Introduction:
Kanna’s existence in Maplestory has been tumultuous to say the least. The latest balance changes once again reflect a lack of experience and proper testing protocols needed in the team responsible for these balance patches. Whatever data and testing methods that are being used seem in sufficient or out of date. The slow response to issues the class has faced over the years have stigmatized the class in the eyes of many.
Nexon's Intent vs. Reality:
"We have designed Kanna to excel at various fields that can serve various roles, but as we adjust overpowered spec, Kanna’s characteristic became vague and the overall power level became low. In order to solve this, we decided to focus on Kanna’s damage rather than the party support ability."
While Nexon's goal seems to be to shift Kanna to a primary damage dealer rather than support, the recent changes have not achieved this objective and leave Kanna in a state where she is not a good at either.
Skill Concerns and Suggestions:
I’ll be going over many if not most of Kanna’s skills below. While I have 7 years of experience playing the class I do not claim to be a master and there are certainly better and stronger players out there. The following is just my own opinion.
• Geomancy/Blossom Barrier/Bellflower Barrier: Mana Veins' have inconsistent spawning makes any increased reliance on them problematic, especially during mobile boss battles. Fortified barriers appear larger visually do not have a matching hitbox. Teleporting to veins and barriers will occasionally break in boss maps after patches. There is also no way to dispel a barrier once placed.
• Haku:
◦ Haku's Blessing has seen many changes since it first was implemented. It provides the largest amount of flat magic attack in the game, over 300 for end game Kannas. This isn’t necessarily a good thing as it disproportional affects mages. IF the intent to lower Kanna’s support abilities, changing this to be a 20/40 atk and matk buff would be better.
◦ Breath of the Unseen is very underwhelming since it’s full 30% final damage boost require the player to be in a party of 6. Removing that requirement and adding back the IED the skill had originally would be of great value.
◦ Personally I'd like to see Haku's fan become a true secondary, giving players the full stats and potentials. This gives Kanna a lot of it's missing base stats the class is missing from passives. Be able to roll IED or Boss lines on the potential could help a lot of players from having to roll extremely expensive 3 line matk.
• Shikigami Charm: Not as consistent as other classes upjumps due forced height, backwards push and cooldown. Reworking it to match other classes upjumps would be good.
• Radiant Peacock: Should be a passives
• Soul Bomb: Needs an entire rework or replacement. This skill has never been useful.
• Tengu Strike: This might be a controversial and selfish opinion but I feel the animation canceling effect should be removed. Fix Haunting so it is rapid and smooth, bump it's numbers if needed. For other skills; speed up the animations or don't lock the player into them. I don’t think ‘weaving’ as we call it and the reliance on things like sticky keys, filter keys, adjusting key repeat timings and 3rd party programs, is good for the class or players.
• Kishin Shoukan: The cooldown and duration could be adjusted for a better experience and remove Night Ghost Guide’s ability to increase this skills duration.
• Shikigami Doppelganger: Has lost a lot of it's impact from early post revamp due to bug fixes and the boost node nerf. Without just getting a damage boost I think having the damage be spread out over the entire animation would help since sometimes it will activate when you are out of position and even though the animation might be still happening, moving in range of an enemy won’t cause them to take damage.
• Yosuzume: Increase damage, lines or number of charms spawned to match the standard set by Assassin’s Mark because at the moment this skill lacks the damage to help farm and doesn’t contribute enough in bossing.
• Binding Tempest/Veritable Pandemonium: Dual binds are has been useful but with Erda Nova’s availability, newer late game bosses being immune to normal binds and all 6th Job Origin skills being true binds, the overlap is becoming a pain point.
• Nine-Tailed Fury: Not sure why this is a 180 second cooldown skill with a 150 second buff. Making the buff a passive and shortening the cd back so it can be used in mobbing might make better sense. Supposedly the mana usage was an issue.
• Orochi Unbound: The knockback resistance and floating abilities have been supplanted by the more versatile Blink Node. The attacks essentially pulse every second for up to 6 seconds rather than being continuous damage which means the damage ends up being too low. Being a keydown skill that locks you in place leaves the player too vulnerable.
Changes to this skill would need to consider the what path Nexon takes Vanquishers and Oni Lord, especially since 6th job will likely include a Mastery Core for Vanquisher’s. This could end up overlapping with Oni Lord, if Nexon decides to modify that skill so she has a 5th job burst skill.
Become a short duration, high damage summon akin to Demon Slayer's 'Spirit of Rage' might be a good move.
Vanquisher's Charm: Mana cost increase is excessive and makes the skill overly reliant on synergy with Mana Veins, Yuki and mana hyper stats. This skill now ends if the player has less than 40 mana. Mana cost going to 40 will cause a player to use all of their 100 base mana in under 2.5 seconds, on a 10 second key down skill. Also, this isn't going to lead to multiple more Doppelganger procs as it already has an internal 5 second cooldown. Shorten the keydown time to 4 or 5 seconds, cool down should start when they key is pressed to better align with other skills and bursts and an appropriate damage boost to match the reduced duration would help.
• Falling Sakura: Reconsider how the healing is done and give a visual indicator of the area that is affected. Right now it only affects players between the enemy and the caster.
• Nightghost Guide: The skill has lost it’s place. The chance of bonus EXP is low and it increases the chance that an equip might have a higher starting potential not actual drop rate. The damage is negligible.
• Linking NGG to Kishin was done to limit the effectiveness of the spawn increasing effects Kishin used to have. Without that there isn't really any point and just makes Kishin cumbersome.
• Circle of Suppression: Needs significant rework or replacement. As a hyper skill this should be far more powerful, and long gone are the days of teleport farming in Singapore or Malaysia maps.
• Princess Sakuno's Blessing: A very powerful buff that unfortunately combined with the rest of Kanna's kit, creates one of the worst burst setups in the game. It backloads a large amount of final damage and gives the player a small window to capitalize on it. Far too often something will happen that prevents the player from getting their full burst off.
• Sengoku Forces, Assemble!: Ayame gives 17% crit damage and there is no scenario where a player wouldn’t want that over any of the other buffs. Having it be RNG which appears is not a good design. This skill should allow players to choose which are summoned similar to Loaded Dice or should summon all 4 members since the other 3 are more nice to have buffs.
• Yuki-musume: Was an amazing skill back in 2016 when kanna was a hurricane class and only had 100 mana since it dealt with our main limiting feature: low mana. Now it's mostly used for the healing, though the v244 now requires this skill be active in order to use Vanquisher’s Charm.
• Spirit's Domain: Should have had changes made to it back in 2017, but it has sat untouched until now. Changing from 33% final damage for all members in a party to 15% final damage for the party + 100% boss damage for the caster is not something I think I have ever seen anyone propose. The drop in final damage for the entire party is in no way compensated by adding 100% boss damage for Kanna. The recent reduction in mana cost to reach stage 2 is very welcome but I’m not sure exactly how this is going to work in the players burst rotation.
• Liberated Spirit Circle: Due to it having a moving verticle hitbox and activating automatically after 30 second when using your main attacks, it is an unreliable skill while bosses. Every Kanna could probably recall an instance where Circle missed because they weren’t perfectly positioned under the boss. Interestingly, from what I've seen, Maple-M's version will actually slow on contact with enemies, which would make it far superior to the one we have.
• Great Oni Lord's Legion: This skill lacks focus on whatever direction Nexon is intending for it and as a 5th job skill, it should have a lot of impact, especially because Kanna’s first two skills were utility and support and the third is essentially a passive attack. Instead it’s been an unreliable iframe that requires charging and a farming skill; luckily the recent patch now saves the charge after death. The damage is too low, at 5 second intervals and stretched over an entire minute for it to be an effective bossing skill.
As others have noted, 6th job enhancement cores are going to preform very poorly on Kanna since 3 of our 4 Vskills are low damage support skills. Kanna is going to need serious thought put in to the direction Nexon wants to take the class and how to bring it to a good state. Many of these complaints we have had for years, though they often got brushed aside for various reasons. I am concerned that changes like these happen because Nexon's balance team does not have a reliable and repeatable way to test balance patches at various points in a theoretical players progression.
I'll apologize now because I've surely made some mistakes or missed things. But this should give a general idea on things.
Ghiblee's responses on discord were as disappointed and disconnected as you might expect.
And her response to someone doing a quick google search to provide context on what a normal DMT sale is like.
Can't say I'm surprised by any of this though. Nexon seems like they want to further slow progression down, despite lowering Exp requirements. Hoping this all backfires on them and whoever is making these asinine decisions gets a reality check, but in all likelihood, players are desperate and will buy off sale.
Demon Boss's verticle hitbox is smaller compared to what we saw in JMS.
Tengu's range it shorter than displayed in JMS.
Haunting received two nerfs one to its base damage to the first hit (reduced from 300% in JMS to 250%) and one to its node. It now gets 2%FD unlike the 7% (1st job boost) in JMS
Calculations for summon damage have been nerfed
Spirit Veins are incredibly hard to see with skill transparency on but playing without it is almost impossible due to the amount of skill spam.
No way to dispell barriers
Decent Combat Orders doesn't seem to affect skills
No new potential lines on Haku's fan, meaning Kanna's still must go for 3L magic attack.
Mana Balance costs 50% hp
Mana overload is working as intended now but it feels terrible to use especially since bosses do %HP attacks.
Mana Hyper stats are broken
Haku's blessing is nerfed from 48 to 40
Haku's Blessing is broken and not giving a buff despite showing as a buff.
Breath of the Unseen lost its 80% knockback resist and 40% IED
Haku's gift (healing) now only heals 80% and has a 2-minute cooldown (30 sec in JMS)
Foxfire now has a 55-second duration and a 60-second cooldown (use to be 40 seconds I believe)
Geomancy spread (increased number of spirit veins) has been reduced from 2 in JMS to 1 in GMS
Burning tons of nodes to get new Trios
Had to rebuy skill books...
Mixed:
Kishin nerf
Bind nerfs
Vanquishers does more damage but costs more and haunting nerfs mean VC is actually is still "better"
Barrier system
Blossom Barrier gives 60% damage reductions and 50% stance instead of 70% and 40% as in JMS.
Spirit Veins will be annoying
Final Damage was reduced due to soul sheer's removal leaving only domain and parties as Kanna's way to increase her FD. This may be a problem in the future.
Nightghost Guide is a nerfed version of Monkey Spirits. It's not great but ultimately insignificant
Blossom Barrier doesn't heal through potion lock for better or worse.
Bellflower Barrier changes: 20% damage +5% boss damage. Not sure what the point was.
No changes to Domain
Going to miss long teleport
Weird namings schemes...
Pros:
Faster teleport
Teleport to spirit veins will be great to recover mana or avoid attacks in bosses
Blossom barrier heals HP at a good rate.
Flashy
Yosuzume mark is nice
Bellflower barrier hyper +20% boss is finally fixed.
Quite a few of the cons were not present in JMS and reversing at least some of those changes would be good. RIght now Kanna is nowhere near the powerhouse she was speculated to be and in fact, is actually significantly weaker than before (which was already much weaker due to the old Haku nerf). Some of this is due to bugs which may get fixed in the first unscheduled maintenance, but I also worry that Nexon will not move quickly to address issues past that. This is made more concerning due to how slow they have been to address past issues with the class.
Only got the first 2 on my Dark Knight I advanced.
Was actually hoping we were also getting the 2nd skill free too for previously advanced characters. I had gotten my AB to 200 maybe a couple months ago but didn't get spotlight. Ended up opening 100 nodes but still didn't get it
As Nexon knows, one of the issues with trying to report hackers is that they have the ability to nearly instantly change channels, enter the cash shop, or quit the game. This can make it very difficult to grab their name to report in-game or through customer support. It would be handy if when using the report feature, the name of the last player, other than yourself, was saved. This would help mitigate some of their ability to evade player detection.
