Increase the level of Shaolin mobs

I posted about this in semi-jest on a couple of other topics, but after thinking about it a little I decided to actually make a more serious thread about this.

If the staff ever decides to nerf Shaolin Temple in some way, I think the best way to do so is to increase the monster level of all the mobs within, to something along the line of 120 for wooden fish, 130 for bronze monks, 140 for silver monks and 150 for gold monks.

The fact that Shaolin is the best training place in the endgame, in my opinion, is not a problem - after all, some area has to be the best training place in the endgame, and the idea to nuke the best spot to bring some kind of balance makes no sense - what happens to the second best spots afterwards, then? And what would happen to the third best spot if the second best spot is also nuked somehow? The main problem with Shaolin is that it comes "too early" in the grand scheme of things, due to the overly low monster levels. And I'm not just talking about how it affects leeching, either.

In order for what I want to say to make sense, I'm going to cover some of MapleStory's mechanics first. While for the first 75 levels or so, monsters' HP/exp ratio would steadily go up, after about level 78 most of the monsters would generally be stuck at an HP/exp ratio of about 20-25. This number alone would mean that training on lower level monster is pointless as you'll always want to go after the toughest monsters, whose higher HP means that you waste less time moving around hitting new mobs, and waste less damage to overkill, but there is one last balancing mechanic preventing this from happening - if the character's level is lower than the monster's, for every level there is a penalty to both damage and accuracy. Essentially this means short of defense ignoring attacks like poison and meso explosion, characters can't really kill monsters that are too higher leveled than them, which creates a progression on what monsters they can kill based on their levels.

However, Shaolin mobs break this progression. The two kind of bronze monks have similar amounts of HP as Chief Oblivion Guardians, but their levels are 10 lower. The gold monks in 5-6F and 7F also have a level that's 1 lower than Chief Oblivion Guardians, but they give more than twice as much as exp, and even though their HP is also around twice as much, it essentially means that when looking at their HP/exp in a vacuum, there would be no reason to go after Chief Oblivion Guardians when Gold Monks give a similar amount of exp per damage taken, but Gold Monks are much better at absorbing damage than Chief Oblivion Guardians. Obviously, this has an effect on leeching as well. There's no point in leeching on Chief Oblivion Guardians, when Gold Monks can be leeched on roughly same level but give back much more exp based on factors above.

This is the big reason why I think that adjusting Shaolin mob levels is the best way to go to balance this area. By increasing their levels to something more appropriate for their HP, they essentially become a higher step of the grinding ladder, rather than a step that competes and completely overtakes lower steps that they really shouldn't be competing with in the first place. It would give ToT a time frame of relevance - not all the way to endgame, but a time frame nonetheless. It might also solve the overcrowding issue at 5-6 right now by dispersing leechers across the two other maps, though I'm honestly not sure if this will do much - Shivering will probably quickly figure out a new way to leech any level buyers at 5-6 using Poison Mist or something. Most importantly, this should be an extremely easy change to make technically, as it should just involve overwriting some numbers.

The 120 for wooden fish and 130 for bronze monks I gave are based on the level of ToT mobs with similar HP. The 140 for silver monks and 150 for gold monks are much more arbitrary since there exists no non-regional monsters that give similar amount of HP - Neo Tokyo mobs also have level and HP that are all over the place, so I just kind of went with an arithmetic progression. Honestly I think when considering the gap of HP between bronze and silver, and gap between silver and gold, giving 145 to the silver monks probably also makes sense.