Ideas to improve the server - feel free to post!

[Drazn]

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.

[El Socko]

Yeah, very good posts Drazn.

It always baffled me why most FO weapons add tons of ATP that is never going to be utilized while almost none of them add any substantial amount of MST - and this coupled with the fact that MST can never go above the classes' cap anyway.

It would have made so much more sense to have FO weapons that give a lot of MST - say, for example, 500 MST, and of course it should go over cap. Furthermore, attributes on weapons could have worked the same way as when using the regular attacks so that for example, a 500 MST weapon with 50% Native would give your attack 750 more MST potential against Native enemies.

I think if it always had been the way I described it, there wouldn't even be too much of a need for tech boosting equips. Resists would still have had to be a little lower though.

[Drazn]

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 ^^

[tru]

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.

I agree. Single Player resistances are great way to solve this problem. I was saying that all classes have to use different things to defeat enemies than what is typical. That's the way pso was made. Rangers want to use guns all the time, but they cant hit lizards at all in ep4 with guns, so they're forced to bring something like ultima reaper or excal to kill them effectively. Hunters want to melee all the time, but enemies like Zus and Zol Gibbons will annoy you to a great extent if you try to only melee them (the same thing goes for the 3rd form of falz).

[Drazn]

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

Edited March 25, 2016 by Drazn

[Soly]

I would like an "Admiration Mode".

In most game, "Admiration Mode" allow the player to take clean screenshots or to avoid having too much informations at screen while playing.

For PSO, admiration mode could be a key combinaison (alt + name it) which would remove :

• The cursor target (three triangle pointing on monsters, items and mates)
• The HP/TP/Lv/Pseudo of players (top left corner)
• The mini-map (top right corner)
• The three buttons showing which attacks/techs/traps are available for attacking (bottom right corner)
• The little status window which appear when close from an item or a monster (bottom left corner)
• Optional : the number of damage dealt on monsters and HP healed with resta

So to put it simply, every game informations that no one expect to see on a real photo =)

Back to this... I was able to remove

• The HP/TP/Lv/Pseudo of players (top left corner)
• The mini-map (top right corner)
• The three buttons showing which attacks/techs/traps are available for attacking (bottom right corner)
• The little status window which appear when close from an item or a monster (bottom left corner)

Not able yet

• The cursor target (three triangle pointing on monsters, items and mates)
• Optional : the number of damage dealt on monsters and HP healed with resta

[Fyrewolf5]

In regards to techs, there is something many people are overlooking, and that is that techs cannot miss, have set damage that doesn't vary, can stunlock most enemies, and have absolutely massive reach, able to cover the whole room. There is no weapon that can attack wide enough to hit an entire room, or can reach as far away as the longer range techs. They have quite a lot of advantages over regular weapons, which they trade off some of their damage for.

The real reason techs suck is different though, it's because of Damage Cancel. Techs have the largest windows with which to cause dmc, as well having the range to hit the entire room, and also cause numerous other bugs / undesireable effects on top of that. Unless you buff techs to be literally better than everything else (which is silly given the advantages they have over weapons, nobody else would be able to touch anything before entire room gets nuked down e.g. original hylian shield, anyone that remembers that will know how bad it was for the game), they will always suck because of dmc.

Also, I think it's a bit of a fallacy to assume you should be able to get through everything ONLY using techs. Even hu/ra aren't supposed to get through the game using only 1 kind of weapon, they make a variety of weapons available to many classes, if a ranger wants to use a partisan to hit up to 10 targets in front of him instead of a shot with range but only 5 targets, he is allowed to do that, even though he won't be as strong as a hu doing that with a sword. The argument of hu shouldn't be using ranged weapon but can because of smartlink is invalid; sonicteam puts recoboxes on the wall in seabed, along with many kinds of flying enemies. Hu NEEDS to use a ranged weapon to hit them and advance. Rangers may specialize in ranged gear and therefore have the stronger ranged options with rifles and shots, but that doesn't mean hunters aren't meant to use a balance of melee and ranged weapons too. Some enemy resist tweaks would not be unwelcome, but black mages will never really a thing viable everywhere.

The character descriptions say that forces are an advanced class, and that they are supposed to use a balance of weapons and magic (Fomar : Their combination of techniques and quickness in combat makes them unique, Fomarl: Besides excelling in support techniques, Fomarls are competent with weapons. This gives them a more balanced growth potential. Fonewms: Fonewms are balanced, and excel in numerous techniques. Only Fonewearl is said to "have limited combat skills" and even then she can be one of the most skilled forces with weapons due to her high ata).

A force trying to use only techniques throughout the entire game is going to have just a hard a time as a hucast trying to use a saber to hit gee.

Edited March 25, 2016 by Fyrewolf5

[Misombre]

I would agree on pretty much everything.

However, if you're referring to me for the "hunter need to use range weapon" (since am mostly the main complainer in the matter ^^) I never said that hunter should not use any range weapon at all. Nor I would say that for a force with melee weapons and so on. Of course PSO has been designed with a lot of possibility and asks the player to adapt. One cannot simply spam monsters with the same weapon/technique.

What I did say however, is that hunter do not "need" melee weapon as much as they need range weapon. If I was even more extreme, I could say they don't need melee at all. One can simply spam sets of mechgun type with demon's/hell/charge and sometime a slicer as well for boss or crowd.

Of course, am not being totally fair, in a big chunk of case you will have to use a sword type to contain the monster. But concerning saber, daggers, double saber, twin swords : you could do as well if not better with a good mechgun.

Now please (for my sake), don't talk about Excalibur and Dark Flow ^^

[tru]

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.

One thing not to overlook is the fact that EDK shouldn't really be reduced on many enemies (if any at all) because we have very good Hell weapons like asteron striker and ultima reaper.

[Drazn]

In regards to techs, there is something many people are overlooking, and that is that techs cannot miss, have set damage that doesn't vary, can stunlock most enemies, and have absolutely massive reach, able to cover the whole room. There is no weapon that can attack wide enough to hit an entire room, or can reach as far away as the longer range techs. They have quite a lot of advantages over regular weapons, which they trade off some of their damage for.

The real reason techs suck is different though, it's because of Damage Cancel. Techs have the largest windows with which to cause dmc, as well having the range to hit the entire room, and also cause numerous other bugs / undesireable effects on top of that. Unless you buff techs to be literally better than everything else (which is silly given the advantages they have over weapons, nobody else would be able to touch anything before entire room gets nuked down e.g. original hylian shield, anyone that remembers that will know how bad it was for the game), they will always suck because of dmc.

Also, I think it's a bit of a fallacy to assume you should be able to get through everything ONLY using techs. Even hu/ra aren't supposed to get through the game using only 1 kind of weapon, they make a variety of weapons available to many classes, if a ranger wants to use a partisan to hit up to 10 targets in front of him instead of a shot with range but only 5 targets, he is allowed to do that, even though he won't be as strong as a hu doing that with a sword. The argument of hu shouldn't be using ranged weapon but can because of smartlink is invalid; sonicteam puts recoboxes on the wall in seabed, along with many kinds of flying enemies. Hu NEEDS to use a ranged weapon to hit them and advance. Rangers may specialize in ranged gear and therefore have the stronger ranged options with rifles and shots, but that doesn't mean hunters aren't meant to use a balance of melee and ranged weapons too. Some enemy resist tweaks would not be unwelcome, but black mages will never really a thing viable everywhere.

The character descriptions say that forces are an advanced class, and that they are supposed to use a balance of weapons and magic (Fomar : Their combination of techniques and quickness in combat makes them unique, Fomarl: Besides excelling in support techniques, Fomarls are competent with weapons. This gives them a more balanced growth potential. Fonewms: Fonewms are balanced, and excel in numerous techniques. Only Fonewearl is said to "have limited combat skills" and even then she can be one of the most skilled forces with weapons due to her high ata).

A force trying to use only techniques throughout the entire game is going to have just a hard a time as a hucast trying to use a saber to hit gee.

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.

[Drazn]

One thing not to overlook is the fact that EDK shouldn't really be reduced on many enemies (if any at all) because we have very good Hell weapons like asteron striker and ultima reaper.

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.

[Fyrewolf5]

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.

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.

Damage cancel is indeed a very important issue. Whenever two or more things hit a monster at the same time, one or both of the damages can cancel out, it happens quite often in fact. Literally anything that can affect a monster in any way can do this, even things like freeze traps and jellen / zalure will cause dmc (and can be even worse since they count as 0 damage hits so more chance to dmc). Techniques have an much larger window to do this than most other things. What this means is that spamming ra- techs in teamplay is actually doing negative damage, not only is your own tech doing 0 damage from being cancelled (as well as fucking with other players being able to manipluate monster movement and flinching, screwing with trap usage, making some enemies go briefly untargetable, bug out, or other issues), but you also make your teammates do 0 damage often as well, actually decreasing your team's damage output and making things slower. It sounds counterintiutive, but adding more damage is more often than not actually slower. This is why coordinated teams will focus different enemies and different parts of bosses; just jump into any cca today where players have hell gear, and if they all try to hell the same target, where normally it would die in 1-2 combos, it simply will not die and take many many more attempts because dmc is happening literally all the time. DMC effectively makes it extremely difficult to make techs good, since unless they are extremely strong, then they will always be undesireable in a party unless they are so strong as to outclass everything even with the dmc. If you want to use Si- techs in a party to attack monsters other players are not focusing so as to not dmc, we do have glide divine v00 on this server, which has a whopping 200% foie boost and 100% barta and zonde boost, which also brings me to my next point.

Techs are actually buffed quite a lot on this server and extremely powerful, but are very gear dependent. You are very new here so you don't have any of the the high level force gear yet and don't have a good idea of how much ultima has buffed them from the original game, a ton of the major event items are designed with force in mind and many others are made for all classes but are still very useful on force. Techs are strong and do have their uses, it's just not the use that most people are expecting. If you came to this game expecting to play a Black Mage, then just go play a different game, you won't find that class here. It'll be a lot better for you to find a game where that is actually designed into the game, rather than try to force a game that obviously didn't want that sort of thing to redesign itself for it. Even without having that kind of class here, techniques are actually extremely powerful in solo play, with insane room clearing potential and much less problems of dmc. There are many areas of the game you can solo with only techs, you just can't do the entire game with only techs. There are clear signs in the design of the game that shows that Sonicteam did not want players to solo with only techs; for example, there are several enemies in the game that completely ignore all tech boosting gear you may have, and I don't just mean the enemies that ignore attribute %s too. A good example is slimes, they ignore tech boosts and have a chance to split when any technique is used on them (though barta techs do it almost garaunteed, other elements still have a good chance), they intended for techs to not be the ideal answer everywhere. Still, techs on this server have been buffed quite a bit, and are extremely powerful in many areas. Ep 4 is very soloable with only techs (in fact I find it the most ideal way to do so), and if you are a maxed out force you can kill a booma in only 3 rafoies, which is just nuts. Techniques are strong, but they aren't meant to be an answer to every situation, and the design of the game clearly shows that.

The single player resists have very little bearing on arguing for anything. This game is designed as a multiplayer game (it even has online in the title), the balance of the single player monsters is not a good indicator of the intended design of the monsters, their stats are often vastly different and sometimes some concessions are made in some monsters resistances since you cannot have anyone with you, though really it's the hp values that make them easier to kill with techs more than the resists. Many other things about the monsters are often different and sometimes harder (e.g. morfos have 90 esp in 1p and 50 esp in multi), and several enemy attacks function differently too. The real kicker though is that you think that megid "is in a good place". Megid is pretty terrible in Blue Burst, a force has a much, much better time using a 50hit hell raygun or an ultima reaper over megid. In ultimate, almost nothing has less than 50edk, and many of the enemies which hell is useful on are often higher in the 60-80 range. On those lower edk enemies megid would have a 50% chance to kill, but hell with v502 would be 86% chance to kill. While megid may only have a 31% chance to kill a recobox (highly unreliable), a hell weapon with v502 has a 48% chance to kill and can fire off shots at a much faster rate than megid casts too. Even with having to pass an evp check (which freezing can make basically gauranteed), hell is so much more reliable and faster than megid its not even funny.

TL;DR Ultima has already done a ton to buff techs (forces get so much love on this server it's insane), but if you want to play a black mage, then go play another game, this game really can't have it due to various inherent design problems that will always hold it back from doing so.

[Drazn]

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.

[Soly]

The issue with dmc, I believe, is that all the battle system is managed by the clients. I think I did test this out... It goes like:

- Wild monster appears with 2000 HP

- Player 1 deals 500 damage to the monster and tells the other players of it

- Player 2 deals 100 damage to the monster and tells the other players of it while receiving the damage dealt by Player 1

Here would be the issue, decide whether the monster will have 1900 (p2 own damage) or 1400 (both players damage combined) or it does 1900 (and sends to p1) then receive 1500 and the final health for p2 is 1500 but...

- Player 1 receives that the monster now has 1900 HP (from Player 2) and effectively cancelled 500 damage

Edited March 28, 2016 by Soly

[El Socko]

The factor about the larger window is probably just referring to the fact that some techs can affect more targets due to their large (or even huge in the case of Rafoie) AoE than the vast majority of weapons.

One unrelated thing I've recently noticed in One Person mode is that the AoE seems to be a bit smaller there? I saw that during Restless Lion when I was casting Rafoie on big spawns and it didn't quite seem to hit enemies way "outside the edge" of the big explosion (the way it does in regular multi-mode). Also when trying to break crates in one of the rooms there with no enemies using Razonde.