=== Overview ===
1. Vanquisher's Charm - Post-Rise Vanquisher will have a fixed duration and a cooldown. Due to the fixed duration, it will be unable to fully charge up Spirit's Domain. Vanquisher has a 1 second delay upon first holding down the skill so you are only getting 9s duration rather than the 10s. Spirit's Domain requires the full 10s to reach final stage and won't be achievable with Vanquisher in this state thus making it very difficult to fully utilize Spirit's Domain to its full potential. If Spirit's Domain needs to be nerfed, I recommend a direct nerf to that skill rather than penalizing Vanquisher. When Kanna got revamped, Vanquisher was made to be obsolete. While I agree this helps put Vanquisher back into the picture, the approach being made with it doesn't work out. (Note that these thoughts are what is being perceived before the patch hits)
2. Nightghost Guide - While the idea to boost duration of kishin seems good, it makes keeping this skill up quite a task in itself and makes it a chore to grind as a kanna. With what we currently know, Nightghost doesn't proc enough to meet the cooldown time (1 minute) in general. Instead of associating Nightghost with Kishin, I'd keep it separate, as its own thing, as it was Pre-Rise.
3. Kishin Shoukan - The new changes to Kishin that combat Kishin muling are alright. I can see why Nexon is wanting to prevent it. It is not healthy for the game. But neither is the new way to obtain Kishin. If you're going to "reduce the gap in efficiency between classes" then that means solving the problem through equality, such as being forced to use Wild Totems to increase mob spawn. If Kishin did not increase the mob spawn in the first place, this skill would not be need to be seeing nerf after nerf.
=== Thoughts on the "Kishin" Problem ===
When the Fury Totem was introduced, it is a step in the right direction to improving the issue. It allowed a way to increase spawn for a while without needing a Kanna mule. It wasn't the best or too great, but it was a way to get it nonetheless. I still believe this is and can "not" be the solution, but part of the solution if done right. Now, to make a reasonable solution, you have to look at what's causing the problem to begin with. That being;
1. Many maps in the game lack mob density.
2. The respawn timer is quite long and makes grinding for long periods of time very monotonous and without kishin, you have to grind for way longer periods of time than others.
However there is also another side of the problem, Being;
1. Possible strain on the server itself from all of the kishined maps.
2. The "best" maps generate a very high demand due to how great their exp/meso rates are when kishined.
=== The Reboot Side of the "Kishin" Problem ===
Reboot relies on the above to progress at a decent pace, decent pace being reasonably fast for the average player who has a busy life. Especially when they're funded to end game. Looking at the price of cubes, average tier up rates, cost to roll certain potentials (3L att/stat, 2L att/ied, 2L att/boss, etc), GMS specific starforce costs vs the hourly meso rates.
- Cost of 6 Red cubes = 72 mil
- Cost of 6 Black cubes = 132 mil
- Average cost to tier an equip up to legendary = 1+ bil
- Costs to reroll an equip to a certain potential = Anywhere from 1+ bil to 50+ bil
- Average cost to attempt one star at 15 stars = 100+ mil per attempt with safeguard which easily adds up to 1+ bil very quickly while you're at the mercy of RNG.
Now looking at the current hourly rates the average meso farmer makes while meso farming in Arcana which ranges from 400 mil to 800 mil an hour, average. Some can make as high as 1 bil per hour with Legion Meso buffs and Wealth Acquisition Potions. Keep in mind this is Pre-Rise kishin rates, before nerf.
Another thing we must take into account is the fact as your equips get more "perfected", the more they cost to achieve any sort of upgrades. You can easily spend 200 bil on your character trying to upgrade, and 200 bil meso in actual hours spent is 200 hours if you're making 1 bil an hour. All of these combined result in a wicked time sink that takes hundreds of hours to achieve with the sheer amount of meso farming that needs to be done to reach it. In order to combat this problem, there are two viable solutions;
1. Halve the overall cost of all of these things in Reboot (Starforce costs should be halved for both Reboot and Non-Reboot, the price is disgustingly high, even in current Non-Reboot where 1 bil costs $10). Which would ease the time sink quite a bit and make meso farming less of a second job.
2. Make Wild Totems more accessible and obtainable by further lowering the price and upping the quantity in RP shop as well as adding it to something like the Maple Tour shop. Currently they cost 1800 RP, even Post-Rise nerf to price, it still takes exactly 2 days to get one totem. Note that this problem also stems into Non-Reboot.
=== The Non-Reboot Side of the "Kishin" Problem ===
The Non-Reboot side of the "Kishin" problem is not as much of a "meso problem" like with Reboot. With the Frenzy Totem in the picture, it is difficult to compete with players who have a Frenzy Totem because it's insanely difficult to obtain. For example, if they're racing to 275, you cannot compete with them because Frenzy is OP. There is simply no contest.
Its ability to be placed on a map and the owner can up and leave while its effect remains. This allows them to sell Frenzy service where players go to their map and cast Frenzy in exchange for meso, basically generating a market for this. And as the totem gets more and more rare, as fewer people who have it that offer Frenzy service, the price to buy one cast of Frenzy off of someone only skyrockets. Not only do they have superior exp rates, but also access to a means of endless amounts of meso just for casting their totem for someone else. They can have 100% uptime.
I get they bought it with real money, and that's just what Non-Reboot contains, but I do believe an alternative to decrease that P2W item gap are basically required when there is something that offers such a crazy advantage. As result, many Non-Reboot players have resorted to making Kishin mules to kishin themselves with, which helped create this problem to begin with. Now, with the Kishin nerf, it further widens this gap of advantage for those who have Frenzy totem. This is not a very healthy environment for Non-Reboot. (Forgive me if I left anything out, I main Reboot but I care for the health of both servers)
This is why I believe Wild Totem should be reworked to lessen this gap that both servers struggle with. It doesn't have to completely erase this gap, simply lessening it is a step in the right direction.
Comments
Maple's Design has clearly moved towards an endlessly kill mobs gameplay. The spawn rate doesn't really reflect that in a lot of areas.
The maps as a whole need to be redesigned to work better for this and for party play, which plenty of people seem to want, but can't enjoy.
Maplestory has a chance to really shake off the decade of legacy content and outdated mechanics given the recent high success in Korea.
If Nexon will actually increase the attention they pay to GMS and place developers who understand both KMS and GMS in charge of our content, they could make both regions widely successful.
The general response when I ask people about the game is they agree with the general direction the game is going, but that GMS keeps going backwards constantly because the developers don't understand the content they're balancing.
I think they're slowly giving KMS this new breath of fresh air, what with changes to elite mobs (champions), map reworks and new arcane river areas.
However GMS deserves this fresh air too, not just blindly nerfing/buffing Non-KMS content without looking into the actual meta behind it.
First during self testing, the proc rate of Night Ghost guide while farming was ~2-3 a min depending on skill use - Most of the procs being on Emobs (Without bubble).
which is unsustainable for a Kanna farmer. The reason for the massively low proc rate is because it 1 shots, If I did not 1 shot it can proc Night ghost Guide, which is the MASSIVE problem with the change.
What makes it massive, counter intuitive, and makes it go against normal gameplay? - it hard guts 1-shotting, the goal of everyone in the game.
When I used things like having bubble (Kanna Hyper) on, which is really hard to 1 shot, and just let it have a chance to proc I would be able to sustain Kish.
But it is incredibly un-intuitive to wait to attack things
The Method of using Exorcist charm for the FMA also faces a similar problem, Cause while it leaves a poison cloud that can proc Night ghost guide, you would first have to let the poison latch on and proc. Again this is un-intuitive to natural game design of Kill things as fast as possible since you could easily cast the skill again and kill the mobs before the poison had a chance to proc.
What does this change NOT do? Remove/nerf kish mules. Simply having your kish mule take up a platform with bubble on would be enough to sustain Kish.... which means the change literally only hurt Kanna mains and did nothing to 2-pc problem (Just got to make sure bubble is on)
While I understand they want to increase player engagement and keep people coming back, we're not the KMS community. A vast majority of players on GMS still consider 200 an achievement and 220 an even greater one. Getting max Arcane Force takes a full year of daily engagement already, and with endgame maps needing 880+ AF on both your main character AND a Kanna mule (that you essentially have to build from the ground up as a second main account just to be able to reach the point of efficiently training to 275), there's absolutely no shortage of actual player retention for the hardcores.
If they simply made spawn rate increasing effects more accessible to EVERY class in a way that's not totems, or reworking totems to be unlimited and more easily accessible, or making it a link skill, or making it a V Node like Holy Symbol, etc, then the need to make Kishin mules would immediately evaporate and half of the characters logged on would disappear. Servers would become much more stable without having so many characters online all the time (ESPECIALLY Reboot), and they wouldn't have to struggle and fight with the various non-KMS code to fix spawn rates while creating unforseen glitches and bugs everywhere else. The best option is to give it the Holy Symbol treatment and make it accessible for everyone, not nerf it into the ground and hurt literally every other class that's NOT a Kanna. That's so counterintuitive and so unbelievably backwards when they've fixed 2PC meta in the past with Decent Holy Symbol as a line on gear, Decent Holy Symbol as a V Node...
The problem with nightghost is that it must actually hit an enemy to increase the duration of kishin, and nightghost does not activate unless there are monsters in range.
If you are meso farming you want to full clear the map. But if you full clear the map, nightghost does not have time to hit. So, it is difficult to keep kishin up if you are fully clearing the map.
If shikigami or exorcist does not kill quickly, then nightghost has a change to hit. Which increases the duration of kishin.
So kannas are not punished for killing mobs quickly? What is nexon thinking.
Hackers aren't the ones making Kishin mules? What are you even going on about?
Just casting circle of suppression and Kishin, it's impossible to keep up if your main is also killing stuff. Without your main it's a gamble, but you would have to have a lot of mobs in range of circle to have it last longer before the CD is up again.
All in all they managed to make Kishin a half minute cast for your main. I can easily see people do 3 Pc but that's just not worth it to me. It was already tedious to recast it every 2 minutes and now some crazy people are going to cast it every 30 seconds.
Arcana was 600 mil clean per hr, and someone tested that now it is about 460mil clean. I really don’t think the 1 bil/hr before was OP. I saw a youtube vid of someone 22 starring their dreamy belt, and they were really lucky it didn’t boom and got to 22. It still took them 22bil, and that is a very cheap and lucky case. That’s 22 hours of farming for one equip. There are like 20 equips. So 1bil/hr is tolerable and not OP.
There’s a certain point where progression and funding rates become so slow that maybe it’s not worth it anymore to play. Before the patch, I just got my kanna to lachelein and made about 400mil/hr clean. It took a lot of hours to tier accessories to legendary and then get the meso and drop rate lines + stat. Now with this patch, kishin feels too clunky to use. It’s a turret skill but you can only recast it after a minute. That means wherever you are after the minute, you have to run over again. The resummon time with ghost yaksha boss and kishin might not overlap, so now you have to run back and forth a lot resummoning things. It’s awful to play. You also are painfully aware of when kishin has turned off. The mobs just stop spawning for 2 seconds.
I would usually work with whatever nexon is throwing at us, but this time I’m not okay with their change of slowing progression needlessly. I don’t want to farm mindlessly more for this game at any moment they feel like changing things. That really does feel like a cheap move for the company to simply cut income rates by 20% and you just have to accept that you have to farm even more hours to progress.
I think for now I won’t work on my kanna anymore. I wanted to gear up to try lotus while also saving some meso for DMT, but now I think I will just aim for midgame. Just solo lotus/damien and then be done. I was looking forward to gearing more and partying for lucid and beyond, but it’s not worth it to me to have to farm more just because nexon decides that. In the future the company might even just take away respawn increases entirely. They’ve never increased the default spawn of the monsters in the maps, which would solve everything. They clearly want to waste your time.
RMT would be less common if Frenzies were more common or even obtainable. By removing Frenzy from their rotations, they made Philo and Marvel less desirable. There was no new P2W alternative Nexon was trying to promote in response to Frenzy removal. So they kind kind of screwed themselves and us. And also, the further nerfs made to Kishin isn't promoting Frenzy since those are gone. The only people are those who have Frenzies already and are selling service or reselling at quadruple the value.
Also since people are thinking Decent Kishin and Link Skill are the solution to this mess, do you care to describe the effects compared to +50% density -50% time we know? Do you care to talk about its levels for it's Link Skill proposal? Will the actual demons be summoned so we can attack with it too? What will happen to original Kishin?
Even at the current reduced rates, I think most people would be okay to simply have a far more accessible but nerfed version of Kishin. This rate is okay, just make it 100% uptime and easily accessible so people have no reason to make second accounts and clog the servers with so many people online and all of this trouble will go away entirely.
If we wanted to propose what would happen to current Kishin with its ability stripped... well, it got buffed so it does a lot more damage now, so it would simply be another tool, like Yaksha, for Kannas to use to map clear. The cooldown could be removed from it because the only reason it HAS one is the spawn rate increase effect, which would be pointless if it was on a link skill, in this case. Considering Kanna only has a max level of 2, you could either go with a weaker version of the spawn rate increase effect on level 1, then increase it to the current ingame level at level 2, or you could simply have the Kishin half of Kanna's link skill be tied to its level 2. Just like Mercedes' link, you can bind it to a key and use the teleport, so it would simply work that way for Kanna's as well.
The fix is unbelievably simple to make. Nexon just has to take notice and actually make the effort to give us just this one bone for a change. Player retention would be higher if they stopped scaring all of the seasonal/new players away with gameplay design that should've died back in 2006.
EDIT: The link skill idea does make the most sense, now that I think about it, because Kanna link is essentially mandatory for literally every single person playing the game anyways because it's a best in slot link (damage %). Everyone has it and everyone's going to go for it anyways, so it would be perfect accessibility for everyone, completely deleting any need for a second computer entirely. The ONLY people who might even fathom it are people who are crazy enough to build a Bishop or a Beast Tamer to either follow them around (extreme tryhard that no one does anyways) or to sit in party for the passive (not worth because then the BT could leech if attempting to use this strategy in Arcane River). No one's crazy enough to do that, and Kanna's the only actual problem with multiple accounts.
I feel forced to make a Arcana Kanna farmer in order to stay efficient. Which is fine by me since Kanna is undisputed King now. Grats Nexon you killed the 2 PC meta, but all you made people do is switch to Kanna.
i agree, once i reached 250 i stopped trying to lv up, the slowness of the process, lacking kishin, not having time to spend 2hrs straight of a fury, makes me not want to keep lvlinng up. They really need to do something to fix this issue or else a lot of ppl will start quitting once they reach lv 250
i tested twice and got 460 once and 490 another, its annoying, requires more skill and the rewards are less. WTF is this game design nexon, it should be that the more you work, the more rewards you get, not the other way around
no its not okay, dont just say that, we were fine before, nexon should just either remove kishin and increase all maps spawn toi kishin lvs, make a kishin link, make a kishin ode, w.e, intead of this mess.
Sorry, what about my post are you not agreeing with? You basically just agreed with my point that spawn rate increasers should be more easily accessible through a link or a V Node. What about my point was wrong?
Also, if they increase spawn rates across the map, then Frenzy becomes even stronger because it has a higher rate to work off of, making an even LARGER gap between the haves and have-nots. The real fix is to make it more accessible to everyone.
You obviously DON'T go to a magnitude of different maps. Try getting off the primary or most common training maps. I have reported COUNTLESS "bots" using kanna mules over just the past 2 weeks. Kanna characters doing impossible teleporting, never turning around and attacking the other way, not taking any damage, floating above the ground, among other things. They seem to try and mix up the maps they go to as well, My last run in, yesterday, was in Cadena starting maps but before that they were all over orange mushrooms. I would assume that they're not as prevalent in Arcane maps for 2 reasons. Higher concentration of other players so a higher risk of exposure and, they're little freebie pet Ram expires so they can't loot mesos and items quite a fast.