MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

Looking at the race identity thread, it's come to my attention that paladins seem to have the fairly short end of the stick when it comes to transformation. Elves and giants get their skills, DK's get theirs and are able to stay in trans technically forever as long as they have the pots or means to heal themselves in disarm, what do paladins get? A negligible "buff" to def/prot (at rank 1, this is 15 def/6 prot). Compared to the others, that's basically nothing. 15 defense blocks a whopping 15 damage, 6 prot blocks 6% of most damage (IIRC).
What I would suggest is outright doubling the def and prot that paladins get at each rank. 30 def and 12 prot at rank 1 paladin is not OP, but not something that you wouldn't notice either.

The reason I said humans can't charge without a shield makes sense. Giants are bigger than most mobs in the game, so they should be able to literally push them out of the way due to there being much more mass to hit them with. Humans on the other hand are about as big as most mobs, it would be like a regular American football game. Both sides would just kind of... slam into each other and not move too much, but slam a shield into them and they'll probably stumble a bit.

Considering that elves and humans need a (fairly rare) re-forge in order to charge w/o a shield on live (can be considered a magic buff of some sort), it still wouldn't make sense to give them a shield-less charge for free. Sure, there is an argument to be made about balance, but there's also the argument that giving that ability to all classes would be unbalanced as well. If we're going to change the fundamentals of charge, then here's what I suggest. Make it so charge only effects things related to your size, race and charge rank.

Since giants are objectively the strongest melee race and the largest, they should get an all around modifier of being able to charge things 1.5-1.75 times their size.
Humans are well-rounded, so make them have a modifier of 1.1-1.25
And since elfscrubs are weaksauce, they get a modifier of .7-.8

As for charge rank scaling, I would say every rank adds a .1% modifier to size with rank F starting at .1% added modifier, so a rank 1 would be able to charge something an additional 1.5X my size (though we can go to 1 technically there is no modifier past 6, so the cap is effectively an extra 1.0X added modifier)

Also, from what I've seen most people on Pro are long time players from live, and like me have done the hell that is ranking life skills, and would rather it be not as grindy. For the issue of even adding it though, if adding a completely different destiny option isn't possible, perhaps adding it to existing ones is possible. Like Melee would get refining and blacksmith, archery gets weaving, tailoring, handicraft etc, and magic gets... production mastery...?

This actually makes more sense, an adventurer would need to know how to tailor to fix clothes and make their own things.

As long as we sacrifice the filthy elves to the Nexon Gods they allow us to continue our meager existence.

I don't think you did that right...

That and the thing is, many people simply WON'T do life skills because of the annoyance that it really is to rank. Windmill people have no issue with because it's only one skill. Now add about 6/7 more skills and people will just groan at having to do that. I know I did, and having to do it all over again just puts me off.

Giving a bigger incentive may cause people that wouldn't have given it a single thought to possibly go at it. Also, ranking blacksmithing and many life skills is very costly, so even if someone wanted to rank up but doesn't have the money to buy higher rank mats or the time to get them, they're screwed there as well.

As Blighty said, games are supposed to be fun, I dare you to find me ONE person that willingly would say "Oh man ranking all those life skills was a blast, I'd reset them to F and do it all over again any time!"

You know, the whole "Feel rewarded and accomplished" thing was also said by a certain company (who shall not be named) about the infamous SWBF2... and it had the exact same issue our life skills do. The payoff of ranking life skills at their current requirements is many times, not worth it unless you're going for something specific, have literally nothing else to rank, or you want to be a half decent archer that doesn't take forever to kill anything compared to even alchemists. Sure, maybe instead of straight up halving the requirements to rank up isn't the right answer (though, that was more of a starter and not a final thing), but a rework at the very least is. Hell, I'm sure most anyone would be plenty satisfied if the "Fail X" wasn't part of the requirements (Why TF is that even a req? Why would failing something if you know how to do it correctly help you in ANY way?) as anyone that wants to play the game instead of grinding through life skills at the very start will usually have too much dex to fail at all.

Now, thank god for the fact that we have fail potions, otherwise anyone that's over current 200 would be totally screwed (though what is it, 60 or 70k for 5 minutes? Seems way overpriced for what you get, almost as punishment for not daring to rank life skills first and foremost). But the issue is that we shouldn't need fail potions just to progress in the game, that's literal punishment for not doing something the way the devs wanted you to... in a game that says you can do what you want when you want. Seeing the issue here?

No one is really asking to make life skills EASY to rank, just not make it as blatant time padding as it obviously is.