Questing Ring

Spoiler: HP-washing

This has been said many times and honestly no one who's begged for HP has ever even addressed it:
Is HP washing such a "BIG issue" if you're choosing to play a difficult, challenging and "old-school" server?

There are multiple other servers which are much easier 4x-1000x exp, which also completely change the games mechanics to better suit players that don't necessarily want to put time nor effort in their characters. If Navi and Kimberly wanted to address the "HP-Washing" issue, they would have addressed it when they were deciding the goals of the server. Yes those do shift, hense why we have cool new content such as Shanghai. My personal opinion however, is that if there was truly a want to abolish hp-washing, it would have been done before this point and time.

HP washing most of the time does not require people to remake their characters
HP washing has alternatives: events, rings, hp-scrolls, not doing HT right away at lvl 155
Dont want to HP wash, fine, you can: make a mage, make a warrior, make a buccaneer, play WHATEVER CLASS YOU DESIRE and enjoy 99% of the game anyways.
And many more arguments/alternatives have been mentioned in the 50+ threads created about this

Point is, the more you give the more people ask for. This will NEVER change.

Now, to discuss the issue with Quests specifically giving that reward:
Player X spent 100hrs on maplelegends questing
Player Y spent 100hrs on maplelegends grinding/party-questing

Implement a tiered ring system based on questing:
Player X instantly gets a reward that most likely benefits them (or else why implement the reward in the first place)
Player Y, who spent 100hrs grinding because thats what they liked or thought was more efficient, is now at a (small to large depending on what the reward gives in the first place) disadvantage and must spend another at least 100hrs playing unefficiently to be able to catch up to Player X.

**This was not an issue for MB book because as mentioned above, everyone was on the same starting point: 0 completed**

 

I was mainly focusing on your class balance part. To go back about the quest rings, I think it will be a nice addition. However, I believe Nise stated what my concern will be if this were to be added to further alleviate washing:

I always saw rings as a small boost in hp to reduce the number of wash, (kind of like a cherry on top or icing on cake) NOT a whole system to replace hp washing for good. That means to fully be able to challenge bosses at a lower level, you are still required to wash like everyone else does. Another problem with having flat hp rings is the fact some classes will benefit more than the others. But in the end, I do think it will be a good idea to the game, as long as people accepts that having these kind of rings will never be a permanent solution to washing.

 

Random idea - the reward could be a chair/chairs. This would be purely cosmetic and wouldn’t give anyone an unfair gameplay advantage. Could maybe even be area specific. Meaning if u complete most quests in an area you get the corresponding chair for that place (Victoria Island, Elnath, Ludus Lake etc.) But at the same time we already have chairs for area bosses so I don’t know, maybe its too much. Just a thought…

 

And now the plot twist: the player who spent all their time grinding and party questing is nearly double the level of the player who focused on questing, because the questing player pretty much spent their time as inefficiently as possible.

100 hours of playtime for a MMO like this also isn't even that much... so supposing we had tiers of quest rings, the quester would also have a fairly low-tiered ring. The questing player might now have the same amount of HP as the grinding player. But the grinding player has: way more stats, way more levels, way more skill points and/or the next job advancement.

There is a reason the vast majority of people simply prefer to grind and ignore quests. Because they know they advance much more quickly in the ways they want simply by grinding. So in a way, the grinders already got their "reward" upfront and early.

 

So did the questers who did quests with actually good rewards. There are quite a few quests which give really valuable scrolls that are unobtainable by grinding, or pretty amazing EXP. If you chose to do quests that give BS exp/rewards, you chose to do them. Some quest lines have horrible rewards for the first few quests and then a great reward at the end.
So yeah, they might not be ahead in EXP / Stats / Level, however questers can make quite a bit of money and levels if they chose good quests and spend a little time on researching rewards.
I agree some quests rewards should be re looked at, sure, why not. Chairs, better scrolls, better equips. But even then, people who will have had already completed these quests would be at a disadvantage since they cannot re-do most quests that have already been completed.

I disagree that the number of quests completed should count for anything, especially as a mechanism to alleviate HP-washing.
Players who have completed quests have certain motivations:
-ranking
-rewards
-OCD with having the available quests empty
-enjoy the lore
...etc
If all that mattered to them was EXP/Stats, they would be grinding.
I FMhoe, a lot. I chose to FM hoe instead of getting ahead in the game... because I enjoy it.

+1 for this. I remember writing all the dialogue for the valentines quests. It took days, not to mention getting all the Item ID's ready, NPC ID's, etc and then it gave Kimberly even more of a headache when she had to wz.edit the actual files to implement the custom quests, make them functional. And then a constant back and forth between testing, bug finding, bug fixing, etc.

 

Requires a period at the end.

Either "I wonder what she wants?" or "What does she want?"

Man...I'm OCD grammar correcting stuff that isn't even in the game...LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO ME!!!

 

I like this idea a lot. I already done every quest in the game and I can say that about 80-90% of the rewards are useless. However, a ring might be a little to much since there is already a ring for monster cards and others. I would like to see maybe adding medals instead. Like quest medals, veteran adventurer, junior adventurer and so on. Each medal could give a boost of +1-5 in stats and +10-100 HP/MP. There are already to many rings. I can't even use all of my rings. You get a ring from monster bock, ring from events, ring from getting married, ring from Elin forest quests, rings from nx cash shop. I don't think adding an other ring would be the way to go. Adding medals or some other reward that players can accomplish for doing quests would be really motivated tho. So I'm glad you brought this up.

 

This outlook is pretty much wrong, though.

If a quest has good rewards, anyone can and should do it... if they don't... well, that's their choice. Again, people frequently make this choice. Get a nice scroll you can sell for 10m? One hour of grinding/selling leech makes more than that.

And besides, the vast majority of quests (aside from low level ones which are actually meant for helping beginners and first jobbers along), do have crappy rewards. So if all you are doing is cherry picking the quests with decent rewards, you aren't going to have enough for a ring.

Questers do ALL the quests, even the "bad reward" ones. Only when doing all of these bad quests, could you possibly hope to acquire a quest ring, so talking about how there are a few worthwhile quests is pointless.

 

This is factually incorrect. You need at least 7600 HP after HB (4800 before HB) only for legs/tail magic attack. After legs/tail you only need 5600 HP to survive magic attacks. If you have 4800 HP before HB, you can fully do HT. A level 155 NL will normally have a base HP of 3953 before any other HP gear/boosts. With a deputy star, ellin ring, and T7 MB ring, you can achieve this with NO WASHING AT ALL NOT EVEN ONCE. Yes, you will need to rely on HB and use power elixirs and be vigilant of dispel, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible. The reason why 5600 HP is recommended (not required) is to survive magic attacks after legs/tail without HB which is a luxury that doesn't even take much effort to achieve.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

 

As for the actual ring suggestion, I'm indifferrent. I have many quests done on multiple characters, it's an aspect of ML that I enjoy. I just don't think that more stats from rings are necessary. Ideally I'd like to see some of the stats from the MB ring be lowered and transfered to a quest ring so it's more spread out.

This was also already discussed in this thread...