[NEW MERCENARIES] Please note that all new forum users have to be approved before posting. This process can take up to 24 hours, and we appreciate your patience.
I stashed my +15 in favor of a +12 so I actually enjoy playing the game somewhat like it used to play instead of facerolling. That said I'm just hanging on for nostalgia at this point, the game was pretty much dead, now it's buried.
Those things that you mention don't equate to skill in game
Yes they do. Once again, if you lack the qualities I have mentioned, you will never be one of the best/better geared players in this game. This is simple reality. Many people do not have the pacience or self control to play a game like Vinidctus, so they don't. They choose games like GW2 or TERA instead, games that are a lot more forgiving and doesn't require as much skill in the traits i mentioned. Yes, a very small minority will abuse P2W elements to get what they want. But the vast majority will be/want to be honest players, or they will quit in the process.
For some reason you missed that others are arguing that the point of this update is to get people to feel their best option is to spend real money to progress. Someone who drops a few hundred--or a few thousand if they're unlucky--on the new special runes and premium runes and NX boxes for airtight items to sell for gold to buy whatever they don't get lucky on does not reflect in game skill, and it never will.
This is a none issue. Once again, you are pretending to be upset when the game is exactly the same as before. This game has always been pay2win/spend IRL money to get **** done. All this update did was add +20 to give veterans a new incentive upgrade their gear and spend money (or grind it out) again. All of these P2W arguments were the exact same thing people cried about when the game first launched because no one had +15 gear at the time. Now, years later, nearly everyone has +12 or higher. So Nexon needs to make a new incentive for veterans to spend, and they added +20. The game is still the same as before. Don't tell me you are a veteran player and still didn't see this reality of Vindictus.
If you suddenly have such a problem with all the P2W elements in this game then maybe you should quit in protest (ACTUALLY quit, not return for the 6th time). Maybe if there is a mass exodus of loyal players Nexon will do something about their unfair cash shop but lets be real, that will never happen, and you aint gonna quit. They would probably rather shut it down than make their cash shop more fair. Just use some common sense and be real/honest. You should understand how Nexon works at this point, to expect anything more would actually be delusional. I have already accepted this reality about this game years ago. If you dealt with Nexon as long as I have, then the P2W in their games would not (and should not) bother you anymore.
Guess what? Once that person who's all geared out hops into a raid even if they're horrible that stacked gear will keep them alive and ever hit they get on the boss in their unskilled flailing will get them more rewards than someone who knows the bosses, knows their character, and puts in the effort to play well--simply because they don't have the gear.
This is a huge hypothetical """what if""" that almost never happens in this game, The vast majority who spend the time, money, and effort getting geared, likely knows how to play their class. Gear has mostly never saved you from getting rekt in this game to begin with. If you didn't know what you were doing, you would be hugging the ground or playing extremely passively. Maybe the decrease in difficulty will make it possible to straight gear-carry now, but we shall see.
This notion that I see way too often in F2P games which equates money spent to lack of skill is just ridiculous and often over-exploited. Even if it does happen, It does not effect you in any way because Vindictus is a PvE co-op game. Just like Warframe, nothing that player does with their money, will ever effect you. You are literally being upset about ghosts, so why waste the energy being upset about it? Why be angry about things that you know won't change?.
That is not a good system. You believe what you like, but your point has been refuted in other threads and multiple times in this one.
No one has "refuted" my point, all I have seen so fare are a bunch of ghost arguments or hypotheticals, then I debunk why you should not be upset about it or why its ridiculous. If you want to get mad about something then get mad about how the game may be too easy to a fault, or how they made it harder to enchant gear. Things like that have true merit to warrant an outrage. Don't be mad because someone who has better gear than you.....did more damage than you. (shocker, right?)
Anyways, I've made my opinion very clear and continuing would mean further repeating myself. If you agree, great. If you don't, you are entitled to your opinion I guess, Im not gonna even try to argue with ghosts or strawmen all day like I did years ago. Bottom line is I wish people would chill out and stop calling this RISE "literally the worse update ever". Yes, change is difficult. But You should be happy the devs are STILL willing to change anything in this game to begin with instead of letting it wither away uneventfully.
For years I've gone to various gaming forums and promoted Vindictus and argued/defended it by saying it had no real elements of pay2win and was only pay2carryotherpeople.
This is a pure PvE co-op game. People bringing more damage into your raid group can only ever be mutually beneficial, and eventually you will get more damage as you get geared as well. "Wow someone who is FAR more feared than me just out dpsed the hell out of me and carried the raid, how unfair!!!" Yeah that is SUPPOSED to happen??? Its not like you need the extra damage to begin with because they made the game so much more easier to steamroll. Stop pretending this is some awful change, it literally won't negatively effect you in the slightest. Also, getting the gear to begin with does take a degree of skill as well.
Besides...almost no one gonna have a weapon past +15 anyways.
People care about damage because of the nature of the game. In a pure PvE game, the same content is constant and stale. However, players are not constant, which is why you see see people compete in damage, because it is a dynamic part of the game. Not to mention, the main focus of the game has been around skill for many years, but these changes to additional damage simply widen the stat gap between +10s and +15s, and place a larger emphasis on gear rather than own merit. Before it was about 10-11% damage difference in additional damage, and now being 100%+.
So, your main point being: Additional damage changes do not matter because everyone benefits from the boss dying faster.
Which I respond with: Additional damage changes ruin the dynamic and skill oriented portion of the game that retains its players even when the boss pve is stale. With a higher emphasis on stats and rng to reach the end-game gear, the game is simply throwing away its identity as a skill focused game and becoming one that simply emphasizes stats.
Therefore, I agree with your point that everyone benefits from other party members having better stats. However, I do not agree that point is enough to justify the changes, and that my point on additional damage ruining the dynamic portion of the game is why people do not like these changes.
I won't deny the fact that saying p2w people are totally sandbagging no-skill players is very inaccurate because a lot of the times its those same people that take the time to learn the mechanics of the game and try to play at a level that is above just average. Also don't get me wrong, Nexon expecting people to pay for this game has always been the idea because if nobody is spending money on the game how can you keep it afloat? But this game is definitely not the same as it was before, especially the direction that past updates have been.
*Inhales*
I would argue that in the past it was more "pay for convenience" because with tokens in the beginning paying money for the game meant having an edge over other players because you could run limited boats more often than other players. But this extended to EVERYONE since people that paid money for this convenience could host more often or even pay for people that ran out of tokens. Later they would do away with the token concept allowing all players to run the game an indefinite amount of times, however also introducing a higher enhancement rank that while made gameplay much more fluid (the attack speed gains) but did not break the damage system.
Again the game would change with the introduction of daily limit raids that did make a bit of a gap between non-paying and paying players because of the included introduction of VIP status. Again though, this benefited the overall community because the same high-geared characters could run multiple times for people that had multiple characters they wanted to gear. Moving closer to the present, we had the enhancement buff update that drastically changed the damage game that uneasily made a distant between non-pay and paying players again. This was then followed by the Season 2 update that while it tired to change the standard level by level dungeon crawl, began to severely hide gear behind luck by making the most sought after gear hidden behind once a day raids. These two updates created the beginnings of the concerns we have today but were mitigated by later updates like 1) the character revamps that increased the overall base effectiveness of characters and their skills and 2) the damage formula revamp that tried to close the gap between non stat-capped characters and stat-capped characters.
The game would change again with the introduction of level 90 gear that no longer required a heavy amount of investment or luck into the game to break into the end-game scene since blue/purple level 90 gear allowed for a transition into the new higher stat-capped content. The only concern though was that the actual end-game was still very difficult to get because it continued to rely on RNG to obtain rare mats. This was then mitigated again by the introduction of the Seal shop update, that first did away with the random OJ box and changed it to the boss specific boxes. That was later changed to the boss & item specific boxes (i.e. having a box that gives only an OJ regina wep feather, nothing else). This was a TREMENDOUS update that actually REWARDED hard work and persistent gameplay and for the first time bypassed a large RNG aspect of the game and made it available to EVERYONE.
What am I trying to say about these past updates? Basically the past updates and cash system in the game were more based on convenience. When the later updates would begin to creep towards a true P2W situation they mitigated it with subsequent buffers like the said damage formula change.
Now lets take a look at RISE...
Firstly, if you take away the the whole damage formula change and the enhancement ranks/rates, RISE has an amazing amount of QoL changes and arguably things that lessen the RNG barrier (enchant scroll scraps for instance). But the problem lies when you take into the account of the enhancement and damage changes. Firstly it definitely made it easier to get to +10 in the game but there still lies the risk of blowing up your weapon at +9 and beyond. The thing that makes this more P2W rather than pay for convenience is the introduction of the enhancement rune fragments. Netting 4 of these from 4 failed enhancement runes gives you a guaranteed +1 coupon. Personally I love this because it frustrated me to no end when you blew over 8+ runes going from +8-+9. The problem though is that these cannot be sold on the MP for everyone to access, but more importantly allows you to BYPASS portions of the RNG itself that are only available to paying players (because its essentially $15.6 per coupon).
Now lets take a look at the new enhancement rank changes, which ties in to the damage formula changes. The new enhancement ranks increases the added additional damage SEVERELY (300 add dmg pre-rise to 3000 add dmg post-rise for +15 level 90 weapons). For players like me who were fortunate enough to get a +15 level 90 weapon noticed a remarkable increase in damage. However along with this damage increases, the boss HP was also increased (and also no longer scale) to compensate. For characters like mine that have high enhanced weapons, this made little difference but to people that only had +10s or even +15 level 80 weapons (which did not get the substantial add dmg increase) the overall effectiveness of their characters decreased. This is just horrible because these same characters that could stat-cap the bosses in the past and could be on par with level 90 weapons were essentially PUNISHED. This forces them to enter the already gruelling RNG game once again (because also you can't double boom things anymore), not out of the pursuit to better their characters for fun, but because it is now a requirement because the only meaningful way to deal damage to bosses in raids is to stack additional damage that can ONLY be achieved through enhancement ranks. This coupled with the new +16-+20 ranks (which at +20 will give 12500 add damage) severely widens the gap between the players willing to shell out the money for this game and those that are not, which has NEVER been seen before in this magnitude in the past (arguably ever in the history of this game).
But hold on, why should we worry if we have some of these whales to pretty much carry everything for us? The game will continue on because they will carry and allow people to get better gear.
Admirable thought and also a very valid point. But I would argue that 1) the whales that help keep this game afloat were slapped in the face this update and 2) people will get tired of being carried in a game that is increasingly hiding behind RNG and luck (or now cash paying as well), so what is the point of them staying? The whales were penalized because the runes and coupons still only go up to +10 so essentially it is WAY more difficult to get to +15 let alone +16 or higher especially now that you can't revive your weapon for a second chance to boom it. Speaking as a whale myself, the main reason I shell out cash (aside from my poor financial choices) is to help hit that true end-game. Causal players will find less enjoyment in the game because frankly it gets pretty old for someone to carry you through everything, especially if you played WAY better than them but in the end your skill is meaningless in front of an average player like me that can steamroll through things based on my stats alone, made worse by the fact that this game was advertised to be BASED ON SKILL (hell that's why we stacked attack speed before, to play more aggressively with more fluidity).
TL;DR version: This game was more "pay for convenience" rather than P2W, but now the new update has widen the gap between paying and non-paying customers because of the increase in additional damage. We should all be worried because casual players will get bored of the game fast and paying customers will be punished to the point of leaving, and I don't know about everyone else but I would definitely be sad with this game closing because to me there is no other game like it.
P.S. I'm like 1000% sure that my timeline of the updates is horribly inaccurate so uh sorry about that...
*Exhales*
*Rolls on the floor and passes out wheezing*
Those things that you mention don't equate to skill in game
Yes they do. Once again, if you lack the qualities I have mentioned, you will never be one of the best/better geared players in this game. This is simple reality. Many people do not have the pacience or self control to play a game like Vinidctus, so they don't. They choose games like GW2 or TERA instead, games that are a lot more forgiving and doesn't require as much skill in the traits i mentioned. Yes, a very small minority will abuse P2W elements to get what they want. But the vast majority will be/want to be honest players, or they will quit in the process.
For some reason you missed that others are arguing that the point of this update is to get people to feel their best option is to spend real money to progress. Someone who drops a few hundred--or a few thousand if they're unlucky--on the new special runes and premium runes and NX boxes for airtight items to sell for gold to buy whatever they don't get lucky on does not reflect in game skill, and it never will.
This is a none issue. Once again, you are pretending to be upset when the game is exactly the same as before. This game has always been pay2win/spend IRL money to get **** done. All this update did was add +20 to give veterans a new incentive upgrade their gear and spend money (or grind it out) again. All of these P2W arguments were the exact same thing people cried about when the game first launched because no one had +15 gear at the time. Now, years later, nearly everyone has +12 or higher. So Nexon needs to make a new incentive for veterans to spend, and they added +20. The game is still the same as before. Don't tell me you are a veteran player and still didn't see this reality of Vindictus.
If you suddenly have such a problem with all the P2W elements in this game then maybe you should quit in protest (ACTUALLY quit, not return for the 6th time). Maybe if there is a mass exodus of loyal players Nexon will do something about their unfair cash shop but lets be real, that will never happen, and you aint gonna quit. They would probably rather shut it down than make their cash shop more fair. Just use some common sense and be real/honest. You should understand how Nexon works at this point, to expect anything more would actually be delusional. I have already accepted this reality about this game years ago. If you dealt with Nexon as long as I have, then the P2W in their games would not (and should not) bother you anymore.
Guess what? Once that person who's all geared out hops into a raid even if they're horrible that stacked gear will keep them alive and ever hit they get on the boss in their unskilled flailing will get them more rewards than someone who knows the bosses, knows their character, and puts in the effort to play well--simply because they don't have the gear.
This is a huge hypothetical """what if""" that almost never happens in this game, The vast majority who spend the time, money, and effort getting geared, likely knows how to play their class. Gear has mostly never saved you from getting rekt in this game to begin with. If you didn't know what you were doing, you would be hugging the ground or playing extremely passively. Maybe the decrease in difficulty will make it possible to straight gear-carry now, but we shall see.
This notion that I see way too often in F2P games which equates money spent to lack of skill is just ridiculous and often over-exploited. Even if it does happen, It does not effect you in any way because Vindictus is a PvE co-op game. Just like Warframe, nothing that player does with their money, will ever effect you. You are literally being upset about ghosts, so why waste the energy being upset about it? Why be angry about things that you know won't change?.
That is not a good system. You believe what you like, but your point has been refuted in other threads and multiple times in this one.
No one has "refuted" my point, all I have seen so fare are a bunch of ghost arguments or hypotheticals, then I debunk why you should not be upset about it or why its ridiculous. If you want to get mad about something then get mad about how the game may be too easy to a fault, or how they made it harder to enchant gear. Things like that have true merit to warrant an outrage. Don't be mad because someone who has better gear than you.....did more damage than you. (shocker, right?)
Anyways, I've made my opinion very clear and continuing would mean further repeating myself. If you agree, great. If you don't, you are entitled to your opinion I guess, Im not gonna even try to argue with ghosts or strawmen all day like I did years ago. Bottom line is I wish people would chill out and stop calling this RISE "literally the worse update ever". Yes, change is difficult. But You should be happy the devs are STILL willing to change anything in this game to begin with instead of letting it wither away uneventfully.
TL:DR there is none, read the post dammit.
Nice post, but gear has become more than ever the deciding factor as to who gets the most rewards and who does top damage. Skill is of moderate value, gear is almost everything. You can see that clearly in the Additional Damage formula and the fact that it's been crushed to nothing for sub-90 gear. Again, you can see it however you like, but the numbers don't lie, how rewards are given don't lie, and the fact is this: a player with lots of cash to blow will get a better return and better results with less skill than a skilled player who learns a character will get with less gear.
Yes they do. Once again, if you lack the qualities I have mentioned, you will never be one of the best/better geared players in this game. This is simple reality. Many people do not have the pacience or self control to play a game like Vinidctus, so they don't. They choose games like GW2 or TERA instead, games that are a lot more forgiving and doesn't require as much skill in the traits i mentioned. Yes, a very small minority will abuse P2W elements to get what they want. But the vast majority will be/want to be honest players, or they will quit in the process.
Do you know that skill is subjective? Because according to your way of thinking everyone is noob who prefers different games than Vindi at the moment.
If you base this on how unforgiving a game is then i have to tell you something. Tera for example is more unforgiving in terms of raids than Vindi ever was. You can hardly solo or can't solo raids at all because most of them require teamwork and focus on what you're doing and quick reaction according to what you have practiced. One minor failure and you wipe the whole party and you can't avoid it with trans or other skills.
You can learn everything you want but you would be surprised how different things are that share something in common and vice versa. You press the same keys that you press in Vindi, it's just the animations, character skills and mechanics that are different but it doesn't make anything more skill demanding than the other in general. For example you won't learn real cooking skills just because you know how to put some materials together in a game. There's no universal skill for everything. That's not how it works. You can still perform badly in other games after Vindi if you're new to that game. Learned boss patterns here won't help you in beating other enemies in other games. Not to mention PvP that's a bit more complicated but it's still far from giving you skills that you can utilize anywhere else because they are simply different. You have to learn everything respectively.
Games like chess require more focus and reaction than Vindi does. (the olympic kind of chess) But with a biased mindset you won't understand. (i'm not saying this in a satirical way)
On topic:
My thought about it is that it's gonna milk the whales (or how you call them) even more because now runes are worth their money. That's not implicitly bad but at least you know their true intentions.
@lumix345
-Now that's a post! I'd like to continue on some of your points that I'm paraphrasing here, 'it gets pretty old for someone to carry you through everything, especially if you played WAY better than them but skill is meaningless in front of an average player that can steamroll through things based on stats alone'.
With the S3 boss HP buff due to group size changes, +10's are notably less effective, which isn't the worst thing in the world by itself, however all my fancy scrolls, max Bal, stacking AS / Crit, etc. are now basically pointless when it comes to doing damage compared to Add. Dmg.
That said, I'm more worried about new players and how they will experience these changes since they'll notice that they are doing minimal damage during the end game battles. I'd imagine some will feel useless and just stop playing, others will just get lazy because they end up being carried through everything, and for those that want to progress I'd guess their experience will be something like:
How do can I be more useful (do more damage)?
->Get highly enhanced gear.
How do I do that?
->Get extremely lucky or open the bank vaults and spend on runes (and if they realize what the odds are, they probably won't be too enthusiastic to do so).
So if they don't want to spend ,they are basically stuck waiting for events that give runes as prizes which can be few and far between (especially for the quantity you need at higher levels), creating big gaps of waiting at which point they'll probably just stop playing. Not to mention at this point they are basically playing the Enhancement system more than the game, and it's a battle you lose (a lot).
-Btw, anyone know how the update is going over in Korea / China?
Guess what? Once that person who's all geared out hops into a raid even if they're horrible that stacked gear will keep them alive and ever hit they get on the boss in their unskilled flailing will get them more rewards than someone who knows the bosses, knows their character, and puts in the effort to play well--simply because they don't have the gear.
This is a huge hypothetical """what if""" that almost never happens in this game, The vast majority who spend the time, money, and effort getting geared, likely knows how to play their class. Gear has mostly never saved you from getting rekt in this game to begin with. If you didn't know what you were doing, you would be hugging the ground or playing extremely passively. Maybe the decrease in difficulty will make it possible to straight gear-carry now, but we shall see.
This notion that I see way too often in F2P games which equates money spent to lack of skill is just ridiculous and often over-exploited. Even if it does happen, It does not effect you in any way because Vindictus is a PvE co-op game. Just like Warframe, nothing that player does with their money, will ever effect you. You are literally being upset about ghosts, so why waste the energy being upset about it? Why be angry about things that you know won't change?.
While you think this is a hypothetical "what if", I and many others on West have seen tons of people who pay and get geared overnight, and then proceed to be UTTER garbage at the game. It's not a small minority. Someone with crap gear who instantly/rapidly becomes endgame geared is not magically gaining skill and playing their character optimally. Now, money spent does NOT equal lack of skill, in fact if someone paid to win and is good at the game then I have nothing to complain or say anything about. Time spent playing the game does not equal skill at character either.
Your attitude makes me thing you are one of those people who maxed out Attack Limit in a week, bought D/R/E silver bracelets and put superior gems in them, rolled 4* +12 armor max synthesis, bought a +15 90, and then went into Neamhain and was permadead before 6bars.
Aside from neamhain, the additional dmg on high enhance levels just overkills anything.
As already said, for as much skill could have mattered before, now it is something that isn't required to make us of. The additional dmg system must be nerfed and/or changed. If the objective is to give a reason for players to invest more time into upgrading, make a new system to do so.
The RNG enhance system which rewards out of luck and money isn't something that most played modern games are successful for.
Vindictus needs a proper way to proceed and make progression out of time and effort put into the game without having to farm a loot that drops for 1-2% chances.
If the developers actually haven't given up on the game, and want to make it have more success they HAVE to listen feedbacks coming from old players. (I'm talking to you too DOL)
Welp, instead of arguing yet another time about this "update", should keep track of the thread and answer the main point..
My thoughts on additional damage changes are simple : why did you bother to break something that was already working fine ? Oh and by the way, the multiplier is still the same (6.25), thus why you now deal insane amount of damage.. going from 300 to 3000 additional damage for +15 is a pretty clear obvious change.
Yes we deal more damage actually, even casting armors bonus aside, I do not know if we actually got the 7.7m HP s3 raids or if we got them with the recent -25% HP that Korea recently got.. but anyway, you have to mind HP doesn't scale anymore that's why clear time is much lower actually, think with scalling, solo HP was like 40-45% of a full-party value so it's normal that with a certain additional damage value you actually double your clear time.
What bothers me is how broken each enhancement lvl now are.. I used to outdamage some +15 players with my +12, or Hell even with my +10 purple Scythe actually damn, but now I would probably not stand a chance at all, since the difference between +10 and +15 is literally more than 100%.. so yeah, rewarding skill rather than gear was what made the charm of raiding actually.
And for people like WhiteYukii, if we shouldn't care or accept the normal fact that a +15 outdamages a +10, then remove this damage ranking reward at once. After all, it's a co-op game right ? So why do we have damage ranking ? We shouldn't care since it's a party... may you actually give additional cores if the party isn't maxed.. like 3 players raid = 1 extra core, duo = 2 cores, solo = 3 cores. This is where you will see who's a tryhard (going full solo just for the sake of getting more cores) or who actually wants to play with friends/other player and doesn't care about the amount of cores.
Either you let the additional damage remaining as such, but remove those ungrateful rankings bs.
Or simply revert back to old additional damage, which was already working more than fine.
Stay focused people, the thread title is "Your Thoughts on Additional Damage Changes?" not "Your Thought on other people's Thoughts on Additional Damage Changes?" ...
Strictly looking at how Additional Damage affects game-play, I agree that additional damage completely overshadows all other stats now. When I was struggling against Kraken, simply upgrading my +3 Nighthawk Staff to a +8 allowed me to crush it due to the Additional Damage. This makes enchant scrolls, power infusions, etc. less relevant and puts a lot more emphasis into enhancing.
Then stop saying that people who quit the game have less patience and self-control and people who don't like this game or aren't good at it should git gud because it's annoying like some of those YouTube commenters under the Dark Souls videos who keep saying the same sh*t over and over again without knowing those people they talk about in real life. You don't even know what they've gone through in life and what they have fought for or what their interests are before saying things like they don't have the patience and then you arrogantly think that you are better than them because you think the game you play is so cool. Most of those people don't have the will to spend their time on a damn game or are interested in other games. It has nothing to do with patience or self-control...
These topics wouldn't get derailed if people kept their arrogant opinions for themselves and stopped comparing this game to other games because first it has nothing to do with this forum section, second it's like comparing people by their skin colors. You don't go into details because that would become off-topic then why don't you stop comparing them in a few sentences and start talking about Vindi only?
This is not as bad as people want it to be. As I said, there is literally no reason to be outraged by this, The game is still largely the same, strong players will hard-carry and weak players will leech until they become a strong player, or quit. Vindictus has always been like this, at least for the last few years. This game is like Warframe, it doesn't matter how strong other players get, it will always be mutually beneficial for everyone they interact with. This is all I am saying. In my opinion, the fact that they made the raids faceroll, or you can't enhance restored gear anymore are way bigger issues because these directly affect every player in the game. I could not care less if some dude that has better gear than me anyways, got some more AD than me. This is a beta issue especially for this type of game.
Also, getting the gear to begin with does take a degree of skill as well.
Spamming the same morbus boss to get money sure takes skill lol... ^^'
Makes me understand why Rise actually happened on this game when I see certain posts on these forums.
There is skill in patience
There is skill in time/money management
There is skill in planning
There is skill in spending your IRL money wisely (unless you are just a rich whale that can waste money left and right)
There is skill in having the sheer willpower to play this grindy ass game.
The game isn't just fighting the boss, most of the game is farming, grinding, planning and patience. There is a reason some people cannot and/or will not ever be as geared as the best players. It is not ALL skill but it does take some skill to achieve this in any game. Everything in life, including breathing and reading this post, takes a degree of skill to execute.
yeah what you're saying would make sense in any other game except vindictus. Unfortunately, the whole point of this thread comes from the idea that enhancement levels have become much more important in progression, and the enhancement system itself has not been remedied to accomodate that. Hence, the problem with AD being the NEW big stat.
If your idea of being a "strong" player has anything to do with enhancement levels, I'm sorry to say that there is no skill when it comes to that. One player can one-shot a weapon to 15 or (unrealistically) 20, while the rest of the playerbase may spend years and years working for the AD those enhancement levels have to offer and never come close. No amount of planning or money management can ever assure you(emphasis on assure) the amount of AD you wish to attain. Clicking on the enhance button and leaving your fate to RNG Jesus isn't a skill.
enhancement levels have become much more important in progression, and the enhancement system itself has not been remedied to accomodate that. Hence, the problem with AD being the NEW big stat.
.
My only regret is that I already revived my weapon so I can't attempt to enhance it any more, since clearly now it's not even worth getting to +12 or whatever and saying "Good enough" - if you don't enhance to +15 or above you may as well use a trainee weapon, you'll pull about the same DPS relative to the guy with a +15.
Comments
-hides-
The fact only 2 +17 exist in KR is pretty much saying +20 is impossible. Why are people still so mesmerized but nonexistent stuff?
This is a none issue. Once again, you are pretending to be upset when the game is exactly the same as before. This game has always been pay2win/spend IRL money to get **** done. All this update did was add +20 to give veterans a new incentive upgrade their gear and spend money (or grind it out) again. All of these P2W arguments were the exact same thing people cried about when the game first launched because no one had +15 gear at the time. Now, years later, nearly everyone has +12 or higher. So Nexon needs to make a new incentive for veterans to spend, and they added +20. The game is still the same as before. Don't tell me you are a veteran player and still didn't see this reality of Vindictus.
If you suddenly have such a problem with all the P2W elements in this game then maybe you should quit in protest (ACTUALLY quit, not return for the 6th time). Maybe if there is a mass exodus of loyal players Nexon will do something about their unfair cash shop but lets be real, that will never happen, and you aint gonna quit. They would probably rather shut it down than make their cash shop more fair. Just use some common sense and be real/honest. You should understand how Nexon works at this point, to expect anything more would actually be delusional. I have already accepted this reality about this game years ago. If you dealt with Nexon as long as I have, then the P2W in their games would not (and should not) bother you anymore.
This is a huge hypothetical """what if""" that almost never happens in this game, The vast majority who spend the time, money, and effort getting geared, likely knows how to play their class. Gear has mostly never saved you from getting rekt in this game to begin with. If you didn't know what you were doing, you would be hugging the ground or playing extremely passively. Maybe the decrease in difficulty will make it possible to straight gear-carry now, but we shall see.
This notion that I see way too often in F2P games which equates money spent to lack of skill is just ridiculous and often over-exploited. Even if it does happen, It does not effect you in any way because Vindictus is a PvE co-op game. Just like Warframe, nothing that player does with their money, will ever effect you. You are literally being upset about ghosts, so why waste the energy being upset about it? Why be angry about things that you know won't change?.
No one has "refuted" my point, all I have seen so fare are a bunch of ghost arguments or hypotheticals, then I debunk why you should not be upset about it or why its ridiculous. If you want to get mad about something then get mad about how the game may be too easy to a fault, or how they made it harder to enchant gear. Things like that have true merit to warrant an outrage. Don't be mad because someone who has better gear than you.....did more damage than you. (shocker, right?)
Anyways, I've made my opinion very clear and continuing would mean further repeating myself. If you agree, great. If you don't, you are entitled to your opinion I guess, Im not gonna even try to argue with ghosts or strawmen all day like I did years ago. Bottom line is I wish people would chill out and stop calling this RISE "literally the worse update ever". Yes, change is difficult. But You should be happy the devs are STILL willing to change anything in this game to begin with instead of letting it wither away uneventfully.
TL:DR there is none, read the post dammit.
Now Nextrash has proven me a liar.
People care about damage because of the nature of the game. In a pure PvE game, the same content is constant and stale. However, players are not constant, which is why you see see people compete in damage, because it is a dynamic part of the game. Not to mention, the main focus of the game has been around skill for many years, but these changes to additional damage simply widen the stat gap between +10s and +15s, and place a larger emphasis on gear rather than own merit. Before it was about 10-11% damage difference in additional damage, and now being 100%+.
So, your main point being: Additional damage changes do not matter because everyone benefits from the boss dying faster.
Which I respond with: Additional damage changes ruin the dynamic and skill oriented portion of the game that retains its players even when the boss pve is stale. With a higher emphasis on stats and rng to reach the end-game gear, the game is simply throwing away its identity as a skill focused game and becoming one that simply emphasizes stats.
Therefore, I agree with your point that everyone benefits from other party members having better stats. However, I do not agree that point is enough to justify the changes, and that my point on additional damage ruining the dynamic portion of the game is why people do not like these changes.
*Inhales*
I would argue that in the past it was more "pay for convenience" because with tokens in the beginning paying money for the game meant having an edge over other players because you could run limited boats more often than other players. But this extended to EVERYONE since people that paid money for this convenience could host more often or even pay for people that ran out of tokens. Later they would do away with the token concept allowing all players to run the game an indefinite amount of times, however also introducing a higher enhancement rank that while made gameplay much more fluid (the attack speed gains) but did not break the damage system.
Again the game would change with the introduction of daily limit raids that did make a bit of a gap between non-paying and paying players because of the included introduction of VIP status. Again though, this benefited the overall community because the same high-geared characters could run multiple times for people that had multiple characters they wanted to gear. Moving closer to the present, we had the enhancement buff update that drastically changed the damage game that uneasily made a distant between non-pay and paying players again. This was then followed by the Season 2 update that while it tired to change the standard level by level dungeon crawl, began to severely hide gear behind luck by making the most sought after gear hidden behind once a day raids. These two updates created the beginnings of the concerns we have today but were mitigated by later updates like 1) the character revamps that increased the overall base effectiveness of characters and their skills and 2) the damage formula revamp that tried to close the gap between non stat-capped characters and stat-capped characters.
The game would change again with the introduction of level 90 gear that no longer required a heavy amount of investment or luck into the game to break into the end-game scene since blue/purple level 90 gear allowed for a transition into the new higher stat-capped content. The only concern though was that the actual end-game was still very difficult to get because it continued to rely on RNG to obtain rare mats. This was then mitigated again by the introduction of the Seal shop update, that first did away with the random OJ box and changed it to the boss specific boxes. That was later changed to the boss & item specific boxes (i.e. having a box that gives only an OJ regina wep feather, nothing else). This was a TREMENDOUS update that actually REWARDED hard work and persistent gameplay and for the first time bypassed a large RNG aspect of the game and made it available to EVERYONE.
What am I trying to say about these past updates? Basically the past updates and cash system in the game were more based on convenience. When the later updates would begin to creep towards a true P2W situation they mitigated it with subsequent buffers like the said damage formula change.
Now lets take a look at RISE...
Firstly, if you take away the the whole damage formula change and the enhancement ranks/rates, RISE has an amazing amount of QoL changes and arguably things that lessen the RNG barrier (enchant scroll scraps for instance). But the problem lies when you take into the account of the enhancement and damage changes. Firstly it definitely made it easier to get to +10 in the game but there still lies the risk of blowing up your weapon at +9 and beyond. The thing that makes this more P2W rather than pay for convenience is the introduction of the enhancement rune fragments. Netting 4 of these from 4 failed enhancement runes gives you a guaranteed +1 coupon. Personally I love this because it frustrated me to no end when you blew over 8+ runes going from +8-+9. The problem though is that these cannot be sold on the MP for everyone to access, but more importantly allows you to BYPASS portions of the RNG itself that are only available to paying players (because its essentially $15.6 per coupon).
Now lets take a look at the new enhancement rank changes, which ties in to the damage formula changes. The new enhancement ranks increases the added additional damage SEVERELY (300 add dmg pre-rise to 3000 add dmg post-rise for +15 level 90 weapons). For players like me who were fortunate enough to get a +15 level 90 weapon noticed a remarkable increase in damage. However along with this damage increases, the boss HP was also increased (and also no longer scale) to compensate. For characters like mine that have high enhanced weapons, this made little difference but to people that only had +10s or even +15 level 80 weapons (which did not get the substantial add dmg increase) the overall effectiveness of their characters decreased. This is just horrible because these same characters that could stat-cap the bosses in the past and could be on par with level 90 weapons were essentially PUNISHED. This forces them to enter the already gruelling RNG game once again (because also you can't double boom things anymore), not out of the pursuit to better their characters for fun, but because it is now a requirement because the only meaningful way to deal damage to bosses in raids is to stack additional damage that can ONLY be achieved through enhancement ranks. This coupled with the new +16-+20 ranks (which at +20 will give 12500 add damage) severely widens the gap between the players willing to shell out the money for this game and those that are not, which has NEVER been seen before in this magnitude in the past (arguably ever in the history of this game).
But hold on, why should we worry if we have some of these whales to pretty much carry everything for us? The game will continue on because they will carry and allow people to get better gear.
Admirable thought and also a very valid point. But I would argue that 1) the whales that help keep this game afloat were slapped in the face this update and 2) people will get tired of being carried in a game that is increasingly hiding behind RNG and luck (or now cash paying as well), so what is the point of them staying? The whales were penalized because the runes and coupons still only go up to +10 so essentially it is WAY more difficult to get to +15 let alone +16 or higher especially now that you can't revive your weapon for a second chance to boom it. Speaking as a whale myself, the main reason I shell out cash (aside from my poor financial choices) is to help hit that true end-game. Causal players will find less enjoyment in the game because frankly it gets pretty old for someone to carry you through everything, especially if you played WAY better than them but in the end your skill is meaningless in front of an average player like me that can steamroll through things based on my stats alone, made worse by the fact that this game was advertised to be BASED ON SKILL (hell that's why we stacked attack speed before, to play more aggressively with more fluidity).
TL;DR version: This game was more "pay for convenience" rather than P2W, but now the new update has widen the gap between paying and non-paying customers because of the increase in additional damage. We should all be worried because casual players will get bored of the game fast and paying customers will be punished to the point of leaving, and I don't know about everyone else but I would definitely be sad with this game closing because to me there is no other game like it.
P.S. I'm like 1000% sure that my timeline of the updates is horribly inaccurate so uh sorry about that...
*Exhales*
*Rolls on the floor and passes out wheezing*
Nice post, but gear has become more than ever the deciding factor as to who gets the most rewards and who does top damage. Skill is of moderate value, gear is almost everything. You can see that clearly in the Additional Damage formula and the fact that it's been crushed to nothing for sub-90 gear. Again, you can see it however you like, but the numbers don't lie, how rewards are given don't lie, and the fact is this: a player with lots of cash to blow will get a better return and better results with less skill than a skilled player who learns a character will get with less gear.
Do you know that skill is subjective? Because according to your way of thinking everyone is noob who prefers different games than Vindi at the moment.
If you base this on how unforgiving a game is then i have to tell you something. Tera for example is more unforgiving in terms of raids than Vindi ever was. You can hardly solo or can't solo raids at all because most of them require teamwork and focus on what you're doing and quick reaction according to what you have practiced. One minor failure and you wipe the whole party and you can't avoid it with trans or other skills.
You can learn everything you want but you would be surprised how different things are that share something in common and vice versa. You press the same keys that you press in Vindi, it's just the animations, character skills and mechanics that are different but it doesn't make anything more skill demanding than the other in general. For example you won't learn real cooking skills just because you know how to put some materials together in a game. There's no universal skill for everything. That's not how it works. You can still perform badly in other games after Vindi if you're new to that game. Learned boss patterns here won't help you in beating other enemies in other games. Not to mention PvP that's a bit more complicated but it's still far from giving you skills that you can utilize anywhere else because they are simply different. You have to learn everything respectively.
Games like chess require more focus and reaction than Vindi does. (the olympic kind of chess) But with a biased mindset you won't understand. (i'm not saying this in a satirical way)
On topic:
My thought about it is that it's gonna milk the whales (or how you call them) even more because now runes are worth their money. That's not implicitly bad but at least you know their true intentions.
-Now that's a post! I'd like to continue on some of your points that I'm paraphrasing here, 'it gets pretty old for someone to carry you through everything, especially if you played WAY better than them but skill is meaningless in front of an average player that can steamroll through things based on stats alone'.
With the S3 boss HP buff due to group size changes, +10's are notably less effective, which isn't the worst thing in the world by itself, however all my fancy scrolls, max Bal, stacking AS / Crit, etc. are now basically pointless when it comes to doing damage compared to Add. Dmg.
That said, I'm more worried about new players and how they will experience these changes since they'll notice that they are doing minimal damage during the end game battles. I'd imagine some will feel useless and just stop playing, others will just get lazy because they end up being carried through everything, and for those that want to progress I'd guess their experience will be something like:
How do can I be more useful (do more damage)?
->Get highly enhanced gear.
How do I do that?
->Get extremely lucky or open the bank vaults and spend on runes (and if they realize what the odds are, they probably won't be too enthusiastic to do so).
So if they don't want to spend ,they are basically stuck waiting for events that give runes as prizes which can be few and far between (especially for the quantity you need at higher levels), creating big gaps of waiting at which point they'll probably just stop playing. Not to mention at this point they are basically playing the Enhancement system more than the game, and it's a battle you lose (a lot).
-Btw, anyone know how the update is going over in Korea / China?
While you think this is a hypothetical "what if", I and many others on West have seen tons of people who pay and get geared overnight, and then proceed to be UTTER garbage at the game. It's not a small minority. Someone with crap gear who instantly/rapidly becomes endgame geared is not magically gaining skill and playing their character optimally. Now, money spent does NOT equal lack of skill, in fact if someone paid to win and is good at the game then I have nothing to complain or say anything about. Time spent playing the game does not equal skill at character either.
Your attitude makes me thing you are one of those people who maxed out Attack Limit in a week, bought D/R/E silver bracelets and put superior gems in them, rolled 4* +12 armor max synthesis, bought a +15 90, and then went into Neamhain and was permadead before 6bars.
As already said, for as much skill could have mattered before, now it is something that isn't required to make us of. The additional dmg system must be nerfed and/or changed. If the objective is to give a reason for players to invest more time into upgrading, make a new system to do so.
The RNG enhance system which rewards out of luck and money isn't something that most played modern games are successful for.
Vindictus needs a proper way to proceed and make progression out of time and effort put into the game without having to farm a loot that drops for 1-2% chances.
If the developers actually haven't given up on the game, and want to make it have more success they HAVE to listen feedbacks coming from old players. (I'm talking to you too DOL)
My thoughts on additional damage changes are simple : why did you bother to break something that was already working fine ? Oh and by the way, the multiplier is still the same (6.25), thus why you now deal insane amount of damage.. going from 300 to 3000 additional damage for +15 is a pretty clear obvious change.
Yes we deal more damage actually, even casting armors bonus aside, I do not know if we actually got the 7.7m HP s3 raids or if we got them with the recent -25% HP that Korea recently got.. but anyway, you have to mind HP doesn't scale anymore that's why clear time is much lower actually, think with scalling, solo HP was like 40-45% of a full-party value so it's normal that with a certain additional damage value you actually double your clear time.
What bothers me is how broken each enhancement lvl now are.. I used to outdamage some +15 players with my +12, or Hell even with my +10 purple Scythe actually damn, but now I would probably not stand a chance at all, since the difference between +10 and +15 is literally more than 100%.. so yeah, rewarding skill rather than gear was what made the charm of raiding actually.
And for people like WhiteYukii, if we shouldn't care or accept the normal fact that a +15 outdamages a +10, then remove this damage ranking reward at once. After all, it's a co-op game right ? So why do we have damage ranking ? We shouldn't care since it's a party... may you actually give additional cores if the party isn't maxed.. like 3 players raid = 1 extra core, duo = 2 cores, solo = 3 cores. This is where you will see who's a tryhard (going full solo just for the sake of getting more cores) or who actually wants to play with friends/other player and doesn't care about the amount of cores.
Either you let the additional damage remaining as such, but remove those ungrateful rankings bs.
Or simply revert back to old additional damage, which was already working more than fine.
Strictly looking at how Additional Damage affects game-play, I agree that additional damage completely overshadows all other stats now. When I was struggling against Kraken, simply upgrading my +3 Nighthawk Staff to a +8 allowed me to crush it due to the Additional Damage. This makes enchant scrolls, power infusions, etc. less relevant and puts a lot more emphasis into enhancing.
These topics wouldn't get derailed if people kept their arrogant opinions for themselves and stopped comparing this game to other games because first it has nothing to do with this forum section, second it's like comparing people by their skin colors. You don't go into details because that would become off-topic then why don't you stop comparing them in a few sentences and start talking about Vindi only?
yeah what you're saying would make sense in any other game except vindictus. Unfortunately, the whole point of this thread comes from the idea that enhancement levels have become much more important in progression, and the enhancement system itself has not been remedied to accomodate that. Hence, the problem with AD being the NEW big stat.
If your idea of being a "strong" player has anything to do with enhancement levels, I'm sorry to say that there is no skill when it comes to that. One player can one-shot a weapon to 15 or (unrealistically) 20, while the rest of the playerbase may spend years and years working for the AD those enhancement levels have to offer and never come close. No amount of planning or money management can ever assure you(emphasis on assure) the amount of AD you wish to attain. Clicking on the enhance button and leaving your fate to RNG Jesus isn't a skill.
on topic: