Overall Skill Rebalance
Mabinogi is an old MMO that's been under development (more or less) for many years. With the changing landscape of games in general and the multiple changes in developers/directors, a lot of Mabinogi's skills aren't well-balanced (even with multiple targeted attempts).
Balanced skillsets should provide choice. Multiple skillsets should all be viable decisions with different upsides, downsides, and capabilities. Sometimes existing skillsets or meta will need to be changed to make changes in other skills viable or attractive alternatives once they're functioning properly.
In this thread I'll go over every skill available and discuss their downsides (or broken aspects) as well as suggesting changes/fixes to many of the game's skill-centered problems. I will attempt to be as objective as I can, but feedback and suggestions are welcomed. I plan to post this for more feedback on the official forums after polishing it up too.
A few things to note...
I'm covering skills available to humans because it's where the majority of my experience is, feel free to chime in on the elf/giant skills I didn't touch.
Many skills need rebalanced training. A major part of Mabinogi gameplay is skill training because many skills require you to put yourself in specific scenarios or accomplish specific objectives in order to train them. Unfortunately a number of skillsets were released with horrible training. When Grapple Shot at rank A is slower than Windmill at rank 5, there's a major design problem.
The skill order is from my skill lists and focuses on use so excuse the ordering.
- Life
The art of being a village NPC in an MMO. Life skills are the most varied within a skill tab, and in general either need minor changes, or additions to crafting in general to be more desired skills.
Tailoring
Design: Give players the ability to create unique and high-quality clothing.
Reality: Fails on both counts. Most unique clothing comes from other sources, and the quality bonuses on many objects mean little to nothing.
Changes: All the unavailable tailoring manuals need to be given sources in-game (such as fishing). In addition, tailoring manuals for clothing that's no longer available need to be added as well. Defense bonuses should be increased and non-body items need better stat bonuses.
Rest
Design: Let players sit down and increase their passive recovery speeds.
Reality: Increases some speeds, but is capped so cannot increase others.
Changes: Uncap the skill and even out the recovery increases (even increase at all ranks).
Campfire
Design: Make a fire for additional bonuses with other skills.
Reality: Rest bonuses mean little to nothing and cooking is better done at cooking NPCs.
Changes: Resting near a campfire should greatly increase wound recovery. Campfires should also either have specific meals that can only be cooked on them, or should give general bonuses to cooked food depending on the wood quality.
First Aid
Design: Let players heal wounds using bandages.
Reality: Works, but is capped (so players can't get the full potential) and is awkward to use on the fly.
Changes: Uncap the skill and remove the requirement to be sitting for full effect.
Weaving
Design: Allow players to make intermediary materials for other skills.
Reality: Works, more or less, but the RNG with quality is aggravating for training and producing goods.
Changes: Divide fabric/silk qualities into their own recipes.
Handicraft
Design: Let players create various tools and random objects.
Reality: Most items in the list don't serve a purpose.
Changes: Tools made should have high durability bonuses, and more tools should be craftable.
Refining
Design: The skill players use to turn ore into bars.
Reality: It's a skill that turns ores into bars.
Changes: -
Blacksmithing
Design: Allow players to create high-quality and special weapons.
Reality: Many weapons cannot be crafted and attainable stat bonuses are small.
Changes: Stat bonus ranges need to be increased (like up to 10 per stat), and like with Tailoring we need access to the many manuals we do not have access to.
Cooking
Design: Combine foods for hunger restoration and stat buffs.
Reality: Hunger restoration is not needed in general. Stat buffs can take a lot of effort and might hit the stat cap for endgame players. Eating dishes normally causes unwanted weight changes. Many types of cooking take too long to be worth it.
Changes: Make flour and other high-effort ingredients buyable from normal NPCs for gold. Make weight values a part of character looks/creation. Make temporary stat increases from cooked food ignore the stat cap.
Herbalism
Design: Pick herbs for use in other skills.
Reality: You pick herbs for use in other skills. Many herbs are available easily, others not so. The requirement to pick a white often gets players stuck for a long time. Oranges to be picked also really slow down progression without the help of others.
Changes: Make more herbs (white/orange) spawn in more places weaker players can reach.
Potion Making
Design: Make healing and recovery potions for use.
Reality: Craftable potions have not scaled to modern stat values. Making anything above 100 is a labor-intensive process using unstackable materials.
Changes: Bump all crafted potions up a tier. 50 as the base, 300 craftable without clovers, etc.
Fishing
Design: Fish up fish and random trash or goodies.
Reality: Most players have little to no need for fish and there's better ways to get random items.
Changes: Any suggestions? Some use for fish that would consume them, like making them into high-stat dishes or something?
Production Mastery
Design: Control skill that grants higher success rate overall.
Reality: May or may not work with newer skills.
Changes: Make it work on newer skills.
Taming Wild animals
Design: Tame animals to have them join your side.
Reality: Tamed entities are still weak and have little to no use to make up for the difficulty taming them. Tame a monster and it ends up fighting other monsters around the same difficulty as it, meaning it doesn't last long.
Changes: Tamed entities should get stat boosts (+50% HP/MP/SP and base stats, +25% defensive stats) so they're helpful for the time they exist. They should be strong enough to take down at least a few of their own kind before getting killed. This skill definitely needs more bonuses to encourage use though, any ideas?
Metallurgy
Design: Get ore fragments and gems from sifting through sand.
Reality: Works, if RNG lets you rank it.
Changes: The training needs to be way less reliant on luck. Methods need to have higher total possible counts.
Carpentry
Design: Create nice firewood and bows.
Reality: Pretty small list of craftable items, really grindy skill. No minigame so results are RNG.
Changes: Could have more items added to the crafting list. More bows to fill out the ranks, and better possible stat bonuses so players want to craft them... and a minigame so player skill has a part.
Wine Making
Design: ... ?
Reality: ... a few stats?
Changes: Should this even impact the game, and if so, how? They added a minigame and there's some tactics to ranking the skill, but it needs more benefit. Perhaps additional grains could make different types of alcohol that act as food that gives status effects instead of stat changes.
Rare Minerology
Design: Dig up minerals for use in other skills.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Hillwen Engineering
Design: Craft guns and other weapons/arms from minerals and such.
Reality: Crafting rolls are out of the player's hands, there's no minigame so player skill has no effect. Stats are rolled individually so objects are often crappy in at least one aspect. The training is terrible (less than 0.01% per creation at higher ranks).
Changes: Consolidate weapon/armor quality so you don't end up with a 95% roll on one stat and a 2% roll on another. Add a minigame so player skill actually plays a part. Change a lot of the training to work off of results and not pure grind.
Shyllien Ecology
Design: Collect magic crystals and monster parts for use elsewhere.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Magic Craft
Design: Craft wands and other weapons/armor from crystals and monster parts.
Reality: Same issues as Hillwen Engineering.
Changes: Same as Hillwen Engineering.
Tasting
Design: Control skill to boost food effects.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Ingredient Hunting
Design: Kill enemies for leather and special food drops.
Reality: Weird, but it works.
Changes: -
Catering
Design: Allow players to merge cooked food for higher buffs to the party.
Reality: Works, but strong buffs can be impeded by the stat cap for high-level players.
Changes: Like mentioned earlier, make food effects ignore the stat cap to keep it relevant.
Sheep Shearing
Design: Allow players to shear sheep for wool.
Reality: Wool is basic. Master the skill and you produce the same items as a newbie.
Changes: Multiple tiers of wool you can shear as you rank up, with higher tiers being better at making higher-quality fabric. Higher quality wool can be a chance from normal sheep, and/or sheared from some monsters.
Mining
Design: Mine ores for use in other skills.
Reality: Mines ores for use in other skills. Also wants you to mine useless alch stones.
Changes: Change the training to not need the alch stone mining.
Egg Gathering
Design: Gather eggs for use in other skills.
Reality: Same as with shearing, eggs are eggs no matter your rank.
Changes: Players with at least a specific level in Egg Gathering will be able to gather from more exotic creatures, like the wild ostriches. These special eggs will have higher-tier uses in cooking and such, use them instead of normal eggs in recipes and get different, higher-stat food items out of it. Maybe even gather eggs from pacified monsters at high ranks.
Mushroom Gathering
Design: Gather mushrooms.
Reality: Gather mushrooms.
Changes: Should really not be a skill, Production Mastery should take care of random gathering like this. Unless you all want hallucinogenic mushrooms or something.
Milking
Design: Milk cows.
Reality: Milk cows.
Changes: Unless we're going to be milking Glas or something, I don't really see a use for this skill either.
Harvesting
Design: Gather wheat and such.
Reality: Gather wheat and such.
Changes: Could use more products to gather at higher ranks for use in higher-ranked cooking. Maybe different types of wheat and such for use in a Wine Making potential alcohol addition.
Hoeing
Design: Gather random products.
Reality: Gather random products that don't have much of a use.
Changes: Undecided. Should this stay and get additional benefits? Should flowers have a better use? Or should it be merged with Harvesting?
Commerce Mastery
Design: Carry goods from one place to another for profits.
Reality: Uninteresting to train because it's just unloading goods.
Changes: Training needs to be spiced up. Things like "deliver a load without running into bandits" or "defeat at least 5 bandits on the way", for example.
Transformation Mastery
Design: Collect monster souls to transform into them.
Reality: Works, is fun.
Changes: -
Exploration Mastery
Design: Find artifacts, sketch things, and do quests.
Reality: Gives additional benefits when doing these things.
Changes: Works I guess? Bigger changes would be needed to exploration in general to make it more interesting.
Artifact Investigation
Design: Analyze and attempt to restore artifacts for gold and experience rewards.
Reality: Huge cooldown means the skill is only useful on very special/rare things you can't risk losing. Also the cooldown makes training take forever.
Changes: Reduce the cooldown by a huge amount and remove the gold rewards.
- Archery
The art of remotely installing new pointy sticks into somebody. Bows in general are weaker than comparable melee weapons across the board, so some skill changes could be used instead. In general, ranged attacks need to calculate their range from the outside of a hitbox, not the center. With the way it is now, targeting the center can often put you within melee distance on really large enemies.
Ranged Attack
Design: Use bows to attack enemies from a distance.
Reality: Works, but archery skills are prone to missing, something other ranged attacks don't do.
Changes: Normal archery attacks should always hit after 75% aim, with further aim increasing damage (up to 25% more)?
Magnum Shot
Design: Ranged version of smash, high single-shot damage multiplier.
Reality: Works, but is too slow to aim at a distance.
Changes: Magnum should always aim at the same median speed (as if the target was halfway) regardless of distance.
Arrow Revolver
Design: Rapid-fire fast attacks to keep an enemy pinned down and/or chip away at it.
Reality: Works, though mainly for pinning now.
Changes: Potentially copy the changes to normal attacks, but that might be too strong in practice.
Support Shot
Design: Attack an enemy with a fast, weak attack that sets it up for the next melee hit.
Reality: Sort of works, is used in specific situations but not much in normal combat. Also a total pain to raise to acceptable levels in the first place.
Changes: Should buff the next attack from all sources, not just melee. Training needs to be greatly increased to encourage people to rank and use the skill, right now it's a horrible grind where you have to use it instead of normal attacks until your arm falls off.
Urgent Shot
Design: When you miss, you can fire an emergency shot to recover.
Reality: Is annoying to use in emergency situations because it's two actions.
Changes: Change it to be one action. Triggering the skill should fire it.
Crash Shot
Design: A ranged AOE, shoot an exploding arrow at a target.
Reality: Hits limited targets and aims too slow, other players will usually kill things before you fire. Takes a long time to train due to grind as well.
Changes: Needs to aim much faster and hit more or all targets in range. Increase the points available from killing enemies with it so training is faster.
Bow Mastery
Design: Mastery skill for bows, increasing their effectiveness.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Crossbow Mastery
Design: Mastery skill for bows, increasing their effectiveness.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
- Lance
The art of making people feel like they got hit by a truck. Lances have unique mechanics, but unfortunately the minimum attack range doesn't work well. Mabi has lots of position lag issues, and since these aren't getting fixed (being inherent in how the game operates), the minimum distance to attack with lances should be removed because it does nothing but unfairly hinder players who use lances.
Lance Counter
Design: Special counter for lances, deals more damage but cannot be controlled properly.
Reality: Being locked into it, it going into cooldown even in use, and not being able to cancel it makes this skill just... bad.
Changes: Remove some of the restrictions
Lance Charge
Design: Charge at an enemy, hitting others in the way, with more damage for longer charges.
Reality: Works, but you tend to get your position desynced, the target enemy is not properly knocked down, and it won't hit enemies in the finish state on the way, making training horrible.
Changes: Set the player position to the enemy's current (not previous position facing them) at knockdown, knock down the enemy properly, and hit enemies in the finish state on the way there.
Lance Mastery
Design: Control skill for lances, adding damage and a hit to the combo.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
- Combat
The art of sticking the pointy thing into the squishy thing that bleeds. Many combat skills affect other talents, so suggestions will vary.
Combat Mastery
Design: Control skill for normal melee, giving health and damage.
Reality: Works, though gives double bonuses for dual-wielding.
Changes: Should only grant bonuses once.
Defense
Design: Block the next attack, taking reduced damage.
Reality: Damage works well, taking both defense and protection into account.
Changes: -
Smash
Design: A strong defense-piercing attack against an enemy with some side effects to boot.
Reality: Works, but the effects are unreliable due to the activation chances.
Changes: Increase the chances of the special effects, and increase the prot reduction for axes to 10. In exchange, lower the max bleed of swords (from 20%) to 15% per tick and reduce the axe debuff duration (from 22) to 10 seconds
Counterattack
Design: Counter an enemy's next attack, dealing increased damage and pushing it away.
Reality: Effectively a single-hit combo, but locks archery from loading any skills.
Changes: Allow archery skills to load during the recovery. It's tempting to increase the damage multipliers to make up for the fact that it's just one hit, but that'd be dangerous for players to go against.
Windmill
Design: AOE attack that damages and knocks away enemies.
Reality: Works.
Changes: Could use more training points from weaker monsters.
Critical Hit
Design: Control skill for crits to deal increased damage.
Reality: Works, if slow to train.
Changes: Could use slightly faster training.
Charge
Design: Charge at enemies, shunting off ranged attacks on the way.
Reality: Works well, if a little awkward due to the minimum distance.
Changes: Reduce the minimum distance for the skill (from 400) to 300. The cooldown already prevents spamming.
Assault Slash
Design: Jump at a downed enemy to attack them.
Reality: Works in most cases just fine.
Changes: Allow it to work in more cases, like the "knockdown" from Lance Charge.
Rage Impact
Design: Stun enemies around you and cause them to take increased damage on the next hit.
Reality: The stun time is tiny and the insane stamina use means hitting the next enemy twice instead is a more efficient use of your resources.
Changes: Stun time should be greatly increased (from 0.2-1.6) to 2-6 seconds for the stamina this skill costs.
Bash
Design: Repeated stacking melee damage combo on enemies.
Reality: OP, sorry. It's simply better than most other skills and it bypasses an important part of Mabi's combat (hit/stun/knockback exchanges). In addition many weapons can "double Bash", which is an accepted bug (it is NOT a proper second use of the skill) that unfairly priorities different weapon speeds with no tradeoff for weapon choice. It also uses a lot of durability and has a low attack range preventing players from comboing into it.
Changes: Reduce the max damage multipliers (from 380-460%) to 180-250% at rank 1. Cut the stun time down (from 3.1-4.5) to 2.5 seconds for all ranks. Make the skill cause double (2.5x?) the current knockback meter increase. Fix the bug allowing two activations with one skill use. Reduce the combo time to 75% of the current. Change durability usage to normal. Make the attack range take the held weapon into account for proper combos.
Final Hit
Design: Trump card skill, gain teleportation and greatly increased melee abilities with a large cooldown.
Reality: Works, but the 400% damage at rank one combined with rapid attacks supercedes other skills, making this skill a central focus when it should be more of a specific use skill.
Changes: Lower the damage multiplier (from 400%) to 300% at rank 1.
Sword Mastery
Design: Mastery for swords.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Axe Mastery
Design: Mastery for axes.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Blunt Mastery
Design: Mastery for blunts.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Shield Mastery
Design: Mastery for shields.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Light Armor Mastery
Design: Mastery for light armors.
Reality: Works, but the only upside is the lack of Dex penalty.
Changes: Raise the magical stats. Increase the magic defense (from 16) to 30 and the magic protection (from 3) to 15
Heavy Armor Mastery
Design: Mastery for heavy armors.
Reality: Stronger overall than light with the only downside being a Dex cut.
Changes: Should grant less magic defense and protection. 20->10 and 5->3.
Evasion
Design: Dodge ranged attacks and bolt magic.
Reality: Has down time after you dodge, letting the attacker charge up again. Also is capped.
Changes: Uncap it, and reduce/remove the down time after a dodge.
Dual Wield Mastery
Design: Mastery for wielding two weapons.
Reality: The balance increase isn't too useful since combat and sword mastery already grant bonuses. It also makes the dex cut of heavy armors mean nothing to sword-wielders.
Changes: The balance increase should be changed to something else or removed. Any suggestions?
Gold Strike
Design: Grant non-combat players the ability to expend gold for damage.
Reality: Works, for the very few players it applies to.
Changes: -
Crisis Escape
Design: Attempt to drop aggro from enemies by disguising yourself.
Reality: Works, but looks ridiculous.
Changes: Should use different models depending on location. A hasty paper-mache tree for outside, a rock-printed cloak for other areas, etc.
- Cleric / Healing
The art of using fartsparkles for good deeds. Clerics need some way to produce or sanctify goods for use, the easiest way would be for Clerics to have some way of producing Holy Water, perhaps only while under the talent.
Healing
Design: Restores HP.
Reality: Works, but scales slowly.
Changes: Should get increased HP from magic attack, say 1 per 5 instead of 1 per 10.
Party Healing
Design: Heal the whole group at once.
Reality: Works well.
Changes: -
Magic Shields
Design: Put up a shield that protects you and other players from elemental attacks.
Reality: Cumbersome. Prevents a player from doing anything, so rarely used.
Changes: Make the shield mobile once cast (Yui and such already cause this).
- Magic
The art of powering up like you're in DBZ, then hitting them with magic instead. Charging up and then firing heavily-damaging skills, works well overall but everything could use attention to detail.
Magic Mastery
Design: Overall control skill, increases MP and general magic stats.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Meditation
Design: Passively recover MP faster depending on rank.
Reality: Works, but is capped.
Changes: Uncap it.
Enchant
Design: Enchant items for additional stats/effects.
Reality: An unreliable, damaging mess of a skill.
Changes: Took a multi-paragraph post to suggest fixes for this a while ago.
Elemental Masteries
Design: Increase damage, reduce mana usage, generally increase potency.
Reality: They work.
Changes: -
Bolt Mastery
Design: Control skill for bolt spells.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Magic Weapon Mastery
Design: Control skill for magic weapons, increases bolt magic and intermediate charging speed.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Bolt Spells
Design: Deal damage with differing mechanics.
Reality: Work.
Changes: -
Thunder
Design: Chain attack that stuns and then deals a multitude of damaging bolts.
Reality: Works, but only chains from the initial target so groups are often only partially hit.
Changes: Make additional targets work off of any existing targets, not just the initial one.
Lightning Rod
Design: Charge up a big piercing attack.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Fireball
Design: Charge up a large damaging AOE fire spell.
Reality: Works, but without a special wand is often too slow to fully charge in battle, being used via Snap Cast instead.
Changes: Make the spell work from three charges and up with appropriately-scaled damage? Any different ideas?
Meteor Strike
Design: Charge up and then drop a meteor, dealing damage in a large AOE and leaving leftover fire.
Reality: Works, but can be annoying to train. Needs to be fired at raid bosses and dragons, and most of these are not available at night outside of rare passes and completable generation quests. This can leave some players unable to effectively train the skill depending on their play schedule.
Changes: Change training points so that using the skill on a raid boss is not required to rank.
Ice Spear
Design: Freeze and then explode enemies for chained damage and crowd control.
Reality: Works well for the most part, but the short range makes it unusable in some situations.
Changes: Increase the range to match Thunder's range.
Hail Storm
Design: Repeatedly charge up and fire large chunks of ice at enemies.
Reality: Has a charge time and locks you in place, doesn't have enough range for many situations.
Changes: Increase the max range (from 1400) to 1800 to cover bigger rooms and such.
Fusion Bolt
Design: Fuse bolts for increased damage and combined effects.
Reality: Works well, an underrated skill in many cases. Does not carry over all desired effects though.
Changes: Fusions involving Icebolt should have the slowdown effect.
Mana shield
Design: Use MP in place of HP as a buffer for attacks.
Reality: Works, though due to stat changes you tend to lose more MP than you would HP at all available ranks, despite the skill claiming otherwise. Also capped.
Changes: Uncap the skill. If the R5+ efficiency isn't enough in practice, increase overall efficiency a bit.
Blaze
Design: Charge up magical energy in a physical form and knock over enemies with it for large amounts of damage.
Reality: Charges too slow and gives little to no choice over target once charged, the player is at the mercy of enemy positioning.
Changes: Increase the charge speed (from 4 seconds) to 2 seconds and increase the range of the initial attack. Let players aim at an enemy to use it on if no enemy is targeted, sort of like how Focused Fist works.
Spellwalk
Design: Allow players to charge magic while moving, and to move with intermediate magic loaded.
Reality: Players use it for the second aspect, because the first is too costly.
Changes: Reduce the MP usage when charging magic to... 150%? 125%?
Snap Cast
Design: Periodically instantly charge a magic spell.
Reality: Works when available. Trains way too slowly due to the grindy nature of it.
Changes: Make "use the skill within x minutes" available for training for entire ranks.
Inspiration
Design: Pause to recover a percentage of your MP.
Reality: Works quickly, the percentage means it scales well with stronger mages.
Changes: It's a little too convenient, make the skill take twice as long to restore the MP when activated.
- Construct Alchemy
The art of making little clay horses and then losing your mom to an unknown illness. Intended for support and to be used alongside life skills, lots of changes could be used here.
Fragmentation
Design: Allow players to break down finished goods to get some of the materials back.
Reality: Very little can be done with this skill. The skill works off of a specific list of items and the vast majority of goods that can be created cannot be broken down.
Changes: Change the skill to work on all the items players can produce. Players should be able to break down weapons, armor, clothing, and all sorts of potions to be able to get at least something back. There's lots of waste in fragmenting so it's not like players can re-craft a Bone Breaker 5 times with the same items anyways, but being able to break down stuff at least once will help a lot.
Synthesis
Design: Combine various items to make new ones, either from a recipe list or randomly.
Reality: Can produce a limited amount of usable items without extreme cost. Ranking it can cost tons of gold, being based on RNG for NPC resale values.
Changes: More useful recipes need to be added. For example the ability to make the special music scrolls (which have more uses) by synthing paper with magic powder or something. This skill should be the magical Handicraft equal, not something ranked up purely for dyes and Dorren's Request. Got any other suggestions? Also the training needs to stop relying on NPC sale price of produced goods after R6 or so.
Mana Crystallization
Design: Capture magical spells in crystal form for use by alchemists.
Reality: Bad to train, slow to use, draining, and underwhemling when in effect. No niche use.
Changes: Removal. I can think of no redeeming qualities for this skill, and changes to make it useful would be so extensive that it would be turned into a different skill at the end anyways.
Barrier Spikes
Design: Summon defensive spikes to block enemy attacks and movement.
Reality: Spikes scale poorly and don't defend much.
Changes: Spikes need scaling defense/protection in order to survive any time at all in more difficult situations. Spikes should also be wider to block more movement. I want spikes to be usable anywhere, but the potential for trolling by blocking areas in the overworld is too high.
Rain Casting
Design: Create a cloud that buffs life skills and reduces aggro.
Reality: Works for the most part, but at R1 bugs out with sleeping enemies. Also reliant on Water Cannon to train.
Changes: Fix the aggro bugs and change training to not rely so much on Water Cannon also being ranked, to give non-combat alchemists the ability to rank the skill.
Metal Conversion
Design: Change ores and fragments into other ores and fragments.
Reality: Is incredibly slow, simply mining out the desired ores is faster now.
Changes: Allow the skill to work on batches at a time.
Transmutation
Design: Control skill for various kinds of alchemy.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Summon Golem
Design: Summon a golem to help in combat.
Reality: Really awkward to use, golem often doesn't listen, prevents you from taking other actions.
Changes: Golem should have an auto-pilot mode where it uses normal AI against the enemies... properly. Very aggressively, hopefully.
- Battle Alchemy
The art of using magical science theory to cause proven physical trauma.
Alchemy Mastery
Design: Passive control skill for alchemy in general.
Reality: Would work, if it could be ranked up. Some of the training is literally broken.
Changes: Fix the training to not require impossible things, and make both combat and construct alchemy able to rank the skill up individually.
Elemental Alchemy Masteries
Design: Provide passive bonuses to elemental alchemy.
Reality: Works, but provides relatively low bonuses.
Changes: Increase the max bonus (from 10) to 15 at rank 1 for each.
Life Drain
Design: Suck HP from an enemy to use for yourself.
Reality: Works great, though it doesn't scale well to players since it's static amounts of HP.
Changes: Should be percent HP restored, capping at 75% at rank 1.
[img]Water Cannon[/img] http://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/images...ter_Cannon.png
Design: Charge up and shoot water at an enemy for high damage.
Reality: Works well.
Changes: -
Wind Blast
Design: Blow an enemy away while dealing damage.
Reality: Works, but does really low damage.
Changes: Increase the base damage (from 50-150) to 150-250 at rank 1, since it doesn't get as many bonuses as a skill like Water Cannon (so the potential damage is notably lower) and the cooldown prevents spamming anyways.
Flame Burst
Design: Shoot a cone of fire, stunning and damaging multiple enemies repeatedly.
Reality: A little slow and underwhelming, even considering all the multipliers.
Changes: Total number of attacks should scale evenly (from 3-5) to 3-7. Base damage increased by 5 each rank. Attack ticks should have less time between them.
Sand Burst
Design: Blind an enemy, preventing it from attacking.
Reality: Low range, single-target, limited CC. Little to no benefit for ranking, surprisingly.
Changes: The attack should be a cone AOE instead of single target, increasing in distance with rank. Blind time should be changed (from 9-11) to 7-11 seconds, scaling evenly. Should grant some stat for ranking, maybe Will? It'd be thematic to use Luck.
Frozen Blast
Design: Freeze enemies in a line, preventing them from doing anything.
Reality: Useful when it works, but it's slow, has a low range, and many important/annoying enemies cannot be frozen (such as golems).
Changes: Make the skill cast faster, make the attack range larger, and make it work on more enemies people regularly encounter.
Shock
Design: Apply the shock status to you or another player, granting them a periodic stun to enemies.
Reality: Works well, if you can get it past N.
Changes: The pages need to stop expiring and pages need higher drop rates and more sources.
Heat Buster
Design: Once enough pressure has been built up, fire it off in a big attack.
Reality: Damage is a bit too low, splash is a bit too small.
Changes: Increase the splash radius by 25%, maybe a base damage increase too.
Chain Cylinder
Design: Allow periodic multiple charges on offensive alchemy skills.
Reality: Works when you remember to turn it on.
Changes: Should stay toggled after a relog/CC.
Elemental Wave
Design: Gain elemental bonuses depending on what you cast, and buff one next skill.
Reality: The elemental bonuses have minimal impact.
Changes: Instead of container stat increases, the bonuses should be flat damage increases to the elemental skills themselves. So building it up would be helpful, and then the choice of using it all for a buffed next attack would be tactical. "Do I sacrifice my flat damage bonuses temporarily in order to do the AOE freeze right now or not?"
Golden Time
Design: Activates Elemental Wave and then goes into cooldown.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Hydra Transmutation
Design: Summon a hydra to slowly poison an area.
Reality: Little to no effect on moving targets due to the small range. A skill from another skillset (Lullaby) should not be a requirement for this alchemy skill to be effective.
Changes: Increase the range by at least 50%.
Guard Cylinder Mastery
Design: Control skill for dual-wielding fancy arm-mounted potato guns.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
- Fighter
The art of punching things until they stop moving. While the skillset was designed to be single-target initially (as balance against melee), the offensive options for it are limited and repetitive and some of the nerfing needs to be undone. Counterattack should have normal stamina usage and Windmill should have a normal radius with a fighter setup. Counter Punch should be a normal skill with two more skills added to make a third full chain to help reduce repetition.
Knuckle Mastery
Design: Control skill for fighter combat.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Chain Mastery
Design: Control skill for most fighter skills, allowing and controlling chaining.
Reality: The timer for chains is often too small to account for enemies moving around in combat, and the skill itself trains terribly. It's not uncommon to have all other skills rank 1, but Chain Mastery still rank 5.
Changes: Increase the timer on chains and speed up the training.
Charging Strike
Design: Initial attack, rushes in and hits an enemy.
Reality: Works.
Changes: -
Somersault Kick
Design: Multi-hit attack that can daze enemies.
Reality: Works, though the duration may be too high to totally lock out other skillsets.
Changes: Potentially reduce the duration of the daze effect.
Pummel
Design: Finishing move that pins and repeatedly hits the enemy.
Reality: Does not work on a large number of enemies (even though Drop Kick tends to work on said enemies), and is incredibly time-consuming.
Changes: Change it to a standing rapid beatdown so it fires off quicker and doesn't take so long to complete (happens in one stage instead of three).
Focused Fist
Design: Charge up an attack to hit and stun an enemy while starting a chain.
Reality: Works