Drazn

The Arrest Needle is practically not mine. I was given a spread needle and a POST by a generous player... Like pretty much all of my equipment was. The problem is not that good gear takes a long time to accumulate, its that not having good gear feels like your wasting your time. Which is not at all how i felt when i got to max level on GC. My gear frankly was pretty terrible and I knew much less about the game than i do now. But I still felt like i was reasonably powerful. On Ultima, unless you have the absolute best equipment you feel like a total weakling all of the time. Apparently even with the best gear you still feel extremely weak, either because you don't have enough base ATP, or you don't have a weapon with 50h+ on it... I'm not trying to say that getting geared on Ultima is impossible, or that getting to max level is particularly difficult. I'm arguing that it's a terrible experience. The game can be hard, after you let people feel like their making progress towards being powerful. If you make people feel weak and drastically limit their options for getting powerful, they will just get frustrated and bored. There will be people who enjoy that sort of grind but me and my friends and pretty much everyone else i've shown ultima in the last month are not those sort of people, and we are being pushed away by these things. And these are all people who played PSO, either with me or by their selves, in the past and they greatly enjoyed the experience. Sure, I was making full use of Freeze Traps, Confuse Traps, Arrest needle, Frozen Shooter and so on. The problem is, at what point do I actually do damage? My frozen shooter does about 60-40 damage per shot to a Baranz. While a single volley of their missiles instantly kills me from full health, at any damage to their armour. When your in a room with more than one Baranz, or other mobs besides, I cant afford to focus my attention on firing the ungodly number of shots it would need to take one down while doing 50ish damage. Also, im grinding, the point is to do it quickly, which means taking risks. Killing 20 Baranz in an hour with much frustration when the average drop chance of an item you frankly should be able to get at level 120 is well into the 1/600s is a terrible experience that makes me rather go and play another version of PSO where I would never have such an experience unless i was grinding truly endgame stuff. Hell I come from playing Path of Exile which is far more unforgiving than PSO is, and the experience i've had playing that has been far better than this particular experience. The point here is more that anything of value that could make an actual difference with your experience with Ultimate, is hidden behind the wall that is Ultimate itself. Whether you lower the stats of the entry points to Ultimate, or return them to vanilla and add a completely new difficulty or mode ontop of that, something i feel very strongly needs to be done here.

I admit that i wrote my post in a great deal of frustration, and probably is full of hyperbole, but i'm sitting here after having tried to grind for a Panzer Faust in Ep2 Ulti for about an hour, and having killed a grand total of about 20ish baranz and dying at-least five times as much as that as a level 123 RAcast with all the listed equipment. I don't know how typical that is, but I don't ever remember having this much issue with getting through ulti in PSO. Sure the later parts were pretty spikey in difficulty, but Forest and the beginning of EP2 I don't ever remember being as weak as this, with vastly inferior equipment. I will admit that I haven't counted how many shots it takes to kill things with my Arrest Needle, but i can tell you it is far slower than what I would expect were i playing any other version of PSO I currently own with the amount of ATP my character has. Which would be less of an issue if it wasn't content that frankly a character of that level should be able to do, unless you want people to be stuck doing Vhard as I said into the mid 100s. It is a grindy game, and I do not have an issue with this. I come from a background of many ARPGs like Diablo and Diablo 2, Path of Exile, Borderlands and so on. I am used to and enjoy grinding in games. What I take issue with is bad grinding in games, of which I also have a fair amount of experience with, Maplestory, Fly For Fun, and that korean 2D fighting RPG i cant for the life of me remember the name of. Those were bad times. And what those times had in common was a feeling of making no progress whatsoever. What better ARPGs had in common was that they gave you a little often, and a huge amount some of the time. its what keeps you coming back, a feeling of accomplishment. It was a feeling I had when i hit 200 on GC or when I get a build running on Path of Exile and its a feeling that I totally lack on Ultima. There is a lot to be said for a smooth progression in a game, and what exists on Ultima today is far from smooth and is compounded further by the game's economy and many of the issues vanilla PSO had. I just think Ultima can do better than this. We need a steep slope, not a brick wall.

Price check on this junk please XD Demolition Comet 10/0/0/25|25 Mahu 0/25/30/0|25 Slicer Of Assassin 0/15/0/0|30

Interesting reading this thread 4 years later because this is exactly what happened. Allow me to go on a little rant... I've been playing PSO for a very long time, basically since I was a kid. I've gotten to 200 on the Gamecube, i got to high 100s on the official Blue Burst servers. I've done ultimate before. It was pretty tough but it was doable and the rewards were worth it. So then recently I returned to Ultima, decided to give getting to 200 a solid shot again since the server has EXP boosts, figured it would be pretty smooth sailing and with lots of super powerful weapons and items added in for the fun of it. So far it has been the most grindy and unsatisfying experience I have ever had with PSO. I have been given donations a plenty from some extremely generous players, even donated myself a substantial amount ($55) to try and piece together an ultimate-capable set of gear. I got a level 200 Mag, got a full set of 115 power materials, even manged to get an Arrest Needle. And with all that i can now clear Ep1 Forest in ultimate. Slowly, taking more than 12 shots from an Arrest Needle to kill even a single mob. I do 0 damage to Gal Gryphon with all my weapons, even a fully grinded Ultima Reaper. I dunno if there are some really masochistic players in this community or everyone expects to be boosted to 180-200 before they can even consider trying to do Ultimate without a level 200 with a Dark weapon helping them. But none of this seems like good game design, or even just a matter of "git gud." Its just boring. Really, really boring. It amounts to either your given your levels and gear by someone else, or you spend days pouring over tradelists not actually playing the game because if you want gear to do ultimate, you either have to get someone to get it for you or have it given to you because there isn't a way to do ultimate so that you can do ultimate... I've never had an experience like this with PSO before. The game always had something for you to do at each level, and while there were some slow spots none of them were particularly bad. Most of them where to do with the poor pacing of levels between Vhard and ultimate, in that you reach Ultimate too fast and Vhard stops being profitable too soon. All the buffed stats on Ultima have done is exacerbated this problem so that what once was a relatively steep slope is now something more like a brick wall that you either need to pay real money or rely on other player's generosity to have any chance of having an enjoyable experience with. PSO is a multiplayer game, and yes I know your going to say "but working together with people is the whole point of the game!" But thats hardly a useful point, because if you take 4 people, have them level together to 120 without any interaction with the rest of the community outside of people their level and with similar gear they are almost certainly going to have a terrible experience with ultimate mode, in that none of them do any damage, cant hit any of the monsters and have no way to rectify this problem outside of an extremely long and tedious grind to max level on Vhard. So the only option is that they try to raise wealth inside of a economy that suffers huge inflation on the prices of, and permanently low supply of useful weapons for Ultimate mode, or relying on the generosity of the community. So its terrible for multiplayer too, not even counting PSO's inherent problems with multiplayer (free for all loot, damage canceling, section ID abuse etc.) And I don't know about you, but I thought PSO was a Loot Grinding game, not a Loot Donation game. I like the feeling of earning my powerful weapons, not having them given to me. And while trading is an excellent community-builder, its also a huge barrier to new players with no wealth because we all know how easy it is to make money once you actually have money, but if you have absolutely nothing your gonna have a very long road ahead of you, especially since pretty much everything you can get your hands on is worth absolutely nothing to the majority of wealthy players in this game. Sure with some knowledge you farm up some mats or something and make some money that way, but its slow and tedious outside of green-names, and during green names they are worth half as much as they normally are. If I wanted to play the long game and build up wealth over the course of several months, i'd go play EvE Online instead. This is not the reason why I enjoy PSO, this is not reason why any of my IRL friends enjoyed playing PSO with me, and I'm sure many others in this community agree with me. Trading is a good thing, as an option. It should not be a requirement to beat the game as not everyone enjoys it. What is important for Ultima's health and for the health of PSO is to be welcoming of new players. This game is far too close to dead to be erecting barriers that deter new players. I also feel Ultima as possibly the most popular and well known private server for PSOBB has a larger responsibility in this regard that most other servers do. However I also understand that the long term players of this game need to be given a reason to come back. This community is too small and the influx of new players is too slow to risk shedding veteren players by not heeding their requests. In other words, there needs to be a balance here which currently, I feel, does not exist. Crack mode needs to come back, another difficulty needs to be added, Priestege, something needs be done to remove the wall between Vhard and Ultimate so that newer players can have a smoother and far more enjoyable experience with Ultima. I'd love to help, but without any programming experience I fear I might be useless to you. But if you need testing, or advice or anything you think I could do to help, ill be there. This community so far has been extremely welcoming and being the largest server keeping one of my favorite games alive I'd do anything to make it better. Rant /fin

what are the stats on the Yas 9000m?

Thanks for the heads up ^^ I've decided to just grind for them instead. Also, updated list with Materials for sale.

Updated buy-list

Master Sword has Sold. Also, i was Buying a red ring, not selling one : P

Selling: Demolition Comet 10/0/0/25|25 1PD Mahu 0/25/30/0|25 1PD Slicer Of Assassin 0/15/0/0|30 1PD x89 Mind Materials 6:1PD, 14PDs for the lot x33 Power Materials 5:1PD, 6PDs for the lot Buying: Adept 3DTs Heaven Punisher 50H+ Offers Wanted Iron Faust 50H+ Offers Wanted Yas 9000m 50H+ Clean or with Charge Offers Wanted

The issue has been effectively solved on Sodaboy's server simply by having better servers in better places. If you look back a bit in this thread i posted a video of people abusing traps in a way that would surely cause damage canceling in a slower system. So improving Ultima's servers could have the same effect. As for a solution in the code, it seems like its an issue with how the client to client communication of damage works. It might also be a database problem. I'm not programmer so I don't think i can help much, but other people in this thread have posted some ideas as well. All I can say is that this is an issue of great long-term importance for the health of the game.

Regardless of whether you think the game favors multiplayer or singleplayer that frankly doesn't matter. Damage Canceling is a bug. It is not how the game is intended to operate. For this reason alone it should be fixed. You can argue the virtues of the fact it promotes team-play but the fact remains that damage canceling is a completely unintuitive and nonsensical bug that tricks newer players into stepping on the toes of more experienced ones, punishing them for actually trying to play the game. It also encourages passivity and an attitude of "well if you don't do the absolute best damage you shouldn't be trying to do damage at all" which destroy's class diversity and centralizes power into a few select min-maxed classes (Like HUcast and RAcast for example.) You can argue Ultima has done much to promote class diversity by introducing new items and weapons, but thats just working around what the problem was in the first place. As a game mechanic frankly, its boring. It means as certain classes all you do is apply status effects and stand around waiting for things to be killed for you. Some people may enjoy playing like that, and power to them. But there is no other way to play for classes with poor per-hit damage which is restrictive and completely ignores the wide class diversity and flexibility present in PSO's class system. At no point should any game mechanic ever un-ironically promote that doing absolutely nothing is the best strategy. Ever. Its bad game design, people like games because they get to have agency, they get to do stuff. Not wait around and wait for other people to do stuff for them. And even with the bug fixed all the exact same teamwork scenarios will still work. The only difference is that suddenly you have more options when making those strategies. Either way, improving server structure is one way to mitigate this issue. But it would still be interesting if we could have a complete solution via code, as even with the best servers and the lowest ping, damage cancel will still exist it will just be much harder to trigger.

Can't we just get the crack server running again... anymore buffs would be painful for new players : /

After doing some of my own research turns out they solved the issue by simply having better servers in strategic areas. Doesn't remove the issue entirely, but mitigates it into irrelevance. Here is a video of people doing something that should by all accounts be impossible due to damage canceling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkvdmFdQ8fE Perhaps something Ultima could look into, if it manages to raise enough donation $$$s.

Perhaps it would be useful to get in contact with someone managing that server and ask them how they solved this issue, if they actually have in a useful way. It seems like a very frustrating bug that leads to a lot of unintuitive play, and prevents wide range techs from being useful (rather detrimental) as well as other bad stuff like Rangers canceling Hunter damage. Reminds me of when i used to play Path of Exile back when it still had massive Desync problems.

How much do Addslots go for nowadays? And as a sidenote where can you find them ^^ Also how much do S-rank weapons go for?

The whole design of FOnewm and FOnewerl screams black mage to me, but I understand the point your trying to make. PSO is a very old game and has some weird coding problems that make techs problematic for group play. Though I do maintain that lowered resistances would make Techs less gear dependent and perhaps more approachable to newer players, rather than creating a bunch of extra hoops to jump through before you get anywhere close to good, and also wouldn't penalize people who would prefer to play solo for no reason. While you say the game is a multiplayer game, that doesn't however mean that the game has no single-player content or that content is somehow less important. One of the things I value most in an ARPG is having the option of multi-player, but not being forced into it. I guess the real buff to forces would be to somehow fix the damage canceling bug. I'm getting the impression though that that is a very tall order, since it seems to just be an accepted fact of life in PSO. Would like to understand the actual mechanics behind the bug, in particular why Techs have a larger window of causing it. Especially if I'm obliged to play around it in multi-player.

Yes, agreed, I actually feel Megid is in fairly good place right now so I don't think we should change this just to suit forces, it slots quite well into your arsenal as a powerful counter to certain enemies, As does Grants, though I do feel Grants could do a bit more damage to certain enemies which is actually what the Single Player resistances result in. From what I've checked there doesn't appear to be a difference between the EDK resists of mobs switching from Online to Single Player, so that is not a problem.

While techs cannot miss, they also cannot Crit, which weapons can. This fact I feel evens out any advantage/disadvantage having ATA or not having ATA would cause, which is why I didn't include it in any of my rants ^^ Also, there isn't just one kind of tech, you are using any of the 11 attack techniques as well as switching weapons to suit each one potentially. This is fundamentally different from said HUcast trying to swing a saber at a gee, as it would be the difference between trying to use Foie instead of Barta on VHard forest Dragon. Again, using a melee weapon on a force should be an option available to any force, which it is. But if you consider each Tech individually, or each class of tech (Fire or Ice, Gi or Ra) and the fact you will probably want to switch to an appropriate weapon or even shield for each one, Forces already use as many if not more weapons than any other class in the game. They are an advanced class, sure, but there is a limit to that, there is always an option to make every class more complicated, like taking 15 different weapons with you on your HUcast. Only on Force though does that seem to be a necessity due to all of the natural weapons you have being pretty terrible online. On the topic of nuking rooms with Rafoie, obviously the more coverage your attack has the less damage it deals. Which is exactly how Rafoie works, it kills the ones weak to fire fast, and does nothing to the rest. Only atm it does nothing to everything. Thats the part i want to change, I don't want Forces to be crazy damage dealers with insane range, i want them to be able to actually damage stuff with their insane range. There is a balance to be struck here, and I feel the current resistances do not currently provide anywhere near that balance. Also perhaps there is an argument for lowering the base damage of the wider ranged Techs, but I feel that would be even more complicated. Also, Damage Canceling is something I hear being talked about but don't understand fully. Could you explain this issue further? It seems fairly important.

Indeed, the design of PSO especially into the later episodes revolves around making good use of a variety of weapons. You can argue the pro's and cons of that kind of game design till the cows come home, however there is an argument in the difficulty and cost in the transition of weapons. That is to say, to take our friend the Tech-specialised FOnewerl, it takes a lot of careful mag breeding, material usage and good units to even consider trying to use a melee weapon, because they are just that specialised. You can make it work, but you need more units, more mag levels, more material uses and crucially a weapon worth using that a FOnewerl can use. Compared to the transition of a hunter to a gun, or a ranger to a sword is comparably a complete no brainer, you already got the stats and everything else, you arnt balancing anything when using a ranged or melee weapon, they both use the exact same stats. And over here we have the FOnewerl not only forced to switch weapons, but possibly switch mags as well to have a chance of hitting anything. I feel the comparison here, again, is overly unfair to Forces, but I guess thats why the game labels them as the hard mode : P But either way i'd say 50% is a great number to encourage a Force to use a different tactic, but not forcing them. 90% though is just a slap in the face. Edit: Also, not a fan of the gun immune mobs either. A lot can be accomplished by making something harder instead of just plain impossible, immunities are my pet peeve in any ARPG

Yes, substantial amounts of MST on all force weapons, at-least tied with the amount of ATP each weapon gives, would help the Teching force immensely not just through damage but also early game TP. The % on weapons affecting Techs is also an intriguing suggestion that might be fairly difficult to execute. I feel the %Tech bonus damage on weapons already makes up for this already. The real kicker would be to have Zalure also affect enemy resistances, thats when Tech damage would start to be extremely relevant, but alas this also seems to be a tall order. I'm hoping that since the Single Player elemental resists already exist in the game, it would be at-least easier than most other methods to implement those. However I have no idea how PSO is coded or how much root access the server devs have. I'm just hoping someone on the server dev team sees my posts and at-least agrees with me ^^

My view on mobs like Chaos Bringers is that their threat to a Force lies in the mobility, aggression and powerful ranged attack that steals TP. Forces already have dangerously low defence, so I don't personally think that making those mobs also super resistant to tech damage is being very fair to a force. Forces already switch weapons/attacks and even shields constantly while teching, I don't see why they need to be forced to melee as well even if its only occasionally. Especially when clearly tech oriented Force classes exist (looking at you FOnewerl.) Being a Melee Force should be an option you have, and the main reasons why you would choose FOmar and FOmarl over FOnewm and FOnewerl. It should not however be a requirement to actually beat the game, and the single player resistances reflect that (Chaos Bringers have 20% or less resistances until Ultimate where it spikes up to 30, which is still fairly reasonable. While online on the other-hand their resistances start on normal at 75% and spike up to 90%(!?) on ultimate) I'm still of the opinion that the Single Player resistances are the best template with which to solve this problem, in that they would immediately make Tech Forces a viable damage class in all difficulties. Maybe not the best damage class, but actually noticeable where at the moment they are not.

Oh I wasn't saying a tech force was incapable of clearing content. its just slower and harder to do so because of the higher resistances. The problem is largely to do with the MST formula and resistances. On paper MST and ATP are very similar, 5 points gets you roughly 1 damage. However ATP is consistent, there aren't enemies that resist 80% of your damage because DFP is a flat defence, it removes an amount of damage equal to its value, and everything past that is pure profit as far as damage is concerned. So with characters with especially high ATP the effect of DFP on the damage is very low when compared to their total damage which is exacerbated further by the amount of weapons Hunters have access to that hit multiple times. Factor in Shifta/Zalure there is no way in hell a force can keep up when hitting something that resists even just 40% of its damage (Which is practically every mob in Ultimate EP1 when online.) This is why Hunters are well known for steamrolling through most content with few hiccups, their damage is extremely consistent and once you get ahead of enemy DFP their damage becomes incredibly high. Techs on the other hand are affected by resistances which reduce their damage by a percentage. This is important, because to a force, a 50% resistance means you always do 50% less damage. While to a hunter, something that resisted 50% of your damage, could be reduced to resisting just 20% of it because DFP does not scale up with the amount of damage you do, while thats exactly how Resistances work. The more damage a Force deals, the more of their damage is blocked. This is also ignoring the massive almost 70% damage boost Hunters get from hitting a Zalured target with Shifta on them, which means they shave through even more of a mobs defence. Couple this with no actual way to get MST over your class's cap, your just left with percentage bonuses from weapons. But when 50% of you damage is being resisted, just throwing a halfhearted 30% more damage is just giving forces 15% more damage, assuming they are not wearing a shield merge, at which point that extra damage amounts to 11% extra damage overall assuming one of the Red, Blue or Yellow merges. Even with those added weapons you listed giving a 140% bonus to Ra techs, thats just 70% more damage against most mobs in the game online in Ultimate mode. That might close the Shifta/Zalure gap, but your gonna need 200 or even 300% bonus damage to techs before resistances to bring them closer in-line with the damage Hunters do. So what does a Force without exactly those rare weapons do? What if they are playing Solo or self-found? They need to go online to do some of the more important quests which means a very very slow crawl through content. I've done it before, it wasn't fun. You'd expect the draw back of a Force, and what makes them hard to play, is their low defence primarily and all their support responsibilities on top of that. You wouldn't expect them to also struggle to deal any noticeable damage but thats where we are right now, basically existing to throw S/D, J/Z, Resta and Reverser at people and sit back and watch everyone else do the work. Sure you could play them like that, but is that fun? I don't think so, and the only way to change that is to be a pretend hunter rather than a spell caster. In short it makes little sense to me. So the problem with Force damage is definitely that Resistances are not a fair defence to compete with compared to DFP, unless resistances of at-least one element per monster were extremely low or non-existent and served only to enforce the find-the-right-element-for-the-job playstyle Tech Forces have. These low resistances already exist in the game, on single player. And even then i'd argue that some of them are far too high for the amount of damage Forces do. That said, the single player resistances reflect much better the kind of resistances you would expect if you wanted Tech Forces to toe the DPS line with Rangers and Hunters. Like in the previous example where a hunter can get enough ATP to effectivly push 80% of their damage through to monsters unhindered, Forces are constantly having 50% or more of their damage blocked at all times, if not more when trying to attack a variety of monsters with differing resistances. So to sum it all up Hunters are less affected by monster defences, can easily over-cap on ATP through the use of a weapon, get a massive boost from Shifta/Zalure and only have to worry about getting enough ATA to reliably hit their special attacks. While on the other hand Forces casting techs are much, much more affected by monster defences, have no way to over-cap on MST in any noticeable way, do not benefit from Shifta/Zalure and have to worry about getting rare weapons and armour with % bonuses to tech damage to even try to compete, all of which is still taxed by monster resistances. The whole system of resistances vs DFP is heavily skewed toward weapon usage over techs, which is why even FOnewerls with their piddly 580 ATP cap seriously consider using a melee weapon over casting techs because Shifta and Zalure are just that good. Again, changing resistances to be fairer to Forces is what needs to be done, but may be too complicated or time consuming to achieve. Personally I think this is an important issue, but I'm biased because I love forces and techs in general : 3 If something could be done i would be extremely happy, but I'm already extremely happy to be able to play my favorite childhood game with friends over modern Internet connections, something I thought i'd never be able to do again when the official BB servers shut down. So don't sweat it, but do keep it in mind ^^

These are my thoughts exactly! Though i wouldn't say its the server that hates techs, but the original design of PSO that hates techs. As i said before i played a whole bunch on pretty much every platform this game has come out on, and I have encountered the same problem on each one: techs don't do damage in multi-player, but do in single player for some non-apparent reason. While melee forces are a cool idea which i also personally enjoy, I would also like the play the classic spellcaster, throwing huge balls of swirling fiery death, dropping bolts of lightning from the heavens and freezing my enemies solid with blasts of absolute zero. In reality, you do these things and tink off an ultimate mob for 200 damage while that hunter melees it for 800 6 times before you even begin your next spell... While in singleplayer you hit for 1400 easily to entire groups of enemies. Techs could fundamentally do with being a bit stronger even then, but being comparable to an okay geared ranger would be better than being worth nothing except what S/D and J/Z added to the group's damage. But again, a change of this sort might have far reaching consequences (Elemental weapons come to mind) and would probably not be easy to implement. But I feel it would be great for the health of the game if people that wanted to be bad-ass spell-weavers had the damage to back it up.

Hello, recent re-turnee to ultima and a long time PSO player from all the way back when it was on dreamcast XD Always loved to play Force, but never at all understood enemy elemental resistances when changing between single player and multiplayer. When online enemy HP increases, which makes sense since there is (usually) more than 1 person there so mobs get stronger. But monster elemental resists also increase. All that does is hit Forces trying to use Techs for damage twice in a row. Now mobs have bonus HP AND take 20-80(!?) less damage from all your attacks. This problem only gets worse in EP4. From all my experience playing, Forces seem to be on-par with rangers for DPS while in single player, but their damage is reduced to practically nothing unless you stack tech bonuses like crazy, and even then you do far less damage than a ranger with a similar level of gear, never mind a hunter. I get Forces are a supporty kinda class and have stuff like Megid to even the score at times, but surely the have attack techs for a reason, and not just so they can clear single-player... Basically, what i'm wondering is if the fairer elemental resists for Single Player can somehow be transfered to multiplayer? I know you guys made a crack to make the game harder for people that wanted a challenge (Though it seems to be broken atm?) Would it be possible to make similar changes to make the game fairer for Tech forces? This is a pretty specific and potentially far reaching request that could be extremely time consuming to execute, but I genuinely think it would be better for the game as a whole. I wonder what you think. Thanks regardless for keeping my favorite game from my childhood alive. You guys do awesome work, keep it up ^^

Thanks a lot for the help ^^