So last time I talked about some of the older maps, ed/market and how fast you’re levelling, etc.
This one is about the secret dungeons, this dimension of siniste or whatever and the over abundance of different stats.
So I didn’t play all the secret dungeons, because now they’re in this rotation so I can’t just choose what I want to play, there’s only two maps per day. On the other hand, the first run of the map is always free for the day, and that’s pretty nice. Then you can run it another 5 times. I’m not sure why you’d want to, it was probably like that and then it just got forgotten due to newer content. But from what I can tell, nothing much really changed since I last played.
Nasod Inspector wasn’t reverted, it’s still this gnome version of what it used to be but they never elongated the platforms to have it makes sense. The thing is always slightly off to where you really want it. Since some characters now have a passive that changes all their skills to a specific damage type, the magic/phys barriers don’t really do much. Though that was the case after the 3rd revision I think.
I don’t think 5X and 6X changed much at all. 5X is still does the whole dps check but since the gear is overall better, it’s actually kind of easier since I played it. It was a cool boss too, it was one of the first times where you have to consider what you’re party is doing. The first one was 4X, then probably the 3 plant monsters and the wyvern but they were really basic in comparison.
I must’ve just erased all my memories of 6X back in the day. I know I didn’t run it much but it wasn’t that bad. I remember I had to use some pots for some specific skills that would just get me, but I forgot all about these minibosses. It’s not every time, and I don’t know if that just makes it more funny or just sad but sometimes theses minibosses were perpetually attacking alongside being in super armor. Other times they entered super armor here and there but would get stunned without much trouble.
And the other one I played was what I’m assuming is the secret dungeon for Lanox or 8X, or 9X if they changed it and Feita counts as its own town now. The whole boss arena is kind of a joke because it needed two things being shit for it to get me, and they fucked up both. I guess I should say that the boss itself is whatever, it didn’t have some bullshit mechanic from what I saw. The boss itself isn’t a problem, it’s the genius who decided make the 2/3 of the bottom floor into lava so you’re always getting damaged while also making the boss AI retarded or smart enough to never leave the corners where the lava is. And that along would be fine if the platforms or the boss’s collision worked properly but they don’t. The middle platform is where you should be able to hit him with the disadvantage that most of his strong moves hit that area of the screen. It’s just that the platforms aren’t long enough for you to combo properly, and half the time I’m going through the boss with normal attacks. It’s basically telling you to fuck off if you don’t have a range option and just overdose in pots to spam skills and just sit there and wait for pot cooldowns to end.
The dimension of siniste is kind of fun, I didn’t notice that they start you out with full mp so I wasn’t abusing arma blade for awhile. But they only give you two platforms and they’re both in the same levels. There was this rose that would stall her shots so she hits you right before stunlock ends. It was pretty funny, I don’t know why they don’t provide more platforms. There was something like this during my time, but I forgot how to get it. It was pretty rng, I’m not sure if it’s strictly in pvp or if it was in a random henir room..
Anyways, now onto stats. There’s a lot more than when I used to play, and this feels way to close to closers. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing, combat power is a pretty shit mechanic when you think about it. Because the game sets the combat level requirement based more on the what the whales can achieve. There’s sections where it jumps from 1mil combat power to 2, to 6mil. I think there’s a 10mil now, and that’s because the leviathans of the game can reach 25mil and higher. Elsword is way better in it since you can at least change your substats infinitely, you have to use an item to reset the tuning chances in closers. On the other hand, getting to +11 is basically guaranteed and +12 isn’t all that hard. At least elsword doesn’t have item level yet.
And it’s pretty mean to say that they straight up copied, but considering they took crap from maple story back when I played, I wouldn’t put it past them. Not that they took it from closers, but that they took it from something that has the same stuff. Now you have crit damage and this maximize which I think it’s just raising the weapon range to always go for the higher numbers. I forgot what game had that, I think it was Kritika. A lot of these new ones are pretty boring, it’s in a lot of different mmos, but I find this polarize one pretty interesting. It increases your damage while also increasing how much damage you take. It sounds like a death sentence but it sounds really cool if you’re confident in yourself, though it probably kills you more often that not in a raid. The other cool one is adaption, I think it lowers the damage taken from anything that wasn’t an attack, like being burned/poisoned/in lava etc.
Outside of stats but also kind of in there; it feels like I have way more hp than I used to, and also that some characters are kind of faster at 0% aspd(I know the avatar set gives 10). The one that stands out the most was Chung, Eve feels exactly the same but Elsword and Rena feel like they have slight boosts.
And since this one is kind of shorter, I’m just putting part 3 into this one. So most people know elsword is ancient, it started in early 2008 from what I remember, and I started in 2009. Everything I’m going to say isn’t even really their fault, or at least half of it, the game is just old. It had a core premise that wasn’t used a lot back then, and again pretty much ignored now, and it was simply that you can gain mp from doing normal attacks. It was a fun system at the time but there’s a lot of downtime. I didn’t mind it but many did and that’s where all the pots came in. So you can skip the combo and go for the skills, but it really just became what maple story already was. There was already a lot of games that did that, people are trying to make it something that it’s really not. I talked with a friend of mine about it, and I joked that it felt like you’re a thief class but saw how archers were cool so you bought a crossbow but instead of bolts, you slotted in your knife. Why are you still trying to incorporate your knife, you wanted to be an archer. If you’re going to do a change, then do it, they keep trying to have both for some reason. You want to be a skill spammy game, then make it work like that instead of just making the players do the extra legwork of spamming a couple of extra buttons. Because even if they do that, it’s not like they’ll ever use a skill that doesn’t have the highest modifier. Like why use rolling smash when it’s 40mp and doesn’t even reach 2k% when sandstorm can do like 15k% for 200mp and Double Slash doing around 40k%.
And it’s funny because it was kind of the same for Closers. In the beginning you also gained mp primarily from doing normal attacks, but it was the most boring shit ever so the devs changed it all in like 2 months. Even then, they had to rehaul a bit to make it more fun anyway, Elsword was above for quite a bit. Then they removed the cancel cube and just put in the cancel points for free so you can freely flow through several skills. So now it became about spamming skills in specific rotations but you didn’t really need to spam pots, you’d have moves that regen and some passives as well. And elsword is kind of doing that already, you gain mp naturally now, just bump it up to 10mp per second in pve. You could also bump up the mp from normal attacking to 20 or 30mp as well and that would enforce more normal active skill usage instead of just saving everything for the 300mp moves. Sure, would it be kind of stilted compared to other games? Yeah because that’s how your skills feel, but your actives don’t. You already separated pve and pvp mods(and that took you like 7 years to do), might as well make some more changes and make it more fun. All in all, Elsword is that legacy application that the company has that is too old for anybody to know the full knowledge-base of it and instead of doing a full overhaul, they keep slapping on more patches and features on the sides. Making it just another frankenstein’s monster.
But in the end, I still had a good time playing again. I’m still not really far because I keep going back and making new characters and see what they changed with them. Chung got stupidly fast, Wind Sneaker had some visual updates but her mods kind of suck, and the combo Add still feels slow. And it’s funny because Chung feels faster than him now.
I’m sure when I get to endgame, I’ll eventually be burnt out again and call it kind of boring but that’s my issue with mmos, the finale is generally the worst part for me because it’s just spamming the same exact location for weeks or months. Otherwise I’d still be in closers
Mainly a Visual Novel Blog now 