Greetings, today I’m making this thread to talk about the party system.
This thread will focus on the actual party system, the good and the bad so the point of this thread is to not spawn any disdain but to encourage changes for a better system. there are some general concerns during and on the conclusion of the test such as double hp of monsters not being worth as much xp so leveling is twice as slow. But this thread will not aim to discuss this but more focus on the actual system of partying.
Party Questing
Okay so first things, what is the party system and who benefits? In our test it started out as an attempt to quickly finish the Pui Pui and Kui Kui Gathering quest, I concluded a few things from this test.
- Doing the quest together required some working together and hopes that nobody screws everyone over.
- Relied on people to not be greedy.
Thankfully this went smooth but it did take longer than it usually would, I would say with me being much lower level I was the only one who benefited actually doing it this way. It is much faster to solo.
Party Looting
The random loot distribution works successfully but it does have some issues, that being that again everyone has to loot the corpse and its hard to tell who loots. The only improvement I can see is if we can making 1 person loot to distribute items across party opposed to having everyone cast Shift+ C
With that being said I did notice it was not as much of a pain having everyone loot, but there are potentials for lost loot if people forget to or lose track of bodies. The more people you have the more unfair it also becomes.
Our test was with 5 people so everyone was barely getting much loot, we even went into Ymir Cave where yield is suppose to be very high.
I have a few suggestions
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allow for unlooted loot after 30 seconds to be lootable by anyone in case people choose not to loot.
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Possibly try to find a system that will autoloot to random people into party opposed to corpse looting
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Introduce a 10% loot drop rate bonus per member just like you have with the 10% tap bonus
I think the fact we have random looting is the party system going in the correct direction
Enmity Aggro and Boss Fighting and Party Dynamics
We Ran a test in which we fought he Pui Pui boss together, aside from the stun being too high the fight went better than expected. Aggro transfer all over the place which is probably what helped survivability. This boss could use the Nerfis bat, but that is not what this thread is about, I made a thread about this boss else where on forums.
Things to maybe help low level aggro transfer system would be the following
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Knights Passive Ability Aggro Generation, this would have a bit more control in addition to the skills allowing the knight to hold aggro better
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Crits should generate higher aggro, in balance a crit needs to be dealt with within the party this would be the opportune moment for a knight to use their voke
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Voke cool down must be lowered, this is a staple skill that maybe may not need additional levels or versions but should simply pull the enmity
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Assassins should be able to distribute their aggro over to tank effectively giving them a role in MVPing ( I know this can cause griefing but a small community keeps tabs on people they will punish themselves by being stupid)
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We need more MVP’s to further test this all we have working so far is Boss Bandit, Great White and Pui Boss as far as I’m aware.
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Tab Targeting needs to work properly and skills need to switch when someone else is selected when casting. I know you hate programming the client but this will be critical for mid/late game development.
Over all party play
Party play is good it actually feels good it’s fun and made the experience overall more meaningful I had a lot of fun. XP per hour was better than soloing, although xp should be 2x more with the HP buff to everything (I’ll reserve these thoughts for another thread another time).
But overall I enjoyed my time. I think some suggestions that you should take into some serious consideration is maybe Revamping and making some Party Zones, Maybe special instances of existing zones designed for partying, where monsters hit a bit harder than normal but also have way more HP that give way more loot than usual including rare drops more often.
Maybe Lif Island the old starter dungeon can be a low level party zone where people can put their adventurer skills to the test, maybe give rock throw over to low level adventure and scale damage off con so early recruits can also join in on the fun, including pick up stone
Maybe make level 2 of ymir cave into a party monster zone where everything past the landslide is at those levels of damage and health with good drops.
There are many ideas to bounce off this but Id effectively just like bonus to party drops, small adjustments and improved to party random looting if possible and just things to benefit partying overall. The test went smooth aside from one major bug.
The bug
This bug is quite annoying, and there are a few workaround I can think of, so basically when you die the death window vanishes and there is no way to respawn without relogging, this effectively kicks the person out of the party because the game does not recognize offline players. This forced us to re-establish our group after the boss fight.
Special thanks to Lope on discord for the footage
since the video is bigger than 4MB i’ll post a link to from discord
This bug needs to be addressed as it disrupts gameplay flow, a temporary workaround would be adding a respawn command /respawn or something like that, that calls the function as if you were dying and going back to the nearest Cattaya or Kafra, you could do /Kafra so people can choose to respawn to the area of their choosing, this would be a good work around until the bug can be completely fixed. You can make it so it only is callable when player status is set to death.
Conclusion
The test went successful, we caused a tornado of Havok all through Lighthouse island to Merman and into Ymir caves before ending. There are many improvements needed and I asked the people who participated in this test to try to and write their thoughts too. I will please ask that everyone provide constructive criticism and not to attack Neris for design choices as we wanna see improvements while allowing him to make the game the way he envisions.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my thoughts on the matter.
**PS: please nerf chonchon I know you are good at swinging that bat, so smack these stupid flys while you are at it. 
It took us a whole minute with all five of us to kill this thing.
