Change Meso-Up from being a party buff to a self buff

I think it's worth remembering this is almost a direct nerf to mages.
The unconfirmed but very noticeable nerfed droprate left them really only useful for leveling other chars up and farming meso. By taking the meso farming aspect away, mages are going to be pushed even farther away from being useful for anything else other than being leeched by other chars.

But still, I agree with this change. I just hope it brings to discussion on how to incorporate mages into the game in other ways, since you essentially have a class that only excels in 1 thing, except that thing is heavily crippled.

 

that is an oddly specific example....

 

How this situation is not being viewed with the same concern as HH mule feels woefully ignorant.

"There's only one guy doing it, so it does not matter" -> there was only one HH mule at its start before exponentially picking up. At one point you almost couldnt be considered an endgame bosser without having an HH mule.

"HH mule required massive exp investment in making a 4th job character" -> If its worth it, people will do it. 4th job is a significantly easier milestone today than it used to be. And people *are* ramping up multi-mage farming using one of the fastest classes to reach 4th job in the game. And not just at ulu1 either... they'll go wherever they can station enough mules to cover the entire map.

"HH mule didnt require skill, multi-mage does" -> Not sure how people can actually say that when even the lead proponents demonstrate that its easy and practically afk, especially at ulu1. The entire point of the method is to minimize movement and maximize area covered using many characters. The bigger barrier to entry is getting a powerful enough machine and enough screenspace to run more clients (how multiclient bossing ban was viewed too P2W and this isnt is beside me). And you can do this at your own pace-maximum efficiency isnt even a requirement. There arent any leechers that demand attention/efficiency. At least the HH mules had a literal three-headed dragon of seduction in the room to be (somewhat) worried about.

But how would we tackle this? Personally, I dont think there is a good answer, and its simply yet another case of having to deal with the choice to allow unlimited multiclient. Some common thoughts Ive seen are to simply nerf the mage ultimate. Implementing a cooldown does nothing here. Less than 10 seconds and it's back before the mules need it for the next wave. More than 10 seconds and the skill and entire mage class breaks down and needs a total revamp, for better or worse.

Reducing damage? While I think it totally does need a damage reduction to not be both the strongest skill and cover the most range (at least for a/m), it wouldnt help either. Leveling more, or worse, actually putting gear on the mages, makes it a fairly moot point. And even if it were enough to make the skills totally unviable, what's stopping similar concepts from happening with a variety of other classes? Such as replacing a mage with a DK-priest roar healbot, or a bunch of STR sair bird gene spammers? Maybe these or other combinations wouldnt be anywhere near as efficient, or maybe they simply havent been explored yet. The potential will always be there. Mages are just the obvious choice at the moment.

At the very least, removing MU party buff guarantees less raw meso is being generated by multiclient meso farmers. I worry that injecting so much raw meso into the market is going to force more people into the multiclient meso farm. It's basically the case with leeching, but at least portions of leech earnings are circulated from other players, not raw generation.

 

some games with time move to a bartering system. maybe it is just the normal evolution of a game where you can basically print money. with time meso will be worthless and end game gear will cost chaos or white scrolls exclusively.

 

I'm on the case of proposing a 15sec CD now, and I will continue to push this matter until I see major revamps in how nerfs are done over mage abuses.

What does this do? It basically cuts the mobs killed per hour by 1/4
I would almost argue that a 15sec CD would be a sweetspot, to undercut 1/4th of the mobs killed per hour from a single mage.

The main reasons I feel that are good about this is (and I'm getting pretty tired of the anti-mage nerf parties nowadays), listen well staff because its directed to you too.

1) NERFING A MAP IS NOT NERFING MAGES

You might think that "oh wow we nerfed mages" after nerfing a spawn rate of a map... but that did nothing, it just brought mage-meta to another map which will repeat the cycle of
Discover new map meta -> Abuse -> Publish info to friends -> Friends publish to more -> Everyone knows -> Becomes a new meta -> "oh shit that new map meta is a powercreep" -> Nerf map -> Repeat cycle​

2) Meso generation is too stupidly high for mages with basically no game interaction involved

Yes I said it. Its too stupidly high when paired with a MU mule, which basically gets repaid after a couple of hours of work (given its lvl 77 or 79 if you want some FJ)​

3) EXP has become such a meaningless factor

I still remember when people got to LVL 200 and was like "wow, gz" and now I'm looking at smegas every single day and be like "eh another duo mage 5-6f afker"​

4) We have seen an increase in RWTing during the Covid era

Yes, I'm not joking, I'm seeing RWT ban waves with people from which I've bought leech (atm I'm counting 11/14 of the leech sellers I bought services from) because mages are so easy to just powercreep to 4th job, get ulti and spam all day for meso which later on translated for those people into real money.
​

Now why am I saying there is a need to push to nerf Mage Ultis to a 15sec CD?
Its because maps rotate around a 10sec respawn cycle for mobs so, by getting a +5sec CD over the respawn timer you're basically nerfing 1/4 of the mobs killed per hour (20 sec lost per 60sec of casting).

What does it mean? Lets take into account a map such as Ulu1, if I stand correct the general total EPH generated from the map stands at 9m per partner, so 18m eph for duo + mage leech seller (10m) should bring to around 28m eph with HS.
Average the mobs xp + hs and you're getting around 2.4k exp per kill
So we're looking at abour 28000k / 2.4k = 111666 mobs/hour

So we can reasonably calculate that, a normal mage farming for mesos at the map can rotate and get ~11.5k mobs/hours for a reasonable 6m/hour (meso bags only).

What can be easily calculated is that, with a 15sec CD the nerf would directly be proportional (accounted we use absolute numbers, not % chance drops of meso bags)
~8300 mobs/hour => 4.3m/hour (meso bags only)

Which brings to a decrease of 20~30% of meso making (generalized now for % chance for meso drop) from single mage alone
There would of course be a drop of 25% to exp making too, which would make leeching more sporadic.

Reason for this 15sec CD nerf :
1) 20%-30% meso generation reduction to all mages (per mage most likely on a map, when accounting for duos or quads)
2) 25% exp making reduction per map to all mages (reducing as such the powercreep of leeching, a major problem that is constantly brought up)

2.1) By decreasing leeching powercreep players should be more incentivized to play the game​

3) RWT ban wave decrease (yes, most of the RWTers we see are mostly people that powercreep to sell leech to later on cash out, point 3 is correspondent to nerf given by point 2)

 

it might help and it sound like a solution.
but personally i am not a fan of it for 2 reasons:
1) 2 hitting mobs will not be an option, you either have anough Matt to 1 hit or FU. now i am biased and it is a personal thing, because i am a luk mage i will not get to a point were i 1hit mobs to grind to. so all of my grinding up to 150 was 2 hitting mobs, mostly in TOT.
2) there is nothing gained in return, i think there is a need to sweeten the proposition , maybe a buff to raw dmg of the ult ?

 

1) non-ulti skills have to be buffed
2) no, ultis already on their own, if maxed to 30sp will get you close to 1hit for many maps, if not at least 2hit 100% of the time, increasing their dmg would do nothing beneficial if not provoke more interests into mobs that were impossible to 1hit before, to maybe be 1hit after a "raw dmg buff" (look at shaolin 2hit mages)

 

This is a textbook how to guide on how to get ML player count back to 300 players. You bring up great points but your solutions to those points are awful and your limited perspective on mages blind you from seeing how terrible these changes actually are. You yourself are changing how you think the problems should be addressed as you get new info on how these strategies actually work. It might be a time to take a step back and gather some more info before suggesting such drastic changes like this.

Also, as a side note, 5-6F has not been afk for a long time you're like 4 months behind on patch notes and it is literally impossible to multi-client mages to 200 easily any more due to a variety of changes that have been made to the map.

 

Bishop and the multiclient magefreinds have been meta grinders/farmers since before i even joined the server.

Thats a bit telling right...?

 

Cant wait to see Shivering's 8 mage ulu1 journal with virtually the same difficulty, cost, and gains.

 

can you please tell more, because on paper what Motto said sounded not bad as long as you give a baff to other skills.

 

Pippy already said it if you bump CD to 15 seconds all you do is instead of 4 mages you make 8 mages and plonk 2 in the same spots. Then you rotate casts so that you can farm the same amount of mesos by rotating casts to get around the 15 second CD timer.

And then you have the issue that you just gutted a ton of maps interactions to address an issue with multi-client farming.

 

is it possible to multi client 8 mages + 1 MU mule +1 sweeper at the same time???!!!! i understood the issue why changing the CD can be to extreme. but i am gust shocked from the idea that multi-clienting 10 characters at the same time is not a big deal.

 

The characters require no movement. You might need 2 PCs to execute the strategy, but I doubt it would be difficult to execute it.

 

I've dabbed into making mages myself and I've burned out on them, because the gameplay is just utterly boring and uncharacteristic.
Yes I've been making like 8m/hr with 2hit ulu2, its very afkable and tbh its basically more work than cornians (for which I was making slightly less but 100% afkable just skill combo + ulti)
Its not a bad spot to afk 6~7m/hr by just clicking 2 buttons with auto-pet

I see no problem in putting a Cooldown to the ultimate skill it has, why?

Because all I see from the pro-mage is this reply, toxicly saying I don't have experience with the class, I don't have enough info to understand why it would be a catastrophic change and yadda yadda.

Goes to show 20iq mages can just think as "me mage cant be nerfed, click button I make meso" and can't actually understand that the underlying design of the class is utterly broken, in comparison to other classes.
What you're basically saying with the reply you've given me is that, the suggestion I made, legitimately made you get angry and salty, which for my part makes me laugh, goes to show that, with just a little push, I can trigger even high lvl maplemageends players.

Even better, goes to show my suggestion works great, makes the hardcore farmer andys work harder at what they're doing.
By having to work around 2 computers to alt-tab so many clients at the same time, make their brain actually work a little bit.


edit : "can't actually understand that the underlying design of the class is utterly broken, in comparison to other classes."
Maybe if its hard to understand this part, given you're a pro-mage, its basically about the fact that mages are the only class that get MAP-BASED NERFS and not SKILL-BASED NERFS

 

Rollback 4th jobs

 

Everybody knows that the longer your posts are and the more you bold things, the more valid and true your statements are.

 

LOL. Why not just suggest delete mage instead, so i don't have to read so much.

You are suggesting to nerf mage's efficiency by 50% at least. This is way more, if you dont duo/trio/quad mage to achieve 100% map clear rate at every cycle.

If too much rare meso is generated, just nerf MU, because it is MU that is causing the problem.
Refer to my previous suggestion on possible MU nerf, and somehow fix some loopholes on the "buff then leave pt" stuff.

 

1) something somewhere will always be a meta. Irregardless of nerfs. Are we going to nerf a map/class every few months?
2) after any nerfs, shivering will still find a way to generate mesos.