Summer Event Balance Changes and Bug Fixes

also why are MM's getting nerfed I thought they were still meme tier after the last buffs, legit question were they too nutty??? cuz i personally have not seen a marksman in like 3 years so jw

 

I would like to hear the reasoning behind this change, I don't buy the "be more GMS-like" when there's stuff like 5 arrow strafe on MM, 15 second HH and the buffed assassinate just to name a few.

Don't think enough bishops are stressing enough how much this change is gonna affect them considering that mass sed is now on a separete cooldown and if I'm reading it correctly is guaranteed to happen every minute after the first one, before the change if you were a good or at least a competent bishop you could survive 3 consecutive masses if you played it to perfection by shielding the 1st one, hero's willing the 2nd and by the time the 3rd comes your holy shield will be off cooldown allowing you to shield again to survive the 3rd, this gave the party enough time to take down the arm that is currently casting mas, now with the change bishops of all skill levels are forced to hero's will the first mass and pray they don't die to the ones coming after.

I consider myself to be a great bishop and enjoyed every aspect HT because it challenged me to improve in many ways that other bosses just can't because of how simple they are, with this change I personally have lost interest on playing my bishop the class that I first HTd with and I learned the fight with because I believe this will turn into a hold down genesis, heal sed target and repeat cycle, most of the skill to the fight has been thrown out the window.

If you wanted to make HT harder you could've just gone with the sed changes and not touched holy shield at all.

 

This would be extremely helpful for future patches, as it opens up avenues for more productive discussions. A lot of these changes have pretty clear motives ("HH mules / dexbuccs are broken") and communicating them as part of the original post would likely improve the quality of community feedback.

On a separate note, I'm pretty disappointed to see that the changes to make HT harder do so by removing skill-based counterplay from the fight. Holy shield blocking seduce gave strategy to the fight that will likely be replaced by more dedicated multiclienting and mule-ing.

 

people who picked Paladins, expected something in return for there hours spent on grinding, the staff should have been more considerate of the time people invested In there class, therefore the balance that was made should of been more gradual, before the nerf no one complained about Paladins being broken or anything , now you have many pally mains with no drive to play the game anymore, because other than ht and cwkpq there is no pt play. So it’s not enjoyable.

 

As a low level (145) pali, knowing that while participating in bossing HH will be completely useless, and the fact that balance team members have effectively stated they're not concerned about people's ability to grind etc., it now no longer makes sense to waste 30 SP in HH considering how many other useful skills are useful for bossing (stance, achilies, gaurdian, mw, hell, even holy charge might be more useful). I'm now going to have to save up what, 125k nx to refund that? Sure you can HH grind at 7f but that's not particularly fun. You can HH grind at NT but that's not because you want to, that's because you're required by quests to kill enemies with 100+k health that have full elemental resistance. There is literally no point to wasting points in hh this early on anymore. Kinda doubt I'm going to be able to get that much nx to refund it any time soon either.

 

Why MM got nuked?

 

fully agree. this holy shield change is whack and it's a hardcore nerf to bishop gameplay in bossing. It isn't your usual damage nerf where some numbers are tweaked but It's a complete removal of a class mechanic, this change damages the skill floor and makes the class more one-dimensional and boring. Staff should be able to see this, there haven't been any riot about SI because that's alright to go but we the players that care about the class want our holy shield and gameplay back. It's dissapointing and it's bishops biggest lose today.

 

Before someone says the holy shield change is not a balance change it's a bug fix let me just say that not all bugs have to be fixed specially if these make for a better and more enjoyable player experience, there are various examples of these in gaming history one of the most famous being the street fighter case where combos were a bug at first but the developers found it fun so they left them in.

 

I guess I'll step in and give the correct answer to this since Joot was being a Joot again

The new 5 line strafe is STRONGER than 4 line strafe with SE - quite a bit so, in fact. The old strafe was 110% per line, and since SE boosted critical adds 156% per line on average, it comes out to (110%+156%)*4=1064% in total. The new strafe is 75% per line, which means (75%+156%)*5=1155%, which is 8.5% stronger than the old Strafe. Without SE they come out to 640% and 625% respectively, with the 5 line strafe being very slightly weaker, but in practice is unnoticable because 3rd job sniper don't use Strafe a lot in training and there are almost no boss for 3rd job characters to kill.

As for the mastery reversion... well, I'm not a staff so I can't say that I know exactly what they're thinking, but something that a lot of people didn't seem to notice is that the change from 90% to 95% mastery never actually worked (https://forum.maplelegends.com/inde...stery-bonus-is-not-applied.30958/#post-214055) - I suspect the game just hard caps mastery at 90% (it actually confuses regional maplestory developers, too - you see a lot of bosses in Zipangu with massive 3k+ defenses, even though the game actually hard caps it at 1999), and I suspect the staff reverted Marksman Boost altogether because they couldn't find a way to make it work, and they're currently looking to implement something else (or at least, I sure damn hope that they are).

 

The fact that they're being worded as bug fixes instead of balance changes just feels sketchy honestly, like they're trying to sweep it under the rug.

 

Absolutely.... paladins in gms were a meme class before big bang because they provided meme dpm while having absolutely no party buffs. Systemically the way maplestory and this private server is designed to play it makes them irrelevant if you dont give them decent DPM. I absolutely agreed with the earlier hammer nerf from 10 to 15 seconds as the EPM I was pulling was not logical for where I was at game play wise. However HT is end game on this server and a huge part of actually being able to become an end game player, if paladin aren't apart of that equation then I don't know. Just makes things very complicated for paladins in my opinion to say the least.

 

"Like GMS" is an arbitrary justification in a server that deviates from GMS in plenty of ways.

Why exactly is the laughably unbalanced mess that was GMS ever taken as an example? And who or what decides when GMS is the example that needs to be followed? When are things changed to be more like GMS and when are they allowed to be different? Even if something is a bug, that doesn't always mean it was causing problems (Unlike the res bug for instance?)

If re-creating GMS was truly the goal you would only ever do bug fixes, set the server to 1x and revert every balance change ever made. At some point you have to be transparent about what GMS-related lines can be crossed, and which ones can't be if you want to maintain an image of any kind of consistency. Right now it just feels like some sorta get-out-of-jail-free card that gets pulled whenever a better reason for a change can't be thought of.

EDIT: Big props for reverting the HShield changes, thank you devs!

 

The main point is you need to fund your HH mule a lot with pot costs & actual gears to do relevant damage vs. luk pally.
And, you will get 4m+ dpm only if it surpasses certain threshold, not like from 140.
In addition, if you are willing to level HH mule up to level 180 or something to output similar level of dpm before this upcoming patch, then why not?
It is a lot of effort.
Also, I don't have to mention that regular HH mule will have to use a lot more potions and you actually need to take an eye on the mule more frequently.
To be honest, if I had to use regular pally as a HH mule, I would rather spend some apples on my main to make up whatever dpm HH mule provided.

 

maybe nerf HH and buff some other attack skill, so make HH mule less desirable while still favoring paladin mains

 

As one of the small handful of bishop mains on this server, I can personally say this change with Holy Shield has definitely deterred me from wanting to Horntail in the future and I can see future Horntail hosts struggling to find a bishop to want to run (unless that bishop likes to either braindead press Holy Symbol and Heal or enjoy keeping track of multiple timers and babysitting).

These are my thoughts, so not sure if other bishops can relate, but the only reason why I choose to run HT (or used to, before this change lol) is because it's a boss that requires some sort of skill/focus to make sure both you and your party stay alive through the expedition. While people can make the remark that people HT to spend time with friends (which is true to some extent), as a bishop, personally, I'm usually too focused on not dying or not letting my party die to be able to do friendly banter with friends over VC while Horntail-ing. Not sure about other bishops who do HT, but when I HT, I always have a preference of being Sed Bishop over Reg Bishop because much more brainpower is used and needed to look for animations, know when to strategically use Holy shield, keep timers, and just in general to keep everyone alive. While some players may be content with just pressing one/two key(s) and bossing, I find content more fun when I'm more engaged and not just turning off my brain and pressing the same 2 buttons (heal and buffs) for 2 hours lmao. With the new changes, all we are good for is buffing and running after the sed mule (or when the arms are left, trying to stay alive during all the consecutive mass sed's after will has been used). The small timeframe that we do have to possibly Genesis and provide damage will very likely be disrupted due to all the different sed timers now and also worrying about dispels + not dying :') #babysitterforlifeiguess

HT is definitely harder in some aspects (having different timers for different kinds of seduces and having no way to avoid future ones after you've used will until it's off cooldown ), but also easier in others (just heal and give buffs). I suppose that's a way to up the book prices, but for me, the seduce craziness (and the usual dispels) is just not worth the 2 (or 4, if you run twice) hour stress accompanied with running HT as a bishop with this new Holy Shield change. Who knows how many bishops will even live through the arm seduces...perhaps we'll have to start HP washing ourselves to stay alive :^)

Anyhow, not sure how other bishies feel, so would love to read what the other opinions are.

 

Yes exactly this is the real solution. You need to play around with blast percentages and hammer time intervals to actually balance the class. Would still be interested in some sort of transparency behind these changes just like we have recieved in the past, or some numbers or something

 

Paladins have good single target damage already as proven by the balance team many times, therefore this should not really affect any high-leveled paladins as they will have steady great single target DPM with the addition of HH. It seems to me that many fear the idea that because of the HH changes, they will not be invited to run 5/6 man HT, but I'm pretty sure as a Lv 155, it is possible to find a spot in a 10-12 man HT run.

With that being said, Heaven's Hammer should be changed so that the damage scales with Weapon Attack to counteract the HH mules if this was really the prime intention (might need a wonky formula so that it is balanced and all). Since most HH mules rely on pumping their AP into LUK and HP, this would make their HH hit for basically nothing. This will reward players that have good gear on their pally.

This does beg the question:
Can't a HH mule just rely on STR?
Assuming that the HH mule isn't HP washing (as that would take too much effort to add INT and whatnot), they will have low survivability at HT as well as tons of pot consumption making it not really ideal as a mule. However, if they did somehow take time and effort to HP wash the HH mule, I would like to point out the suggestion would be to scale Heavens Hammer to Weapon Attack. There should be a higher weighting on base weapon attack than there is on STR. If a player somehow manages to give their HH mule some godly gear, I feel like at that point, you should reward their efforts as they're investing possibly 500m+ (hypothetically) which is the amount of money a person invests in their mains at 12 man HTs

 

Returning marksman boost back to the way it was makes no sense. The entire point of buffing marksmen in the last major re-balance was to bring their single target damage from semi-crappy to moderately good, which it did. We discussed all this after the last rebalancing, damage calculations and all. I don't think anything needed to change.

Anyone have damage formulas handy to calculate how this compares with other classes, pre- and post-changes?

 

Why is Bishop in HT?

 

This fundamentally changes the class identity of paladins. While before they were single target attackers who performed extremely well on a small subset of bosses due to elemental weaknesses, and performed well on other multi target bosses (mainly zak's arms which is honestly an afterthought and HT) due to HH. Now there is no fundamental reason to have points in HH other than grinding, to the point where those 30 skill points are a net negative towards the paladin as a bosser.

This is such a drastic change to the skill that the new build order would most likely take HH from one of the top 3 skills to get, in the first 20 lvls of 4th job, to literally the last. Even holy charge would be more useful outside of training. Most of the endgame is focused on bossing, so while it helps with grinding, it's no longer worth the 30 points. I'm asking that any paladin character have their points in HH refunded, or receive the 30 4th job SP resets on request due to how drastic / breaking of a change this is to a class identity / skill. Even GMS would refund character's skillpoints when they did overhauls to class identity like this.