~ To start, I would remove the whole player vs player aspect entirely, and just let it be about testing your own personal record.
~ The blessings aspect is great, I would expand on this further and as each week goes on, you can get more and more crazy strong! I would also introduce more fun effects with this. Get creative and fun with it!
I would have it where you can have 4 effects each week, and instead of resetting the blessings each week, you keep those blessings and the next week you can have 4 more blessings!
- And make the blessing more potent than they are now too, this way there is very notice-able difference in power each week, and an extreme difference in power between week 1 and the final week of Ride or Die!
~ The bosses I would change to be you have all 5 bosses immediately and can fight them whenever you want and in whatever order.
- The highest scores save and persist each week!
~ Each boss fight I would make it where the blessing choices are separate for each boss.
- (This is for the player can more easily customize their experience to help them against that specific boss based on player preference and job.)
- With the new blessing system where you keep accumulating power each week, you would become stronger and/or have effects to make the fight easier.
So you can go for a higher score on the bosses and have a constant progression of an easier time with the boss fights to make the fights more fun and less repetitive feeling, but also can hit better rewards as well by increasing your score with further weeks!
~ Boss fight timers increase to 30:00 minutes maximum.
~ Set a damage minimum and maximum line damage to 10,000 which removes most outside stats from being a factor, also set attack speed to maximum, now players don't need to worry about buffing up before the fights. The focus would be about player skill and your choice of blessings and accumulation of blessings each week - most progression on equipment and matrixes is removed by doing this as well (outside of activating nodes and other effects), allowing all players to partake in the event equally!
- Boss HP will be tuned around dealing this amount of line damage. (Decide if you want Origin and Ascent skills to have their own higher line damage or not.)
- You can increase this 10,000 set damage further with final damage giving effects from the blessings, if you took any of these. This would be the only way to further enhance the line damage that you deal.
- [NOTE: That this damage should be before enemy defense applies, actual line damage would be based on current ignore enemy defense vs the boss monster's defense value.]
~ And finally the rewards overall I think need to be improved at this point. They were good when the event was first introduced, but we need more and/or better rewards than what we currently get from Ride or Die going forward.
I think doing Ride or Die this way should better live out the premise of Ride or Die which is to challenge the player, especially by the first week, but remove the week-to-week chore aspect with more fun gameplay of "let's see how crazy strong you can become and what crazy new effect the blessings offer me" with every new passing week!
And by setting everyone's damage equally, outside of job differences, you can have the first week experience be about this really hard challenge to try to get through where most players probably will die out before the timer runs out, while the others will barely clear in time.
As the weeks go on and you get more blessings and stronger blessings, the fights get easier and/or faster, causing the players to die less and clear the boss faster, get a higher score, and better rewards each week by improving each boss' score every week.
