Gellerhead shield buff

I'm all for all shields of warrior to become 10 slots. 1 handed warriors are weak anyways, so we can't really call a few extra str to the average build a power creep. Unless you are a min maxer, i think many warriors will just take a high godly str of the shield that looks best on their chara and scroll that.
All 1 handed players using maple shield isn't nostalgic anyways

 

It kind of makes no sense that Warrior Shields haven't been buffed to 10 slots already. The amount of funding needed to make a 1H+Shield be on par/slightly better than a 2H Sword makes it not worth it from a cost efficient standpoint. It's literally 17 slots (1h+shield) vs 7 slots (2h sword)... maybe 14~12slot if you manage to land 3~5x 30%s on the Shield beforehand, but that still requires some time/money due to all the booms/fails needed to get to that point.

Let's put it into perspective though. White Scrolls cost ~470m right now so assuming the player is using 10%+ws and it takes ~10 WS per slot:

2-H Sword..................... 7 slots x ~4.7b(470m*10) = ~32.9b
1-H Sword+Shield........ 17 slots x ~4.7b(470m*10) = ~79.9b
1-H Sword+Shield........ 14 slots x ~4.7b(470m*10) = ~65.8b (person landed 3x 30%s on Shield)
1-H Sword+Shield........ 12 slots x ~4.7b(470m*10) = ~56.4b (person landed 5x 30%s on Shield)

(Note: this does not include the amount spent on trying land +3~5 on a shield with 30% scrolls)

1H users have to spend nearly ~40-117% more than what a 2H user would spend just to achieve nearly the same damage. So, it's not asking for much to have Warrior Shields be changed to 10 slots. It's only ~11str (~2 attack) gained at most using Crossheider (from Cwk) at the peak of the Warrior Shields if they were to be buffed and it's not significant enough to suddenly convert 2H users to 1H.

If the Staff doesn't want Warrior Shields to be buffed and to remain "nostalgic" (aka useless), they should just comment saying so. That way we can put this thread and any future threads to rest.

 

It shouldn't be on shields scrolled for attack to bridge the 1h 2h gap, that's ridiculous, and then thieves and mages would complain for 10 slots. There's better ways to go about that. There's no point to provide shields with more slots solely to be scrolled for attack, it helps nothing, and your own post shows how ridiculous it is.

 

We got daily vote nx. Gms please. If this breaks the game I will make a night lord and delete my paladin

 

Where this change will break the game? 1h is already inferior in many ways - price, damage, buff advantage (booster/si). As known, the main shield will be either gellerhead or crossheider, and max damage they can give can be 2~3. So, yeah, go ahead and try to scroll a 10 slot shield (look Darkomantis post, it simplifies the cost of it), and you notice it still not close enough to reach NL or Corsair damage!

Btw, what the heck shadowers and mages need to complain about? Shadowers have Dragon Khanjar, which already gives att. Mages already scalonate its damage with INT, so it isnt hard to find an esther shield with 6~7INT, so thats already enough!

 

Because the slots automatically equal weapon attack. If it's such a huge problem, why convolute it by making all shields have more slots to literally appease people who want to scroll them for attack? Change the 1h formula if it's so bad or go 2h, add more base att to 1h weapons. calling for all shields to have 10 slots is a sloppy fix for your problem and other classes use shields.

I'm ok with gellerhead, totally. It's a unique item and you get one chance per character. Like that holiday bunny tail cape thing that had way more slots than normal.

All shields? Just to scroll for attack? Slop, imo. Simpler suggestions can be made. As Darko showed, it's not simple at all, it's extremely costly, so why take on a crazy expensive project for the chance to maybe have ok damage against an average 2h.

I think shields should stay out of the discussion. Buff shield mastery, but not for attack. They should be for defensive, personal playstyles, not an attack exploit

 

h0h0 bumb, this thread is derailing quickly. Please refer to my other thread for 2h v 1h discussions sirs.

10 slots please

 

EXACTLY! Thats why it wont bring a lot of changes from what is now! The strongest shield will be Crossheinder, but even with it the max damage it can give its 3-4 att (correct me if Im wrong). Its not something that will make heroes/paladin reach top 3 damagers in the game, and wont make 2h worse! Its not a game changer, neither a game breaker. Its just +3 slots to shields, for 1% of h/p players who can spend 30/40b with the shield!

Btw, yeah, buff shield mastery. AND GUARDIAN, because I love it =)

 

Bump for poor geller

 

Lmfao nicko thanks.

Justice for gellerhead

 

This was 2 years ago...

 

Some changes are worth dying for

I will not stop bumping this thread until we get this shield to 10 slots.

 

+1 for this change. I'm just surprised that you got backing from a GM in your OP but still have not been implimented.

 

noticed by senpaii

 

Well, idk if I'm a bit late to this thread or not, but as a user of a 1H BW Pally and a 2H Sword Hero, I'll throw in my two cents on this:

Personally I do, in theory, like the idea of buffing the Gellerhead shield, and heck, the rest of warrior specific shields as Matt said. However, I am of the mindset that while, yes, giving them 10 slots would technically make them better, it wouldn't really change a whole lot in regards to how shields are balanced in this game, as has already been discussed in this thread by @Cooler @Scarlof and @xDarkomantis , so I won't necessarily repeat all those points here.

I'm not entirely sure why you feel like the thread is being derailed in regards to people discussing the overall balance of shields, I mean, after all, this thread is about getting a shield buffed, no? I don't think it's too unrealistic to think that people might want to discuss the bigger picture of shield balance as this thread evolves. If your sole point of this thread was to only have the gellerhead shield buffed just because it looks cooler than the Maple Shield (which you're not wrong on btw) and that it should just be a trophy of sorts for warriors who can perfect scroll it, then that comes across as a bit short-sighted. While it does seem like some of the staff is on board with some sort of change to shields, surely it doesn't hurt to have a larger discussion about shield balance, and maybe come up with ideas that better serve the community rather than just being focused on making 1 shield have more slots for what seems to be more personal reasons, no?
Idk maybe I'm misinterpreting your opinion, which in that case feel free to correct me and call me a big-dumb-poopy head or whatever (Also maybe make a link to that 1h v 2h thread you were talking about if you want to direct the conversation there)

...Anyways back the the Gellerhead shield

So I have two schools of thought for this. We'll call solution A the "Band-aid" solution and solution B the "Actually-addressing-the-core-issue-with-shield-balance-but-will-most-likely-won't-be-implemented-due-it-being-a-lot-more-complicated-and-possible-limitations-to-the-coding-that-I'm-unaware-of-but-screw-it-I'll-talk-about-it-here-since-I-have-nothing-better-to-do-right-now"...solution

Solution A:

Simply make the Gellerhead shield like the Dragon Khanjar and give it some base wep att while keeping it 7 slots. Hell maybe even make it 5 slots and just adjust the base wep att in a way that it would be on par with what a maple shield fully scrolled could give. The whole idea is that less slots = less investment, which would make a more attractive for people to use since again, it requires a lot more funding on a 1H+shield to keep on par with an equivilent 2H.

Also as been mentioned, Buff that shield Defense. In my opinion, I'm okay with 2H being slightly stronger than 1H+shield in general, but as a trade-off, shields need to give a lot more defense and have noticeable reduction in damage received. Yes, Guardian is a nice skill to have, but more damage reduction on top of that wouldn't hurt. This could be done either by increasing gellerheads base def/mag def or by buffing shield mastery skill, or both, idk

Lastly, make it reobtainable in some manner after initially completing the Guardian quest. It's fine if it's untradable and a one-of-kind weapon, just make it so if you boom it or miss a bunch of slots, you're not completely SoL. Make it so there's a repeatable quest that's more difficult/requires more resources and mesos to complete. Most importantly, make the base stats on it static, meaning there's no variance in wep att, str, def, or mag def, as well as not being affected by the godly system. This is simply to avoid having to repeatedly redo the quest just to get a decent shield roll which would just be a miserable experience imo.

Solution B: (I'm gonna throw this under a spoiler tag simply cuz this post is getting long and rambly enough as it is and it's more of a tangent/wishful thinking at this point)

Spoiler: Solution B

Okay, in a perfect world, I'd just completely overhaul shields and make them fulfill a different role than they do now. Essentially, we make them almost purely for defense (at least for warriors). We do this by geting rid of Wep Att, STR, and LUK scrolls for shields, leaving only DEF, HP, Magic Att, and also massively buffing the DEF scrolls. We can make the Gallerhead shield (and all other shields too) 10 slots, but they only have base Def, Mag Def, and HP (the gallerhead would give the most of all shields). Basically, all common/warrior shields cannot have any weapon att, or STR on them at all, doing so would make it so people would have people trying to chaos them, which would defeat the purpose of keeping shield prices down.

Now, you might be thinking, "Wouldn't this make 1H weapons super weak without shields giving weapon attack?" and yes, it indeed would as things are currently. However, there's something we can change to fix it, something I like to refer to as the "Main stat multiplier" or MSM. Essentially, all attack damage weapons use essentially the same formula (magic uses something a different formula) to calculate your damage range. The thing that differentiates them is the value at which your main stat is multiplied by in order to calculate your range.

(link here if your interested https://ayumilovemaple.wordpress.com/category/maplestory-formula/)

Each weapon-type has their own value for this, for example 1H Swords have a 4.0 MSM, whereas 2H Swords have a 4.6 MSM. So simply put, adjusting these values for 1H weapons to be closer to their 2H counterparts would fix the shields not having wep att problem. Exactly how much they need to be adjusted by, I'm not entirely sure without having ingame testing, which obviously I can't do myself.

So what about non-warriors, after all, changing this would potentially affect other classes that use shields, like Mages and Bandits, right? Well, fortunately for mages, we'd still keep Magic Attack scrolls, and while the mage-only shields would now be 10 slots, which would make them better than maple shields, maple shields do have the advantage of being a common item and therefore still useful for hp washing purposes. Bandits/Shadowers is where it get's a bit more tricky though. Since they're very reliant on their Khanjar for additional damage, not having scrolls to boost it would be very detrimental to them. Once again, we have two solutions to this:

Solution A: Have both regular and dragon Khanjars still have their same base weapon att (Afterall, they are kinda like a second daggers so it'd be weird for them to not have attack on them) and adjust the MSM for daggers to compensate. They can still be affected by the godly system as well, but in order to avoid the whole Chaos scroll issue like before, we'd have to make it so they aren't scrollable (as well as reseting the any existing khanjars on the server to their base stats). This would probably have the unfortunate side-effect of pissing off a lot of Shads who spent a bunch of money scrolling/buying good scrolled Khanjars, so a possible different solution is...

Solution B: Keep both Khanjars stats/scroll slots exactly as they and keep dagger's MSM the same too. Instead, we add a special type of scroll that is essentially the same as shield weapon attack scrolls, but it only works for Khanjars, which would additionally allow us to not have to restrict chaosing them either. This does mean that Shads still have the same issue as 1H+Shield warriors where they have to spend a lot more than other classes for weapons, but greater discussions on that may be best left for a different thread at this point

Christ, I didn't think this post would be so long. Glad to finally write down these ideas that that've been swimming in my head for some time now. Anyways...

TLR Nexon's coding for shields is kinda crap, but if we're stuck with it, just make the Gallerhead more similar to the Dragon Khanjar or something idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

@smilinsphere
Hello good sir. I appreciate this addition to the thread and you have well articulated points I would like to discuss.

First, let me address the derailing comment. The two prior comments started comparing warrior shields to thief and mage shields. This discussion is not the one I wanted to promote when making this thread. Thief shields and mages shield are the least of my concern when making a thread about boosting a shield that is uniquely for warriors. Secondly, 1h vs 2h debate appeared. I did not want this thread to become a discussion on Multipliers of 1h vs 2h and DPS. This thread was originally made simply to try and get the gellerhead to 10 slots to compete with the Maple Shield (one time chance). This should be put in context with the situation when I made the thread, shields were 7 slots and there was not a GM update thread notifying of possible changes.

Alright let us begin. Concerning your first solution, this thread discussed having shields with base attack. I think that this is a great addition to shields but I do believe does not fit the theme of shields being a defensive option. Furthermore, this could prove to be quite overpowered with the godly system in place and the relative ease of finding shields. On the other hand, this could be implemented on the Gellerhead shield as you get it once per character and ruining it via chaosing or whatever could be costly. That leaves us with discussing defense stats. Unfortunately, defense has largely been a useless stat in Royals and the only time you can feel its impact is getting a zhelm at 50 (And it feels hella good). If armor felt that way throughout the game, perhaps the people willing to sacrifice dps for tankiness could find a niche. Unfortunately, this is mostly aimed towards newer players. I say this because most of the high end players have a shadower that is blood washed to carry them through horntail (where you need someone tanky). My solution for this however is most likely not possible to implement due to MapleStory coding. If armor gave you a % damage reduction (physical or magical) based on the armor of the shield (or total armor), I could see people focusing on getting high armor gear instead of maxing out strenght or such. The way I see it right now is that shield mastery is one the worst skills in the game. Investing 11 points into it nets you a shield defense buff of +5 defense (55%) with the maple shield equipped. Here is another solution that might not be possible as well. Why not give shields a parry chance? Similar to Guardian, this parry chance could be anywhere from 2% to 10% (possibly overpowered). This would synergize with guardian for warriors and be quite useful for mages as well (might be overpowered for shadowers). So in conclusion, I definitely think your first option is realistic but I do believe giving shields weapon attack the wrong way to go with this although it would be a relatively easy fix for GMs.

As for your second solution. I think that this is a bad idea for many reasons. Multipliers make sense, a 2h weapon should be stronger than a 1hander. What is problematic in the server is that 2h weapons are the same speed as 1h weapons for the most part. It would make more sense to play with these instead of going around and making a 1h sword do 8x multiplier vice to match a 2hander attack damage. Instead, make smaller weapons faster, possibly give speed buff (or give 2h speed loss) and make them give you accuracy buffs (or dex). Furthermore, give 2h weapons slower attack speed, a speed reduction stat. This would accomplish two things, 2hander would have bigger numbers and larger range and 1handers quicker and more agile at the cost of being weaker. This would open up diversity for the warrior class. Warriors could choose between being a strong hitting warrior that is mostly stationnary or a weaker hitting warrior that is more agile and has a chance to block with his shield.

The big however is that the game is relatively balanced right now. These changes would change the state of the game and I do not believe they are possible to implement without the player base getting relatively angry at the changes.
Let me know what you think

Cheers,
Haplopelma

 

I knew this thread was about to get bumped, but didn't expect it in this way lol

As the gm blog mentioned, suggestions folks have long requested, qol changes coming to 1h'ers, to paraphrase. This thread immediately came to mind but I pray it's not more slots on shields because as I've said, that just creates more gulf between the in game price to play, and does nothing for shields as shields, only serving the meta and enforcing the limits of the attack meta on unfunded folks. Maple shields are ubiqutous, all this would do in the long run is, as smilingshpere sort of touched on, well just have attack shields with a bit more base stats

So all that means is an extra equip with base to supplement very low base folks, which 1h don't need because there are no weapons like ST that are demanding in the same way

Shields for attack shouldn't be so hard wired in the game at all, and I really hope the GM's aren't reinforcing this meta. Would rather see shield mastery get a buff, or add passive d./m.def, and avoid. Or a % chance to reflect some amount of non-magical damage, or projectile attacks

 

I agree that I do not like the fact that shield are made for attack but there is a deeper rooted issue with how people view this game. DPS is the most important thing. This is a result of having armor being relatively useless in the game, I hope something can be done about that

 

If the 3rd job Shield Mastery skill were to ever be buffed, the only reasonable solution would be to add avoid.

Attack on a Warrior Shield isn't exactly broken... If the staff ever did it, they'd probably make the stats somewhere around 1~4 atk max (1~9 godly). However, I think just having varying high STR stat is good enough. Let's wait to see what they do with the warrior shields first before talking about any attack on shields.