Hi guys! Just a few hours ago, I've finally managed to complete the Secret Diary for the Pink Bean event class. The Pink Bean class is an event class that is available for about two months, which after this event ended, all Pink Beans will be removed from the game.
Similar to more recent events in the past few years, there's a list of objectives which you need to complete for rewards. The objectives for the Pink Bean class are varied a lot, ranging from level milestones (Level 100, 150, 200), miscellanous objectives (such as activating runes, travelling to certain maps, leveling Traits), and defeating bosses (such as an Elite Boss, Zakum, Pink Bean itself). Not only would you receive rewards on Pink Bean itself, but you'll also receive rewards on a different character of choice. Most rewards for Pink Bean are thankfully to improve training and equipment; which is to ease the difficulty for especially people who are relatively new to the game. Three objectives gives a Squishy Bean pet each, which comes with a desirable Looting Skill in order for you to get the necessary Mesos to buy Potions.
In order to give the opportunity to most players for being able to fully complete the Secret Diary, the overall gameplay of the class has been designed on a way to ease that difficulty. Pink Bean works with a "damage scaling" set of skills, similar to certain skills for Battle Mage, where stats are being automatically raised upon raising your character level - this reduces the need for strong equipment (because most area's in MapleStory do require a certain amount of funds before the location becomes feasible to train at). In addition to that, Pink Bean also starts with some "rare" stats,
such as Status Resistance, Defence Ignore and additional EXP/Droprate to easen the gameplay.
Despite Pink Bean having a well thought out system where the class is designed to be accessible to
all kinds of players (such as veterans and people who are just familiar with the game), I can't help to express
my honest opinion that there are some minor flaws to the design by itself.
I won't complain about the excessive required effort to achieve all the milestones; consider keep in mind that we *do* play a MMORPG. RPGs require a lot of time, both online and offline - more people should be aware of it...
The thing that I kind of felt missing on Pink Bean is a bit of encouragement and smoothed out combat gameplay.
Pink Bean gets a respectable set of skills for combat, but the last skill is at Level 140 - which means there's no new skills to look up for after unlocking that. While on paper it wouldn't seem *that* bad, the last 50 levels on
Pink Bean feels it lacks something refreshing to help out the longer training sessions you might have.
As for its combat gameplay, it does feel stiff after playing it a lot. This is perhaps because certain skills of Pink Bean are RNG-based. Certain buffs and skills have different effects - some of which have quite a large difference between - and that doesn't help when most skills have a rather long cooldown.
I think that the combat gameplay could've been improved by either of the following small changes:
- Reducing the cooldown for most (if not, all) Pink Bean skills. Especially for the Let's Roll, Instant Garden, Chill Out and Everybody Happy skills; the cooldown does hurt its usability
- Raise the amount of active Mini Beans to five or six
- Prevent the player from accidentally chaining Blazing Yo-yo twice in a row by requiring each consecutive hit with another press on the assigned key (similar to Pink Powerhouse)
- Or just remove the RNG in skills to make the class more consistent and reliable. Keeping the various visual aspect of skills like Pink Powerhouse and Instant Garden is fine, but at least remove the differences in hitboxes/attacking speed and stick with one reliable decision
Ah well. The class itself ends at the 19th of January - I wish you all good luck on the last objectives you have left! That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!
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