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Giants are fucked.

Hello, I'm making this post to tell you why giants need a buff. I played live for along time, and all of my time are on melee humans and giants. On live it's no secret that humans have almost always held the edge in melee (not lance) combat. Any time dual wield is even slightly better than 2-handed weapons humans skyrocket. And when 2-handed weapons are in vogue, humans are able to keep pace with giants easily. I'm of the opinion that giants should be beyond stronger in melee than any other race. Giants are the only race to lose an entire skillset (until lances come along) and our compensation is nothing.

According to the wiki, humans on this patch get 248 strength. Giants get 256. Giants give up archery for 8 strength. Giants get charge with no shield, but since humans have access to reliable ranged abilities and bunshin this bonus isn't very strong. Humans who are pure melee can just carry a shield in the offhand as well. Giants can use 2-handed swords in 1 hand with their shield, but defenses have never mattered in this game and 2-handed weapons suck compared to duel wielding. Meanwhile, every giant racial ability sucks. Wind Guard is super niche, Taunt is super niche, Stomp is completely worthless, and Throwing attack is beyond trash. Final Hit is one of the best abilities in the game, and even Final Shot has uses. When do you use Wind Guard outside of sulfur spider for 1 wave? Taunt is just a shitty rafting ability. Stomp is just a shitty windmill. Throwing attack is 25 seconds. Giant's abilities suck, but so do their weapon choices.

First and foremost I'm of the opinion that dual wielding is not fun and crowds out the old damage option of 2-handed weapons. If dual wielding was removed today I'd be happy. However it's not going to be, so here's some math. I'll be using a 300 strength human and a 330 strength giant. I've given giants 30 more strength due to their .25 extra strength per level (adding up to 25 extra at level 100) and the 8 more strength they get from all skills. For humans I'll be using artisan battle swords with 70 strength artisan and for giants I'll be using the warhammer below. I've chosen this warhammer because in my opinion the full max damage warhammer isn't worth losing 20 crit. Some might also choose to go hook carving, but this would have made the damage calculations too human favored. This is my compromise.


Giant warhammer
(84+0(Not bothering with enchants)+132(Strength bonus at 330)+86(Blunt and Combat Master))
(84+84+132+86) is 386 max damage.
versus
Human battlesword
(54+54+176(extra strength from artisan)+64) is 348.
Ha! Humans are weaker! Well, at least if you only take a look at max damage, of course
blunts end up looking favorable. There are 2 other places we should look at.

Min damage.
Giant warhammer
(0+0+110+13) is 123 min damage
versus
Human battlesword
(36+36+146(Rounded down despite it being 146.666~)+34) 252 min damage.
Almost double for humans!

Balance
For balance we will assume 30 base (or 211 dex, which favors humans as they can really
get much more)
The formula from the wiki is
([Max damage - Min Damage]Balance) + Min
So using our numbers above we get
Giant warhammer
([386-123].45)+123 = 241.35
versus
Human battlesword
([348-252].80)+252 = 328.8

This time for 2-handed weapons.
No need to repeat the numbers or explanations above. I'll be using Battle Hammer and Broad Axe (which are both super similar to the point of being the same but just in case) as well as Highlander Claymore.

Battle Hammer (using wiki's type 258 which is what I see the most of)
Max (106+132+56) = 294
Min (12+110+13) = 135
Balance ([294-135].55)+135 = 222.45

Broad Axe (Using 251)
Max (114+131+46) = 289
Min (16+110+23) = 149
Balance ([293-149).77)+149 = 259.88

HLC (285 and 295 are basically the same but I'll be using 295)
Max (105+131+46) = 282
Min (18+110+23) = 151
Balance ([282-151].70)+151 = 242.7

Finally as a bonus 222 Broads.
Max (73+73+120+64) = 330
Min (0+0+100+34) = 134
Balance ([330-134].80)+134 = 290.8

Giants can get bigger numbers, but most of the time humans are pumping out higher dps. Giants throw away archery only to be worse at melee than humans. We get nerfed magic only to be worse at melee than humans.

Now what do we do? Giant weapon buffs are on option and already suggested on the forums. If we buff the numbers to the point they go over it's problem solved. Quick and easy. Mechanical changes could offer giants QoL as well as Significant buffs. However, it is not clear to me what is possible for the dev team to accomplish. From what little I've heard adding new skills is near impossible for them, so making use of existing skills is all I feel comfortable suggesting. Allowing Full Swing out of trans would be a buff (that in all honesty may be overkill). Allowing more skills in Wind Guard is nice QoL. Throwing Attack is universally agreed to be in need of a cooldown buff, but this doesn't change giant melee strength.

If there is anything wrong with the way my math or the formulas are used please don't hesitate to correct me.

Giants have bunshin.

Throwing attack is indeed worthless besides the stats it gives.

Taunt and windguard are a joke besides the stats it gives.

Something to not forget as well is the shorter load time on smash for giants.

You say final hit is one of the best skills, but lategame it's just a meh skill, used to finish mobs or clear trash rooms like when you are running a dungeon that isn't hardmode/peaca or a SM that isnt HM/elite (talking about 1k+ kind of lategame).

Something that always happens in posts like these are the exclusion of enchants. Enchants play a CRUCIAL part in mabinogi and heavily determines the power of a character. Especially for giant, stuff like balance enchants are important(more on this later in the post).

How you use balance is off. Dual wielding giants have the option to use an egoed iron mace, sacrificing a shit load of crit, to get the best max dmg ego possible for melee dual wield. Combining it with a warhammer, their dual wield damage is through the roof compared to human and their balance issues are lessened due to the iron mace ego not having garbage balance. Furthermore, any giant that knows the game, will probably resort to using balance enchants like shard, swarming (end game you can still use swarming on accessories 2x and gloves) and strider.
The only real problem with dual wielding warhammer + ego mace is the ridiculous difference in crit between a giant with ego mace + warhammer and a human with hooked cutlass ego + battlesword, making the giant OP for windmilling (due to ignoring prot for crit) but bad at smashing. This can be partly remedied due to giants being able to wear a HLC and an enchanted shield for much better crit and insane max damage due to HLC's high damage and 2h weapon enchants (for example you can use a necromancer alligator HLC + a salt alteration cooking pot for insane damage/crit boosts). Due to the extra damage received from using a 2handed sword, it deals insane damage.

Even though I'm saying all this, I'm not saying giants are meh in some regards and that no changes are needed. Throwing attack is pretty ass and definitely deserves... something. Windguard, stomp and taunt are a joke in my opinion and the fact that not only they can't use ranged at all, their magic sucks as well, kinda hurts. Just allowing them to use magic equal to humans would already be a decent change imo, giving them more options overall. Making their melee advantage better would also be a solution. Giving them ranged... not an option, and most likely no1 would suggest that anyway.

Never said they didn't. What I was pointing out was that melee humans have options outside of charge to close distance.


Something many people (including me) cannot take advantage of due to server lag.


Final Hit is more than usable in HM/elite. I've played these levels as a human and final hit speeds up shadow missions immensely.

As for everything else, it'd be easier to do the numbers for it to show. If the way I use balance is wrong please post how you should correctly use it. I didn't bother with ego's because as far as I'm concerned 1 ego weapon shouldn't be the only thing the entire race is good for. I understand how good iron mace ego is but I'd prefer to see numbers before I concede that that alone is enough. That's really it, if the numbers are better please do show them.

I was the person that suggested a battlesword equivilent weapon for giant, one with good min-max dmg.

Atm the only reason for me to play my giant is because Giant Full Swing completly nukes a room full of monsters in 1 hit.

Also I also suggested once to make the load time for smash on giants from 1.6 seconds to 1.4 seconds so that even people with higher latency outside of NA can use N+smash.

If you are talking about not being able to use N+smash, fair the benefit is lessened. However, the smash still charges faster making stuff like smashmilling more feasable. I personally play from EU so my ping isn't NA level either, but with my giant doing anything with smash is just smoother because of the loading decrease (I personally can't N+smash due to latency as well) and still speeds up gameplay overall. Also, considering the loadtime difference in smash doesn't benefit you due to such high latency, loss of ranged should for you personally not be a big downside since range is heavily reliant on ping.


Well if you actually think it's useful in the current generation, that's just something we differ in opinions on. I don't think it's a very useful skill for higher content, especially due to the high cooldown. When our guild runs our elites/peaca int runs and whatnot, I'm pretty sure the amount of times FH is used it countable by one hand.


Well, any setup that doesn't use 0.8 modifier for balance is basically a non realistic one, since one would work towards a gearset + skillset that supports 80 balance. Also, egos define a race majorly. The hooked cutlass is BROKEN for its insane crit and one of the highest damage one handed weapons (for humans atleast), and the iron mace is broken for its insane damage for giant dual wield.

I'm going to try and do some calculations using mostly the values you have given before, but adding in different weapons etc. and considering some enchants.
Theres a TL;DR at the end.

So for dual wield setup, human and giant with cutlass and iron mace, all stats level 40 besides int and dex since most people disregard those (I didn't opt for 50 in the other stats since reaching 50 in all stats is unrealistic amount of time, only about a month ago did one of our players reach lvl 50 in strength).

Cutlass 90-152
Mace 23-201 and 40 balance

The giant uses swarming on accessories x2, swarming on gloves and a shard suit for extra balance. The human doesn't need this and can use peaceful on gloves for 15str instead of 4 max/min, max roll white horse for 2 extra max, and 2x earthquake for 15 str instead of 4max 4min. The str enchants in total give 6 more max than the giant, giving the human 8 more max in total due to the giant using balance enchants which can be added to the humans base damage.

Cutlass + battlesword

152 + 54 + 146 (removed 30 max from your double artisan calculation due to -75 str cus missing out on 1 artisan) + 64 + 8 (because enchants) = 424 max
90 + 36 + 124 + 34 = 284 min

Iron mace + warhammer

201 + 84 + 132 + 86 = 503 max
23 + 0 + 110 + 13 = 146 min

Balance
I'm actually personally not sure how balance works with dual wielding. I am assuming that you add both weapons balance and then divide by 2 for the total balance from weapons gained. If both weapons their balance value is added without dividing it, it would boost the giant to 80 balance easy even without enchants.
the 30 base + 20 ((40+0)/2 due to dual wielding) +15 from CM + 14 from enchants resulting in 79 for the giant
Human can reach 80 balance easy

for giant: ([503 - 146].79)+146 = 428
for human: ([424 - 284].0.8)+284 = 396

With this setup however, it is much easier for the human to reach the required amount of crit to be able to dual wield smash than the giant. For the giant to reach a satisfactory amount of crit, having restored would almost be a must (which is quite hard to get) and to use a vine/blunt helmet whereas the human could for example use oblivion on the hat slot for 10 more max damage and -3 crit. But for windmilling purposes (which is a large part of mabinogi melee) the giant is favored (albeit not by a huge margin).

However, when we touch on the subject of smashing, a 2h weapon gets a 600% modifier instead of a 500% modifier, making a two handed weapon quite useful to smash with (or is it?). So now we are going to calculate for using a 2h weapon. We will be using a highlander claymore with untamed alligator, and the giant will be using a salt alteration cooking pot. For the actual weapon, I will be referring to a HLC I made myself, which gives +36 str (20 from enchant, 16 from artisan), which is +14 max and +10 min, has 22-94 damage reach, 45 crit (due to artisan +66 luck) and +45 max damage from enchants. In total, the damage reach with arti/enchants is 32-153.
The weapon:
(sidenote, at this point I actually went to check the dmg bonus from CM and SM, since there is a difference between them for giant/human and I noticed your calculation for the CM/SM bonus is off since human gets 18 max 8 min and giant gets 20 max 10 min from CM and sword mastery gives 20 max 10 min according to 2011 wiki, meaning that in your calculation for dual wield, the number should be 58/76 (first number if CM applies once, 2nd if twice, I'm not sure) max and 28/36 min (same as before) and for blunt it should be 80/100 (same as before, dunno if CM applies twice) max and 10/20 min. Since I took your numbers for my calculations as well, they are a bit off too, but I can't be bothered to change it all at this point since I'm not sure even if it applies once or twice).

Human
153+120 (300 str) + 38 = 311 max
31 + 90 + 18 = 139 min

giant
153 + 132 (330 str) + 40 + 15 (salt + alteration str bonus on shield slot) = 340 max
31+ 99 + 20 + 11 (salt+alteration) = 161 min

balance
weapon has 10, if both human and giant have 30 base balance, and get 15+15 from SM/CM, they'd both have 70 balance. However, lets assume they both compensate the lack of 10 balance through the same balance enchants on other equipment slots, resulting in 80 balance for both

human
([311-139].0.8)+139=276.6

Giant
([340-161].0.8)+161=304.2

So giants can wear 2h weapon and benefit from the 100% extra smash damage better than human. However, when we compare the 304 damage giant has with the claymore, to the 428 he has when dual wielding, that doesn't matter at all since dual wield would be 2140 damage and 2h weapon would be 1824 damage. So the advantage that giant has in terms of smashing with 2h weapon is neglected by the sheer overpoweredness of dual wielding. Of course, this is assuming I did everything correct myself which I'm not completely sure of. And the numbers used for CM/SM and CM/BM bonuses are wrong as I said before for the dual wield calculations, however the differences shouldn't be too huge (as far as I can see, like 6-10 dmg difference).

Honestly this was a learning experience for me, since I didn't realise using a two handed weapon was actually that bad, and when considering that, although humans have less damage when dual wielding, their huge amount of crit gained by using a hooked cutlass ego makes them much better for crit smashing. Before this I was of the opinion that because a giant could dual wield for insane dmg on windmills and switch to 2h for critsmashes whenever he wants/needs to, that giant had an edge in melee combat overall. But now, it looks to me like giant is only better at windmilling spamming (which still happens a lot in mabi because a large part of mabi is grinding stuff with aoe), but for harder content smash starts to matter more and more, where human is apparently better at.

TL;DR: I might be bad at math, insecure about whether I even did all calculations correct. In the end, seems like 2h weapons are absolute garbage compared to dual wield, making giants only marginally better at windmilling and worse at smashing (unless you compensate for the lack of crit hard with crit enchants, lowering giant his damage). I still think being able to charge without shield when dual wielding is very nice, and the decreased smash time is quite nice, but overall giant does seem to have some incredibly horrible downsides with no good returns for it.

Mechanical changes seem more than fair. The currently existing giant-exclusive things (great swords, hammars, etc.) could all stand to see a substantial improvement, be it their starting stats or upgrade options.

Wind Guard could use a substantial buff along the lines of aoe and/or movement allowed (-90%?), just offset it with using a lot of MP or SP so it isn't "abusable". A physical equivalent to the Cor magic shields, if you will.

Stomp, better hit mechanics if not just range, to make it a quick wide area hitstun to support party members who are about to eat a hit.

Taunt, better range and possibly temporary Weakness debuff on enemies at later levels (believe that's what it's called, where mobs lose all hitstun).

Large shields - make their base stats better and/or add unique enchants to make bettering them at least possible. Maybe through a custom Par dungeon for extra flavor?

Gear:
I do agree with the basic giant weapons having a buff: great sword, hammers, etc. I also think they should have better upgrade paths. Maybe add custom enchants only for those weapons?

In terms of combat:
Smash needs to be brought to 600%, if it isn't already naturally 600 for them.
The rest of the combat could be reworked for slight bonuses across the skill set.

Other:
I'm also all for giving giants play dead and rock throw, as well as, a slight debuffed form of archery with their atlatls.

I feel like adding in a second atlatl skill for giants could be helpful. Maybe a "wound" skill that would have a load time and would lower an enemy's defenses or movement or something for a while.

Friendly reminder from the most loved one.

"Git Gud"