Make bossing great again

I would actually love it so much if the entire structure of earning mesos was completely redesigned from first principles. MapleLegends isn't doing a poor job at all, but there is definitely room for improvement. Inevitably, Maplestory comes down to bossing whether we like to admit it or not.

If bosses were the primary source of income, it would make bossing more interesting than selling leech & mindlessly farming. But looking at Royals, where this is the case it's also the idea of only running HT twice a day non-stop would burn you out quickly too, at least that's what their base suggests. So only if every boss is highly rewarding, even Zakum, Krex & Scar would this work.

 

Bosses need "Boss NX" for APR, or WS/CS shards. We need better boss rewards.

 

I think even if you make bossing the best way of making a profit farming would still be good since is unlimited how much farming you can do a day.
I remember back then killing Zakum and later on HT was profitable and everyone wanted to kill them but the market is flawed in the game, the more you kill the bosses the more books, and once you are done with the book the number of potential buyers go down. Also, the more time passes the stronger people get, and the more killers the more offer of the book or the goodies that the boss provides. Demand goes down with time and offers goes up with time so the market is doomed.

I don't think any of the old bosses of MapleStory can be challenging since all boils down to trial and error, find a way to make it optimal (find where to stand and then hold a button, or just stop attacking when reflect comes, that's it). Once this optimal strategy is found all goes down to RNG, aka how many cancels and reflects the boss will do when they are off cooldown. As far as I remeber bosses go like this:

Zakum- Cancel RNG fun wohooo
HT- Will the Bishop react on time to the dispell or did a lot of optional washes to survive. The rest of the jobs role in HT is just doing dmg perhaps use a buff and that's it, if you are the sed target perhaps you can try to hero's will on time but since you get mana drain is mostly up to the Bishop.
PB-Later on you are not really fighting Pink Bean, you are battling against wonky mechanics: Let's pay attention to @GM when PB doesn't reflect, broken aggro mechanics and the favorite of all melee attackers will my pushing and pulling skills work rng gallore, and welp after the latest update the thrill of will I get a game crash or not?. The statues are a pain when you get a million stuns and PB is just a traffic light, now you can attack now you can't.

The other minor bosses are the definition of not fun:
Scarlion and Targa- Waiting for the cancel to run out simulator, Targa adds annoying attacks into the mix and stun spam if you get a bit too far from it.
Krexel-The dummies from shaolin but with cancels
Pianus- There is a reason why his name is the combination of pain and anus, dispel spam and unavoidable cancels that's to a patch (cos waiting outside instead of going in and out make this boss more challenging).
Dunas- Annoying attacks, spend most of the time on DR, waiting is fun.
Nameless- Crappy aggro festival + will my skill push it?

The only OK bosses are Vergamot and perhaps Nibergen if it didn't do that many cancels.

So yeah most bosses are annoying or have stupid mechanics that remove the control from the player (excessive stuns that you can't avoid or seduce). Also, you can see how they all waste your time with excessive Cancels or DR, when there is a bug and DR and Cancel don't happen you see that the boss dies twice as fast. And every time they want to change a boss they make it worst, add more of these annoying mechanics just in case, more seduces, more cancels, waiting is hard.

Anyways the only fun is to coordinate with ppl and perhaps spend time with friends that's the true fun, too bad the fun part of the game for me won't make me progress thru the game

 

This is somewhat of a nitpick, but reacting to dispel, using hero's will, and the bishop controlling sed is not indicative of how rich HT gameplay truly is. The things you brought up are certainly a part of HT , but its an incredibly small part of all of the techniques and strategies that need to be executed in an optimized HT run.

I mostly agree with your claim that bossing is very limited in early versions of maple, most bosses mostly involve holding down 1 button for some period of time. However the one thing that is exempt from this description is HT, particularly the process of optimizing HT. I would argue that damage optimization in HT is the one thing in the bossing meta that far exceeds any other bossing activity in terms of depth. There are so many specific nuances and techniques I would ramble about, but thats going to take so long that I don't even want to type it out. As a quick example consider BM and corsair. The optimal strats have been long known and documented for these 2 classes, yet only a handful of people can consistently execute those strategies. Luckily since we have the @dpm command in the server, it is not difficult to see that damage optimization makes a huge difference for pretty much every class. It is because HT is so rich in gameplay compared to every other boss that myself and some others love to champion @dpm45 as the one true metric.

 

CWK (cleave) - a simulator to observe how often your pet auto pot fails
CWK (range) - shaolin dummies, now one of them has iFrames
Jiaoceng - similar to cwk cleave

 

IMO HT is so much more than that, especially being the sed target. Sure, you can play passively and be a "hold 1 button" player, but you can also go balls to the wall and optimize; if you choose to go down that path, there's so much to learn about each body part and how to optimize around its skills. Calling it a boss where you die uncontrollably and just do damage is a huge understatement. There's a lot of richness to it that you get to explore each time you go in, and the slight RNG of getting scenarios like dp & sed keeps things exciting. Of course, there's diminishing returns to it, and after hundreds of runs it does get boring. But even then it's absolutely not comparable to a boss where you just hold one button.

Also any sed target banking on pressing hero's will and not getting mana drained is not playing to the fullest. Personally, I love being sed target because it actually engages me and keeps me from falling asleep, and I think if others engaged with the role more they would get a lot more out of it. As a sed target, you can manage so much without a bishop (not to say they aren't useful, they are incredibly important) just by watching animations and reacting properly. You can start off by just watching for the arm's sed animation then immediately roping + dark sighting, then add some spice by timing ACPs with skill locks, counting which type of sed is gonna happen and repositioning accordingly (e.g. don't stand beside right head when left sed is gonna happen), keeping your mana pots up when a sed is coming in case of mana drain, deliberating when to right-click dark sight and use hero's will while seduced, and more.

For of mana drain, I've had over 3k MP on an unwashed shad since 170 ish, so again you do not have to rely completely on a bishop in that scenario.

 

What I was implying with alternative exchanges of meso sinks are meta objectives.
IMO, things like non-tradable, exclusive chairs, effect rings, etc. for x amount of boss clears could be a nice addition.

There could even be self-induced challenges through community-led competitions for things like fastest clears with random team assignments, random sed assignments, etc.

However, on the topic of making bossing more fun and challenging, there are many ways to change things up with even the existing Horntail that could shift the way people battle it.

One example - locking certain body parts from damage (or reduced damage) until others are taken down.
Right now, it's way too easy to avoid one of the main mechanics of HT by simply taking down all of the heads before the arms activate. The recent changes to making heads cleave basically eliminated most risks of proccing mass seduce, ensuring a higher % of clears.

The problem with bossing now a days is that information is shared easily for a game that has a pretty low learning curve. The hypothetical/exploration phase of the game has gotten shorter and shorter as information is shared and implemented quickly.

If there were to be large changes made to certain bosses, I would prefer staff not to disclose all the information and instead allow for the community to test and explore things out for themselves.

Of course, with any suggestion comes the question of technical feasibility and the amount of time and effort involved in implementation.

 

Those of you who have never played as a mage sed target in HT have never experienced true fun

 

While you can say that you can make bossing more attractive, by making it more fun.
But how fun is a boss run really difference a lot from people to people, some consider it fun by optimising damage at the boss, while others consider it fun by shit talking in vc/chat during bossing.

The simplest and the most obvious and the most justifiable way to make bossing attractive is to make it actually profitable in dollar and cents (meso).
Without consider selling leech, even just raw meso farm with a mage at ulu is miles better than the time taken for bossing (including forming party and stuffs).
If you want the "bossing exp", literally just self leech your attacker together.

 

Everything can be optimized but the only cure to sed is hero's will and you can only use it once every 6 mins (unless you are Bucc cos fuck this class, lets make barrel undispellable shall we?), after that is pure yolo pray for avoid to proc, as a Shad is easy, even I yoloed seduces as Bucc but if you are a warrior then GL. You still can enjoy the mechanic but IMO is stupid and strips power from the player, if you could only avoid it like in Vergamot.

 

This might be a crazy idea. If the shard idea were to be implemented, adding an untradeable Pam's Song as a possible exchange would definitely help incentivize bossing. If you are not familiar, Pam's Song is a better version of the white scroll because you only use it when the scroll fails, whereas a white scroll is burned whether it passes or fails.

Adding Pam's Song is essentially adding a reward that cannot be obtained by farming using a mage. Therefore, this gives bossing at least one clear advantage over farming with a mage.

Of course, this item should not be easy to obtain. The only reason why this item was so OP/P2W was because it was purchasable from the cash shop. People would buy it even though it costed like 10+ dollars each.

I personally don't think this item will be that abusable. Assuming you won't be getting 10+ of these like you would with white scrolls, it would be unwise to use Pam's song with 10% scrolls. I see it being used to finish an item with 60's. So instead of burning a white scroll with a 60 to scroll a cape/shoe/hat, you would use the Pam's song. Therefore, I don't really see this item as game breaking as long as the rates are adjusted accordingly. Just think of it as a better/rarer white scroll that you can get exclusively from fighting endgame bosses like HT and PB.

 

https://maplelegends.com/lib/equip?id=1042243

Time to add a HT t-shirt to the gift shop

https://maplelegends.com/lib/cash?id=5000323

Might as well give HTers parental responsibility too by making them care for a baby. We know you've killed hundreds and now HT is an endangered species, gotta raise the next generation.

At least HT is always fresh. The same NL squads get old pretty quick but there's a lot that can be done if you choose to bring a mage, like leaving Legs and Tail to mage/bishop ults while everyone else focuses on the heads. The only major concern is that LA DP is up after the 80mil HP of Tail is down, with 50mil HP left on the Legs. Gotta be a real beefy mage to survive Leg touch after a DP, or else really be on point about escaping. Mid-head DP is also rather close at that point too. Once Fartsy washes out HT is doomed though.

 

You did it akashsky

 

I doubt it's from the summons.

 

still relevant in 2023 , bossing is so bad compared to leeching its a joke

 

wat were you killing

 

Mushmoms

 

I do daily trio core , dou zak , dou nameless , dou verga , solo jc .
and the hourly average mesos I make is less than if I just would sell petri leech.