Something that is bugging me is that people are not doing any math and are instead knee-jerking to this.
Back in the day, we had defense piercing weapons that were not an MVP card. Many of them.
An example
We'll use Caesar's Sword as an example. http://db.irowiki.or...item-info/1134/
- This is a level 4 weapon with 140 attack. it has a bonus of 25% damage against plants and pierces their defense.
- When this item was implemented the defense formula routinely reduced the damage of incoming attacks anywhere from 55% to 70% when combating end-game monsters.
A competitive one-handed sword otherwise would have been a 3-carded Saber (115 atk, lv 3), or a few years later, Twin Edge of Nacht Sieger (160 atk lv 4).
- Thee card slots guaranteed around 92% increase in damage.
- If we do some rough math here, we'd see that against a 55 DEF enemy, every 1000 damage you'd do would be reduced to 450, and then increased by 92%, totaling 864 damage.
- meanwhile, with the def-piercing weapon, we're more keen to do around 1250 damage per 1000 initial damage, due to not being reduced by def, then further increased 25% by the effect of the weapon.
What did we learn? Well, the def-piercing weapon is clearly better than using a weapon you've created yourself with cards. The only "compromise" we're making here is that we have to craft via an NPC quest the rare item, and we're limited to fighting one specific race. In return, we get about 45% more damage than normal against that race in exchange for only being able to do that damage against that one race, and only if that race has a high defense value to begin with. Lower defense enemies will yield lower results from the weapon.
Now let's come forward to renewal.
- In renewal defense is a much softer reduction on damage. Monsters routinely have no more than 25% to 35% damage reduction from defense.
- In renewal, most sought after PVM skills already ignore defense (cart cannon, dragon's breath, etc.)
- The shadow slot routinely gives around 10-15% overall damage for characters, from a variety of ATK, %atk, %rangeatk, dex/str, and %race bonuses.
- Shadow layer is intended by kRO to be a required part of the character strength/balance and no an extra bonus. The "free" gears still add about ~20 atk on average which amounts to a few percent more damage, but its true the push toward kafra shop introduction into the market is lame. You can buy these off players for zeny though.
The item tradeoff suggested here is
- Remove 10% damage incentive from existing gear
- Replace with def piercing gear for a specific race.
The calculation example
- Since we're looking at around 30% reduction here, we're seeing about 700 damage for every base 1000. With the shadow layer we'd be seeing about 770 for every 1000 we'd normally do.
- With the defense piercing equipment we've got around 1000 damage for every 1000 we'd normally do.
What did we learn? Well, the def-piercing shadow layer is clearly better than using a damage/atk generating layer of shadow equip. The only "compromise" we're making here is that we have to obtain the expensive item and then dump cash into upgrading it, to get this effect. A we're limited to fighting one specific race. In return, we get about 30% more damage than normal against that race in exchange for only being able to do that damage against that one race, and only if that race has a higher defense value to begin with. Lower defense enemies will yield lower results from the equip.
tl;dr:
2005:
Gravity: Trade your normal weapon for an expensive one that only works on a specific race, and do about 45% more damage!
Players: okay.
2016:
Gravity: Trade your normal shadow gears for an expensive one that only works on a specific race, and do about 30% more damage!
Players: omg so op!!!! gravity suxxxdevil!!1