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[Announcement] Regarding Kanna's Haku's Blessing
Comments
Re-read the initial post. The original threads linked aren't justifications for the change. They're expressed concerns from the community in regards to Haku's Blessing and the original design of the skill.
Decisions aren't made from a single individual or a select number of people. Decisions are made from both the game teams or publishing team and discussed before a final decision is made. There are many things that goes into the discussion between publishing and game team and community feedback is one of the main ones.
As stated in the main post, we're well aware of what the community wanted and it was already communicated what the community wanted. In the end, I want to make it clear that there is a distinction between us listening and acting on the feedback. We do listen to you guys and the many options brought to the table from the community to address the issue of the design behind Haku's Blessing.
"Make it a self buff, it's that simple!" If we didn't listen to the community, then how would we know of this suggestion? Why is it then that this very suggestion was communicated?
Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Maplestory/comments/6zdnno/the_updates_of_kanna_in_tms_would_affect_other/dmv4jzc/
The fact is that we do listen, but ultimately, that won't always transition into an outcome desired by the community.
I guess a reason people are saying Nexon isn't listening is we don't see any of the discussions; the reasoning and justification behind these changes. What we see is a nerf copy pasted from TMS and we players feel like our complaints just fell on deft ears with the management hoping that eventually people will grow tired, move on and stop complaining. Telling the players that the team will monitor the situation to see what happens and if they might need to recommend further changes does not bring any comfort to the players especially considering how long they might have to wait and how these changes were handled in the first place.
While many will say we would agree Haku is a powerful buff to other mages it is one that even in its current state allows Kanna mains to just barely stay afloat. The last final damage buff was pretty good and helped uplift Kannas. Even then I'd say more could have been done. This nerf would effectively undo that buff or worse depending on the players.
It's bad enough that most people only play Kanna to farm, this just seems like it will cause more of these characters to become Kish mules. I talked about the nerf earlier with one of the players in my guild and their response was a bit disheartening. It boiled down to "Eh I don't care, I only use my Kanna to kish me anyways so it doesn't really affect me." Mostly apathy for this creeping normality.
First they came ...
If they wanted to remove the mage dominating parties for Lucid while keeping Kanna's power relatively the same when soloing, they can just add a passive effect to one of Kanna's skills that gives Kanna +magic attack% or Final damage% to balance the scale.
If the scale ever gets balanced...
They did add a passive 30% final damage buff in the last update to Kanna. This nerf will basically undo that and more. Will need to boost that up to like 60% FD (or just not nerf Kanna).
Translation:
"We hear you, but it's easier for us to just copy-paste the changes made in other servers than actually making reasonable decisions for ourselves"
It's pretty blatantly obvious the reality of the recent "changes" the community have begged you guys not to make. It's not that you & the team decided that it would be better off for the game and its players that the changes go through, but rather decided that it would be EASIER to try and keep all of the versions similar so less stuff breaks in future updates. We've seen old GMS unique changes bring plenty of bugs in newer content, so you're trying to avoid this happening in the future again. Simple.
And just as a reminder of what Arwoo said previously about the re-evaluation of Haku's buff.
Credit goes to Loxiona for testing.
1. soloing is the primary playstyle
2. mages are comparatively unpopular so having a niche party buff for a niche tree of characters isn't particularly bad because of the inate difficulty of abusing said skill
3. haku's blessing requires communication as opposed to other buffs that can be recast since it's a buff outside of tshhe control of the kanna in question and would either require the kanna to position in a way to give hakus blessing to primary targets and deal with the comparatively inconsistent mobility when entering these positions or have the players play around the kannas cooldowns which are both VERY common issues for support classes in regards to group bossing in mmo's as a whole
i believe someone earlier in the thread suggested that another version of maple received these changes so i have my doubts as to this being lead on by OUR community for the health of OUR community considering the kishin nerf was something no one wanted especially because of the inclusion of totems
overall i think changes to kanna as a class aren't really necessary at the moment and i don't believe kanna was ever considered as a solo class to begin with considering their hypers and (new) 5th job skill have virtually no synergy with kanna's kit in any way shape or form
kanna is literally the only party focused class that's still in maple since bishops don't play a primary support role because of how intuitive and consistent their buffs and cool downs are
point being made if this change does end up happening i'd like to see you guys put your money where your mouth is and fix issues with kannas solo play patern
you know like how ether pulse has the longest cast delay in comparison to other mobility skills
Or how soul bomb still causes damage reflect
maybe how soul sheer is virtually useless aside from the passive effect which has nothing to do with soul sheer as a skill at all?
Or just maybe the fact that blossom barrier is a worthless skill since stationary bosses don't exist and the vast majority of the skillfloor with new bosses comes from not dying in one hit?
targeting superficial problems that help lower the power gap for players in PARTY conditions seems like a waste of resources
As a fellow Kanna main I feel saddened Nexon made the decision to follow TMS. A server which by all means is the most unbalanced server of them all. I sincere hoped GMS would be able to make its own decisions and follow through to them. There have been plenty of good solutions given of how Haku Blessing could be changed so the class isn't as reliant on 1 buff anymore and neither its party effect is would be broken anymore. Yet out of all these directions that could have been taken, Nexon decided to take the solution least favourite by the community. Keeping it a party buff, but only for flat m.att and not solving the issues concerning this buff at all. Even though the skill should be changed in the very near future again, I think this is a very poor solution for now.
I would like to eleaboriate a bit more why I think the taken decision of TMS and thereby GMS is in my understanding the wrong path to take. One of the first reasons is that having more then 1 Kanna in the same party, will override each others Haku's Blessing. Often it have happened to me when partying with my fellow guildie Kanna main that I got a weaker Haku's Blessing cause my own got replaced by his. Keeping this skill a party buff will still cause this to happen and won't solve this first issue.
A second reason why this will be a bad solution is that the buff will still be mages only. Yes it will be a weaker buff, but physical attackers will still complain about the buff. This could have been solved by making Haku Reborn's FD be shared with the party in contraory with Kanna only. This skill is only activated anyway when buffing other party members in the party.
A third reason will be that to have Kannas available for a party to do bosses with, it on the first place should be possible to play this class as a solo class and only for the end game boss like Lucid you should party up. This game doesn't have the classic roles of having a "Tank", "Support", "DPS" dealers anyway. The game is currently designed and benefits clearing bosses solo. With the boss changes which we get with Nova is a great example for this. The crystal that you can exchange for mesos that drops from bosses, gives the highest return if you clear a boss solo. So yes this game is being able to solo content first and partying up is a 2nd or even a 3rd priority. We all remember when Paladins got nerfed and a lot of players where forced to quit there Paladins cause it wasn't viable enough anymore to join a party to do bosses with. I have seen so far 0 Paladins doing Lucid, you think this is a coincidence? and yes the nerf proposed to Kanna is more devestating and heart breaking then it was for a Paladin. No class should have to go through the pain of being relevant and then from the moment the next day starts not being able to clear content anymore.
Continueing on how this game more and more becomes a solo game, a great example to this is Dream Breaker. This is content that is only possible to do solo. With Kannas slow mobility it already takes a lot of time to switch rooms and being punished for this, but now also losing 70% of its damage (Damage Test: https://www.reddit.com/r/Maplestory/comments/7691rk/kanna_comparing_haku_vs_no_haku/ ), instead of being able to clear floor 70 and maybe getting close to 80 I will be dropped down back to floor 40. This means it will take me almost 2x as long to get enough Arcane Symbols to level up my Lacheln Symbol. Before the Tune UP patch i was clearing floor 50 and with recent improvement I made to my job It would be easily floor 60 by now. It is not acceptable in anyway to punish a class so hard for its damage, that it will literally be unable to do solo content like this.
Long story short, if you wanna go through with changing Haku's Blessing comming patch some counter measures should be taken to mitigate the 70% dmg loss. Cause otherwise Kanna can't be competitive to other jobs.
Possible solutions:
1. Haku Reborn FD for party, keep m.att % as is and only as a self buff for Kanna.
2. Give Kanna 30% FD passively on Kasen with the Haku Blessing Nerf.
3. Make it self buff only, keep it as it is.
4. Increase Skill damage of every skill, mainly Vanquisher Charm from 242% --> 360% (other noteable skills Shikigami Haunting, Demon's Fury)
And my response to these are:
Nexon could have blunted the outrage to this change by providing a video of their test Kanna with before and after clips that showed the damage output was still comparable. But, we have already seen the effects of this nerf in TMS when it first appeared a month ago; players reported their damage dropped by over 50%. Now, a few players in GMS have simulated the new change and they show similar results with a drop of 50-70% in damage.
If the GMS or any team is testing these changes prior to deployment, the effects should have been easily seen has extraordinarily heavyhanded. Even then, TMS has had the patch for over a month so being told that Nexon will continue to review and gather data after these changes are implemented in GMS is somewhat insulting. The data should already be available and should be being used to roll back the changes in TMS instead of pushing them to other regions.
We are told the Nexon does listen and yet our concerns are unaddressed.
We are asked to wait, to let the team monitor the situation, to trust.
Considering Nexon's history, trust is not something the players have a lot of.
We have to copy and paste updates from other regions because we simply cannot code fixes for bugs that will happen with future updates. Seeing as GMS makes up for a minor % of the total revenue for Maplestory, I don't see the development team behind this to be large or competent so to speak.
As our copy pasted updates are taken directly from other regions, it will create more stability issues in the future if GMS were to make any tweaks to the coding. The game is already on a crumbling foundation that unfortunately, Nexon does not want to invest the additional resources to fix. Or they simply can't fix the coding.
Thus far this is the only reasoning I can see behind the curt communication. Admins are unable to disclose the reasoning for it, to preserve the integrity and image of the company.
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I am not saying I agree with the change, as someone that's loved Kanna's style since inception it is unfortunate how Nexon communicates is nothing new. Community outrage will simmer as people get used to the change.
Perhaps when they see that there are far less people playing the class, far less representation of Kanna in the game will they finally come to their senses.
But then again, who knows what the company is thinking most of the time?
You said you are going to monitor the change but we all know this is a big fat lie. Just look at Beast Tamer and Jett, do you guys 'monitor' these classes ? We all know about their miserable state, Kanna is going to join their ranks pretty soon.
Sure Haku's blessing as a party buff is broken, but Kanna itself in solo play is definitely not broken. Just make it a self buff.
You can get your developer team to re-read the original feedback too, since their proposed solution don't solve the fundamental problem with haku's blessing. I mean, it's still a strong PARTY buff (even stronger than an onyx apple and it's a stackable buff!) for all other mages though it's not as overpowered as before, at the expense of Kanna herself.
There's no need to sugarcoat things and assure us that the team would be "monitor(ing) all points pertaining to Kanna's performance in-game" as there is no need to monitor anything - just look at performance tests of Kanna mains in other regions who got the same nerf to haku's blessing (spoiler: ALL of them have their damage reduced by more than half compared to before Tune-up).
Also, there are calculations done by a redditor just after TMS got their patch which screwed over Kanna illustrating NUMERICALLY how bad this haku's blessing change would be for Kanna herself:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Maplestory/comments/6wyb6f/rip_haku_buff/dmc42e3/
Numbers don't lie and they tell a very clear story - Kanna's solo potential would be gutted even further despite patch notes stating that "her stats would be increased to make her competitive and balanced with other Magician jobs".
I'd also like to add that timing this announcement right before PSoK sales don't exactly reflect well on the company either.
Welp, if anything, I sure as hell am not recommending new/returning players to main a non-KMS class (BT, Jett, Kanna and maybe Hayatos since who knows when they'd be gutted like those 3 even though they're decent now?) as the bugs and crappy decisions surrounding them makes it not worth to put any time on them despite their uniqueness... If I'm even sticking around this game afterwards since I'd have trouble doing my dailies again as a Kanna main, ha!
I agree with all of your points but I'd like to point out that at least Paladins have the option to job change to another warrior branch unlike us Kanna mains. RIP Arcane Force progress and end-game dreams.
while it's true, they actually just fully implemented TMS's change to the buff, which was turning it from % to a flat rate buff, so they are just applying pre-approved change which is why they can kick this change out so fast.
this is the buff from haku equipped fan
it use be a %boost from the fan that only applied to kanna, but then it got updated in 2015 to be a party buff with the additional boost with each magic party member.
now it gets nerfed the way it does because it's an "already made cure" without the need to jump through the same hoops to implement.