MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

G13 of Mabinogi left alot of things unfinished, and it lacks a fun endgame to work towards, which is why alot of players end up quitting and/or going on hiatus. There needs to be things that keep players incentivized to stay.

Party Quests and Iria Quest Board
While the team is working on new custom content, I think it'd be a nice idea to add in the remaining dungeon PQs for non-normal dungeons that G13 left undone. This would add an extra incentive for running these dungeons people would otherwise not bother with. Similarly, Iria could do with similar treatment with the Rano quest board. While I don't know how much of this is possible, adding in custom quests for running Iria dungeons with rewards comparable to running circles around Cor would give players more options to obtain gold, exp, and what have you. More options means more variety and less burnout from doing the same thing over and over. G13 actually has alot of content, but most of it is overshadowed by a few superior options, or rather the unvisited content is significantly inferior to the said superior options.


Aside from that, there's a few fun ideas I have.
Monster Hunting on Iria
Iria reminds me alot of Monster Hunter. Having something like periodic spawns of giant monsters akin to the Iria field bosses would be interesting. These monsters would be doable with just a small party or perhaps even solo. Maybe have quests from the quest board that would activate these monster spawns. Limiting the availability of these quests would be important.

More HM dungeons
If new hardmode dungeons are possible, it'd be great if the commonly run dungeons such as Rabbie and Math got hardmode variants. Running these for materials without the challenge and threat of death is a drag.

Now for some loftier ideas.
Commerce and Homestead
I'd like to see merchants and trade routes come to MabiPro. Probably difficult or impossible to implement at the moment but it would make the world seem more alive. Homesteads would be nice too, however I've heard people speaking out against them. Being a custom server, it's possible that we can prune the bad parts and keep the good parts of it. Mind you, I've never played live, so I don't know what it's like.

MabiNovel
(https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/MabiNovel) seems REALLY FUN. Something to mess with on the side. It's the little things that count.

A Penultimate ENDGAME
There's an old MMO that I used to play. It's not very well known but did get a good playerbase in its heyday. The game was flawed and had content problems too (skills were very limited and combat doesn't get any more interesting after a certain point). However one particular thing of note was that the game had a very strong PvE endgame. The endgame of this MMO was a massive war fought in a massive field with upwards to a hundred few players participating. It had multiple phases, bosses, goals (the home base spawn point needed to be protected while you took down the enemies), and a time limit. Despite the fact the game is still alive and populated by a small, dedicated playerbase, this endgame event has yet to be cleared; all attempts have either been losses or time outs. Something as grandiose as this in Mabinogi would be absolutely terrific.

I want to emphasize that the last few points are just me fantasizing. These are big things that are unlikely to happen in the present but still ideas that I wanted to throw out there.

Party Quests and Iria Quest Board
Part of the issue with dungeons, is a lotta pointless running, and you get less xp and typically far less rewarding than just doing SMs. About only true advantage to them at the moment, is reliable herb source and unique drops that you can't get in SMs. If the drops were included in SMs, i would bet most interest in dungeons would be flat out gone.

Monster Hunting on Iria
Live has a feature, Ancient Monsters. When a monster in the field is alive for (think it was) 2 hours, then it has a chance to turn into an ancient monster. A larger, much tougher, version of it's normal self with the title ancient, and anything with the title has a unique drop table added to it, such as equipment and enchants. All ancients share the same drops, in addition to keeping their normal drop tables.

Now, i don't know if i want the literal exact same thing in Pro, but the concept of improving field play is most definitely appealing. Having more frequent boss spawns, especially since we have 1 channel as opposed to 7, would definitely be nice. Honestly, i much like the sound of having a boss always present, or be force to spawn say, 5 minutes after all bosses in its region are dead. But i doubt everyone would approve of that.

More HM dungeons
Probably bears finer discussion; drop tables, how much to vamp up mobs, and exp rewards, but overall i say yes.

Commerce and Homestead
Commerce never appealed to me, absolutely hated it, but i acknowledge it's a feature that many would actually like. If we do get it, i really truly would like to get bandit hunt as well, or some variant. Give incentive to go after bandits, for those of us who truly hate the merchanting aspect of it all.

Homesteads, i think the major complaint is that you're guaranteed free resources/workstations daily. I mean, higher odds of fine wood, free herbs, etc. on a regular basis is a bit too easy mode for what some of us want in pro. That said, i still would like the ability to be able to have easy access to a fishing hole from basically anywhere, even if i do still have to go to town to buy bait.

MabiNovel
Meh.

A Penultimate ENDGAME
With Pro, that may be worth considering. However, most the AI is total crap in game. Which would lead to either players easily overwhelming the mobs, or just super tanky mobs that players just whittle down and basically be bored to death in the process of. And the whole 'use a pre-generated character like generation quests do' is a no for me, unless you give me super gold and xp rewards. Pre-generated characters mean no drops, and only xp is literally mission reward. So overall it tends to be unappealing. That said, you could use a setup like the embattled boss event did from live, where you possess a bisque doll, to allow lower levels to use a pre-generated character to keep up with higher levels, and without hurting higher levels in the process. Loved that event, but it seemed vastly underrated.

Reference video for those who don't know the event, what i'm talking about, the bisque dolls, can be observed around 0:23 in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pVuBWAdXQQ&t=2s
_________________________
Discord: Tonkatunk#7079
https://github.com/Tonkatunk/Mabi-Pro-Lazyfae-Mods

Experience and gold efficiency is irrelevant. The point is to give certain dungeon difficulties more of a reason to do them. The people I run with hardly touch SMs outside of dailies and special passes, and it'd be nice to have a reason outside of 'I want to get this pass out of my inventory without it going to waste' to run them. Furthermore, Party Quests encourage multiplay, something that an MMO ought to do. It's something that Nexon left incomplete in this version of Mabinogi and wouldn't take much effort to remedy, so why not?

Also I agree that dungeons have alot of pointless empty space to traverse. If I had the source code and had the ability to change this, I'd add traps, ambushes, and general random events that would occur in the empty hallways to keep players excited and on their toes. On the other hand, dungeons have more variance given that the layout is procedurally generated. This little difference makes running dungeons over and over again significantly less strenous than running SMs over and over again.


Even if you don't participate in commerce and merchanting, it still affects you. Positively, that is. Seeing all these merchants travelling and delivering goods makes the world seem more alive and helps with immersion. And, yes, immersion is important.

See, when I thought homesteads, I thought of a personal farm you would raise from the ground up. You would have to protect crops (herbs) from wild animals, and, uh, your trees and fish source from whatever; obviously not something that essentially hands you materials on a silver platter. I also don't like the idea of having a free teleport to it. I'd rather have to travel to a certain warp point to get to it as a limitation.


Not everyone's cup of tea of course, but the idea here is simply an extra activity that one can do when bored. It's not all that different from music. Music as a feature in Mabinogi is absolutely unnecessary, yet it's here. You might argue that music can provide buffs, but these are insignificant and a waste of manpower in combat. These things are for people who like to write or compose (like me). Some day, you might get bored enough to read some terrible Mabinogi fanfiction. Who knows.


In the event from the MMO I played, it was specifically an endgame event, for players who reached a certain level threshold. It's something you'd participate in after you've completed a good chunk of content. Aside from that, there was still a good range of player levels that were allowed to participate. The various tasks that the group of players on the field needed to complete had various difficulties. Lower levels would protect the player spawn points and attack the enemy fortress gate. Capturing enemy territory was left to stronger players and taking out bosses were left to the absolute highest level players.

As for the AI, they are pretty limited in this game. But, you don't need good AI for a proper challenge. All you would need to do is give monsters gimmicks, things that players would have to plan strategies to take out and perhaps even use teamwork, and no that does NOT MEAN GIVING EVERYTHING HEAVY STANDER, MANA DEFLECTOR, AND NATURAL SHIELD. Ahem. Let me give a few examples I've thought up.

Skeleton Wheels that spin around colliding with players when hit with a windmill. This means that players have to take into consideration whether to use windmill or not in the presence of one.
An enemy ability called dispel. Golems too powerful? This ability will remove any magic in an area, doing massive damage to (magically) summoned entities.
Monsters that teleport in response to be hitting with ranged magic attacks. Firebolt spam too powerful of a strategy? Enemies with this capability will teleport close in a standing position and attack immediately after getting hit.
A monster that reads player inputs and responds perfectly to them; a deadly creature that essentially sees the future.

Also the discussion of gimmick monsters brings the topic of balance to mind. Skills do not need to be nerfed whatsoever. Rather, it's better to make overpowered ones more difficult to use in situations because of enemy abilities. See: poison. Terrific for killing beefy opponents, except that most-hard-to-kill bosses are immune to it.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.
Individually, a gimmick monster wouldn't be too much of a threat, but slap a bunch of different gimmick monsters together and you have a puzzle that players must work out and solve. Mabinogi doesn't work well as a fast paced action game, but it excels at being a strategy game, and that's where I think combat gameplay should be emphasized. It's a shame that 100% custom monsters aren't possible yet (I assume), but this is definitely what I would suggest if they were.

Skills don't need to be nerfed? That's somewhat subjective depending on the player and situation. Mana Shield is a wonderful example. A player with high int, and good def/prot, can cut the damage they take. I'm talking a mob doing like 1/3 of its normal damage, possibly dealing less if the player really wants to make a tank setup. This is especially noticeable when fighting mages.

As for gimmicks, the skeleton wheels sound amusing. Dispel is an interesting sounding one, will it have any effect on pets, just to prevent pet spam en masse? What kind of cool down should we expect, or what kind of triggers? It'd be a great counter to say, a bunch of int magic spammers. Cut the mp of anyone currently channeling a spell and cancel their spell, for example. But at the same time, if it gets used every 10 seconds, a lotta mages are gonna be royally ticked.

Teleport, if this is the counter to mages over dispel, then i protest. Mages act primarily like a sentry. They stay in one spot and cast. Generally they go the way of the elves though, once they're hit, ie dead. If you're saying give a boss this, you'll see loads of insta dead mages, not good. If you give little mobs this, you will have to severely limit their numbers, makes sure they're not gonna die to say 1 fireball crit followed by another spell, and the question is will the mages be wanting to attack the mob or are they trying to be careful not to hit it with an aoe effect. If it's the latter, that cuts out some concerns. If it's the former, you need incentive for mages to prioritize the mob over range/melee, which means heavy protection and heavy standers.

Reading player input... is that really gonna work well in a raid? I mean, seeing a player charging Thunder, shooting another mob with Arrow Revolver, or something along those lines, and the mobs organize to put a stop to it would be rather amusing. But at the same time, if you have lots of players you'd have to balance the number of mobs somehow, as well as how they compliment each other, for them to be doing anything other than essentially ignoring whatever tries to intercept them and getting killed in a show of supposedly poor coding. Sounds like a real nightmare to try to get enough logic in multiple mobs to allow them to properly handle reading player input, in a raid like scenario.


But yeah, going back to the whole gimmick implementation, that was their whole idea with tara shadow missions. You weaken a shadow commander and spam weak attacks? Well, you're gonna have a load of snow golems. Dark commander in Fomor Attack, better make sure to get the unique drops from rusty swords. Blinkers are supposed to be ranged or hit with sand burst. Dullahan you're supposed to evade, or alternatively let your hp drop as low as possible without being deadly, and pop mana shield. Sulfur spiders, barrier spikes make great procrastination and herding tools for the center room. Even some earlier content, nightmare humanoid and lycanthrope, required some kind of gimmick early on.

Problem with a lot of gimmicks in mabinogi though, becomes 'okay i need to invest 100 ap or possibly more, to make the skill i need useful. And then i'm likely to only use it in like 2/50 things i do. In live during this generation, it was worse as xp and ap were a lot harder to obtain. I mean, when you have the skills ranked, you may feel pro for carrying with the gimmick skill, but everyone knows that really the ap cost/effectiveness of the gimmick skill (including stat returns) normally isn't worth it until much later in your game life, where you're basically just raising skills for stats and doing absolutely nothing else. At which point most people still won't need the gimmick skill too much, because you're gonna have all the skills that are far more useful universally, while also having the stats to back up your fighting style.


Spent more time on this than i intended, but overall, especially with the mabi and nexon's track record, gimmicks concern me. Send anyone but a melee character into Their Method on HM or Elite. We know it's not hard, but it doesn't mean it's not a nuisance or just ridiculous. I'd like to hear more gimmick ideas, but please not a bunch that are heavily reliant on niche skills.
_________________________
Discord: Tonkatunk#7079
https://github.com/Tonkatunk/Mabi-Pro-Lazyfae-Mods

What I was trying to get at when I said that was that skills don't need to be directly nerfed and have their numerical values reduced. Instead, it's a better idea to make enemies resistant to that skill as an indirect nerf. Players don't like having their toys taken away, so it's better to let them keep their overpowered abilities but reduce its usefulness by giving enemies a skill to counter it. Obviously this doesn't mean to overdo it and give EVERYTHING this counterability.


The ideas I presented are very general and of course require fine tuning. A monster with this ability may only trigger it in reaction to certain element used on them, so that mages would have to switch up the abilities they use. Otherwise, just bring a buddy that has another damage type and have them take care of monsters that would otherwise be a hassle. And yes, this isn't something you give to a boss, unless if it has a bunch of mooks that mages will instead target and leave the boss to the other players.

And this goes back to the whole idea of my flavor of gimmicks, which serves a different purpose from the gimmick bosses and monsters we already have. The idea is to limit a player's toolkit in dealing with challenges. 'Do you like spamming windmill? Then here, have a monster that you generally do not want to use windmill on. Beat him some other way.' This would be the most simple of gimmicks and you would tack on more and more to make the monster more challenging to beat. Once again, you don't overdo it to the point the monster is frustrating to fight. There's always that balance.


This particular idea came from fighting game AI, which is notorious for reading player input as a means to make them 'harder'. Having dynamic group AI for monsters isn't the idea and would be difficult to implement. (Actually, you see very simple group AI with shadow warriors, lancers, archers, and the ilk.) But rather, you'd have a boss or mini-boss monster that would move and respond immediately to player skill loads. Due to limitations, let's say they only do this to the player they're aggro'd on. Say if a player loads Defense. The monster would move in, immediately loading Smash or a bolt to counter. Cancel that Defense, and the monster stops to load Windmill. Charge a bolt or a ranged ability to counter this? The monster will load Charge to stop you. In a fighting game, this would be terrible. However, in Mabinogi, this would instead be a monster a player would have to outsmart in order to beat them.

I'm not sure i'll ever be sold. I mean, i understand if any new skills are extremely limited in both gimmicks and stat gains, but i've already seen proof of how bad it can get, from live.

Let's look at Rabbie Phantasm from live, hardest content i saw before quitting. Counter to pet summons? Check. No barriers? Check. Counter to load time skills? Check in the form of insta multi+insta range. Counter for reforge elemental damage? Check. Counter for things like puppets? Check. Counter to tanky characters? Check. Counter to stun locks? Sometimes check.

All the counters to players' skills gets pretty ridiculous end game. Their counter to a lot becomes dealing fixed damage based off hp percentage, rather than flat numbers, have any flat number damage be absurdly high at like 5k+, and massive aoe or insta range attacks. The boss of Phantasm is so ridiculous that if you don't basically live right by the server, you can't even kill her i don't think, due to one of her gimmicks. Rather than do so much damage during a specific attack, you have to land so many hits. And guess what, she picks one target at random, from your party, that is able to hit her. Everyone else was locked i believe.


Probably my biggest concern, is that with more gimmicks and new power creeps though, is that old content gets dramatically outdated. Most dungeons and shadow missions were made to be challenging on release. After a few updates, and when players invest enough in skills, most of it becomes easy though. And in live, it's a constant joke. The progression of the game, with more gimmicks and skills, just continually raises the bar, and with no effort to rebalance skills, not to keep up with new stuff but to actually attempt a balance in the skills between each other, resources required for skills, and with the content/intended usage of the skill, it all just gets broken to the point things get too easy after a while. And that is the whole reason i stopped live, was the end game had a rather distinct line, between easy and ridiculous.

This is not to say, don't give mobs gimmicks and counters of their own, by all means do that because it can keep things fresh and entertaining. But i will always feel that skills need nerfed and sometimes buffed, to work on that balance, no matter how much players may hate it. Digital Extreme's Warframe is an awesome example of that imo. I don't agree with all of their changes, but they are constantly reworking parts of the game, to try to keep things in an intended progression line, no matter if players get unhappy about losing things or not.
_________________________
Discord: Tonkatunk#7079
https://github.com/Tonkatunk/Mabi-Pro-Lazyfae-Mods