90 replies to this topic

[Albruna]

Not to nag on one point, but this applies even more heavily to the War Mage class as they are probably the absolute worst class of all to take to the endgame due to their lack of groggy. A personal example is always a bad one but it bears mention: I've seen perhaps the best WM in the server and perhaps the best Pathfinder in the server barely do slivers of damage to Elga, and skill cards, stats, gear, and skill still proved to do literally nothing to keep up in terms of DPS.

I want to add a little more to the points Prin made already, regarding WMs:

I do not want to seem incredibly whiny and of course I am not saying that WMs/Sorcerers are the only neglected class (Rogues/Savages as well). If I didn't love my class so much, I would have rolled another more useful one or quit. Probably the latter.

But anyways, I agree with everything that Prin already said. War Mages are incredibly annoying to play with when it comes to groggy. A War Mage can stand there and spam their entire arsenal of spells on a boss in rage-mode and what happens? -- Nothing. Maybe, if you are lucky, you are able to groggy the boss up to about 5-10%, but that was it. Unless you want to find yourself mindlessly whacking with your spear, this is a serious pain in end-game. As a War Mage you only serve as a padding in Elga runs, while everyone else just daggers everything out of their way.

Mind you, that I have around 21k MATK buffed with passives, Focus and 10 Star rings. Which isn't too bad in itself but I think it is time to remind Gravity, that War Mages are supposed to be the magical destructive class. Basically the equivalent to Myrmidons/Overlords (we know how loved those are compared to Paladins/Dragoons, right?). Oh, and they sure are treated as such. Only one of our falsely promising MATK-passives is working on our final MATK-stat (the one on the Warlock skill-tree) while the 4th class passive is just a complete waste of skill points, because it is based on your base-MATK. I would whine a little less, if this would be fixed. It also adds salt to the wound (oh, woe!), that Summoners/Earth Master/Spirit Lord are receiving working MATK-passives left and right and can easily rack up to 30k MATK with the right build, equips and enchants. On top of that, groggy is easy cakes for them.

(edit: Oops, wrote them Myrm wrong!)

Edited by Albruna, 09 April 2012 - 11:08 AM.

[Jumpluffspore]

I want to add a little more to the points Prin made already, regarding WMs:

I do not want to seem incredibly whiny and of course I am not saying that WMs/Sorcerers are the only neglected class (Rogues/Savages as well). If I didn't love my class so much, I would have rolled another more useful one or quit. Probably the latter.

But anyways, I agree with everything that Prin already said. War Mages are incredibly annoying to play with when it comes to groggy. A War Mage can stand there and spam their entire arsenal of spells on a boss in rage-mode and what happens? -- Nothing. Maybe, if you are lucky, you are able to groggy the boss up to about 5-10%, but that was it. Unless you want to find yourself mindlessly whacking with your spear, this is a serious pain in end-game. As a War Mage you only serve as a padding in Elga runs, while everyone else just daggers everything out of their way.

Mind you, that I have around 21k MATK buffed with passives, Focus and 10 Star rings. Which isn't too bad in itself but I think it is time to remind Gravity, that War Mages are supposed to be the magical destructive class. Basically the equivalent to Myrmidons/Overlords (we know how loved those are compared to Paladins/Dragoons, right?). Oh, and they sure are treated as such. Only one of our falsely promising MATK-passives is working on our final MATK-stat (the one on the Warlock skill-tree) while the 4th class passive is just a complete waste of skill points, because it is based on your base-MATK. I would whine a little less, if this would be fixed. It also adds salt to the wound (oh, woe!), that Summoners/Earth Master/Spirit Lord are receiving working MATK-passives left and right and can easily rack up to 30k MATK with the right build, equips and enchants. On top of that, groggy is easy cakes for them.

(edit: Oops, wrote them Myrm wrong!)

To add on to this for other classes: why not make every class more or less equal in groggying? It's a simple boost in the groggy factor stat of the skill and probably would not take very much thought to balance out. I reccomend a change in the groggy potential of all classes so that everyone's on a level playing field. As for the MATK, it's been rough for priest and sorc(which should have highest matk imo). Summoner's MATK should be decreased, and warmage's upped. Summoner has that lolol summon along with an arsenal of status effects and other gimmicks, while warmage pretty much has a bit of flab and fat. Warmage has gone from being the arcane master of magical offense to a bubble shield.

Potential fixes/ tl;dr: increase warmage's power, increase power of certain skills, add a magic passive, change existing matk passives to final matk (there is no reason it's base anyways, come on...), and give them SOMETHING to have an edge over priest/summoner in pve because they are essentially useless there.
Here's an example of how bad this is... I've out killed a boss on my harlequin with a +5 claw, same level as my warlock with a +11 spear, because of groggy. Slight issue.

Edited by Jumpluffspore, 09 April 2012 - 12:42 PM.

[Ethernal]

Potential fixes/ tl;dr: increase warmage's power, increase power of certain skills, add a magic passive, change existing matk passives to final matk (there is no reason it's base anyways, come on...), and give them SOMETHING to have an edge over priest/summoner in pve because they are essentially useless there.

To add another change, can we see a more detailed research about useful stats in end-game sets, no offense but it's absurd to see that the Black Dragon set for Sorcerer gives Evade, MP, and MP Recovery, i'm not only aiming for my class but for the other ones like Overlord, Dragoon and Summoner, they just have the worst end-game sets (i mean elga sets, dragoons are fine QQ), and Elga as the final boss must give the best items possible or at least useful ones and not just get individual pieces to get the bonus. I mean, my secmathian top gives more health than the black lord top? I just want to see an actual change to the gear, and not just the elga set. I think we all can ask for a nice elga set like the ones in the Thief route. QQing all the way.

Edited by Ethernal, 09 April 2012 - 12:49 PM.

[GrapefruitGod]

Yes, Prin is correct.

I can go to elga with my 27k+ attack and do literally nothing to him. It's really not fun at all to know that I put so much into my character (I have cancer) and I can't do anything. I've been in a run with pretty much every other class at an extremely stacked level and it's all the same story. Ninja/dragoon or don't bother (though destroyer/dragoon isn't that bad). Fix it please; I'm pretty sure many people would love to run the dungeon without having to rely on their ninja or dragoon friends.

[Jumpluffspore]

Intelligence +60
2 Piece MP +2300
3 Piece INT +90
4 Piece MP Recovery +275.0%
5 Piece Critical Rate +37.0%
6 Piece Evade Rate +15.0% Black Claw Nest Top 418 334 Health +40 Bottom 334 268 Max MP +1100 Bracelet 92 98 Magic Damage Drop +10.0% Pads 250 200 MP Recovery +90.0% Gloves 168 136 ATK Speed +14.0% Shoes 202 162 Movement Speed +12.0%

Atm the bonuses are mp+2300, int+90, mp recovery 275, crit rate 37, and evasion 15% (taken from ds wiki)

A better change would be: hp+2300, health+70, critical damage 80%, crit rate 37%, and agility+40

Edited by Jumpluffspore, 09 April 2012 - 03:50 PM.

[zabmaru]

Intelligence +60
2 Piece MP +2300
3 Piece INT +90
4 Piece MP Recovery +275.0%
5 Piece Critical Rate +37.0%
6 Piece Evade Rate +15.0% Black Claw Nest Top 418 334 Health +40 Bottom 334 268 Max MP +1100 Bracelet 92 98 Magic Damage Drop +10.0% Pads 250 200 MP Recovery +90.0% Gloves 168 136 ATK Speed +14.0% Shoes 202 162 Movement Speed +12.0%

Atm the bonuses are mp+2300, int+90, mp recovery 275, crit rate 37, and evasion 15% (taken from ds wiki)

A better change would be: hp+2300, health+70, critical damage 80%, crit rate 37%, and agility+40

I would rather see stat balance so that sets with "useless" stats aren't useless anymore. Sorry Quin, but if you want to change the set to that, you might as well make that the set bonus for every Elga set for every class, since CD and AGI are really the best stats in the game.

Edit: Didn't see evade, that's retarded

Edited by zabmaru, 09 April 2012 - 04:28 PM.

[Kazu731]

Stat balance is a little harder to do...
There's no real way to make crit damage and agility less effective without majorly increasing the base multiplier than strength and intelligence work off of, and if you increase those, you probably should decrease agi's crit rate multiplier and crit damage's multiplier as well, otherwise you get lol damage in every situation.
Imo, it's better to have all the black dragon sets have unified, useful, same sets than for them to be scattered around in an attempt to retain their unique-ness.

Postscript/thisdidn'treallyfitinidkbad at conclusions. You almost /need/ some useless stats...otherwise everything gets kind of overpowered and ridiculous.
I.e: let's look at myrmidon: lovely str base stat so why would I work on stacking it? I'll stack mainly agi, cd, and crit rate with health. In the event str adds much more attack than before= myrmidon becomes this freakishly giant murder machine

Alternate notes: I suppose you /could/ have balanced stats but that is going to require a lot of guesswork and testing. I'd like to see the mathematical formulas for str, agi, and magic before I can support a change in the balance of these stats. If correctly handled, we could prevent things like mass genocide myrm from happening, while retaining individual facets of the armor sets.

I think you're partially right, Quin, in that sets cannot just come premade with godstats. However, it's widely agreed upon that it's quite silly to have stats that do nothing. For example, if STR and INT offered useful things [Which, the Devs are working on a stat balance, so I hope they will receive them], you can potentially have a balanced realm of stats. The way you are thinking limits it only to the current situation, rather than considering future potential.

Consider that the ever-infamous issue between Evade and Aim stems directly from Agility being the single godstat out of the four stats. There has been attempts to balance this, but you PvP players know better than I do how this works. It's clear that the other stats do very little to any competent player, and despite what you think, it's not quite rocket science for developers to make them useful. There have been countless suggestions on what to do with these, and there isn't much of a limited scope. You could have STR and INT function differently for classes that operate on it [For example, added CR or CD, or appropriately added ATK or Aim], or simply amp up the amp the numbers in the formula to make it more worthwhile. It was heavily discussed in the game balance summit so I suggest taking a look there.

Here is a link to the stat formulas:
http://ds.irowiki.org/wiki/Stats

[Jumpluffspore]

I think you're partially right, Quin, in that sets cannot just come premade with godstats. However, it's widely agreed upon that it's quite silly to have stats that do nothing. For example, if STR and INT offered useful things [Which, the Devs are working on a stat balance, so I hope they will receive them], you can potentially have a balanced realm of stats. The way you are thinking limits it only to the current situation, rather than considering future potential.

Consider that the ever-infamous issue between Evade and Aim stems directly from Agility being the single godstat out of the four stats. There has been attempts to balance this, but you PvP players know better than I do how this works. It's clear that the other stats do very little to any competent player, and despite what you think, it's not quite rocket science for developers to make them useful. There have been countless suggestions on what to do with these, and there isn't much of a limited scope. You could have STR and INT function differently for classes that operate on it [For example, added CR or CD, or appropriately added ATK or Aim], or simply amp up the amp the numbers in the formula to make it more worthwhile. It was heavily discussed in the game balance summit so I suggest taking a look there.

Here is a link to the stat formulas:
http://ds.irowiki.org/wiki/Stats

Mmm I guess that's true, changing them from adding attack/hp/mp in marginal amounts to something completely different could work if done correctly. What if different stats did different things for different classes? Or is that too much...

[Kazu731]

Mmm I guess that's true, changing them from adding attack/hp/mp in marginal amounts to something completely different could work if done correctly. What if different stats did different things for different classes? Or is that too much...

That's my suggestion and I believe FireOnight suggested something similar, which I support.

[Coolsam]

Regarding Agility I think they made it too easy to stack up. Alex/Kryos shoes and gloves are a free +90 AGI total. And depending on the class AGI seems too easy to get from low required set pieces. Heck I'm an Overlord and I have 500+ Agility and there's at least 2-3 other Overlords I know who have it between 500-600. And there are other classes non thief/archer/twin that can easily get it higher than 425 if they knew how to set up gear. And since it's the main stat that assists Aim rate, evade rate, and critical rate, high AGI has now become an obvious choice when it comes to building stats.

Now stats like STR and INT are also easy to stack up if you know what your doing, but they aren't worth it in the long run. I'm pretty sure I could get 600+ Strength if I had the time/gold. But what would it get? Some crud base physical attack and defense that's not gonna make a darn difference. And I've seen mages that hit 500+ INT and it doesn't seem to help them other than higher mp.

[Lunateric]

This is kind of my point. Everything is very IM-dependent and very stacked against the players, even with IM. However, I do disagree that the skill cards are anything but an extra luxury. The MATK example is a poor one, especially in consideration of the comparison of Summoner MATK passives versus War Mage MATK passives. And further, Coolsam is absolutely correct in that you could never reach the DPS of a certain other class even with a 10/10 of a very good skill. Stats do not matter in 95% of the PvE very much, so of course it doesn't count in a place like Lavalon. The point is that in the endgame the DPS scale is slanted to only 1/10 of the classes and there is literally nothing that you can do to keep up or try to get on par, even with excessive IM spending.

Not to nag on one point, but this applies even more heavily to the War Mage class as they are probably the absolute worst class of all to take to the endgame due to their lack of groggy. A personal example is always a bad one but it bears mention: I've seen perhaps the best WM in the server and perhaps the best Pathfinder in the server barely do slivers of damage to Elga, and skill cards, stats, gear, and skill still proved to do literally nothing to keep up in terms of DPS.

PvP may be a much different story with skill cards, but that's beyond the realm of what I'm knowledgeable about. However, I have to agree with Quin here and state that our goal is to provide useful feedback and suggestions to change the things we are unhappy with, because the Development team is making an effort to hear us out and just bemoaning the current game's status does not row our precious boat forward. I personally do not like anything in the game being IM-dependent save for a luxury. For example, there's a large difference between an EXP boost pot and a monster card insurance scroll. Attempting to farm these cards and blend them without the insurances would be an endless task. It's hard to find a balance, but my suggestion would border along the lines of making the insurances a reward for doing certain PvP or PvE achievements [Not the medals, but moreso like a difficult Hunter G quest or a certain amount of wins].

Talking about the competitive scene and not taking PvP into account is what most certainly doesn't let you and me agree. PvP is and will always be a huge (end)game factor.

[Ethernal]

I wouldnt ask for agi though, at least health and CD or more CR, the ints okay i mean we are meant to get it.. right? but not as a main stat, i'd like to see a complete change in the lol stats like you guys mentioned, the dependance on Agi is just bad for some classes that are not made for that, what if str adds CR too and more def, and that int gives magic def, idk.

edit: didn't check that int gives mdef already, nvm

Edited by Ethernal, 09 April 2012 - 07:41 PM.

[Miname]

Talking about the competitive scene and not taking PvP into account is what most certainly doesn't let you and me agree. PvP is and will always be a huge (end)game factor.

Nope, nobody pvp's at high level anymore.

[Coolsam]

Talking about the competitive scene and not taking PvP into account is what most certainly doesn't let you and me agree. PvP is and will always be a huge (end)game factor.

Forgetting the perma level pvping? Permanent level 50's, 55's, 60's, 70's, etc.

From my experience in the perm 50 it's a totally different scene. Of course your equipment is limited to certain choices but it isn't end game. Even Perm 70 is just Zauha's + set mixings or BD/Secmathian.

[GrapefruitGod]

Nope, nobody pvp's at high level anymore.

I'm gonna go cry

[Kazu731]

Talking about the competitive scene and not taking PvP into account is what most certainly doesn't let you and me agree. PvP is and will always be a huge (end)game factor.

I'm sorry--I think you may have glossed over some of the things I said in that post. Indeed, I admitted to a lack of PvP knowledge, but in no way did not take it into account. I mentioned the PvE side--which I would like to remind you is also a very large (end)game factor--and more than welcome discussion on the PvP side. I am well aware of PvP's importance and in no way dismissed it--I only talked about DPS and even in the competitive scene cash applies very heavily advantage-wise, as well. Perhaps you could explain to me your opposing viewpoint to what I've said so I could take a look at what you are saying.

EDIT: Just to clarify--again, I urge you to post constructive suggestion rather than rhetorical argument. The substance of feedback comes from experience and opinion, rather than a simple "I disagree" statement.

Edited by Kazu731, 10 April 2012 - 06:27 AM.