Low Avoid Classes Discussion

reduce macro to 1 slot

 

This would be fine so long as you could still chain different skills (buffs)

 

banhammer

 

I'll give my 2 cents as someone who has very recently been learning multi-client, I currently use my bucc lv 164 as a second attacker on some bosses, on most bosses i am underlevel

I'll point out a few things:
I tested the bucc outside and in the st, classes like pirates that need a considerable number of APS are definitely much worse to mule

Even though I'm lower level than the bosses, I see that avoid is much better than stance many times (especially with the stance bug that apparently only I had?)

Well, it's obvious, but it's always good to point out that the easier the boss mechanics, the easier it is to deal with more than one character.

I did some bosses attacking with my super low lv shad and full of int attacking in dual client, the difference that the dish +100 avoid makes is absurd

tl:dr I think it was what everyone knows/imagines: that the easier the boss, the fewer actions the character needs and the more avoidance he has, the easier it gets.

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giving my 2 cents about survival in PB as a warrior, for me a life changer was to stop using ACP, you can survive the STG 5 statues even practically without HSS, which I see is still a big gate are the ranged hitbox in relation to melee

 

at this point its easier to just ban multiclient, but this was already discussed many times and always ends being considered not viable

 

I think we don't really see bans for boss freeze abuse as the community generally puts in a good faith effort to @gm when it does happen. The minor gains you can get from abusing things is generally outweighed by understanding the consequences, losing your hard work or putting a demerit on your record is generally enough of a motivation to just go without a minor buff, especially when it affects multiple people in a boss run.

 

awesome thread, very based

Can we craft content in a way that promotes the simultaneous existence of both low and high avoid classes?
Regarding the specific suggestion: I think manipulable RB banish would be excellent in favour of random behaviour, without changing the whole sed order mechanic entirely. PB statues are very discriminatory to low avoid classes but reworking the entire fight probably isn't going to happen any time soon, so adding intelligent counterplay options is a good band-aid. Statues are too uninteractive as is.

Looking at the bigger picture, I think there are positive signs in other endgame content that high avoid isn't an invincible monster when it comes to boss design, although it certainly places a lot of restrictions on what you can do. I think existing content could look a lot healthier overall with a handful of conscientious tweaks to make everybody relatively happy in the world of free avoid.

In your opinion, do you believe the skill ceiling in "meta" content is too high, too low, or about right?
In a PvE game with extremely finite content and only gear treadmills to keep us running, I think we should be striving to constantly raise ceilings and introduce more difficult gameplay. Even the laziest implementations of something like Chaos Horntail could be a fun refresher and bless the population with thousands of hours of new challenges. I'd personally love to see a spike in difficulty in end-endgame content (post endgame?) where clear rates aren't better than like 30% and require extremely high levels of skill and coordination within squads to even stand a chance. Anyway, with more "meta" options available, you have more room to ensure good class diversity across them all, instead of trying to insist that everybody is equally good at PB, HT and Auf combined.

Do you view multi-attack as a positive or negative for the game?
I think multi-attack is just an extension of the game which presents a whole new tier of difficulty and axes of optimisation. But it never deserves to be elevated above the core single client experience and I think we should rarely hold back on any otherwise positive changes out of fear of hurting multi-attack. Even changes which impact muling and potentially undermine players existing mule/multiclient infrastructure I think are generally fine. Any player who opts into these strategies should know there's always a risk that things can change against them (as has happened in the past). It's also easy to see that a huge portion of the population is not particularly interested in participating in this level of multi-character gameplay, because that's not really in the spirit of MMORPGs at all. And once the rest of us are that many layers deep into hexa-attack optimisation and we're all soloing HT in our little boxes, I think we've completely lost the essence of what makes this game magic.

Should high avoid come with a cost?
Yes, please implement my NL nerf!!!!!!

 

NL is the one class that actually needs avoid the most. People love to talk about how "broken" this class is, but they neglect the downsides. If they didn't have avoid, they would not be able to survive long bosses. Since more than half their inventory is filled with stars, they cannot hold as many potions as other classes. NL without SE is terrible. If you have ever been on a boss run where the BM/MM d/c it's pretty much over. NL is the only class that requires a buff from another class and summon rocks to function.

I also believe that people that play NL generally invest more into their gears than the average player, which gives the false impression that it's the class that's strong rather than their gear.

I do not think that NL is a broken class as a single attacker, but I do see how it can be an issue when it is scaled. We should not be balancing classes based on their multi attack viability. If multi attacking is a problem, then we should address it directly. I don't think we should get rid of multiclient as a whole, but I think the easiest solution would be to disallow having multiple primary attacking skills in a row on macro.

 

can confirm NLs are broken

 

These are all excellent points and I generally agree. It’s definitely a lofty and most likely unobtainable goal. Some extra thoughts I had anyway:

1. People already feel as though content is very stale, so adding any amount of freshness is nice to revive player interest, even if only temporarily and with an imperfect implementation. Even then, when the content does grow stale, I’d still rather have 4-5 stale things to cycle between than 3-4. Unique rewards (post 200 progression?) could also be fun to explore more.
2. That’s fair. Would there be an issue with shortening the run time for new endgame content? It would be far easier to iterate on that way too.
3. I agree that class diversity is hard to achieve, but my point was that if for example each piece of content is only “fair” to a subset of classes, then the more content you have, the better opportunity you have to not leave anybody stranded. Overall diversity is generally accepted by the community, e.g. “I don’t get invited to HT, but it’s not so bad since I can NT2”.
4. While that’s true, pre-challenges the playerbase was very tolerant to content being locked behind washing timelines that are much longer than 6 months. Even now, challenges are often recommended and embraced as a stepping stone to endgame while players accumulate NX anyway. Personally, seeing the content timeline grow longer would only motivate me more, regardless of my existing progression. Do people really want to run out of new content that badly?

 

TT no longer can Marco

 

inclusivity has always been a concern but rest assured the invisible hand of the shadow balance team will always have its way

 

Totally fair, I’ll wait for you to start that thread too.

That’s very fair. One idea that could be explored is attaching a big reward (whatever that is) across a number of stages. These can be repeated in a relatively arbitrary order, but you need one clear from each stage to redeem the reward. Zak prequest and (arguably) CWK exchange are already like this, so it should work in theory. This way you can have the content be like 5-6 separate 15 minute intense technical grinds, but with one overall reward.

Definitely agreed. Related to the first point, I think the space of unique rewards (and not just money or stat/wa) is super under explored and I’d love to see what ideas people have about the kinds of incentives they’d run content for.

Couldn’t agree more with the diagnosis. As for future action, I’ll always support feeding players their medicine even if they’re throwing tantrums, but I of course understand why staff chooses not to do that.

 

So... something like this?

 

Pardon me if I’m misunderstanding, but I thought your issue was that demanding players invest their full effort and focus for over an hour is unsustainable and unrealistic? So I’m just thinking of ways to cut up content into short intense bursts instead.

 

There's too much agreeing going on in this thread.