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Skill Leveling too easy now?
Mostly just curious what'cha all think. Been talking with my one friend who still plays Mabi and she complains its far too easy to level things now. Honestly I kind of agree with her. Its nice being able to complete skills and achieve grandmaster faster, but also feels like a lot of the challenge has disappeared from it, which I personally found fun, and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came with it. I definitely don't miss the CP restrictions - which she does, the insane child - but I'm suddenly breezing through things I was working on before, which gives me the feeling that I'm going to run out of skills to level up sooner than I thought I would. Meaning I'll have less things to do in this game in a nearer future than anticipated.
I guess I'm just curious if anyone agrees, or if everyone else is happy with the new changes. Which if so is absolutely inconceivable alright, this is again simply fueled by my curiosity.
Comments
Memorial Link Skill is wonderful, Spider Diffuser is great, and just increasing our total level with Blaanid saves so much time compared to the countless rebirths we were doing before. Also I noticed you can level the Transformation Mastery Skill much faster now. The reason I don't really have a major problem with it in this case though is it doesn't change the fact that you still need to put in the effort and actually hunt and collect the transformations to get them. Love the Blaanid's Boost Halo thing, as a slow human who can use this buff even when over level 30k I really love the movement speed buff it gives you. I think with some minor adjustments (mostly stop letting us rank our skills 6 times without putting in any effort) this update would be just fine.
For certain Talents it was (¿still is?) an expectation to use a skill somewhere around 8000 times (e.g. Ninja) to meet one requirement, especially towards the later ranks. While "training," I didn't perceive that as a challenge as much as it is repetition. Of course, those sorts of skills became somewhat tolerable with enough skill EXP multipliers. As for certain skills that required CP requirements, (again) with enough multipliers and some preparation (if needed), you could get them fully trained in minutes even before the update. Events like Master Plan were really great for that.
For the Grandmaster subject: it's now 4 days rather than 7 *assuming ideally, at max efficiency and free of charge* to receive the title and effect, right? I remember attaining some over the summer. Occasionally, I would get a challenge I knew I definitely was not going to do, which would ultimately slow down the process. If anything, I think the devs probably realized that some of the challenges are.... not as frequently completed as others. (coff coff, like the Theatre Missions, especially since Hard Mode anything requires you to collect Gold Pages from Paper Sheep at a measly CHANCE and then hope you a] successfully craft a pass and b] successfully craft the right mission pass). Originally, a player could theoretically just do the first challenge only (avoiding all others) and have to do it for 20 days straight in order to get the necessary tokens, which is probably longer than the average kid's attention span.
Don't worry, though - the pain is still there in some sense: you can still burn bandages by using First Aid 50 times AND run the Theatre Missions each day if you want it done quickly. However, if you don't want to handle those challenges, you'll feel less like you're being flogged for not doing so.
I recall the point of the NEXT update was to make the new player experience smoother. I noticed there was a new player referral event going on over on the KR when it occurred, so it seemed like they had collected feedback from new players. Back when I returned at the end of 2016, I did notice that players across web boards had pointed out that this game had a few issues, like an obvious power creep; the idea of a newer player never really being able to catch up with a situated one; and then the classic AP struggle. The game has changed in ways since then. The Memory Book update seemed like it came with the intent to ease some of that. This one was probably meant to ease others. Add in that current content and future content will pretty much expect you to hold most Talents/skills at the max at the bare minimum, meaning you will have to deal with training them... and yeah, the cause for this sort of update clicks into place.
My only concern with it is: what good are the Tendering Potions now? I have a pet with rows stocked in the inventory and I'd like to know if they'll be repurposed somehow (like the way the bags that previously held gold boxes were) or if I should just throw them out.
EDIT: yay TYPOS
With the newest update, I decided to give some attention to one of my alts and level him. His cumulative was around 2.2k, but it was from one of those free characters Nexon dished out last year where the characters start with a 2k total. So I hadn't really worked much with him previously. Anyway, I got the alt started with the new event and went off skill-training. It felt like I had taken a 64x or 128x skill potion (if such a thing had existed). I rapidly trained up combat skills and mage skills to r1/master with about the effort skills usually required to get to rB, rA, or r9. I had been working laboriously on my main to get Master of Meteor Strike. Then the update came out. My alt got the title first.
I don't think the issue is that players aren't wanting to work hard to train skills. I mean, sure there is some of that, and some skills had been way too much of a grind to train, but I think the concern is new blood. Instead of keeping generations challenging but at the same level, they rewarded players with stronger and stronger skills and ramped up the generation difficulty to insane levels. A new player under the previous system would have a long, long way to go to catch up. That's more likely to discourage them and have them leave. But the new system ramps up the skills quickly enough that they can come close to the veteran players.
Almost all combat skills feel the same to level up now. New players will never know the agony of having to rank Meteor on boss-level enemies. While I won't miss how difficult it used to be, the game definitely feels a bit like a cakewalk now. I'm no longer searching for the correct skill-leveled enemy just so I can bump said skill up one rank or two. Now I'm just going, "Oh, I need to rank this up. Time to attack things."
There are a few exceptions to this. Crafting skills still have a sense of difficulty due to their ingredients requirements, though not as bad as before thanks to massive skill multipliers. Fighter requires attacking a certain type of monster. It will still take time to rank up, but compared to before it's lightyears ahead. I think the new system was put it in place due to a variety of factors. The game's age, how powerful players are now, how difficult certain content can be. The game definitely feels focused towards endgame content. There's a lot to catch up on.
It did feel a bit ridiculous though when I was ranking up Puppet's Snare on my own Barrier Spikes.
Most situations you can actually get through with just 1. and 3. Half the value of a skill is just having it but so much focus is on 2. If you look through social media, so much discussion is on that. Many folks think that learning the game is just learning equipment and modifications. And why wouldn't they? It alone can carry you pretty far. This is how Nexon likes it, because that's what makes them money. They made skill advancement easier, for two reasons: 1. players asked for it, and 2. it makes it easier for players to ignore learning how to play and concentrate on kit. How does this make Nexon money? It encourages you to buy from the Web shop. Either to buy items you can use or to buy items you can sell to buy the items in the Auction House. Auction House inflation makes the Web Shop more attractive. Neat trick huh?
I learned how to fight from a PvPer. If you're approach to combat is just dish out more than you take then find a PvPer and ask them for lessons. If all they talk about is gear, reforges, and enchants, then hear them out then find another PvPer who will show you how to use your skills. As an example, I taught a new sub-level 100 player some combos. I had them fight one of the pretty golems on the black-sand beach. Total level under 100, naked, bare handed, basic magic bolts and they beat the golem with no deaths. It took them 90 minutes but, by God, they did it!
EDIT: argh so many words have "the" in them, so spell checker misses it! >:(
Personally:
I leveled every skill except for Shock and Taming Wild Animals before the skill revamp. I also did things like master Hydra Transmutation. I personally was able to do these things by hoarding event items like Special Tendering Potion S, various skill multipliers, and at one point a "the Returned" title during master plan (for some Pet Trainer things).
However:
I found that I stopped playing the game outside of those crazy events BECAUSE it was so difficult to level skills otherwise. If it takes me 20 hours to master+dan Hillwen Engineering DURING Master Plan with 96x skill multipliers, why bother to play the game at other times of the year when the best non-event mulitpliers are 4x?? I'd rather spend 480 hours playing something else like Elden Ring rather than try to chip away at a Mabinogi skill that's training with 1/24th the optimal speed. I also found that my friends were not happy with this situation, particularly because they did not know how to amass the right event potions or use a google sheet to plan out which training requirements would consume the least mats (where a mis-calculation led to several hours of extra farming). Mabinogi was turning into a game that I could be clever at but that my friends increasingly did not want to play.
Yes, I feel strange knowing that my character is barely above level 20,000 and that all characters can essentially jump to where I am. But more than that, I'm hopeful of what I think is a bright future that has newly opened up: a world where players CAN have significant stats without 5 years of investment, and a world in which we can start to do things like Crom Bas and Theta together.
But for skill ranking getting easier, I prefer it much more like this. Way back in the day even before talents, this game did not respect your IRL time at all. Mabi had to be the only game you played for you to be good at it. Taking tedious grinding away and making that process easier is a good thing IMO. I'm not a depressed teenager that lives inside a single MMO anymore. I'm an adult with a life and I like a few different games that I want to balance in between time with family and friends and responsibilities.
If Mabi never got all these different updates to make the grindy parts of the game easier, I would have quit a long time ago. Or switched to being a social player only. I literally used to never rank a single skill or bother with grind leveling until Master Plan events started. Now the game is more appealing to properly play all year round.
Yeah I know, cue the: "but the game will die" logic, but the sad thing is that Mabinogi died shortly after it released, its been dead ever since, will stay dead from now on, and will still be dead when I'm playing it 10 years from now. Mabinogi is undead. It will never "live" again, but its not going anywhere. It will undergo random changes as the management in Korea changes (we're on director number 8 now folks!). Some changes will be decent, a lot will be truly horrible, but at the end of the day....
(I'll let you decide! Conclude the above sentence with one of the below:)
(1) ...you may as well just accept whatever happens, cus there's nothing you can do about it.
(2) ...[insert something postive here]
(3) ...its Mabinogi. You know you're always going to come crawling back to this crap.
its good for the short gain but over all for the game its not good at all because no pepole dont have goals to work for that are not NRG based and pepole are loseing interrest faster i have had quite a few friends quit because "There is no point in playing a mmo were you max so fast" there words not mine z.z i was maxed before talents existed...
Isn't it the case that now you only need 100 points to master a skill? I was playing the other day and got all these "bugle calls" in short order; I was wondering what the heck was going on. I guess it was skills mastering as I used them. I guess there's still vanity reasons to complete the list on Rank 1 skills. Think of it like when you were a kid and mom said: "finish all your oatmeal and then you can see the smiling rabbit at the bottom of the bowl!"
I don't remember if it is or not, but I did just note that it seems like the lvl200 bonus is gone?
which means I may or may not just forgo trying to finish cooking on my alexina account and pretend it doesnt exist.
Wait what? That should be in some release notes somewhere. If the level 200 bonus is gone then I can start rebirthing again ... I mean ... it has been since Dec. 2017 since I've reset levels. o.O
It's gone. You can confirm by looking at your training requirements on individual skills. The EXP bonus is gone.
I think the web post a few days before the update mentioned it. If not, it was mentioned somewhere. I wasn't all too happy about that. I used it a lot myself, and kept a couple of alts there for when I get around to training them. Then as soon as I saw how easily it was to rank things, I changed my mind.
Incidentally, you are also capped at 8x training buffs in any combination (talent, title, event, potion, prism, etc.). So I'll never again train at level 200 alt with 32x skill training ever again (effectively making it a 64x training). That was a fun time I pulled that one off.
Oh and I believe we can no longer combine all-skill 2x potions with talent-centered ones (eg, complete skill pot with life pot).
The level 200 bonus was a good idea; it had benefits and consequences, so required the player to consider their decision; this sux.
The Wiki confirms this. So, it would seem, they made ranking-up some of the combat skills easier and yet made ranking-up life skills harder. With the level 200 bonus you could skip hard-to-do criteria, now you can't. Off the top of my head: cooking, tailoring, blacksmith, and handicraft just got WAY harder; I'm glad I level 200ed my way through those while I could.
Under the old system, while CP requirements made ranking-up of SOME combat skills challenging, most of the time the real bottleneck was lack of AP. When you had plenty of AP to spare many of the combat and magic skills, say, did not take long to rank up. Duncan's reset service addressed that; it's gone now too.
In some ways skill up-ranking is way easier. In others maybe not.
With the third (?) version of the Blaanid Quests, characters with a cumulative total less than 20k get 1,000 AP for each generation they complete. Getting AP is getting easier too. Long , long gone are the days when I'd work hard to get about 70 AP every three weeks.
There's also an absolute ton of skills to rank, and I'm sure they're trying to make Mabi, an older MMORPG a bit less daunting to potential new players. They've already downsized the number of servers so they can have 1 busy server rather than 4 dead ones. If the game stayed as it was and didn't make it more appealing to new/casual players the game would bleed away it's older playerbase and die.
I'm not always hooked on Mai and making it my day to day, ut if I came to check on it