[EMS] The new Blink

Hero takes flight!

Imagine a skill single-handedly trivializing the current landscape of challenging bosses. Usually such a feat is caused by a newly released skill that's exclusively available to one class. A new bandwagon and meta is formed, the class in question becomes over-represented to a fault, and then nerfs follow soon after. This time however, it's different.

Blink was among the very first 5th Job skills, introduced in 2016. It is available to all classes, and it's commonly found when opening Nodestones. Yet it rarely saw any in-game usage and it was hardly a topic to talk about. For good reason, as the original functionality of the skill was lukewarm and unremarkable. It only made sense for Nexon to improve Blink, so that it becomes a worthwhile skill to use. That is what happened... but they overdid it.

In today's blogpost, I will discuss how much of a stupid idea the new Blink is, how exploitable it is, and how much of the game's difficulty was thrown out of the window because of it.

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Another brief history lesson
Dragon Blink was originally introduced with the Chaos update as an exclusive skill to Evan, back in 2011. It was the first skill of its kind, allowing Evan to teleport to a random location in the map without a cooldown.

This type of skill has always been considered to be a novelty. Due to the teleportation being random, you could end up pretty much anywhere in the map, making it difficult to rely on. It was more abused by bots than by actual players, so Nexon removed this skill when Evan saw its revamp in 2015 that introduced us to the current Fusion skill mechanics.

Nexon wouldn't revisit Dragon Blink's concept until they released 5th Job with Blink. While it allows the exact same functionality as its predecessor, Blink was dead on arrival due to its silly half-minute cooldown.

Perhaps this cooldown was justified because Blink is available to every class in the game, but the practical use of this skill was greatly hindered because of it. The random aspect of Blink means that it's common for the game to barely change your location at all, as the distance you'll teleport is decided by the roll of a dice without any guarantees to at least move you by a set distance. With Dragon Blink this wasn't necessarily a problem because it had no cooldown. The player would spam the skill until you ended up where you wanted to be - but you can't do this with Blink.

The original Dragon Blink would of course be too good for modern day Maple. It would allow the player to constantly teleport away from boss attacks, rendering any difficulty moot. Grinding maps are also much larger now, so having no cooldown on Blink would make it too invaluable.

The suggestion that Nexon is actively avoiding to go back to the old Dragon Blink is only further reinforced by Kanna's most recent revamp from 2019. Mana Warp has Dragon Blink's random teleport without cooldown, but it can only be used in towns. Aside from the rare seasonal or GM events that would spawn monsters, towns are void of combat.

So, if Nexon wanted to make Blink useful, they should reduce the cooldown or make the dice roll better numbers, right? Nexon did none of that, but they took the more exciting approach by giving Blink an additional function. Although it is a bit too good. So unreasonably good that there's no reason to not have and not use Blink at all.

So, how much of a problem are we talking about, you might ask?

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(Super)stance, Vacuum immunity and a Fly Hack for everyone

Well, shit. That complicates things.

Blink's cooldown is reduced to 20 seconds, regardless of skill level. The skill can now also be used in the air by holding down the skill key. When doing so, your character will float in the air. The duration of flying is limited to up to 3 seconds initially, and it can be raised to 5 seconds at Level 30. Additionally, Blink also gives a small passive Attack bonus, with 1 Attack per level. It's not going to be much of a boost, but anything is nice I guess.

While hovering, you are also able to move around in the air, similar to flying mounts. Your flying speed however, is at a snail's pace. It feels similar to the Freeze and Slow status effects, where your movement speed is more than halved. It's not going to be like Kinetic Jaunt where the flying speed is significant enough to fly away from danger.

For the sake of readability, I will now refer to this hovering mechanic as "floating" in this blogpost.

Blink's floating is a mistake. Most of the game's difficulty only exists because you can't fly over boss attacks. So, make an educative guess in how much Blink invalidates that. Remember: Nexon had to disable flying mounts and chairs in boss maps because it was heavily abused by the community. And yet, here we are.

They fly now? They fly now.

Yes, I understand that flying skills in this game are nothing new. We got plenty of those. However, it must be stated that these are class-specific, and the classes themselves are balanced with this in mind. In most cases, flying skills either have a high cooldown, a short duration, comes at a cost, or all of the above. Blink however, is available to every class, and its floating mechanic comes with many built-in properties that invalidates most of the game's difficulty.

You see, the state of flying receives priority over most of this game's mechanics, including status effects. For the low price of only 140 Nodeshards, you can have the following...

You'll gain Power Stance, which allows you to be immune against knockback from monsters. In some situations, this also doubles as Superstance, which gives you knockback immunity from modern boss attacks in the game.

Blink's Superstance is a bit of an oddity. Against most boss attacks, the Superstance effect does not seem to work. Few bosses however, such as Lotus, has all of his knockback ignored under the effects of Blink. You'll still take the damage and receive the knockback's immobility, but it should prove to be a game changer when used well.

And for the bosses where Blink's Superstance can't be used, there's still plenty left for Blink to offer.

You'll also gain Vacuum immunity, which means you can no longer be pulled by enemies that do this. 

Ever hated that bosses like Lotus, Dusk and Black Mage often pulls you towards them, leading you to gravitate towards debris that'll kill you? You can now use floating to completely nullify this movement manipulation.

And because floating takes priority over status effects, your flying will not be cancelled by status effects such as stun and seduce. Paired with the Vacuum immunity, it is incredibly difficult to die during Dusk's laser attack as even the stun debris can't stop you.

Here's some examples on how status effects work with Blink. Let's assume that you hold down the skill key when these effects are applied to you, and the duration of floating has yet to run out:

• If stunned while floating, the inability to move will apply, but floating will not be interrupted.
• If seduced while floating, you'll still move in the direction that it dictates, but floating will not be interrupted. The potion disabling effect still applies. Since your movement speed is drastically reduced while floating, the forced movement caused by seduce is also reduced to the same degree. Sometimes, this is beneficial.
• If the seduce forces you to jump (i.e. Royal Guard), the effects are non-existent because you are unable to jump while floating. The only exception here would be if the seduce forces you to jump and move simultaneously (i.e. Bergamot), as the forced movement won't be ignored.
• If weakened, you can still use floating and fly around. Because weakened only disables the jump button, it does not disable skills that can be used in mid-air (including Blink), or skills that move you upwards.

The only status effects that will cancel out Blink are the ones that immediately halt any active or ongoing skill effects, such as seal, petrify, whirlwinds and binds. Keep that in mind.

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Combining Blink with other skills

But wait, there's more!

Using Blink with other skills further exacerbates how much it is a cheese strategy. In Hero's case, we have plenty of skills that makes great use of Blink's floating mechanic. So, let's take a look at those, shall we?

Because of the slow flying speed, Blink by itself is not reliable enough to fly over boss attacks. In order to make it reliable, one would need an additional skill to combine it with Blink. Flash Jump is a skill that almost every class has, so you could use Flash Jump to gain height, and then use Blink to stay in the air. The risk that comes with this combo is that Flash Jump demands horizontal distance, which is not always safe due to falling debris. An easier and safer alternative is to use vertical movement skills, but these are unfortunately limited to a handful of classes.

Hero is among these few with a vertical movement skill, Upper Charge. As discussed in its own blogpost, UC is a great skill that proved itself to be invaluable for bossing as it allows Hero to constantly jump over boss attacks in order to remain safe. It is better than the traditional upward jump because it does not require you to be in the air before you can use it. Upper Charge also doesn't consume your Flash Jump and it can be used immediately with a skill key. Since it can be used without a fiddly command input, it allows you to have a faster reaction time.

One can imagine that a combination of Upper Charge → Blink is way too good of an option, and that is indeed true. With only two keyboard presses you can teleport high up in the air, and stay there for up to 5 seconds. This combo is a get-out-of-jail-card as it allows Hero to stall out lethal attacks, as the sky is often the safest place to be.

This stalling also proves to be effective against most status effects. Basically, most of Maple's common status effects are designed to hinder your ability to use the jump button or arrow keys, but that rule does not apply to skill effects when skills such as Upper Charge and Blink can be used without touching the jump button or arrow keys. Add some Status Resistance, and the combination of UC → Blink will prove itself to become invaluable. 

As mentioned in Leap Attack's blogpost, LA can be used after a Flash Jump to abruptly stop any momentum. Blink is another skill that can do this. It is common to use Flash Jump's speed for the purpose of dodging attacks, but it can be sometimes difficult to deal with a particular type of area-of-effect that leaves anywhere unsafe but a dedicated safety zone. These safety zones are often randomly assigned in the map, and with only a limited time to reach them it's common for players to miss it by a hair. Flash Jump's speed boost makes it difficult to make precise and timely landings on these locations. Especially when platforms are involved, or when the safety zones are short on width. Leap Attack allows us to make more precise landings, but in terms of practicality it left much to be desired.

Leap Attack is slow, it must be used close to a platform and connect to it. If it is unable to connect to this platform, the skill will not be used. As these conditions are precise and not always present, it is difficult to rely on Leap Attack for everything. Blink's only condition is to be in the air, and that makes it a good alternative for the times where using LA is not ideal. Conversely, Blink comes with a cooldown and it does not provide the directional teleport that Leap Attack has. Both skills have their own strengths and weaknesses, so it is up to the player to use them to their fullest potential.

Last, but not least: the unconventional combination with Combo Hookshot. Blink can be used at any time to cancel out Combo Hookshot's effect where the skill moves you towards the enemy's location. This has three benefits:

• Cancelling Combo Hookshot returns full control over your character, allowing us to use other skills such as Flash Jump and Rope Lift, or even use Combo Hookshot again.
• All hookshot skills provide their own brief window of floating before it propels the player towards the enemy.
  You can use Blink to extend hookshot's own floating. You can also use Combo Hookshot as a way to activate Blink's floating on the floor, without the need to jump.
  
  
  

• Combo Hookshot has shoddy programming. It's common for hookshot to fail and not place you where you wanted to go. This is because the skill is programmed to always place you in front of the target at a fixed distance, and it does this too literal. If an enemy is located at the edges of a platform: tough shit. Use Blink to cancel shoddy hookshots or float manually towards the platform you intended to land on.

Thus, it is always better to use Combo Hookshot with Blink.

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Verdict

Blink providing a multitude of invaluable attributes is what makes it a powerful skill. It is flexible, works well on any class, and can be combined with many other skills. Its stalling potential is currently one of the best in the game, rivaling even the best of invincibility skills. Whether if you want to play passive with Sword of Burning Soul's stationary attacks, wait for cooldowns to run out (whether yours or a party member's), or to survive when you're being carried... Blink will do the job, because it has at least one answer for every major boss in this game.

With Blink, Hero will be able to survive a lot more moving forward. Its low cooldown makes it frequently available, allowing us to save Combo Death Fault, Valhalla and Body of Steel for more demanding situations. Use Blink defensively so you no longer have to rely on these three to avoid knockback. Save Valhalla and BoS for bursting.

Appalling.

Now, here's an interesting discussion: is Blink broken? Compare Blink with any of the other all-class 5th Job skills. Skills such as Rope Lift, Erda Shower, Erda's Will and Erda Nova are balanced because they help to improve your gameplay experience while also respecting the game's difficulty. Blink is pretty much the textbook definition of braindead skill: it is incredibly easy to use, it offers way too many benefits and it can be used way too often.

And if this blogpost hasn't convinced you somehow, go see for yourself. Try out Blink's floating and be creative with it. With this skill demanding little to no effort or skill to gain a significant advantage, it shouldn't take long for anyone to understand its value. A lot of the game's difficulty went down the drain. Lazy skill design.

Is it now finally worth pouring Nodeshards into Blink, after five years? Arguably, yes. The initial duration of 3 seconds will be more than enough for a lot of scenarios. For the few drawn-out attacks however (i.e. Lotus phase 3), having that 5 second duration will make all the difference. If your essential skills are maxed out and you still have plenty of shards left, Blink is a better investment than most of the other common-class 5th Job skills. At least it's not Rope Lift.

What a joke. Platforms are overrated anyway.

That said, I believe that Blink is too much. It is probably healthier for the game's future to reconsider whether Blink's current state should remain as it is. The skill underlines a problem in Nexon's current approach to designing boss difficulties, more so than other skills do. If Blink becomes the next meta, then every future boss will have to be designed with Blink in mind, as proven with Reaper's Pendant and Breath of Divinity. Bosses will become more complicated as they'll start to counter Blink, giving us the same problems caused with Nexon implementing Superstance Ignore and True Deaths. It brings up the question whether if we should go down that path. 

Although to be fair... this has always been a problem. The flawed implementation of things like Potion Lock, Potential Seal, Zombify and % HP were no different. It's just that it's easy to forget about it, since those were a decade ago.

So, is there any reason to even use the "Dragon Blink" part of Blink, the main reason the skill even exists? 

That is a good question. Sure, it can be used for grinding (i.e. large maps of which we have plenty) or in the few bossing situations where teleporting away is safer than doing nothing. But I suppose that Nexon understood that Blink needed to offer something better to overcome its lack of popularity, hence why they added the floating mechanic.

But the main reason to not use Dragon Blink is because its cooldown is shared with floating. Two skills, same cooldown. You gotta choose. Dammit, this is Shout all over again. Have we learned nothing from that one?

Perhaps Blink should be changed into two separate skills. One that continues the concept of Dragon Blink, with an improved cooldown and the guarantee to teleport you by at least a sufficient amount of distance so that it's worth to use it. The other skill will be the floating mechanic, but with a more balanced approach to it so that doesn't invalidate most of the game's difficulty as it does now. 

But alas, I'm no developer at Nexon so take my perspective on this with a grain of salt. I mean, look at Puncture. Still no nerf on that one. At least don't be an idiot like I was when investigating for this blogpost, as I used Blink accidentally to teleport and ended up straight inside Dusk's laser. I swear, I am certain that I pressed the skill key in mid-air!

Anyway, that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

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