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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/08/24 in all areas

  1. 1 point
    I know @San0 you are working on new patch and other balance, but I want to highlight some balance issues and changes made in quick order that has drastically shifted balance without you intending to. 1) A while back you changed summoners to have longer CD on re-summoning pet. This was meant so that summoners had to work more on their intended class design to protect their pet or else be left vulnerable. This change was not implemented to DA, Paladin, Warsmith, and worst of all Necro. DA, Paladin, and Warsmith while having summons are not technically summoner classes. There is no transfer pain, little to no buffs for their pet, and probably most impactful long casting time for summoning. Necro on the other hand has 2 of the 3 just mentioned and the only 1 missing has little effect on them. Their pet casts extremely quick, they have transfer pain, and while they dont have pet buffs their pet isn't meant to be the sole source of dmg. Now don't be misunderstood that their pet doesn't do decent damage, it does good damage, and because of the class balance being they can re-summon almost instantly it means they can play as a better summoner and just continuously send their pet in like old summoners used to. This is also not the only purpose of this class they have the most CC's, hard hitting nukes, and as stated one of the tankier classes because of transfer pain. Having necro work like other summoners to keep their pet alive or become a squishy nuker should be the intended game design. Please look at adding CD to necro cursed man. 2) Cubic change. I don't play Dion and I think most of TI players were confused because cubic did not feel THAT strong on TI. So a change was made to TI as well where it essentially only hurt people and probably hurt more classes than it helped. The problem of Kitty and SM cubic being able to trigger from out of LoS and CC you was understandably bad because you can never reach a summoner, then you get CC'd and just die/lose. However, this has ALWAYS been the history of cubics and I think an intended design choice of cubics. They are supposed to be NPC like "pets" for classes, but now they are even more reliant on the "master". Kitty and SM still have controllable pets that the summoner can play around so the cubic just added to their strength, but they are still problems because they can nearly kite indefinitely. Classes that have major downfalls to this change are SK and TK which have more dps and support cubics, but now are neutered from being helpful NPCs because they need LoS and in many cases that will never happen. Example: TK smart / root cubic is supposed to be the helpful NPC/pet that lets a TK lock down a target and catch them, but now a TK can be perma-kited and just lose forever. This also extends outside of oly as well, in open world you would want your cubics to support you and your party regardless of LoS. If your low health ally was around the corner you cubic would heal, now your cubic will lose the cast and essentially sit idle for 1 whole cycle. IMO this change was very targeted at Dion not having as much mental resist from boss jewels and essentially changes the LONG history of cubics in L2. I would challenge the GM's to very much evaluate the changes made and ask yourself if this was a beneficial change on the whole or based off people's complaints and potentially roll this change back. 3) The long standing issue of CC in oly, balancing, and the obvious villians: Necro, DA. So I think this is currently a problem of TI more so than Dion, but I imagine will become a problem quickly on Dion with intended design changes coming (again don't play on Dion, but can see progress of server). Every class in L2 has a CC effect so that is 1 way to look at the balance, but sadly not all CC are created equal and this has always been the case. The reason I think this effects TI more than Dion is A grade armor and to a degree S grade armor. a) +6 and +8 set bonuses are almost as strong as set bonuses alone so you pretty much run whatever +6 or +8 set you have. b) resist effects are the only other reason you run a set. It has nothing to do raw stats. So with TI having lots of +8 A grade and A grade having the highest and most vast resist pool in the game it means that many CC's have been degraded further than old design standards. Sleep/Hold resist at 70% and stun resist at 50% is VERY high resist profile and for classes where they only have 1 CC in those profile it almost completely negates their CC style (SE, EE, PP, BD, SWS, BP). Stuns are still strong and many classes have high level stuns now, but not a truly reliable CC because of MJ and MA. I would say the stun resist chance is actually healthy, 50% resist profile means it can happen while not being guaranteed. Now to the villians. Necro, DA, and even WC all have MENTAL based CC. This CC type is not gear resisted (when all players have equal boss jewels) and for Necro and DA they also have multiple forms of CC. So while other classes got their CC nerfed because of armor, these classes stayed the same and recently got major buffs with high level versions of these skills. For a while necro fear was unreliable because it was low level, DA was always strong. But now that fear has a base land rate of 70% (horror 90%) and largely unaffected by anything because the mental based jewels are not terribly hard to get these skills are a major problem again. My suggestion, increase the mental DEFENSE of core/zaken/orfen/antharas to make it so that those jewels are net defensive based not equal attack/defense. Besides WC, necro and DA have other CC styles which means while this being a nerf to those classes, those classes are still strong and have other forms of CC to maintain viability. 4) This is an obscure and not very well talked about balance issue, but I think its time to talk about openly. The state of TI is there is almost no B grade full drops, top A drops from a variety of locations, and improved enchants have been piling up on this server for quite a while through daily enchant boxes and DKs. This is resulted in +16 top A. This is not a bad thing, and arguably a great thing to allow people to progress their characters. Seeing the first +17 Daimon crystal is amazing and terrifying at the same time, as it should be (RIP +21 Sirra). However, this becomes a MAJOR problem when it comes to oly where it is raw stats vs raw stats. Weapons on this server scale MUCH faster than armor and worse jewels. Jewels you are limited because you have to run 4 boss jewels that have set mdef and cannot be improved so you only have 1 piece (neck). Now, way back in the day I think GMs did a good thing and added 82 book to counter this a bit and balance mages a bit; however, this was ~4 years ago now and top A mage weps have well surpassed this balance again. Armor is also a problem because the enchant success of armor is lower than weps and the pdef/HP gain is minimal. So again weapons out scale all defensive capabilities. This is probably best show cased by current state of Titan in oly. This class can sit and DEVOUR a tank through UD in +8 top A armor while spamming heals, necros and most mages casting damage is insane, and gladiators have absolutely wild burst damage (as they should but overtuned a bit). I think this is the hardest tuning to achieve as it is very number specific and you dont have a large gaming studio to run numbers on large sample sizes, but this is obviously a problem. 1 shots should not be a thing on top defended characters as well as a gladi/tyrant should be able to burst a mage down in short order through healing. I'm not sure the best balancing recommendation for this, but it is a problem worth talking about. I know the design team is busy and I hope the community gives feedback as well, but having the design team acknowledge or lightly comment on the topics discussed here would be helpful to know what has/hasnt been talked about already. I don't think any of these topics or ideas are extremely unique, but I also dont think any of them are extremely complicated either so that they have never been implemented means it was either not talked about / or rejected. Either way I would like to discuss the pros/cons of that with GMs and community.