Gellerhead shield buff

Agree, agree, agree!
I've been behind shield mastery adding passive avoid (a good chunk at max, about 100), and passive +def, not %def.
Also adding a non+magical/projectile reflect, or 10% to reflect some % of damage of all kinds

However I really hope they don't add base att on shields, slippery slopes ahead. Just slightly tweak with the 1h formula instead of create new funding brackets for ppl that want to be shield users. Don't give them the shad treatment, let a shield be a shield, sometimes thinking inside the box is the solution

Only problem is, wks have no sp to max shield mastery, they have very costly and demanding SP allocation

 

Tweaking the 1h formula will cause more issues than simply adding base attack on Warrior shields. You're overestimating Attack Shields. Also, most (maple) shields are used for mages in my opinion.

White Knights have 11 points in 3rd job that they can freely pour to anywhere. It's commonly placed in 'Improving MP Recovery'. If Shield Mastery was ever buffed to be +1 Avoid per SP, I think a good amount of people would shift their points into it since avoid is more valuable than MP recovery.

 

Mp recovery is great if you sed. Charged blow could definitely have 10 levels shaved off

 

You need max charge blow before you can lvl acb
Anyway regarding the 1h I think they should make the element charges work for both sword and bw or at least have 1 for 1h bw/sword and another for 2h.

This way you'd be able to fully use 1h with flame sword without si and skull with si.

Right now going full 1h is worse than 2h cause skulls are too slow without si, and if you go sword then flame sword is only good without si while sparta/carbella are all around worse than stonetooth.

 

I mean 20 to max instead of 30

 

Hi @Haplopelma , I appreciate the response to my post. Lemme clarify some stuff as well as add some things.

Personally, I would love if shields were just a purely defensive thing and that we don't need to deal with offensive stats on them (which is what I went a lot more into with "Solution B").

In regards to shields having base attack however, that was mostly just in regards to the Gellerhead shield, not necessarily all the other warrior shields. While I'm mostly focusing on the Gellerhead shield here since that would be the endgame shield, and therefore the most important one to talk about in regards to balance, it wouldn't hurt to look at the rest of the shields too. Since I neglected to suggest any specific numerical values the stats for my stuff in my previous post, I'll give some examples here to make it easier to illustrate my point.

Let's say the Gellerhead gives 10 weapon attack, 5 STR, 5 DEX, has 7 slots, and as I mentioned in my previous post, it wouldn't be affected by the godly system and would have static stats since it would only be obtainable from the quests. This would allow it to have up to 31 weapon attack, 19 STR, and 5 DEX from using purely 10%/30% wep attack scrolls, which is only slightly higher than what a perfectly scrolled Maple Shield could give. As for all the lower level warrior shields (which all have 7 slots), we could have it so the level 60-80 shields have 0-1 base attack, the level 90-100 shields can have 1-2 base attack, and any of the shields below level 60 won't have any base attack. This way, they could only have up to 7 base weapon attack with the godly system, making them still potentially useful as mid-game shields without them being overpowered.

While I mostly agree that the defense stat is woefully underpowered in Royals, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it completely. Once again let's throw in some more hypothetical stats:

Currently the Gellerhead has something like 84 def 35 mdef, so let's buff that instead to 170 def 100 mdef (a bit more def than what a zhelm gives). Also, let's make Shield Mastery give +130% def and +50% mdef. With all this the Gellerhead shield now gives 391 def and 150 mdef. Also, a few people made suggestions of giving shield mastery a +avoid% boost. The Gellerhead actually does have a bit of avoid on it, but let's buff that to 30 base Avoid, and give shield mastery +100% avoid, giving us an additional 60 Avoid. While these numbers aren't gonna make a huge difference for things like HT's tail or Toad, but it would probably make a difference to lower hitting bosses as well as high level mobs from places like ToT or Neo City. Keep in mind that I don't have access to any formulas for how much damage a player takes from mobs, so these number could potentially need to be adjusted, but I feel these are decent enough buffs to make a difference in certain situations. (The same general principle can also be applied to lower level warrior shields too)

If only, sadly this isn't the only element of this game that Nexon didn't code very well :/

That honestly, would be a pretty cool idea, like each shield could have it's own % chance sorta like how bows/xbows have a certain % chance to knockback when attacking from close. I guess in order differentiate it from Guardian though, maybe make it so normal parrying would only knockback the enemy and not stun it, and Guardian would increase the knockback chance as well as a seperate chance for the multi-mob stun ability to proc that would scale as you level the skill. Probably not possible to implement, but neat idea regardless.

I don't see how making the Gellerhead 10 slots would necessarily be a better solution in this case, since at the end of the day, a fully scrolled shield in both of these solutions would more or less land you at the same results strength wise. The only main difference being one requires more investment on the players part than the other, which in my and many other's opinion, is the main issue of the 1h+shield combo. Again, I'd like to reiterate that I would vastly prefer that shields didn't have weapon attack, or any attack stat, and were just a purely defensive thing that supplements a 1handed weapon, not be a crutch for it. However, we sadly just have to deal with Nexon's poor coding decisions for this version of Maple.

So, I actually completely agree with you that 2H should be stronger than a 1H weapon, in fact, I'm fairly certain I said that directly in my first post. The way I view it, 2H should have the higher dps, and 1H+shield should have slightly lower dps with increased defensive capabilities. I mean, this is technically the case now, but it could very well be argued that the gap in dps with 2h and 1h is a bit too large, which is further compounded with the aforementioned pricing issue with shields. As for the multiplier thing, let's get into that...

Okay, so I was really confused when I first read this. 8x multiplier??? That's not even remotely close to what I was suggesting in terms of modifying the Main stat multiplier for 1handed weapons. I'm not sure where you got that number from, so that kind of leads me to believe that you didn't quite understand exactly what I was referring to when I'm talking about "Main stat multipliers". So I'll try and do a better job explaining it here:

*******MASSIVE TANGENT ALERT********

Okay, damage range for all attacking weapons is calculated with two formulas:
Highest range: (Main Stat + Secondary Stat) * Total Weapon Att / 100
Lowest range: (Main Stat *0.9 * Mastery + Secondary Stat) * Total Weapon Att / 100

If I was using 1H swords in this case, my Main Stat would be my total STR, and my secondary Stat would be my total DEX. However, before it's calculated, your Main stat gets multiplied by another number, which depends on which type of weapon your using. In the case of 1H sword, this value is 4.0, so if I had a total STR value of 800, that value would actually be 3200 when using the damage range formula. Likewise if I were using a 2H sword, the multiplier is 4.6, meaning that the final STR value would be 3680. So even if you were to have exactly the same stats and weapon attack with a 1H and 2H sword, you'd always have a higher range with 2H sword. This same deal goes with Axes and Blunt weapons too but have different MSM's (though those are a bit weird since they both use a separate "swing" and "stab" formula and get combined together).

Okay, so why does this matter? If we go back to my "Solution B" scenario, where I suggest that we make it so shields don't provide any extra attack or stats, it leads to the conclusion that having differing 1H and 2H MSMs is honestly kind of redundant this situation. After all, given all things equal, if the goal is to make it so 2H stronger than 1H in general, then all you would need to do is have 2H weapons have higher base weapon attack than 1H weapons, right?

Despite all this, I don't wouldn't actually suggest that we set them to be equal in this scenario, since it would require having to adjust the base stats on a ton of weapons in order to better balance the damage gap, which doesn't seem very practical. Rather, it would make more sense to make the 1H MSM closer to the 2H MSM, once again, let's use an example:

We'll use a warrior using either a 1H sword+shield or a 2H sword with the following stats:
-1100 total STR (without shield)
-120 total DEX
-45 wep Attack from non-weapons and non-shields
-133 att 2H sword
-130 att 1H sword
-18 att +10 STR shield

The following are the ranges of this warrior with a few different common pots based on current MSM values for 1H swords:


Now, the following is with the 1H sword MSM increased to 4.5 and where shields give no stats:


So yeah, the scenario with a higher 1H sword MSM and no shield stats would get us a bit more favorable stats in comparison to 2H. Again, these don't need to be the end-all-be-all values, just an example that demonstrates how exactly this hypothetical change would affect stats.

*******MASSIVE TANGENT OVER********

Okay, so as far as weapon speeds between 1H and 2H goes. Again, I kinda agree with your idea there in theory, because after all, it would make sense that a 1h weapon attacks faster than a 2h weapon. Implementing that would be a whole other issue though. My understanding is that all skill speeds are a set of hard-coded values (I could be wrong on this), and which value is used is determined by your weapons speed. Here's Brandish/Blast for example:

Faster (2): 630ms
Faster (3): 690ms
Fast (4): 750ms
Fast (5): 810ms
Normal (6): 840ms
Slow (7): 900ms
Slow (8): 960ms

The game doesn't really care what type of weapon your using, as long as the skill is compatible with it, the speed will be whatever your weapons speed + whatever buffs you may have, and I don't think there would be practical way for there to code a separate table of values just for 1H weapons to use either. The other option would be to make all 2H weapons base speed no faster than Slow (7). However, even if you tried increasing 2H damage to compensate for it's slower speed, you would eventually run in to our good friend Mr. Damage Cap (especially with Paladins), which would cause 2H weapon dps to fall off and and be overtaken by 1H dps. As much as it would make sense for 1H to be faster overall, it's best to leave that whole things alone and just focus on the difference in DPS rather than the speed. As for accuracy buffs for only 1H, the only I think you could implement that is tacking an accuracy bonus onto the shield mastery or guardian skills.

Mmm, while I won't say here whether I feel the game as a whole is "balanced" right now, I can say that 1H vs. 2H sure ain't balanced right now, I mean that's why most people are using 2H, no? As far as my "Solution A" goes, it really only affects warriors who use 1H+shields, and won't really disrupt the balance of the game as a whole I'd think. As far as my "Solution B", even though it potentially could change other classes besides warriors, I think I covered ways to prevent it negatively affecting them. The only thing in that scenario where I could see people getting upset are warriors who already spent a lot of money making a really good attack shield, (which tbf, isn't a huge portion of the community). Personally, I wouldn't mind giving up my shield to have that change implemented (I know it probably won't happen, but hey a guy can dream ) but I do understand that people who've invested in one more than me probably won't feel the same way. I guess my only suggestion there is that people with really good attack shields can get comped for it in someway, idk.



Double Christ, I somehow managed to pump out another essay complaining about how an old mushroom game isn't well programmed. I know the staff is already looking into solutions for 1H+shields and stuff, so I have no idea if any of the ideas I rambled on about today are really gonna matter in the end, but hey, no harm in trying I guess

 

You made it man haha

 

GMS CAN WE CLOSE THIS THREAD WE HAVE SUCCEEDED, FOLKS, NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS EVEN IF THEY ARE STUPID.
THIS IS HAPLOPELMA ON GELLERHEAD SHIELD BUFF THREAD,
LAST TRANSMISSION,
IT WAS AN HONOUR TO FIGHT WITH YOU ALL

 

More expensive attack shields, gambling, meso dumping. Im a 1h hammer user and I don't really get the point, just stretching the limits of the current meta imo