Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience
post rev. 6 by Sushiburger on 11-04-18, 10:20 am
Posted at 11-04-18, 10:03 am Link | #
Melee by virtue of being melee, the most risky playstyle should have some kind of clear advantage. You pick up the most agro. You have the least amount of options. You are in the action. I don't get how this is a point of contention. I mean I do. People have worked on their DEX and they want to maintain their position as a dominant power, but I don't understand how that information is taken seriously by anyone that has any respect for balance. "BUH RANGE HAS TO AIM". You shoot your first shot at a still target. If by some unholy curse you didn't blow away every mobs body and essence your first shot, you tap your second target with a pet, or you're on a horse, or you're behind some barrier spikes. What are you even talking about?
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Maybe numbers in skills can't or shouldn't be tampered with. Perhaps much of the communal fallback to such a large change would hurt the integrity of a nostalgic server. I still believe the more risky something is, the more benefit it should have (in general). You shouldn't punished for risk. That promotes a boring stagnant game. If the staff(whoever you are) are willing to go beyond Nostalgia for the sake of superior content(which it appears you are by the new content), there are some simple changes that could greatly improve the flow of the game. That doesn't mean breaking old-school content. It means maintaining that old-school feel and improving current systems. There is no shame in taking a knee if a person hasn't done a perfect job. You guys are great. I'm just expressing a shared opinion of many players.
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Maybe numbers in skills can't or shouldn't be tampered with. Perhaps much of the communal fallback to such a large change would hurt the integrity of a nostalgic server. I still believe the more risky something is, the more benefit it should have (in general). You shouldn't punished for risk. That promotes a boring stagnant game. If the staff(whoever you are) are willing to go beyond Nostalgia for the sake of superior content(which it appears you are by the new content), there are some simple changes that could greatly improve the flow of the game. That doesn't mean breaking old-school content. It means maintaining that old-school feel and improving current systems. There is no shame in taking a knee if a person hasn't done a perfect job. You guys are great. I'm just expressing a shared opinion of many players.
The one(s) in charge of balance if anyone, I'd urge them to take suggestions from players, perhaps veteran players.
This is already being done, but you don't hear about it because that would invoke unwanted leaks/negative attention to players who help in balance.
I'm glad the team is listening to most veteran players and not just people you're personally friends with and/or yourselves.
Simple ways of making melee more viable and enjoyable, like decreasing the cooldown on AS (something that can be done by the way) or giving Smash a buff outside of Giant (oh no the horror, who would want humans, the ""STRONGEST"" race to be even MORE powerful) or like, I dunno, not making all of the custom content being anti-melee as fuck (because there's nothing balanced about enemies being immune to knockdowns and thus being immune to assault slash and there's nothing fun about enemies spamming ranged attacks and having ADV heavy stander and making melee wholly unviably outside of WM spam which isn't fun), would greatly improve the fun aspect of playing melee and its viability.
Is this game all about grinding? I mean, yeah. It's a KMMORPG. Does that mean that the content you do to grind has to be boring as hell and feel unrewarding? Does that mean that the endgame content has to be difficult to the point of unfairness and honestly have no clear balance to it? Does that mean that anything is fine as long as you, the person creating new content, personally don't have to suffer through the stuff you've made? I mean, maybe if you don't play the game and don't actually care about things other than what you're personally concerned with, that'd be fine. Y'know, if you just made stuff you liked and put it out, or if you just made crap that you personally like and used it and shared it with your buds and had a great time of it while 99% of the playerbase is just scratching their heads going "Why??? Why would you add this content??? Who is this targeted towards??????????"
Anyway though, yeah.
Buff AS, stop making it impossible in custom content. And melee having juicy Smash numbers outside of Giant would be cool. And stop making everything require WM spam if you're melee even though apparently WM is """overpowered""" because apparently balancing is really difficult and nobody thinks these things through too much. And stop putting ADV heavy stander on so much stuff like it's a good balance decision. It's not. It's artificial difficulty and discourages melee entirely, and it's just not fun to fight against at all. But I guess games aren't supposed to be fun or balanced or have cohesion in terms of what its content is trying to test in a player.
This post won't be very constructive but hell I feel like saying something. This probably feels better suited to another thread and I'm very bad at conveying my thoughts but whatever.
I'm going to chime in for the first time to say that a lot of enemies in new content are horrendously anti-melee in their design, to the point where it's really no wonder why a good amount of long time human players are rerolling to elf. I was going to make a post on the forums, if Ihzi didn't, called "stop making enemies with kd immunity like demigods/spiders/flagbearers/bog creatures as this only really heavily punishes one archetype". I love the idea of Viridius, and would run it even if the rewards were not necessarily worth it (and they aren't), but the fact that almost nothing in there is fun to fight makes me think twice. The mob designs are heavily flawed (if not flawed they're broken and thus not fun to fight for anybody, not just melee). I could go on and on about them.
Like not give heavy stander enemies redundant PDs that just make everything hell, or untargetable plants that also shoot unavoidable arrows in a gigantic aoe. I get that plants are supposed to be "danger zones" that you are supposed to avoid, but again this only really heavily punishes one archetype. If danger zones are dangerous to mobs as well or something, it'd actually be a very interesting gimmick that melee could utilize.
It's a pretty common opinion that Ghasts are terribly designed so why are we getting mobs like Bonefish who are not only kb immune but also melee immune? Aside from pet aggro swapping nonsense what is the legitimate way to kill them? Just tank, drink more pots, and kill it before it kills you? Unavoidable damage isn't difficulty, it's essentially just a healthcheck, and guess who spends most of their time windmilling their health away and playing with 0 will? Melee was already a high risk low reward playstyle in my opinion, and we keep getting content that punishes melee/windmill and not elfspam or magic/alchemy in the same way.
I'm not saying all content should be designed around melee, but all other playstyles are very one dimensional in their style of play compared to melee which has to play a guessing game often due to load times, fast mobs, pd, finnicky hitstun mechanics etc, and those other playstyles are not punished nearly as much. I know many people won't understand this point because "hurr wm spam so ez and broken" etc so I will elaborate.
I'm going to take golems and to a lesser extent Ruins Gargoyles as an example. Golems are fast, one of the fastest enemies in the game, and they hit hard. You throw heavy stander into the mix, suddenly I can't normal because it's extremely unsafe. No normals means that if a Garg/Golem decides to smash and I don't have windmill or counter loaded, I'm ded. I could use a pet or run in and normal and hope to god PD doesn't activate which is obviously unsafe. Both these mobs know stomp too which will force an approach, and if I don't have smash loaded I am similarly ded. If you are guessing the golem will try to stomp, you approach with smash, and the golem just decides to run at you and hit you, you're boned. If you guess the golem is going to try to normal but instead loads stomp, you're boned. They can also load windmill which really throws a wrench in things for melee, but the point is everyone else can straight up ignore these aspects of the combat system. I hope this illustrates an example of why melee often even has to wait because of being unsure, and stuff like smash not being a good spam skill despite it being highest dps.
multiple skill sets at once.
On the topic of unavoidable damage, it's an idea that has essentially never been done by Devcat. I'm not going to count cerberus heads as it's pretty much the only legitimate example, and it warns you beforehand. I could go on in more detail but I feel like I've said enough to give a general idea. I don't want to beat this horse too hard as Ihzi has already done for a month or two now.
I also agree with rewards in new content being overall too niche for the general populace to enjoy. Demigod set is nice but it's a gimmick, healing is pretty much useless as long as injury exists, etc etc. I know you can pretty much complete these sets in a day as well, whereas we have to spend 5 weeks in bouquet for something like a 0 mag bohe wear. Relevant players are "talked to" but I know myself and quite a few people have no legitimate reason to run the new content because no reward is really "worth it" to them. My group was running it, but we gave up due to the tedium and complete boredom of running coill for rare passes. Just my 2cents.
tl;dr New content punishes melee more than other archetypes, rewards don't really cater to most players.
Posted at 06-14-19, 02:30 am Link | #
Fun is, in fact, not allowed in old school mabi
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