Lykra

My point is the maps don’t matter if there is no REASON to farm the map. I would argue the REASON for most people to play the game is to improve your power in PvP (while PvE improvement helps toward this goal, the “true” endgame is Olympiad and sieges). So… let’s operate under the assumption PvP improvement is why I would login and play, what things can help with PvP? 1. Practice - there’s a lack of people currently so this basically doesn’t exist. 2. EXP - you need 82, 84 on some classes for all skills. Problem… exp is so easy now with Varka / Ketra + the raids + Antharas exp 3. Gear - you need better than +8 A armor and a high + top A weapon to get an upgrade. Where can you realistically farm this? You can’t. In my view you could do something about 1. with a merge - more people to fight. 2. is pretty much done and dusted, there are max levels on server and 82 is all you really “need” on most characters to compete in Olympiad. That leaves 3. which is why I say S grade is useless besides Major Arcana. You can’t use sets without stun resist in Olympiad versus most classes or you auto-lose. Easiest way in my view to add gear improvement and potentially level the playing field upon merge would be to release new grades (S80) that have set bonuses better than +8 top A. People will only fight over exp spots if they need exp - which 90%+ of top players on server don’t anymore. Can you answer me this: what will you do on this new maps? What is your reason to farm there?

Epics is the only thing left to do on the server aside from farm Anakim / Lilith which I think should be disabled on Olympiad anyways. S grade is fine for PvE but it's completely worthless aside from Major Arcana for PvP. You aren't able to farm actionable upgrades for characters with +8 A armor and Top A weapons. That's bad.

Some thoughts/suggestions for discussion. Enable chant of gate on entire map. Add Frintezza/Valakas areas and epics. Add S80 or improve S grade armor sets to be more PVP oriented (they are useless in current form besides Major Arcana and losing +8 bonus sucks). Add more ways to obtain EWS to improve chances of upgrading gear. Currently everyone is wearing +8 A and top A weapons with almost no hope of an upgrade. Stop with all the custom events, stuff that doesn’t matter or bring people back. Focus on actual content and giving the existing playerbase things to do in game. Instanced zones are bad - encourage people to hunt on field. Add dyes to epic drop table (same as Dion). Consider adding +8 set bonuses baseline to new armors (S80) to encourage people to stop using A grade armor sets/farm new gear. Add more areas like Chimera - this is the perfect CP spot. Only exception is Celtus AOE paralyze land rate is too high (but this is true for all PVE). Stop spending resources on this updated client idea - we all want to play Lineage 2 CLASSIC club. This goes for other non-classic things like elemental stones, etc. Our characters don’t need more offensive power, we could use more defensive power. Consider disabling Anakim / Lilith runes in Olympiad. They are ridiculously strong. It makes Olympiad way harder to balance. Consider making more frequent Olympiad balance changes. You could do small balance updates every month.

The cancels are insane though. And due to how the server is coded they prefer the Olympiad (lower level) buffs which is crippling when you play versus them. For example…. You can’t use some level 77/78 buffs to “protect” the Olympiad buffs… which makes very little sense. Cancel chance for each skill should be same so you can at least try to outplay the cancel. As it currently stands you’re just praying to the RNG gods that you don’t lose every Olympiad buff to triple cancel in first 5 seconds of the match.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to increase Necro fear CD to be equal to DA? If these were underpowered characters I’d agree buff it, but you’re talking about 2 of the strongest classes.

I agree. I actually think Core should remove all debuffs and the cooldown should reset upon Olympiad entry, same as talismans. The cooldowns should function the same - either they all reset or they all do not. If the purpose is to encourage skilled play and allow counterplay to all classes this would accomplish those goals.

Ding ding ding. This is some sort of weird “buff DA” post when they’re S tier class.

DAs are struggling on Olympiad?

Any chance to enable gate on entire map for TI? Obviously minus Sailren zone…

I will add, aside from a few small quality of life improvements, I do think the server is in quite a good spot. Perhaps a Dion “ladder” and TI “non-ladder” system where Dion is merged into TI at regular intervals could help reinvigorate the population.

I’m curious at this point why we don’t either add ability to put runes on the Coin of Knowledge weapons or add back raid boss drops for lower level raids. It feels like there is an absolutely massive gap in the ability to gear a new character. Your options are either… use shadow gear that’s max +6 bonus and no runes or save billions of adena to buy A grade armor/weapons. I think you could also remove the shadow gear limitation of +6 bonus. Just allow full bonuses (making +10 with regular scrolls is close to impossible). The concern previously seemed to be that people were farming the shadow weapons as an alternative to top A/S grade, but there are strong enough weapons on the server now that lower level gear CANNOT displace it. It would also be nice to be able to pursue things like +8 and +10 B grade armor sets. The market is so dead because C/B grade don’t even exist hardly anymore. A nice quality of life improvement would be to make Researcher Earring lv. 10 tradeable to help invigorate market… Also make some harder-to-obtain items useful, namely, Sailren Claw and Bracelet of Duty Fragment.

Any additional thought been given to any of these items by admins? Had a lot of really good feedback and quick changes early in the year.

Expanding on some of this discussion - there are 4 quality of life changes I think would be well-received and minimally impactful to the balance of the server: 1. Revert Lilith change 2. Enable gate on FI and Hellbound 3. Add some use for Sailren Claws/Bracelet Fragments (nobody is going to spend 7k coins to upgrade from 7->8 when they fear you will add another level in the future) 4. Add other ways to earn daily coins. Similar to strix quest credit being expanded to include all new content released - why is the only way to farm daily coins on FI? (Multi-year old content). Balance the # that drop per mob appropriately to not flood market with daily coins or materials but give us further encouragement to farm new areas.

Can we please get gate enable on FI and HB?

I would first recommend perhaps polling the community on if the changes you would like to implement are even desired. For me personally, events aren’t very important and the last one was very bad. I am fine with passive events where you collect item and turn in for additional reward. These other tracking features you highlight are meaningless to me. I think adding elemental stones would be a giant mistake - the power of our characters is already quite high. In terms of actual content… perhaps Frintezza, Valakas, Hellbound tower, etc. could be added with current client? If that’s the case I think it is more than enough to keep sever interesting for many more years.

Antharas has been like this for years. Do you think a change would fix the gap? I’d argue only way to close the gap would be your side camp Anthy and actually PVP to win it…? There are very good alternative exp options now. Chimera is best CP exp I’ve ever seen. Varka/Ketra very good 1 by 1 with boss spawns giving double exp every 40 badges. Anakim is pretty decent for Warlord/Titan but requires more setup and gear than the other two.

TLDR of entire thread, revert Lilith change. Only thing both sides agree on.

I think Lilith change back makes 100% sense. The boss doesn’t spawn anymore because nobody can farm there effectively. I don’t care either way about Olympiad status other than keep two days. Participation with 10 people to make a wave was almost 1,000 unique characters. We could barely make 30 games this past weekend. Match quality was low in both versions, I would probably rather have it easier to make waves but either way is fine. I don’t see any reason to change castle walls. If they are paper castle siege will become a cap and re-cap fiesta. Antharas set time = you know when to come PVP. Antharas random time = people who camp and can gather faster are almost 100% guarantee to win boss without a fight. Antharas exp is pretty crazy but I don’t know what they are supposed to do about it at this point. Huge reward for long difficult farm and 10 day respawn.

Agree with FI and HB gate. Please enable. Running characters for 1/5 the time I plan to play in a night isn’t fun. Please revert Lilith change. I think it’s spawned what, 3 times since you changed it? Dead spot. Either change it back or make mobs social aggro like Anakim.

Nukes and transfer pain is all they need in mass PVP. Transfer pain IS so OP lol. It’s incredibly powerful and makes necro the preferred mass PVP nuker simply because they can survive focus fire twice as effectively than elemental mages. Also, their pet gives bishop a larger effective health pool with which to balance life. Why do you think mass PVP on TI is 99% necro parties? Elemental mages are glass canons. You make a conscious choice to improve overall damage output by sacrificing tankiness. The problem is…. Tankiness is way more important especially when death spike base power is > baseline nukes from elemental mages. If you play a Necro with transfer pain and hold down death spike in mass PVP you will be more impactful than every elemental nuker - besides maybe elemental nuker heroes. If you’re saying Necro won’t land debuff in mass PVP wouldn’t that mean the debuff nerf has zero impact on mass PVP? Only mass PVP nerf is Death Spike power and pet resummon time (an attempt to balance transfer pain). Seems pretty reasonable…? Why would you try to balance around non-stacked characters? That seems a little weird.

Has any consideration been given to another farm location for weapon parts to earn daily coins? A little weird the only place to farm them is in FI which is multi-year old content. I would think adding to HB and Ketra/Varka would make sense.

Is only way to acquire 8 through this dungeon or daily coin trade as well?

Am I reading correctly? Bracelet level 8 for Talking Island?

I would say everyone agrees you shouldn’t arbitrarily balance classes. Does anyone disagree that necro is S tier in both Olympiad and mass PVP? Making a balance adjustment in that case would not seem arbitrary at all.

We got 30 games but it died as soon as people got 30 on their mains. Only 75 unique participants so far that I saw. Seems to be a preference thing, some people like the slower oly.