Gear Progression

[Soft]

This post will be about how I currently view the gear progression and how I think it can be improved, in my opinion. I'm writing this very quickly with a decent amount of thought put in, but if anyone sees any flaws or has any ideas, please comment and suggest anything you'd like.

The Problem
First, how does current gear progression work and flow and why isn't it that great? Here it is:

get Sweetwater gear

That's it, currently crafting Reverse equips is completely useless, along with almost all pieces of Timeless, excluding TL Gloves & Overall because they can end up better than their SW counterparts with good Crafting & Leveling RNG.

So, once you're able to boss daily, you can instantly go solo Papulatus and get the BIS SW Cape, reach level 150 and get the BIS SW Monocle, and quickly earn enough Spirit Points to craft your BIS SW Weapon. Now you already have 3 BIS Items including your Weapon. Being this strong now you can continue on and run Von Leon for your BIS SW Earring.

The issues here are that you become "strong" so quickly, and completely skip over other alternative equips that exist leaving them useless. All Reverse gear is irrelevant and almost all TL gear is not worth crafting, and now that you're getting so strong so quickly, you can move on to the harder bosses and continue your run in getting your BIS Shoes and Helmet from CZak, BIS Face and Pendant from CHT, and go spam some dojo for your BIS Belt.

Alternative Gear Progression
So instead of this, I can see gear progression being much less flat and becoming more rewarding with a few changes: (Let's call these "TIER 1, 2, 3, 4")

TIER 1 - First let's completely disregard SW Gear, imagine it doesn't exist in Maker skill, and doesn't drop from bosses. Now your options are Reverse and Timeless equips. Well, everyone will choose to craft Timeless, so let's make TL gear more expensive to craft by changing the recipe from requiring Piece of Times, to Rock of Times which drop from Pink Bean. Along with that let's add Reverse gear to Maker and let that be craftable with Piece of Times.
So now progression is looking like this - Reach level 120: While grinding your way towards level 140, craft your Reverse weapon and any other equips you want, get a ZHelm, some Facestompers, a Pink Adventurer Cape or BFC, and now you're a pretty geared "Tier 1 Player" who can run easy low-tier bosses like zakum, krex, etc. and start building your spirit points and upgrading your new gear.

TIER 2 - Now that you're stronger you can consider doing some Chaos Bosses like CZakum, CHorntail, and Von Leon. (which isn't a chaos boss but is similarly difficult) Now we can add Sweetwater Gear into these bosses loot pools. Still though lets exclude SW Gloves, Overall, and Weapons. So we're left with SW Tattoo, Earring, Shoes, Cape, and Monocle. (Belt can stay in dojo, and more info on Helmet at end of post) So now add these items into the loot pools of these bosses.

Von Leon - SW Earring | SW Monocle
Chaos Zakum - Chaos ZHelm | Enraged Belt | SW Shoes
Chaos Horntail - CHTP | SW Tattoo | SW Cape

Now after running these mid-late game bosses you can upgrade some of your gear like your Maple Leaf, Spirit Earrings / Rex Earrings, PAC/BFC, FS, White/Yellow Belt, Raccoon Mask/Spectrum Goggles, which have all become useful items because Sweetwater is no longer easily accessible.

TIER 3 & 4 - Now that you are a strong boy with all your SW gear, a decent Reverse weapon / gloves / overall, and your other chaos equips, you can comfortably try taking on Pink Bean. Pink Bean now leads to some major upgrades. A Timeless weapon/gloves/overall will give some of the biggest range boosts out of any other equips. Like I said earlier, PB should drop Rock of Times which you can use to craft TL gear, but a single RoT to craft a TL weapon would be too easy and cheap in comparison to OA/Gloves. I think copying a little of what Dream does where a weapon costs more RoT's to craft (such as 3) and also allowing you to disassemble any TL weapon into a single RoT makes floor dropped TL weapons valuable while leaving Perfected TL Weapon crafts better. Failed/low roll crafts would also not be worthless anymore.

Now Empress can be ran with these new TL upgrades. I think making Empress function similarly to Pink Bean in terms of drops will function well. Your SW Weapon/Gloves/Overall can drop, as well as the Empress Diamond which will work similarly to a RoT except be used for your SW Weapon instead. SW Gloves and Overall would need their stats buffed so that their average floor drop is about the same as a NEARLY perfected TL counterpart.

I have no clue where to fit SW Helm in anywhere it just sucks compared to czhelm and needs some type of buff lul

 

[Aralaya]

This post makes me realize i know nothing about late game mush game.

 

[Mike]

Had very similar thoughts on this matter, good write up! Hard agree that BIS items were too easy to get early on

 

[second finger]

Definitely agree.

Gear progression should be longer, more difficult, and not be such that players can rush for BiS gear as quickly as possible.

To add on, I don't think SW has to be strictly better than TL, too. I think they should provide varying stats but are on the same tier. This prevents power creeping while encouraging diversity as opposed to min-maxing.

Examples can include stuff like the following:

TL weapons have higher base attack, SW have lower but are faster.

TL armors can level up for potentially more Str, Dex, Luk, Int stats, meanwhile SW gear can have 1 or 2 more slots and provide other stats like HP/MP or more defense.

TL, Reverse helmets should offer similar stats to that of Zakum helmets/Czak helmets.

 

[yuna]

Great write up thank you, will review and get back to you on this post when we're ready for testing

 

[Bruh]

I like the idea of the average SW gear being better than the average TL gear, but having TL gear having a higher potential than SW gear. An example of this being that CZAK Helm has +21 All Stats 10 Slots while SW Helm has +25 All Stats and only 7 slots. So theoretically a perfect CZAK Helm is better than a perfect SW Helm. I think its interesting in terms of gear progression to go from average TL -> average SW -> perfect SW -> perfect TL. This back and forth also supplies new players with hand-me-down gear and keeps material prices at a good place.

Edit: So to accomplish this you can play with level up values/slot values/ and +HP (Assuming a level 250 no longer has need for HP on their gear they can sacrifice for other stats)

 

[second finger]

To add on, I think SW/Timeless/Reverse (if implemented) should not all be significantly be better than BWGs and SCGs, Facestompers, PACs, PGCs, etc, only for nostalgic purposes.

That ideally if someone wanted to go for something like 18 ATT BWGs or 19 ATT SCGs or 27 ATT BWGs, it's not significantly worse than scrolled TL or SW gloves in trrms of ATT while TL and SW provide other bonuses.

 

[rain]

Here are some more suggestions that Soft and I talked through last night. These suggestions aim to solve a few of the server's current problems with item progression:

1. Currently it's too easy to get endgame, best-in-slot items (even without beta rates) and progression does not feel rewarding as a result.
2. Timeless gears are also too easy to obtain and not particularly rewarding as a result.
3. In some cases there isn't much of a difference between SW and Timeless gears.
4. Having tradable BIS items eventually results in a flooded market, allowing new players to skip progression entirely and simply purchase their endgame equips.

Here are some proposed solutions:

• Instead of dropping SW gears outright, all SW gear should be made via Maker, using a similar recipe to the current one for SW weapons.
  • SW weapons currently require 50 supreme crystals, 30 spirit coins, 1k magic powder.
  • Other SW gears should require a similar recipe except the amount of supreme crystals/coins/powders should vary depending on how big of an upgrade the gear would provide. E.g. A SW tattoo could cost 25 crystals, 15 coins, 500 powders.
• However, in addition to these materials, all SW recipes should also require a rare boss ETC. These ETC should only drop from endgame bosses so SW gear aren't easily accessible. VL would drop the ETC for tattoo and monocle, CZak would drop the material for earring, CHT would drop the material for shoe and cape, and Empress would drop the material for weapon/gloves/overall/hat. I think that these ETC should drop at the current drop% rate of SW, except they should be in the drop table three times so you're more likely to get them and can sometimes get more than one.
• In addition, each SW recipe should require mob ETC from future henesys/perion/stronghold mobs. The amount of ETC could match the number of magic powders required. E.g. SW weapons would also require 1000 ETC dropped by one of the Stronghold/Hall of Honor mobs. SW earring might require 500 Tino feathers, for example. This would increase the challenge of making SW and also create a secondary market for those ETC items.
• Disassembling SW items in maker would provide you with the the rare boss ETC, so that you can disassemble poorly scrolled SW to help with creating a fresh one. E.g. Disassembling a SW weapon would give you back the Empress ETC drop. Disassembling a SW tattoo would give you back the VL ETC drop.
• SW gears should be buffed enough so that they give a significant boost over TL/previous gears, given the increased difficulty in obtaining them.
• SW and other endgame items (CHTP/CZak helm) should no longer be tradable, even before equip. However, they can be traded by purchasing the special trading scroll for 100m or maybe even 150m meso. This will prevent the market from becoming flooded with them and also add a meso sink to help control inflation. However, these gears should all be fully tradable within account (without needed scissors), so players aren't penalized for creating a new character or wanting to play multiple classes at once.
• Timeless gear should remain strong (no nerf needed) but they should require Rock of Time to craft them (which is how it was in GMS). The Rock of Time should only drop from Pink Bean. The stats of Timeless should be midway between Reverse gear and the new SW gear stats. Similar to SW, timeless gears should be able to be disassembled into Rocks of Time. Similar to SW, Timeless gears should not be dropped outright.
• CZak weapons should be slightly stronger than Reverse but not as strong as Timeless.

By making these changes, the server would have a distinct and more rewarding journey through boss/item progression with clear stages. Stage 1: Early game gear and Reverse gear crafting. Stage 2: Timeless gear crafting by clearing PB. Stage 3: SW crafting by clearing VL, CZak, CHT, and Empress.

Under this progression model, VL/CZak/CHT/Empress should all be harder than PB.

 

[yuna]

Thank you everyone! This has been extremely helpful, particularly from what Soft and Rain have mentioned. I will be pushing a patch later today to address these issues, so if there are any concerns after the update, please post here.

Edit: Patch notes are available here