Zeperios

There was rumbles of a new patch coming out after the last event and after what has come out I feel I need to continue on this tirade and discuss the TI server. The TI server is still significant and successful, but after what is coming on 2.5 years since relevant new content I feel like commenting again. Patch Releases in reverse order in the past 2.5 years: (Dion only) FI 2.3.0, Goddard Part 2 (new PvE earring, no new area), Goddard Part 1 (new area, no advancement), Hellbound Part 2 (new anthy earring lvl), Hellbound Part 1.5 (balance patch), Hellbound Release (new content) 10/23/2023. Now there is nothing wrong with content being slow and deliberate and letting people grow in the patch, but as stated above there is a near 0% chance of grinding to get an upgrade in the current servers status (eg. better than +16 A grade in S grade = ~+14S). There are still upgrades to be had as is the case in any L2 server. You can enchant all the way to +50 for weapons and +10 armor is still rare in any class of armor let alone A. I want to be nuanced in this discussion though because I think creating new content for the sake of new content is also a problem. This is where I saw the problem of lvl 4 epics. It seems like a good idea to create an even more powerful item with stuff that is already in the game and "revitalize" the old content, but there was a poison pill in this that was ignored and then attempted to be band-aided. Creating lvl 4 jewels halved the number of people with top end jewels!!!!!!!!!!! HALVED! So if you had a server with 60 people with full jewels and max damage, you now only have 30. That's not good business especially because the 30 people that "lost" their jewel didnt just step down or have minor setbacks. They were sent to 0. Lets look at this from a CP's perspective, we had 9 people and over time we had all made baium 3, zaken 3, etc. When levels 4 came out we now only have 4 baium lvl4 and 1 baium lvl 3. Sure you can trade the gear around, but when push came to shove on oly, or mass pvp or anything half were stronger and half were weaker! That is not fun gameplay, its legit the opposite. Now the admins tried to solve this by increasing the drop rate x2, and some people have claimed "more loot makes people soft" "supposed to be a long grind" etc., and IMO the admins are right to ignore these comments because the math just checks out that its the exact same system. Was 33% drop rate and needed 4 rings to make lvl 3, now is 66% drop rate and need 8 rings to make lvl 4. BUT THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE! The issue was that 1/2 your population went backwards. You went from 60 people having fun and acquiring 1 new person at top gear every ~60 days to having 30 people having fun and acquiring 1 new person every ~60 days it was just an actual step backwards. Hellbound was a good patch too. We got the release of a new grade of armor and weapons, but the reality is that the armor is bad and the weapons but really the enchants drop at such a low rate that to make an improvement on the server is nearly impossible. The most significant grinding areas sadly in TI are still FI and anakim/lilith. Goddard has decent rention for people farming for exp, but the overall character progress and net adena increase there is much smaller. TLDR: Please look to add new content that is engaging, not character reductive, and requires engagement. You have hit these points 1-2 at a time with patches, but never all 3 which is the true test of a good patch.

I want to take a moment to discuss Talking Island. 1) New content - While TI is getting some "new" patches there hasn't been any notable new content to the TI server since the release of Hellbound. The Goddard areas while they have a point and an item to grind, in the context of the TI server are not significant. The "mini boss jewel" that comes from Varka/Ketra is almost a just a cool item or PvE item with very little reason to grind the area. There are so many orfens, zakens, and even antharas earrings on the server due to time that this Researcher's earring has very little room to be used. There is even a problem with Hellbound as S grade is not viable or will not be viable this decade. Problem a) S grade armor resists are terrible and no variability. If you were heavy armor you have root/sleep resist which besides killing healers is not helpful. Light armor has no resists at all, and robe has the best resistance in it being stun, but its hard to compete when it has no +% cast speed of MJ or BWL. Problem b) is that +6 and +8 set bonuses are SOOOOO strong. I don't even think most classes would wear S grade even if they could pick the resist type they had on the armor because the +6 and +8 set bonuses are too impactful. The problem of +6 and +8 sets leads us to the next bigger problem.... 2) Item progression - In the "glory" days of TI there was lot of items and lots of item progression into and through B grade with little to no A grade being used. Overtime that obviously changed and preference moved to A grade as it became more available. But, for A grade to be viable it has to be as enchanted as B grade (eg +6/+8 armors, at least +10 top A = +16 B). The slower progression of A grade and probably non-existent progression of S grade is due to 2 factors.... item drops and IMPROVED ENCHANTS. B grade improved enchants dropped from DK's, but there were MANY more RBs that spawned 65 RBs and they also drop from Epics (Baium/Zaken). RBs also dropped numerous full B grade items that could endlessly be used to enchant. A grade is not so lucky in either way, the item drops themselves are rarer and so are improved enchants. This is not to say high level loot shouldn't be more rare, but over time in TI it has sort of crashed the market as RBs don't drop B grade anymore and there is less and less A grade available as every item is attempted to be over enchanted to catch up. This is exacerbated for S grade where there are NO improved enchants and crafting rate is 30%. So now where there are +16 A grade weps to have a S grade weapon be viable it needs to be +13 which has to be naturally enchanted to that level. One thing the admins have hinted at with the most recent update and UI change is the idea to add elements to the game and this is where I want to yell a big "BE CAREFUL". If you add elements to the game there is a massive incentive to have as many sets of gear possible in order to counter other people's elements. In our server life where for the whole life of the server the idea has been enchant as many pieces as high + as you can, to then come in and say that you need duplicate sets (realistically +8 A as B grade doesn't drop consistently anywhere) this is a MAJOR problem. Combination of 1 & 2 - There were some comments on the Dion discord recently about "new server", problems with classic's progression, etc. I have thought and discussed with a variety of people on why L2 is fun and the conclusion I have come to is there is nearly an infinite scaling progression, but it feels obtainable. If you want to get stronger, you work harder and over-enchant an even better piece of gear. You go grind and get to the top level and learn a skill that no one else has. You win PvP and you drop more epics for your clan. Etc. There are still numerous people that play Gracia Final Lineage 2, and watching the number of people play that version had me think that there was always something to do there too. Getting 20 sets of armor from S grade to S-80 with all different types of elements, getting 6 different weapons with different SA's, and enchanting as much as possible, using lifestones to Augment hunt. There was actually a TON of endgame content. I think the people that play Gracia Final are playing an inferior version of the game, and while TI has gotten some "custom" or merged content throughout L2. The balance and playstyle of this server is SOOO fun, there is just the missing puzzle piece of content for late game, top parties to continue to strive for. Most top parties get +8 armor, +16 weps, epics, you name it and have nothing left to grind for. You might say "well no one has Lilith 10 let alone on every character", and that is very true but there was a part of the description of infinite power that was important...."feels obtainable". The ONLY item to not have been created in TI's history is still light years away. As to the writer's knowledge the highest rune on TI is only lvl 7 which is 1/8 of the runes to get a lvl 10 with perfect success from 7-10. So I have pointed out a lot of problems and no solutions, so let me offer some solutions that I think might work and hopefully that gives some ideas to the admins on how/what they might finally implement. 1) Make lifestones more common to drop from Hellbound or any new area. Make it so lifestones become a currency on the server for people to hunt for unique augments. 2) Either add S-80 or the similar mechanics to S-80 where when you unseal you pick the specialty of the gear. Apply this to S grade so there are a wider variety of resists (stun, poison/bleed, root/sleep, para). 3) Make S grade enchants drop chance higher. I think adding improved enchants from the beginning was a problem, but there is no undoing the past; you can only grow into the future. Allow players to grind and make an investment to transition to S grade if they get lucky and get a high + S grade item. 4) We have a material problem as well. There are a couple materials that are severely limited in order to push new levels of gear that do not not reliably from high level content (mold hardener, mold glue, thread, mithril ore). To make S grade you need lots of these materials, but if we just increase drop rate we will result in HUGE volumes of A grade. I think this needs more review or more custom materials for S grade crafts??? 5) Add B grade drops back to low level raids. Give something for newer or less dominant players to go farm and make money on. There is a HUGE chasm of gear between freebie gear through raids (+6 armor and weps no runes) and obtaining A grade as almost all the B grade has been over-enchanted and gone at this point. 6) In new content add something that has impact that can be farmed and has a reason to control the farming zone. It pulls people out of town, makes natural pvp occur, and makes people play on mains rather than on boxes in non-war clans.

Can original poster please answer these questions 1) If castle walls are too strong how did you lose Oren 2 weeks ago when it and Aden were the only castles that were enhanced? And I believe you lost Giran 2 weeks before that. 2) Should there not be benefit to OWNING a castle and making it more strong? Yes the castle is VERY strong right now, but so is our gear. Walls maybe too much without dwarf buff, but gate is beatable. How does a GM balance this when you pull people very quickly. If they nerf and make it ok right balance for 30 v 30. If you bring 10 people then door will feel soft. 3) You claim Antharas random will be better. As others have stated what will it help. The boss has spawned on a FIXED timer in YOUR PRIME and you dont show up to fight. How is random any better? Yes server data is wrong, but what do you expect with random spawn. Camp for 24 hrs, lose pvp, and complain more? You know EXACTLY when it will spawn. Its a server wide message and you add 10 days and your team doesnt show up now. Also Antharas timer is not monopolized right now. It moves ~2-3 hrs per 10 days so it moves primes already. Other have said following: "Titans are too strong for RB and oly". Can that person please respond why not all titans win all games. There are very few titans that win consistently, most others play very poorly and lose against almost any other class. If it is that strong why do your titans not win? And again I will teach you this server. Go try other exp methods. Admins might have made VERY good EXP changes that are better than antharas recently....... So maybe antharas isnt as good as you think and you arent playing the game? Hint. Hint.

I think points 1 and 4 are just absolute lies. #2 has merit, but is extremely hard boss that requires lots of people. Overall that raid is awful. If you open entry to any time it never gets farmed again. If you reduce the exp its almost not worth the time investment. #3 everyone has asked for. #1 is a lie because you are obviously posting from a HighClass perspective and YOU LOST a reinforced castle 2 weeks ago............. Oren #4 is a lie because November was the most active month on TI oly in like 2 years because everyone could throw boxes and feed their own hero. There was still 8 hours of oly (4 per day), but people played because 10 chars made wave. The admins changed back to 20 (not 40 that is wrong information) and now no one plays again. This is a massive cry post with no real solution or evaluation of the game. You think exp is broken on Antharas, go farm varka / ketra. Do you even know how much exp comes from that area now with RBs? Test new areas someone people say HB is good. Anakim is still fairly strong AoE spot. Go read my other posts I dont shy on telling admins where they go wrong, but at least give reasonable feedback and evaluation of the game. The larger point of this post that newbies have a hard time entering the server is very true. Sadly that is L2 for you. Boss jewels and scaling effects of buffs. You have to be smart and in numbers to beat those with better gear. If you do that consistently you can get more powerful yourself and win. Also new patch just dropped that is meant to give Dion and TI more A grade viability. How can you bash the changes when you havent even fully tested the new patch which should allow newbies to get more powerful again???????? TLDR: More solutions, less cry

I opened test server and 1) it looks like patch hasnt dropped over there??? 2) It seems like its only Dion server as all characters from TI are not there. Is there a way to have Dion and TI test server when it drops as there are a few differences?

I just dont know how to take this seriously. Death spike is not your only skill. You have vamp claw, gloom, dark vortex, and all your CC. You are the class with almost the MOST buttons to hit besides maybe bishop. Also if you know what you are doing you can easily weave vamp claw in regularly so you should already be using 2 skills. Yes that is the point of necro you are supposed to be a tanky mage that lives forever with vamp and debuffs while still going GREAT damage. You should NOT be a burst mage. If you want to be go play elemental mage. "What the hell am I going to do with only transfer pain in PvP"..... easy. LIVE. Go play elemental with your same gear and get 1 shot by hurricane rather than buster. And I'm sorry necro and almost all mage classes do not have quadratic scaling in this game (orcs do). Its very linear to gear because most of the damage is based off base Matk rather than skill power. So necro is OP at low gears and at high gears. If you have an elemental and necro in same gear 9/10 times the elemental will lose because they have less HP and dont do x2 dmg. I'd love to put you in some tests and show you, but its also easy math. This nerf is coming because the class as a whole is TOO strong and almost always has been in L2. Admins are taking a stance that they dont think the gap between necro and other mages should be that large.

If you are getting 1 shot by elemental mage on a necro. Sorry you are never winning that fight. You have a 200% effective HP bar and are still getting 1 shot. Maybe put jewels on or sing warding. Is this not the state of Dion right now? I can tell you it’s worse on TI. If necro stacked is the best class. It’s also the best class non-stacked or near the top. And sorry to say that’s how it’s always been in L2. These changes have no real impact to power. Necro will still be used in mass pvp because of their reliable damage and survival. I can tell you a patch when necro wasn’t the top class or at least top caster class. When there was nobless. Why? Because survivability didn’t matter, you keep all buffs, stand back up on rez and keep fighting. So it was about who 1 shot more people and put rez on CD. Lastly if you are claiming this happened on TI. When and why was necro never not the top pvp class? Legit every CP that is caster has been necro unless they are just going against the consensus for a reason. If you want to complain about your class getting nerfed then you should at least come with some reasonable arguments on why this change is bad.

Check intended interaction for archer buster shot. It says it’s magic. Not worried about damage class, but I think it should be physical. Magic skill means cast speed is driver not atk speed

Can I ask you how much you recast your summon right now? I would argue probably never maybe 1 time per fight. You are either by yourself and kill someone before pet loses all health or maybe resummon once, or you are in a party and your healer is group healing your summon. If you have your summon up in town and with you on log in like all necros do your skill will never be on CD so you get 1 pet resummon with no CD. The 2nd might have a CD for a short time. Other summoners have CD of like 30 seconds. Do you truly recast your summon more than once per 30 seconds? If so maybe you should just spec pony and not necro. Summon is stronger, has transfer pain, and might be more aligned to how you play with spamming pet. This whole thing was meant to be discussion and suggestions. Crying about repayment based off server wide changes is crazy. That would be the death of this server, admins giving away free Ferraris.

Ok good to hear and thanks for response. I didn't want this to come across as a cry post or being negative on all your changes. I wanted to add a bunch of color and rationale behind where I thought there was imbalance and maybe how to fix it. Game balance and one with as many scaling factors as L2 is very challenging to balance, so dont fault you or your team let alone a game you didnt design from the beginning. I agree oly will always have a "meta" class/build/method. Some overpowered archetypes felt longer lasting and didnt know if it was focus of new patch, so felt like it was worth bringing up. However, you were ahead of this so never mind. I think almost all top L2 players know oly can't be balanced, but walking into a 99.9999999999% match is 0% fun. But a 90-10 match gives you something to hope for and roll the dice on. I think that 10% chance is often what people are trying to ask for. As you stated giving that 10% chance without breaking the rest of the game is hard, so looking forward to the changes coming on new patch.

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.

Drop rate of epics is not and was never the issue. It took 4 jewels to make lvl 3 at 33% drop rate. It now takes 8 jewels to make lvl 4 at 66% drop rate. The problem was lvl 4’s took all progress from CP’s and clans and cut by half. If you don’t have full stacked party you were miles behind at the top end. So you had to full stack casters with baium 4 which meant half the number of players had baium. At the time of implementation there was theoretically only enough baium drops throughout 4 years of farming for 30 baium 4s. That means only 30 people have fun while everyone else is getting shit on. Progress and character progression was the exact same speed (4 jewels at 33% or 8 at 66%). It was only slightly faster bc you get the baium 3 effect at 4 jewels even though you are still far behind.

Sano interested to see how the archer class balance works out. IMO archers will never catch up with skills as the base because they are competing against extremely fast casting and in necro's case extremely durable mages. I never offered this as a suggestion, but did you ever consider giving archers a "buff" where they lose -500 crit rating (they would still have remaining from being over 500 with othell), but it gives +100% crit damage. This would send archers back into the old days pre-othell where they are praying for crits, but as a CP it is also competitive because the more archers the higher the probability you have of rolling a crit and killing someone. I know its kind of late as you are about to roll out this new patch, but giving some -crit rate +crit dmg buff would be interesting to archers as they could be PvE viable again in physical CPs without having full archer CP. One of the biggest downsides, which you are trying to fix, is archers becomes utterly useless at the stage of the game Dion and TI are in. They cant farm fast on high health targets, they dont auto faster than mages cast for low health targets, and you are giving AoE but its hard to say that mages wont beat that with aura flash due to no cap and the number of AoE spells mages have.

I think going 1 day only will have a result opposite of the intention of oly. Participation in oly is supposed to be for nearly only 1 goal, to be hero. Hero characters are designated on whole server wide system and given extra glow to be identified. Heroes are supposed to be the STRONGEST characters in the game (clan strength fed them, enforcer took themself, or just best player). Going only 1 day per week means that any emergency could force someone to miss oly and not be hero. That could be regarded as good that there is diversity and someone else wins, but it’s not really the point that you have to play this game 100%. 2 day oly allows people to come either day or 1/2 of both. It allows better players and games the whole time.

Similar topic was brought up for TI long ago. They gave them 35% crit damage buff, but is still no where near enough. You are right something needs to change, but also if you do all 3 of these changes at 1 time archers will become Hi-Five levels of good. x2 crit dmg, added range, and atk speed. Every healer and caster will get focus killed in 0.5 seconds by an organized group because aggression from tank cant hit, 3-4 archers hit and 2 of them crit at x2 dmg, and then reload and atk again before 2nd heal goes off. Yea.......that's a bit overkill to ask for all 3 together. Think its viable to ask for 1-2 of of the 3.