Luk mage avoidability buff

What do you think about having LUK directly contributing to MA (perhaps 2 or 3 LUK = 1 MA) on top of everything else you discussed. That could help narrow the DPS gap. Lukless mages will still do quite a bit more dmg.

 

Brb making full luk hs/ress/sed mule to save HT splits

Just my 2 cents though, making avoid scale 1:1 with luk would give a full luk mule at HT like 70ish% avoid, not to mention that you still get a significant amount of maxMP from your 1st job passive skill enough to survive HT even when going full lukless, not even accounting for wearing int gear before levelling. Maybe the dispels can make this not worth it. But I'd imagine this is enough for some people to justify not bringing an extra bishop to save on splits. I'm all for buffing luk avoid on mages, just pointing something out.

 

But my comment was regarding its viability after your proposed 1:1 luk:avoid change...

I'm not against the fix, never said I was. But the staff here have also been known to be against/made changes to things that only a few have abused, even though it ended up screwing everyone else who played normally.

 

As a luk mage, i approve. I Restarted playing the game recently and join quite recently, and i don't plan to play the game seriously to the lvl of washing or plan ahead too much (A Quester Type player XD). I think it would be fair to give those who decided that they want to use gear and not sacrifice everything for Mag. DMG a bit of an advantage

 

I never said it would lead to abuse, entirely your assumption from the beginning from misinterpreting my comments. So don't quote me as if you're debunking something I said. All I did was pointed out how much avoid you'd get, that you'd actually have enough MP to survive while also acknowledging it probably isn't feasible due to dispels, and acknowledged the possibility some people might do it anyway regardless that it might not be worth it. I never even said if any of these are positives or negatives or if would lead to abuse, literally left it all up to interpretation.

This wasn't referring to your suggestion but your reasoning of fixes against abuse in general. Didn't even say if your reasoning was right or wrong, just pointed out what staff had done in the past.

Can't seem to get the point across that I'm not attacking his suggestion I'll just stop commenting now as I don't have anything more to contribute and don't want to derail this thread.

 

Luk mages could use a buff of some sort to make it more unique, but considering the avoid buff further I don't think this would be the best fitting solution.

HT isn't the only part of a bishop's life, and other than your bishop and WackyWarlock I can't think of any other luk bishops that have ran regular Horntail, at least regularly enough that the buff would matter significantly. It would affect Horntail but I don't believe it would have any significant impact outside of the cave, which makes it a very situational buff and not necessarily a good enough reason to go be a luk-mage over a luk-less counterpart for your average player. It could save a few pots in the early levels but it just doesn't impress me, especially when staircases already have 100% avoid from levels 40-80.

I think it's a marginal buff at its best, but it could be a nefarious buff at it's worst. We need to consider an absolute Horntail degenerate like

Spoiler

Skarmory

gets a hold of this buff, and resets most of the int into luk to be a monster bishop with a full MP pool. All it would cost is about 3 million NX to turn an established bishop into a newly acquired dodge tank. And the people willing to do that are the people willing to use all of the degenerate strategies, where the bishop will be able to stand near HH mules/dex buccs for easy shielding, and using arm management techniques to disarm mass seds. If you already plan on spending 3mil NX making your new dodge tank, then you might as well also pump your MP back into HP as well, as without the ult cost having 30k MP becomes a lot less useful compared to 6k HP. After a dispel, Left Head's 5.9k attack is likely to miss, but even so you'd be able to tank it anyways with another million NX or so. In a year and a half one could turn their bishop into another monster. It's something worth considering, as when coming up with a design it's usually helpful to do your best to try to break it by bringing things to their absolute extreme.

 

I'm still completely in favor of this buff as long as it doesn't come in the form of a ring.

 

I think this is a wonderful idea. LUK mages have been trash since before 4th job ever came out.

 

I suppose that really leads to asking why institute the buff in the first place if it's only niche enough to affect Horntail? The vast majority of bishops never try to become Horntail bishops, and the proportion of them who have gone on more than 5 Horntail runs is low, and the number who have gone on 50+ runs is absolutely minimal out of the scores of bishops out there. It just seems like an odd buff that feels clouded by more of a personal situation rather than what the majority of luk-mages actually want out of the class. To me it seems like a good majority of luk-mages aren't trying to optimize the class in the forums, they understand that it's worse off but they're willing to accept that for the personal reasons they have to invest in it, and that's fine on their part. They can play the game in the way they find most enjoyable and it doesn't affect my experience at all.

Not everything needs to be optimal. While it would be nice for luk mages to have some advantage over their lukless counterparts, I don't think this is the solution that will make the most people happy. It just feels too niche while opening up a can of worms with potential exploitative builds. In a way I get the impression that it's more of an all or nothing sort of solution, and I don't believe it will have a very positive effect on Horntail even for a standard luk mage, as a more random dodge rate may mess with iframe actions.

In some situations it may even be a bit detrimental in posturing on a bishop, like in the iies method of Genesis with Legs up, where you gen on toes, and jump gen back to position so long as the bishop has SI. A 10-20% dodge rate would probably mess up the flow of that movement, as it's a lot of precise, quick movements centered around getting knocked back in a regular fashion. Throw in more effective dodge-rate and the movement becomes more difficult, as you'd have to react to whether it misses or kb's you, giving way to another thing to pay attention to rather than mastering the muscle memory that comes from having a minimal dodge rate.

The same can go for climbing ropes to buff your party. When you become good at knowing exactly what instance to climb a rope and where to get knocked back with iframes it can be slightly more difficult when the path you planned is thrown off by the random miss, making more random adjustments needed to accomplish the task at hand.

I'll always be on the side of heavily vetting ideas, and properly testing them where possible. It's not always possible with the staff's limited time and some creative optimizations slip through, like recently the Duku meta slipping past with unconventional leech methods, or Halloween 2018 stew crafting, or the summer 2017 agent equipment. It's difficult to catch everything before issues arrive, or how something will really effect play in a positive or negative light, so it's better to play on the safe side while implementing anything. Everything said so far just scratches the surface of what it really takes to implement an idea, and testing is needed in all circumstances. Is it an improvement in Horntail? Why or why not? Some runs need to be done with really experienced bishops to find out. Can it be exploited? If so, how can it be prevented and can we find all the ways before implementation? How does it affect normal play for an average player? That's hard to measure as the game has many levels of play by many different people, and while it isn't easy to get a lot of feedback from many different players staff can try to put themselves in their shoes to make general assumptions. It takes a lot of work to do anything, even change a couple minor values with all of the background discussion that goes into balancing. I won't say that I know exactly what would happen if the buff is implemented, but I respect all of the work done to make changes and assume that staff have thought about it more than I have with the data they have available. All I can do is provide an outlook that may or may not make their job easier with some creative outlook and knowledge of the game.

 

Whether you like it or not, this is how maplelegends IS balanced. The game does in fact revolve around the actions of select few hyper-dedicated players - just note how hammer mules got nerfed and how event drop rates balanced around the hardcore farmers.

 

I hope we aren't making an appeal to popularity - simply because a majority of LUK mages aren't trying to optimize the class doesn't mean none of them do. And the muscle memory you're describing would be true for LUKless mages, and therefore the LUK mages would have to develop a new system and strategy - this is completely incumbent upon the classes to figure this out and not a reason to not move forward with this idea.

I think you might be right that it's possible this isn't the ideal buff for LUK mages, but the diversity factor is certainly something to aim for. Not to go off-topic, but I would love to see a different type of advantages and disadvantages among warriors depending on the weapon they choose, or between Thieves going DEXless or standard. You are right that we need to vet this idea carefully, and that this buff cannot be exclusively a benefit to HT. If you support diversity within classes, what would you propose would be a possible buff that LUK mages could have over LUKless mages?

 

You're correct, the admins look at hyper-dedicated players who try to break the game in order to properly balance it. But I don't think that was his point. I think he's suggesting we not limit ourselves to this fact and be willing to explore more options in order to create more diversity within the classes.

 

Make Luk mages have more stable dmg? Kinda like what dex does to warriors?

 

I agree that vast majority of bishops never try to become Horntail bishops. I never created any of my characters for endgame content; I want them to be enjoyable every step of the way. That said, I still feel that we have to take HT bishops into consideration in case there's any possible chance of abuse. You just need one person to prove that something's broken after all.

Once again, since most clerics never live to face Horntail, I feel that adding LUK should confer some benefit to low level folks too. All those high LUK folks out there are strictly at a disadvantage, and I deleted my LUK cleric because it felt pointless to continue on with a gimped character. (And this is coming from a guy whose I/L has INT as a dump stat. I love cleric to bits but I'll rather play a STR I/L than a LUK cleric.) The benefit has to be significant enough to make LUK magicians viable, and TBH I doubt at high levels an insane amount of LUK would break the game.

As for what LUK does... an avoid boost sounds nice. I'm partial to damage stability, but I'll definitely say no to a straight up damage boost. If anyone wants brute damage, they should go down the LUKless path, similar to how we have DEXless thieves and so on.