47 replies to this topic

[Doddler]

This seems like a valid topic of discussion, so try to post constructive feedback.

Question: What is wrong, or what do you think needs to be updated about the current monster spawns?

[Theoretical]

It seems that monster spawn is something that iRO could implement all on their own. So in the absence of more advanced monster AI I feel spawn rates should be increased to an intense rate on all maps that have aggressive monsters.. This would force people to work together to level. On maps with non-aggressive monsters spawns can be kept low to allow people a place to casually solo, that way people wont be as tempted to just AoE the non aggressive monsters. Making spawn 5-10x rate would be a great joy to experience. It would be challenging for parties, and rewarding. That is what a party should be all about, a challenging/rewarding experience.

This IS something that can be reviewed and RAPIDLY introduced into the game. Lets see that happen, please.

[mooMOOmoo]

Field maps have much higher monsters population than pre-renewal. A typical field map has around 100 monsters and renewal the number is raised to around 200. This was a good move and helps lower the impact of drop rate penalty.

[Miii]

I think the current spawn is okay.

[Doddler]

My opinion is that there's a bunch of maps that are in serious need of revision.

Spawn Balancing: Places where I feel that certain monster appearances (or lack of appearance) has a negative effect on the game.

Clock Tower High Orcs (alde_dun01): This is the only map that has High Orcs, Orc Archers (in reasonable numbers), and Brilight. The map is more or less ruined by a high spawn of arclouse which are about 25 levels higher than the other monsters on the map.

Prontera Culverts 4f (prt_sewb4): The primary monster on this map is level 30. It would be a really good place to level, but there are many drainlairs (level 47), and 5 super fast cramps (level 82). The drainlairs are not a huge issue, but the cramps are unavoidable and can one shot many level 30 characters.

Inside Glast Heim (gl_in01): The only map where hunting sage worm and dark frames are viable. They are targets for an 70-85 eden hunting quest. However, the map is dominated by marionettes. Raydric Archers are required to be killed for the eden quest too, but they only appear on high level maps. Maybe replacing the marionettes with raydric archers would make it a better map for questing.

Labyrinth Forest 3f (prt_maze03): This is the only map in game that the monster Baphomet Jr (Lv 57) spawns. Most spawning monsters here are within 10 or so levels of this monster, except for stemworms, which are level 84. The stemworms probably need to go for it to be a good leveling map. What I think might be a good idea is perhaps replace those stemworms with Iron Fist (Lv 47), a monster that currently does not have any natural spawn) and would fit in pretty well here.

Hoomga Jungle - Umbala Field (um_fild04): This is the only map where wooden golem spawns, and one of two maps where stone shooter spawns. However, there are only 5 of each monster here. Hunting for Logs, required for some quests is an exercise in frustration with such small spawns. However you don't want to ruin it for wild roses, since this is also the only place they spawn. Perhaps if the number of stone shooters and wooden golems were increased a bit, 10-20, it would be a much better map. I hear Korea actually made a similar change with a recent patch.

Splendide Field 2 (spl_fild02): This map is home of Pingicula and Luciola Vespa. However, with renewal the map is home of a substantial quantity of special quest Naga and Bradium Golems. The problem here is that these monsters give no experience. These monsters are considerably harder than the indiginous spawn monsters, and ruin the map. While removing them would break the warlock job change quest, would it hurt to give them the same experience as the original monsters? They already have the item drops of the original monsters.

Odin Shrine 2 (odin_tem02): Back when this map was first introduced, it was populated by frus and skogul, some of which would not give any experience. These no-experience monsters would spawn only on the bridge, as a way to disuade players from taking the shortcut to odin shrine 3. However, these no-experience monsters now spawn randomly on the map along with the other monsters. Their existance don't serve any purpose and simply lower the experience gain of players who chose this map to level. I don't see the point of keeping the no-experience frus and skogul unless they were returned to the bridge again.

Odin Shrine 3 (odin_tem03): Before renewal, valkyries would spawn every 30 minutes. Now, they spawn between 90 minutes and 120 minutes. While I can understand if the longer spawn time was introduced as a means of balancing their item drops, the long variance is a big problem for those that hunt them. Consider lowering their spawn variance to something similar to an MVPs, which have 10 minute variance tops. Also, this map suffers the same no-experience frus/skogul problem of odin shrine 2.

Elite Monsters: Heimdallr said this himself, there are certain monsters which are much stronger than other monsters. The problem is that they do not reward the player for this added difficulty, and as a result are forgotten and ignored.

Biolabs 3F: This map is home of the hardest monsters in all of ragnarok. In renewal, this continues to be true, as they all have very high HP and remain incredibly dangerous. However, in terms of reward, a player may find that killing bio2 monsters, or even abyss lake monsters way more rewarding. Those places afterall give half as much experience, but are a fraction of the difficulty and come in large numbers. In my opinion, the bio 3f monsters would need about 2-3 times their current experience value to be a desirable leveling zone.

Thors Volcano: Thors is right on the cusp of a bad trend in monster stats. At about 135, monster HP begins increasing substantially, but their experience does not shift with the increased difficulty. The salamander in particular is one of the most brutal melee monsters both pre and post renewal. However, it scarcely gives more experience than a gold acidus. The monsters in thors could use an increase in experience value to make up for their difficulty, or people will ignore it entirely.

Thanatos Tower: This is a bit of a different complaint. Thanatos Tower is actually a very good leveling zone. The tower floors 9-11 are incredibly mobby and is actually one of the best party focused zones in the game. My issue is that players will likely never go there. There are two reasons: The doorman on floor 2 will only let you pass if you have 5 or more players with you. Parties under 5 players are locked out. The second is that the recent thanatos tower changes FORCES you to get all of the keys in order to enter floor 7 every time you go, even if you do not intend to summon Thanatos. This is a big hassle, as getting these keys can take up to an hour if a player is not familiar with some of the mechanisms. So my suggestions are two-fold: consider lowering the number of players required to enter from 5 to 2 or 3, and secondly, allow players passage to floor 7 even if they have not obtained the keycards. If a party wants to summon thanatos, the Keys are already needed anyways.

Edited by Doddler, 08 November 2010 - 12:33 PM.

[mooMOOmoo]

Elite Monsters: Heimdallr said this himself, there are certain monsters which are much stronger than other monsters. The problem is that they do not reward the player for this added difficulty, and as a result are forgotten and ignored.

Current level-based exp system penalizes players for the added difficulty (40% exp).

Edited by mooMOOmoo, 08 November 2010 - 04:28 PM.

[Brindizer]

Off topic but are you able to add a Battlegrounds suggestion thread here? I made one in Proposals but it'll go untouched there.

[Ramen]

I agree with taking a look at the monster levels for each map. Some of them are just stupid, like Doddler pointed out. A lot of people want mobbier maps, but is there any way to make maps that would be more doable for /nc levelers like myself? There aren't a lot of skills available to my build of SC that will one shot a single monster, much less a whole mob of monsters. Pre-Renewal, I could level considerably fast, even if I was just control clicking, but now, there's no freakin way I can even keep up with other classes that can one shot or easily mob level. I just don't see why a good build should be made to glaringly sub-par because of the way the monsters got changed.

[Doddler]

Current level-based exp system penalizes players for the added difficulty (40% exp).

That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a level 90 character fighting level 130 monsters. I'm talking about a character fighting monsters of their own level that are harder than other similar monsters. An 'elite' monster in most MMORPGs out there is one that is substantially harder than other monsters of a specific level, but not a boss monster. In WoW for example, an Elite or group of Elite monsters may require two, ten, twenty players to kill, even though they share the same level of monsters that players could easily solo. iRO has 'boss' class monsters, but it is more of a status and not really denouncement of power, a kasa isn't any harder than any other level 135 monster just because it's boss property. If RO had elites, picture a monster that is for example level 100, but gives substantially more experience, but hits considerably harder and has way more HP than other level 100 monsters. You would still have to be level 100 to fight it, but it would be much harder, and more rewarding than other monsters. If they did their job correctly, you would need to group up to fight these monsters.

My point is that bio 3 monsters, thor 3f monsters, they're more or less elites, they're substantially harder than other monsters (Seyren Windsor is considerably harder than say, a Ryncho or Phyllia, despite the fact that they are very similar in level). You aren't rewarded any more for killing a bio3 monster than you are killing other monsters a few levels lower though, and that's the problem.

Edited by Doddler, 09 November 2010 - 03:29 PM.

[DrAzzy]

Well said doddler. I 100% agree on every one of those points.

Splendide Field 1-3, Manuk Field 1,3.

The spawns here are two damned low. Prior to renewal, that was fine, because the monsters compensated by giving larger exp awards. Now, the spawns are the same, but the exp/kill is inferior to that of monsters on much mobbier maps, making these maps useless.
The spawns on these maps should be greatly increased. I'd say we'd need 2x spawns on all these maps, maybe 3x on 03, which is particularly lightly populated and wide-open.

Spl_Fld02 - to compensate for the obnoxious spawns, instead of making them give EXP, couldn't we make them non-aggressive? Or set them to only be aggressive to level 99 players (like lvl 99 hwiz'es doing the quest) and ignore everyone else? I don't remember what could be done with level-based AI's, so i don't know if that would be easy to implement.

Edited by DrAzzy, 09 November 2010 - 11:45 AM.

[Shanden]

I cant find a more suitable place to put this, but bring drops back to the way they were before Renewal, hunting items to make money has gone down the tube.

[ZeroTigress]

Spl_Fld02 - to compensate for the obnoxious spawns, instead of making them give EXP, couldn't we make them non-aggressive? Or set them to only be aggressive to level 99 players (like lvl 99 hwiz'es doing the quest) and ignore everyone else? I don't remember what could be done with level-based AI's, so i don't know if that would be easy to implement.

http://forums.warpportal.com/index.php?/topic/1284-behavior-of-luciola-vespa/

Supposedly in the works. I certainly hope so.

[Mwrip]

I can't comment much on specific maps... I'm a caster-heavy player who likes parties, so yeah, I'm pretty much out until we get the results of this forum.

In general though:
1. Exp vs. difficulty: Before, the exp of a monster took its stats and skills into account. Monsters varied wildly in difficulty, and the exp was adjusted to match. This would make you consider things like:
Anubs - Lazy, easy, slow leveling
Kasas - Moderate difficulty (assuming you had fire armor), moderate leveling speed
Bio - MUCH harder monsters, in quantity, with exp to match (I'm assuming, of course, that you actually played the dungeon. Yes, you can camp staircases, no, they shouldn't have allowed that.)
DG - Harder than bio, but worth it if you could handle it, especially for those last few job levels
Now, level is pretty much the only thing that determines monster exp. So, while before, you chose the map to play on based on how skilled you were and how much risk you were willing to accept, now it's "what can I kill the highest quantity of that's as close to 9 over as possible without going over." This changed the game from a game where you had several options in each level range based on difficulty, so generally 1 clear map to use in each range.
Exp NEEDS to be scaled to affect this.

2. They forgot quests exist. Period. Have fun getting those logs for The Sign quest when the dungeon you were supposed to get them from is removed from the game, and nothing else has a good drop rate. Brilliant. They need to go through the trash drops and fix this. If the drop has no value, then yeah, no one cares if it's hard to get now. If, however, it's a quest item, they need to make sure it's available in quantity *somewhere*, and the people in the level range that are supposed to be doing the quest can actually fight the monsters. Alternatively, substituting drops is also an option.

3. Nexus maps need to be traversable. Want to hit half of the Ein fields, Magma, Jup, or KH? You wouldn't think those have anything in common with each other, but they do... one very important thing. You start your trip by exiting Juno to the south, which is a tiny map swarmed with roughly 100 harpies. There's simply no excuse for putting that on a map so many have to pass through, especially when it's right outside a town, and there's already 3 other harpy maps. Throw a high level passive there, or hell, just flood it with porings. No one levels on harpies anyway as they're a great example for their level range of "same exp, thrice the difficulty." Seriously, METALINGS give the same exp (actually I think slightly more).

4. We need maps that encourage partying. This is currently impossible due to #1, but if that's changed, they need to make sure there's could places to party. There isn't right now.

5. Don't put similar maps in the same level range. Spread them out more so there's more variety at all levels. For example, keep Magma where it is, but kick Ice up 10ish levels (or the other way around, but those shouldn't be in the same bracket.)

[Bahlum]

On top of supporting the ideas to look over the maps to make the monsters be on similar levels and making sure quests send players to level-appropriate areas, here are some of my suggestions:

• Have more maps (particularly those designated as "party" maps) utilize spawn zones like Thor does for its large cave areas.

This would help out the efficiency of partying by taking out time needed to travel around the map gathering mobs. It would also lessen the amount of "increased" spawn people would satisfied with, so instead of crowding the map and making it really dangerous, people have a decent amount of monsters they can reliably find. The map becomes really dangerous when there are too many monsters spawned because if a large mob of monsters gets killed in one area, they usually spawn on some other place in the map and a lot of times catch parties in a vulnerable moment (their tank is out gathering more mobs). Either way, the point of increasing the amount of monsters in a map is to let players kill more monsters per time invested, making the monsters spawn in particular areas instead of randomly across the entire map is another way to accomplish that.

Something that can come from this is making "trails" from cities to cities so so that players can walk more or less hassle-free (if they wanted or need to). Maybe there could be some "ambush" spots for certain cites as well ... Spaced out to every 10 minutes or so a player walking across a certain part of the road can trigger a spawn of "ambush" monsters.

• Create more synergy between the monsters (have them work together more)

This may be a part of trying to improve their AI, but on top of them working together in a party-like way, I could appreciate if monsters "fit" together on the map more. Some maps do this but I think more maps could benefit from it. The map south of Rachel is an ok example: there are ranged and melee attackers, and even some "support" in the form of healing from Muscipular and Close Confine from Drosera. More maps can use a better distribution, and in a lot of cases addition, of roles. "Parties" of monsters with various roles would provide more of a challenge to players as well, especially mobile ones that react to player tactics (like bio lab monsters).
To summarize: arrange monsters spawns on maps so they have a wider variety of "roles".

[Snoopy]

Poor warlocks.. since you're forced to solo because exp sucks on share so you forced to do Bradium golems until idk, I've started lvling there since 130 - 143 and still going, storm gust cast is horrible so thor 3 wouldn't be good. Bio2 is only good with Hibram shoes. Manuk field 2 is a hot spot for Warlocks / Dragon Breath Rune knights I think the spawn on those should be increased~

[ZeroTigress]

Was trying to help my sister collect Tough Scalelike Stems for her Archer and so decided to go to the Stem Worm map to collect it when I discovered this:



Could someone explain to me the logic of having a weak field map surrounded by stronger field maps? I thought the distribution is supposed to be weaker maps close to the towns and then spread out into stronger maps. Stem Worms and Breeze monsters should switch maps, in my opinion.

[Charon]

Was trying to help my sister collect Tough Scalelike Stems for her Archer and so decided to go to the Stem Worm map to collect it when I discovered this:



Could someone explain to me the logic of having a weak field map surrounded by stronger field maps? I thought the distribution is supposed to be weaker maps close to the towns and then spread out into stronger maps. Stem Worms and Breeze monsters should switch maps, in my opinion.

havent checked the breeze map myself, but maybe its almost empty, and it simply says breeze there because its the most common monster on the map. Otherwise yeah.

Regarding Arrow Crafting... they should simply change the requirement from tough scalelike stems to pointed stems or whatever the ones are called that are dropped by wormtails southwest of Alberta. Wasn't that an iro exlcusive modification anyway? I remember collecting the wormtail ones with several archers on euRO.

Edited by Charon, 13 November 2010 - 02:50 PM.

[ZeroTigress]

havent checked the breeze map myself, but maybe its almost empty, and it simply says breeze there because its the most common monster on the map. Otherwise yeah.

Breeze map is ridiculous. I keep getting mobbed by at least 10 Breezes and lag to death from that. The Rafflesia map is slightly better, but not by much.

Was hoping to level up my Monk by collecting the Tough Scalelike Stems for my sister, but seeing as that is pretty much suicide for her, I had to switch over to my Assassin who can hit faster.

[Mwrip]

...which raises another point. Requiring a monster that you now fight when you're 2nd job, job level 4x, to acquire a quest skill for a 1st job, job level 3x, means it's not a 1st job skill at all. It was at least *possible* to get the stems pre-renewal while still an archer, but now? Not a chance.

Edited by Mwrip, 13 November 2010 - 04:07 PM.

[slapaho]

I'm not 100% sure on this one, but it's a bit irritating. The lighthalzen swordy MVP is now level 141 with almost 3m HP, with a big mob of 130+ monsters, placed on level 60 in Endless Tower together with Dopple. It's a bit sad that a not yet too well geared party with an average level of 100, can't go higher than that. Maybe it would be possible to switch level 60 and 70. If the floors are meant to be to be increasingly hard it would be only fair. Orc Hero and Lord are far easier MVPs than Cenia.

Edited by slapaho, 21 November 2010 - 02:59 AM.

[Mwrip]

I'm not 100% sure on this one, but it's a bit irritating. The lighthalzen swordy MVP is now level 141 with almost 3m HP, with a big mob of 130+ monsters, placed on level 60 in Endless Tower together with Dopple. It's a bit sad that a not yet too well geared party with an average level of 100, can't go higher than that. Maybe it would be possible to switch level 60 and 70. If the floors are meant to be to be increasingly hard it would be only fair. Orc Hero and Lord are far easier MVPs than Cenia.

Like with everything, they didn't bother updating the dungeon, at all. The izlude battle arena is even worse. It asks you to fight a mob of things 40 levels over you... per room... in under a minute. Good luck with that.

I really hope they fix this kind of stuff, as it's rendering parts of the game like ET excessively difficult, and others like the arena just plain impossible without god items.

Edited by Mwrip, 21 November 2010 - 11:45 AM.

[Lambor]

Satan Morocc and Valk MVPs need to be buffed. Hands down.

I have a 150 genetic and I can solo Satan Morrocc with 20 bombs and 50 slims. It's so damn easy. It hits for 700, if that.

Pre-renewal, Satan Morrocc had 15m hp, and that was awesome. It allowed for competition between guilds and it was actually fun. Now, it's all first hit because 1) bomb does so much damage, and 2) it has such little HP.

There used to be strategy involved. Any random noob can walk up now and beat an entire guild. There's no skill involved. It all depends on who gets the lucky tele and gets that first hit off. It doesn't have enough hp for the second hitters to recover MVP or loot priority.

Keep its current attack and stats and all that, but give its HP back. Same for Valk.

Edited by Lambor, 26 November 2010 - 06:57 PM.

[Sera]

There needs to be another reasonable 120 dungeon besides Juperos.

There needs to be more end-game maps in general. Stop implementing stuff in the 80 to 99 range, there's plenty of decent things there as far as I'm concerned.

RO maps are seriously weighted towards lower levels, while the player base is seriously weighted towards higher levels.

Edit:
On the topic of MVPs, I think they need to change them to scale exponentially.

They need to designate a few 'noob' MVPs to give people a taste of the hunt, which can be easily solo'd by most people. For instance, Phree, Drac, Drake, etc.

They also need to rework the end-game MVPs to require a coordinated effort between multiple (at least four or five characters) to take down imo.

Edited by Sera, 26 November 2010 - 08:08 PM.

[Scott]

I was actually thinking that many of the low and mid level areas aren't particularly good for parties.

[Mwrip]

I was actually thinking that many of the low and mid level areas aren't particularly good for parties.

Ditto on the high level areas. Partying is basically out of the game ATM.