god items discussion

[Kiaro]

Well I thought everyone knew for sure already Ayu, but then he posted like that so I thought perhaps people were unclear about what a helpful post is.

Regarding battle chant: No one cares what high end damage it can do in very situation circumstances with every disadvantage on the opponent and advantage on the attacker. That's really not important or relevant to woe. Battle chant is excellent but highly unreliable and leaves the paladin vulnerable. This is a whole other ball game from wearing the stat boosts all the time.

[Nidsrule]

Kiaro Wrote:Sleipnir no longer scares me. Wool/tidals and variant shoes have power creeped up to it. I think a Sleipnir is very VERY good, but is it fair for the god pieces it consumes? Certainly.

Okay, Mjolnir. Is it still a crazy scary whitesmith powerhouse making machine? Yes. Is it THAT much better than a decently refined hurricane fury? Well, no, not THAT much better. It's better for sure, and I'd rather use it, but for god item components? It seems pretty fair. It's +3.1% success on brewing compared to the next best, which to those with a GOOD grasp of the brewing system is pretty hax. But for god materials? Okay, again, it's not gonna wreck the server.

Brigs, the hax accessory? Okay, it's really good. But it doesn't give huge favour to any one stat and it doesn't give dex, so for the effort... I'm still kinda a little on the fence. You can pull off some really impressively top tier builds with it, BUT it still loses to orlean's glove on any char that wants dex, for example. I'd even be willing to say brigs in okay.

Megs? No. What? No. Please no. Please? RO works off exponentials, and +80 str on a proper melee class is terrifying. To say it just works with melee classes, so no biggie, is like saying a +40 int accessory only works with casters and biochems, so no biggie. It's still terrifying due to the huge amount of exponentials used.

I look at this from a different perspective. Considering the sheer amount of time that needs to be invested in WoE to make any one god item, I see Megs and Mjolnir being appropriately "balanced" whereas Sleipnir and Brigs aren't worth the effort.

Before the discussion continues any further, stop looking at the case where a player has 2 megings. It isn't going to occur on heRO. With the way the system is designed, guilds that have held a high econ castle for long enough may find themselves being close to making 2 different god items; they won't be making 2 of the same item in quick succession though. Like Kadar stated previously, it could easily be a year or more before the first god item even appears (assuming LW maintains pront at high eco for that long).

As for the argument that it is "easier" to make a god item with the way the castle drops are set up, it is a lot easier to target specific castles, econ them until you gather the required components and move on to the next castle. The current system of randomized chests makes it impossible to plan or aim for a specific item. Guilds simply have to hope for the right drops.

From what I've seen, you are looking at an average of maybe 1 or 2 god item components per week, from a max eco castle (Naturally you'll have your good and bad weeks, but it averages to about 1 or 2 a week). Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how the distribution of treasure box spawns works, but there is a very low chance of getting the components you want/need. Overall I'd estimate it would take anywhere between 1-3 years holding a max eco castle to be able to make a god item (Judging by the rate pront was spitting out components I'd place it at the higher end of that scale).

I don't see that it is inevitable. Over such a long span of time a lot can change within a server/guild and there are many factors that affect the longevity of a server/guild. It doesn't matter how determined a guild may be to make a god item, under the right circumstances their dream of making one can be shattered quite easily. Whether they get sloppy defending their castle and have their econ raped, have a mass exodus of their members leaving due to real life issues or simply disbanding due to internal conflict. While it is impossible to predict these events, they must be taken into consideration.

Finally I want to discuss the issue of competition. There is nothing stopping guilds such as Behemoth and DD from allying and making a decent attempt at taking pront. I can only think of 2-3 WoEs when a decent attempt was staged and in those cases there was very little team work between guilds. I think it is sad that it would require only one castle to remain open to provoke a decent sense of competition. It's your choice to defend another castle, but in order to break a properly defended castle you at least need to make a continued attempt to do so. If people were truly worried about seeing god items on the server, Pront should have fallen long ago and no guild would be given the chance to econ for any decent length of time. If you think it would still be inevitable for people to make a god item holding castles with 10-20 eco, you are kidding yourself.

Still, the main point is to focus on the scenario where a player has access to ONE item. At the rate the server is progressing, it will never see dual megings in the hand of one player.

While I don't agree with changing megings to 20 str, IF they had to be modified, I'd suggest increasing their weight so using a single meg would place severe limitations on what a str based char could take into woe (and possibly making it essentially impossible to equip 2 of them).

[MagnusKain]

I like the idea of god items... like everyone was saying it takes so long to get them. I mean you even have to have your whole guild complete a quest before the guild master can get it. You have to HOLD (without losing once) a castle for weeks and you have to be a guild leader. Right? That narrows the availability down tremendously right there.

I came from a server from long ago where you could BUY them thru the donations. OMG it was horrible. People would drop $400+ to gear out there characters with all they could. I swear my eyes would fall out of my head everytime I seen them talking about "how much they pwn". *pukes a little* I would personally piss'em off by smiting them with the mighty Whitesmith and pm'ing them telling them "I spent $0 this month on a private RO server. What about u?".

Thinking of them days makes me love this server even more

[Kiaro]

Quote:Finally I want to discuss the issue of competition. ~~~. If you think it would still be inevitable for people to make a god item holding castles with 10-20 eco, you are kidding yourself.

I don't know where to begin if you think that is my attitude regarding woe, or the current situation. There's a lot more that goes on than you can see, and precast breaks are pretty digital. Either the precast gets broken, at which point the success rate for breaking has been extremely consistant, or the precast is not broken and so there is no break. Regardless, this isn't about the current woe situation and I hope you don't think I'm motivated that way. If it's impossible to believe I'm trying to tackle this objectively, then I don't know what discussion of god items I could possibly bring forward that would lead to that conclusion and we can only conclude for everyone to mistrust everyone.

Perhaps I should clarify by what I meant about competition and 1 castle. At the moment, things are pretty simple. I didn't want to get into an analysis of the metagame since it's not totally appropriate but here goes:

LW is established, and so will hold a castle. This leaves 3 castles. Bamboo makes a serious attempt for al de, and because it's a stupid out of the way 'side game', they'll only seriously lose it for any length of time if a dedicated pre-trans guild pops up (because if any other guild were to jump to a large number of pre-trans they'd be left too vulnerable in their 'real' castle). Behemoth, CDZ and DD are pretty much going to fight between the remaining two castles. So far behemoth has held fairly consistantly, and I'm not sure what happens at payon but I think it alternates somewhat? Whatever. What other large competitive guilds are left? Pretty much everyone is accomdated, but no one can really strike out easily without risking their castle's econ being pierced when people are away. As a result, we have what's happened lately, which has been a fair bit of inactivity. I don't see how the current situation is conducive to competition. But hey, that's pretty much a whole other topic right?

Besides that, I liked your post a lot. The randomisation of drops does make it harder to focus on a specific item, but it's not like that makes it anything more than, as I've said from the start, time. Yes, it's a lot of time. Here's where I think I meet my disagreement with people:

I believe the time invested does not justify that powerful of an item. There are repercussions on a small server once megs exist, and while a reward is great it shouldn't come at the expense of the server's woe. I'd then say that megs as is are in a world of their own kind of crazy. +20 str lets you oneshot a few new tiers of players (ones specced to survive the usual 130 str optimally geared EDP SB, for example) and +40 str ups it another 2 or so tiers up putting /extremely/ heavy pressure on even well geared non-swordsman classes. Not always a oneshot on the vittiest, but easily a 90% smack of health. +80 pushes it a few tiers more. Now any non-swordsman class can pretty much resign to death the moment they get touched, and of course grimtooth allows (a healthy amount of) safety while doing this. Only swordies feel safe, and even they don't feel THAT safe.

That said, I'm not stuck to the +20 str modification, I'm just saying megs are really quite ridiculous and would have too great an impact. Yes, maybe if they weighed even more and wielding two was VERY impractical, that'd be another way to do it. You can become crazy hax, but lose a lot of gear/potion choices (which isn't the case with the 800 weight megs, on 99 str classes).

Regarding sleips and brigs by the way, they're really REALLY good. So are variants and whatnot, but honestly they have some very unique advantages. Sleips have the obvious walkspeed advantage, which you can get a lot of out of with some work (like having a moonlight in your variants, then add in some decent def!) and brigs open up a lot of builds. I'm saying that their advantages, while fantastic, are subtle. Brigs lets you make some very clever builds, or you can just be simple and put them on a wizard or biochem and get the best int levels in the game, while packing even more vit(!) and so on. My point was that megs are just in a league of their own, and that the weight limitation is really more geared around the kind of seige you'd see on a large pop server (I'm sure we've all seen vids of busy busy iRO woes right? Losing 800 weight there is REALLY gonna hurt, when you're crawling through way more damage everywhere, compared to teeny tiny hero woe by comparison).

But yeah, thanks for your thoughtful post about god items.

[teOx]

kiaro you just spent a whole post explaining that the only hax item was megingjard (and mjolnir but not as hax)

Nidsrule Wrote:I look at this from a different perspective. Considering the sheer amount of time that needs to be invested in WoE to make any one god item, I see Megs and Mjolnir being appropriately "balanced" whereas Sleipnir and Brigs aren't worth the effort.

i love this point, its exactly how i see it and not sure why i didnt say it. megi is the only one worth the effort!

and yes i did say god item release is a time released function ON PAPER. i also spent many paragraphs detailing why it will never run rampant, and very few guilds, if any, will ever get one on hero at this rate. the "bloody well long time" you mentioned will be longer than most guild lifespans as i mentioned. that is where it can be justified to stop calling it a time-release and suddenly something that will require huge effort to achieve.

pretend that a 5 eco castle will get a god item in 20 years. there is no way you are going to wait 20 years. so you fight and fight and get broken every once in awhile but maintain 50 eco on average. lets pretend that is like 4 years. guhh will you be here for 4 years? gogo 100 eco hold it every woe with effort and guild coordination! now its only 2 years??? @_@. (heaping helping of perspective: LW is not 2 years old yet, and DD is about 1 year old)

i dont believe you should be calling anything inevitable or time-release when the scaling is so far from linear. in this particular case, it is nowhere near arguable as a time release in the actual practice.

p.s. i guess i can infer the meaning of it but i never heard the term strawman before and it sounds funny

[Kadar]

Kiaro
I wasn't saying that god items were time release.??I was showing you essentially what teOx said, "that god items LOOK like time release on paper.??In practice they aren't time release."??On your first post you expected all the vet players to wholeheartedly oppose changing/nerfing/removing/etc the god items.??You felt that you've never gotten a real reason behind such beliefs either.??I think it's that once you've gotten enough experience playing this game you begin to see just how difficult god items are to obtain.??When I first heard about the god items I thought meginjard was a bit ridiculous.??It wasn't until I saw one in action that I realized it's not a big deal.??There is a difference in damage from 4 str to 40 str acc but it's not a game breaking difference for one to exist. On top of that it took so much work to make one that it was obviously not going to flood the server. When megs become a common item such as on a HR server they can cause problems. However when any item is flooded onto a server through donation it disrupts the game balance. This is something we can see even on this server with OCA. While it's not mainly obtained through donation it is obtained at a comparable rate as a donation item on a HR server. We have seen the negative effects of this in the economy already.

You said that double meg is what you're truly worried about.??What you don't seem to see yet is that double meg will NEVER happen.??There won't even be two megs on the server much less all in one guild. Don't fret over things which will never happen. And if by some freak chance one guild gets a hold of two megs then don't worry about it. It's not unbeatable.

I appreciate that you are taking our points into consideration and I applaud your concern for the server. The main issue I see here boils down to is megs or isn't megs balanced within the WoE dynamic.??Every practical application of the item I have seen shows it to be very well balanced.

[Général_Argos]

When a guild leader smash chests he gets elus, equipments, ocas and other usefull stuff. Can someone explain me how the fact that getting god item materials make it harder to smash the chest? Where is the extra work?

Raising a character 99/70 to kick butts in pvp or to kill tons of mvps doesn't make the leveling part harder or easier.

Raising a high eco in order to get lot of ocas or to get god item materials doesn't make it harder or easier to do.

Btw with the randomisation of chests you only ?get? to raise an eco ?one? time. Now prontera has 100 eco. Your saying that it would be easier to raise 3-4 castle to 100 eco one at a time? Thats a bunch of zeny.

[Kadar]

Why it is harder:
Weren't you a guild leader Krim???Shouldn't you know how hard it is to even keep a guild going much less organize them to keep a castle long enough to build eco?

Why Randomization makes it tough:
Let's say that every time you got an item for the ele wings it had an even chance to only work for one of the wings and not necessarily the wing you were trying to make.??Let's say you had the option to pay a bit more and the items you got would for sure work towards the wings you wanted to build.??Would you pay the money?

[Général_Argos]

Kadar Wrote:Why it is harder:
Weren't you a guild leader Krim? Shouldn't you know how hard it is to even keep a guild going much less organize them to keep a castle long enough to build eco?

Yes its a hard, a very-hard-and-not-always-fun-work. But what I say is that aiming for god items doesn't make the job harder.

Kadar Wrote:Why Randomization makes it tough:
Let's say that every time you got an item for the ele wings it had an even chance to only work for one of the wings and not necessarily the wing you were trying to make. Let's say you had the option to pay a bit more and the items you got would for sure work towards the wings you wanted to build. Would you pay the money?

Yes, but in the case of the god items, its not a ?a bit more?. Having to raise an eco four times instead of one make a huge difference. Also, in the case that you would be in a castle that do not drop material that you don't need, how much more would you get the material you needs? My bet is ZERO. But I can't be sure, we would need the code modifications and the formulas that gms made. (GM help would be apreciated here). Anyway, the point that you would have to spend ?4? times more money in investment stays. Useless to add that a guild leader can only invests two times a day and that it would take alot more time to get back the eco on every ?next? castle to get all the materials.

[GM-Pandora]

We didn't make any special formula. Normally a castle only has 2 chests and it randomly spawns one or the other, we just extended the random over 40 chests instead.