My 2 cents on inflation

a nice way to beat the sweaty and rich players is to make inflation go up even higher than prepatch. after all, inflation is a tax

 

i agree with some parts
i expected a drop rate nerf on ult skills, and also tax on prestigious coins trades.
i dont think the multimage nerf will be enough

 

An actual fix to the issue, relative to specific maps that get abused by multi-maging is to poll / gather data in the following months (after the changes to ToT) relative to the "meta" farming maps for mage classes.
I imagine data will be gathered in relation to more than 2 mages in a map killing mobs per X minutes.
After that is done, you can gather a list of Y maps, from these maps take the mobs and start halving their meso drops, make the scrolls rarer to drop and such.
~ What's the issue with this?

Its the fact the maging metas always rise, they go from one to another map, at the end of the day the other classes will get affected (imagine if all ToT started halving meso drops, scroll drops and eqs drop... hell for anything other than mage to make the grind "profitable").

~ Possible solutions

The solution for inflation is to combat the meso generation made in other ways, and tbh the increase of mana consumption by mages with ultis would be a nice place to start.

Decrease the dmg the ulti does from SP 1 to 10 (2/3rd of what it is now) then when you go above 11 you'll start consuming 1.5/2x the MP you are using right now.
This would make casting ultis more expensive.

"But what about the ones that have a ton of tma and just SP reset back to 10?
At that point I'd say the skill wasn't nerfed enough in the first 10 SPs.

Another point to take, which I've already discussed 2 years ago (which failed to be taken seriously) was the fact that ultis are the only "big AoE" skill that has no cooldown.
If you can cast one ulti every ~5 seconds, why not make it be castable every 5 seconds? Making a mage only cast ulti every 10 seconds.
This alone halves their potential DPM, EPM, MPM, SPH, EQPH drastically.

Bracketed tax in this game can't work, we can see what happened pre-2019 with people just selling millions of etc for 9999 meso and you'd sit there, just to evade the higher tax bracket on big sales.
(Theres still people doing it nowadays lol)

I would suggest making the trades of Coins only available through something like Duey.
Where you will have to pay a good tax to trade it to another player.

 

Yes, mages create inflation on items but who create these items? warriors with power blast?
Mages make the server already TOO MUCH easy, extremely good items being sold for nothing because they farm like no one, do you really think mage nerfs is going to increase your purchasing power? Instead of this mesos become harder to get for everyone, pot costs really start hurting and no one can afford nothing if they didn't do the BEST farming method, the game become very hard to profit and agressive to new players and casual farming methods since the supply will receive a very HUGE cut

 

If you go back to the balance changes thread and look through the data, you'd see why they decided to do what they did. Making NLC pots more expensive was probably the single most efficient thing they could have done to slow down the inflation curve. In the past, NLCs pots not only allowed people to make a shit ton of money, it allowed EVERYBODY to play with them inefficiently and STILL profit massive amounts of mesos in return.

The ammo recharge nerf can be more seen as rebalance for the two strongest attacking classes. Before, there was little to nothing weighing them down. Now there is a slight economic downside to playing these classes.

 

This would be correct if this was back in 2016, where there wasn't much rebalance of every class through players complaining about their damage output.
You have classes like Paladin, MM, Shadowers, etc. getting buffed every patch as NL is always seen as the ceiling.

I wouldn't mind the price of stars if the damage gap was bigger, because simply that's what NLs only purpose is.
They do high single target damage, but whats the point of increasing prices if our gap between other classes isn't even that large.

Staying on topic,

The issue has already been determined that multi mages are the main source of the inflation.
Everyone knows it, yet the whole community gets hit by the changes.
Changes should be directed towards multi maging.
Not everyone has time to farm enough money for pots for a single boss run every week.

To combat them, this has entirely been a game of cat and mouse, chasing down spots that the multi magers have been farming at.
Gobis>Harps>Cornians>ToT

 

The whole community get new 30% drops and in some good maps like grims so the potion increase for starters won't will impact too much, after shadowers and buccanners Night Lords are probably the class who get more relevancy on this patch, they'll spend more on stars but what about their insignificant pot costs? While warriors is going to spent ALOT in potions now, NL will stay by far the class who spent less on boss runs after those two, while dealing by far the most damage!
You really is comparing nightlords to shadowers?
Boss runs profits aren't negative, you don't need to farm potions before entering it
You're guys are not fine with being the best class, also need to be the #1 in costs to maintain, we understand this is NL story, but can we let staff try to make other classes less worse in comparasion?
Just use snowballs, still the best class

 

Paladins, MMs, Shadowers have been getting buffed because there was no reason to play them before any of their buffs. The gap was too wide for them to be justified as viable classes. This was evident based on their low active class counts, and the buffs seems to have revitalized the classes a good amount while dethroning others.

The only disadvantage NLs had going for them for the longest time was their HP requirements which is fairly irrelevant now a days, and they've always sat comfortably at the top and are still very clearly a top-tier attacker. They also have other advantages like low pot spend - HP/MP-wise and in Attack pots, and they still blow any of the above classes out of the water DPM-wise on content that requires high attack pot usage. That is their area of expertise, and they're fairly unmatched in that regard.

There was little to no downside of playing an NL outside of more and more cleave-friendly/mob-spam content being introduced. Also, we're not really in an NL top meta anymore. The class to look at is corsairs, where they basically have everything in their tool kit to make them the strongest, well-rounded class. Their main downside is their mechanical requirements and lack of avoidability which ends up becoming a great equalizer for their dpm in various types of content. However, staff seems to already be aware of this and it seems like they were nerfed accordingly.

Another class to look at is Buccs. They seem to have everything under their pros list and very, very few downsides. Their formidability as damage dealers is also showing out through some of the more dedicated Bucc mains.

The best direction for holistic class balance is to bring the DPM spread closer and closer together. A tighter spread makes the nuanced advantages and disadvantages much more relevant to class balance, making tweaks over time less drastic and more niche-forming. This is an overall good direction for the server IMO, and staff have been taking the necessary steps to get there.

Everybody contributes to inflation. That's just a general fact of this game with how it is designed. If you're playing at a meso deficit, you can always adapt to not be so resource exhaustive - that option is always there. The pot cost changes impacted multimagers more than regular players as their pot costs scale per client used. The pot cost change was a buff to NLs with their alchemist, so you could see it holistically as as a lateral change with the shadow star/ammo recharge cost adjustments -- while it was a more direct nerf to corsairs.

Like I said, the pot cost change was probably the most efficient way to go about curbing inflation. It's shown right there in the data. Does it affect other people too? Sure. But with a universal change like this, it forces people to adapt to new strategies. Also, let's be honest. Everybody already knew NLC pots were overpowered AF for the longest time. The recent change is just painful because it was normalized for such a long time.

 

staff has to be aware of new multimage strategys that come up and mix respawn timer from the new meta mobs. however, you can’t wait big patches to do that. I believe it’s not necessary to wait a long time as changing respawn timer doesn’t need a patch, neither maintenance, right? I believe that doing this + the changes you made this patch gonna be enough to maintain low the disparity’s beetween bossing/multimage farming and leeching. mixed respawn timers + the new potion cost are enough to slowdown the multimage by a large amount

 

The problem with increasing the cost of mage ult is that eventually you reach a point where nothing except the meta maps are profitable. For mage players this means the entire game revolves around fighting for a map at Shaolin or Ulu/Skeles. For everyone else this means the cost of scrolls/equips goes through the roof because no mages will farm other maps.

The fact is that low rate MS servers rely on mages providing goods to the market. This is especially true on pservers which don't have the population GMS had back in the day.

Adding a CD to ults would be terrible. What would mages do in this five sec window where they can't use ult? Use Angel Ray/Paralyze for pitiful damage on one mob? Mages don't have skills to make up for this in their kit. I/L has Chain Lightning, sure, but it has less than half the base spell power of Blizzard. Third job skills are too weak to be usable into fourth job. FP and Bishop only have single target skills. Why would anyone play mages with a five sec ult CD when Corsairs can do virtually the same thing with air strike and also top the DPM charts on bosses? Why not just play DK and spam Roar? Why gear a Bishop at all, why not just mule it? Mage fourth job would need to be entirely remade with custom skills for them to be viable after this kind of change and the result would probably be to make mages into another sub-par bossing class.