admit I’m biased as a mage main, so take these as starting points for discussion—not serious proposals. I know they're probably impossible or stupid, don't call me out on that. The goal is to inspire ideas.

• 5th Job Specialization (150/160): Let mages continue as “farmers” or specialize. Nerf ultimates unless they go the farming route.
  
  
• Bishops: Give them more reasons to be in a party and to actively cast buffs. Examples: stronger HS, a “party alchemy” buff, a DoT heal that counters 1/1s, or even a pre-ress ability that saves someone about to die. Scale buffs with TMA so a level 200 Bishop outclasses two level 150s.
  
  
• F/P Mages: Focus on DoT or a high-risk, high-reward mechanic. For example, lower MP = stronger fire magic (similar to Zerk). If DoT isn’t viable for bosses, give them powerful but dangerous burst tools, or make them excel against magic reflects.
  
  
• I/L Mages: Lean into debuff/crowd control. Ice slows or stops mobs, maybe an “ice wall” that blocks damage briefly. Alternatively, mirror F/P: Ice = DoT, Lightning = an MP-Zerk mechanic.
  
  
• General Mage Farming Role: If nothing else, keep their utility for farming but scale it so they require more investment to stay ahead.
  

And as a side note, archers could benefit from something similar. Let them specialize in 1v1 or AoE. For example:

• Strafe arrows could curve like Chain Lightning.
  
  
• Bowmasters could become true party-support classes, buff-heavy and speed-focused.
  • Hurricane + Bow Booster + SI could break the speed cap
  • Concentrate could be turned into an “overdrive” ability—huge short-term burst damage, followed by an exhaustion phase that makes them weaker and shifts their role back to party support.
    

 

For mages why not make one of the 3 Mages a single target DPS. Remove or NERF the ultimate. Then buff a single target ability to allow them to boss.
No need to have 3 Mages with farming Ultimates - they do the same job. You can have
Bish - support - ultimate
Fp - farmer
Ice - bosser
Vice versa