[UNOFFICIAL] Ellin Part 2 Feedback Thread

I'll keep feedback short and sweet.

The good
New content is enjoyable from a thematic POV and offers new grinding potential for previously difficult to obtain scrolls, which is great.
New ring, both scrolled and unscrolled, is great.
New boss fights are cool, especially Ephenia.
The teleporters on the maps are decently well thought out.

The bad
New content feels poorly tuned; the new bosses feel like they would be exceptionally difficult to clear even at 130+, and Ephenia's drops are incredibly underwhelming, as is her EXP reward.
Ele resist gates grinding from a lot of 3rd job classes which makes party grinding significantly worse as you're now dividing the grinding populations.
Ring scroll grind feels poorly tuned; the reward you get is exceptionally low for how long of a grind it's expected to be, and rewards stats that are higher priority on less-meta classes (if anything these stats should be easier to access to help the lower-meta classes with the stats, which are good for everyone, being more difficult to access).

 

maps and mobs are good for both exp and mesos

bosses are good too but are definitely not geared for 3rd jobbers as intended. The timers are way too short to allow lv100's from clearing them without a carry. It seems the meta is for high level players to provide carries to low level players in exchange for the hearts that the latter accumulates from farming the maps. If the intention was to add 3rd job content than the mark was missed on account of this

 

My feelings on the new area in no particular order -

Boar map is frustrating due to low spawn and wide map. Can't use return scrolls in the map, so feelsbadman.
Fairy maps are great, in map teleporters make farming the wings quality of life pretty great.
Chao is basic but that's not a bad thing. Probably just BM things, but only complaint is delay between his summon skill usage, feels like i clear his spawns and then less than 2-3 seconds later he's spamming the summon again.
Ephenia - My issues and feelings regarding the boss fight -

• The lightning ability and that damned stun. The stun lasts longer than her seduce does, 4 second seduce vs a 6 second stun which is on par with the mole mechanic from Leafre, which is a greatly hated mechanic, and part of why i don't grind in pre-Dragon Forest Leafre often, it's a pain in the ass.
• The fight feels VERY unintuitive as a bowmaster. Puppet does not pull her aggro on many occasions, hamstring does not slow her movement at all, PKB cannot knock her back. Due to the lightning spam, you cannot realistically expect to utilize hurricane for more than 2-3 seconds at a time, leading to a frustrating, but doable, fight.
• Her drops don't feel good, especially when you get some shit like this multiple runs back to back -

• The EXP feels fine, solo run timer slightly longer than Ravana for EXP slightly better than Ravana.
• Does not feel scaled for players to realistically gain anything from this fight until they're able to solo or utilize a carry that doesn't need/want the drops or they end up carrying themselves.

​

The questline feels fine, albeit a little short.
Ring upgrade is great, the scrolls are rough but makes sense to have people work for the upgrades. Drop-rate for the shards feels rough, personally hitting multiple 0 shard runs back to back, really does not feel rewarding.
The heart craft feels fine, while the crystal craft does not. Requiring the wings for both the heart craft as well as the crystal scroll for the ring doesn't feel great, especially with how many people are flooding the area due to it being new as well as the Shining Fairy map being a solid map for grinding and farming. Circling back to lack of shard dropping from the boss, the crystal does not feel good to craft with that 15% success rate when you can go multiple days without seeing a single shard.
The overall mob drops feel alright, some good some bad, like shield luk and str scrolls and the elemental staves feel bad, but the bottom dex acc variant, topwear str/luk and eye int scrolls feel great.

 

Aight, here we go.

THE GOOD

• The environment/maps are gorgeous and the portal placement is on point. becasue of this farming for these etc feel good.
• Bosses and mobs feel great as a 167 shad.
• the new mobs/bosses drop tables are good, they all seem to drop valuable items.
• EXP on faries and bosses are tuned alright.
• It's new content, what's not to like.

THE BAD(ISH)

• Bosses and mobs feel great as a 167 shad, What i mean with this is that they feel great for me. but for the intended player level range I can't see it work. bosses and mobs have too much HP/timers too low for them.
• Something has to be done about the soul shard drops or how much we require for a scroll, becasue at the moment it doesn't feel that good. I was thinking about making shards a quest reward after killing ephenia with a fixed amount of soul shard (3 or 5). this way the intented level range can party up to kill ephenia but dont have to devide 3 soul shard drops between 5 player. making the bosses more accasable for lower level players.
• Please make tusk drop 100% of the times. i'm going out of my way to kill Choa to use less etc. feels bad to run him and still have to get those 80 leathers per heart.
• Not a big fan of the strong vs everything on Ephenia, just feels like a way to strech out a fight. This also makes it less accessible for lower level players.
• The upgrading of the ring feels streched out aswell. with the low succes chance of the scroll and the random soul shard drops.
• Upgrading the ring feels lackluster becasue it takes long to only gain 150hp/mp. (would it be massively op if we could choose a str,dex,int or luk scroll which one give +1 on the chosen stat?
• Boar HP to XP ratio feels bad and their spawn rate could use a buff.

CONCLUSION

I really like the new content, and am happy with the addition. but I don't think it hit the mark with it being for the 100-120 player range.
Thanks again staff for the hard work!

 

I think there's definitely room for improvements, but in many regards I believe we are still adapting and it's too early to tell.

• Boars: I've got good setups personally to farm these, but don't think I'd be enticed to fight them as a late 3rd/early 4th job of any class. I don't take issue with big, beefy mobs, but they don't feel like they reward well in either exp or meso. This may be once again due to gach imbalances, as killing more lower level/hp mobs = more gach = more money = more leech = more exp. I have a back of the head thought that a full party of noobs grinding the boars may well be decent exp, but by this point the playerbase is heavily incentivized to *not* party grind, in part because half the playerbase *cant* grind at these levels. (This will be a recurring theme throughout).
• Chao: Chao might actually be the big winner here. A simple boss, with no cost to entry, that doesn't have any unique drops to muddle perceived value of the content (like shards or auf helms). It's fairly common to get paid out more by Chao than eph, even before accounting for the cost to make the heart summon item. Some classes also fare much better than others in Chao, specifically those that can outrage his attacks or otherwise aren't bothered by his constant jumping. Warriors (post stance) can reach him by jump attacking, and bucc demo lasts long enough that Chao becomes reachable again before demo ends. Third jobbers may struggle more due to not having pivotal tools, but if archmage can solo with extra time on the clock, a party of challenge 3rd jobbers probably could be too. The problem, of course: is it worth the hassle?
• Fairies: Similar to boars, I believe the fairies have potential. The mobs aren't as bulky as the boars, but there's more of them. The fairies can be sliced through quickly as a high level (duh), but a late 3rd/early 4th job will take longer to chew through them, leaving large swaths of the maps wasted potential. There's space enough for a full party to grind, and as of yet I believe the server has not properly tested such a setup. However, even if it works and party play can meet or even beat Big Leech, is the grinding playerbase large enough to easily create fairy grind parties? No non-mage characters I make these days are capable of this due to washing, and mages are even taken down by ele res. This all leads to the reality of most maps being taken by a single high level character, maybe 2. I think fairies could be good content, but they just don't fit in present-day ML. And I don't think they'll be strong enough to fight the status quo.
• Ephenia: The reason everyone is back in ellin forest, the final boss. Ephenia takes the materials from all 3 of the previous entities to summon, and shares a very similar level and exp to Bigfoot (even hp is pretty close after factoring resistance). Access to 2 'free' bfs per day through summons should be an amazing deal for many players of all sorts of levels, but the fact that eph has many tricks like tps and stuns makes it much weaker in reality. Even Bigfoot at low levels can take a while, so a 15 minute timer on a Bigfoot that fights back can quickly become too much for players to reasonably work with.
  • Ephenia occasionally drops a shard that can be used as part of crafting of upgrading her ring. I actually like this system more than the typical method of gaining raid loot: tossing items and starting from nothing until you get lucky. When the content is crafted to be ran over a long period, the state of the ring will follow. Progressive progress through eph ring still takes luck, but also doesnt sting as much when it doesn't pay out and yiu throw out your 75th auf helm... as long as that is not the ONLY reason you are running. Right now, of course, eph is swamped with high level players still working on rings (assuming they even benefit enough from the rings to care in the first place). High level characters don't have or need much of a reason to fight eph once their rings are done, as they have better ways to get money and experience. Low/mid levels in theory should benefit from this fight's exp/rewards but might be gatekept by the timer too hard. Assuming she drops anything of course. Even the stuff she drops looks like an absolute nightmare to split.

At the end of the day, I don't think the entirety of Ellin2 is poorly designed. If anything, wash/leech culture has doomed content of this level range from being viable before it even began. If I suggested any form of changes, I'd suggest looking at the ephenia timer, as well as the duration of ephenia's stuns (I think most stuns in the entire game should be drastically shortened though).

If we want to make late 3rd/early 4th job grinding maps more enticing, we'd have to find ways to encourage party playing, ideally at similar levels. It would be a large undertaking to be sure, but perhaps a discussion of a dynamic exp rate that rewards more exp for being "close to the target level" is in order (think like Pokémon exp curve post Black/White). In theory, it could boost gains of the targeted level ranges while not impacting high level players that should have graduated. Just don't give it to leechers, of course

 

giving feedback in a more succinct way

: I liked the mobs that once again had hammer as a useful skill for me, in most of the mobs I could kill in 2acb anyway, so..

I liked the bosses, Ephenia's elemental "defenses" don't bother me since I can solo in any way, but I believe it could be a barrier for beginners and perhaps, if it were like the mage of cwk, that would be better

 

Soul crystal 15% pass rate is barely worth the hassle for the stats it gives

 

So it is worth it? Great.

 

Given the effort involved, I think it's worth it for exceptionally endgame warriors, archers, and pirates (we're talking in the 20k+ coin funded range). It's likely never worth it at any point for thieves, and mages only for the HP.

 

What do you think makes it worth the effort for those classes?

I’m not sure it is, perhaps aside from the rare occasion where you’d find yourself only just crossing the next meaningful avoid threshold on baskets…

Even then, you’d probably be better off spending your next 100k coins on something else. No?

 

Warriors have wanted to replace all their gear slots with the same w.att gear as other classes. The accuracy can help at low funding too and the avoid is still a minor boon, but the ring by itself probably won't bring level-appropriate players to the content.

 

I agree, the ring absolutely can help warriors at low levels of funding. I’m only arguing the reward might not reflect the effort required to obtain it. Even at low funding, you’ll probably be better off spending your time/mesos elsewhere if your goal is an additional 10 acc/avoid.

With that said, I do think the content itself is very enjoyable, and that alone makes it “worth it” to me. Not quite in the same sense though... But I also don’t think every single new addition necessarily needs to be “worth it”, or the new optimal thing to do for anyone.

Now that we’ve come full circle and I’m arguing against myself, I’ll see myself to bed. Good night.

 

Avoid is valuable for all of them and Accuracy is valuable for Warriors and to a lesser degree Buccs, especially those who have converted to STR Auf helms and EPs and Facestompers. Once you get to obscenely expensive endgame gear like that optimizing for damage, finding sources of Accuracy (and Avoid, for all of them) can be difficult without giving up damage in the process, making the effort for this much more justifiable since you don't have to give up anything for it.

But yeah, it's incredibly stat-inefficient for the amount of time that goes into it, so, like you said, it's usually better investing that time elsewhere until you're already so funded that upgrades are months apart anyways.

 

not ironically the high end too

 

The extra 150 hp can be good for pepega's (me) who did not wash enough and are very close to a relevant HP threshold.

Outside of that the getting 3 15%'s to pass for a total of 9 avoid and 9 acc seems not wroth it at all.
All classes would likely be better off spending their time making money some other way for different upgrades even deep into endgame

 

It definitely feels like some of the most amount of work for such a mediocre payoff for me, a 15x paladin. I duo or trio, and so in my experience, even best case scenario, assuming each person provides one heart per run, that's 40 of each material to get 0-1, MAYBE 2 shards from one run, so roughly 5 shards in 3 days; so we're up to 120 of each of the 3 materials (360). then 100 of each wing added onto that for a total of 560 materials and 3 days for one 15% chance. I would like the +9 accuracy for sure, but it makes much more sense for me to grind 200 materials and just make 5 hearts and sell them if I was so inclined, and then just spend that money on upgrading all my equips instead of slowly upgrading one equip over the course of my entire lifetime, because I have similar scrolling luck to Gurk.

As for the rest of it, A+. Love Chao's proximity to Pap to make for a very fluid boss rotation.

Edit: In fact, I made 13 hearts instead of 1 Soul, and I feel like it was a massively better use of my time already.

 

Overall excellent content, there's a little bit of everything for everyone which is no easy feat. It's very polished and well-tuned, fits well thematically.

Mobs:

• Excellent source of income and exp, though time will tell if ETC value holds up (doubt)

Bosses:

• There's some comedic value in Chao being highly aggressive and annoying against Melees, and a literal target dummy to ranged attackers. But this is a consistent pattern across many bosses.
• Ephinea seems nigh impossible for lv.100-140, not sure if requiring a carry was intentional. Maybe the difficulty was supposed to encourage large parties, but the reward structure is far more effective at discouraging parties. The exp is not good by the time an attacker is able to comfortably clear.

Ring:

• Getting to +2 all stat is very worth it
• Going for the bonus acc/avoid is situationally strong, but not at all worth it until omega late game. It's a total jebait for new players, but I suppose the same can be said for any piece of PQ gear. At least the ring scales into late game, so it's not the most punishing of noob traps.
  
• For the uber-funded though, it seems to be a non-negligible amount of power creep. Afaik Warrior no longer needs any CS'd gear to build full STR, which is getting into economic impact. If DK's still existed, Sky Ski lost a significant part of its power which is quite a blow considering there aren't any tradable alternatives Normal(6) spears, not to mention CS'd eye / face.

 

The ring upgrade being a 15% chance seems unnecessarily low. Odds are you're getting zero successes with that rate, at which point why bother even giving us the option to waste our time grinding for them?