Buccaneer Class Feedback

I feel that if you reduce trans cd it would be fair to increase energy charge rate/ buff duration (during early stages). This of course is due to the branching paths of mauraders (either using shockwave or energy blast). I would definitely recommend changing energy buff duration during early levels, because if i remember correctly, i could only use about 3 energy blasts before the energy charge would expire during the early levels of energy charge.

 

Although extra HP is nice, buccaneers are never really a tanky melee class. They instead use iframes to avoid most damage. If you are struggling with HP, just bring an HBer and you should pretty much live through everything.

2. a convenient change but won't really make a difference anyways.
3. the energy charge is already charging at a faster rate than before
4,5,6. Lower CD on demo = different iframes which makes buccaneer feel different. Transform feels useless so you want to lower its CD? I don't get it, why change the CD of a useless skill to because it would still be useless.

Also: did you even read the thread? lol

The only 3rd job skill useful in the charged state is energy blast. So adding cooldown to transformation, which has nothing to do with the charged state, makes no sense.

While I do feel the early stages of energy charge is almost useless, there is a reason why you level things up, because it gets stronger
I'm also confused of what you mean by the branching paths of marauders. Any marauder who actually uses shockwave as a form of training is not training properly. I checked the delays on both skills (since the delays on the website that I use is incorrect) and energy blast is over 2.5x faster than shockwave. If I just use the 2.5 calculation, that means I get 420% * 2.5 = 1050% - 700% = 350% more damage compared to every shockwave used. Shockwave is NOT a viable build if you are looking to max damage which means there is NO branching paths of marauders. There is only one way to build marauders which is maxing your energy blast first and then energy charge. Transform is not useful at all. You are right that a level 1 energy charge has a very short duration, so level it up ! SSK is a pretty good mobbing ability to charge up energy before you unleash blast when you have charge.

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The problem with buccaneers isn't the early game since they have powerful mobbing skills that are useful in the early and midgame. It's the endgame damage that is a bit lackluster and must be addressed.

 

Its not really just about being a melee class or having iframes in this case. The fact is from the brawler stage and forward their hp gain scales similarly to warriors. Their hp differences aren't far apart. So it just makes sense they get the same amount of hp buff as warriors did during the update.

I disagree with this, during 3rd job marauders still have to rely on their 1st and 2nd job skills in consistent grind sessions because every combat skill obtained requires charge or transform. Energy charge isn't always available especially in the early level stages so a low level transform and shockwave can be a better starting setup for grinding given they go through with this change. Energy blast is a more versatile move than shockwave in most situations but shockwave is always available on demand, given your transform is available. Even though it has a delay similar to dragon strike, its a stronger mobbing skill and has a farther reach. Its a lesser version of dragon strike pretty much but that doesn't make it useless during 3rd job since you don't have access to dragon strike until 4th job. Rather than just reducing the overall cool-down of transform I'd suggest reducing the max cool-down from level 1 so it becomes more viable to use at that state.

 

I wasn't talking about the update and how much HP it gave, if you want to talk about that then you can probably post another feedback section on that. What I can say is that Nexon had in mind that buccaneers don't have the same HP as warriors, so whatever you interpret that for the updated scaling of HP is up to each of us and may be for another discussion.

You are correct that 3rd job marauders have to rely on 1st and 2nd job skills in constant grind session because I believe the only useful 3rd job skill is energy blast. What do you mean by "low level transform" is better than their 1st and 2nd job skills? Sure it may do more damage at level 20 than SSK but it is so slow I would rather have my SSK hitting tons of enemies to charge up for blast than to have to wait for the CD of transform. And since energy blast outscales scales shockwave in the end, it doesn't really matter. I'm also not really arguing the best way to change how marauders train because that isn't a problem. Warriors are stuck with power strike and slash blast and I don't see any of them making a huge deal of having new buffs to their 3rd job skills to do more damage.

In my experience, the marauder is already doing pretty good damage training and mobbing. Even though their SSK has a short range, the mobility of their 2nd job skills make up for the damage and gathering potential of mobs. The speed of SSK helps charge energy faster for energy blast in 3rd job. I don't really see a need to change the cooldown of a 3rd job skill since it doesn't even matter endgame. Even if it is changed, ok you added like 10% more DPS for like 15 levels. It won't really matter endgame anyways.

When this thread was made, I saw this as: "hey buccaneers, we've noticed that your DPS endgame is not very strong no matter how much funding you have, let's make a plan to change it so you guys are more viable in bossing." I didn't see it as: "hey marauders, we've noticed that during your level 70-85 levels you guys are still using 1st and 2nd job skills and we want to make your 3rd job skills a bit more powerful for 15 levels so you can have a better training time." Not to be rude kevin, but I think we both know what the problem of buccaneers are and it is NOT the 2nd statement.

 

This doesn't really make any sense, because this is the buccaneer feedback section? Also what do you mean by don't have the same hp, their overall hp isn't that much different than warriors unwashed using unwashed standards. Can you tell me what other classes within the explorers have the improve max hp skill? That's all that I'm trying to say, not trying to say just because they're melee they should get hp buffs because that would bring shadowers into this and they already have tank abilities, despite also getting shadow shifter. And again that isn't the point I'm trying to make, I don't mind if they don't implement this but as far as what they've done to implement hp buffs this just makes the most sense to me.

First of all, asking for some reduction in 3rd job transformation cool-down doesn't ask to make anything "stronger", just more useful and accessible. You know, kind of like the suggestions to increase range of blast for paladins and barrage for buccs. I've actually grinded through this class before new source and I can tell you that Shockwave isn't as bad as you make it out to be, it's got much of the same functionality as Dragon Strike's range and delay. Of course, during that time energy charge would always be up practically and blast was always available. But that luxury doesn't exist anymore and shockwave was crippled mainly because of how long the cool-down of normal transform is especially at lower levels. And as far as their skill build goes alot of them don't show the best utility until enough points of been allocated into them. And this class has a fairly large amount of skills to cover.

My suggestion here is just based on the experiences I've had training through this class with minimal amounts of base int in the past. It's not important at all for endgame but just a QoL adjustment that would make something seemingly useless like the first transformation into something with some form of utility. Of course, their grinding path isn't necessarily as bad as some other classes in my experiences but it's something I've wanted to suggest for the class on a lower priority level.



Lastly, the end-game damage issue has been acknowledged by just about everyone here already and all the feedback I would have given on this matter has already been stated. I wouldn't have felt the need to make this post otherwise. But yes that is clearly the top priority that should be taken on this class.

 

I'm all for demoliton buffs. Give demolition a good crit percentage with faster cast time, make buccs more centred around super transformation which really brings out it's 'dang, that looks dope'-ness. So more peak damage in super transform, and subpar damage without it, eventually balancing out overall dps.

If not, just buff the damage of barrage. Seeing your character doing peanut damage as you twist and turn is not a very fun experience. Reduce the delay between consecutive dragon strikes. When I have 6 chief guardians in front of me, I'm honestly just want to spam dragon strike instead of using some really bad dps combo...

Increase range of barrage because it's quite sad that a bucc can barely hit top left zak arms.

Make 2nd job skills actually do decent damage at higher levels. Because 2nd job skills like backspin blow and corkscrew are so crucial in helping us stay in iframes, our dps drops so much when executing combos. You can say it's price to pay for staying in iframes, but most of the time unwashed buccs HAVE to stay in iframes because we have soooo little natural hp, and as a result, spend ages killing multiple mobs (especially when energy isn't charged when you need it). Which is why marauders grinding at himes is a no-go, and why farming ToT is so slow compared to other melee classes. Most of the time you're just using the skills for the sole purpose of charging energy really, which removes the satisfaction in punching and elbowing and uppercutting. Add a 3rd job skill (if I recall, similar to one in old ms) (and to replace stun mastery) which specifically buffs the damage of 2nd job skills by a percentage, namely backspin blow, corkscrew, and uppercut. To balance this out, you can reduce the base damage of the skills from 2nd job.

Otherwise, just give us the natural crit we all really want. It was so not cool when you released that patch video showing a bucc critting with barrage and STILL not give us natural crit. Not cool at all

And transformation decreases attack speed

 

I agree with your statement, but why not throw out some ideas to improve the path to becoming a buccaneer? We all know "marauder hell" so its understandable that we would like some changes to some skills. As stated in my previous posts, adding more mobs hit to corkscrew and backspin blow would be extremely useful to not only a brawler, but also a buccaneer. Other than that, i also agree that marauders have a decent grinding rate (at least for the energy blast path in the higher levels of energy charge/ blast).

Most of us have already stated what we think are necessary changes, the most prevalent being a stackable attack buff for energy charge, increased damage/ range to barrage, increased damage or a cooldown reduction on dragon strike, and increased damage to demolition. The other things that we are suggesting is now more to tweak and improve than to fix.

 

I've just recently lvl my marauder to 100 with mostly PQ contents, with that said, the problems i ran into during the process are as below.

Energy Charge - hard to time to do any good in a PQ, would recommend to lower the required Charges to activate and should gain extra Energy while facing a Boss monster(at least let me give it a few blast before it die).

Energy Blast - Doesn't last, the only improved skill for advanced into a marauder but only come in the form of short burst while other class gain skills that last forever(crusher, strafe, shadow partner), Energy Charge hard to time in PQ to make use of this skill.

Stun mastery - there are only this much of stun skills available:"2"(while i dont use 1 of them, the other usually instant kill normal mobs), the chance for stun to activate is 0 in my case. Useless against bosses, and should at least bundle with some other damage buff mechanics (damage/crit/mastery) to boost damage output.

Transformation - 480s CD haste, unreliable.

Shockwave - Rely on transformation that come with 480s CD, long animation, inefficient mobbing skill compare to others(while other killed a group i'm still waiting for the first animation to end). Useless.




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Regarding energy, it does get easier as it levels up. I do agree that it is extremely unreliable during early levels, and have stated this in my previous posts. (I think energy charge should last longer on earlier levels.)

Like most people here, we all agree stun mastery is useless. XD

Transformation is one of the most useless (to me) skills available, since i used energy blast, and only leveled shockwave when there was nothing better. It also adds more frames, lowering attack speed.

Shockwave animation time is the reason y i dont use it. It has little if any iframes, but it does hit hard.

 

Im still new to Royals, so take what i say with a grain of salt.
But with that said I just had some thoughts concerning Buccs.

The main issue seems to be about dmg in high levels, and alot of people are suggesting permanent crit chance added to stun mastery. While I agree that its a way to increase bucc dmg, I think thats the wrong way to do it.
I always thought stunning was a cool part of what buccaneers are all about, and i think that its neglected in this discussion. Increasing permanent crit chance would make the class more "like the others" and totally miss the original thought behind stun mastery (i think).

Instead how about making it so that stun mastery gives a permanent stun chance to all your attacks? Currently its only backspin blow and double uppercut that are used to stun mobs, and those attacks can seem a very weak when you have unlocked 4th job skills. Adding permanent stun to all your attacks would keep the "uniqueness" of the buccanneers, while still addressing dmg since more stun = more crits, also it wouldnt completely make backspin blow and double uppercut obsolete, since they would still have perma stun. Im thinking somewhere between 20%- 40% chance, but Im hoping some of you smart people can do the math for what would be a fair persentage, I certainly arent the big math guy, but im sure someone can figure it out.

Of course bosses cant be stunned like this, so dmg-wise that would still be a problem. But that could be solved by just buffing 4th job attacking skills.
At leasts thats my thoughts, hopefully my suggestion makes sense!


BTW: Im loving this server, tried alot of private srevers through the years and even tried to get bag into official maple, but things just werent as fun as when i was younger, but MapleRoyals seems to be so far!

 

This is a great idea, and i would be all for it. I'm assuming that you mean "skills" when you said all our attacks. While stunning isn't a big part of a bucc's kit, i think that adding it wouldn't change our identity, and instead enhance it. Being able to stun multiple mobs with dragon strike would make us really good crowd controllers.

In my opinion, there wouldnt really be a point the previous stun change if our skills are going to be buffed anyways (as they would stack on each other for regular mobs). If the previous change was to happen, i feel like it would be better to just give us a flat crit chance against bosses. Or maybe im just overthinking things.

 

Buccs aren’t the greatest grinders, so i dont think the combination of small stunning chance and base damage improvments together will make them unstoppable broken grinders.

 

It wouldn't help that much to be honest, you mostly do bosses from lvl 135+ so stun is pretty useless there.
Bucc isn't that good at grinding and I think the only way to make it fairly good at maps like oblivion is to remove the delay from Dragon Strike entirely (and even then it will probably still be weaker than the warrior classes)
The crit itself isn't even that useful at high lvl too, dragon strike deals 810% damage so a critical hit will barely give you more damage (since the crit bonus is additive) while barrage/demolition are already kinda overkill and can 1 hit almost every mob in the game without criticals.

 

I can tell you after having experienced a long string of petri grinding and some oblivion grinding on my bucc in this server that stun mastery makes some difference. Iirc, the backspin blow stun was broken for some time in new source so it wasn't very useful. But in grinding scenarios it can make a difference between 3 hitting mobs with dragon strike to 2 or 2 to 1. It also makes grinding more effective at lower level 4th job, when you're still not 1 shotting certain mobs yet even with barrage. Even at high high level grinding it gives an extra edge to oblivion grinding. From my experience, the classes grinding efficiency starts to slow down as marauders, they don't become the worst at grinding but they're definitely nowhere near great by that point. And they continue to be middling grinders as buccaneers. Which is why I think the energy charge stacking solution is the best overall solution since it will be available at such a critical time as well as give them the much needed buff.

Theres a bigger picture than just the hp-washed bossing meta thats largely being overlooked and thats something I wanted to bring attention to when improving this class.

 

I want to see math and calculations. What proposes do you have (like a damage increase of x amount or passive stub of x amount which would overall increase effective damage by y) that would be beneficial? There is a lot of talk about marauders and buccs being not so great of a grinder. Where is the proof of exp gain compared to other classes? I’ve train up my first Buccaneer and I would say grinding was just fine. With a skill that hits 6 mobs and decent mobility, I think we are pretty decent mobbers. I’ve never saw this as an issue and only now when his thread popped up does some of you want this change, but elsewhere I’ve never heard of this complain and how difficult it was to level as a marauder. If there is hard data of comparison between a marauder and another class on different levels and how marauders are consistently underperforming significantly in training and exp gain, then I will take back what I said. As for now, I stand by what I think which is that our class is fine and very capable in mobbing and training. It may not be the top grinder but I don’t see that as a problem.

I also think this is slippery slope. If you ask for one change here that isn’t necessary, why not also balance all the other classes? We can see that the Buccaneer endgame dps is far below other classes which is why that is being addressed. The grinding capabilities of a bucc/marauder is fine. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

 

You admitted that you think there are useless skills and abilities like shockwave and stun mastery. And if thats the case, isn't that asking to fix what is broken? Why not shorten the delay in shockwave or improve duration in energy charge?

Barring hermits and outlaws however, marauders are probably in the lower tier just above crusaders of the grinding scale if I had to say from experience. You can say, well those classes have it worse, but the main issue is that the skills that SHOULD BE MORE USEFUL, just aren't for the reasons that were previously given.

 

I mean then why does this class get anything special. Dragon knight’s sacrifice is useless. Drain from assassin is useless. Panic and coma is useless from some of the warrior classes. There are a lot that I’m also missing. Each class has useless skills that Nexon thought would be useful but really just point fillers. If you want usefulness in all skills, why not just balance all skills from all classes? This is why it is a slippery slope because one change here will then prompt x,y,z somewhere else.

You haven’t proved your point yet anyways why some skills need to be changed. Show me some data; prove to me your theories are substantial with what you have experienced with numbers. We can talk all day but until you got something to back it up, it doesn’t hold much weight in this arguement.

 

I figured you were going to say something like that and the answer is pretty much utility. I already explained why certain changes would benefit the class unlike the other skills you mentioned that are supposedly filler. They are within reasonable suggestions too if
I had to say. Your only argument against these claims is just you believe this is too much to ask. Mind you, outlaws received buffs regarding grinding but anyone can say whats the point right? They're one of the top dps endgame anyway, none of it matters towards endgame meta, which is basically what you're trying to say? You act like these suggestions are giving shadow partner to buccs or something.

I could also ask you why you chose those exact numbers on your calculations for buffing barrage and demolition. You can choose any number right? But we all know it has to be at a certain level where they don't outdps other classes while maintaining a competitive range. It isn't that hard to understand. In fact, why buff buccs damage at all in that mindset, they don't need special treatment with their support skills. Right?

 

Excuse my lack of concrete math, what Im writing about it based off eyeballing jacksons math and some dps charts posted on the forums here and elsewhere so these are just approximations.

I think the best way is to just give barrage and demolition buffs:
300% maxed barrage - imma just steal jackson's reasoning cause I found it pretty solid. Instead of a 22.5% barrage dps boost, it's 25%.
Why 300%?: Outdps DrK that isn't zerking sweetspot. (maybe sed waiting a couple secs for sed to go off). And yes currently a drk not zerking outdps barrage + dragon strike assuming stuff like se, si, apple, echo for both sides.

Demolition from 400 to 540%. Jackson's suggestion of 490% while a nice improvement doesn't really move buccs too far up and I personally like the idea where buccs hit a crazy power spike when super transformation is back up. At 490% they're tied with optimal marksman snipe play, but still below bowmasters and drks.

Why 540%?: This puts buccs like 3% ish higher overall dps than BMs and DrKs (other popular support classes that also do good dps) when super transformation is running. Currently theyre outdamaged by the likes of stuff like rapid fire corsairs and marksmans not using snipe. Doesn't sit right that negligent players on good dps classes still outdps buccs at their peak. (Again with se, si, apples, echo)

Whats the overall effect of these changes?
Put buccs above good dps classes with extremely negligent play(not zerking, losing boat, not hitting snipe). Demolition gives dps classes a run for their money when it's up, but overall buccs are still reasonably behind other top picks even under ideal conditions so that they don't overstep their niche support spot.