Zeperios

Personally I never liked the caster archer in L2. Just play a mage. I agree that first option is the easiest, but IMO probably least satisfying and still leaves archers to be plvl’d by a melee and is a physical mage (aka no healing or vamp). The second option is nice but provides so much barrier to take CC out of the game. That is like a whole year long rebalance just to remove that 1 skill. That is why I gave the comment of providing some “crit penetration”. If bow mastery ignored the crit reduction buffs that would give the effect of removing CC and CoP to them while not having to rebalance everything and balance the physical class that doesn’t benefit much from CC. I think if this is done there would need to be minor rebalance of skills that can crit because a skill should not: crit from range and ignore crit reduction while daggers are in the thick of a fight. So remove crit from double shot, lethal and death sting. Increase powers a bit to compensate for no crits but emphasizes archers trying to get crits from auto attacks to do large dmg. This would be interesting and fun to play again, but DA, summoner, and necro balance would be better. All of it would be amazing to allow for various CPs in pvp. What a dream right?

This is more of a question and @MoDoy suggestions are way more balancing for the server than this, but is there a way to balance stigma for archers too? Stigma now helps pretty much every class except archers. I ask it as a question because I think just adding “- bow resistance” will make skills hit too hard vs making archers auto attacks hit for a reasonable amount of damage. It doesn’t seem that archer parties are completely useless in pvp (they just obviously aren’t the best and in a server this old why not just play the best). The crit dmg buff last year gave a boost for sure but I think the major difference is that to run a GOOD pve let alone pvp archer party you need all of the archer types so even in pve it’s a large party to compare to similar dmg from 1 melee. I think giving a range counter crit would bring back old school archers of getting crit 1 shot and with othell would be too strong, but stigma could be a help or some other way to encourage archer auto attacks which would also help farming. Last idea to maybe help archers, but would pretty much only affect pvp sadly is; the crit dmg passive give some penetration through crit reduction (CC, COP). Again though, the above suggestions around summoners, necro and DA I think are way more balancing even compared to allowing a revitalized CP configuration.

Follow on, pet has UD to keep it alive. Now pet UD is just used to get a few more hits before resummon.

@Kse Any intentions of restarting this weekly post? 1) It is encouraging to have devs/admins active on forum. 2)You may be reading what people are writing about, but communicating what the dev team is seeing/working on is encouraging for the population and or just posting fun posts like this. I hinted at this in another post, but thought maybe the Community Club weekly post could be a fun spot to put like a Top Bug Hit List. Ones that are biggest priority and/or need help in replication the most from server population. Anyway hope it comes back, if not 8 weeks was a good run.

Instead of looking for medusa change, what if admins reworked a bit of the DE and specfically BD skills. I think everyone can pretty much agree that dance of protection is almost a completely useless skill. What if protection kept (or not) reflect dmg reduction and added some debuff resistance. Plays into the skill name a bit and somewhat the idea behind the dance. This comes with large mass PvP implications bc if it is too strong then you will be required to dance it, and since dance slots are limited caster parties are buffed because they use less disco then melee. Or even better adding it to defense motion. But protection dance can get reworked as it is a pretty much a useless skill. Next, BD as a melee dmg dealer is a joke in late stages of L2. They are meant to be a bard and provide extra dmg to other classes, everyone knows this and Sano echoed it recently in your posts. Great should not be a large base dmg dealer themselves, OK. This also means that their dances are not that useful in olympiad because their stats are no where competitive to other classes and gear doesnt scale as well on them. What BD's do have is amazing caster dances and those scale very well with gear and base stats. So, what if DE casts were scaled so that DE's could more effectively use these skills in oly. Freezing strike now - slows, pretty long cast time, not much dmg Freezing strike change idea - keep slow, more dmg or scale with BD dances, lower cast time???? The skill cant be too strong or else BD's will be like another caster in a caster party. They may run out of MP in mass pvp so maybe that is the balance, but freezing strike can get a buff to help BD be more of a caster type debuffer in oly. Poison blade dance - hard skill to tune besides another level of it since it is melee but it is a decent skill. If possible going through medusa could be a cool/interesting buff. Poison and/or Sting - I think 1 of these needs to be redone for 82. Probably makes more sense to do poison bc its castable, but might make SK significantly stronger. Don't flame me Rizos I know you want bleed and sting at 82. THESE COULD BE GREAT THINGS FOR PLAYERS TO TEST ON THE TEST SERVER FOR FUTURE PATCHES ADMINS!!!!!! Last: Drain HP - so many other classes have base heals in oly which is amplified by runes (iss and/or aeore). The other differences between the other classes is that heals are typically done LoS and obviously self cast, so the player healing is safe. All DE's have is slow cast, fairly low dmg, small leach cast. This is another nuke that could be scaled with BD dances to make them relevant as a dmg dealer and give some sustain. I think this could be a fairly "easy" implemented and balance change. It is easy to estimate how much healing other classes can do in a given time with given MP. Use those values to balance a health differential on DE's offensive skill. You do XX dmg to the opponent (dmg to opponent is not as valuable as self healing) and you need to return XX health on yourself for characters in equivalent gear. The DE archetype is supposed to be more offensive and damage focused which is great, but that doesnt mean in a private server where balances are done to help improve game stability that the archetype cant evolve over time to still be offensive but have some utility with it. @darksinger Let me know what think of some of these ideas and how do you think BD could end up doing in oly with some of these changes?

Well made points, but if you evaluate your statement it seems that uppercut is not what is OP but it is fear. Based on the original comment by Lykra about uppercut it is understood that fear is being resisted now on lvl 82 targets (they dont need epics to resist). The 82 lvl CC that titans get can be interrupted by LoS and played around because it is slow which is the initial argument. So while titans push to 81/82 they get a new CC but if they fight targets at similar level to them they are actually getting less effective.

All true. Different points than what are being complained about and I'm discussing besides me saying bleed does do too much dmg before. Just trying to point out other classes / skills / situations that are as bad or worse than what people are complaining about uppercut and rush bleed dmg. Rizos doesn't want to get crit by uppercut for 4k from a character that has to run a yul weapon to keep up with bishop on 2/3 oly maps and a skill that has ~1.2 second cast animation (after haste and zerk) that is cancelled by LoS. This skill is broken in Super Smash too.

#kappa https://www.youtube.com/c/EncubeREAL/videos Top tier streamer but you might not have heard of him. I think he plays a class that bleeds for 105/s vs 134/s and might even activate through walls, LoS, and at range.....??? I heard he might have couple skills that hit for 2k dmg base let a lone crits, hit from LoS by almost like 2nd character, and have short CD. I think he has like some cat friend too that can do almost similar if not more damage. Just to warn you this streamer is best player on the server he plays on though so take it with a grain of salt.

100% agree. Entry into the server is steep. Here are some of my thoughts on other variations of what you said @Rizos so admins could determine which process is easier. 1) make daily Strix quest give some number of buff scrolls (2 hrs of total time or more?) that only last 1 week or 3 days (allow not everyday farming but encourages constant logging in), but the buff scrolls are better than beer even. Make them include full buff and disco at that level (or just full) that way there is no need for PA and trying to manage that for new players. Make buff scroll stop at 75+ daily so top level players do not get and is time based scroll so expires and cant stock up at lvl 70 and rush to lvl 80 with no box. 2) Increase level for free armor again. Had moon quest, have C grade now. Don't stop as Rizos said, but maybe easier is give Top A time limited gear. Top A is at least good +++ of B gear but has draw back of not having amazing +6 and +8 set bonus. Time limted +6 or +8 sets sound hard to code too . (Event): Exactly as he said. The balance of the event items can be done in the time. Make the duration the balance, so if event is 2 weeks, jewels only last 1 week so there are weeks in a month that wont have full free epics in oly. Gives people that have them real advantage still, gives new players boost and chance to fight on some weeks. (DI zone) also agree. Took a good amount of the money motivation of DI out now, maybe tune gem A towards higher areas and increase exp in DI so it is entry into GC??? Leave gem A to drop there, but maybe reduce chance in DI, add to FI, and increase heine. Gives new players chance to get money with Gem A and B weapon keys but gives solid exp location like LoA used to be. Needs some thinking on how to tune, but it is an area that is there. Could maybe even increase exp x2 or something and make monster level much lower so it is no use to existing players to get exp there. (new player exp) L2 is best played in group, but unless you are bringing full CP it is hard for new player to keep getting decent exp above lvl 75/76. Most CPs are not open for all roles and pretty much want Bd/SwS bc they are boring class and hard to keep people playing them. So it is fairly important to allow new players to keep getting decent exp until they are minorly relevant and/or find a CP to play with. But right now it is quite a hard to stop of exp and requires finding a CP very soon after hitting lvl 76 which is low lvl for most CP. Lastly, driving is always a thing so can say just play char inside CP, but we play MMO's partially bc we like OUR characters. So there is more importance on lvling their own character. So maybe even SV needs exp boost to help players keep grinding exp at ok pace. (new player gear) The difference between entry players and top players is probably 1000+ hrs of time in game. That is fine and hardcore players should have advantage, but advantage is nuclear bomb vs pellet gun. Top A "can" fill that hole slightly, but if time limited gear is introduced there is still Mount Everest in front of you to get real +10++ B grade weapon and +6/+8 armor. Another major problem with A grade now, is 75 DKs specifically. A grade could have been tuned like Rizos said to have low enchant drop rate and easier base weapon farming so there was way for players to get real Top A weapon; however, 75 DKs drop enchants and improved enchants at rates that top players would abuse if A grade was made easier to craft/drop. (S grade) It sounds like from patch that this will be last A grade patch which makes it sound like S or S80 is around the corner. Great!!!!!!!. Echoing Rizos make it so base weapons are easier and enchants require farming. Gives newer players way to be 50-60% as powerful as top players without being irrelevant forever. The bigger topic of next gear set and if possible should be implemented sooner for A grade too; OVERENCHANT BONUSES!!!!. Even if S grade armor comes out, there is almost no reason to move into S armor rather than stay in +10/+8 sets for top players. The set bonuses on A and maybe S armor needs to be edited to have some of overenchant bonus and/or edited to be good for the classes that use the armor set. Admins, We know you don't have infinite time and resources to do these things. So I think this is where communication from you towards the community needs to be increased. You have a large number of players that play this game regularly and in large quantities of hours. Make a list of things that players can help with: coming up with ideas, replicating bugs on test server, coding for those that know how. Make it similar to bot report and/or quest logging done recently, if you help admins with work you get a bonus. This is also good for newbies because they can get some of these rewards that full CPs might think will take away from group play. But, the players need information on what they can do to make the server better instead of just waiting around for new content from you. Finally, We all know this server needs money and PA system alone is decent source; but if some of these changes are going to be introduced it will reduce the income of the server for people buying CoL to sell for adena to buy gear. Ok, so lets unbox this. If new players wont pay for PA until deep into game, and wont donate large amounts to get gear to be relevant you will lose money. But if a lot of people join the server is good for the server too. So maybe think of new way to do the auction on website and/or make new gear only tradeable on auction and require "Auction Tokens". Auction tokens can be bought with Euro and for existing players they can use in-game adena to buy auction tokens (maybe at worse rate than euro? to encourage money to server?????) This gets very hard to make a specific set of items only tradeable on auction, but obviously you still need to make money and is better to "tax" all players a little money then to require 1 new player drop 1000's of euro's to join server and keep afloat. Old MMO's had monthly subscriptions, we have PA. You need the constant money, but it needs to change that all players contribute small amount vs new players drop 1000 euro and top players just buy all COL and never pay for life. Community please roast this section and come up with better ideas, but this server is living off the back of new players that I guess we assume are born in Dubai and have whole country's worth of money. We need something to split burden of server cost, reward players that farm a lot, but not require new players to pay for server.

And don't ponies do that in 1 nuke and have long stun and can cast x2 in 20s? Can't necro do that much damage in a few nukes vs 20 seconds of bleed oh and they have 5 82 lvl CC? Don't dwarves have 82 stun that is faster to cast and longer duration and same bleed why are dwarves not OP? No doubt destros have a lot of tools, but you are acting like 1 uppercut and rush means you are dead. 3/4k dmg is not much of CP/HP of well geared high level characters and takes 20 seconds, so many other classes do that much damage in less time, at range, and while you are perma CC. You said 82 uppercut and listed damage still never said an 82 CC that is weaker than uppercut. Have you used uppercut in oly or pvp? 3s stun, 1.8 second animation finish and character is knocked away from you. Everyone acts like skill lasts an eternity and titan has stopped time with this CC. The EFFECTIVE CC time is very low, depending on buffs (in/out oly) is shorter than TK stun. (Values: Mana cost, HP cost, Range, skill cast, animation finish, skill cooldown) Have you counted the times in oly where you make uppercut cost mana and go on CD because the cast time is long and LoS'd around a pillar? Your 82 root is .5 second "longer" cast, but robe passive alone makes it shorter. No doubt the skill feels crippling because you are flat on the floor, but of all the hard CC at 82 that was introduced what CC is weaker? Real game balance; CD, mana cost, duration, land rate......his point is uppercut is not anywhere as strong as other 82 CCs that are put in. Everyone just posts flame instead of making real comparisons and evaluating game. Titan is very strong in oly bc of guts, lionheart, z/f, battle roar, OtB and is warrior class with good damage, but rush with bleed gave them constant damage for people that like to hump and bug pillars and kite for 5 mins because titan doesnt have ranged skills and outside of oly titan is absolutely nothing without rush. So let's actually evaluate the game as a whole and help the devs for game design rather than just flame whole time. The bleed damage is probably too high, but just complaining without giving real reasons and balance just means devs will not implement your complaint because they have to think of new design, code, test, and test more which is so much time for a complaint for 2 characters on all of server. P.S. oly is not everything. You have to balance the game in and out of oly and sometimes that means 1 is broke and the other isnt.

One more thing to add. This skill uses continuous mana and is much more than dwarf passive. Think viscous stance MP consumption. They added your mana steal to help run these auras enough, but I dont believe that is even enough when meleeing constantly. Xjou plays live in Black Team CP and tends to lose mana still while meleeing with good gear. So its good buff but dont expect to have it on 100% of the time. A good amount of uptime but not 100%.

@Koll this may not be the best place to ask, but are there commands for forcing clan buffs/unity? I haven’t been able to find any information on this and makes characters weaker than they would be on live server with full clan buffs during testing.

Is this the confirmed rune combination method? Not documented in patch notes. So it’s different than normal runes which only take a level 1 to try and improve?

Sano, Your messaging or intent of the new zone is not coming through. You say it is to "fill a hole for a type of farm", but as many people are saying the drops and exp do not make sense for how you have created the area. THIS IS THE WHOLE ARGUEMENT. Ok. So main point is to have AOE area for A-grade items. Great. Have it drop all sorts of key mats, and other materials. Great. Since area is AOE, have mobs with "lower" exp values. Ok, but should probably be fairly comparable to other areas if it is still a group area (your example of ABG, ABG is a top EXP location. Understandably this new area does not need to be TOP exp). Is a group area with A-grade items. New area has mobs at 81 min level.... 2 higher than FI and 5 higher than GC. So you have to be a fairly high level just so you can hit, CC, etc. As you are stating the idea is to make it a different type of A-grade area for AOE. MOST AOE areas including using CC's and debuffs, but mobs are so high that they wont land unless you are already high level. If you are already high level you have figured out how to farm in either GC, FI, or SV (yikes) efficiently enough to get to those levels. And if you have figured out how to farm in those other locations why go to new fields because they are just worse in almost every aspect. Effectively you are telling the player base F*** you, this is how the area will be while the players are telling you it doesnt make sense. Rizos's whole post was to show where there are actual holes in the game and some ideas on how to fix them. You are saying that no AOE spot is a hole in the game but you filled it about as much as . O This post is open for pointing out real holes and trying to address them. We get it you have limited resources and cant fix all the things we cry about, but there have been multiple discussions now on how this zone can more effectively fill the AOE hole that you are trying to fill. I'll give you and your team tons of credit. You have made some great changes and additions to that game that keep it interesting. New skills, new zones, new weps with Antharas patch. It's good content. This new area just feels like a waste of time and effort though. Took all the time to make and balance this area, for it to be best as a "solo" grind spot to replace SV but with no quest because the exp is bad and is high level requirement. I hope you can read what people are saying and not hear that they hate what you did, but are trying to explain how it does not make sense as a farming location.

Are gem A supposed to drop from nephilim escort to mirror lillim royal knight? Not sure if they are dropping in game but database doesn’t show drops on escort.

Is there an announcement, an NPC that tells you, or a sounds to notify when this occurs? The map is quite large and would be difficult to go check when the fortress is "weak".

Can we get 1 more clarification of patch notes. Is there level requirement for new cardinal and SK skills and are they book from Lorenzo?

Patch seems good for balance and CC update on high level. Following up on this, titan got uppercut which was meant to be high lvl CC, but is left as only high lvl CC for titan now with being 3 second CC and 1.8 of that is cooldown from skill let alone running to target. Every other class with this update now has at least 7+ second CC (besides TK whose stun is only 2). If anything should titan get hammer crush at 82 like dwarves? Dwarf and titan are only class that share skill and titan does not get at 82 while both dwarves do. Biggest buff is for titan to get new roar similar to other classes getting CC's from 78 last skill level leveled up, but understand that comes with balance strength due to strength of that skill. TLDR: Hammer crush should be looked at to mimic "sister" class that has skill at 82 and imagine roar was looked at and ignored for now but should be thought of as well.

Ok first off Sano and rest of the team, thank you for releasing the new balance patch. I do not want the rest of this post to feel like a shit post as it is obvious you are working on things, but I want to get some thoughts out there regarding current A-Grade status. Overview: 1. A-Grade weapon crafts / availability are unbalanced. 2. Unsealed A-grade armor is too expensive for players to progress into. Point 1: Some A grade weapon key mats are unavailable in the game at all, and some have such a ludicrous drop table it is impossible to get the weapon. Unattainable keys: Branch of the mother tree Doom Crusher Keys only drop from Hekaton Chires: Infernal Master Destroyer Hammer Flaming Dragon Skull Blood Tornado (recipe only from chires too) Meteor Shower Bloody Orchid (recipe only from chires too) Dragon Grinder Tallum Glaive (recipe only from chires too) To be fair some of the low A grade weapons full drop from all 75 bosses and epics so there is the method to obtain those weapons through other means. I am not sure if it is intended as well that Branch, Doom Crusher, and Dragon Grinder are only attainable from epics either similar to Ice Storm Hammer, Guardian Sword, Wizard’s Tear, etc; however, it was balanced a while ago that the recipes for many of these weapons were added to the drop table either through FI or through gamlins, so it doesn’t quite make sense that they keys are still only attainable from 1 mob that has a 3.5 minute respawn time. I think there is potential for a separate discussion on the overall craftability of Mid-A needinging 70+ gem A, but the bigger gap is that some keys are essentially off the loot table. Point 2: A-Grade sets require 7 cloth pieces to unseal a whole set. 4 or 2+2 for body/legs, 1 helm, 1 boot, 1 glove. At the going market rate (this may not age well) that is ~550kk just to unseal pieces. Lets break down current cloth piece drops rates to put it in perspective: 1 A-Grade set requires maxed cloth pieces from an Antharas kill, requires 2 max+1 Zaken kills, 2 near max baium kills (with cloth drops 52%), or 3 max+1 sailren kills (10% drop rate). The other drops are from Hekaton Prime 4.7% (3 hour spawn), Midnight Nightmare 2.2% (10-20 min spawn ¼ of the day), and Pterosaur 0.3% (10 min spawn). So excluding the epics and assuming you have perfect party conditions that can kill all these mobs on spawn all day as they spawn (this is including all 4 pteros on FI not just 2 per spawn location) potentially simultaneously, an A-Grade set would take 66 hrs of playtime to unseal. If doing the more reasonable thing and only farming the best mobs (Ptero x2) it would take 204 playable hours to get enough cloth pieces. Each of these mobs are also some of the strongest single mobs in the game and require full farm party to kill (~5 members minimum – DD, DC, PP, BD, SwS/SE). Overall cloth pieces have been challenging to farm and I expect them to remain challenging to farm, but I ask the GM’s if the purpose of A-Grade is to solely wait until there is a +6+ set made before unsealing because due to the scarcity of cloth pieces? There are plenty of non +6 A grade sets currently on the server, but in reality, for most players changing to A-grade is not worth it because +6 of any armor is pretty much better. Another intent would be to slow down the progression into +6/+8 A grade sets so the life of the server is longer, but couldn’t this also be achieved through making obtaining enchants harder while allowing non-over enchanted A-grade to be an upgrade? If this is the intent and to keep unsealing the gating piece to enter A-grade then that is ok, but please address point #1 in detail. TLDR: A-grade weapons are very limited and only top A has full loot table. A grade armor is fully limited by cloth pieces and making standard +0-+3 A-grade is much worse than just using +6 B grade.