Warrior Wish List

I've been beating mobs with glorified sticks for quite some time now, and have accumulated a bunch of coins I'd like to toss down the wishing well to the balance team. I have no particular insight on how fair, necessary, or possible to implement any of these suggestions are, I just think they would be cool to have without being outlandish or unbefitting of the old school Maple theme.

Spoiler: Foreword:

It's awesome that the distinction between melee and ranged in ML is well preserved from OG Maple. The stark pros/cons between jobs has always been something that made pre-BB MS more interesting, social, and complex than many other MMOs that often fall into the trap of "everyone can do everything".

However, due to the age of the server, the types of content available, and the resultant meta, the pros of Warrior feel overshadowed by the cons. Stuff hits really hard by late game, it's pretty unpleasant to take 20k+ per hit even for Warriors. Combined with the amount of weird movement, debuffs, 1/1s, and the oddly high amount of specifically anti-melee mechanics, Warrior seems to struggle to lay down damage with not much else to show for it. I think it would be nice to exaggerate the strengths of this class and empower the fantasy of warrior without stepping on the toes of other classes.

Make Power Stance a Toggle:

• Warrior has a lot of armor on, is an absolute unit, and has probably engrained the importance of proper stance into the essence of their soul. It feels a bit odd that these traits would be lost after a dispel or 300 seconds.

Make Buffs Last Longer:

• For an ape with a stick, Warrior seems to spend a lot of time casting spells - especially 2nd job skills like HB, Rage, and Powerguard. I'm not sure if other attackers are the same way, but my BM feels like a breath of fresh air where realistically you can get away with only casting SE every 5 minutes.

Combine Axe and Sword Skills:

• It would be pretty cool if Axes were more than an odd-job weapon. I think there are a few niches where Axes might be quite good whether that be due to a player's financial situation or the need to hit bigger lines for KB, but because Sword and Axe use entirely different skills (booster, mastery, FA, Coma, Panic), the SP requirement is too high of a cost to really bother experimenting with axe-play.

Make Panic into a powerful Brandish:

• ML has specifically buffed Hero so that Panic is worth using in 4th job, but it still retains a lot of the drawbacks of 3rd job skills - namely inconsistency. It's essentially an extra strong 1st job Power Strike - it has a pretty small hitbox that changes randomly both in size and delayed timing based on which animation gets used, and the number that comes out is usually not what you are hoping for.
  
  
• It is a great DPM increase on bosses where you get to consistently beat on it very very many times. But for a lot of enemies, having 1 line instead of 2 lines makes casting Panic over Brandish a hard sell because you're using your balls to deal a wildly inconsistent number that has a good chance of missing completely due to accuracy or player skill.
  
  
• A lot of targets are unpleasant enough that you don't really want to get super close to Panic them
  
  
• Panic swing sword slower, but do bigger number ?

Combine Guardian and Power Stance for All Warriors:

• I am proposing that ALL warriors gain the effect of Guardian, with or without a shield. Power Stance just seems like a sensible place to put the Guardian effect.
  
  
• For those unfamiliar with Guardian, it's a skill that allows Hero a 20% chance to block damage entirely and stun the attacker. It's an incredible ability, but is rarely seen in the wild because its gimped by its fatal flaw of requiring a Shield.
  
  The reason the vast majority of Heroes don't use shields beyond costing a lot more money is because 1H weapons have worse damage scaling ratios than 2H weapons, you need much more total W.ATT for a 1H+Shield to outperform a 2H. Ironically this W.ATT requirement only increases with the amount of STR you have; Because Guardian is a 4th job non-core ability, by the time people consider taking points in Guardian they are already at the point where a 1H is very unlikely to outperform 2H.
  
  Of course DPM isn't everything, and there are already situations where Guardian is quite good, but it just feels right to me for all Warriors to have means to passively avoid some damage. DKs, a class that could really use help with pot costs and HP management, does not have Guardian.
  
  
• But Achilles already exists - isn't that already serving as a common warrior defensive skill?
  
  Yes and no. The % dmg reduction granted by Achilles is not nearly as valuable as % chance of avoiding dmg, at least not in the current state of ML - namely due to 30k HP cap and NLC pots.
  
  Achilles is an outstanding defensive/economic ability against soft-hitting enemies, but the benefits are much less apparent once damage goes up. If you get hit by a big number, you are going to want to use an elixir to avoid dying to the next big number, so the 15% HP you saved from Achilles is not going to translate very well into pot savings - and this is to say nothing of the value of dodging status effects tied to attacks. All in all I don't think Warriors really need Guardian in the same way NL probably doesn't need Shadow Shifter - it would just be a thematic luxury that makes the character feel a lot more special

Allow Beholder to Remove Status effects:

• Imagine if Beholder can store up a charge of "Cleanse" over some period of time. When the DK gets hit by stun/blind/seduce/whatever, beholder will consume that charge and remove the status effect.
• Beholder is a pretty big part of DK's identity, IIRC there are 3 or 4 4th job abilities dedicated to Beholder but despite that, he's not very useful. You get the 10 SP worth of weapon mastery from Beholder passively, so there's very little reason or motivation to further invest SP or summon him at all except that I don't really like to stock ciders on my HB mule.

Allow Macro to continue casting after an Error:

• For DK it would be really nice if I could map Macros that was like:
  
  "Spear Booster -> HB -> Pole-arm Booster",
  "Spear Crusher -> Pole Arm Fury"
  
  That way I don't have to change my hotkeys and macros every time I switch weapons - it would just skip the abilities meant for the other weapon. Unfortunately, Macros stop casting as soon as they encounter an error, so this doesn't work.

Fix visual bug on Brandish:

• These little hit markers show up even when you aren't hitting anything
• No target, stars still show up:
• There are 3 stars here even though only 1 tree: