Official Ironman Rankings

An official ironman mode would really bring some fresh experiences into the server, but in the meantime all we really have is our honor to go by. I've made a couple ironmen, but it's fairly hard to balance around the fact that shops sell most of what a player needs, at least in the beginning. Equipment is really easy to get while scrolling said equipment is really difficult. You can buy armor/weapons until level 40 or so but there are easy to access weapons at level 50 from NLC. Even afterwards weapons/armor come with some fair grinding but collecting 7 scrolls for weapons or armor is a rather difficult prospect, unless you just use the 100% scrolls from the random salesmen. It feels rather clunky for the most part, they feel like a vanilla character only without scrolling any equipment - that's how it ended up for me. That's how my first ironman character ended, I got him to level 70 or so, had a full set of equipment that was really quite easy to get, and realized there was no viable way to scroll anything and that the only real upgrades would be in getting higher level equipment. It didn't really feel like a challenge at that point, it just felt like a weaker character. Potions weren't hard to get, equipment wasn't hard to get, it was just rather bland near the end, so I ended up making him into a normal guy and killed Mannequins for a while.

If it is made, I feel like re-balancing things would make it a more enjoyable game mode. I have no idea if it would be feasible to do any of this, but in my opinion it would make it a better gamemode to play overall if these changes were made specifically for ironmen:

-Double the price of potions, 100% scrolls, and equipment from NPCs, with an even larger nerf to the NLC potion store
-Halve the NPC price sell price of equipment
-Have special ironman gachapons drop that tend to give more basic and cheap scrolls like 60's for weapons and armor, and with an even higher benefit from the Victoria Island towns

These next changes would be cool, but it's very understandable to leave out if they would be very difficult to code in, so they're less important:
-Halved drop-rate of equipment from monsters
-Doubled drop-rate of scrolls from monsters

This would make it more balanced, but it would have to come with a stipulation that anything dropped from an ironman disappears rather than making it eligible to be transferred to a main account, as to prevent scroll farming from iron gachapons. Or maybe just leave the best items off of the ironman gacha list

I honestly have no idea how difficult it would be to code any of that, but if it does come to the game I'd really appreciate these changes, and I feel like it would make it more enjoyable overall. If you've made enough characters, you'd understand just how easy it is to breeze through the early parts of the game, and not interacting with other characters wouldn't change that. Making money a bottleneck and having easier access to scrolls would make the gamemode a lot more enjoyable overall, and increase the sense of accomplishment.

Half the reason I made VicTheHobo the way he is is because the gamemode would be too easy otherwise. NPC shops are really overpowered when you can just rely on them for everything and never run out of cash. Should everyone make a shop-free ironman? Hell no. Please don't, it'll melt your brain. But if shops are re-balanced and scrolls become achievable for the mode it would help tremendously with making it feel like its own playstyle.

Otherwise go right ahead and start an ironman, I don't see it officially getting added for a long time so you might as well enjoy it. There's nobody to impress but yourself. ^^

 

I just took the opportunity to dump some opinions and reflections on attempting ironmen. Maybe staff is listening and has talked about it, well, they'll probably need some more opinions. It just seems unbalanced when it would take less than half the time to make a Dragon Carabella/Claymore for my White Knight then it would take to gather 7 scrolls for it. The same went for the Red Katana he so luckily received from Dyle. And nowadays the only chance at a 30% scroll for those swords is in the gacha and from cwkpq.

It should be hard but things should come at a more uniform grind pace. Some things feel impossibly difficult while others feel relatively easy.

Good luck on your new ironmeme. Share what you think about the gamemode and whatnot.