lumix345

MisterWhiskers wrote: »

pls don't use official term;that's reserved for stuff hosted/managed by the company

Well seeing as how he is the only one that is trying to organize a large scale Vindictus Community Halloween party on the East Server that happens pretty much annually and generally receives positive reception, I think I'm gonna consider it the "Official" Vindictus Halloween Party.

Also the fact that Saygo and the Vindictus Team backs this up as well as potentially being sponsors to some of the rewards makes this as close to "Official" as you can get, save working for the actual Vindictus Team

Strudul wrote: »

lumix345 wrote: »

I would imagine any character would benefit from high speed

Lann doesn't

High speed means sacrificing bal and crit. All Lann's damage comes from crit, so without it you do no damage and can't glide. You are also constantly out of stamina unless you play super passive, but then all that speed is wasted.

I'll agree Lann has a pretty tough curve when it comes to gearing because of how directly crit plays into his game play, but regardless he definitely does benefit from high speed because more speed = more chances to crit which means more opportunities to gliding fury.

I know he was definitely nerfed damage wise even before RISE, but I would still imagine that at least sword lanns still gets the wind-step buff along with his max of 65% to crit, so even if he has issues criting, dodging bosses attacks at the right time will allow you to crit pretty effectively albeit at sacrificing a safer gameplay.

As for spears; well yeah I have no idea how this turned out for spear lanns so I hope it didnt turn out that poorly.

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*

As a holder of a +15 90 weapon, it really worries me that I can play like absolute crap compared to other more highly skilled players and still do like 50% dps cause of the increased additional dmg.

Its great that they made leveling much more streamlined and gave new players a way to break into the end game with +10 enchanted purp gear and a free OJ Wep Feather as a lvl 90 gift, but what is the point for them to stay afterwards since the only way to do damage meaningfully now is to stack AD? Pretty much the only way to do that is play the RNG game, but with RISE getting high enhanced items got SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult because you can't double boom and you can only +13 once you have a FULL OJ item, all along side the reduced enhancement chances and the bug (or lie?) where rare items are supposed to have increased drop rate but aren't dropping.

The additional damage increase could have been nice if they had been a little more conservative about increasing its value but at this rate new players are just gonna join, steamroll through story, get frustrated by the end-game and the gap between their chars and deck-out chars and then quit without spending a dime. Hell, this update also slapped the faces of veteran players because 1) Reduced the enhancement rates AND prevented double booms that while may have resulted in rage quitting was one of the main reasons why people could get high enhancements in the first place, but more importantly 2) high enhanced lvl 80 weps got DRASTICALLY nerfed compared to lvl 90 weps, again (surprise, surprise) due to the new AD increase.

If the developers thought this game could continue surviving by either 1) making the true end game more unobtainable so that "Whales" will fork out more money to get it, or 2) make the game much more accessible to new/casual players so that they would have more people spending money on the game, then they definitely missed their mark with AD. How the the hell are you suppose to even get anybody to spend money on this game and keep it afloat when they are basically punishing everybody whether they be new players or old players?!

P.S. this rant has been brought to you by a biased "Whale" by the way

I may be misunderstanding your point again, but in-response to what I believe you are saying:

For your Eochaid and Zecallion points, yes Zecallion gives you ample amounts of CA opportunities so I believe you in saying that CA has an edge over other strategies when trying to DPS in zecallion as a Fiona. But in that regard that does not really help your point in saying that CA trumps everything because you can focus on using it mainly in any situation and still come out on top, because, well that just isn't true. Eochaid you can easily spam a lot of CA attacks especially in his purple form, but there is also the option to focal point spam which arguably has more openings to use on Eochaid. At that point, it is harder to argue that "CA > everything (mostly)" because this situation between Eochaid and Zecallion just shows that it is merely situational and tactics that have an advantage in one raid, falls short in others.

If you are saying that CA in comparison to other character's abilities/strategies when it comes to damage/gaining SP/feasibility has an unbalanced advantage, then yes I would definitely agree with you. This has never been more evident after the update that allowed Fiona to non-perfect guard smash attacks, which made the game incredibly easy (boring maybe?) for some Fiona players. I mean a strict adherence to CAing constantly is essentially what allowed me to roll through Ein Lacher quickly compared to other classes (at least people trying to aim for Gold like me).

But to say that CA trumps everything doesn't really explain why most of the time I see high level Fiona players (players that pretty much solo Neam for example) spam focal point like crazy while elegantly mixing in CA+Amaranth, Shield Bash + Amaranth, and Parry buffs.

I do not disagree with your point that CAing is an incredibly easy way to play safe/gain SP/and do a substantial amount of damage, but that is not what makes Fiona broken IMO. What makes Fiona broken isn't that her CAing is too powerful, but that she has incredible suvivability. Take for example Thor's electric charge, in the past it presented characters with problems because in his stimpack mode it followed the character more than on his slower mode. If you had a dodge mechanic that was the main survivability you have to dodge the whole animation to get out of the way of the attack, which leaves less room for attacking. But to a Fiona, the WHOLE animation is considered one hit, as in you can block the initial tap and while he is still running at you dish in DPS in CA's or Amaranths.

Saying that Fiona is broken merely because CAing does a lot of damage and gains a lot of SP, is something I do not agree with because CAing is no longer the main way to achieve high levels of DPS as a Fiona, and while it does have an impressive SP gain, I would argue Twinsword Vella has an equal, if not more impressive SP gain strategy compared to Fiona since she literally has an active skill that gives her a bar of SP at max blade heart, and it has a miniscule CD time so she could essentially have full SP near the beginning of a raid.

TL:DR version: 1) Yes I agree sword Fiona is broken, but that is due to her survivability to damage relation rather than the CA damage that she does and the amount of SP gain she gets from it. 2) Focusing mainly on CAing is not the highest form of DPS for a Sword Fiona, her strategies are more situational now as with many characters.