Greetings to all the MapleRoyal Staffs and Players around this server, In this post, I will be pinpointing an extremely critical pointer that might increase the longevity & satisfaction of players in the game and that i hope the Staffs around will consider implementing! Points : VARIETY! Attract & Appeal. () Balancing the bosses around MapleRoyals in my opinion is a must, lets take an inside look of some bosses that players barely or NEVER bother to fight them. The Time Temple Bosses! - How many of you players hunt dodos, lilinouch or even lyka often? compared to HH (headless horseman). simply because of the fact of the drops, HP, exp and other factors that come in. *DODO has 5.9m HP. 20k+ exp. *Headless Horseman 3.5m HP. 300k EXP. (with better drops) () Increase Spawn Rate for other maps This is to let players have different VARIETY of maps to choose from for their training! rather than the same old standardized maps for everyone. (Players will understand this point) CONCLUSION : Buff the exp of the Bosses that are needed to buff (eg. Dodo,lilinouch, Lyka) HOW WILL THIS HELP MAPLEROYALS ? A slight buff of EXP for those bosses will appeal more players, but also too much change will unbalance the game. as for the map spawn rate buff, More Variety = More Fun = More Satisfaction = longer lifespan in the game = Eventually more players! (which brings me to my next point!) <BUT AT THE SAME TIME, WE DONT WANT TO LOWER THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL TOO MUCH> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- () Fixed Builds ( EXTRA. Not important, more of a suggestion) Players that start this game learnt to understand that Sword > BW , Hero/DK > Paladin. Why not buff the weapon attack of BW so that players have more variety to choose from. (im not a paladin) Such that players wont be already excluding paladin as their path way before they even hit level 30. A SLIGHT BUFF WONT HURT OR MAKE MAJOR CHANGES BUT MAKES THE PLAYER THINK AGAIN BEFORE ADVANCING! more variety!. For example! BUFFING BW WEAPONS by 10% will not make paladins overpower classes like NL , BM, or any classes at all. but brings it closer to a Class worth choosing! THANK YOU FOR LISTENING AND I REALLY WANT TO SEE WHAT YOU GUYS THINK ABOUT WHAT I SAID IN THIS POST! CHEERS!
Just wanted to throw in that Crushed Skull already has the greatest damage potential of all possible weapons available to a pally (IE it is the best weapon they can get), I'm not sure on the math with a perf skull/shield vs perf ST when apples are involved though. It's all the other BW that... honestly just suck, and make getting to 120 annoying. Overall pallies need a buff to their skills/class, it's not the weapon so much as even with charges on weak monsters, a hero with similar items will outdamage them, which IMO makes no sense. A pally should IMO pull ahead on elemental weak and fall behind on monsters with no weakness (For sake of ease in understanding the numbers, the idea would be Heros should be a solid 100 across the board, where pallies on elemental weak monsters should be 130, and on neutral monsters, 70. If that makes sense.)
An old school server doesn’t have to be unbalanced. You can still have an old school server where skills are balanced out to make less played jobs more playable. And I agree on buffing spawn rates, as PQs are boring and it’s good to be able to grind and get EXP at a competetive level with the PQs.
Royals was based on higher rates because of the horrible grind that can come from 1x1x1x. We added in additional bosses and zones like Ulu and soon to be Ninja Castle to give more places to train. We've made QoL changes to Royals from regular GMS to make things more fun and enjoyable. There is absolutely no reason at all for certain classes to suck. I would even go as far to say weapon types like Axes and BW have no reason to suck either. I dont find it nostalgic that almost nobody plays 3-4 classes. I dont find it nostalgic that certain weapon types have absolutely zero chance of ever being used due to how inferior they are. We have the chance to make the right changes to things to make Royals all inclusive for weapons and classes and thusly more things to play and enjoy. And i dont think the slippery slope falacy can be used in this instance. We have hindsight available to us, and we simply use hindsight to stop ourselves from going beyond the scope of what Nostalgic Maple is.
For what it's worth, that's the trade off. Mages can mob and grind and cannot boss. NL are terribly mobbers/grinders but are excellent bossers. The issue is you cannot make every fruit the same, but you can make bad apples (pallies) more on par with good apples (heroes). Class diversity is one of the things that made old maple good and ruined newer maple (remember when they gave everyone a mini-flashjump? That's class homogenization and it's not good). The most successful MMO's have extensive class diversity. WoW is a classic example of this, they just took it a step further with sub-classes that took on even more specific niches, and bosses with very diverse mechanisms.
1. "No HP Washing" That's something unique for old maplestory version, nobody has to do it. Nowadays on gms every single class has lots of HP and MP, but that doesn't make any difference, because every boss does damage on a % rate. I've played on that reboot server for a few days and noticed that, I went to zakum at lv7x, 8x, 9x, 15x, and ALL it's skills sent me from 100% HP to 200-300 HP left. And the high level bosses are even worse, 1hit kill skills, and death countings. HP Washing is a "special" formula for people to do bossing easier, the same way some people used to make HP equips back in gms '07. If you think you need it, you do it, if you don't want to, you don't. 2. Making BWs stronger won't solve much the "problem" The damage formula for BWs is already higher than sword. The solution should be the skills, like Evan said about the charges, they don't give any "extra" when compared to Fighters, but should. 3. Increasing spawn rates is something that they should've already been doing in various places. Imagine if the spawn rates of every kind of mob in the server was about the same. You could grind/leech/farm ANYWHERE you wanted to, without any problem. And it would pretty much reduce/eliminate the "finding empty maps" on places that are usually crowded. Also about the area bosses, wouldn't it be good to make a instance room for each one of them? Like the ones on official server that you use for the Silent Crusade quests. They don't drop anything, just gives EXP, and you can only enter it once a day. Could be a good thing for people that plays less hours/day/week, since it's hard to find the bosses sometimes.
Here's a thoughtdump on some of the ideas brought up in this thread so far. As a quick preface to it, I think it's important to remember that everyone's nostalgia is different. Some people who played remember being unique by playing weaker classes, or using weaker weapons. They did so because they wanted to use those items for the rarity appeal. Others remember HP washing fondly, because they play the game to be the strongest, most optimal character possible. Everyone who plays this game with that magic word nostalgia in mind remembers specific parts of the game that they loved, however big or small, and so it's a very dangerous thing to change these parts of the game far into a server's lifespan, as it may come at the expense of people who remembered it and wanted it the way that it always was. That said... 1) Buffing Temple of Time area boss HP The reason these bosses were hunted were never for exp, they were always for other gains, and that's the way they're currently there. People kill Dodo, Lilynouch and Lyka to progress through Temple of Time. Lilynouch has a couple of decent skillbook drops that are tough to acquire otherwise - one that I've personally farmed hundreds of Lilynouch for is Achilles 30, otherwise only dropped by Manon, and very stingily I might add. Lyka meanwhile previously had a very good NX drop rate on this server and a small chance at a Chaos Scroll, making it special as the only mob in the game to do so. Dodo being the first area boss required to progress means that it's the first barrier to progress through the questline if it's being hunted for other purposes. Altering these three bosses to be hunted for experience rather than these listed gains becomes dangerous for other aspects of the game; people will find it harder to fully unlock Temple of Time, certain skillbooks may deflate and become common to their current rarity, and (more) alterations to the NX/Chaos droprates may have to be done to prevent damage to the economy. The idea was certainly with good intentions in mind, however it's important to consider the positives of a boss before deciding to create another! 2) Balancing Axes/Blunt Weapons to their Sword counterparts My preface is very much relevant to this topic. I will willingly admit bias to this topic - I played an Axe Hero personally when I played GMS, and I chose that weapon line because I knew they were uncommon and I didn't mind the sacrifice in overall damage to have a big, badass Axe swinging around. Apart from the different look, there are other very real reasons to experience the same nostalgia - some people picked these weapons because they're cheaper to buy and scroll, others picked them because the theoretical highest damage number for either given class is through these weapons (because of slash stab multipliers being an even 1.0x for swords and favoring slashes for both axes and blunt weapons at a rate of 1.1x off memory), and others picked them simply because they wanted higher damage range rather than more actual overall damage (every axe/blunt weapon has a higher STR multiplier for the character's damage range when compared to the corresponding sword, resulting in higher damage range). At the end of the day, these weapons are underpowered, but the truth is that there will always be a less powerful option unless you make all the fruit the same (thanks Evan!) and I don't think that that's what anyone hopes to accomplish. I think that everyone needs to decide for themselves where along the line of damage vs style they lie, just as they always have, because that's the true distinction here, and for that matter, also in the next topic... 3) Class Balance Some classes in this game suck. Paladins are basically relegated to being a non-mage alternative grind class due to utterly underpowered one-on-one skillsets, and realistically they don't even do that job very much better if at all compared to their other warrior brothers. Marksmen have absolutely nothing positive to balance them behind Bowmasters other than a stronger early-4th job due to damage stability from Snipe and some more utility from a freezing summon/skill and a 4th job mobbing skill. Shadowers have the niche of not requiring gear to do real damage, just mesos, but the damage falls off and gets extremely expensive to maintain over time, and furthermore require a larger equipment set to be functional without relying on Meso Explosion - and that "real" damage is still bottom tier among non-mages. Speaking of Mages, all they do well is nuke maps for a lot of damage on a lot of monsters slowly but surely, and outside of that mass farming ability, they're essentially worthless. That's what class balance is. It's very easy to look at classes and only see what a class doesn't do well, ignoring what they do. What if I told you that there's a class in this game that has no short-range attack other than the standing equivalent of the lay-down-poke, a very weak space-clearing push attack to make some space to avoid that terrible short-range deficiency that you only get far into 4th job, and one of the weakest mobbing abilities in the game, and then argued that this class needs to be buffed in order to bring it in line in grinding speeds with the powerhouse mages that can hit everything on the map and have Teleport to zoom around? I'd be absolutely mental, because the class I'm talking about is of course Night Lords, who have not only the highest avoidability in the game and a passive damage negation skill to supplement that, but also have the strongest mobility skill in the game in Flash Jump, the second strongest theoretical one-on-one DPS, and a skill that makes attack potions last longer because why not? Obviously, the classes I mentioned in the first paragraph are nowhere near as strong as Night Lords, I'll never argue that they are. But they all do have an upside somewhere. Paladins do have more versatility in their kit to be able to selectively hit one mob with a nuke or hit six and stun them all, and they have their own form of ultimate skill in Heaven's Hammer which (may not be functional, but if it is,) lowers up to 15 mobs on the map to 1hp for you to rush around and instakill, which no other non-mage has. I listed a bunch of tools that Marksmen have as well over Bowmasters, and they still have the Sharp Eyes skill that all the boss parties are so keenly after. Shadowers have the strongest 3rd job by far, and one of the most immersive skill kits in the game, only remotely matched by Buccaneers - it may not be rewarding from a damage perspective, but the Shadower class isn't played the same way as any other class in MapleStory, which is a reason to play them, powerful or not. Every class in the game has something that the other classes don't, and that makes every class have a role somewhere. I understand the idea of tuning these advantages to make them meaningful compared to the stronger classes in the game, so I'll re-invoke the same concepts from the last section to enforce why I think balancing classes isn't a good idea; some people simply remember these classes as being suboptimal and liked that about them, choosing to sacrifice the damage or ability to do certain things for the appeal of playing a class that you don't see often. Changing that about the class may appeal to a few die hard supporters of those classes, but it really changes how MapleStory functions as a game and makes it something that a lot of people didn't remember. People remember Night Lords zipping everywhere DPSing the biggest bosses down, Heroes loltanking everything and shelling out big damages, Mages spamfarming to their hearts content. They don't remember, Marksmen flurrying down bosses, Shadowers doing anything outside of looking cool, and Paladins being anything more than "woah, a Paladin!" And maybe that's the way that it should stay. 4) HP washing There's a lot of controversy around HP washing - whether or not it's fun, whether or not it's needed, whether or not it was intended at all. The last point is the easiest to address - we don't know if it was intended, but it was in the game and never removed, and I think it has to be assumed that it became just as much a part of the game as any other aspect. Whether or not it's needed is another fairly easy to address topic; as it currently stands, it's not needed for any boss in the game. With the reintroduction of Horntail, whenever that may be, that will STILL be the case so long as nothing about Horntail is changed, as the bare minimum to survive a Horntail run on the old source was 7.7k or so, which is easily attainable for any class using Hyper Body. However, I will not deny that HP washing is an important part of end-game MapleStory, and very lucrative investment. HP washing does make every boss fight easier or more accessible in situations where a Dark Knight is not present to provide Hyper Body. Furthermore, there will soon be a boss in the game that outright will require HP washing for any non-warrior to complete - the Castellan Toad's ability to hit upwards of 15k means that ranged characters with less than about 9k hp simply can't survive - and even that number requires a fairly significant amount of HP washing for ranged characters. Warriors all attain that number fairly easily with the assistance of Hyper Body, however. The concept of a warrior-dominated boss is not exactly unwelcome, either; consider the Bodyguard+Grandpa combo in Showa Town, and to a lesser extent, Anego. All of these bosses require absolutely no specific HP requirement for a ranged class that can simply attack safely from outside of the boss' attacking range, but have significant HP barriers for melee classes (11k touch/18k magic for Anego, 20k touch/26k magic for Bodyguard A, 22k touch for Grandpa) and Grandpa is essentially unhittable for any melee class that isn't Shadowers, as it has a gargantuan accuracy requirement of 442. The introduction of a boss that's far more suitable for melee fighters may be a welcome addition to provide some bossing parity to classes that largely fall off in boss party viability otherwise, and is killable without HP washing by those classes. This will contribute to class balance, as some classes will have access to some content without washing and some will not, just as there are other barriers (the necessity of ranged attacks, accuracy requirements), but it's important to note that all content in the game will be accessible even still without HP washing - just not to every individual class. As to the topic of whether or not it's fun... isn't that subjective to everyone individually? I think it's very important we distinguis the differences between subjective wants and needs in any situation and what's actually a positive change to the game, as not understanding that will inevitably result in dissent about decisions that harm them with the simple argument of "well, why do you get your way and not me?" I'll restate my argument of everyone remembering different individual parts of the game as good - some people enjoy mage training, enjoy leeching, and probably have more fun leeching characters to high levels than actually playing them afterwards. That was a long one. Happy reading until next time...
Even though it was hell expensive, I've seen people who did it in gMS '07, even an irl friend did it a few times. Certainly not in the size people do it here, with free nx, but they did it. If you agree that nobody has to do anything, why everybody keeps sitting on this key? I know dozens of players that did not HP wash and are living well without it. It's just an extra for making life easier. I didn't mean to say "same". People used to make GODLY HP Gear for lower level thieves and bowmen to survive at Zak. It was WAY cheaper than HP Washing and would be helpful for them. I was in a bossing guild back in '07 and I had enough HP Equips for a Lv50 thief to survive at Zakum.
Well said. I'd like to add hp washing even removes diversity between classes. You know why warriors have little chance vs the bosses in showa town? Cause it was made for ranged classes so that's where they shine and other classes fail. With hp washing covering archers and nls only real weakness, they'll manage to fight any boss that would usually 1 hit kill them.
