byakugan Wrote:It is true that these skills aren't trully original, and it might be true that the sun and moon mechanism is only one with the purpose of filling up the skill set by giving you 2 of the same skill, just please stop acting like the Striker and wind archer revamp were original at all. They both were only original aesthetically, the same as this one. We could go even further back to Xenon and Devon Avenger and say the same about them. Despite a small mechanic that differenciates them from the rest, mostly all of their skills and gameplay can be linked back to another job or many that already had them.
I agree with a lot of that, but it's not that simply brushed off as unoriginal.
Thunder Breakers have a unique style where all their attacks chain, which isn't visible in any other class except Hayato. In the case of Hayato, his skills chain in a very specific order. Thunder Breakers can literally go in (almost) any order they want. (The exception is Ascend can only chain to Thunder) Whether it's a good design or bad design depends on if players actually enjoy the way it works. I personally don't. Some of the skills may be considered reskins (Thunder, primarily), but the only skill similar to Ascend is Mercedes' Charge Drive + Rolling Moonsault. This is different because Rolling Moonsault
required Charge Drive to be used first. Charge Drive was a two-part skill that rushed, and tossed. Ascend does neither of these. It only does the jump that Rolling Moonsault does.
Annihilate is also another unique skill that deals more hits based on a counter. The only other class that has something similar is Demon Avenger's Exceed system, which improves a skill based on his exceed level. Annihilate depends on building charges, gaining improvements on each charge. Exceed requires you to be at the highest exceed level to gain the benefit. Thunder Breaker's charges provide defense ignore, or can be spent to improve damage, and then recharged. Demon Avenger's exceed prevents it from freely spamming different exceed skills, and is depleted when Release Overload is used (primarily to Heal, or maintain a high HP). It's a similar concept of a sacrifice for gain, but that's what every thing in everything has. You sacrifice a resource (MP) for a benefit (Buff). Replace MP with whatever flavour name and Buff for whatever effect. The only different things you could possibly have here is you sacrifice a resource for nothing, or you gain a buff for free. I don't see many games use those, they're pretty unique, therefore they must be fun.
The only unique thing Wind Archer really has is a multi-target slow Final Attack, which is rather boring, and the splash damage of Spiral Vortex, which is kind of similar to Angelic Buster's Sting Explosion, and Cannon Shooter's Barrel Throw thing I think. It is a rather bland reskin of pomegranate, but it has significantly better thought put into it compared to the archers that aren't Mercedes.
Which brings me to the main point:
Dawn Warrior is probably the second most incomplete class to ever be released on KMST. If I am wrong, then they've just plain pineappleed up in design. The only more incomplete class I think is Cannon Shooters. Cannon Shooters went through several iterations of redesign while in Tespia, though in actuality, I feel that they weren't incomplete, rather people were unhappy with its design of having a primary attack skill be balanced as a dedicated 3-target, instead of a stronger 1 target viability. Cannon Buster was thus changed to Cannon Barrage. Bazooka was also tweaked significantly, as well as Spike, and several of their skills to be a strong progression instead of 20 Spike > 26 Bazooka, or their 1st job having some rather useless stuff.
The majority of Dawn Warrior skills appear to be placeholders; the Solar and Lunar counterparts posses the almost if not identical range, attack speed, damage, hits, etc. Speeding Sunset and Dance of Moon are identical except for height and that Dance of Moon doesn't force aerial, and Dance of Moon (air) doesn't force landing. This doesn't really matter much in fact, since Falling Moon and Rising Sun change the skills to function differently, so your Moon skills have 2x the hits, and 55% the damage, and your Sun skills have 20% more damage and are faster. Most skills aren't even properly tagged with their info parameters. For example, Moon and Sun Cross are missing their push/pull tags. Light Flux has a blind tag. Dance of Moon (air) can chain to Dance of Moon except Dance of Moon (air) doesn't force you to land. You can't actually use Dance of Moon after Dance of Moon (air). In fact, Dance of Moon (air) makes you stay in the air. As far as I know, it is the only attack skill in the entire game that can do this; the only comparable skills are Mercedes' Leap Tornado, and Xenon's Combat Switching: Shoot Down because they push you upwards after one use, but after that you
always fall down. People are saying it looks like Hayato's Yousousen, which is a copy of Mercedes's Gust Drive and Dual Blade's Flying Assaulter, mind you, and forces you to land, as well as doesn't require you to be in midair.
There appear to be a lot of complaints that his skills look similar to Hayato's. For the record, there are physically only three ways to attack with a sword. Stabbing. Straight slashing. And Curved Slashing. God forbid that the sun and moon are circular, and that curved slashes form crescent shapes, and that the primary attacking method with a katana is a curved slash. The only skill that even looks close is Crescent Divide, because the crescent moons in it appear so fast and are so thin and even that's a stretch.
Do you guys even look at these skills or read their effects?
In summary, they are either testing Soul Master on the test server (gasp), or this is the worst designed class after Mikhail in the game.
Every class is going to have similarities to another. Regardless of how brilliant a game designer could be, unless you rewrite the game engine with each class, there will always be overlap. You may be able to conceive one or two unique skills that are interesting with themes that apply to a new class. If you create an entire class with entirely newly designed skills, that's what 9 skills? A year's worth of development time, given the rate they make classes now? More? Think about what type of theme a class would have to be to fit an
entire set of new skills. Think of the type of theme the skills would have to have to fit the class. How could none of them be redundant? How could none of them have overlap with anything existing previously, concurrently, or in the future? How would customers feel, having a completely new thing make their old thing redundant? How could you possibly top that in the next release, a year or two later?