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Lutetium

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Lutetium
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  • Physical/Melee damage is too favored in this game

    This is actually a legitimate skill balancing issue not "another complain post", though there are a few corrections needed.
    Heavy Stander does have constant damage reduction, as well as it's additional halving of damage on activation.

    Bone chip/atk pot and Overture infact do not work on any magic directly, including Firebolt, the additional damage you do see using Firebolt with one or both active is only applied to the bonus damage from the spell's max damage enchant coefficient mentioned further down OP's post. These coefficients only exist for bolt and intermediate magic however, so chip/atk pot and overture will never have any effect on advance magic, shockwave, or blaze.

    The Magic Damage stat was previously 20 int per 1% before the Merlin update not 25, but rather than adding a fixed amount of min/max damage to spells it like the new Magic Attack stat with it's int/5 scaling Magic Damage functioned as a multiplier to spell base damages, which were reduced in g13 when the elemental masteries were added but the result was a net gain after ranking those skills as they were a second multiplier to the fixed spell base damage. When the Merlin patch did hit though titles that gave magic attack as well as upgrades were multiplied by 4 to match the new int to Magic Attack scaling, but enchants that gave magic attack were forgotten and have been left forgotten and effectively worthless outside of the new Arcane and Foretold enchants for staves which still lag behind the total damage adds of comparable enchants for physical damage weapons.

    Now as for my personal commentary on this subject.
    I feel Alchemy's scaling is in a good state, massive prot vs mprot imbalances aside for the moment, although I'm speaking from a late game perspective of a character with 3200 hp 2500 mp and 2700 sp with no gear or enchant boosts that's still 9k total off maxing the boosts from Shine of Eweca, I believe it's worth considering though that alchemy scaling caps at 2500 so enchanting magical on all of my alchemy gear at this point will net me 0 additional damage to Water Cannon, despite comparatively superior scaling below the mp scaling cap.
    It should also be considered that Alchemy damage enchants scale with charges, and some of the on-Cylinder enchants have quite high potential bonuses along with being able to be doubled up when equipping a Guard Cylinder with the same enchants; For example Moist + Wave on both a Tidalwave Cylinder (the same 30% cylinder efficiency for water alchemy as a Celtic Tetra, Revenant Insight, or Perseus Tyrannus Cylinder) and Guard Cylinder with max roll give an additional 70 water alchemy damage, this proceeds to stack 5 times on a full charge, get a 1.2* bonus when used at close range, a separate 1.3* bonus from the Tidalwave's Cylinder efficiency, and in ideal use case a further 1.2* after that from r1 Rain Casting for a total damage add of 1310.4 without involving reforges, to get the same damage bonus for a giant's dan 3 smash would require 151.6~ max from enchants on your 2 handed sword + shield, or 63~ if you have a 40% overture and bone chip active (accounting for overture's bonus being boosted by 1.2* with chip active) which amounts to a Demi Lich+Minimum roll Girgashey on the sword and Oblivion+max roll Wild Boar on the shield, overall slightly harder to obtain but easier to enchant compared to two Moist+Wave on Cyl+Guard. However you'll need quite a decent set of bard enchants and likely reforges to reach the 40% overture that equalizes these enchant boosts on the sword+shield to the point of the alchemy enchant boosts to Water Cannon.
    If we start throwing reforges (one each in this case, 20 level assumed, although I think it's fair to consider as both can be obtained without real cash investment on Echostones.) for Rain Cast Water Cannon damage (+100% damage added to the basic +20%), Smash damage (+200% added to Smash's base multiplier which will be boosted 1.2* using a 2 handed sword), and set effects for Water Cannon enhancement (1.15* multiplier to WC) and Smash enhancement (the same 1.15* but to Smash's multiplier) in here now that 70 water alchemy damage has turned into a 2762.7 damage add, which Smash (again Giant dan 3 in this case) would need 217.6~ max from enchants in the same slots to compare or a not quite possible 90.5 after bone chip+40% overture, and I'm taking the best case for Smash here, being used by a Giant with a shield and 2 handed sword for extra base multiplier and enchant slots over a Human or Elf.

    All of that gets completely thrown out the window though when we look at the root cause of the physical/magical damage imbalance; Magic Protection.
    In early game content it isn't quite as noticeable since even up to hardmode shadow missions most things only have 10~20% damage reduction from protection, around 5~13 points, easy to work around with Cerenus summon and Hydra, though admittedly dependent on a temporary cash shop item with a 45 USD cost to be ensured to obtain and a skill with a relatively small radius which remains stationary and requires monsters take a damage tick from it before the debuff is applied that also has a 60 second cooldown. Most of that content you'll be able to do enough damage that the reduction isnt really an issue though, but once you're getting up to content like advance hardmode dungeons it starts to become more noticeable that physical damage is pulling ahead, particularly with all of the new bows and swords coming with piercing levels, and all of the free Bone Dragons we're given from events and their comparatively lower cash shop price of 9~12 USD although still a temporary item not always available for players to purchase. Once we start getting into later game content like avalon purification and tech duinn adv missions, Magic has become completely impotent due to magic protection, even when applying Hydra and Cerenus, while on the physical damage side you're definitely running a piercing sword and or bow at this point or using high multiplier slow animation skillsets like Chain that were designed to work around protection in this content tier, Alchemy fares a little better than magic if you've invest into an Erg 50 Cylinder, Rain Cast Water Cannon Damage reforge and Flame Burst duration reforge, but that's pretty extreme compared to the investment to be effective in this content with physical damage.

    As for a specific example to highlight the problem that is Magic Protection, let's take Tagar from the Purify Avalon's Altar mission. Tagar has 180 Protection and Magic Protection, this results in an 80% damage reduction to any attack you use on her, you can reduce this by 37 on the physical side by hitting her with a Bone Dragon, Mir Dragon, Spinning Uppercut, and Smokescreen, bringing her down to 143 protection or 73% damage reduction. Comparatively if you can get her to stay on one place long enough for Hydra to tick and hit her with a Cerenus summon you can bring her magic protection down 28 points to 152 or 75% damage reduction. It almost sounds fair at that point, albeit a tad slanted towards physical damage, but we haven't accounted for Piercing yet, on the lower end with a Bhafel Slayer greatsword or Bhafel Hunter longbow that takes off another 10 protection from their upgraded 2 piercing levels, which gets us to 71% damage reduction. On the higher end though since this is late game content you could be running a 3 pierce meteoroid enchant on that Bhafel Slayer, or a Novel Divine Crossbow which bring the protection down to 118 and 113 or 68% and 67% damage reduction respectively, quite an advantage over what you can obtain with magic type damage sources and applies to things other than Tagar specifically. Lets get into the meat of the imbalance though when it comes to any boss type monster like Tagar, Feth's rings, Balor, and so on.

    Brionac, when shocked will reduce the protection of certain monsters (mostly bosses as mentioned, but also of note the water spirits in abyssal lord tech duinn mission) by 3 per hit, this means 60 quick love taps on Tagar with vivace buff on makes her have a whopping ZERO physical protection and take full damage from any physical attack regardless of other debuffs or piercing levels. Before the Merlin patch that introduced the split Protection and Magic Protection stats this damage reduction ~reduction~ from Brionac would apply to all damage types allowing Magic and Alchemy to be at least able to compete with Melee and Ranged damage skills, but now Physical damage is working at full force and Magic type damage is at a 75% disadvantage, more in cases aside from Tagar.

    But this is the NA forums where trying to discuss imbalances is pointless and will never be seen by the developers who have the power to fix it and only by players who have little to no knowledge on the games mechanics and who will only contribute snide remakes comparing any attempts at discussing game balance to someone complaining to be compensated for a few extra hours of downtime on a free videogame as they idle in Dunbarton or Belvast with the game minimized, ignoring anything that may improve the game and make it more enjoyable for those who don't want to hit things with a big axe like Todd Howard.

    EDITED IN BONUS: Some posts came in while I was writing this but to keep it short and sweet, Ego revamp does not make up for 75% extra damage reduction to magic type damage sadly even if it gets significantly faster for lower tier content.
    SherriOwntrolfRadiant DawnKitiniChaosShadow
  • 2 Shadow Missions needs to be revamped

    Greta wrote: »
    Or just a newbie.

    Jesus, do we really not have those or what? People don't want to remember them, but later cry that game is dead and such. If we make such updates without thinking about new players we might as well just shut down this game.
    As Mizuko said above, memoir and new skills, but not to be forgotten is the potential system which gives you further rebirth potions for the blaanid quests leftover after your free sub-5k rebirth pots become unusable. These three things combined mean we unironically do not have newbies, just new players who are 7k+ total level day 1 with skills that obliterate all the old content in 1~2 clicks. You would have to be willingly ignorant and purposefully ignoring all the tutorials and ignoring memoir as well as completely not interacting with other players who will universally be able to set someone who's just installed and made a character on the right path to be able not to clear shadow missions at this point.
    The big issue here is the early game no longer exists, and shadow missions as a whole have not been maintained to scale with the new game balance of not having an early game, they were fine when they were added to the game and some time after but the balance has changed drastically since then and shadow missions now are in the state of dungeons pre-revamp. Of course in the case of dungeons, post-revamp there is a massive variety of difficulty to them, some have suffered the same fate as shadow missions already with the addition of memoir though and become trash content you can obliterate after 4~ hours playtime, however at the very least some of those low level ones are part of the memoir questline and do have justification for their existence still as something you go through with a little difficulty once to be showered in thousands of ap.

    Personally I think the solution isn't to just speed up spawns of Defensive Battle and Scout but to revamp the shadow mission system as a whole in some fairly simple ways, in particular making the difficulties have wider gaps, making monsters give combat exp regardless of Combat Power as dungeons already do so they can stay relevant for leveling going forward, and in addition to making mobs spongier with higher difficulty going the tech duinn mission route and having additional spawns, additional waves, normal spawn monsters and bosses using more skills with higher aggression going up in difficulty level (eg: Female shadow wizards start chain casting firebolts and casting fireballs and actually attacking instead of running up to you doing nothing with the spell loaded or loading another charge. Shadow lancers actually using a form of lance charge. Dark commander bosses using rage impact and a skill or two unique to them aside from their aoe lifedrain. etc).
    Most of these changes just involve changing some numbers but Devcat could go further and add some entirely new shadow missions, revamp reward pools to include more enchants and gear/materials, or even expand upon the Revenant and Perseus weapon tier sets like they expanded on Celtic weapons with the dungeon revamp.
    Sherri
  • Nexon pls tone down the amount of concurent events

    I am in 100% agreement with thread title, it's very tedious to keep track of so many things going on simultaneously. I personally feel running events that require active daily micromanagement take away from running events that passively boost drop rates or give some sort of bonus to doing normal content especially. Lots of events throughout the year is great but running them at the same time is just going to frustrate and burn people out, especially those with little time to actually play.
    It's either 6 hrs of play time or abuse the computer and leave it on overnight.
    Turning the computer off every night is actually more abusive to it, the silicon suffers more from heat cycling than staying a consistent temperature, spinning drives also suffer reduced lifespans from having to park and spin up every day.
    If you use your computer for more than a few hours every few days day it's better to just leave it on if you want the components to last as long as possible.
    courtneyyKingEphyKensamaofmariWolfsingerSherriShakayaxSho76lilblkrose
  • Elsie Concerns Me

    Yandere is objectively best dere.
    Yes that's all I have to say no three page long post full of math today.
    pawcalypseBlissfulkillRadiant DawnWolfsinger
  • Fix The Gap B/w Giants and Every Other Race

    You know, the "RPG" in "MMORPG" stands for "Role-Playing." Just putting that out there.
    Yes as I'm sure anyone with a triple digit IQ does, but I understand your instinctual reaction to talk down to me in response to a comment made in jest due to the off topic nature of that which it was in response to.
    However regardless of that Mabinogi is an action sandbox MMO not an MMORPG. Mabinogi has some RPG elements like the stats system, but you can slap a character level on a first person shooter as well, it does not suddenly become an RPG. An RPG involves above all else choices an consequences, Mabinogi as a sandbox lacks these things, at no point are you actually role playing in the game outside of self imposed restrictions, which are unrelated to game design, Mabinogi does however contain some "Illusion of choice" in some of it's storylines, moreso with the recent ones but your choices are, as the phrase implies, an illusion and have no effect on the outcome of the story or influence on the world because the game is a sandbox which must remain in a singular state for all players so they can go through the linear storylines too.
    The closest things to actual choices with consequences in Mabinogi are which race you play, and if you're a human which transformation you decide to use, an (MMO)RPG would involve those sorts of choices throughout the storylines and the world, in Mabinogi if you cut down a tree the tree never disappears, it simply "runs out" of wood and eventually regenerates, keeping the world in a static state for the next player who wants to gather wood.
    And, yes, while for some players the meta and min-maxing their character to perfection is the end-all-be-all of the game, others do play it for the thrill of adventure and to play out their fantasy of being on an epic magical journey as *insert classic RPG character type or mix of classic character types here*.
    That's an artificial restriction imposed by the player while playing the sandbox, and not a game mechanic of Mabinogi, a discussion of gameplay balance needs to involve discussing the actual balance of the gameplay and not arbitrary self imposed restrictions the players may or may not impose on themselves.
    I personally respect anyone's right to play any video, tabletop, or otherwise game however they wish but those choice can't be accounted for when balancing a game that simply is not designed to cater to that sort of gameplay where the player has choices to make.
    The only character type not properly represented in this game? Rogue. What are rogues known for? Stealing, stealth, and...say it with me now...dual-wielding daggers! If we can't get a proper rogue talent, the least we can get is Elves dual-wielding daggers.
    The only? What about necromancers?! How about Deckers? Where are the corporations to even break into?!
    Besides, if you think dual-wielding is such an inferior strategy, what should it matter to you if one more race can do it anyway? It may not be optimal if you play solely based on numbers, but it's fun and it makes people feel bad-oars.
    Because Mabinogi is an action sandbox not an RPG and the game mechanics for the supposed "melee oriented" races should actually reflect that by them having some sort of unique advantage in the same way Elves, the "archery and magic" should have legitimate advantages in those skills to make up for their lacking performance in others from a purely game balance point of view.
    As they say, sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good...
    I only offer my opinions as a video game developer, published author, and avid player of role playing games in various formats, I don't claim "perfection" and as a proponent of free speech and open debate I welcome your disagreements with me, condensation included, and am willing to discuss them, and banter in return, in places where they are on topic and relevant, but the simple fact is this thread is a discussion of videogame mechanics and their balance in relation to other mechanics, and not a discussion of roleplaying inside the confines of a sandbox where it has no effect on the actual mechanics so I don't believe it's on topic to discuss that here.
    VeylaineDanievictriaSherriUrufu