Rage Timers, Party Problems, & Schedule Conflicts etc

[VisegradDawn]

This is just my scrambled opinion. There are dungeons that I could complete playing solo without begging or waiting for a party. If the rage timer were not there we could do these dungeons faster. Even if you get a party together and the party wipes, that's time wasted and you have to start all over again. I could complete the solo event for the third turtle boss in Mushin's Tower if there wasn't a rage timer. Why does everything have to be about DPS/rage timers and not about skill? DPS is not a skill. Rage timers are a horrible idea and it prevents a wide range of players from partying in the game to run these harder dungeons. Everyone wants you to have whale gear strong enough to kill the boss as fast as possible so that they don't wipe and have to start all over. This is going to discourage every new player who can't DPS fast enough with low tier to beat the timer when they could do it without the rage timer. Maybe they like these ridiculous grinds and speedy timed runs in Asia but we don't like it here in the West. There needs to be a backdoor for casual players and solo players who would enjoy the game so more and continue playing a lot more often if rage timers weren't in the way. Wiping the party with boss rage timers and stat requirement to party for dungeons is a good way to kill a game. These Eastern MMO's just can't get it right. Everything is segregative. I can't stand sitting in a lobby waiting for a party when I am capable of completing a dungeon if there were no rage timer. As for one time purple heroic daily dungeon quests, there should be reset items for them all or just make the quest repeatable with the quest rewards. We're playing the game on the party schedule and not our own. In FF-VI SNES/Chrono Trigger, we started out alone as a main character, then we got more party members through progress to aid in battle. They didn't leave the party or quit playing the game or have to go to work etc. They were always there when you wanted to play. If there was at least an NPC recruit feature where you could hire NPC party members that would be a great option for players/clan members with conflicting schedules. The fun level of this game is about a 3 out of 10 for me mainly because I can't stand the hassle of finding a party. I was gaming in Arcades before gaming ever went to console/PC but it was more fun back then even with 8bit. Come on NCsoft West, start talking to the devs in Asia and save your game and ours as well. Regards.

[Hanuku]

Yeah. Rather scrambled opinion indeed. I respect it and may agree to a point or two, but not all of it. I'm a bad and lazy player. I also come from the 80's arcade gaming and my first console was an Atari 2600, so I know what you are talking about. BUT, here's the thing. Times change, even in gaming customs. What we could do before, we can't do now. While gaming from the corporate side of things has always been about greed and fat revenue, the things they can get away with now are different than what they could do before. Thank or blame the connectivity era for that.

 

Now about that third stage turtle.... I can now easily beat it with a low gear 120k dps character. Such a character can be made in a few days after completing story by getting the now almost free raven 3 weapon (mine is raven 4 because of science but their differences are almost non existent), and a bracelet and glove update from moon refuge farming. In my case I also got the last 3 blocks of the raven soul shield so that adds a bit to my dps. Outside of the turtle, with the recent dungeon nerfing, this game is more soloable than ever (though still we can only solo very old content). The other day I was soloing Ebondrake Citadel. Fun dungeon to do and still drops a material needed to upgrade some gear. Thing is, some things require either whale behavior to skip, or some work to earn. For that third stage turtle, you don't need as much effort. The 4th turtle though? Do note that I'm still too slow at the reaction game to beat Mushin 20th, so I'll leave that for when I can get a 500k dps character, kek… Anyway, If you want to try a turtle without enrage timers (and a much lesser reward), go to MSP alone and try the level 1 turtle there. It has 100M HP but has no timer and it's as slow as the one in the event. I did it recently and the greatest achievement you get is to not bore yourself to death with it. :)

 

As for rage timers themselves, I agree that gating them to DPS checks instead of mechanics is the wrong way to do it. People would have more fun (and would actually have to work to earn stuff), if an enrage timer was tied more to doing mechanics while the dps requirement remained low. BUT, with whales and super ultra tryhards having more than double the power your average daily playing guy would have, the devs decided to set up stuff for them to use all that extra power on. I mean, how much power a geared character can have? The other day I entered the panda/raccoon village stuff from moon refuge. It's a pvp area, so expect to be ganked. And ganked I was. The guy 100-0 'ed me before the initial stun from his first approach skill ended. And that thing lasts like 3 seconds only. I mean, I have 20 HM points to defense and HP and 25 to combat regen. I also have some pvp def somewhere but forgot were. So yeah. There are people out there with enough gear to one shot Mushin should he come down to fight us in his god form or something.

 

In the end, some of your ideas are fine, and an NPC tank for soloers (just like in the training room) would be a social inept's paradise. But the concept of MMOs, with as much solo content as they have, is still about joining with other human players and completing content with them. In other words, you (and definitely I), could use some more friends in game...

[Amarathiel]

As much as the enrage timers suck, there are quite a few reasons why it exists. 1 reason is to prevent cheesing them and from soloing bosses that are intended to be done with a party(low level dungeons not included). Second reason is to prevent too low dps party from doing dungeons that developer did not want them to do yet. Enrage timer is technically sort of a progression show in terms that when you do beat the boss within the timer you know you have more power and skill than before. There are party bosses you can solo if you are skilled enough to deal with the mechanics and/or have high dps, that's true.

 

Main point of enrage timers is to show to the party that they need better gear or skill when dealing with the mechanics before doing it, to encourage becoming better. And i'm not talking about the outrageous timers some bosses like this current event has, those are a different matter. Bosses pretty much are about the dps AND the precise mechanics which requires good teamwork in most mid and high level dungeons.

 

Problem is that players in the west do not want to do this form of gameplay and that results in them wanting to whale max gear to not having to deal with it. To that i can only say that this is an Asian game by origin so everything will be based on that. I personally think that the game should be more or less identical in every single region as that is the original way of gameplay that the developers originally designed and intented it to be. Which in BnS is party oriented and communication oriented where you are supposed to play with sort a static group to gear up together and learn the mechanics of the bosses on your own when new dungeons come etc. Buuuut people in the west kinda hate that, too much thinking :P I mean where do you think all the guides for dungeons come from? Certainly not from the developers.

Edited April 18, 2019 by Amarathiel

[Arkdain]

The enrage timer here  is only to force people who want to rush into spending real money.

Some examples of better enrage timers in other games

 

1- boss goes berserk geting a power up until its killed but dont wipe

2- boss gain a shield for a certain period negating all damage and perform some strong attacks, once shield broke the enrage time start again

3- boss recover certain amount of hp and timer start again making the figth longer

 

whit all these above you  still need help of other players yet you dont die and lose all the progress making you waste time over and over again but i say it again BnS enrage timer is a way of milking money nothing else.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Arkdain

[Kozuki]

1 hour ago, Arkdain said:

The enrage timer here  is only to force people who want to rush into spending real money.

Some examples of better enrage timers in other games

 

1- boss goes berserk geting a power up until its killed but dont wipe

2- boss gain a shield for a certain period negating all damage and perform some strong attacks, once shield broke the enrage time start again

3- boss recover certain amount of hp and timer start again making the figth longer

 

whit all these above you  still need help of other players yet you dont die and lose all the progress making you waste time over and over again but i say it again BnS enrage timer is a way of milking money nothing else.

*NCSoft duly noted and decided to add all of these suggestions in future. Together with their normal enrage timer, of course*

[Grimoir]

Take away the current enrage and then there is literally no reason for people to upgrade gear for pve. and if someone is not geared for a certain dungeon then he should not be there in the first place.

 

buttt….lets have it this way they should change the enrage so its no longer a wipe, instead they should change dungeon requirements.

remove the hm level and weapon requirement for f8 and introduce gear score based on your equipment upgrade.

Edited April 19, 2019 by Grimoir

[Kozuki]

7 minutes ago, Grimoir said:

Take away the current enrage and then there is literally no reason for people to upgrade gear for pve. and if someone is not geared for a certain dungeon then he should not be there in the first place.

 

buttt….lets have it this way they should change the enrage so its no longer a wipe, instead they should change dungeon requirements.

remove the hm level and weapon requirement for f8 and introduce gear score based on your equipment upgrade.

People still upgrade gear to increase their farming efficiency.

 

Sure, you can kill Ma'o  with newbie gear without enrage timer, but are you willing to spend one hour per run to get a single alpha token fragment as end reward? Or will you upgrade first so that it becomes 10 minutes/run?

 

The only thing enrage timer severs in this game is to DPS-check players, thus forcing players to gear up. If they want to gear up fast, they have to swipe, or grind a lot on multi alts, exhaust themselves, then give up and swipe.

 

NCSoft is also very uncanny with enrage timers. Many times, in order to force players to gear up, they reduce enrage timers if they find out that players can dps leisurely at low gear. If you pay attention, you will notice that many end-dungeon bosses have much less enrage timer compared to mid-dungeon bosses. Numok is a good example. Of course, it is not matter now since awk.skill patch gives players a lot of DPS. But pre.awk, if you were in a party with low DPS (typical R6 party) and failed to do mech to prevent him healing, Numok was unkillable. Ironically, if he was in his former enrage timer (about 7-10 minutes), he would be killable even failing all mech.