Empress should be scaled down to the current population. It should still be hard and take a while, but as it stands right now there's a boss that's off-limits that prevents progression into end-game.
Make Empress kill-able
- Thread starter Jester
- Start date
I understand why most of the buffs given to Cygnus in early February happened, but essentially we as the remains of the community; and the people who've started playing since, got left to suffer with them - whereas the people who "necessitated" the buffs in the first place just server-hopped. Now I'm up to a challenge, and the way the fight was tackled mechanically needed to be improved from the player side (rushing into corner was kind of troll), which we figured out better in testing since.
But mathematically it's not really completable with everyone who can actually join it, and it's not possible to motivate the newer players who are rightfully just enjoying the game to help us complete it. With the buffed Cygnus damage resistance at ~60%, that gives her an effective 26.5 billion HP to clear in 90 minutes. Not including all of her damage reflect, stuns, seduces, time lost to snow + Dark Genesis threat (death count is tough as it is) and one person having to aggro the Chief Knights instead of attacking her. Even though we've been farming really hard for a month and have gotten very strong one way or another, we're still not even that close - even with getting a few people who don't play (often) anymore to come with us like Fame and Arknight.
If her damage resistance was re-adjusted down to 30%, that would give her effective 15 billion HP. That would still make the fight very hard but potentially doable with good play. It would still take more than long enough for death count to go to 15 if we were screwing around.
I would also appreciate the level cap being lowered again to 200 or at most 210 as it would be a way easier sell and a more natural progression for newer players after Pink Bean. Level 225 on this server is very time-consuming and among all of the "newer players", only Laral (LaFlorA) has been prepared to put in that amount of work to go to Empress Cygnus.
Please implement these changes, because now the server is quietly recovering somewhat it's starting to be a big problem (for fun and player retention) that people just faceplant into an extreme wall of grinding and chaosing items after completing Pink Beans.
But mathematically it's not really completable with everyone who can actually join it, and it's not possible to motivate the newer players who are rightfully just enjoying the game to help us complete it. With the buffed Cygnus damage resistance at ~60%, that gives her an effective 26.5 billion HP to clear in 90 minutes. Not including all of her damage reflect, stuns, seduces, time lost to snow + Dark Genesis threat (death count is tough as it is) and one person having to aggro the Chief Knights instead of attacking her. Even though we've been farming really hard for a month and have gotten very strong one way or another, we're still not even that close - even with getting a few people who don't play (often) anymore to come with us like Fame and Arknight.
If her damage resistance was re-adjusted down to 30%, that would give her effective 15 billion HP. That would still make the fight very hard but potentially doable with good play. It would still take more than long enough for death count to go to 15 if we were screwing around.
I would also appreciate the level cap being lowered again to 200 or at most 210 as it would be a way easier sell and a more natural progression for newer players after Pink Bean. Level 225 on this server is very time-consuming and among all of the "newer players", only Laral (LaFlorA) has been prepared to put in that amount of work to go to Empress Cygnus.
Please implement these changes, because now the server is quietly recovering somewhat it's starting to be a big problem (for fun and player retention) that people just faceplant into an extreme wall of grinding and chaosing items after completing Pink Beans.
Yup. This is what i meant from the start, just didn't want to intimidate anyone with my maple design knownledge. Yuna do the thing.
~ I meant reducing the damage resistance from current ~60% to ~30% just to be clear (halving it from current), since we can probably barely scrape that number.
Lv. 200 entry requirement is great for community inclusion. c: I don't think they need to receive a level-based damage penalty as with original Empress to be honest; on this server the large base damage differential between a Lv. 200 and a Lv. 250 should already be enough to motivate people to keep going (at least through daily bosses and the like), there doesn't need to be another incentive.
In terms of additional ideas which are less important but would still be great -
(Quality of life for the fight) Empress "Snow" Poison Mist attack honestly is way too large of an AoE for how lethal it is. The fight would be more interesting and balanced if more classes could outrange it, or if classes could use Rush abilities to push Empress away from her own Snow for safer DPS. As it is it takes up like 60% of the boss room, so you just have to hope you don't die to Dark Genesis + Snow RNG, you can't play around it. This makes the fight unfairly miserable for classes without damage resistance/% avoidability/invincibility frames.
(Empress Sweetwater drops and gear) The quality of Empress drops and weapon crafts varies too drastically between items. I can provide a full breakdown if you like, but I think the ideal position for Sweetwater weapons is for a crafted Sweetwater to be a good chunk of W.Atk better than a well-crafted & leveled Timeless, but not such a high stat differential that you're left feeling as if your perfected Timeless weapon (which you absolutely need to do decent the boss) is now garbage.
However at the moment there's several weapons where even an average or below-average drop weapon is always better than even an insane Timeless (Sweetwater Claw, Knuckle, Gun, Wand/Staff most of all). Then there's some which are a sidegrade or conditional (Polearm, Two-Handed Sword). And a few items which are actually objectively worse than previous tiers (Two-Handed Mace, Pendant, Gloves)! Another pass on the statlines would do so much to make it feel more like a natural upgrade and less like certain classes just get screwed if they can't use their Sweetwater weapon. Can provide a list if need be.
(Gear progression outside of Empress) If you ever feel like doing a server event period, or alternatively introducing a "Hard" version of Von Leon for example (using simple statbuffs), the gameplay would greatly benefit from having some gear available that is inbetween Reverse/Zakum's Poisonic and Timeless in terms of quality - there's so much stuff already in the database that could support this, for example the "Frozen" weapons. It would also be nice if there was something (or sidegrades at least) inbetween Timeless and Sweetwater perhaps. That would give the Sweetwater items more room to be OP.
(Pink Bean drop rates) These need to be buffed/reverted to what they were a long time ago, which is probably as or more important than Empress changes. >< There just isn't enough active lategame people to do enough runs per week (1-2 is the most possible) to support people joining the server and progressing from mid-lategame with the current miserable average 5 Rocks of Time it drops. Mathematically I don't know how it even comes out that low (I don't know if it's bugged because in theory with 1.2x Drop it should yield an average 6.5 weapons and/or shields in addition to the guaranteed 3 Rocks of Time, but you're lucky to even see 3 weapon/shield drops), but it's always 4 to at *most* 6. The 20% droprates of Timeless Moonlight Cape/Pendant/Earrings and 10% droprate of Maple Warrior 30 would also really benefit from being increased. There just is not anywhere near enough supply to keep the economy for them active, and some popular classes like Dawn Warrior absolutely need a Timeless weapon or they're far weaker.
Hope this helps.
(Made some edits.)
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Thank you for your feedback on this. I will provide an update for next patch~