I quite like the new familiar system, but it's far from perfect. The initially high drop rate of Jr Boogie made getting end-game familiar potentials too easy, and as a result, the rest of the system is going to waste. Nexon sort of mitigated this by changing the drop rate for familiars to be based on rank, however, not only did this remove another aspect of the revamped system, they forgot to account for mobs in non-KMS areas, and as a result, people began farming Oda Warriors. Lots of things need changes, but I'll start with drop rates.
Familiar Drop Rates
With the change to drop rates from the recent unscheduled maintenance, the entire rank up system died. Nobody is going to spend a month to rank 1 familiar from uncommon to common. The issue is that while two types of familiar cards exist for most monsters, only the highest rank one is in the drop table. This needs to be changed. Monsters should drop both a common rank card and 1 higher rank card, with the common rank cards having a high drop rate, say 10%. This will allow players to reasonably farm their favourite monster to rank up and use and rewards them occasionally with a higher rank drop which offers more points when fusing to rank up. This will make some badges easy to get, but others still require bosses, which should NOT have a common rank card added to the pool, and bosses that only have a common rank card should have their rank increased. Boss familiar drop rates should use something separate to the regular mob drop rates which are based on rank, and instead, all bosses should have a flat rate, perhaps 1/200, which will still give an incentive to buy booster packs but also allow players to farm it themselves. In addition to allowing players to use their favourite familiars and not making the fusing and rank up feature unusable, this also still allows players to reasonably farm their 1 free booster pack per day.
Badges
With these changes to drop rate making a lot of the badges easier to obtain, the effects badges give need to be changed. The effects such as Att%, Magic Att%, and Ignore Def should be on badges that have at least 1 boss familiar. New badge effects might also need to be added and the stats given by badges and, subsequently, the stat caps should be increased so that sets with 2 bosses or more are worth getting. The Exorcism badge, for example, has ONLY boss monsters. People who complete this badge should get something good, perhaps 5% crit damage.
Potential System Changes
Familiar potentials need to be changed to be based more on rank than the current system, and changes should be applied retroactively to existing familiars so those who got in early don't have as huge an advantage over those that didn't. In addition, red familiar cards should be added to the reward shop. There are currently 5 ranks of familiar potentials. They are common, rare, epic, unique, and legendary. The potential lines for each rank should be something like below:
Boss Damage & Ignore Defence
- Common: 5% / 10%
- Rare: 15% / 20%
- Epic: 25% / 30%
- Unique: 35% / 40%
- Legendary: 45% / 50%
Att %, Crit Rate %, Stat %, HP%, Damage%
- Common: 2%
- Rare: 4%
- Epic: 6%
- Unique: 8%
- Legendary: 10%
Crit Damage
- Common: 1%
- Rare: 2%
- Epic: 3%
- Unique: 4%
- Legendary: 5%
Healing (HP, MP, HP∓ self, allies, party)
- Common: Heals ONE of the stats continously for self only
- Rare: Heals ONE of the stats by a small amount for self only (I assume this heals more than the previous, but only Nexon knows)
- Epic: Heals HP & MP by a small amount for self only
- Unique: Heals HP & MP by a small amount for self, allies, or party
- Legendary: Heals HP & MP by a large amount for self, allies, or party
Drop Rate (item, Mesos)
- Common: Increases ONE of the above by a small amount
- Rare: Increases item and meso drop rate by a small amount
- Epic: Increases ONE of the above by a large amount
- Unique: Increases item and meso drop rate by a large amount
- Legendary: Increases item and meso drop rate by a large amount
The rest of the lines nobody really cares amount, lines like 10% chance to inflict stun or poison and lines that change your appearance, flat boosts to HP, MP, DEF, etc.
Edit: Added Damage% in the same pool as Att%
With that, I think I have covered everything. These changes allow people to farm their favourite familiars, use the built-in system to rank it up by fusing, obtain their freebies from the familiar shop, and entices people to buy the booster packs and the red familiar cards to get the better potentials.
Comments
It's apparently coded to be Very similar to this for %s to Tier, it's just the REVEAL POTENTIAL bug causing the problem.
There's probably other %bugs happening but that should hopefully be ironed out with the potential bug fix.
I won't quibble on specific numbers, but will point out one problematic principle: retroactively applying potential changes will break Nexon's promise to keep the skills of familiars registered before the update (drop and heal ones, primarily). Those familiars would need to have their ranks upgraded.
I forgot about that promise. People would be upset, but right now they have nothing, so it would still result in gains when the system comes back online. For familiars like Wolf Underling which is usually in the Marvel Machine reward pool, they could opt to give it a "special" potential rank, similar to in-game equips like the Tower of Oz Emblems. As far as I'm aware, the potential line given to Wolf Underling can't be obtained normally so it would still be a unique familiar
As to why they could still do that it is because of their wording on the Familiar Revamp Details Memo
"if a similar potential is available" doesn't specify "at the base rank for that monster's familiar."
Make everyone's old Mutant Snails Legendary if that's what it takes to keep their large amount party healing.
I think it would be better if cards could drop at all levels except legendary. The vast majority should be common or rare drops with a small percent that drop at epic and a fraction of percent for unique similar to how equips normally work.
Badges: The badge system seems to have been thrown together almost as an afterthought but I really don't want to see too many of these sets stuck behind a boss monster that players can spend a year or more trying to get.
Potentials: Boss Damage and IED are, in my opinion stupidly high, here, or in the system we had. Common and rare shouldn't even have these stats. Epic should be where legendary ends up. More stat is nice, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing.
For healing, I think you didn't mean for Unique familiars to heal a "small amount" since that was already listed for epic. Pushing "Large" to legendary is fine if we can still stack healing.
The rest of the junk lines are there as filler so players need to reroll. We have them everywhere else in the game unfortunately and I don't see Nexon getting rid of a way to make us farm more or spend money.
Old familiars should get a sperate rank that would allow it to keep its potential. However, using a Red Card or ranking up the card would cause it to only be a Rare while fusing it into a card gets you 5 points since you only could get 3 of them.
I'd like Nexon to roll back all familiar data to what was on hand when the servers went down for maintenance. Get rid of all the farmed boogies, oda warriors, and whatever other mass farmed cards people had. Unregistered familiars in players inventories farmed prior to the update should be reduced to common rarity. Compensation could be given in the form of Red Familiar Cards, Suspicious Fauxmiliar Coupons, and Booster/Unique Booster packs.
Some of this has already been mentioned in the thread over at Familiar Feedback and Idea
I really, really like your take, I just think they should be nerfed to the ground and be something you can work on slowly on your way to end game.
Then getting a second line would be part of late game optimization rather than a must-have early game item that doubles your damage
There is a cap of 120% boss damage from familiars, there are probably other stat caps too but unless Nexon tells us what they are we won't find out soon.
For healing, unique rank can heal for the party and allies, while epic can only heal for yourself. Stacking healing is why I put "large" in legendary rank. The junk lines, of course, won't be removed, but since nobody cares about them I decided not to balance the numbers or what rank you can get them at, which is why I omitted them.
I do still think Nexon should be held to their promise of keeping previously registered familiars potential though. That's my biased opinion as someone with 3 Wolf Underlings, and several visual effect familiars.
And I know of people who spent absurd amounts of money and efforts into the familiars after the patch only to have them get rolled back due to the system being bugged. If possible, those people should also be able to keep the potentials they landed on.
First of, The drain a familiar has on the summon gauge. In the patch notes it says that it has to do with the defence of the monster. But i don't know more about it. How much does defence affect the drain? It would be much clearer if the you got shown the drain your current setup had, instead of just showing it's defence.
As for the summon gauge, it's also unclear how much time you have left. The gauge starts at 2000 but that doesn't tell me aniyting if i don't know the drain my familiars have. the only thing it tells me is a rough precentate of the gauge i have left.
And last of all the wording on the potentials of familiars are again unnecessary vague. As an example, the effect that says "restores HP/MP by a small amount" how much is a small amount? It's like a potentials with %attack said "Increase attack by a small/large amount".