Cancels Changes

Tbh there's 2 routes I see, old maple is a simple game and in a way thats the charm, but some skills/mechanics had so much potential that are just so laughably bad.

-Letting, say, 3rd job warriors use their crashes to cancel with a cooldown
It adds a bit of depth, makes them a more valuable member of a party, and depending on how frequent weapon cancels occur the mechanic would still be a pain here and there and thus keep some of these work-arounds you mentioned around, which personally I also think is great because the idea of just holding down a key for 90 minutes is a incredibly dull concept to me.
Thought about that one plenty before, and in (my) opinion it would still be somewhat fitting to have that in the game, but on the flipside I think there's a limit to how much tweaking can be done to skills before the game becomes "too" custom. ML's skill tweaks are in a very comfortable spot imo, but everyone is going to have a different opinion in what can fly and what cant. Random example being marksman strafe 4>5hit change, I love it. Yet, as sosmeone who enjoys sound queues/visuals/bgms/class feel yadayada I would also completely understand if suddenly having a extra arrow in there feels odd, imagine if nightlords threw 5 or 7 stars for example it could feel really odd to some.

I think reducing it to 75% or so is also good, and here I think moreso about areas like gobys where its just annoying if you cant deal with it. If there was still some damage to be done it may not be efficient to keep attacking, but its much less of a headache. It leaves the choice up to the player to decide wether theyd want to optimize for DPM, comfort, etc. Some breathing room for classes to set up is quite nice to have and if I were a shadower I woulnd't mind getting to drop a few bags and charging for some big hits.

Either way, i'd love such changes myself

 

The idea of use warrior crash for remove weapon/magic cancel just make warrior mulable (just see our neighbor r0yals)
I think it can be a good suggestion, but need to find a number to be fair

 

As much as we all hate weapon cancel at the end of the day, removing or working around it (making it 75%) would further diminish the potential to balance classes around certain niches. What I mean by this is that it's already a big struggle to fit in every class in a way that makes sense in terms of balance. Mechanics like DR and Wep cancel for example could serve the purpose of allowing a class like shadower to be good at bosses that includes those (That would be if their base damage wasnt as low as it is and allowing them to top bosses with those mechanics present).

All in all, I think removing certain game mechanics in favor of making the gameplay experience more rewarding would make balancing the game way harder than it already is. The whole idea of balancing classes in prebb maple has to be around their ability to excel at certain scenarios for example paladin on elemental weakness, Corsair on low chaos/dummy bosses, marksman in PB body (due to snipe), heroes/dk in cleave (if that existed) and classes like BM and NL just be good overall despite the scenario. Removing any of the scenarios where you could capitalize on for balancing is sadly unhealthy for the game in my opinion ( as much as we all hate wep cancel)

 

The change would also reduce the difficulty of various boss runs by reducing the effective HP of many bosses - which has some implications given that bosses are a source of chaos and white scrolls.

 

I wouldnt be surprised if it opened up the possibility of 3-4 man HT attacking squads without the uses of apples (Unless it's already possible and I'm simply unaware).

 

please just remove them and buff boss hp where necessary

 

SURRA guild aka the biggest on server is recruiting Brazilian people to the family

Jokes aside, I would like to see kind of mechanic to remove the weapon/magic cancels. I think there was something like this on CPQ, but Im not quite sure because I dont remember.

But my idea was something like: after a weapon cancel is casted, you can break 4 pillars to remove it. So your party would need to move around the map (and that's something that can be optimized depending on your squad) to break the pillars and start killing the boss again.

 

Meme reply: Weapon Cancel is a nice window for being able to rebuff and chat
Slightly less meme reply: Weapon Cancels do add a certain level of depth to HT in deciding where to prioritize damage

That being said, I think people are overestimating the frustration reduction in lowering Cancels from 100% reduction to 75% reduction. At the end of the day, our simple lizard brains will still categorize 75% damage reduction and 100% damage reduction as the same sensation of reduced agency, leading to frustration.

Generally you'll see in "good" game design the player presented with a choice, where making a good choice is rewarded with increased agency. In old school Maple, many of the "choices" presented to players tend to be both hamfisted and binary, where good choices mean you can play the game as normal and poor choices mean you get to do nothing. There is actually surprisingly few decisions that a player will ever be faced with that actually reward the player with increased agency (notable examples generally revolve around abilities with cooldowns, such as ST, TL, Concentrate, etc) and none of them involve fight mechanics besides Core Blaze's chandelier (which, granted, is actually a pretty unique addition to the game) and elemental weaknesses (which tends to be a set it and forget it decision).

Most modern day RPGs, even single player ones, seem to have learned this lesson that players generally respond better to positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement; it's hard to think of a game that doesn't have some form of "the boss's armor is exposed! hit it really hard while it's vulnerable" that lets the player go big dick mode. Mechanics like these feel incredibly good to the player, as they're temporarily empowered with a level of agency that is noticeably higher than normal, whereas mechanics like old school Maple's will reward the player for hitting the Magic Cancelled target with... normal damage. There's little reward for the player to be doing the correct thing, such as hitting the Horntail Head that isn't Weapon Cancelled, but a lot of punishment for doing the wrong thing such as hitting the target that's Weapon Cancelled. Increased agency = dopamine, decreased agency = frustration.

While I don't disagree that Cancels are overall a pretty lame effect, one also has to wonder to what degree we're actually willing to tolerate the overall design philosophy that old school Maple seems to embody. There's so many examples in the game of just... un-fun boss mechanics, but very few boss fights that people will laud as well designed and "fun". You might be able to take out Cancels from boss fights, but you'd be hard pressed to fully remove what they represent from the game, and I'd be surprised if lowering Cancel reduction from 100% to 75% made a noticeable difference in player enjoyment of content in the long term after the initial "wow this old thing we hated is gone" phase wears off. At the end of the day, I'd imagine most of us aren't here for well designed fights anyways, and getting into overly custom changes (HP thresholds would have to be attuned to account for the new lack of 100% damage reduction) without a strongly guaranteed payoff is a big risk when developer time is so valuable.

While I would love to live in a world where some of the more barbaric designs in this game could be replaced with more modern practices, if I wanted better game design that badly I'd probably just play one of said modern games.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

 

What about merging these 2 routes?

Ex/ weapon/magic cancel reduced to 75% damage reduction, down from 100%.

Hero "armor crash" further reduces weapon cancel to 50% damage reduction, down from 75%.

Paladin "magic crash" further reduces magic cancel to 50% damage reduction, down from 75%.

Dk "power crash" doesn't affect cancels, as they already provide extreme group utility in "hyper body".

If we wanna go a step further, I'd like to see bishop's "dispel" reduced to a defensive support skill that only clears enemy placed debuffs on teammates (and not enemy buffs like attack/defense up, or weappn/magic cancel) to make way for the 3rd job warrior crashes to become the primary means of taking away enemy buffs.

 

Remove weapon cancels entirely and replace them with stronger Atk/Def power ups that would need warriors to crash.

That or make mages stronger attackers so that it could be worth it to bring a mage to bosses during those shitty weapon cancel events.

Cancels where you can do nothing about but sit around or what is the most braindead and pointless mechanic in existence.

 

Weapon / Magic cancel is an equality mechanic, it makes it so people who deal twice the damage of other players do not straight up kill bosses twice as fast.


Removing it without an adequate replacement would significantly increase the wealth gap which is already pretty severe in ML, not to mention cleavers would become even more of a meme

Core Blaze miniboss’s chandelier mechanic is a good example of a weapon cancel alternative that’s interactive and skill based. (Every so often, a chandelier spawns and you can drop it on the boss to do a bajillion damage. The boss is too tanky to kill without chandalier drops). Not only is the wealth disparity bridged because most damage output comes from the chandalier, cleavers are given an explicit purpose where usually they are the ones who force the boss to stand under the chandelier and walk to dangerous places that ranged can’t go

 

The problem with cancels overall on bosses where you have nothing else to attack is that you rebuff for 5sec and then just sit n wait 25sec, its just straight up boring and I think everyone having experienced a thirdbody zak Weaponcancel 10+times feel the same.

Dont change the 30sec cancel itself but make the gameplay a bit more active! Lets say having a "switch" spawn somewhere on the map, forcing the whole team to go hit it x amount of times to remove the cancel and be able to save like 10sec of canceltime.