2010-03-15, 05:05 PM
Some of these ideas are terrible and are obviously from people who haven't played games with better mechanics than this one (pretty much any MMO/RPG). Whatever, from what I've played (Kingdom of Loathing, Ragnarok, Diablo 2 particularly), here's the best mechanical systems I've experienced:
Whatever. This isn't going to happen. Still, these are just a small portion of the things Maple does ridiculously poorly that other much older games have done right. To be honest, there's almost no excuse for a game to be as mechanically poor as MS, but whatever makes money I guess.
wall of text
Equips:
The problem with equips in Maple are NOT that they do too much. The fact is, they do too little for too much money. Almost no equips legitimately do anything but provide a small damage boost. Things need to be reworked, because this system is clearly a watered down version of very basic 1980's RPG design with customization for an MMO that makes everything really poorly done.
-First and most importantly, MAKE EQUIPS DO THINGS. There should be equips that are worn for good stats. In almost every other game, however, there are equips worn for effects. There should be armor that reduces damage from certain sources and other armor that reduces other damage, covering many different monsters and allowing fast switching for various battles. There should be equips that can give autocasting of certain skills, whatever. Diablo 2 did it fairly well, but even then I think it has issues, especially noticeable after playing mods that end up throwing really big numbers on really unimportant modifiers because there's not as much you can do with equips. However, Diablo 2 was way ahead of its time and did many things extremely well that other games should take example from.
-Rework tiering and upgrades. Yes, better armor should be higher level, but not just better statwise. Equips of different levels should have different roles. In most games, NPC equips are plain equips that are okay statwise but do nothing else. Other weapons from drops will actually have effects you want to use in certain situations. For example, maybe NPCs sell plain swords up to lvl 50 that aren't very upgradeable. You can find a lvl 35 sword that has a chance to stun when you hit enemies. And a lvl 120 sword from a hard boss might be holy elemental and make part of your normal damage holy element and give a 25% damage boost when you use Holy Charge.
-Rework upgrading. The best upgrade system I've seen is that of RO, where upgrading is two-dimensional. There's pure upgrading, which does what upgrading in MS does, or similarly. Upgrading a weapon increases its attack a certain amount for each +X on it, and defense for armor. Then, there's a customizable upgrade system, where items have slots for putting cards into, that give effects. For example, a Hydra card in a weapon gives +20% damage to humanoid enemies (including in PVP) and lowest level weapons can have 4 slots, meaning you can get +80% damage with that weapon to human enemies. Then there's Ghostring card for armor which makes the wearer ghost element, taking 75% less damage from physical attacks. This gives more reason to have multiple equips at a time and constantly switch between them.
-Rework defense and magic defense. KoL uses a DA/DR system, and RO uses pure % reduction, which gets a little overpowered. But the DR system from KoL is pretty brilliant. Essentially, there's a % reduction for defense, but it has a cap and diminishing returns. I believe it's sqrt(Defense*10) - 10, with a minimum of 0 and max of 90. When you have 40 defense, you will take 10% less damage from physical attacks, 90 defense gives 20% reduction, 360 defense gives 50% reduction, and 1000 defense gives 90% reduction. On top of that, there's sources in both games that flat out reduce the final number by X, which is on Shields in KoL. For example, with 360 defense and 200 reduction, if an attack would do 1500 damage, you'd take 50% of it, which is 750, and 200 off, which is only 550 damage.
-Make attack not multiplicative. In all these other games, you have a part of damage you get from your stats, and the damage from weapons is ADDED to it. For example, switching from a 40 atk weapon in RO to a 120 atk weapon added 80 damage, not tripled your damage output. You would probably go from like 450 to like 530 damage range. Wouldn't this make weapons useless? Yes, except they would DO THINGS. The number of weapons that are good on pure stats should never be that high, and even the ones with ridiculous stats should be fairly mediocre in game design because effects should outweigh stats. Why should this happen? Because people LIKE cool effects like autocasting useful skills a lot more than they just like 10% bigger numbers psychologically.
-Likewise, magic should work on the same system. If physical weapons and magic weapons were both based on the same system, then they would be fair between each other. If a 500 int character with a 120 matk weapon had the same "magic damage range" as a 500 str warrior with a 120 atk sword, then you could make skills like Cold Beam doing 260% magic damage and Power Strike doing 260% physical damage and they would be equal. Or separate them into differently boosted but EVEN systems. In RO raising int gives a HUGE boost to matk (increasing returns, going from 20 int to 30 int isn't much, but 120 int to 130 int is a TREMENDOUS damage difference), but there's little way to boost it otherwise, while physical attacks get more multipliers. So a physical attacker can get 110 str and like +90% damage on their weapon, and a magic attacker can get 140 int and they'll be even.
-No matter what, MAKE EQUIPMENT SWITCHING MEANINGFUL. Maybe not weapon most of the time, except when you want to use elemental weapons, but armor switching definitely. And give accessories cool effects. In KoL, the most universal accessories are +item drop accessories, in RO, accessories that give a skill point in things like Hide (sort of like Dark Sight I guess) or Teleport (teleports to a random spot on the map), and in Diablo 2, +skill points and +elemental resists. You should have to choose between a pendant that gives +5 all stats vs a pendant that gives +20% max hp vs a pendant that gives use of lvl 1 Teleport.
-Make equipment support builds. Not necessarily SP builds, but allow variation. Say there was a set of equips you could get that make Hawks do a lot of damage with much larger mob area for bowmen, and the bow of that set had low attack but stunned enemies. This would allow a Inferno/Frostprey pure build for mobbing, and then you could have another set that gave normal bonuses and the weapon gives +20% more damage to Strafe/Hurricane but weakened your mob skills. It's somewhat evident in Archmage elemental weapons (ice weapon for training, lightning weapon for bossing), but extend that system to have much more variety, much more useful and practical effects, and across many more classes. Equips should make certain builds viable and have purpose. There should be certain equips for NLs that make training with Avenger powerful and useful, and another one that makes Shadow Web viable as a party support skill for disabling monsters, and another one that makes TT do what it does right now for good boss damage, and yet another build that allows maximum use of Taunt, making it give even bigger boosts but making it so you have to work harder and spend more money training to get the big exp boost. There should be many different equips that support all these different builds and make then all viable.
Stats:
There's a lot of things that could happen, but really, here's the bottom line. Make stats not linear.
-HP and MP stats should use diminishing returns, and should be tied to other stats. RO by far has the best system to me. Vitality and Int are the hp/mp stats, and raising vitality gives 1% hp per point and 1 damage reduction per point. So if you had 30 vitality, your hp would rise 30% from the base hp for your level (say 2500 for a lvl 9X sin, with 30 Vit would have 3250 hp), and then take 30 less damage from everything. Int works the same way, but with magic defense, and is the damage stat for mages (So yes, a mage would need a lot less base mp, but a lvl 150 mage with 750 int and 2000 base mp would have +750% or 17000 mp and take 750 less damage from magic).
-Damage stats should use increasing returns. Why is it that leveling between lvl 150 and 155 gives almost no damage boost when it takes so much work to gain those 5 levels? The use of breakpoints would be great. Make the normal damage increase linear like it is now, but at say every 10 points you get a bonus of (X/10)^2 damage. So at 10 str you get 1 bonus damage, 20 you get 4 bonus damage, and at 800 you get 6400 bonus damage.
-Make a real attack speed system. Weapon attack speeds are fine, but make ways to actually boost your attack speed. Then you could have tradeoffs of more attack speed vs more damage. Make it so that someone who does not invest in raising attack speed will attack very slow, and someone that does will see significant return, like a DrK with enough attack speed boosting could Crusher as fast as a NL does TT right now, but only with a weak weapon that gives a big aspd bonus. Also this would allow separating gloves further: damage gloves vs +skill gloves vs aspd gloves vs accuracy gloves. And allow breakpoints of extra aspd to come from various sources, not one source that EVERYONE will use and nothing else. Or even implement a stat like agility that makes you attack faster and nothing else, so people would want to invest in that stat.
-Make accuracy matter. Make sure people will have to sacrifice something to have accuracy for very high avoid bosses, and make it feasible and obtainable the same way for everyone. Do NOT make it so that there's a boss where say bowmen can always hit, thieves can hit with an acc glove, and warriors can never hit. Make it so normal bowmen with good equips can sort of hit, and everyone else will always 100% hit with a well made accuracy glove. Make certain enemies have low avoid that with no acc equips anyone can hit regardless. Things like that.
Skills:
I outlined a lot of this already, but I will reiterate it here.
-More skill variance. Allow more skill builds to function, so more skill choice. Mages should not get 2 attacking skills and a ton of skills that do nothing but save very small amounts of money for maxing them. Skill trees should be more complex, more specific towards special builds, and allow multiple builds of the same kind of character. In Diablo 2 I can make 8 different Sorceresses and none of them will be anywhere CLOSE to the same, and they'll all be Hell-viable. Why can't I make 8 different Bowmasters and have all of them use very different skill builds, all of which can be used to get to lvl 140 without any trouble?
-More good oneshot/small investment skills. In most games, skills like Flash Jump/Teleport don't take 20 points to max. They take 1. There should be several skills like this, and they shouldn't take many points to max, maybe 5 at most. They're fun utility skills that help all the time but don't add to damage. Why force players to put tons of points in them? They do nothing but take up filler space because the developers couldn't think of useful other skills to allow you to put SP in. For a F/P mage skill tree, you could make Teleport and MP Eater both 1 point skills, and add 2 more solid attacking skills that would force you to choose a more varied skill build. Booster should pretty much always be a 1 point skill or actually add more speed at lvl 11, so it'd be a 11-pointer.
-Make some skills non-grinding oriented. Assassins have a buff in RO called Enchant Deadly Poison which QUADRUPLES damage for about 2 minutes. It's annoying and expensive to get the deadly poison bottles for it, however, so it's only used for PVP and bosses. The main attacking skill of Creators is an acid bomb that's also fairly expensive to make, and does ridiculous amounts of damage (let's just say a typical party for Valkyrie Randgris, the equivalent to say Horntail in RO, involves tanks with Priests to Safety Wall the tanks, which completely ignores around 12 hits of physical damage, and some other support classes to help the tank survive, and 2 creators, which kill off probably the 3rd hardest boss in the entire game in under 30 seconds, with just 2 attackers, should give an idea of how powerful this skill is), as well as breaking armor and weapons and totally ignoring defense, doing MORE damage the more vitality the target has, but it's expensive and isn't used for training. Meso Explosion is a very poor example of this, but it IS an example of this type of skill. There should be more skills like that in the game.
-MORE UTILITY SKILLS. Buffs should not just be about raising damage and exp gain. Here's just a small list of the utility skills RO has:
1. A skill that completely ignores about 12 hits of physical damage to someone standing in a certain area
2. A skill that completely blocks all ranged physical damage in an area
3. A skill that makes you take damage for your party members so they don't die from monster attacks
4. A buff that cuts all damage by half from monsters
5. A skill that makes a wall monsters have to attack to get through to hit you
6. An entire job devoted to giving big buffs to specific jobs (it has a different buff for each job in the game, and each of those buffs strengthen that particular job in a unique way, like making Priests do 5x as much damage with Holy Light, or giving Bards the ability to buff themselves with their songs and walk faster while singing)
7. The entire Bard/Dancer job (almost all their skills do nothing but give big buffs to people around them)
8. A whole set of skills that create a mist that raises the damage of a certain element inside the mist
9. A skill that creates an area that heals everyone standing in it for like 5 minutes every second automatically, and pushes demon and undead enemies out of it.
10. A skill that unequips armor and weapons from the target (makes monsters lose a lot of attack and defense, actually unequips items from players and stops them from reequipping anything for a few minutes)
Equips:
The problem with equips in Maple are NOT that they do too much. The fact is, they do too little for too much money. Almost no equips legitimately do anything but provide a small damage boost. Things need to be reworked, because this system is clearly a watered down version of very basic 1980's RPG design with customization for an MMO that makes everything really poorly done.
-First and most importantly, MAKE EQUIPS DO THINGS. There should be equips that are worn for good stats. In almost every other game, however, there are equips worn for effects. There should be armor that reduces damage from certain sources and other armor that reduces other damage, covering many different monsters and allowing fast switching for various battles. There should be equips that can give autocasting of certain skills, whatever. Diablo 2 did it fairly well, but even then I think it has issues, especially noticeable after playing mods that end up throwing really big numbers on really unimportant modifiers because there's not as much you can do with equips. However, Diablo 2 was way ahead of its time and did many things extremely well that other games should take example from.
-Rework tiering and upgrades. Yes, better armor should be higher level, but not just better statwise. Equips of different levels should have different roles. In most games, NPC equips are plain equips that are okay statwise but do nothing else. Other weapons from drops will actually have effects you want to use in certain situations. For example, maybe NPCs sell plain swords up to lvl 50 that aren't very upgradeable. You can find a lvl 35 sword that has a chance to stun when you hit enemies. And a lvl 120 sword from a hard boss might be holy elemental and make part of your normal damage holy element and give a 25% damage boost when you use Holy Charge.
-Rework upgrading. The best upgrade system I've seen is that of RO, where upgrading is two-dimensional. There's pure upgrading, which does what upgrading in MS does, or similarly. Upgrading a weapon increases its attack a certain amount for each +X on it, and defense for armor. Then, there's a customizable upgrade system, where items have slots for putting cards into, that give effects. For example, a Hydra card in a weapon gives +20% damage to humanoid enemies (including in PVP) and lowest level weapons can have 4 slots, meaning you can get +80% damage with that weapon to human enemies. Then there's Ghostring card for armor which makes the wearer ghost element, taking 75% less damage from physical attacks. This gives more reason to have multiple equips at a time and constantly switch between them.
-Rework defense and magic defense. KoL uses a DA/DR system, and RO uses pure % reduction, which gets a little overpowered. But the DR system from KoL is pretty brilliant. Essentially, there's a % reduction for defense, but it has a cap and diminishing returns. I believe it's sqrt(Defense*10) - 10, with a minimum of 0 and max of 90. When you have 40 defense, you will take 10% less damage from physical attacks, 90 defense gives 20% reduction, 360 defense gives 50% reduction, and 1000 defense gives 90% reduction. On top of that, there's sources in both games that flat out reduce the final number by X, which is on Shields in KoL. For example, with 360 defense and 200 reduction, if an attack would do 1500 damage, you'd take 50% of it, which is 750, and 200 off, which is only 550 damage.
-Make attack not multiplicative. In all these other games, you have a part of damage you get from your stats, and the damage from weapons is ADDED to it. For example, switching from a 40 atk weapon in RO to a 120 atk weapon added 80 damage, not tripled your damage output. You would probably go from like 450 to like 530 damage range. Wouldn't this make weapons useless? Yes, except they would DO THINGS. The number of weapons that are good on pure stats should never be that high, and even the ones with ridiculous stats should be fairly mediocre in game design because effects should outweigh stats. Why should this happen? Because people LIKE cool effects like autocasting useful skills a lot more than they just like 10% bigger numbers psychologically.
-Likewise, magic should work on the same system. If physical weapons and magic weapons were both based on the same system, then they would be fair between each other. If a 500 int character with a 120 matk weapon had the same "magic damage range" as a 500 str warrior with a 120 atk sword, then you could make skills like Cold Beam doing 260% magic damage and Power Strike doing 260% physical damage and they would be equal. Or separate them into differently boosted but EVEN systems. In RO raising int gives a HUGE boost to matk (increasing returns, going from 20 int to 30 int isn't much, but 120 int to 130 int is a TREMENDOUS damage difference), but there's little way to boost it otherwise, while physical attacks get more multipliers. So a physical attacker can get 110 str and like +90% damage on their weapon, and a magic attacker can get 140 int and they'll be even.
-No matter what, MAKE EQUIPMENT SWITCHING MEANINGFUL. Maybe not weapon most of the time, except when you want to use elemental weapons, but armor switching definitely. And give accessories cool effects. In KoL, the most universal accessories are +item drop accessories, in RO, accessories that give a skill point in things like Hide (sort of like Dark Sight I guess) or Teleport (teleports to a random spot on the map), and in Diablo 2, +skill points and +elemental resists. You should have to choose between a pendant that gives +5 all stats vs a pendant that gives +20% max hp vs a pendant that gives use of lvl 1 Teleport.
-Make equipment support builds. Not necessarily SP builds, but allow variation. Say there was a set of equips you could get that make Hawks do a lot of damage with much larger mob area for bowmen, and the bow of that set had low attack but stunned enemies. This would allow a Inferno/Frostprey pure build for mobbing, and then you could have another set that gave normal bonuses and the weapon gives +20% more damage to Strafe/Hurricane but weakened your mob skills. It's somewhat evident in Archmage elemental weapons (ice weapon for training, lightning weapon for bossing), but extend that system to have much more variety, much more useful and practical effects, and across many more classes. Equips should make certain builds viable and have purpose. There should be certain equips for NLs that make training with Avenger powerful and useful, and another one that makes Shadow Web viable as a party support skill for disabling monsters, and another one that makes TT do what it does right now for good boss damage, and yet another build that allows maximum use of Taunt, making it give even bigger boosts but making it so you have to work harder and spend more money training to get the big exp boost. There should be many different equips that support all these different builds and make then all viable.
Stats:
There's a lot of things that could happen, but really, here's the bottom line. Make stats not linear.
-HP and MP stats should use diminishing returns, and should be tied to other stats. RO by far has the best system to me. Vitality and Int are the hp/mp stats, and raising vitality gives 1% hp per point and 1 damage reduction per point. So if you had 30 vitality, your hp would rise 30% from the base hp for your level (say 2500 for a lvl 9X sin, with 30 Vit would have 3250 hp), and then take 30 less damage from everything. Int works the same way, but with magic defense, and is the damage stat for mages (So yes, a mage would need a lot less base mp, but a lvl 150 mage with 750 int and 2000 base mp would have +750% or 17000 mp and take 750 less damage from magic).
-Damage stats should use increasing returns. Why is it that leveling between lvl 150 and 155 gives almost no damage boost when it takes so much work to gain those 5 levels? The use of breakpoints would be great. Make the normal damage increase linear like it is now, but at say every 10 points you get a bonus of (X/10)^2 damage. So at 10 str you get 1 bonus damage, 20 you get 4 bonus damage, and at 800 you get 6400 bonus damage.
-Make a real attack speed system. Weapon attack speeds are fine, but make ways to actually boost your attack speed. Then you could have tradeoffs of more attack speed vs more damage. Make it so that someone who does not invest in raising attack speed will attack very slow, and someone that does will see significant return, like a DrK with enough attack speed boosting could Crusher as fast as a NL does TT right now, but only with a weak weapon that gives a big aspd bonus. Also this would allow separating gloves further: damage gloves vs +skill gloves vs aspd gloves vs accuracy gloves. And allow breakpoints of extra aspd to come from various sources, not one source that EVERYONE will use and nothing else. Or even implement a stat like agility that makes you attack faster and nothing else, so people would want to invest in that stat.
-Make accuracy matter. Make sure people will have to sacrifice something to have accuracy for very high avoid bosses, and make it feasible and obtainable the same way for everyone. Do NOT make it so that there's a boss where say bowmen can always hit, thieves can hit with an acc glove, and warriors can never hit. Make it so normal bowmen with good equips can sort of hit, and everyone else will always 100% hit with a well made accuracy glove. Make certain enemies have low avoid that with no acc equips anyone can hit regardless. Things like that.
Skills:
I outlined a lot of this already, but I will reiterate it here.
-More skill variance. Allow more skill builds to function, so more skill choice. Mages should not get 2 attacking skills and a ton of skills that do nothing but save very small amounts of money for maxing them. Skill trees should be more complex, more specific towards special builds, and allow multiple builds of the same kind of character. In Diablo 2 I can make 8 different Sorceresses and none of them will be anywhere CLOSE to the same, and they'll all be Hell-viable. Why can't I make 8 different Bowmasters and have all of them use very different skill builds, all of which can be used to get to lvl 140 without any trouble?
-More good oneshot/small investment skills. In most games, skills like Flash Jump/Teleport don't take 20 points to max. They take 1. There should be several skills like this, and they shouldn't take many points to max, maybe 5 at most. They're fun utility skills that help all the time but don't add to damage. Why force players to put tons of points in them? They do nothing but take up filler space because the developers couldn't think of useful other skills to allow you to put SP in. For a F/P mage skill tree, you could make Teleport and MP Eater both 1 point skills, and add 2 more solid attacking skills that would force you to choose a more varied skill build. Booster should pretty much always be a 1 point skill or actually add more speed at lvl 11, so it'd be a 11-pointer.
-Make some skills non-grinding oriented. Assassins have a buff in RO called Enchant Deadly Poison which QUADRUPLES damage for about 2 minutes. It's annoying and expensive to get the deadly poison bottles for it, however, so it's only used for PVP and bosses. The main attacking skill of Creators is an acid bomb that's also fairly expensive to make, and does ridiculous amounts of damage (let's just say a typical party for Valkyrie Randgris, the equivalent to say Horntail in RO, involves tanks with Priests to Safety Wall the tanks, which completely ignores around 12 hits of physical damage, and some other support classes to help the tank survive, and 2 creators, which kill off probably the 3rd hardest boss in the entire game in under 30 seconds, with just 2 attackers, should give an idea of how powerful this skill is), as well as breaking armor and weapons and totally ignoring defense, doing MORE damage the more vitality the target has, but it's expensive and isn't used for training. Meso Explosion is a very poor example of this, but it IS an example of this type of skill. There should be more skills like that in the game.
-MORE UTILITY SKILLS. Buffs should not just be about raising damage and exp gain. Here's just a small list of the utility skills RO has:
1. A skill that completely ignores about 12 hits of physical damage to someone standing in a certain area
2. A skill that completely blocks all ranged physical damage in an area
3. A skill that makes you take damage for your party members so they don't die from monster attacks
4. A buff that cuts all damage by half from monsters
5. A skill that makes a wall monsters have to attack to get through to hit you
6. An entire job devoted to giving big buffs to specific jobs (it has a different buff for each job in the game, and each of those buffs strengthen that particular job in a unique way, like making Priests do 5x as much damage with Holy Light, or giving Bards the ability to buff themselves with their songs and walk faster while singing)
7. The entire Bard/Dancer job (almost all their skills do nothing but give big buffs to people around them)
8. A whole set of skills that create a mist that raises the damage of a certain element inside the mist
9. A skill that creates an area that heals everyone standing in it for like 5 minutes every second automatically, and pushes demon and undead enemies out of it.
10. A skill that unequips armor and weapons from the target (makes monsters lose a lot of attack and defense, actually unequips items from players and stops them from reequipping anything for a few minutes)
Whatever. This isn't going to happen. Still, these are just a small portion of the things Maple does ridiculously poorly that other much older games have done right. To be honest, there's almost no excuse for a game to be as mechanically poor as MS, but whatever makes money I guess.