Elsword: How to improve on the current skill tree layout

Note: This will address how to improve the current skill tree layout. If I wanted to just rehash the skill tree layout then I’d just bring back the old layout and then just add the multiple skill branches from the current one to have one specifically for pvp.

Normally, I’d talk about all the old skill trees that we’ve had. Some that you know, some that you don’t know.
First one was the truest to the name of a skill tree. It was pretty bad for classes that had to choose between bad skills and higher attack power or the reverse manner. Each skill had a cap of level 3.
This was corrected when the initial passives and actives were introduced, such as kick and stoic. Then locked skills were introduced around 2 months later I believe. This one has been around the longest, and I believe a lot of people still liked this one.
Last one is the one we have now, having a cap of level 20 until rings get involved.

Now that I got that out of the way, there’s two changes I’ll be talking about.

A) Lowering the initial level limit of every skill.

Honestly, I don’t know why you have to get to a specific level and then somehow the character can just get it to level 2 immediately, game-wise. It’s more based on ocd of always having something new every 5 levels than anything else.
Thus, after you get an advancement. decrement the level requirement of everything aside from the initial skill by 5. Thus it’d be 15>20>25 instead of 15>25>30. Then for the 1st advancement, have it as 25>28>31>34. How did 30>30>31>34 get through development, it makes no sense. 2nd advancement is the same concept 45>45>48>52 becomes 40>44>48>52.

B) Beneficial penalty system.

So, with the players restricted to choose only one of the two skills in a normal row, it causes a few changes. On one hand, there’ll be more variation; On the other hand, you’re screwing up a few classes but it needed both. Having both would lead to sp problems anyway.
Now let’s enable the player to choose both, but instead employ a penalty system.
Let’s say the player mains DC, and the players wants both Rumble Shot and Leg Shot. Now let’s say he picks Leg Shot first, costing the player 4sp. Now, Rumble Shot’s sp requirement gets a modifier of 1.5x, thus causing the sp requirement to raise to 6sp.

While at the very base, the same concept; How it’s done changes how all the players play into a much more sense of variety.
The player no longer feels screwed, it’s the players choice if (s)he wants to pick both or to choose one to raise something else with the limited sp points they have. It also boosts the variety in pvp. There’s more choices for the player, there’s also more things to think about when fighting others. Does the DC have both the gun and cannon passives? Does Grand Master have that kd passive to consider. Does that TT have both fields. Is RF sporting both passives or both bolts. Is that RS using rune passives. Does that Nem have EHW alongside the crit passives. The list can go for awhile.

Visual Novel Review: Killer Queen

Note:

Just like when I used to put these on youtube, I’ll try to be as vague to not spoil the story and to keep it short so the viewer’s attention span doesn’t die out. However, I can now add a concept piece to kind of give the gist of the story.

Second Note:

This reviews the original Killer Queen, it only has two routes and is supposedly much more basic than the newer one. This is not Secret Game(or sometimes called Killer Queen -depth edition, which I believe has a total of four routes.

Genre:

Killer Queen is, in its most basic form, a Battle Royale Survival Horror visual novel. You can say it’s a much more gruesome 999 with a much lower budget(that you can tell).

Concept:

You’ve been kidnapped and relocated into an abandoned building. Turns out there’s 13 of you, each of them has one PDA and a collar stuck on your neck. Fulfill the PDA’s requirements to unlock the collar in 72 hours, or die. The requirements aren’t all that kind, there are those who will oppose you and those who will gather around you.

Art/Music/VA/Lengthetc

The character sprites are bad.
The ost is hit and miss. There’s a few tracks that do really well with the tone of the novel. However, the mina theme you’ll hear is hard-boiled, and it’s really repetitive. My favorite is track 16, outside of the OP of the novel(the ost from the video).
The scenery is also repetitive, but it was done intelligently as you’re supposed supposed to be inside an abandoned building that was built to be seen as a maze.
VAs are decent, some are irritating, some are quite enjoyable(My favorites are Fumika and Tezuka(the one I dislike is Nagasawa(die little prick))).
The novel is pretty short, you can finish it under 10 hours.

Overall Opinion:

The novel is quite short. Honestly I can’t delve much into it without spoiling it. My favorite part was learning about all the character and what stands they’d choose. If I just say them, then you’ll probably not like the novel as much, when it’s not incredible to begin with.
While there’s two routes, each route is a narration, there’s no choices. After you beat the initial route, you can play the second one through the title screen(there’s a reason for this).
It does character bonding well, you spend enough time with the characters for you to care if they do die, aside from one or two. The villains are another case, they’re normally pieces of shit so you’re quite glad if they end up dying.
The plot twists are quite good, while also quite obvious if you paid attention. I also believe some of these plot twists were meant to be apparent, thus bonding you to the main character via the shock on how stupid he is or how much he tries to deny certain truths. The first sex scene is kind of funny, you might get what I’m talking about(it’s right after the scene).

Now for the fun part; With all the shit I’ve said about this novel, I’d recommend it over Cartagra.
Cartagra is much is longer, better thought out with better plot yet sometimes obvious plot twists, and the CG and scenery are quite beautiful, yet with all the HCG around, it’s watering down a perfectly good mystery horror novel with a shit ton of HCG everywhere(aside from Hatsune route(but then you missed like 60% of the novel)). The H-scenes and the rest of the novel doesn’t transition well(and when it stopped doing that near the end, I found it much more interesting as it stopped breaking the focus away from the mystery sections). While Killer Queen, while ugly for the most part, it melds it’s two main focal points well, Survival and fear induced love.
There’s also a lot more teary moments in Killer Queen than in Cartagra for me(doesn’t help two out of the three characters I liked aren’t routes, lol).

I give it a C(Cartagra is B+ if you ignore HCG(or don’t mind it), lol). Add points if you liked a type of story like 999 without KID’s unnecessary addition of science fiction(while normally interesting and a huge point of reading KID’s novels). Subtract points if you don’t.

Overall, even with the sprites being what it is, it was a fun read. I have no problem recommending it if you want a quick read. It’s a decent intro read to new comers as well.

Elsword: How a simple change of a boss mechanic substantially changes how the game plays

Note: The first part of the post is to address the delays, this leads up to the boss mechanic that was changed(and the reason why I wanted to make this post).

Recently, there was a patch that removed delay on skills and awakening when fighting a boss(I think it was the 4th of December).I wasn’t really paying attention, but according to some people from skype, youtube, etc, a lot of people didn’t like about that. I answered this on a youtube comment and I’m too lazy to do it again so it’s a direct c&v, though I can explain it better here I guess.

It’s a patchjob to a problem that is only brought upon due to the overall laziness in the development of bosses such as Ran(while cool) and above(for the most part bland).
Mainly, it’s just a prevention of spamming moves to make the bosses “harder”.
While the idea, in and of itself, is fine; The whole issue is that these bosses have just became high damage high hp tanks and nothing else, while previous bosses have motifs(while some have still have horrendously huge def/hp like Overlords/Vanguard).
Thus causing the normal strategy most people used(which is just be mindless, get really good gear and spam pots). Since it got patched, it was a common occurrence in the game; Making it more of a slap to themselves on their own development.

To put it shortly, you might get screwed if you were Iframing to dodge a skill and the boss used another right after(such as you’d get hit by Ran’s best move now). But it’s more of a nerf to parties where we’d normally just gank and chug mp pots until it dies like a minute later.

However, the nerf is still a pretty poor choice. They took away something that made the bosses easier, sure; But that’s not why the boss was easy to begin with. They’re just becoming tanks, boring tanks. Anything that is prolonged isn’t fun, it’s annoying. That’s why King Nasod’s HP was nerfed around 4 times(it’s hp is around 1/4 of it’s former before the rvamp, not sure about now).
With all the new revamps, I find Chloe and Ignis to be some of the better ones. Nerfing Ignis was also a waste of time. His moves had way too damage, yes, but they were all telegraphed to the point where it might’ve been too much. With that, it wasn’t the Ignis’ fault, it was yours. This is also the same with Chloe, she has extremely high damage now, and while it’s not long as Ignis, it’s still telegraphed. And before the nerfs years ago, both Amethyst and King Nasod were in that category. These were bosses that hit hard, and you will probably die the first and maybe the second time(for people in korean version, everybody else has videos which kind of spoils the magic of learning and discovering everything on your own).

Now to the main subject, the removal of stoic from bosses. Is it me or was there nothing on the patch notes about this? Honestly, I waited a few days just to see if it was a mistake on their end. And after 2-3 patches and it still being there, it might be something that will stay(then again, there was a Genocide Ripper bug that stayed for half a year).

This little change has opened quite a lot of new types of playing. The largest change is how dps characters aren’t total bullshit anymore. You can play with Nemesis and not just be a crit+atomic shield user on a slim boss. It buffs a lot of characters such as: CN, DW, IS, IP and BH, Cra.
It even buffs any character that is a multi hit character for the most part(like Raven, Add, Ara).
It can also prevents massive spam(determined by party members, party members that doesn’t kd/launch/etc won’t have a problem, they’ll even be better(like CrA)) as there’s no way to prevent the boss from just going into the sky. Instead, we’d have to wait for the boss to use a stoic move itself for us to abuse it. Thus introducing a reflex+reward system(as some bosses have only a slight stoic animation(like the new Chloe, due to revamp, you can use skills such as shockwave and FG).

I might actually play Elsword for awhile just for this, but the grinding nature is always a putoff. I’m also reading steins’Gate ‘v ‘(which I had installed for a month, lol(at least it’s better than some I have that I never completed and it’s been years).

Difficulty curves and spikes, and the mental states that make the difference important

Note: Elsword is rarely stated here, it’s a concept I’m going through into several posts. There will be several posts, to both ridicule and praise on difficulty management. For now, I’m thinking of making one for Elsword, and one for Dark Souls. The post today is not about either, it’s about the global concept.

I’ve been playing Kritika more than Elsword recently, and I generally watch something on youtube while playing. Normally I just watch the two videos twobestfriends release and then I’m done with Kritika for the day(that’s like 40~60 minutes).

However, I was watching dashiegames this time around and luckily he was playing Donkey Kong Country 1. At least, lucky for me, as one of the levels is the reason why I made this blog to begin with(though I forgot about it and wrote about Elsword stuff instead, lol. And that level was one of the first instances where I felt a difficulty spike.

For the most part, there really was no difficulty spikes in most famous games you’d get as a child(for the snes/genesis(if you had trouble, then get gud). Either the game was just easy once you understand the simple mechanics or the difficulty was just inched up a bit at a time.

To skip all the extra exposition because most people are probably bored by now, the level is called Mine Cart Carnage. You might not know the name, but one look at the stage and most will go, “fuck that stage”(if you played DKC of course). Which is pretty funny because it’s one of my favorite levels. I heard many say that level has a bs difficulty spike. However, it’s just more that every level beforehand was basically for babies. Meaning, the whole first world is more of a tutorial and to familiarize with the controls more than anything else.

The emphasis on the level is reaction and input speed, meaning testing your reflexes. If you can’t beat that stage, how’re you going to handle the 2-4 or 5? Thus, instead of having slight trouble on every stage, they chose to give a big gap on one stage to build the player enough to handle several more stages. Several games have it, it’s just more obscure and generally way easier.
For example, in Devil May Cry 3, if you can’t beat the reaper mini boss on stage 2, you’d never stand a chance against Cerberus(the boss on stage 3), teaching you that guns have shit damage and you better learn how to dodge. Mega Man Legends’ first boss taught you better learn how to dodge and circle strafe(but since it was more of a child’s game, it’s not to an extreme(A better example of this is the first boss in Dark Souls, his moves are well telegraphed and easily dodgeable; It teaches patience is a much better virtue to have in that game than plain damage)). Anyways, I’ll talk about other examples in other posts, I might make a couple just on Dark Souls and what I think about a couple of levels.
I’ve talked about Elsword’s difficulty before(I think it was the first post), I’ll be putting more of those eventually.

I also find the next level after carnage rather interesting. On one hand, it’s way easier than the previous one; It’d be safe to say that the level should’ve been 2-2, therefore giving a save point before Carnage, making it much more manageable. On the other hand, while it doesn’t provide any beneficial factors game wise, it does present a few beneficial psychological factors that I find Dark Souls does at times. After beating Carnage, you’re welcomed to an easy stage, thus giving you a feeling that you rule in this game. However, this also brings overconfidence, and leaving the player with that feeling for too long is detrimental, thus the level right after that is hard as balls again. Just like after you beat the Taurus Demon in Dark Souls, you feel like a badass and you see a few undead soldiers and just laugh because they’re pathetic, only to be owned by the Drake shortly after, pushing you off your self-made pedestal.

In short, I don’t find Carnage to be a difficulty spike, but a difficulty curve. It’s not like FFX-2 where the difficulty just goes up and never goes down after a got past a good part of the game. Difficulty spikes just causes frustration and anger, and most importantly blaming the game instead of yourself, causing a break in both immersion(Immersion is used differently from how most people see it, it’s an act of having fun and dissolving the area around you, not about thinking your part of the game itself; That’s more of a delusional issue like escapism than actual immersion, but both can be seen as immersion). A difficult curve is both praising and ridiculing the player. Such as making fun of you and saying you’re not good enough to beat the level(such as many instances in daily life) and then praising you when you do succeed in the task.
It’s also a parenting style I admire, there’s a lot of entitled children today that only think about themselves, placing themselves on a pedestal and seeing as them as an amazing being instead of seeing everybody as amazing to the point everybody fits as a cog to a much bigger concept.