2011-04-19, 04:39 PM
Dusk Wrote:Before I start, let's look at what players spend most of their time doing. Nexon's intention is obviously to get everyone to train by grouping and running their new faceroll dungeons that they call Monster Park. So it's half-viable for a class that needs to group to exist. So what can that class actually do for a party?
Adv Bless: Minor party buff, comparable to Combat Orders or Sharp Eyes
Holy Symbol: party buff. It's the only one that buffs EXP instead of survivability or damage. I'll get back to this later.
Heal: Rendered almost entirely useless by pots even for the Bishop, remedied only by rare situations where there is a potion cd/Seduce and no Zombify. Also scales HORRIBLY.
Holy Magic Shell: What makes you think this skill will be much different than Heal?
Dispel: Same thing as Heal. Come on. The only reason these skills are wanted at all is because Nexon puts situations in certain boss battles just to say "hey look, we didn't forget about Bishops!" They're complete trash everywhere else. All you do with Dispel is save Allcures. That's hardly support.
Res: I almost want to say "same thing as Heal" for this too, except Wheels cost NX and Res is actually superior to Wheels. Still.
Invincible is a self-buff, I think you're confusing it with something else.
There are so many problems with a real support class existing in Maple. Going back to HS. EXP is good, but what do you need it for? Bishop damage doesn't even compare with other classes and your skills do not SCALE at all. There isn't much a level 200 Bishop in really good gear can do in terms of support that my level 90 Priest with crappy gear couldn't do if I simply leveled it to 125 or so and put some points into the relevant skills. EXP is only relevant if you view getting level 200 as the end goal of the game without any focus on actually having content to enjoy, and even then, there's no need for a Bishop if you have an extra computer handy and park a priest with maxed HS around.
All the classes that are currently viewed as "on par" have immense solo capability. This is because the game does not make partying very useful. Seriously, in the days where Zakum and then Horntail where the Big Bads, you actually needed a big group of decently geared people to take the down. Nowadays, a big group of decently geared people doesn't hold a candle to one guy with 20 grand worth of questionably legit gear hitting millions of damage per hit. No one cares about partying. The game just doesn't support it.
There's also the fact that there's like 20-something classes in the game and only one of them has any skills like a Bishop. This means if they design content that requires a Bishop for anything, they have to ensure that Bishops are by far the most overpopulated class in the game. Which is helped by the extremely long ultimate-spamming phase of the game, but is not a very good model. If they want to make a support class, they need to add more than one.
TLDR This game isn't going to be fixable to where you can actually have different party roles unless they completely scrap the potion system, make classes more self-sufficient without them, add more support classes, make bosses less fake-hard, allow things other than damage to scale with gear, and I could go on with this list of ways in which MapleStory is a broken game. I'm of the opinion that they should just make every class do good damage with different playstyles and change things up every now and then and they can continue milking this game that way until it runs dry.
TL MapleStory is a broken game. Get some NX today!
P.S. AGGGH THERE IS NO 8:2 AND 6:4 PARTY RATIO
currently in GMS: 60% exp distributed by damage, 40% exp distributed by level
old model: 20% exp distributed by damage, 80% exp distributed by level
It's only 8:2 and 6:4 IF YOU'RE IN A PARTY OF TWO AND BOTH OF YOU ARE THE EXACT SAME LEVEL
all of ur problems with the "support" can be cured by what i stated in the later posts before
and as for heal/dispel being replacable by pots: at bosses that takes longer time, people would prefer bishops more. the only problem with nexon and bishop now is they should give 4th job bishops more support skills that makes the difference between level 1 and level 20-30 so that (like u said) lvl 90 priests have a disadvantage over lvl 16x bishops
and if u think maple is so broken and w.e, why play and care about it anymore?