"You may find these books particularly interesting, Adversary. Individually, they're glimpses into the origins of things. A bit incomplete, but a serviceable accounting. But taken together, they tell a story about how those who do not understand the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes." - Darmoa
I hate change, because it rarely is an improvement. More than often, Nexon makes the right calls when revamping Hero. If you're familiar with my blogposts, I'm usually positive about these updates because I tend to agree with the changes made as I understand them. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Destiny. It made Hero objectively worse.
The revamp is rushed, poorly thought out and should've been at least a month longer in development. In fact, Nexon admitted after its release that, in hindsight, the workload was too much and that they were short-staffed. Furthermore, the initial reveal trailer and test server over-promised what this revamp would bring, as it proposed a far better deal than what we ended up getting. They threw out thirteen years (!) worth of revamps out of the window with this one.
To make matters worse, Destiny as a revamp had more emphasis on player-based feedback than what came before. Any related forum quickly became a dumpster fire as it mainly garnered loud players with a lack of knowledge on the subject matter. Result? None of the right demands were made, and even when it rarely happened, it would never see the traction needed to be noticed by Nexon. And as a response to all of this, Nexon overcorrected by releasing too many shortsighted hotfixes back-to-back in an attempt to please the crowd, resulting in a jumbled mess of a revamp.
Because of that, the changes made to Hero are either a hit or miss. Only few changes are great, but most have been a downgrade for reasons I will explain. This revamp shows how much missed potential it was, how much has been forgotten about Hero's changelog, MapleStory's history, why things are as they are, and how easy it is to fix most of it.
Throughout this entire process, from the update's reveal to wrapping up this blogpost, I've been upset at the lack of knowledge and awareness the Hero community has on this game. I've been frustrated at how it negatively influenced the revamp. I've been disappointed in Nexon blemishing their otherwise great track record of Hero changes, and I've felt embarrassed as a bystander to see this entire debacle unfold. To that, I'll say: no more. I can either choose to keep complaining from the sidelines and lose my sanity, or I can make the best use of my experience and knowledge, and try to make things right. Two years later, and Hero is still a mess. It only further justifies the need for this blogpost.
In today's blogpost, I will examine the remastered Hero and give a critique on what we got. The discussion includes the changes introduced with the Ignition update, and those found in the update between Savior and New Age. Anything released after New Age will be saved for the dedicated 6th Job blogpost later this year, unless it's relevant to the discussion. As 6th Job builds on top of the Destiny revamp, consider that blogpost to become a continuation ("part two") of this one, as I'll be examining whether 6th Job addresses any of the issues caused by the Destiny revamp.
But to summarize, before we dive into the abyss: the Destiny revamp isn't well executed, as it fails to equally distribute its attention, changes and quality. It made for an unfinished end result, where certain parts of Hero had lots of work done on it, while others were left unchanged. There have been genuine attempts to solve some of the growing pains, but most of them are simply not enough. Believe it or not: some of these attempts made the end result even worse.
Of all the blogposts I've written in the past thirteen years, while this is not the longest blogpost I've ever written, it is the longest one that got published. But to say that writing this article wasn't fun would be an understatement. It had all the hallmarks of development hell and scope creep. I've been working on it on and off over the past 21 months, and I had to rewrite it at least thrice*. Let's see if this over 140 pages behemoth with 60000 words is going to make a change.
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| My character is so ancient, that it has Follow the Lead twice. If only that could allow me to equip up to six pets... |
We're starting with the first tab, the Beginner skills. Here we already stumble a recurring problem with the Destiny revamp: nothing was changed over here.
The Beginner Skill tab nowadays contains so much bloat, that it's become a burial ground of long-forgotten content and a funnel for giving players (temporary) skills at any given time. But rarely has it been given a thorough clean-up, or skills given an update. The older the character (especially pre-Unlimited), the more unwieldy their Beginner tab is.
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| Did you know? Originally, two-handed weapons could not use Three Snails. |
So, Nexon went through the painstaking effort of rewriting the entire Adventure storyline and added voice acting, reorganized how job advancements are handled and updated an ungodly amount of skills. But for whatever reason, they decided not to rework these three skills and left them as they are.
You still can't have all of the three skills maxed out, and they still haven't ever reset the Beginner SP. Imagine if you created your character during the Supreme server era and you invested SP into Slash Swing. When they removed Slash Swing, that SP is lost for good. And it's very difficult to argue that Nexon can't make any changes in the Beginner tab, because there have been precedents where they have.
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| To have this skill on this character (and how it was distributed) still feels like a fever dream. |
Here's a perfect example of that. Let's look at the redistribution of the Retro Rockets skill, which is up there as one of the weirdest and most niche compensations Nexon has ever done. You see, in EMS, every Jett character that was created in the first week was permanently bricked as it would come without the Retro Rockets skill. They never fixed this issue for these first-week Jett characters; they only fixed it for newly created Jett characters after this week. Trying to contact the European customer support fell on deaf ears, and after the migration the American customer support would call it preposterous and claim that this issue doesn't and cannot exist. At that point, pretty much everyone has recreated their Jett character, unless you are as much of a stubborn mule as I am. And then comes Anna, our old EMS producer, who returns for only a year and adds a script to Maple Admin in order to manually redistribute the Retro Rockets for the handful of Jett characters left without it. Do I have to emphasize how few of these characters still exist after the migration? This bug fix was only relevant for less than a dozen of players, as almost everyone with a first-week Jett (that is almost a decade old FYI) has either moved on or had their account purged over seven years ago.
And even if we were to ignore Jett as an Adventure class* (even though Jett had access to Shark Wave), there are still other instances, such as giving Captain and Viper the Master of Swimming and Master or Organization skills, which used to be exclusive to Cannon Shooter. What about the changes made to Pig's, Stump's or Slime's Weakness because it crashed players that tried to attack other players in The Legends Return with Pig/Stump/Slime in their names, or that players with Slime's Weakness used to have an unfair advantage against Guardian Angel Slime?
Making changes to the Beginner tab is ultimately a decision that Nexon chooses to make and one they can make if they want to, and I still don't understand why some classes (such as the Citizen Resistance classes) receive 9 SP in their Beginner tab and thus can have their three skills, while Adventures/Aran/Evan only receive 6 and has to choose, but then newer classes receive none because they come pre-installed with passive Beginner skills. And then we have characters transferred over from the Supreme server that have no SP in any job advancement and if you didn't contact customer support before the migration, that character now has no skill points and thus becomes unplayable.
But OK, let's say if you want to make these skills useful? It doesn't need much for it to become impactful. Let's assume the cooldowns remain the same. You could change Recovery's healing rate intervals into % HP, and it doesn't need to be more than 10% per interval. For Nimble Feet, change the Movement Speed into Max Movement Speed. And for Three Snails, make it a normal skill with a static hitbox and regular skill damage so that it's actually useful.
And we're not done with the Beginner tab yet, because there's something far more important than Three Snails, Recovery and Nimble Feet. No, I'm not referring to Empress's Might, since I believe that skill is perfectly fine as it is (especially now with Level 250 equipment existing), but I'm referring to Soul Driver because that skill hasn't been updated in almost a decade (let alone is no longer available on Soul Master or Mikhail), and it really needs one.
If we're being honest, not just Soul Driver, but all Ultimate Adventure skills need to be updated, and they also need an enhancement core on 5th Job. The removal of Shout has left a negative impact on Hero's toolkit (I will further discuss this in chapter 4.3), and this brings an opportunity for Soul Driver to become relevant again.
Soul Driver's concept is a very useful one, and neither current Hero, Paladin or Dark Knight have another skill that is similar to it. It's a fast AoE but because it hasn't been updated in forever, its hitbox has become outdated. Something similar to Shout would be an ideal hitbox, but give it a 10 second cooldown to balance it out.
It's not like players will have Soul Driver before 5th Job because of its aggravating questline, and the creation of Ultimate Adventures has been removed long ago, so I believe this suggestion is more than reasonable. Because as it currently stands, Soul Driver is a novelty that hardly sees any use, and that's just a damn shame. Its small hitbox and awful damage output struggles to be useful in modern areas such as the Arcane River and anything past Cernium. The HP, especially in Grandis Force maps, are so ridiculously high, that trying to one-shot enemies with it is highly unlikely, even for whales. That is why I'm convinced Ultimate Adventure skills need enhancement cores and I still don't get why they haven't implemented those yet, or why these skills haven't been updated in almost a decade.
And no, if we're going to argue about how long ago it's been since Soul Driver was updated, bug fixes doesn't count. Advanced Combo Attack's higher weapon mastery not applying to it before the Awake update in 2020 is an oversight, as well was Ultimate Adventures being able to bypass Enrage's old single-target-restriction with it. If anything, it shows that UA skills take a lower priority during testing. Remember that when they nerfed draining effects (a part of damage dealt becomes healing → heal fixed % HP rates) during the Reboot update, they initially forgot about Vampire.
Also, can we please have Skill Quests for Mikhail's Soul? I've been wanting to have this skill and its counterparts for thirteen years now. Please make it happen, Nexon!
War Leap has a nicer feel to it, although I'm not sure if anything was changed. It seems that Slash Blast has a larger hitbox now, but don't quote me on that (Slash Blast, Brandish and Brave Slash aren't important enough for me to keep tabs on changes). No changes to Iron Body and Warrior Mastery though.
I should probably also mention that despite that Upper Charge has moved down two job advancements, the damage boost on its Enhancement Cores remains unchanged (3% per level). Usually, the lower job advancement a skill is, the higher the damage boost is on an enhancement core. As per the rules, Upper Charge and Leap Attack's boost should become 7% (as is the standard for Enhancement Cores for 1st Job skills), but because UC/LA are only found in cores for Rush (a 3rd Job skill), they'll only receive a damage boost of 3% per level (which is the standard for 3rd Job cores).
Additionally, this revamp added some exploitable jank to Leap Attack, possibly caused by its expanding its range:
Get ready, because now we're delving into the substantial problems that this revamp brought to us. It's going to only get worse after 2nd Job, so buckle up and wrap yourself in bubble plastic. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
When the initial Destiny revamp showcase was published, Nexon explained that they wanted to place more emphasis on Hero's swordsmanship and place less emphasis on the rage-themed skills. This change in direction removed some of Hero's long-standing identity that it had since its inception, as "anger management" has been a defining trait in both Hero's appearance and naming of skills, more so than swordsmanship ever was. But don't you worry: it gets worse.
More emphasis on swordsmanship causes an identity crisis. As the word "emphasis" implies, they did not completely remove Hero's rage-theme, and the revamp tries to have it both ways. I wish this was the only problem.
It would've been so much easier to justify swordsmanship, if rage was the only factor we had to consider. You see, there's a particular trait that defines Hero more than anything else; one that is more important than swordsmanship or "anger management". And for whatever reason, Nexon has either forgot about it, or they didn't think this one through.
Because... you know... Combo Attack exists?
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3.2 Combo Attack
It's a valid point, but with that argument I feel obligated to mention that this isn't a new concept to Hero, and that on the contrary it's how Hero started out when 4th Job was released in 2006. So if anything, Destiny unintentionally simplified Combo Attack so much that Hero plays almost identical to its Pre-Big Bang state, as it throws over ten years worth of revamps and gradual improvements made to this system out of the window. I'm not sure if that's an improvement.
To further elaborate on post-Destiny's poor implementation of "no orb consumption", is the gradual evolution of Combo skills throughout the past twelve years. Originally, Combo skills were optional secondary attacking skills that got pretty much replaced by Brandish once you hit 4th Job. This is because Combo skills would consume all Combo orbs upon activation, and even if their damage output was multiplied by the amount of orbs spent, the steep cost did not justify it over using Brandish. Combo skills failed to compete with Brandish, so Nexon remedied this by changing Combo skills to utility. But as Hero's reliance on these utility skills became more prevalent, orb consumption rates became heavier, so they had to constantly lower them to keep the gameplay loop tight until we got to a pretty good balance.
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| In this chapter, I will mainly discuss the fundamental changes made to Combo Attack itself. I will not delve too much into the changes of our other Combo skills here; please refer to their respective chapters for more information there. |
Congratulations, you just undid all of the lessons learned from the mistakes made during the RED update. RED's revamp fumbled the bag on Combo Attack, and the players let Nexon knew. So, Nexon took that feedback into consideration and fixed most of the problems they've caused. But imagine that all of this effort is thrown out of the window, as Destiny repeats the same mistakes, and yet still manages to find room to make it worse than RED.
Add insult to injury, I find myself baffled by how they managed to include two requests I've had for Combo Attack back in in 2020, but these are rendered moot because Destiny changes Combo Attack to a point where these no longer do anything. Even though it's probably an unintentional coincidence, it does give off a tone-deaf feel.
When people discuss what they don't like about the Destiny changes to Combo Attack, several will point out that orbs are no longer consumed for Combo skills, and that this change kind of defeats the point of having Combo Attack's orbs because the skill becomes a plain NX effect if it doesn't interact with the gameplay in any substantial way.
Because I've experienced every change made to Hero over in the past sixteen years, I'm not too bothered by the lack of Combo orb consumption because it threads familiar ground. Personally, I would've preferred to see them restore Combo Attack's charge rate to 100% like what it was before the RED update, but the removal of orb consumptions is fine by me because it basically achieves the same result, albeit in a different way. However, I am disappointed by the poor implementation of the removal of orb consumption, because it feels more like an afterthought. Here's why.
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| Panic, one of our original Combo Skills, was also one of the easiest skills in the game to hit the original damage cap (99999) with. Today, that would've proportionally been 700000000000 (700b) damage. That's how much more difficult funding has become. |
What sets Pre-Big Bang Hero from its post-Destiny counterpart is how often players cycles through their Combo Orbs, as "no orb consumption" isn't the same as "no need to recharge". You see, toggles didn't exist yet, so Combo Attack was a buff with a duration of 200 seconds. After Combo Attack expires, you would have to reapply the skill and that resets the orb count. Then, there was also the constant threat of Dispel, which removed all buffs including Combo Attack. Nowadays, Dispel is gone and Combo Attack is a toggle, and that does affect Combo Attack's behavior and usage. Once you are at max charge, you're done. The only time you would lose orbs is when you log out, enter a location that reset skills (such as Dojo and Urus) or when you toggle Combo Attack off manually. Additionally, what made the old Hero fun, is that you had the novelty of expending all orbs for massive damage (see image above).
So after twelve years of updates we've come to a point where Combo skills no longer consume orbs, and they have also been reworked where they no longer are part of the Combo Attack system. So they are just regular skills now, having a traditional cooldown instead of orb consumption. Any semblance of an unified system is lost, and Nexon has pretty much removed something that never needed to be tampered with. Because if you are going to replace a system that has been improved and reiterated upon for over a decade, you'd better come with something exceptionally good.
But nope, that did not happen. Instead of something exceptionally good, we got something half-baked. At that point, you might as well not do it. Combo Attack is now a standalone skill, and it no longer is Hero's lifeblood. The Combo skills that got replaced are objectively worse in many ways, and the few that remain suffer from newfound problems that they didn't have before this update. And if that isn't already bad enough... it'll still somehow get worse, believe me.
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| Top left: original. Top right: RED (2013). Bottom left: Reboot (2015). Bottom right: Destiny (2022). |
Remember when the design of Combo Orbs changed with the RED update? Combo Attack's runic and abstract appearance was replaced with something more uninspiring and somewhat tacky. They also got rid of the recharge animation for Combo Attack, which paired with the removal of guaranteed orb charging, made for a drastic downgrade.
*If we're being pedantic about it: while they brought back the orbs, they changed the colors slightly and the chronological order of orbs.
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Post-RED Combo orbs would now depict parts of an armor set, and the clockwise-rotating circle that goes in front of the character was replaced with a static background. The newer design wasn't received well by many, and Nexon met this criticism halfway during the Reboot update by returning the old orb design*, but keeping the post-RED background effect. The original orbs also popped better with the rest of our skills as the bright pink made for a good contrast with the post-RED skill designs. Point being: many Hero mains prefer the original Combo Orb design for good reason.
Unfortunately, not only does Destiny undermine the lessons learned from the time between RED and Reboot, it also doubles down on the worst aspect of the post-RED skill design: too much of the same color. So much in fact, that Hero's color palette has become even more dull than it already was during RED, as its void of contrast and visual clarity. This exacerbation of the post-RED design philosophy is one of the reasons why I believe they never should've thrown away the (somewhat) cohesive color-coding of the original Hero skills, because it served a purpose. You see, specific Hero skills used to be color-coded, in either of the following colors: blue, green, pink and yellow.
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Combo Attack and Combo skills introduced with 3rd Job used to be blue, with shades of green. Advanced Combo Attack added the color pink, and skill animations for Combo Skills were changed accordingly; meaning Panic and Coma had ten unique animations each*. Utility skills, such as Rage, Shout, Guardian and Monster Magnet, were colored blue. The remaining skills, such as Brandish, Rush, and Power Stance, were colored yellow.
Even though it should be a mess in theory, it somehow worked. The differences in colors allowed skills to remain visually distinct from one and another, and it made for a pretty good color scheme.
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| *An example of the adaptive animations for our defunct skill Coma. Left: ten orbs consumed. Right: four orbs. |
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With each revamp, Nexon kept the blue/green/pink/yellow color-coding fairly consistent (with some minor exceptions, i.e. Magic Crash) until the RED update. A few examples of how drastic the visual changes were with the RED revamp:
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They reworked every skill's appearance, and dropped the green and yellow in favor of orange. Adaptive animations for Combo skills were also axed (i.e. Panic went from 10 unique animations to one).The bright pink was replaced with red, and this applied to all Combo skills, including ACA. Panic still kept its shade of blue, together with Monster Magnet's replacement Combo Force, but other skills such as Rage and Shout were thrown under the orange bus. Fast forward, the aforementioned return of the old pink orbs happened with the Reboot update but 5th Job continued the obsession with orange, with the only exception being Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct. Sobs thankfully adhered to the old pink rule under the effects of Enrage, while Combo Instinct introduced dark red to our color palette.
At this point, the old blue/green/pink/yellow has been gone for almost a decade, and Hero is now seen synonymous with the color orange/red. Personally, I don't like it. And this comes from someone who's third favorite color is orange.
And for how little distinction there is between orange and red, Destiny further dilutes Hero's appearance by getting rid of red, and replacing the void with even more orange. There's simply too much orange now; it doesn't work. Orange is not an easy color to use, especially not when you don't include contrasting colors, highlights or nuances. Guess which color matches well with orange? The complementary color blue. But as Destiny removes Combo Force and Panic, the only blue skill that Hero is allowed to keep would be Combo Attack. And guess what? No more cycling through orbs, means no more blue orbs. And no, shared 5th Job skills do not count because they are not exclusive to Hero.
Only few skills are allowed to have a different color, and its selection feels random. For instance, Magic Crash is still purple, for whatever reason. 5th Job has barely seen any changes (which is a problem we'll discuss later), so Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct still use the pre-Destiny color scheme. Additionally, Nexon's desire to incorporate swordsmanship into everything takes no prisoners, as Combo Attack is no longer tied to anything, so Nexon made it a swordsmanship skill. This means all the orbs are weapons now. Thanks, I hate it.
I'm not sure what I find the worst Combo orb design. RED's tacky design of armor pieces, or Destiny's uninspiring design using our primary and secondary weapons. Armor pieces or swords and axes; it's all the same trite to me. And to nobody's surprise, the post-Destiny orb design received the same negative reception that the RED ones got. Look, if it aint broke, don't fix it. But of course, Nexon wouldn't dare to bring back the old orbs any time soon because that would've made the work that went into designing the Destiny orbs pointless* - and to them, pointless is expensive.
So I guess I'll see you all in 2025 once Nexon reluctantly brings back the original orbs (and watch how they will forget to include the original recharge animation again). I just don't get why Nexon abandoned their Skill Skin system from a decade ago. They could've easily made bank by selling the RED or original Combo Attack design *cough* Dragon Knight *cough*, since Nexon loves to design revamps problems to sell solutions for, and the new Combo Attack surely received flak. And it's not like they have to do much effort either, because they already have the foundation for skill skins. They'll only need to patch it back in, and expand the system with new skins. Toss in the usual FOMO and the money prints itself.
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3.2.3 Credit where credit is due
Because all skills that used to consume orbs no longer consume them, they have been all changed into normal skills. This means that moving forward, any Combo skill that is not a summon, such as Combo Death Fault and Incising, can now charge combo orbs. If Shout still existed, it would've been the first time in 6 years that it could charge orbs again.
But probably the best change that happened to Combo Attack is that activating it now properly gives feedback where the background effect fades in, complete with a distinct sound. If anything of the post-RED Combo Attack had to be improved upon, it was exactly this because it used to be difficult to tell whether if Combo Attack was active or not.
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| Interestingly, the animation for the new background effect restarts once you've reached Advanced Combo Attack's orbs. |
The new Combo Attack does include a recharge animation for the new orbs (although this recharge animation is hardly noticeable because it's so subtle), and at zero orbs, the background effect remains to indicate that Combo Attack is active (useful feedback that goes underappreciated). Those were the two things I wanted to see with Combo Attack, but unfortunately, because we no longer really have to recharge orbs, we'll rarely get to see either of these. It kinda defeats the point of including these, but at least the foundation is there for future updates. Until they get rid of them again.
But probably the best change that happened to Combo Attack is that activating it now properly gives feedback where the background effect fades in, complete with a distinct sound. If anything of the post-RED Combo Attack had to be improved upon, it was exactly this because it used to be difficult to tell whether if Combo Attack was active or not.
Also, all toggles have a brief cooldown now, so you can no longer accidentally cancel out Combo Attack right after casting it. This is a problem I used to stumble across, so it's good to see it addressed. Ironically, this will be the only time where the brief cooldown is a benefit to the user experience and not a hindrance (→ chapters 5.5.3 and 7.2.1).
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3.3 Flash Slash
Flash Slash is generally seen as an improvement over Combo Force, but it is not. Even with some of its advantages over its predecessor, it still falls short in a few ways on a fundamental level. The way this skill is designed is, in a way, an indication that Nexon has given up on trying to fix the godawful hookshot spaghetti coding. Evidence for this is removal of all Adventure hookshots* with Destiny, all of which were replaced with a "teleport" equivalent.
*Bowmaster and Marksman's Steigeisen (replaced with Quiver Flow and Bolt Flow, respectively), and Hero's Combo Force.
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| The skill that could've been - No, the skill that should've been. |
Before we take a deep dive into Flash Slash, I'll mention it here just to clarify: every time I refer to Combo Force as a skill, I'll make the intentional distinction between "Combo Force" and "Combo Hookshot":
- When I refer to "Combo Force", we're talking about Monster Magnet's successor, the vacuum skill.
- When I refer to "Combo Hookshot", we're talking about the travelling skill with the hookshot mechanic.
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3.3.1 Combo Force died for this
*Glacial Chain, a vacuum skill for Ice/Lightning, has also been removed with Destiny. I would've preferred to be able to say that Nexon deemed vacuum skills to be a thing of the past, but for some weird reason, Hero is the only Adventure warrior that lost their vacuum skill, as Paladin kept Page Order and Dark Knight kept Spear Pulling. I ask myself: what warranted the removal of ours while they were allowed to keep theirs?
*This has been a problem ever since Rush was released in 2006. It is why came with a hidden cooldown, as it would camouflage Nexon's poor spaghetti coding. However, as Mechanic set the next standard with Drill Rush when it came out in 2010, powercreep demanded that Rush had to remove its cooldown, even if Nexon is unable to get the game to push enemies reliably when using Rush skills consecutively.
Basically, Nexon removed Combo Force and made Flash Slash a direct replacement for Combo Hookshot. No more vacuum, and what we have left in Flash Slash is less than half of what its predecessor used to be. That's just dumb.
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| The original Combo Hookshot from seven years ago, which puts current Flash Slash to shame. |
You can read about Combo Force's history up to Reboot and how the hookshot performed here. With the Reboot update, they introduced us to Combo Hookshot. Unfortunately, the original version of hookshot was short-lived, as Nexon deemed it too powerful at the time. They changed its target count from eight to only one a few months after.
But because the programming of hookshot was designed with 8 monsters in mind, making it a single target skill pretty much destroyed its reliability as hookshot now became an incredibly janky skill that was rarely going to work the way you wanted. Nexon tried to improve the spaghetti coding at least three times, and each time they tampered with it, it gradually became worse (as seen here). On top of that, they also shrunk hookshot's maximum distance, which further hindered its use. Judging by their actions, Nexon deems it beyond saving. They deleted hookshot, while ironically the solution has always been there: just to go back to the original Reboot update code, as that worked perfectly fine.
But OK, if you are going to rework the skill from scratch, it better be good. And I would've agreed on it to be better than the original Combo Hookshot, if Nexon kept the original Tespia Flash Slash as it is. Because originally, Flash Slash would've had no cooldown and this would've single-handedly resolve most of the flaws that Combo Hookshot had, while also improving Hero's mobility significantly. This was even one of the major selling points, as said during the initial reveal of the revamp. The benefits from this Flash Slash would've made up for the removal of Combo Force.
But as I've eluded to at the beginning of this blogpost, the Destiny revamp underwent many revisions and before you knew it, Flash Slash hardly resembled anything that was promised. Because for some reason, someone thought it was a good idea to remove Combo Force and replace it with a skill that does the same, but with less than half of the core functionality, affects less monsters, has a substantially smaller hitbox and for whatever reason receives a 4 second cooldown, despite the original from eight years ago was better in many regards, and had no cooldown to begin with.
Not only does Flash Slash have a smaller target count (six enemies, versus hookshot's original eight), we lost Combo Force in the process (as Flash Slash only replaces Combo Hookshot). We traded two skills without a cooldown (Force and Hookshot) for one (Flash Slash) with a four second cooldown. We lost our vacuum, our guaranteed Combo Orb recharge, aggro exploitation and all of our skills that could stun enemies. And even if Combo Hookshot couldn't be used repeatedly, you could still use Combo Force right after using Combo Hookshot. Flash Slash, in its entirety, is at best unfortunately only less than half of Combo Force used to be, and that's just a shame and unnecessary.
With Combo Force, you had multiple skills and multiple features packed into one, and that is what made it so great. The loss of a vacuum on a melee class is very noticeable, as Hero no longer has a way of manipulating monster placement (and boss aggro), which is a must for any melee class and still has its uses in modern MapleStory.
Combo Force was also able to recharge orbs at a 80% rate per monster, meaning that you were guaranteed to recharge a Combo Orb if you attacked multiple enemies. While this aspect of Combo Force was not carried over to Flash Slash, it has been moved to Aura Blade and this feature has been further improved upon (→ chapter 4.3.3).
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| To have lost such a fundamental ability as pulling faraway monsters is a shame. It's been a part of our toolkit since 2006. Those who can't understand the inherent value of Monster Magnet (which later became Combo Force) have much to learn. |
But yes, I do believe that there's still a place for a vacuum skill post-Destiny*, and they could've easily made Combo Force's hitbox much longer, which would've greatly improved Hero's toolkit. Look no further than with Monster Magnet, where it was originally tailored for Brandish, adjusted for Brave Slash, and again for Raging Blow. Trying to do Dojo or Monster Park Extreme post-Destiny without a vacuum skill has become a pain. Imagine being the first class (alongside Paladin and DRK) to invent a staple mechanic, found later on other classes (i.e. Battle Mage and Demon Slayer), to then receive unfair treatment. It's infuriating, and this will not be the last time either (→ chapters 4.4, 5.4 and 5.8).
With the removal of Combo Force, Rush by itself doesn't do enough because pushing monsters isn't the same as pulling them. Sometimes it's faster and more convenient to just pull a monster than it is to Flash Jump towards it, or to use Flash Jump and Rush if you want to change its location. Not to mention that Rush will only reliably push a group of monsters once every second because if you hold the skill down, the game will fail to account for every monster*.
Monster Magnet (then Combo Force) became invaluable and went hand-in-hand with Rush, as the advantages of either skills made up for the flaws of the other. But because there is no replacement for Combo Force, all of the flaws of Rush have returned in its awful glory, and the fewer merits that Flash Slash has are never going to make up for it.
This is why it made perfect sense for Flash Slash to be without cooldown, as throwing away so much of Hero's toolkit justifies the significant trade-off. Dammit Nexon, you had a perfectly reasonable proposition, and you threw it away. And the worst part about it, is that too few players genuinely understand how much Destiny has gutted Hero's toolkit.
Combo Force as a vacuum could've easily coexisted alongside Flash Slash, and they could've included directional inputs to Combo Force as the next logical step forward (chapter 4.3.5). You could even treat it as a two-in-one where you have the two share the same SP investment, which is commonly found in modern classes and was implemented on other revamped classes during this same revamp. Alternatively, they could've added a vacuum to Rush through a command input, like how both Combo Force and Shout used to have one.
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3.3.2 Easier to use, but it's not quite there yet
Can Flash Slash pick up the slack that Combo Force left behind? No, of course not. But I'll admit: it's close, though...
*Reminder: anything that ignores Superstance (such as Monster Park Extreme's Bigfoot), also ignores the Superstance of Flash Slash.
In fact, you're hardly going to be able to use this Superstance because Flash Slash as a skill has a very short duration. The cooldown on Flash Slash doesn't help either. Urus and True Hilla are one of the few exceptions where you can expect to consistently use it, since the specific moves you want to use Flash Slash with are well telegraphed. In case of Urus, the roar attack is always going to be the first attack he'll use when you start a run.
*The Dreamer update adds 15% Critical Rate to Weapon Mastery, but that's two years after this revamp happened. Still better than nothing, though.
Because Combo Force has been removed, hookshot is no longer mapped to ↓ + skill key. Instead, the skill key will now immediately go for the hookshot, teleporting to a monster in front of you. You can also combine the arrow keys with the skill key to select a nearby monster in five different directions: ↑, ↖, ←, ↙ or ↓. If there's a monster in that direction, the skill will send you to that monster. The travelling distance is a significant improvement over Combo Force. Its maximum distance is similar to what Combo Force was able to cover horizontally, but now in any direction.
Note: if Flash Slash can't find a monster in any selected direction, the skill won't activate.
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| Flash Slash on its own isn't perfectly programmed; you must spoon-feed the game for the right directions. |
The programming for Flash Slash is not perfect as seen above, as it will take your input direction very literal. It also seems to prioritize the longest possible travelling distance. In cases where the same monster is eligible for multiple directions, or when there are different diagonal movements possible, you must spoon-feed the game your preferred destination with the arrow keys to ensure you are sent to the right direction.
Overall, Flash Slash is a simple yet effective evolution of our old hookshot, and also a very practical one. Like its predecessor, Flash Slash can be used while affected by Crazy Skull and Weakness. Even if your arrow keys are reversed while under the effects of Crazy Skull, the directional inputs are not affected by Crazy Skull, so you are somewhat able to cheat around Crazy Skull's movement restriction, providing there are eligible targets in range.
The skill also comes with a very rare property: being able to bypass platforms as an attacking skill. You can use it to clip through platforms, and the most common use of this advantage is to teleport to monsters below you. This is one of outstanding additions that Destiny brought to our toolkit, and it is one that many other classes should be envious of.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned four second cooldown kills it, even if Flash Slash is far more reliable than Combo Force. Having to run cooldown skip just to have Flash Slash be on par with its predecessor is a sign of bad game design. Its cooldown makes misfires extremely punishing, and it's a problem Combo Force didn't have.
To make matters worse, the directional inputs have to be used before using the skill key, so you are going to end up grabbing ropes or entering portals instead of using Flash Slash. This means that any map that contains ropes or portals are already a hindrance for Flash Slash, and it dictates that the most optimal maps for Hero to grind in are maps with the least amount of them. And if you do happen to climb a rope instead, active summons such as Spider in Mirror and Sword of Burning Soul are negated, which halts your grind. A simple solution: give Flash Slash the ability to be used while hanging on ropes; problem solved. Teleport already has this, so why not give it to Flash Slash?
And Flash Slash being a simplified version of Combo Hookshot comes with another drawback: you can no longer use other skills during hookshot. Combo Hookshot would allow you to use skills while you were hoisting towards a target. So, you could use skills such as Shout, CDF or Raging Blow to clear additional monsters, while also getting to travel to a different location. There was even an advanced technique where you could cancel out hookshot with Blink or Leap Attack, to follow it up with a different movement skill such as Rope Lift or War Leap. All of that nuance is gone now.
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| Boss summons can now be used to provide you with a quick escape from dangerous situations. |
On the other hand, because Flash Slash is faster than Combo Hookshot, it's easier to use as a quick way of escaping danger. It's not as fast as Rush, nor does it grant you an iframe like Rush does, but you can use Flash Slash in mid-air and to travel vertically to other platforms, which you can't do with Rush. There are plenty of situations where Flash Slash is the ideal skill for a quick escape. And while the skill description now states that you'll receive Superstance* while using Flash Slash, this is nothing new as Combo Hookshot had this as well (it was just not mentioned prior).
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| Unfortunately, we have too few bosses where the Superstance from Flash Slash can be used to great effect... Not to mention, Urus will be removed with the Dreamer update, which leaves us even less places to use this. |
With Combo Hookshot, its Superstance at least saw more mileage because the longer skill duration made it easier to use of it. But here's an honest question: did I ever use Combo Hookshot's Superstance? No, not really. Only a couple of times before we had the Upper Charge + Blink combo. It's simply not worth taking damage to trade for Superstance, given the nature of Potion Cooldown and Hero's glass cannon design. So while Superstance is always a fantastic trait to have on a skill, it's unfortunately one of our skills that will see the least use out of it. If you want a good examples of skills with Superstance: Paladin's Sanctuary and Captain's Fusillade.
At least Flash Slash is an easy and convenient way to get rid of those pesky flying monsters now... Although that's not saying much when we have Incising and Aura Blade.
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| Seven years later: smaller hitbox, less monsters, a four second cooldown and less consistent. It's simply not better. |
No, it does not. Any map starting from 4th Job is too large and Flash Slash has such a small hitbox that, even if the cooldown was to be removed, holding this skill down is slower than to clear a map with Raging Blow or Incising. Flash Slash does have three times the line count of what it replaced, but that isn't a good justification for the cooldown either.
But let's say you could argue that Flash Slash without a cooldown encourages lazy behavior, and that it's not the type of player behavior you want to evoke. Even for something like that, there are so many solutions where you can still have Flash Slash without a cooldown and avoid this lazy behavior all-together:
- An example of this already existed Pre-Big Bang with the Final Attack penalty, where repeated use of Slash Blast would continuously halve Slash Blast skill's damage until the damage was reduced to 0.
- You could also pick inspiration from the original Monster Magnet from 2006 (which is ironically the skill that eventually became Flash Slash), where the skill deals no damage at all (only draw aggro). You could then disable activating Sword of Burning Soul, Final Attack and Aura Weapon for good measure.
- You could implement modern mechanics such as the ammunition system, which has been used to great effect on other movement skills such as Ark's Unstoppable Impulse or Shadower's Shadow Assault.
- To avoid breezing through the early Job Advancements, you can reduce the cooldown for Flash Slash on later Job Advancements. They did this for Angelic Buster with her cooldowns, so it's not a new concept.
So no, Flash Slash should be without cooldown. There isn't really any good argument for keeping it. The initial release of the Destiny revamp in Tespia was right: Flash Slash doesn't need it. I don't get why people believe it needs one.
It's hard to fathom that a perfectly fine skill such as Combo Force died for this watered down replacement that got further gutted in Tespia until there was not much left when it was released. I find it perplexing how few within the Hero community remembers the history of Combo Force, because if they did, there would've been more pushback in favor of a better Flash Slash. But all of the community's attention and pitchforks were wasted into the Valhalla and Combo Death Fault debacle - the aftermath of which we'll inevitably discuss in chapters 6.4 and 7.4. If only they knew better.
At least you can use Rush immediately after Flash Slash, which is something you couldn't do with Combo Hookshot...
Rage has been reworked into Spirit Blade. Functionally speaking, Spirit Blade is identical to Rage. The only difference is that the skill's appearance and name has changed. I ask myself... why?
Was there any particular reason to change Rage, a skill that Hero has been using for almost twenty years now in KMS, into Spirit Blade? Why was Rage chosen, and not our other rage-themed skills such as Raging Blow, Rage Uprising, or even its successor, Enrage? Why didn't they update any of its stats when changing it into Spirit Blade?
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It just feels... like wasted effort, and a change that shouldn't have been made. It feels like Nexon had plans for some (other) skill, scrapped the idea but recycled its animation for Rage last minute, in order to avoid wasting the efforts of their animation team. Spirit Blade's animation and skill icon looks awfully similar to the original Power Stance...
As Spirit Blade doesn't really change anything, I don't see any reason to stop calling it Rage. Unnecessary name changes, especially for staple party skills that have been around since the beginning, is not a good idea. Maybe I will acknowledge it as Spirit Blade starting 2042, as it then has lived longer in name than Rage did. But only if I feel like it.
Anyway, there was the missed opportunity to improve party skills such as Rage and Meditation by buffing the stats. While Rage giving 30 Attack is useful, it's by no means as good as it used to be. Might be worthwhile to add, or to change the party buff to % Attack? It's also kinda weird how party buffs still cater towards either Weapon or Magic Attack, since nowadays other skills that give PDR reduction, Accuracy, Avoid or Defense provides for both equivalents. I don't see any reason why they can't update party skills such as Rage and Meditation to start giving both.
There's probably also something that can be said about Rage's reflect, as how this reflect behaves has always been archaic. So many attacks from bosses use the modern % HP attacks; those can't be reflected. And regular high-end monsters run HP in the billions, so reflect hardly matters. Perhaps there is an opportunity to make Rage function like Pink Bean's Style, where touch damage scales per level, and where you are able to actually kill enemies with it.
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3.5 Final Attack
Remember when I said that the Destiny revamp was a bad case of over-promising? Final Attack is one that I haven't seen anyone really discuss when we're examining the first Destiny video that showcases the changes made to Hero.
Basically, Final Attack was shown to be able to charge Combo Attack again, which was something that Final Attack originally was able to do since its release. It was removed ten years later, around the Jump update, if I recall correctly.
I probably don't have to explain how much easier it would be to have Final Attack recharge orbs again, given the fact that ever since RED, Nexon thought it was a good idea to nerf Hero's recharge rate to 80%, and then also make the class very orb-consumption-heavy moving forward. You can imagine my disappointment after confirming that Final Attack recharging orbs was nowhere to be found in the first Tespia release... I felt cheated.
Anyway, now it doesn't bother me anymore because Combo Attack no longer consumes orbs, which is basically a different way of solving the same problem. But I thought this was interesting observation to share, nonetheless.
Trimming away unnecessary fat and reorganizing skill trees to make space for new skills is something that Nexon has proven itself to be adequate with. This is something they have done multiple times, mainly during class revamps.
A good example of this would be incorporating Power Reflection into Rage during the RED update, which used to be two separate skills. By doing so, they made space to move Monster Magnet from 4th to 2nd Job, which then became Combo Force. Consolidating skills is unfortunately something that Nexon hasn't paid much attention to during the Destiny and Ignition revamps, as a lot of classes (not just only Hero) end up with a lot of individual passive skills, which could've easily been consolidated to make space for something else (i.e. Power Stance on 2nd Job, which is something I will discuss in chapter 5.8). The increase in individual passive skills is mostly due to Nexon's continued efforts for classes to have less active skills, with Boosters becoming passive as a recent example.
However, the amount of passive skills has gone to a point where it's becoming redundant and cluttered. The skills Weapon Mastery and Booster could've easily been consolidated into one. Physical Training, while providing a small but useful stat boost, feels outdated because that stat boost was decided during the Jump update, which was over a decade ago. To make matters worse, with the Ignition revamp for the Knights of Cygnus, we have an example (albeit an exceptional one, at that) where Striker receives additional stats for its equivalent of Physical Training: 10% Critical Rate and 5% Critical Damage boost. I just don't get why Nexon didn't bother to update everyone else's too*. There's an opportunity to consider implementing incremental stat boosts based on your level, I'd say...
By comparison, the passive skills found on 3rd Job are handled better, because it has a more balanced distribution of valuable stats with a clear approach. Skills such as Chance Attack, Endure, Self Recovery and Combo Synergy feel like proper individual skills because they also yield vastly different type of stats that are fancier in both quantity and quality than what is found on 2nd Job. It doesn't have the same redundancy as 2nd Job either, where the same stats are sourced from different skills, nor does it have dated amounts of STR/DEX that nowadays feels like SP filler.
Anyway, Booster is passive now, which is a great improvement. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that we run less active skills, because Scarring Sword (→ chapter 4.2) is a thing. What irks me about our Booster becoming passive, is that Nexon couldn't have applied this to all other classes while they were at it? There are still a good number of classes that have yet to receive this quality of life improvement. It just doesn't make much sense, and just because they've given up on revamping every class short-term, doesn't mean they can't give everyone passive boosters in the meantime. They gave everyone 100% Stance with the Destiny update (→ chapter 5.8), so what's the big deal?
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3.7 Honorable mention: Brandish
Ironically, the Japanese class names from Japan MapleStory are more fitting after Destiny. You see, class names aren't always the same in each regional version, as they may differ depending on the version and update. In JMS, Crusader is called Knight (ナイト), and White Knight is called Crusader (クルセイダー). Additionally, Swordsman
Interestingly, Destiny marks the first time where all of Crusader's original skills have been removed at some point in Maple's history least once, and Crusader remains our only job advancement where this has happened.
5.8.1 Most useless 4th Job skill in the game
*The only class that never saw this update was Zen (Dragon Warrior), because he was replaced by Mo Xuan before this universal change rolled out in CMS, TMS and MSEA. Mo Xuan was initially released without 100% Stance, so that class did receive the universal stance change with Destiny.
But then if we look at Power Stance, I just find it difficult to justify its current state when it's clear that itself has become outdated. Why can't we receive the same stance treatment that the other classes have? It's worse once you consider that Paladin hits 100% stance on 2nd Job, but Hero and Dark Knight, who they share the same 1st Job and have access to Open Job Advancement, need to wait until 4th Job and then sink 30 SP. Nexon could've easily consolidated Power Stance with one of our other skills, such as Combat Mastery or 3rd Job's Endure, as evident to how they handled the other classes. The vacant slot on 4th Job could've been perfect for Shout or Combo Force, as without them, Hero's mobility is currently worse. So much for Destiny being the update with the big Adventure revamp...
5.8.2 Double standards
*Contrary to popular belief, Accuracy and Avoid are currently still thoroughly used, as far as the game is concerned.
6. Hyper Skills
*But don't celebrate just yet, because one-and-a-half year after this change, they gutted Body of Steel for no good reason (→ chapter 7.5).
6.4.2 Performance issues
*Valhalla was renamed to Cry Valhalla because the pretentious translation team at GMS forbids faithful translations. Consequences be damned.
But the worst issue that plagued Valhalla since the Savior update was the skill tanking the client's performance. Thankfully, New Age has fixed most of it (although that took half a year and a lot of bug reports), but performance issues can still be found, i.e. at Monster Park Extreme, during server bottlenecks or with borderless fullscreen.
7. 5th Job
7.1 Did Nexon forget about 5th Job?
7.2 Sword of Burning Soul
7.2.1 Glory died for this
*One of the easiest ways to observe this was with how monster locations were displayed in the Mini Map for Monster Park, but this method was removed with New Age. Monsters outside of your current loading zone were not shown, and were only loaded in once you move to the correct one. Another method to observe this is to go to any major town and notice that players on the left side of the map are removed from the Mini Map once you go all the way to the right. Fun fact: the "Door to Zakum" is not present until you enter its loading zone (i.e. use Blink to notice it spawning in).
7.2.2 Destiny died for this
*This will happen often at bosses where verticality or flying is involved (i.e. Lucid), where Raging Blow connects, but Sobs can't quite reach it.
7.3 Combo Instinct
While Combo Instinct was left unchanged with Destiny, changes made to other Combo skills were beneficial to it. Actual changes to Combo Instinct itself were later added during the Ignition update.
7.3.1 Reaper of victory
7.3.2 Post-Ignition Combo Instinct
7.3.3 The new mobility cycle
7.3.4 Extreme(ly frustrating) Inferno Wolf
*This also negatively affects grinding until Level 260, because mules can no longer piggyback on Inferno Wolf being killed by stronger level characters joining in. This is on top of all of the other issues I'm about to discuss in the next paragraphs. It's not a good change whatsoever.
*I've been losing out on billions of Inferno Wolf EXP every week for over a year now, because of this change.
7.3.5 One flaw left to fix
7.4 Combo Death Fault / Sword Illusion
7.5 Body of Steel
*Assuming we only look at Valhalla's Superstance while completely ignore all the other issues that came with this revamp.
7.6 Erda Nova
7.7 Erda Shower / Erda Fountain
7.7.1 Erda Shower: return of the Ultimates
7.7.2 Erda Fountain: lackluster and outclassed
7.8 Maple World Goddess' Blessing / Aura Weapon
*Keep in mind that casting a new Aura Weapon while Aura Weapon was already active, overrides and resets the timer for the current projectile, meaning you'll lose an eligible projectile if you haven't fired it. Only reapply after it expired, or after you've fired the projectile (if one was available).
*With Blessing having the additional requirement of an-already-active Maple Warrior.
*Or, they can change Aura Weapon's PDR reduction and Final Damage into passive effects. That could work too.
7.9 Spider in Mirror / Crest of the Solar
*I haven't covered Crest of the Solar yet on my blog, but I will at some point in the future.
7.10 Enhancement Cores
If you thought that the Destiny revamp was limited to only butchering skills, you are mistaken. Not even your wallet is spared, as the removal of several skills also meant that Enhancement Cores were reworked.
8. Verdict
Eh... piss, where to start? Ask yourself: what happens if a class like Hero, where most of its toolkit and greatness lies within an overabundance of niches to pull from, is revamped by a development team that used to be known for stuffing skills to the brim with niche interactions, has changed its mindset to streamlining everything so much to a point where they became allergic to continue any type of niche? You get this revamp. Bland, uninspiring, tone-deaf and sterilized.
8.1 Disappointment
How did we even get here? That is a question that has several answers - all of which contribute on their own way.
8.2 Skill icons
The thing is, even if I criticize Destiny's skill animations for being "a lot of the same", they could've still had proper skill icon designs that made it easy to tell them apart. They are not mutually exclusive. Poor skill icon design is a problem by itself and is regardless of the appearance of skills they represent.
8.2.1 Character silhouettes
Conversely, it is definitely possible for existing skill icons with character silhouettes to be designed without them, while retaining a distinct and unique appearance. For instance, Rush. It used to be a character silhouette dashing forward*, but it was then changed to depict a skewering sword. Despite that the sword shared its appearance with Brave Slash, the orientation, color and sense of motion made it stand out from others. With Destiny, it's dangerously close to the making the same mistakes as our other skill icons (→ chapter 8.2.2), but manages to be distinct enough. I do believe that the skill icon would be better with a character silhouette, or at least darker and more pronounced outlines.
*Not to be confused with War Leap's predecessor of the same name (see chapter 8.2, "Rush 2011"), which had a similar skill icon.
8.2.2 Accuracy is not always better
However, this advice is not always enough. In Destiny's case, there are several skill icons that have the right amount of simplicity to them and they would communicate enough in a vacuum. But because so many skills appear similar, so do their skill icons when placed side-by-side. In such cases, more should be done to further distinct them. They are:
The new look for Brandish is great. It now looks and feels much closer to the original Brandish animation. I'm happy with it, even though Brandish and Brave Slash are no longer used once you have Raging Blow with 4th Job.
Fun fact! Did you know? Back when Combo Force was still available, it kind of made Brandish redundant because Combo Force was better in every regard when grinding through 2nd Job. Y'know, larger hitbox, hookshot, guaranteed orb recharges because of its 80%-chance-to-recharge-per-monster. But as Flash Slash gives a watered down Combo Hookshot, removes Combo Force and has that 4 second cooldown, it forces Brandish into relevance.
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| Ah yes Tylus, I remember when you were Level 30 and we had to protect you from Crimson Balrogs and Lycanthropes. How does one even become a 3rd Job instructor at only Level 30? I guess we'll never find out... |
Ever wondered why Hero's 3rd Job is called Crusader? It was because some Crusader's 3rd Job skills contained religious references in its skill animations; most notably Combo Attack and Panic (→ chapter 3.2.2). Other classes also had some (most infamously Soul Master's Soul Charge containing a swastika), and bosses like Zakum had their own fair share. But as time moved on, most of these depictions have been phased out. Only a few of these remain.
(ソードマン) and Fighter (ファイター) are inverse, where Fighter is our 1st Job, and Swordsman is our 2nd. With Paladin losing all of its Elemental damage with Destiny other than Holy, Crusader as its Japanese 3rd Job name
has never been more fitting. If I didn't know any better, I would've called the JMS translation team prophetic.
has never been more fitting. If I didn't know any better, I would've called the JMS translation team prophetic.
The more you know, I guess. But back to the actual revamp. Brave Slash has a larger hitbox, but much like Brandish or Slash Blash, that's all there is to say about it, so let's move on. Combo Synergy and Endure remain unchanged.
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| Unfortunately, ever since the RED revamp in 2013, Paladin and Dark Knight's Rush has oddly been inferior to Hero's. As the Destiny revamp has been a constant letdown, it's no surprise that something like this has yet to be addressed. |
Rush got a visual change similar to Upper Charge. Hero keeps the sword, but Paladin's Rush is now a Blunt Weapon, and Dark Knight's become a Spear. I always found it weird that, between RED and Destiny, Paladin and Dark Knight used a recolored Hero's Rush (which was modeled after Brave Slash), which was lazy. Interestingly enough, despite the animation for Rush having changed a second time, every incarnation (still) looks like the original Rush from 2006.
Perhaps a minor thing, but it might have been an interesting step forward in gameplay if they'd allow you to shorten Rush's distance through a command input at any given point. Currently, there aren't many skills yet that provides finer horizontal movement, and with how modern bosses keep demanding more precision, this might happen eventually.
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4.1 Don't worry, it only gets worse.
Compared to our other job advancements, 3rd Job has probably been hurt the most. The removal of Shout is the main culprit here, and as we continue further down our skill tree, you'll start to see that all of these unfavorable decisions are going to add up. Aside from that, there are some good changes made with 3rd Job, and then there's Chance Attack...
- Shield Mastery was removed during the Big Bang update and replaced by Chance Attack (2010)
- Improving MP Recovery was changed into Self Recovery during the Jump update (2011)
- Combo Attack was moved to 2nd Job and replaced by Combo Synergy during the RED update (2013)
- Armor Crash was replaced by Magic Crash during the Big Bang update (2010), which was then moved to 4th Job and replaced by Endure during the RED update (2013).
- Coma was removed during the RED update (2013), was replaced by Rush, which was moved from 4th to 3rd Job to make room for Incising.
- Now with Destiny (2022), Crusader's final two original skills, Panic and Shout, have been replaced by Scarring Sword and Aura Blade, respectively.
And for those who are curious to keep track of it, these are the nine skills left that have remained since the beginning:
- Swordsman (released in 2003)
- Iron Body
- Slash Blast
- Fighter (released in 2003)
- Weapon Mastery*
- Booster*
- Final Attack*
- Hero (released in 2006)
- Advanced Combo Attack
- Power Stance
- Maple Warrior
- Hero's Will
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4.2 Scarring Sword
4.2.3 What works with Scarring Sword?
4.2.4 Passive or not?
4.3 Aura Blade
4.3.1 Shout died for this
4.3.2 Nexon gives, Nexon takes
Aura Blade is basically Aura Weapon, but better in most ways.
*Under the effects of Crazy Skull, directional inputs are slightly changed. Inputs ↑ and ↓ are not affected by Crazy Skull, but any input that involves ← or → are reversed. So ↖ becomes ↗, but ↑ and ↓ remains the same.
4.3.3 Combo Force, Combo Fury
4.3.4 Problematic Monster Damage
4.3.5 Conclusion: this should've been Aura Weapon
*Then, there's also 6th Job to consider, which is not going to be in Aura Blade's favor.
*I'd much rather have Aura Blade be a 5th Job skill, because it would then receive a damage output and hitbox on par with other 5th Job skills. Aura Blade being a 3rd Job skill means the skill is designed for small maps under Level 100, and that's why Aura Blade struggles to perform well in those Level 260+ Grandis Force maps where monsters spawns become sparse.
*Why do Aura Blade exclusively for Hero, if you could've improved upon the 13 classes with Aura Weapon instead? Y'know, since Nexon gave up on revamping every class as a result of Destiny/Ignition's poor reception, they might as well could've done that instead.
4.4 Self Recovery
If you ask me which part of Destiny improved Hero the most, you wouldn't believe me if I said that Self Recovery was one of the two winners in this update. They've only changed a single thing about this skill, but it's a change that was long overdue and it makes all the difference. And when I say it was long overdue, I really mean it: ten years.
*Though this chapter was written well over a year before the announcement of Monster Life being removed during the Dreamer update. Support for Fairy Tears have ended, and they can no longer be obtained after this update. Nexon has showed no signs of bringing these back, i.e. by selling it from the Union coin shop (considering Monster Life was replaced by Union Artifact, an expansion to Union). I hope they change their mind on this.
*While Self Recovery doesn't work with % HP Recovery Potential, it does work with Invincible Belief. Although since its skill description states it shouldn't work with it, it's most likely a bug that's always been there from the start, and has yet to be found by Nexon.
*Effects of which I'll lose this Summer because Nexon didn't think it was important enough to transfer these stats over to Union Artifact.
4.5 Chance Attack
5. Hero - 4th Job
5.1 I hope you like the color orange.
5.2 Raging Blow
5.2.1 Enhanced Raging Blow
5.2.2 Balancing tool
5.2.3 Deception
5.2.4 Post-Ignition Raging Blow
*Higher line counts are also favorable for situations where it is advantageous, of which there are many. As seen with Princess No and events where your damage-per-line is capped, or locations with different damage formulas, such as Urus or Mu Lung Dojo. Then, there's also the long history with many instances where the damage cap has screwed over players from completing certain tasks, such as Lucid's Genesis Liberation back in 2019.
5.3 Incising
*Suffice to say, this chapter was written long before 6th Job's announcement, but there's always the possibility for Incising VI to happen.
*Which, if it went through Tespia unscathed, would've been a dumb decision because Nexon tried to give Panic a 10 second cooldown for a while, and that obviously sucked, so they got rid of it. But it still would've made for a better revamp because of early Tespia Valhalla and Flash Slash.
But you know what's weird about comparing Raging Blow with Incising? Raging Blow's animation is way larger than its hitbox, but Incising's animation is almost identical to its hitbox, with it being a bit short on the height department*. Both Raging Blow and Incising are 4th Job skills without a cooldown, and I just don't get why Raging Blow can't have a proper hitbox, because it clearly didn't stop Nexon from giving Incising one.
*In example: in maps such as Corrupted Magic Forest 2 (see GIF above), the skill animation appears to be able to hit all platforms, but in reality Incising's actual hitbox is too small to do that - even though the animation clearly intersects with the monsters on the top platform.
5.4 Magic Crash
*The reason why Magic Crash has the ability to prevent enemies from casting new buffs was because of Pre-Big Bang, when Magic Crash (Paladin) or its counterparts Power Crash (Dark Knight) and Armor Crash (Hero) were used against an enemy, enemies would immediately reapply their just-removed buffs because that's how they were programmed to behave. It made these skills useless. Case in point: old Skelegon and Skelesaurus.
5.4.1 Once game-warping, then reduced to nothing
*Reminder that the original Damage Reflect was effective immediately; on the first frame of the animation. As there was no response time, you were pretty much dead unless you whaled on HP washing. This further increased the demand for Magic Crash. Nowadays, you'll have up to two seconds to respond, but this was added in much later - long after they retired Damage Reflect as a boss staple.
*The only exception among this list was Root Abyss with Bloody Queen's crying face, but that is technically speaking not a traditional Damage Reflect as it behaves differently. You see, around this time Nexon was experimenting with a new system called auras, which is not the same as buffs. Buff duration doesn't apply to auras (i.e. Mu Gong Soul was handled as one), and neither does Magic Crash remove auras because it only targets buffs. Magic Crash can however, prevent certain auras from being cast, but not all of them. Auras have always remained a rare occurrence, and they often circumvent a lot of the game's conventional rules. For that alone, they're probably better off left forgotten and not used at all.
5.4.2 Too little, too late
5.4.3 Where was the QA department?
5.4.4 Post-Ignition Magic Crash
5.5 Enrage
5.5.1 Change to "Rule 1"
5.5.2 Lost 1% Critical Damage
Not necessarily related to the Destiny revamp, unless you want to argue that it indirectly is because Nexon hasn't returned it since. I've never really took the time to archive this on my blog, but with the whole dissection of Hero's changelog history in this blogpost, I thought I'd might as well have it on record here.
5.5.3 Nexon, you forgot something
5.6 Advanced Combo Attack
5.7 Maple Warrior
5.8 Power Stance
Scarring Sword replaces Panic, one of Hero's first Combo skills to have been released almost twenty years ago. This marks the point in MapleStory's history where all of Hero's original Combo skills found in 3rd Job has been removed.
The original Combo Attack was moved to 2nd Job and replaced by Combo Synergy with RED. Coma was removed in this same update and was replaced by Rush. Destiny now removes Panic by changing it into Scarring Sword.
Return to Table of Contents
4.2.1 Panic died for this
*Ignoring the one instance where Nexon reduced the accuracy drop from -60% to its current -20%, with the Jump update. This was done to facilitate the introduction of the post-Magnus bosses with 9999 Accuracy, as otherwise any modern boss could have their attacks become dodgeable through basic evasion once we drop their Accuracy low enough by stacking enough debuffs. That's why accuracy reduction debuffs are so rare nowadays.
4.2.2 Party play is dead
Scarring Sword is basically Panic's evolutionary endpoint. In a way, it is the most logical direction this skill could've gone. There really isn't a step further beyond, unless you want to fundamentally change how this skill is used.
Originally, Panic was single-line attacking skill that was designed to hit a single monster extremely hard. As explained in chapter 3.2.1, because Brandish replaced Panic, Nexon sought to change Panic into an utility skill. They've added Panic's Blind status effect after Big Bang, and that would become our bread-and-butter combo with Chance Attack.
As revamps came and went, Panic's utility improved*. It would apply to bosses, it would no longer have a cooldown after having various forms of one, the skill could apply to multiple enemies, and its hitbox was improved to be more generous. But ultimately, no matter how you view it, Panic's only role was to apply a status effect for Chance Attack.
The Chance Attack/Panic combo is modeled after Viper's Stun Mastery, which at some point evolved into Groggy Mastery. The premise of Chance Attack is the same as Groggy Mastery, which rewards players with bonus damage for applying a (certain) status effect. The key difference between the two is that because Groggy Mastery came from Stun Mastery, where the applicable status effect is built-in and is applied to enemies as a passive skill effect, rather than Hero requiring a Combo skill to do basically the same. But with Combo skills gone, Panic could've gone several ways:
- Panic could've been consolidated into Chance Attack (or any other skill), which would make space for a new skill in our 3rd Job skill tree. This is what happened to Power Reflection during RED, where it was consolidated into Rage to make space for Combo Force. Reminder that Mikhail, the quintessential Hero bootleg, always had Panic's effect incorporated into Shining Cross since its release in 2012!
- The status quo could've been maintained, where each subsequent revamp adding ways to make using it easier to apply Panic's status effect, as it has been the case for the past twelve years. Panic's main drawbacks were its small hitbox and the limited amount of targets, so improving those would've sufficed.
- Or, in Destiny's case, they chose to keep Panic as a separate skill, but change it into a buff. They then gave it a new coat of paint, and called it a day. Or so, that is what it seems until we take a closer look...
Are you playing a class such as Demon Slayer, Ice/Lightning or Fire/Poison, and have a Hero in your bossing party? Well, too bad, you are no longer receiving any bonus damage when Hero applies Scarring Sword.
Panic is dead. Scarring Sword is not the same. Functionally, it might apply the same debuff effects with dropping a monster's accuracy by 20% and weapon attack by 30%, but it isn't the same status effect as before Destiny. You see, Panic applied Blind, but Scarring Sword applies Scar. Scar is a new, different status effect, and is exclusive to Hero.
The problem with this, is that Blind as a status effect is one of the most common status effects in the game, and thus, has far more applications and skills that are compatible with it. There was absolutely no good reason to go through the effort of programming an entirely new status effect. This is a perfect example of where taking the lazy approach, where Panic's Blind is kept and not changed into Scar, would've been the better decision. Because as long as every instance in this game that gains something from Blind doesn't also include Scar, or as long as Scar isn't changed to become identical to Blind in all but name, Scarring Sword is a poorly thought out change that only serves Hero's convenience, and is a straight downgrade for anything and anyone else.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that I know whether if Scar is programmed in such a way that it's considered a variant of Blind, but neither should I have to ask such a specific question in the first place. Scarring Sword is just Nexon trying to do more than what was necessary. It just feels like wasted effort, because Blind was perfectly fine as it is.
And then to think, that Mikhail, who can't seem to escape living in Hero's shadow, keeps Shining Cross' built-in Blind status after the Ignition revamp, proving that changing our Blind into Scar was indeed unnecessary. Thanks, Nexon.
Nitpicking aside, how is Scarring Sword applied, and what skills work with it?
How Scarring Sword is applied is very similar to Panic. The first skill that connects with an enemy applies Scar after damage calculation, regardless if the (entire) attack missed or not. The first attack will never receive Chance Attack bonus damage, because the status is only applied after the first attack is dealt.
- Skills such as Final Attack, Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct are separate attacks and are only activated after a skill is used. So the first attack will apply Scar on a clean monster, then these separate attacks are activated, and will receive the Chance Attack bonus, assuming they attack that same monster.
- Example: Raging Blow → Damage Calculation for Raging Blow without Chance Attack → Scar is applied through Raging Blow → Final Attack activates → Damage Calculation for Final Attack with Chance Attack boost
- When attacking a clean monster, Aura Weapon is activated at the same time as the skill that activated it, so Aura Weapon will not receive a Chance Attack.
- Example: Raging Blow → Aura Weapon activates → Damage Calculation for both skills, without Chance Attack → Scar is applied through both skills afterwards
- Summon skills, such as Sword of Burning Soul and Spider in Mirror's summon cannot apply Scar.
- While Combo Instinct is able to apply Scar, Valhalla's afterimages (→ chapter 6.4) cannot.
- Attacking without skills through default attack can apply Scar.
Scarring Sword applies at a 100% rate, and its duration has been shortened to 20 seconds. But because each attack refreshes the duration of Scar, enemies will basically always have it applied as long as you keep attacking them.
However, there are some exceptions, as not every skill we have is able to apply Scar. These are:
- Beginner Skills, such as Three Snails, Soul Driver (→ chapter 1.1) and Sengoku Secret Manual
- Upper Charge and Leap Attack (→ chapter 2.1 and 2.2)
- While Upper Charge and Leap Attack cannot apply Scar, they can activate Final Attack and Aura Weapon. Both Final Attack and Aura Weapon are able to apply Scar as a workaround.
- Rage (→ chapter 3.4) and Magic Crash (→ chapter 5.4)
- Summon Skills, such as Valhalla's afterimages (→ chapter 6.4), Spider in Mirror, Crest of the Solar, Erda Fountain (→ chapter 7.7.2) and Sword of Burning Soul
- While the summons from Spider in Mirror and Crest of the Solar cannot apply Scar, the initial AoE is a normal attack, so that one specifically can apply Scar.
- Erda Fountain (→ chapter 7.7.2) cannot apply Scar, but Erda Shower (→ chapter 7.7.1) can.
Having Scarring Sword automatically applied everywhere is a great improvement for grinding because Chance Attack used to do nothing before Destiny. Using Panic on every monster was not really the most practical thing to do, y'know. And with Grandis Force maps having monsters with ridiculous health bars, you're going to want all the extra damage.
And despite my complaints about Scar being a waste of effort, I'm happy with the improved visibility of the status effect above enemies. It's much larger than the old Blind status effect, and combined with the bright colors it's easy to notice.
Players have suggested that Scarring Sword should have been a passive skill, and not a buff.
I think that Scarring Sword should remain an active buff, for a very simple reason: having the choice not to apply Scar on enemies. There are some (very) rare instances where you do not want to apply Scar, because it reduces enemy's accuracy and weapon attack. Ironically, reducing accuracy (i.e. on Dojo bosses) works against Body of Steel, as it requires enemies to not miss. But of course, the Final Damage received from Chance Attack outweighs the Total Damage stacks from Body of Steel, but losing out on Total Damage because of your own status effects is just dumb and shouldn't be a thing. But you get my point; it's better to have the option to turn Panic off than to have none.
Buffs can be used on a pet auto buff, and Scarring Sword takes Booster's slot as Booster is now a passive. That is also why making Scarring Sword a passive is unnecessary (unless you want to argue that Hero should have fewer active skills and that having six pet auto buff slots isn't enough; then fair enough). Additionally, if you don't want to have Scarring Sword active, remove it from the pet. Making it a toggle would be a mistake, as toggles are in a pretty bad spot now, and Hero doesn't need more of them (→ chapters 5.5.3 and 7.2.1). Having too many toggles can become a detriment; look now further than poor I/L having to use three toggles just to make teleport not suck.
Within the Destiny revamp, Aura Blade is an outlier. Every other skill that was reworked within this revamp would still fulfill the same functions as they have before, even Flash Slash to a degree. Aura Blade however, is a departure as it replaces an AoE like Shout with a multi-directional projectile skill.
At first glance, you'll believe the skill adds a lot to our toolkit. It's a large projectile with a lot of range, what's not to like? After giving it some thought, you'll realize that we already have this with Aura Weapon, and that having another skill in this department is redundant. They could've easily revamped Aura Weapon instead. Because the more we examine Aura Blade and understand it, the more baffling the decision was to replace Shout with a skill this lackluster.
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| It's been two years since Destiny. I still hate how we lost such a fundamentally useful staple skill as this one. |
Shout started out as a skill that seemed highly desirable at the time. AoEs were hard to come by in the old age, and after using Power Strike and Slash Blast all the way to Level 70, you'd expect Shout to make a world of difference.
But because this is Pre-Big Bang, most skills were mediocre at best, and the original Shout was no exception.
It had everything that kills any hope for an AoE: it was awfully slow, its damage was a laughable 30% at max level. Trying to effectively kill enemies with it was nigh impossible until Potential/Enhancements came out. And even if its hitbox was certainly useful, it could only hit up to six enemies. Compared to other AoEs from the same era, it was one of the worst in the game. Level 1 Shout was awful; you had to sink 29 additional SP to improve its damage, hitbox and stun rate. At max level, it still wasn't great. No matter how you slice it, Shout was outclassed by any other skill. If you wanted mobbing, Brandish had everything you wished for. If you wanted stun, Coma's uninterruptable stun was better. Even if Shout had its niche, our tiger simply couldn't reach the heights it longed for, until future class revamps.
Slowly but surely, Shout climbed up its way on the food chain. Big Bang immediately solved the lackluster damage output by multiplying it seven-fold (!), and expanded its maximum target count to 10. RED boosted the skill's damage even further, and around this point, Shout was a comfortable spammy AoE that had some heft to it. But the update that really elevated Shout was the Reboot update (see GIF above), which was also the same update that introduced us to Combo Hookshot. Shout became a Combo skill, and while I was initially skeptical, I grew to love it in time.
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Shout as a Combo skill became its main focus moving forward, and further updates only made it better. Shout's hitbox continued to grow, Incising would passively boost Shout's damage, and 5th Job's Enhancement Cores would let Shout surpass even Raging Blow's damage output. For a time it was actually worthwhile using Shout between Raging Blow, as was with Rage Uprising. The tiger reached the top of the food chain.
It finally became that excellent AoE that players from that oldest era desired it to be. Hero has a bunch of great utility skills, but none came close to Shout's reliability where it instantly deletes monsters in all directions with a short 10 second cooldown. If you needed to get rid of enemies in a split-second decision (i.e. Lotus Phase 1, Dusk), Shout was your most reliable way of doing so. Because sometimes, something as stupidly simple as Shout is all you really need.
RB, Incising and RU can barely hit monsters behind you, Soul Driver hasn't seen a major buff in over a decade, CDF has a cooldown of 25 seconds, Blitz Shield needs to be active for two seconds before you can use it, and not even post-Ignition Erda Shower can compete with Shout's consistency. In short, Shout was a key component in Hero's recipe for successful mobbing. It filled an exact role, niche and purpose that other skills simply could not provide.
And for whatever reason, Nexon thought it was a good idea to delete of 13 years worth of honing Shout to perfection, and to replace it with whatever Aura Blade is. Hero's spirit animal; the tiger, which has been a part of Hero's identity as long as Combo Attack, is gone. Worst part is, that if they kept Shout, Destiny would've probably made it even better.
Despite that Aura Weapon's projectile appears large, it struggles to hit enemies because it has a very narrow vertical hitbox. Comparatively, Aura Blade's hitbox is larger than the projectile itself, making it much easier to use. You are able to cover the same ground as Shout, but that is unlikely to happen because of how fiddly using the skill can be. It's a good start, but the hitbox needs some work. Aura Blade's projectile also doesn't shoot as far as Aura Weapon, though.
Pressing the skill key will shoot its projectile forward. Similar to Flash Slash, you are able to aim Aura Blade in four additional directions. You can combine the skill key with the arrow keys* to fire ↑, ↖, ←, ↙ or ↓. Because of Aura Blade's tall hitbox, the most useful directions are ← and ↖, but others have good niche interactions as well.
Keep in mind that because Aura Blade has directional inputs, it suffers from the same problems that Flash Slash has. Ropes and portals will have priority over using Aura Blade with any input that includes the direction ↑ (chapter 3.3.2).
Furthermore, it's important to know that because Aura Blade is a projectile skill, it will only clip through soft platforms.
If you shoot this skill against a solid platform, the skill will end on collision (unlike traditional skills, which will always clip through anything regardless and can hit enemies inside, through and behind solid walls).
If you shoot this skill against a solid platform, the skill will end on collision (unlike traditional skills, which will always clip through anything regardless and can hit enemies inside, through and behind solid walls).
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| The skill can't even reliably hit 8+ enemies because of its characteristics as a projectile, even if it clearly should've have here. |
Aura Blade is certainly not flawless. It even makes a couple of the same mistakes that Shout had during its tenure.
First, despite its fantastic hitbox, Aura Blade can only hit up to 8 enemies, whereas Shout was able to hit 10. You can expand Aura Blade up to 11 enemies with Pipsqueak Luminous, Inner Ability and an Enhancement Core, but it should have had the same base amount as it replaces Shout. Up to eight is not enough its current hitbox, as it's common to come across situations where you aren't able to clear all platforms in range because there are too many monsters.
Second, comparatively to Shout, Aura Blade's damage is significantly lower than Shout's, which I will further explain in chapter 4.3.4. The passive damage boost for Shout given by Incising is changed into a passive damage boost for Aura Blade given by Raging Blow. The boost is lowered from 160% to a meager 70%. To make matters worse, Shout was able to stun enemies, but this was not carried over to Aura Blade. We no longer have skills that can apply stun.
And third, Aura Blade has a cooldown of 7 seconds. Aura Weapon started out with 4 seconds, which was great. Nexon nerfed that to 5 seconds but gave it a staggering damage output to make up for it. Aura Weapon, a 5th Job skill, still fires more often than its 3rd Job counterpart. Not to mention, AW is fired automatically; Aura Blade does not, and that diminishes its value. Yes, having a manual projectile skill on the press of a button can be nice sometimes, but Aura Blade gives way too little in return to justify removing Shout. If you wanted a good manual long-ranged attack (that had vacuum and stun), Combo Force already filled that role (→ chapter 3.3.1) for 15 years! And then Destiny removed it!
Compared to Shout's 10 second cooldown, I believe that Aura Blade's cooldown is too high for how few it is. It doesn't have the ease-of-use and large-area-clearing-capabilities that Shout has, its damage is abysmal and its target count is too low. With the shortcomings of Flash Slash and the removal of Shout and Combo Force, Aura Blade has the task to pick up the slack for all of the above. If it wants to justify that 7 second cooldown, it better have an improvement on both damage and hitbox. Because as it currently stands, Aura Blade isn't all that great even without cooldown.
Go to any of the highest level maps in the game, and you'll soon understand how quickly Aura Blade is outclassed by the likes of Raging Blow (*cough* 6th Job *cough*), Incising and sometimes even Rage Uprising (which is currently in its worst shape yet, see chapter 6.3). You'd often come across situations where Shout clearly would've been better. While the idea behind Aura Blade is good, its execution leaves a lot to be desired as the one thing it's supposed to be good at is done better by our other skills. That's why you shouldn't replace our key AoE with "more of the same".
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| You know what would've been great to have here? A reliable low-cooldown AoE. Y'know, like the one they just removed. |
Even worse, Aura Blade suffers from the same problem that Aura Weapon has (although in a different manner), in which monsters are able to jump over the skill. Pray to Sayram that the skill doesn't miss when monsters start to jump (read: Shout wouldn't). Happens more often than you'd think (see GIF above). Not the most practical thing.
And while Aura Blade may be a better in horizontal reach compared to most of our other skills, once we compare it to another class that got revamped in the same update, it clearly could've been better. An example would be Marksman's Piercing Arrow, a 2nd Job (!) skill without cooldown, which covers much more ground than Aura Blade. Add insult to injury, we then also learn that we lost Shout because the skill has moved to Marksman instead. Gee, thanks Nexon.
What is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Aura Blade, is that it carries over a mechanic from Combo Force.
As explained in chapter 3.3.1, Combo Force was our only skill to have a gimmick where it had an independent 80% recharge rate for Combo Attack, which is retried for each enemy hit if failed. If you were to attack multiple enemies, you were pretty much guaranteed to hit the recharge rate. It wasn't groundbreaking, but it was a good niche to have.
Now, this mechanic wasn't carried over to Flash Slash, which would've made more sense given that Flash Slash was the replacement for Combo Force. But not only did they carry this over to Aura Blade, they made it better in every way.
Aura Blade has an unusual attribute that makes it different from most other projectile skills. With Aura Weapon, if the projectile hits multiple enemies, all the damage dealt is done simultaneously. Standard stuff, as expected. Aura Blade however, calculates each enemy hit separately. Each enemy hit has a separate 80% chance to recharge Combo Orbs. So yes, you can recharge 10 orbs with only one shot. Unfortunately, this behavior's also applied to Ryude's Sword with its 70% activation rate. Some enemies hit by Ryude's Aura Blade may not receive the additional line, while others will.
This gimmick in Aura Blade is different from any other skills we've seen before. While Sword Illusion does 17 separate attacks, each individual attack is no different from our other skills. Aura Blade is truly an exception to the rule; as much as Combo Force was. Unfortunately, whatever benefit this aspect of Aura Blade may have, is immediately offset by the general changes made to Combo Attack. So whatever merits this gimmick could've brought is already dead on arrival.
As we no longer consume Combo Orbs or have the need to recharge them, there's no real benefit to this gimmick. You can't exploit it during bosses, and with buff freezers removed a year after Destiny, losing Combo Orbs when dying is also no longer a concern. Not to mention, Valhalla and Sobs have become our easiest source of "instant recharge".
The final nail in the coffin for this mechanic is the fact that Aura Blade attacking each enemy separately tanks the game's performance. It's not much, but it is noticeable even on high-end computers. If we were still concerned about Combo Orb consumption, I would've accepted this as a fair trade. But as it currently stands, this unique mechanic is more harmful to the game's performance than it is actively useful. I would rather have Aura Blade be as smooth as possible, rather than for it to hinder game performance for a mechanic that's no longer relevant...
Whatever future prospects this gimmick has is irrelevant as I'm not expecting Nexon to go back to pre-Destiny Combo.
Monster Damage is a stat that has been around for quite some time. Not to be confused with Monster Categories, which is a much-older system with different damage multipliers (and that could be its own blogpost).
Monster Damage wasn't the most easy stat to source until 2021, when they added many new sources, including but not limited to Hyper Stats, Lara's Skill Link and the Union grid. Nowadays it's pretty common to find in large quantities.
Monster Damage works best as additional icing on the cake. Not only does it help accounts with establishing a higher Union score because it makes grinding mules easier, Grandis Force maps have monsters with ridiculous health bars so mains will also want to invest in Monster Damage. The stat no longer works well if it becomes an inherent part of skill balancing, and Aura Blade is a bad sign of Monster Damage becoming a lousy excuse for improper balancing.
You see, in one of the many balancing updates on the test server, Nexon stated during their Developer Notes that they reduced Aura Blade's damage to be only appropriately useful while hunting, in order to avoid the skill dominating the rest of our toolkit. So, Nexon made half of Aura Blade's damage Monster Damage, and that's a load of nonsense.
There are several problems that comes with making half of a Aura Blade's damage as Monster Damage:
- First, Shout's damage output was higher than Raging Blow's once we take Enhancement Cores into consideration. This has been allowed for six years, and Shout's damage didn't incorporate Monster Damage, so it would see consistent performance, no matter if you were hunting or bossing*. I don't understand why Aura Blade needs to be any different, even if the skill has a lower cooldown than Shout.
- Second, Aura Weapon exists, which has a staggering 6x 1100% damage at Level 30. The actual damage is much higher because Aura Weapon also provides Final Damage and PDR reduction. It also fires more often than Aura Blade, despite being a 5th Job skill, which usually have harsher cooldowns than 3rd Job skills. Practically speaking, the difference in hitbox doesn't matter for bossing; they're functionally the same.
- Third, against monsters, Aura Blade without Enhancement cores does about the same damage per line as Raging Blow with Enhancements. Against bosses, Aura Blade without Enhancements does about half the damage per line of Raging Blow. If we were to apply Enhancement cores to Aura Blade, it would only slightly hit harder than Raging Blow. Would it really break the game if Aura Blade had even more damage than that? If so, then that brings me back to point 1 and point 2, and then I'll also ask why Aura Blade isn't allowed to have higher damage than Raging Blow, but Rage Uprising and Incising are allowed to have that.
- Fourth, if it was the intention to have Aura Blade excel at hunting (i.e. grinding, mobbing), then making half of its damage Monster Damage is not the best way to do that either. This is mainly due to the existence of important staples such as Hunter Portals, Elite Monsters, Monster Park (Extreme) and Guild Castle. None of these work with Monster Damage, made worse by the fact that most of these run the highest monster HP multipliers in the game (especially for Arcane/Grandis Force maps), so the dumb decision to design Aura Blade's damage this way negatively influences our EXP gains and hunting capabilities.
- Fifth, how Monster Damage is calculated isn't in a good spot right now. It should work like Final Damage to become worthwhile, but as of now it functions like % Total Damage. So basically, any account with a well-established Union and Skill Links will not benefit as much from Monster Damage because they're already oversaturated in that department. It's not a question of whether if Monster Damage is useful - it's about the fact that for many players, Aura Blade's skill damage being 360% instead of half Monster Damage is better for hunting. With the way how the game calculates things, dealing 90% of a monster's HP in Grandis Force maps isn't going to become one shot by adding 180% Monster Damage. They have to rework this stat.
- Sixth, two years after the Destiny revamp, they introduced us to the 6th Job skill Sol Janus. It is specifically designed so that it's only available in monster maps, a relative new concept. In hindsight, such a simple solution could've easily been applied to Aura Blade as well. This way they could've given it the full power and hitbox it needs for the sake of grinding - aspects the skill is currently lacking.
There are just too many questions that I have about this. It just doesn't make sense.
Look, giving Incising a 50% Monster Damage boost with Destiny is fine, because the 50% boost is only a small part of the skill's respectable 4x400% damage output. That skill also has no cooldown and a much larger hitbox than Raging Blow. But to make half of Aura Blade's damage Monster Damage, will only do its job when Nexon allows Monster Damage to work at locations such as Hunter Portals and Monster Park. That change would at least be within the confines of Nexon's goal with Aura Blade, I assume. Or am I being too unreasonable and asking for too much?
Either way, Aura Blade doesn't set a good precedent moving forward. Before you know it, more skills will incorporate high rates of Monster Damage, and this will become the next "everyone gets a laser" meme (if you know, you know) and it would be a step backwards in game design. Because at that point, you might as well take any class that's great at mobility or has too many homing projectiles, change half of their output into Monster Damage, and watch the world burn as you call it a day. That's not the kind of future for MapleStory I want to see. It'll only bring more problems.
If it aint broke, don't fix it. Imagine that Nexon went through the painstaking effort of changing Shout, a mediocre skill before Big Bang, and gradually made it one of our best skills over the course of thirteen years. It still received buffs all the way up to the last major bulk of Hero changes before Destiny happened. And then they just threw it all out of the window, for reasons I still can't understand.
Because Shout is gone, Hero struggles a lot now with clearing every monster in a map. As described before, Hero has no other skill that is able to do the same thing that Shout did. Aura Blade is a redundant skill that tries to improve Hero's ability to clear monsters in front of him, but that problem was already solved with the introduction of AW and CDF. Furthermore, Destiny improves RB and Incising's hitbox*, and that negatively affects Aura Blade's usefulness.
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| Aura Blade is not good enough for modern maps like these. Monsters are spread out too much, the map is also too large. The loss of our AoE (Shout), our vacuum (Combo Force) and Aura Blade's Monster Damage not applying here doesn't help. |
While the skill can be useful at times, it just isn't as well designed or thought-out. It definitely starts to become less useful the further you get, with maps increasing in size and where monsters are further spread out, which favors consistent AoEs. Aura Blade gives us "another" Aura Weapon, and it makes me question why they couldn't have changed Aura Weapon into Aura Blade instead*. You see, Aura Weapon hasn't been changed with Destiny. It still has an abysmal hitbox that is much smaller than what its animation would imply otherwise, and we basically end up with two skills that fill the same role. Aura Blade has a poorly thought out damage calculation, but a great hitbox utility that affects too few monsters. Aura Weapon has a fantastic damage output and target count, but a non-existent hitbox.
There should be room for discussion to ask: why can't we combine the good parts of both into one for all warriors?
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| A great example of Aura Weapon's non-existent vertical hitbox. This has remained a problem since 2016. |
It would've been better for all warriors to change Aura Weapon into Aura Blade, as every warrior* benefits from this. Given that Nexon gave up on revamping every class, this clearly would've been the better choice. Aura Blade makes AW look worse because a mere 3rd Job skill has a hitbox that's at least four times the height of a 5th Job one, and yet AW also makes Aura Blade's design choices look awful because AW hits like a truck whereas Aura Blade's cooldown is almost double that of the original AW, and has a worse damage output than the skills it replaced and competes with!
In MapleStory's skill design, receiving more of the same can be good. Look at Erda Shower, or Crest of the Solar. You can also never have enough healing options, and multiple binds are welcome too. But I find it difficult to praise Aura Blade, because it tries to compete in an oversaturated market. Furthermore, new 5th Job skills do not remove already existing skills - at worst it'll compete for 5th Job slots as much as Skill Links do. There is a good reason why Shout has been a part of Hero's toolkit for almost two decades. Aura Blade replacing it is not without consequences. Aura Blade and Aura Weapon should not coexist; it doesn't work. Either they should consolidate the two, or remove one of them.
Oh, and you know what also could've worked? Instead of creating Aura Blade as Shout's replacement, they could've kept Combo Force as a vacuum skill on 2nd Job, and incorporate the good parts about Aura Blade into Combo Force. Imagine a vacuum skill with directional inputs, like Eunwol's Drag Pulling (2014). Combo Force would coexist with Flash Slash, seeing as Combo Hookshot was replaced by the latter. Both skills could share the same SP investment, which is something a lot of modern classes (including other Adventure classes post-Destiny) have nowadays.
Most people by now have forgotten that Crusader is the first class to have invented the HP/MP regen as we know it. Replacing the skill "Improving MP Recovery" (which was derived from the 1st Job Magician skill with the same name), Self Recovery was introduced in the Jump update (Spring 2011, KMS) as the first skill to unconditionally regenerate HP/MP on intervals of four seconds. It started with a rate of 80 HP/MP, and this was gradually improved over time.
But as is with everything in MapleStory, the game is at a constant state of evolution. As the game moves forward, so does its rules and mechanics. The next stage in HP/MP regen was released only few months after Self Recovery's debut (Summer 2011, KMS), with the new standard being set by Mercedes. It came pre-installed with the Beginner skill Elf Recovery, a skill that Mercedes didn't have to spend any SP into. It introduced us to the 5% HP/MP staple.
Every class implemented or changed moving forward, with the exception of Mikhail (which was derived from original Soul Master, who was derived from Hero to begin with), that received passive HP/MP regen, would receive it as a 5%.
Examples: Kaiser got it in 2012, Soul Master's revamp in 2013 gave it a 5% HP/MP regen. Heck, when Viper received its revamp during the Justice update in December 2011, it got the passive 5% on 2nd Job! But when Hero got its huge revamp with RED in 2013, we basically got jack shit for Self Recovery: 1000 HP/200 MP, while everyone else (except for Mikhail) was already running recoveries in percentage. Thousand HP recovery every four seconds isn't much once you consider that most Heroes at the time were already way past 50000 HP; even less useful if you whaled thousands of bucks on a Hero for HP washing pre-Big Bang. Add insult to injury: in this same update, Zero was released with a true continuous HP/TP regen (which oddly enough as a mechanic is still underused). So much for RED.
With the flat HP recovery being locked at 1500 HP per interval at its zenith, the most optimal strategy for Hero was to reduce its own HP through AP resets and removing every instance of +HP in order to keep your maximum HP as low as possible. Easier said than done, considering Hero's high HP increase per level up. Nobody was insane (or wealthy) enough to go through the effort and neither was Hero allowed to do this anymore after 2017, because of the major Xenon exploit that happened with MP washing for Overload Mode. In response to this exploit, Nexon removed the ability to remove AP invested in HP/MP moving forward (meaning old characters, including Rayque, no longer has access to all of its AP because any AP invested in HP/MP are lost forever). Not allowing Hero to have the standard treatment of % HP/MP regen was stingy to say the least, and that the most optimal strategy would require you to exploit AP resets really showed how bad the situation was because of Nexon's unwillingness to update Self Recovery.
Add insult to injury, with the Monster Life rework in 2017 (between Beyond and Nova), Fairy Tears were revamped. Although it is a potion with a 30 second cooldown, it does provide its user with a 1% HP/MP per sec regen buff for 150 seconds. It's never been anything game-breaking, but a noteworthy effect is that using the potion again before the buff runs out increases the regeneration effect by 0,5% (up to five times). Keep in mind that this potion is readily available to everyone*, kinda like giving everyone (a better version of) Magic Crash through Overpass Rings (→ chapter 5.4.1).
Nexon only started to shake things up with the Rise update in 2020, with Adele receiving a 4% HP/MP passive every five seconds (as opposed to the usual 5% every four seconds). When Mikhail was revamped during the Neo update (same year), his recovery was changed into a weird hybrid of 2% HP/MP and 450 HP/150 MP. It was infuriating, dare I say almost insulting, that Hero was still running HP/MP with static flat numbers. And while Nexon supposedly changed % HP Recovery Potential to work with regenerate skills in 2020, it obviously did not work with Self Recovery*.
But with Destiny, Hero finally received its update for Self Recovery, albeit a literal decade too late. If Viper was allowed to have it on 2nd Job in 2011, why wasn't Crusader allowed to have it back then? Hero should've had it with RED, and the fact that it took all the way until Destiny for it to happen just makes me feel jaded. In a way, they made it right, but at the same time, I can't feel satisfied because it happened way too late. The damage was beyond repair. And to make matters worse: Hero didn't even get a 5% HP/MP recovery after going through all of this.
Yes, I am not kidding. Despite Self Recovery finally receiving that % HP/MP treatment, someone thought Hero should receive lower than the 5% standard. It's still better than Adele's 4% HP/MP every 5 seconds, but not as good as all of the other classes that have been running the 5% HP/MP, some of which have for a whopping eleven years now. Pain.
A good number of 5th Job skills consume 5% HP, and Hero is not able to recover from it within four seconds because of that 1% less. I'm not going to pretend that one or two intervals is going to make a meaningful difference, but I am going to say that two intervals is dumb. Paladin and Dark Knight are allowed to offset the HP consumption from Blitz Shield, but Hero for whatever reason isn't. I don't get why Nexon decided to no longer universally apply 5% HP/MP, with further evidence found with Ignition. Luminous and Mikhail received 2% HP/MP and 4% HP/MP respectively, but Soul Master kept its 5% HP/MP. It almost feels intentional, to a point where if you didn't get 5% HP/MP before Destiny, you might as well never will. Either everyone should run the same, or they should lower the % HP consumption of 5th Job skills, or change the consumption of these 5th Job skills to % MP for classes that have MP.
But at least I can now grind on Hero without having to be concerned about MP consumption. Ever since 5th Job came out, Hero's MP consumption has gone through the roof, as Self Recovery wasn't even able to offset the cost because its MP consumption was calculated and designed without taking 5th Job into consideration. I had to resort to a weird combination of Monster Life* and Union effects (or, run several lines of Skill MP cost reduction) to have a chance of break-even, but now that is no longer necessary. And with that 5% HP recovery, running high HP with "Invincibility after hit" on Potential is at least rewarding again because not meeting the recommended Arcane Force is common when speeding through early-to-mid 5th Job (see Hyper Burning) and it's even worse for Grandis Force later on.
While it's not quite yet what it needs to be, I'll take whatever I get. And thankfully, with Savior's release of Khali, her Skill Link "Innate Gift" gives a small HP/MP recovery every 30 seconds, which is worth sacrificing a Skill Link slot for.
Chance Attack is a perfect example of unnecessary change. Before Destiny, you would receive a final damage boost if you were attacking enemies that were under the effects of either Blind (a.k.a. Darkness/Cursed), Stun, Freeze or Bind.
Blind was applied by Panic, Stuns were applied by Combo Force and Shout, we could use Bind through Erda Nova, and Freeze is an option through Potential (or Nebulites), or if you are running the old Explorer's Zard. You would also receive the benefits of Chance Attack if a party member would apply any of these status effects, which isn't too difficult with classes like Dual Blade, Paladin, Viper and all three Adventure mages applying either one of these.
With Panic being changed into Scarring Sword, it no longer does the status effect Blind (instead, it does Scar), despite that the debuff effects remain identical. A sane person would not go through the extra efforts of programming an entire new status effect and keep Chance Attack the same. But for whatever reason, because someone at Nexon thought it was a good idea to reinvent the wheel, they had to update Chance Attack because Scar isn't the same as Blind, so Scar was added to the list of applicable status effects for the damage boost.
But apparently going through the extra efforts of reinventing the wheel was still not enough. Somehow, someone found it necessary to completely redo the list of applicable status effects and now Chance Attack will only apply for Scar and Binds moving forward. That means Hero will no longer receive any Chance Attack benefits for partying up with most other classes, as aside from another Hero's Scarring Sword, our only other option are binds.
So let's say if someone at some point doesn't want to apply Scarring Sword in order to maintain a monster's accuracy at its maximum (for, you know, some other skill that Hero has, like Body of Steel?), you're out of luck and have to live without Chance Attack. Because prior to Destiny, we at least still had a way out with stuns (i.e. Stun Mastery) and freezes being a neutral status effect that doesn't hinder any stats on bosses, as it still rewards us the bonus damage.
Am I nitpicking here? Yes, but if you are going to accuse me for nitpicking then I'll also tell you this change has been an utter waste of time and resources, that could've been spent elsewhere. Because no matter how you slice it, these changes have been unnecessary. And trying to find a logical argument against this becomes a real mess once you consider that Extreme Magic (F/P) and Extreme Magic (I/L), two skills that were derived from Chance Attack, have remained unchanged with Destiny. It begs the question: what was the point of changing Chance Attack?
I just don't get why they can't change every skill that's similar to Chance Attack into receiving bonus damage for any status effect applied to a monster. They did this with the Adventure Thief skill link (and Kaiser's Regain Strength), so I don't understand why this can't become the universally applied standard to every similar skill moving forward. That way these skills also would be both fool-proof and future-proof, and we'd have no silly discussions about basic skill functionality not being properly implemented. The way it is now is just a recipe for disaster.
With all of the problems from 2nd Job and 3rd Job piling up, I wish I would've been able to say that the changes made to 4th Job would solve most of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't. There are some really good improvements to be found on 4th Job, but at the same time, that unequal distribution of attention and budget starts to show its ugly side again.
With the removal of the concept of Combo skills, came the removal of the color blue. Combo Attack was the only blue skill left in our skill tree that could give Hero some much-needed contrast to our post-Destiny color palette. But here comes 4th Job holding Combo Attack at gunpoint and demanding that it must be sacrificed in thy holy name of the newly formed post-Destiny crusade for color dominion, to join the others by fusing into this homogeneous condemned amalgamation to dye the entire world in the colors of the Citrus sinensis, as even Advanced Combo was not spared.
Basically, everything is now orange. Not even Raging Blow or Advanced Combo Attack are allowed to have nuance or contrast. Whereas before, skills were allowed to appear distinct from one and another. That is no longer the case.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that there's no value in uniformity of skill appearance (either in theme and/or color), but I would say that Destiny's execution of it has been lacking, and in case of swordsmanship: misplaced (→ chapter 3.1).
Let's discuss the in-depth changes made to 4th Job, by starting with our good ol' Raging Blow. Our always-reliable attacking skill, that's been our mainstay for over a decade now.
As is a common with each Hero revamp, whether if it's small or significant, there's always something for Raging Blow. Destiny is no exception, as it takes the next logical step in how further evolve Raging Blow. And then Ignition ruined it.
Originally, when Raging Blow was introduced during the Champions update in 2012, it wasn't more than a simple hitbox-and-damage upgrade that replaced Brave Slash. It wasn't until the RED update (2013) when Nexon added the right amount of spice to Raging Blow through a simple change with Enrage. If Enrage was active, Raging Blow would become "Enhanced Raging Blow", which made Raging Blow grow in hitbox, become faster and deal more damage.
Enhanced Raging Blow is what put Hero back on its Pre-Big Bang throne as having (one of the) best bossing skills in the game. The extra oomph Hero got had enough impact to become a potential bandwagon class, and as such came a lot of inexperienced players who had to face the reality of Raging Blow only being fantastic for bossing, as without Enrage the skill's performance tanked. While RB without its enhancement was perfectly fine for the serious Hero main, anyone else would dub unenhanced Raging Blow the infamous "wet noodle" because that's how they felt about it.
Then came the Heroes of Maple update two years later, which gave us a small preview into the future of Raging Blow. This update brought a major change to Valhalla, where its original cooldown of 90 seconds skyrocketed to 210, but it would give us our first instance of Superstance, alongside allowing Raging Blow to be changed into its Enhanced form without the need of Enrage. This means that you could have the ginormous hitbox of Enhanced Raging Blow without being locked to a single target, allowing for a short 30-second mobbing frenzy that few classes could replicate.
This set the stage for the year after, as that introduced us to 5th Job in 2016. Sword of Burning Soul was introduced as our first signature 5th Job skill, and as long as the skill's out, the same Enhancement would apply. This effect would drastically improve Hero's mobility, placing it among one of the best and most reliable mobility in the game, only held back by the fact that Enhanced Raging Blow mobility was locked behind Sword of Burning Soul and Valhalla, meaning that Hero would lose steam once these skills went on cooldown. Combo Instinct was released in 2018 with the Black update to help further prolong the ERB mobility cycle, but it was clear that the novelty of boosting Raging Blow was starting to wane, and that a more substantial rework of this concept would be appreciated. And that's what Destiny did.
Nexon greatly boosted the performance of both base Raging Blow and its Enhanced counterpart by increasing their hitbox and casting speed. The old wet noodle became like the old Enhanced Raging Blow in terms of performance, and then they made Enhanced Raging Blow go beyond that, as if the former wasn't already good enough.
However, Nexon reworked how Enhanced Raging Blow is activated. ERB is no longer tied to Sword of Burning Soul, Valhalla or Enrage, meaning that these skills no longer (directly) influence the state of RB. Instead, Raging Blow has ironically become a Combo skill now, as Enhanced Raging Blow activation will only occur once Hero has maximum charge on Combo Attack. And yes, maximum charge in its literal meaning, so if you don't have any SP invested in ACA, you will have ERB with only five Combo Orbs. Whatever your current maximum orb count is, becomes the requirement for ERB. Great, it's already designed to be future-proof for Expert Combo Attack.
Raging Blow has always been directly responsible for balancing our skills, as most of Hero's skill tree is designed around it. RB warps everything around it, as it dictates the performance of everything else. A great example of this, is how updates to Raging Blow, Incising, Rage Uprising, Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct go hand in hand. Or that skills such as Combo Force and Shout were designed to make up for the flaws that RB has. If you do not adhere to that unspoken rule in Hero's skill design where skills are made to facilitate Raging Blow, the class starts to fall apart:
- If Incising doesn't have a larger hitbox than Raging Blow, it becomes cumbersome for Hero to (re)apply Incising's buff. This is why Panic has been made passive (chapter 4.2), in order to avoid this problem.
- If Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct doesn't have a larger hitbox than Raging Blow, it defeats the point of its additional damage output because Raging Blow is often used to activate it. This is why Final Attack's hitbox has been changed (during the Black update) to become identical to the skill that activates it.
- If Raging Blow or Incising outperforms Rage Uprising (i.e. by being able to do the same but easier), it defeats the point of Rage Uprising as it was made to facilitate mobility, so RU must always be greater.
And yes, if you've paid attention, that is some elementary school-level foreshadowing. For whatever reason, with the Destiny revamp, the aforementioned unspoken rule in Hero's skill design has not really been taken into consideration (as you have already read in previous chapters, and will continue to do so for the next). Then, there's also this:
- Combo Force has been replaced by Flash Slash, but generally speaking it is a worse trade (→ chapter 3.3). To also put Raging Blow with Flash Slash into perspective: before Destiny, both Combo Force and Combo Hookshot were longer than Raging Blow. The overall distance travelled with Flash Slash is more or less identical to Combo Hookshot, but Raging Blow has become (comparatively) too large for Flash Slash. This ironically reduces Flash Slash' usefulness, made even worse by the fact that War Leap with post-Destiny Raging Blow covering way too much ground, or that Flash Slash has a four second cooldown.
- Shout has been replaced by Aura Blade, and the latter's benefits are best utilized in any diagonal direction. While Aura Blade can reach spots Raging Blow can't, Incising and Rage Uprising still exist, and so does Aura Weapon. Because Hero has way too many skills that fire in one direction, it makes Hero long for a reliable AoE. Shout existed because it covered that demand. As there is no other skill post-Destiny that picks up the role that Shout left behind, it leaves Hero in a worse position than before the revamp.
This means that for each time Hero's carefully balanced skill tree is changed unfavorably, where skills are no longer designed to facilitate Raging Blow, or is changed to be less good at that role it once did, Raging Blow needs to pick up the slack for every single one of them. And if we're going to tally up every instance of changes made during Destiny or Ignition against Hero's favor, it's getting difficult to ignore the feeling that Hero got nerfed in ways it should not have.
If we were to look at Raging Blow as a standalone skill, it's really the best it's ever been. It also looks much better now, because it no longer has that tacky hilt design that the original wet noodle and ERB were plagued with. Unfortunately, Raging Blow isn't the only thing in our skill tree. Just because RB is at its best, doesn't mean everything else is.
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| Well, at least it's much larger and faster - I'll give them that. |
Let's start with base Raging Blow, post-Destiny. It's superfluous; we're basically never going to see it. As Combo Orbs are no longer consumed or need to be recharged, we're always using Enhanced Raging Blow. Kinda defeats the point - and also makes the effort that went behind animating and programming two versions of Raging Blow a waste of time. They might as well leave out base Raging Blow and stick to Enhanced, as base Raging Blow does barely anything.
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| That's awkward. At least 6th Job will fix this... right? Right!? |
Then, there's Enhanced Raging Blow. The skill animation is huge, and it looks great. But what if I told you that the animation doesn't match the skill's hitbox, and that the hitbox is considerably smaller than its animation? Yes, it's 2024, and we're still dealing with these problems. I thought we were past this after you've fixed Battle Mage, Nexon.
And you know what's worse? When I saw the Destiny livestream where they discussed the planned revamp for Hero, I was convinced that Nexon had this high IQ plan to remove Shout because Raging Blow's giant animation seen during the livestream suggested that it now hit in all directions, and that would've justified Shout no longer being needed.
When the revamp came to Tespia, even the Korean community was quickly to point out that ERB's hitbox didn't match its animation. So, you're telling me that Nexon went through the effort of animating ERB in a way where it shows that Hero now swings behind him... and it makes no discernable difference compared to what we had before? Dammit Nexon, I can't fathom how you guys managed to set it up this perfectly to then not deliver on it.
But thankfully, the fix to Enhanced Raging Blow is a very easy one. Since you only have to adjust the hitbox, you don't need to rework any of its animations. And ironically, making ERB's hitbox identical to its animation fixes most of the problems that I have with Destiny. It would justify the removal of Shout. It would make the four second cooldown of Flash Slash and the removal of Combo Force less severe, because Raging Blow can hit in all directions anyway. It would also place less performance pressure on Aura Blade, as it needs to pick up less slack. I don't get why Nexon couldn't have made ERB like this from the start. It almost wrote itself and not going for it just feels dumb.
I will also have to inform you that despite the huge improvement in Raging Blow's hitbox, it doesn't change as much as you might expect. The higher level you are, the more spread out platforms and monsters become. So realistically speaking, Raging Blow performs the same as before Destiny in late game maps, as you still can't clear two platforms without jumping. This is including the post-Ignition changes, which ever so slightly increased its hitbox. And you know what's ironic? That Incising can clear two platforms while standing still. But I'll get back on that in chapter 5.3.
The final changes to Raging Blow were included with the Ignition update. Alongside the aforementioned slight hitbox increase (→ chapter 5.2.3), they shrunk the line count of Raging Blow to a measly 4. The statement that Nexon gave was to improve a supposed stuttering issue when defeating monsters, but that is something I'm not familiar with, so I can't comment on that. Wait a minute... didn't we upgrade to 64-bit to avoid performance issues in the first place?
So, what about the 4 line count? Meh. It's the lowest line count we've ever had on Raging Blow:
- We originally started with 5 lines in the Champions update, 220% damage.
- Hyper Skills added one additional line to Raging Blow: 5+1.
- The RED update added Enhanced Raging Blow:
- Raging Blow: 268% damage per line
- Enhanced RB: 285% damage per line
- The Reboot update changed Raging Blow to 7+1 lines:
- Raging Blow: 200% damage per line
- Enhanced RB: 215% damage per line
- Heroes of Maple changed Enhanced Raging Blow to 9+1 lines:
- Raging Blow: 200% damage per line (7+1)
- Enhanced RB: 167% damage per line (9+1)
- Beyond changed Enhanced Raging Blow to 5+1 lines:
- Raging Blow: 200% damage per line (7+1)
- Enhanced RB: 285% damage per line (5+1)
- Between Rise and Awake: changed Enhanced Raging Blow to 7+1 lines:
- Raging Blow: 200% damage per line
- Enhanced RB: 215% damage per line
- Ignition changed Raging Blow to 4+1 lines:
- Raging Blow: 320% damage per line
- Enhanced RB: 344% damage per line
I'm kind of growing tired of Nexon constantly changing Raging Blow's line count every few years. They have changed Raging Blow's line count more often than any other Hero skill, and I kinda want them to make up their mind and stick with a long-term decision. It's also important to mention that the reasons for changing RB's line count differs each time they did it. A great example would be the Reboot update: Nexon stated that they found Hero's line count to be on the low side, so they generously buffed it to a whopping 8 lines. But now, seven years later, we're on the lowest amount of lines it has ever been, and it has even less than the original pre-RED wet noodle Raging Blow, because "reasons".
I'll keep saying the same thing that I've been saying on my blog for years, and I'll continue to do so: larger line counts are always better, due to how MapleStory calculates its damage*. Saying that the pre-Ignition Raging Blow and post-Ignition's have an identical "total skill damage" of 1720% (215% x 8, or 344% x 5) is misleading, because it ignores the many multipliers that come from other relevant sources such as Critical Damage and Final Damage. If you want to reduce a line count for a skill, you'll have to increase the "total skill damage" to make up for the reduced effects of multipliers. Look, it's not a perfect solution, but it at least compensates for the loss in damage.
Incising borders on irony. There is this unspoken rule in Hero's skill design where Incising's performance must be greater than Raging Blow, as otherwise it loses a lot of appeal (you can read about that here). But because this design philosophy is maintained post-Destiny, Incising is without a doubt a much better mobbing skill than RB. I would even consider that it's at a point where it can render other skills, such as Rage Uprising and our new Aura Blade irrelevant. At the other hand, it doesn't receive the support of the likes of Combo Instinct and Hyper Skills, which holds it back from taking over RB's position as our main attacking skill. And yet, its damage output is higher than Raging Blow when it comes to mobbing*, because with the Destiny revamp it received an additional 50% Monster Damage.
If you are going to grind in maps like Cernium, Raging Blow is definitely outclassed by a fully upgraded Incising.
It makes me question why Raging Blow wasn't allowed to have the vertical reach that Incising has, or why Nexon insisted to keep Rage Uprising and barely change it. And yet, despite all of that praise where I'm convincing you that Incising is clearly the better skill, it's performance has been made worse by a single change.
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| Despite the larger hitbox, the revamp clearly made Incising more sluggish... |
The way how Nexon nerfed Incising is simple. Originally, Incising was an attack that behaved very similar to Shout: it activated almost instantaneously, but it left the player vulnerable for a very brief period of time. It is now the opposite: it takes time for the skill to activate, but it no longer leaves the player vulnerable afterwards. Instantaneous activations on skills are always better, and seeing this change after Nexon went through the effort of improving Incising gradually for almost a decade is a shame. Incising was power-crept to become faster than RB, but that's no longer the case.
Another way I could describe this change is gameplay flow. An inherent part of the attack speed mechanic removes a part of a skill's initial build up when the same skill is used consecutively. Meaning that the first time you'll use Raging Blow would take longer than the second one. But this also means that skills that activate almost instantaneously are much more desired than skills that take a while to build up, because you can combo the old Incising immediately after Raging Blow. Skills such as Incising and Rage Uprising matched incredibly well for Hero, because they just happened to be a perfect follow-up skill to use. But now, Incising feels clunky each time you use it as a follow-up, and it only has a good rhythm once you hold down the skill. Using Incising right after Raging Blow just feels like you drive over a bump in the road. It just doesn't feel good. It kills the momentum, the flow of combat.
I believe that this clunky behavior is a leftover from one of the earlier versions of Incising when the Destiny revamp was still being fine-tuned in Tespia. Incising was originally going to have an eight second cooldown* because the duration of Incising's status effect was greatly increased (from 30 to 60 seconds), so probably the thought was that giving Incising a cooldown was fine considering players need to apply its DoT less often. This change also meant that Incising as a skill was designed to become clunkier, with a slower casting speed to match its less frequent use.
However, as the community's feedback reminded Nexon that Incising is often used as an additional mobbing skill, they got rid of the cooldown and improved Incising's casting speed. However, improving its attacking speed does little as long as it maintains Tespia's reversed, clunky attack speed. I mean, compare it with this from five years ago!
Anyway, Incising's status effect duration is now a full minute, which is a great improvement over the previous 30 seconds. You now no longer have to be worried about having to reapply Incising in the middle of Combo Instinct because of that. Combined with Panic applying passively, it has made bossing far more convenient.
If you thought I would claim that Magic Crash is the other winner among the post-Destiny changes made to Hero, I'll have to disappoint you. You'll understand once you realize how many chapters Magic Crash has. Spoiler alert: four.
Magic Crash is a skill that suffered in a similar way as Self Recovery. A skill concept that is way past its prime and is held back by some arbitrary rules that are hardly relevant anymore. In Magic Crash's case, the skill was designed to deal with boss mechanics such as Damage Reflect and Super Cast, but did so only in a preemptive manner*, meaning that it's basically does nothing against them when they are already active. And it only grew worse from there as Magic Crash got nerfed so many times that it could only provide for a handful of niche scenarios that almost never happen.
Time for yet another history lesson, as apparently we still haven't had enough of those in this blogpost. Ever wondered why Magic Crash seems to be underwhelming? It's because Magic Crash used to dominate the bossing meta so hard that Nexon overcorrected and changed their boss designs moving forward. It is very similar to the impact that Breath of Divinity and Reaper's Pendant originally had up till the introduction of the Tenebris bosses.
In the old landscape of MapleStory boss designs from the beginning all the way to before Magnus mid 2012, bosses were designed to stall. One of the most common practices that Nexon implemented were Super Cast and Damage Reflect. Super Cast would give monsters immunity to either physical or magic-based attacks (which could be its own blogpost to explain the historical depths and impact of that rock/paper/scissor mechanic), and Damage Reflect would give monsters invincibility and automatically deal (up to a certain percentage of) the damage you dealt to that monster. Basically every major boss ran either (or both) of these, and that meant specific combination of classes (or Paladins in general) were favored over others, because those classes would allow you to circumvent most of these mechanics.
So, with the Big Bang update (2010), Magic Crash as we know it today was invented and was made exclusively for Hero, Paladin and Dark Knight. Yes, I know that Soul Master had it for a while, but that's besides the point. With the RED update, they moved Magic Crash from 3rd Job to 4th Job, but that also meant if Magic Crash were to ever fall out of fashion, it would be a waste of a skill slot. One that could've been used to give Hero something else. Reminder that post-Ignition Mikhail still has Magic Crash on 3rd Job, which is a much better use of 10 SP than 4th Job. As you can no longer use CO with Magic Crash (to reduce its cooldown), the skill might as well be better off returning to 3rd Job.
But back on the subject matter. 2010's Magic Crash gave us the ability to circumvent Super Cast and Damage Reflect, but only in a preemptive manner. You couldn't get rid of Super Cast or Damage Reflect once it was already active*, but you could cast it ahead of time so that it doesn't happen. Not ideal, but it most certainly did the trick. Considering that time and/or lives were saved if you simply added one Hero, Paladin or Dark Knight to your party, I'd call that useful.
And the demand for Magic Crash grew out of hand in the two short years between Big Bang and Magnus. The newest line of bosses, including Van Leon, Akyrum and Cygnus (the latter of which dropped the best equipment at the time) were fully equipped with stalling mechanics - and all would crumble under the might of a well-timed Magic Crash.
But all of that pales in comparison to what was probably one of the largest exploitations of a single skill in MapleStory's history: Neo Tokyo. Probably doesn't need an(other) introduction on this blog, because I always end up talking about it one way or another. That said, Neo Tokyo had one of the most brutal Damage Reflect bosses in the game: the original "Dunas 1" in Akihabara. Not to be confused with "Dunas 2" in Shibuya, or "Master Unknown Magic Beast" in Kamuna.
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| You'll have to forgive me for borrowing your video footage this one time, Peter. |
This boss was a very popular target for Neo Tokyo runs because it was simply one of the most profitable bosses to have ever been released. It dropped so many high-value items such as Magic Throwing Knives and the otherwise Gachapon-exclusive Dragon Khanjar. We're talking about items with a value of over one billion mesos each, back in 2010 when the carry limit was up to 2,1 billion. And what stood between players and their loot was this boss design where Dunas would have Damage Reflect up every twenty seconds. This Damage Reflect would pretty much instant kill you (back when boss respawns didn't exist, and dying costed you hours of grinding), as it was the only Damage Reflect in the game that does 10.000 damage multiplied by the amount of lines the attacking skill had (i.e. Brave Slash with 3 lines would result in 30.000 damage, which back then only HP washed whales had). If you were to include three Magic Crash users, you could indefinitely reapply Magic Crash. Thus, no Damage Reflect. Easy money making.
This particular exploit that was popularized with Dunas, called the "Magic Crash Lock", found its way into other major bosses or expeditions where a sizable amount of participants (up to 30) were expected. Magic Crash had just way too much impact on the game if kept unchecked. It got so out of hand that Nexon had no choice but to make a couple of fundamental changes moving forward, including the way they designed their newer bosses and Magic Crash itself.
One of the major nerfs to hit Magic Crash was the implementation of an additional cooldown. Magic Crash itself has a cooldown of 60 seconds, but a monster that previously had Magic Crash applied to it is now also immune for at least 90 seconds. This immunity grows for each additional Magic Crash, meaning that it's only going to be effective once for most bosses or Dojo floors. This concept for debuff immunity was then later recycled to create the bind immunity, but the irony here is that bind immunity is far less restrictive than the one for Magic Crash. You are always able to apply another bind after its cooldown, but not with Magic Crash. Nexon really doesn't want a repeat of Magic Crash locking, despite that binds have pretty much replaced it. And they only made Magic Crash less useful moving forward.
With the post-Magnus boss design (which lasted until the release of the Tenebris bosses), Nexon stopped including buffs such as Super Cast and Damage Reflect*. This killed the demand for Magic Crash users, as bosses had more emphasis on dodging (lethal) attacks. It changed the demand to healing and bind instead, as we entered the era of Mechanic, Phantom and Eunwol's dominance until those inevitably died the same way the things they replaced.
The shift from Magic Crash towards binds was also made clear once we examine the updates that followed the post-Magnus era. The way how Nexon handled Magic Crash draws several parallels to Self Recovery (→ chapter 4.4), in where Hero got artificially kneecapped for no good reason:
- Newer classes that were designed to become the next meta at the time of release, such as Phantom and Kaiser, basically got Magic Crash but better. These classes were released in the early 2010's, shortly after Big Bang. As this was during the twilight years of Cygnus, Van Leon and Akyrum, these classes would still get some mileage out of their version of Magic Crash. But once we were well into the post-Magnus era, newer classes would no longer receive Magic Crash-like skills moving forward, and instead received whatever was the popular bossing gimmick at the time (i.e. revive skills in 2013, binds a few years later).
- Phantom has Soul Steal, which allows Phantom to remove Super Cast and Damage Reflect, which is far more practical than using Magic Crash as a preemptive measure. Despite that Soul Steal's cooldown is double the amount of Magic Crash, Phantom is rewarded with a stat buff on top of removing Super Cast or Damage Reflect.
- Kaiser's signature skill, Final Figuration, just straight up allows Kaiser to bypass the effects of Super Cast and Damage Reflect and brute-force its way through it. And with how often Final Figuration is able to be used, it completely tramples on the concept of Magic Crash.
- Released in early 2014 (KMS), The Seed (Tower of Oz) introduced us to the Overpass Ring (Overdrive Ring). At this point we were well-past Magic Crash's relevance, so its introduction is completely fine.
- Additionally, around this time, Taiwan MapleStory released the next generation of game-warping Gachapon items, such as Orchid's Badge, which was another way of having an item with a skill that has a Magic Crash-like effect (but better) while equipped.
- Superseding 2011's Treasure Monsters, Elite Monsters and Elite Bosses were released in late 2014 (KMS). As raid bosses continued to be designed with the post-Magnus philosophy, Elite Monsters/Bosses were designed to reintroduce most of the old boss mechanics (including Super Cast, Super Armor and Damage Reflect) and status effects that were hardly ever used at this point. You'd expect that Magic Crash would become useful against Elite Monsters and Elite Bosses, but that was not the case. Far from it.
- Elites that spawn with the Commanding pre-fix: Magic Crash does nothing. You can't remove any of the buffs that Commanding provides, and you also cannot prevent any of these buffs.
- Elites that spawned with the newly introduced Invincibility Bubble: never had any chance.
- Elite Bosses spawned in the map with both Super Casts activated, meaning that you can't use Magic Crash as a preemptive measure.
- And then towards the release of 5th Job, binds have fully replaced the need for Magic Crash. Nexon started to cater to the demand for (more) bind skills and their continued support.
- In the same Gachapon release as the aforementioned Orchid's Badge, Lucid's Earrings were added to the game. It allows the player to use a bind skill while equipped, which has a separate cooldown (bind immunity) compared to bind skills (which often shares the same immunity).
- In early 2016, Japan MapleStory released the Mushroom Shrine revamp. Players bothered to maintain the Threads of Fate could receive Yorozu's Wisdom (another bind skill), or Izuna's Will, which allows you to ignore (but not bypass) Damage Reflect for five seconds. With the Showa revamp of 2020, it is now effortless to obtain either of these skills and keep them forever.
- With 5th Job's release in the Summer of 2016, Erda Nova was added as an all-class bind skill. Erda Nova is now an extremely powerful binding skill, as of Destiny (→ chapter 7.6).
- After 5th Job's release, Magic Crash saw an unfulfilled resurgence with the release of the original Dunkel, followed by a coup de grâce with Mitsuhide Akechi's release a few years after.
- The original Dunkel, which was released during the Black update in 2018, was a return to form to that pre-Magnus era of boss designs. Dunkel, commander of the Elite Bosses, would spawn in Elite Bosses with random prefixes at set intervals. This fact alone could've been the return of Magic Crash in the post-Magnus era, but this never happened because of Nexon's reluctance to fix the skill. In the end, the original Dunkel was replaced by its current form, in early 2020.
- Setting the stage for future boss designs post-Black Mage in late 2020, anything that came from the Asura War content was now either resistant or immune against basically anything relevant. Bind durations are halved against Asura War (boss) monsters (first seen with Princess No), status effects bypass Status Resistance and can't be removed through Hero's Will or any of its variants, and what is probably the worst of all: Magic Crash does nothing, as you can't prevent Akechi's Damage Reflect (similar to what happens with Commanding Elites).
So through that hellish decade, at no certain point was Magic Crash updated to match its powercrept counterparts as seen with Phantom or Kaiser. Every class in the game could now obtain multiple equipment that would give you a considerably better version of Magic Crash. Nexon just couldn't be bothered to update Magic Crash. Elite Monsters and Elite Bosses came out, and it would've made for a good opportunity to fix Magic Crash, but that didn't happen either. It was that stupid that you were better off just buying an Overpass Ring (or Orchid's Badge) instead of using your own class skill that should've worked to begin with. As I said: once game-warping, then reduced to nothing.
Thankfully, someone at Nexon took pity at the state of Magic Crash and decided to give its long-overdue update. Magic Crash is now allowed to remove currently active Super Casts and Damage Reflects, in addition to keeping its original preemptive effect. So you could for instance, remove Chaos Zakum's invisible Super Cast and Bloody Queen's Damage Reflect aura, assuming you missed the window to cast Magic Crash (which is especially difficult with Queen). But unfortunately, aside from those few interactions, the value of this update does almost nothing outside of that.
You see, the Magic Crash immunity still is a thing. For bosses such as Pink Bean in Mu Lung Dojo, you are only really going to see its effect only once. Most Damage Reflects will happen before the immunity wears out. Then, there's also the chance that if you used Magic Crash preemptively, bosses will hold onto their DR until after Magic Crash expired.
As long as the immunity is a thing on top of the one minute skill cooldown, it further limits the skill's usefulness and how often one can make great use of the skill itself.
Then, there's the fact that we're in an era where items exist that gives Magic Crash to any class, which devalues MC itself. Yes, it is useful to have an additional Magic Crash, but are you really going to run an Overpass Ring for Mu Lung Dojo if it shares its cooldown with any of the other Seed rings? The Magic Crash immunity is outdated; it needs to go.
Heck, I'll do you one better: keep the Magic Crash immunity. Adjust it to be in line with the static bind immunity, where it doesn't increase with each consecutive use, and remove the cooldown of Magic Crash. We're at a point where this change would no longer break the game. It's not like Magic Crash Lock will ever be a problem again.
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| Bloody useless. Kinda defeats the point of what Magic Crash is supposed to do, no? |
For Elite Monsters and Elite Bosses, this update doesn't change anything. By the time this Magic Crash update rolled out, Super Cast or Damage Reflect on Elites have been removed years ago. Elite Bosses also no longer spawn with Super Cast and thus you can kill them the moment they spawn in. And while they at least addressed the unforgivably toxic Elite Boss killstealing, it is at least five years too late. And if you think that post-Destiny Magic Crash would now finally work against those pesky Commanding Elite Monsters/Bosses, then I will have to disappoint you with the truth.
Despite that Magic Crash should prevent new buffs from applying, it does not prevent Commanding Elites from doing so (see GIF above). And because Magic Crash has a cooldown and an immunity, you simply have no options here. Binds would be the only way to prevent it, but that's also assuming you can defeat any Elite Monster/Boss before the bind expires (which might not always be the case). Because after that, you'll end up with the same problem.
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| Modern bosses ignoring Magic Crash further defeats the point of it even more. |
The same also applies to Mitsuhide Akechi and Dunkel: despite the Destiny revamp, Magic Crash still doesn't prevent Damage Reflect or Invincibility Bubbles from happening, and neither can you remove an active Damage Reflect or Invincibility Bubbles with Magic Crash. The fact that you can't remove Akechi's Damage Reflect is ridiculous.
Self Recovery's poor handling throughout Maple's history was disappointing and the post-Destiny changes feel stingy by leaving it at 4% HP/MP, but Magic Crash takes the cake as its ten-year-descent leading to a half-assed fix is awful. Despite all of that, I'm willing to take it as unintentional, because throughout the years different teams have worked on MapleStory, and most of them have left the company. Either way, there's no excuse for this good-for-nothing result.
Ya know, it's ironic. If they never revamped the Dunkel boss fight, or if they implemented Destiny's Magic Crash update before the boss revamp, we could've had a (brief) moment where Magic Crash became relevant again.
But wait, there's more. It can't be Destiny without it somehow, against all reason, getting worse, now can it? This chapter may or may not perfectly encapsulate the unsatisfying quality (control) of the Destiny revamp.
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| Magic Crash applying up to 10 enemies doesn't do much if the skill is this unnecessarily difficult to land. |
So Magic Crash receives a new look, but it doesn't receive an update to its hitbox. If you thought that Aura Weapon has a bad hitbox, try using Magic Crash. The currently small hitbox hasn't been updated in years, and on top of that the hitbox is deceptively unreliable. While its horizontal reach is alright, its vertical reach is just too narrow. It was a perfect opportunity to improve its hitbox with this revamp, especially considering most other (non-Hero) skills have been updated with Destiny (a notable example being Erda Nova, see chapter 7.6). Improving the vertical reach of Magic Crash would go a long way. Its vertical reach needs to be at least double, if not triple, the current amount.
With the current hitbox, it basically demands the player to stand inside the (boss) monster for it to be reliable. Keep in mind that Magic Crash has that one minute cooldown, so missing the skill because of an unnecessarily small hitbox is way too punishing for a skill that has hardly seen any relevancy in over a decade.
A great example of how bad this particular problem is, is when you try to use Magic Crash against Chaos Pink Bean. Magic Crash can affect up to 10 enemies in range, so you should be able to use it against the entire horde of Chaos Mini Beans, which all use Super Cast to distract you from Pink Bean and possibly not notice him casting Damage Reflect amidst the chaos (especially since most of you still refuse to play with sound effects on for whatever reason). You aren't going to be able to cast Magic Crash on most of the Mini Beans because of that awful Magic Crash hitbox, so you're going to have to be content with having to sit out their Super Cast in 2024. So much fun (read: sarcasm).
And I'm intentionally giving you this particular example, for reasons that will be clear in just a moment. You see, for these types of blogposts, I always thoroughly test out these skills. Y'know, I used to be an QA Engineer, but that's beside the point. When I was trying to use Magic Crash several times against a cluster of Mini Beans to see if anything was changed, I came across (by accident) what is probably the most baffling oversight in this entire revamp:
Yes, I am not kidding. If you use Magic Crash with Enrage, the target count is now dropped to 3. Good job, everyone. You somehow managed to continue to make things even worse. I just have a hard time believing this got through QA.
You would think that this (bug) would've happened with the Big Bang update, when Enrage was changed into a single-target locking skill. Or when Nexon updated Enrage with the 1/3 Split Rule. Nope. Somehow, out of all revamps that Hero got in the past 13 years (Balance Patch, Big Bang, Jump, Advance of the Union, RED, Champions, Reboot, Destiny), this problem had to be introduced with the Destiny revamp. And it still hasn't been fixed two years later!
Makes you wonder why they couldn't change Magic Crash to be a large AoE attacking skill, like Erda Nova. I mean, if this skill is affected by Enrage, they might as well make it an attack.
The Ignition update has improved the user interface: bind immunity is now displayed below the HP bar for bosses that have one. You know what would be great? To have one for the Magic Crash immunity.
Believe it or not, but it's currently pretty difficult to know whether you can successfully apply Magic Crash a second time on bosses. Missing the time window being by a couple of seconds too early is common and far too punishing because of the one minute cooldown that Magic Crash has. Though it'd be easier to just remove the stupid immunity.
Enrage is one of the few skills where I don't have to explain its history in this blogpost, because I already have in 2021. The skill doesn't see many changes with Destiny. Most of these changes are indirect ones, such as it no longer being tied to Raging Blow (→ chapter 5.2.1), that Combo Attack no longer consumes orbs (→ chapter 3.2.1), and that you can even use Enrage now without Combo Attack.
The latter ones are significant improvements for Enrage, as it gives some of its lost reliability back. You can now just immediately use Enrage whenever, regardless of Combo Attack. It harks back to a short-lived exploit between RED and Reboot, where you could activate Enrage without having any Combo Orbs, or the original release of Enrage in 2006, where it didn't consume any Combo Orbs. Either way, Enrage no longer being tied to Combo Attack was a bit overdue because other classes, such as Battle Mage and Mikhail, had no restrictions on their Enrage since 2014.
No longer requiring a minimum of one Combo Orb to activate Enrage is great.
No longer requiring a minimum of one Combo Orb to activate Enrage is great.
Also, for whatever reason, Enrage is one of the few exceptions (alongside Raging Blow) that doesn't have its name changed to accommodate the shoehorned swordsmanship agenda. It's weird that they found it necessary to rename Rage into Spirit Blade, but they kept Enrage as it is. Enrage was originally designed to be Rage's successor (with both being a Weapon Attack buff), so seeing one of the two skills that are related to another be removed unceremoniously just leaves a bad taste. Like I said, Destiny's not consistent with its ideas and it doesn't know what it wants to be.
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But hey, if there is any skill that has a tasteful blend of the old-and-familiar Combo Attack and the newly-founded swordsmanship, it's the animation for Enrage. It harkens back to the original Combo Attack skill animations where the Combo Orbs are shown to actively morph into the skill that's being cast, and the double-bladed axe that's formed is really clever with integrating a sword in its center, since y'know, Hero uses both swords and axes. Ironically though, despite the great animation, Enrage no longer doesn't actually consume Combo Orbs. Even though Enrage requires Level 30 Advanced Combo Attack to unlock it, these skills have nothing to do with each other since Destiny. I'll say it again: it's almost as if the removal of orb consumption was an afterthought and a last-minute addition.
The big change to Enrage with the Destiny update is the change made to the first rule of Enrage. In 2021, I've stated that Rule 1 of Enrage will always affect at least 2 enemies. Destiny changed it so it'll now affect at least 3 enemies.
It's a small change that does a lot. In the aforementioned blogpost, I've stated that Pipsqueak Luminous is invaluable to get important skills from 2 to 3 enemies. However, because not many players are willing to grind their Monster Life to Level 40 (even though it's become effortless), they'll end up having only up to two enemies with Enrage for most skills. The change that Destiny makes is a huge boost for anyone that doesn't have access to Pipsqueak Luminous. But if you have access to Monster Life, there's no excuse to not already have it. It's great for grinding Union too.
But what about those who already have access to Pipsqueak Luminous? Pipsqueak Luminous will always be fantastic because it boosts every attacking skill on that account for every class. But for when it comes to Enrage, not much has changed here. Because everyone now has at least three targets, the concept of the "magic number 9" has become irrelevant. Getting to "magic number 12" on most skills is still impossible, if not impractical.
If anything, this change to Enrage has been incredibly beneficial for the few important skills that would've never been able to reach "magic number 9", such as Soul Driver, Combo Instinct and the post-Destiny Valhalla (→ chapter 6.4). Especially in case of Combo Instinct and Valhalla, the ability to nuke three enemies is just way too good.
Not necessarily related to the Destiny revamp, unless you want to argue that it indirectly is because Nexon hasn't returned it since. I've never really took the time to archive this on my blog, but with the whole dissection of Hero's changelog history in this blogpost, I thought I'd might as well have it on record here.
Before the release of 5th Job, Critical Damage was still in the old ways of Minimum and Maximum Critical Damage. At Level 31, if you used Self Combat Orders, you would receive a boost of 1% Min Critical Damage. With how Minimum Critical Damage worked, it basically is equivalent to 1% Crit Damage today. After 5th Job, Nexon reworked Enrage's stats-per-level-gains, so you would no longer receive any stat boosts for Level 30 → 31. It's a stealth nerf, as Self CO would no longer offer anything relevant for Enrage after this update. It's been six years and I'm still upset about it.
Anyway, I find it interesting how this has remained undiscussed after all this time, and is basically knowledge lost to time. Unfortunately, that 1% Critical Damage is probably never going to return.
When they've added the 1/3 Split Rule, they've also added an additional skill animation for when Enrage is toggled off. Suffice to say, this was a simple but really good inclusion because having feedback on the state of whether Enrage's target lock is removed is invaluable and communicates faster than having to find the skill icon in the top right corner.
But as Destiny has been consistent with its lacking care and attention, someone at Nexon forgot this animation is a thing so the Destiny revamp rollbacks us 8,5 years ago. Wait, why hasn't anyone else made a mention of this? How did this slip through QA, or the entire Hero community for that matter? Imagine going through the effort of expanding the code for Enrage to include a new animation, and creating this additional animation in the same style of a template from ten years ago, to then throw all of that work away in less than two years after implementing it. What a waste.
And because we're missing that animation, we now have to go back on the old method of verifying whether Enrage is active: skill icons. Which funnily enough was easy before the Destiny revamp, since Enrage was the only pink toggle skill icon we had, and it was also one of the only two that had Combo Attack's orbs on it. Unfortunately, this is the Destiny revamp, so even this basic functionality has been made worse. Because have fun trying to find the skill icon for Enrage when every post-Destiny skill icon looks the same. But that's a can of worms I'm saving for chapter 8.2.
The problems doesn't stop here. When they implemented the 1/3 Split, they slapped a brief cooldown on the on/off toggle, so you can no longer quickly cycle between the two modes. Combined with the indistinguishable skill icon and the lack of a skill animation for toggling Enrage off, makes it really cumbersome to get Enrage to the mode you want.
Furthermore, prior to Destiny, there were additional ways where you can immediately tell if Enrage was active or not. The most common way was through Raging Blow. As long as Sword of Burning Soul or Valhalla wasn't active, you'd always know when Enrage is offline because "wet noodle" would activate. Very hard to miss. You'd have to be drunk or high on green Maple leaves to not see the difference. But because Enhanced Raging Blow became separated from Enrage, Valhala or Sobs, you'll now always have ERB because of post-Destiny Combo Attack. The only indicator you visually have left is Sword of Burning Soul, and that is unreliable because the skill doesn't have a 100% uptime yet.
Sigh. What did they do to you, Advanced Combo Attack? If you've paid attention throughout this blogpost, Destiny's overreliance on the color orange has not been good. The visual changes made to ACA is Destiny at its worst. While yellow, orange, red or anything in-between is perfectly fine for attacking skills, using this color on Combo Attack is not.
I'm not going to repeat the things I've said in chapter 3.2.2, but I am going to expand further on it here for the remarks specifically related to Advanced Combo Attack.
While the blue Combo Orbs doesn't look as good as the orange ones (because the finer white lines blend in too much with the softer blue), the blue ones do provide a better contrast with the rest of the skills. Part of that is simply because orange and blue are complementary colors. Orange Combo Orbs just doesn't work because everything else is already in that color. They should've kept the orbs for ACA pink, even if I find the current orb designs with the swords and axes to be tacky and a downgrade over the original, abstract ones. It's just a shame that Nexon hasn't learned anything from RED's Combo Orbs, as Destiny proves yet again that one does not simply replace the original orb design.
Now, this begs the question: what about Expert Combo Attack? I've always been of the opinion that the most logical color for a hypothetical ECA would've been fluorescent yellowish green. Purple is Dark Knight and yellow is Paladin, so those are off the table. I've also explained that green has been part of Hero's original color coding, so it would've been a perfect way to reintroduce that long-lost color. However, with Destiny removing the pink orbs, I'm almost afraid that they made ACA orange so that they can haphazardly justify pink orbs for 5th 6th Job. I'd be upset if they did this.
This is a bug that has been around since forever, but if you use Maple Warrior and Self Combat Orders on a pet auto buff, you will not receive Level 31 Maple Warrior. It doesn't matter which slots are used, even if you assigned Self CO to be buffed before MW, you'll still end up with Level 30. You'll only receive Level 31 on the next auto buff cycle, or if Self CO was used manually before the pet auto buffs are applied, or if MW was used manually after.
I haven't tested whether if this problem occurs with any other active 4th Job buff (because I don't want to waste cubes or Nodestones to have Self CO on mules), but I suspect this not exclusive to Maple Warrior.
You might ask yourself: why does this matter? In case of Maple Warrior, it matters because of Maple World's Goddess' Blessing, and any of its other variants that are affected by Maple Warrior-like skills. As explained in my blogpost back in 2020, Goddess' Blessing will blindly take whatever Maple Warrior you have at the time of casting, meaning that you'll lose out on a damage boost if you were running Level 30, or received one from another party member.
At the time of writing that blogpost, I didn't know that Self CO does not raise the first Maple Warrior to Level 31 through pet auto buff. So, running Maple Warrior on pet auto buff is not a good idea even if you run Self CO. You'd still have to manually cast MW in order to receive the Level 31 boost, which is stupid because pet auto buff should've worked as it should in the first place. Nexon, please fix this.
Behold, the most useless 4th Job skill in the entire game! If you don't believe me, I can assure you that you won't be able to give a better example of a more useless 4th Job skill. Yes, dare I even say that the original Hamstring Shot, Monster Magnet, Ninja Storm and Ninja Ambush had more use before Big Bang than Power Stance does today.
Here's the problem. Before the Destiny update, classes that didn't have 100% Stance would have to sacrifice a Skill Link slot for Mikhail's Skill Link, which also required Buff Duration for the skill to last longer than its cooldown. With the Destiny update, 100% Stance is now universally available on every class*, Mikhail's Skill Link changed to burst Status Resistance, and Stance has been removed from Hyper Stats and Union. But instead of taking the logical, future-proof route of creating a new passive skill for everyone's Beginner tab (or adjusting the game code, like what they did when they upgraded the base movement speed from 80% to 100% in 2011's Jump update), Nexon decided to painstakingly add Stance manually to already-existing skills from classes that were eligible for the 100% Stance retrofit.
But what if you play the class that invented Stance back in 2006? You get jack shit. Ever wondered why the mechanic of circumventing knockback in MapleStory is officially called "Stance"? Because it's named after Power Stance, duh. No, "Knockback Resistance" is a shitty GMS redub and the term is as misleading as "defense ignore"; don't use them.
Worst part is, the further we dive into how poorly Nexon implemented these Stance changes, the worse it gets. When it comes to Stance class balancing, you won't find it. From all the skills that give Stance post-Destiny, classes who still have the original 4th Job Power Stance (Hero, Dark Knight and Mikhail) were done dirty the most. They need to invest thirty Skill Points to max out stance. In total, we have to invest 45 SP for 100% Stance, and the only other stats we get are from Warrior Mastery. 30 of the 45 SP is exclusively for 60% Stance! Every other class gets 100% Stance for less SP and a bunch of extra stats. Compare our 45 SP investment for Warrior Mastery + Power Stance to this:
| Class | Job | Skill | SP | Effects |
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Bishop |
⦁ | |||
Marksman, Pathfinder |
⦁ |
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⦁ |
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Enlightenment |
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60% Stance. |
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⦁ |
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Combo Ability |
10% Critical Damage. Each "Stack" will also give an extra 2 Attack and 3% Critical Rate. |
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Duration and cooldown: 5 seconds. |
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immunity, up to 7 times (cost: 200 MP). After the 7th time, toggle cooldown: 240 seconds. |
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⦁ |
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⦁ |
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Protection |
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Demon Avenger |
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the combined total of your current HP and the barrier HP exceeds your maximum HP. Barrier HP decays by 40% + 50 every 5 seconds. |
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Training II |
Lift Press and Lift Magnum (both 3rd Job) by 80%. Barrier HP (Endurance Shield, 1st Job) becomes 50% of damage taken. |
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Ride on your selected Jaguar ("Jaguar Management", 1st Job). While this skill is active: |
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50 MP. Can also be started through other "Metal Armor" skills. Activates Metal Armor: Human. While skill is active: 20 Speed, 40 Attack, 300 DEF and allows the use of "Metal Armor" skills. |
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| ⦁ |
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| ⦁ |
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| ⦁ |
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| ⦁ |
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| ⦁ |
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⦁ |
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seconds, resets Morph Gauge afterwards. While active: 10% Final Damage (becomes 15% if 4th Job or higher), 100% Stance, attacks bypass Damage Reflect and Super Cast. |
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While active: 12% damage reduction (works against % HP attacks). Cooldown: 120 seconds. |
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Wings |
30% Boss Damage, 100% Stance. Craft: Javelin becomes Glory Wings: Javelin. Glory Wings: Javelin: consumes 30 MP. Deals 500% damage 6 times, up to 5 enemies. Explodes on contact, dealing 500% damage 6 times with an additional 20% Monster Damage, up to 5 enemies. |
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reduction, 60% Stance. |
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reduction. |
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Spectre mode through Looming Control (2nd Job). Duration is based on Willpower Gauge. While active: 30 Attack, 100% Stance. If Looming Spectre ends, cooldown: 20 seconds. |
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up to 6 enemies. If used with Spell Bullet (1st Job), creates Plain Spell (deals 50% damage) twice. If Plain Spell successfully hits, activates Plain Buff: 20 Speed, 50% Stance. Duration: 60 seconds. |
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50% Stance. |
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LUK, 40% HP, 16% MP, 2000 DEF, 16% Critical Rate, 11% Boss Damage, 40 Status Resistance, 40% Elemental Resistance, 40% damage reduction, 100% Stance. 100% Stance at Level 1. |
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reduction, 60% Stance. |
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⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ |
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Blade Force for each time you hit an enemy, and provides stats: ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ ⦁ |
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Charm (2nd Job), Falling Sakura (4th Job) or Shikigami Haunting successfully hits an enemy, a Mana Vein is summoned nearby (max 3). Cooldown: 5 seconds. Summoning a new Mana Vein replaces the oldest. Standing inside a Mana Vein improves the regeneration rate of Mana. |
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successfully hit, there's a 30% chance to deal 160% damage once, up to 6 enemies. Duration of Kishin Shoukan is extended by 5 seconds. Then, there's a 30% chance to inflict the following debuff on all hit enemies: 30% EXP, higher chance to find equipment with Unidentified Potential. Debuff duration: 5 seconds. |
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(Distortion) |
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10% Elemental Resistance, 100% Stance. |
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Resistance, 100% Stance. |
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ropes), 150% HP/MP, 30 Speed, 20 Jump, 20 Max Speed, 20 Status Resistance, 20% PDR reduction, 40% damage reduction, 100% Stance, 20% EXP, 50% Item Drop Rate, 200% Mesos. to nearby enemies. Cooldown: 10 seconds. |
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ropes), 150% HP/MP, 30 Speed, 20 Jump, 20 Max Speed, 20 Status Resistance, 20% PDR reduction, 40% damage reduction, 100% Stance, 20% EXP, 50% Item Drop Rate, 200% Mesos. |
- Viper (2nd Job), Battle Mage (3rd Job) and Kinesis (3rd Job), who all receive 100% Stance from a single skill, and for only a small investment of 10 SP.
- Because Zero plays two separate characters (Alpha and Beta), you have one skill tree for Alpha and one for Beta. Each level up (up to and including Level 200) provides 3 SP for Alpha and 3 SP for Beta, and each character has their own Stance skill. Moreover, both receive 100% Stance from a single skill.
- Eunwol, Demon Slayer, Demon Avenger and Hayato, who start with a passive 100% Stance Beginner skill.
- Beast Tamer unlocked Growth Spurt automatically at Level 60, which gave 100% Stance immediately.
- The majority of classes require two skills to max out Stance, spread across job advancements. Usually, the early skill gives 40% Stance and the later 60%. However, among the classes with this two-skill-approach:
- Jett, Lynn, Aran, Wild Hunter, Kain and Ark are the only classes with a split of 50/50.
- Evan and Kanna are the only classes to have a split of 30/70.
- Cannon Shooter is the only class to have an unusual split of 20/80.
- Angelic Buster is the only class where both Stance skills appear on the same job advancement.
- Adele is the only class where 60% Stance is obtained before 40%.
- Mechanic is currently the only class in the game that does not have Stance passively, as all of it is supplied exclusively through Metal Armor, meaning that Mechanic doesn't have 100% Stance in maps that prohibits the use of non-passive skills. 100% Stance is available on 1st Job for only 1 SP, though.
- Xenon is currently the only class that cannot have 100% Stance before Level 200, with 15% of it locked behind 4th Job's "Multilateral VI", which is only unlocked after the player hits Level 200, and will only receive the Stance boost if the player meets the required 330 Ability Point investment in STR.
- Wild Hunter, Kaiser, Illium, Ark and Beast Tamer are the only classes with overlapping methods to reach 100% Stance, because Nexon didn't clean up the skill trees when implementing the Destiny changes. Prior, these classes did not have a passive 100% Stance, and would have to rely on their signature gimmicks for that, with most of them on cooldown. Now, these gimmicks (with the exception of Beast Tamer) serve as an alternative way for (temporary) 100% Stance until 4th Job, giving 100% Stance earlier than most classes.
- As Wild Hunter, you can have 100% Stance at 2nd Job, but that requires you to use Jaguar Riding, and while you are using Jaguar Riding, you cannot use any Jaguar Skill.
- As Kaiser and Illium, you can have 100% Stance at 3rd Job while Final Figuration and Crystal Skill: Glory Wings are active, but either are temporary and have a harsh cooldown.
- As Ark, you'll have 100% Stance at 1st Job while either Looming Spectre or Plain Buff are active. Looming Spectre's duration is very limited, but each time you use Plain Charge Drive you'll refresh Plain Buff's duration, making that skill a reliable method to maintain 100% Stance.
- Prior to Destiny, Beast Tamer could only achieve 100% Stance temporarily through the use of "All Together! Critter Crossing!", its Level 190 Hyper Skill with a duration of 60 seconds and 180 seconds cooldown. This would require enough SP investment in the skills Dumb Luck (Bear mode) and Purr-Powered (Cat mode) to reach a combined total of 100% Stance. With Growth Spurt now giving 100% Stance to all animal modes starting Level 60, it replaces the need to be locked into either Bear or Cat mode to have Stance. It also renders Purr-Powered's Stance rate useless, because Purr-Powered is only available after unlocking Growth Spurt.
- Hero, Dark Knight and Mikhail have to spend the most amount of SP for 100% Stance: an unforgiving 45 SP, which goes on top of the fact that 30 Skill Points will only yield 60% Stance for that investment. The average SP a class needs to invest is only 28 SP*. This is excluding Pink Bean and Yeti, and it takes into consideration that, for instance, Mechanic only needs to spend 1 SP in "Metal Armor: Human" for 100% Stance, and pre-Destiny gimmicks such as Final Figuration and Jaguar are not taken into account.
- For the sake of being complete, Zen only received stance from its 4th Job Skill "Immoveable", which gave 50% Stance for a cost of 20 SP. This skill's Jett counterpart is "Gravity Booster", seeing as how Jett has always been modelled after Zen (not the other way around). In theory, if Mo Xuan never replaced Zen, the 2nd Job "Secret Training" skill would've received the other 50%, as it is the counterpart of "Cosmic Shield".
So, it's clear that what Nexon did here is toss stance rates on every class without giving it much thought. It basically boils down to, in a lot of cases, that (previously) unremarkable passive skills received stance to make them more interesting, or for them to look better. I'm fine with that approach; it works. It helps to keep the skill trees efficient.
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| Stance on Paladin's 2nd Job just begs the question why the developers treated Hero and Dark Knight differently. |
It's even hilarious to see that other classes such as Battle Mage and Aran, whom also released over a decade ago with Power Stance at 4th Job, were revamped many years prior to Destiny and don't suffer from the same redundancy that Hero, Dark Knight and Mikhail now have, simply because they got rid of their 4th Job Power Stance long ago.
I just don't know what else to say about it, other than feeling sad about how dirty Power Stance was done. We went from Power Stance being exclusive to the original three warriors, to then being powercrept into a Skill Link, to now be available on every class, and for whatever reason Nexon decided to not give it much thought. Remember when Power Stance was considered one of the most useful skills in the game? I can assure you that it's been generally forgotten.
I should probably mention that back when only warriors and Battle Mage received Power Stance, other classes would receive a different kind of way to mitigate knockback and incoming damage (back when low max HP was a concern): dodge rates and receiving a high Avoid stat*. It was straightforward. You'd either have Stance or this, no in-between.
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A relic from a bygone era and long-forgotten philosophy in class balancing. Without, these classes were unplayable. |
Traditional dodge rate comes in many shapes and forms, but all of them are functionally the same: a fixed % chance to nullify incoming damage (in the literal sense), and it does not work against modern boss attacks. You can already guess why they moved away from allowing dodge rates to work at modern bosses, and why they had to rework the evasion formula entirely. The combination of both was way too good. It had to be toned down.
The following classes have the traditional dodge rate, in any of its various forms*:
| Class | Job | Skill | Dodge Rate | Skill Animation | Damage Effect | Notes |
Marksman |
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Shadower |
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At least 20 out of the current 53* classes has a traditional dodge skill, and the average dodge rate is 44%. Yes, you did read it correctly when I specified that Mechanic has two different dodge skills, so if one doesn't trigger, the other can. Any skill I've included in the table above has been manually reverse engineered and play tested with SP reset scrolls. There are a couple of skills where I've been unable to confirm whether if they are traditional dodge rate skills or not (these have been left out of the table), such as Mechanic's 3rd Job skill "Mechanic Defense System", or a class like Zen (which I had never access to) with an apparent 50% Dodge rate on 2nd Job ("Secret Training").
Now, with the post-Destiny changes, there's an observation to be made: every class received 100% Stance. Classes that did not have Stance prior to Destiny just received Stance with no questions asked. This means twenty classes now have Stance and dodge rates, which goes against the principle of why dodge skills were made to begin with.
Remember, dodge rates and high Avoid were the answer to Power Stance. They are polar opposites, go hand-in-hand, and classes would originally only receive either of the two. But with the post-Destiny changes, we now have examples of skills, such as Fake, that gives both dodge and Power Stance. We're at a point where 39% of all classes have both, which is no longer an exception where it used to be only a few.
So... are they just going to leave this as it is? Can we now give every class dodge rates? That'd be only fair, no? Then again, how ridiculous and quite frankly unfair the differences between classes are could be its own rant blogpost.
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| I still beat myself over accidentally dropping my Gellerhead Shield on a boat trip to Orbis. I'm never getting that one back. |
Fun fact: before Big Bang, Hero had a traditional dodge rate skill, with Guardian. While it counts as a dodge rate skill, we're talking about pre-Big Bang mediocre skill design, so don't expect anything great. It had to be used manually and required you to have a shield equipped. At max level it would only have a 15% chance to nullify incoming damage. This concept would later be reworked into Demon Slayer's 3rd Job passive skill Force Guard and Mikhail's signature Royal Guard because Nexon has shamefully never treated Mikhail as any more than a Hero bootleg.
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| In case you missed it in chapter 4.1, here's the original Hero skill tree again. |
Aside from Guardian, Hero shared all of its other defensive skills with Paladin, including Shield Mastery, Power Guard, and Achilles. Achilles was made available to other warriors, including Aran and Demon Slayer. With Big Bang, Nexon decided to change Paladin's class role from all-out attacker to sluggish tank, and by the Advance of the Union revamp, Nexon stripped away all of Hero's defensive skills and turned them into Paladin exclusive skills.
Achilles is still available on Aran/Demon Slayer, but no longer on Dark Knight. Imagine if you were the co-founder of staple skills with Paladin, but lost all of them while others continued to have them even to this very day. You can still find the roots from Hero's original skill tree in others, with Demon Slayer's Force Guard mirroring Shield Mastery's 3rd Job location, or Achilles and its reskins Hard Skin/High Defense (Demon Slayer/Aran, respectively) being on 4th Job. We got AFA and Combat Mastery in return though, so it wasn't all that bad. However, Hero still craves for a drain skill to offset our glass cannon design, as it is one of the few glass cannons without one...
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| Riddle me this, Batman! What do Hyper Skills, Evolving System and Dimension Invasion have in common? They were released on the same update, and they've been neglected ever since. So much in fact, that the latter two are gone now. |
Unfortunately, Hyper Skills met a similar fate to Beginner Skills.
6.1 Hyper? I hardly know 'er!
*This is one of the ways they keep certain classes in check during early levels, such as Ice/Lightning and the original KMS-exclusive Luminous.
6.2 Hyper Passives
6.3 Rage Uprising
*Rage Uprising's ease of use is greatly influenced by latency. Packet losses and bottlenecks are common, so in practice, it flows even worse than I am able to describe here. I would highly recommend to see this for yourself - especially if you were familiar with pre-Destiny, it wouldn't take long for you to notice something's off about post-Destiny Rage Uprising that wasn't really there prior to this revamp.
*This will be addressed with the Dreamer update, but that's two years after this revamp. Although back when the Combo Hookshot and Shout update was released in KMS, I saw Rage Uprising being used mid-air on video footage covering this very update. I don't know where that went.
6.4 Valhalla
But the most invaluable change to Valhalla is its new feature: Valhalla has become a mini Combo Instinct. Each time a "Swordsmanship" skill hits a target, it will spawn an afterimage that deals three separate attacks that do two lines of 370% damage each, up to 6 enemies each. Valhalla shares some of Combo Instinct and Final Attack's quirks:
6.4.1 Flash Slash died for this
*Ammunition is consumed blindly upon activation, regardless whether if the skill has hit the intended target (due to the aforementioned small hitbox), or whether if the skill is allowed to deal damage since Super Cast, Damage Reflect, Super Armor and Invincibility Bubbles are a thing. Since the afterimages are activated after Raging Blow, Valhalla will often miss when bosses teleport or move away. Not as reliable or practical as it should be.
Hyper Skills are really a product of its time. Sometimes I wonder why we still have it.
With Destiny reworking most of the Adventure's skill trees, and with Nexon's initial plan to revamp every class, this would've been the perfect opportunity to give Hyper Skills some much-needed improvements. Before 5th Job came out, Hyper Skills were released as an addition to 4th Job in 2012, allowing for classes to receive more perks, and in some cases seeing some smart ways to balance certain skills by having certain upgrades locked behind high level*.
Although while Hyper Skills are great in theory, it's been always lacking in execution. Especially in the Hyper Passives department. With only up to 5 Hyper Passive SP, players are forced to choose from a selection of upgrades that range from highly desirable to outright awful. Some classes don't have any good options, while others have way too many.
The initial 5 SP rule for Hyper Passives were made during a time when Level 200 was the max level, but that barrier has been broken four times already so there's no good reason to leave it at 5 SP. An alternate solution would be to consolidate different Hyper Passives of the same skill into one (i.e. combine all three Raging Blow into one), and give everyone five options of passives for five different skills instead (i.e. new ones, such as Incising). Ever since 5th Job came out, the neglected state of Hyper Skills became apparent. Because right now, Hyper Skills are no longer integral or an important extension to a class, and more like an obligation because they got never rid of it. A rudimentary organ.
If they were able to completely overhaul Hyper Stats as a shadow drop during the Reboot update by detaching it from Hyper Skills (in case you forgot about that) and making its own modular interface where Nexon adds or removes stats as they see fit (I'm still waiting for the dormant Sanity Resistance Hyper Stat). I don't see any reason why they couldn't overhaul Hyper Skills with Destiny, because Nexon was planning to rework every class from the ground up anyway.
No changes to Epic Adventure, by the way (aside from a new animation and sound effect), so I won't cover it.
With Destiny changing all of these 1st to 4th Job skills, you'd expect that a bunch of Hyper Passives would see an update because many skills no longer resemble what they were back in 2012. Did you know that in the past eleven years since we've had Hyper Skills, only one Hero Hyper Passive was changed into a different one?
Like Physical Training, Hyper Passives are a product of their time. Most of these perks are no longer as relevant or as good as they used to be. A great example is the Advanced Combo Attack Hyper Passive for double orb recharge.
If you are a seasoned reader on my blog, you would know that I'm an advocate for running ACA - Opportunity as one of the five Hyper Passives, because Combo Orb management is essential for maximizing damage output. Seeing as you'd cycle through orbs all the time, you want to make the most out of ACA. That was, until Destiny changed it.
Because Destiny fundamentally changes Combo Attack to provide you with a permanent max orb state without ever consuming them, there isn't a reason to run ACA - Opportunity anymore. Especially with the newly added effects of Valhalla and Sword of Burning Soul recharging Combo Attack fully with the press of a single button.
In an environment where you can only choose up to five Hyper Passives, having ACA - Opportunity go from an absolute necessity to a mere "nice-to-have" made it useless overnight. ACA - Boss Rush is our next best choice.
Currently, the best possible selection of Hyper Passives are:
- Advanced Combo Attack - Reinforce
- Advanced Combo Attack - Boss Rush
- Advanced Final Attack - Opportunity
- Raging Blow - Spread
- Raging Blow - Extra Strike
Further explanation on why can be found here, see chapter "Analyzing Hero's skills" → "Raging Blow".
Anyway, they should've put some effort in reworking most of the Hyper Skills. For starters, everyone should be allowed to have all Hyper Passives unlocked. There is really no good reason to stick with the 5 SP limit, especially not when Hyper Stats (and 5th Job used to) continue all the way to max level. Hyper Passives could also use some rework.
In Hero's case, they could've easily changed ACA - Opportunity and AFA - Ferocity into Hyper Passives for Incising instead, with Incising - Spread giving two additional targets and Incising - Extra Strike giving it one additional line. They should've incorporated ACA - Opportunity's stats into base ACA together with a 100% recharge rate as part of this revamp to begin with, since I still don't understand why they had to kneecap that with the RED revamp.
Come to think of it, you know what would've been a great idea for a Hyper Passive? To remove the cooldown of Flash Slash (→ chapter 3.3). Something as simple as that would got a long way...
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| It is never a question of whether Rage Uprising is useful. It is a question of whether it has the staying power to remain relevant. |
Rage Uprising is probably a prime example of Destiny's failure to equally distribute its attention, changes and quality. This revamp hasn't been kind to Rage Uprising. It's a cautionary tale on how easy it is for a single skill to lose almost all of its staying power when every other skill got something with Destiny that made it do the same things better.
Rage Uprising is a very simple skill that had three advantages over any other Hero skill: its speed received enough updates to keep it ahead of the competition, its damage output was staggering because it was included in our preferred Enhancement Core set-up and its distinct tall hitbox was useful at the time of release.
Unfortunately, for as simple as these advantages are, they are as easily taken away. If Rage Uprising's speed is cut short, if it its damage starts to lag behind or if its hitbox has to compete with others, its usefulness will melt like snow under the sun. As mentioned in chapter 5.2.2, Hero's skill tree is a balancing act that must always be handled with care, as delicate skills such as Rage Uprising are very prone to becoming surpassed by others.
And as you might have guessed: Destiny is predictable as it weakens the appeal of Rage Uprising in all the places it hurts the skill the most. Because other skills have been buffed way more than Rage Uprising, it sees itself outclassed in the three fields it had to excel at. It also doesn't help that RU can't activate CI or Valhalla (→ chapter 6.4).
Similar to Incising, for whatever reason, Rage Uprising's attack speed was changed with Destiny to become clunky. That thorough explanation I gave about gameplay flow in chapter 5.3 applies to Rage Uprising as well. RU just no longer flows well with our other skills*, and it just doesn't feel good to use anymore. And that's a shame considering it throws away years of careful fine-tuning. Like Incising, it used to be instantaneous and a perfect follow-up to Raging Blow. But its lackluster post-Destiny speed breaks the flow of combat, and that ruins its appeal.
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| The sides of the portal and the smoke effect of the explosion are not part of the hitbox. While tall, Rage Uprising's hitbox is surprisingly narrow. It is less wide than you'd expect. |
To make matters worse, RU's hitbox leaves a lot to be desired. Similar to Raging Blow, Rage Uprising suffers from a hitbox that's considerably smaller than what the animation would've suggested otherwise. Its hitbox is more or less unchanged, and that is starting to become a hindrance. As alluded to in chapter 4.3.2, the higher level, the larger the maps become, and the more thinly spread out monsters are. Whatever hitbox Rage Uprising has is not large enough to be effective in modern maps. If its hitbox were to match its animation, that would be better. But even if you were to do that, it still won't be enough, even if you would also restore its old gameplay flow and allow the skill to be used in mid-air. Because that is how dated Rage Uprising has become over the past couple of years.
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| The competition's tough. And all of them can be used way more often than Rage Uprising. |
Despite all of the complaints I've had for Flash Slash, Aura Blade, Raging Blow and Incising, these skills completely outperforms Rage Uprising in almost every practical situation. We're at a point where the hitbox of Raging Blow and Incising are that ridiculous, that they'll do whatever Rage Uprising can, but better. You can use these skills immediately after Flash Slash, War Leap or Upper Charge, allowing you to also position yourself more favorably in the map for your next attack. Rage Uprising can't be used in mid-air, so it'll always have to be used while standing on a surface. Hero's mobility performs at its best when you are constantly moving around the map like an unstoppable force. Having to stop to use a clunky skill like Rage Uprising pulls too hard on the brakes, and ironically this was not a problem pre-Destiny.
And if you think it still couldn't get worse for Rage Uprising, we haven't talked about Enhancement Cores yet. I'll delve further into this in chapter 7.10, but the gist of it is that because Valhalla became a more important inclusion than RU, it would lose out on the damage boost it needs unless you could afford the slots and shards for a second pair.
So, how on earth would you even fix Rage Uprising? That answer is simple, and if you've paid attention, you know the answer. Rage Uprising was released to fulfill a niche role that no other skill has. That is no longer the case, so it needs to find a new niche (a good example is how Paladin's Sanctuary incorporates Superstance), or one we no longer have. So yes, Rage Uprising should become an AoE like Shout. It already has that 10 second cooldown, so what it needs is a big buff in its hitbox to cover a lot of area in all directions; think Blitz Shield. Then, you would have to allow you to use that skill in mid-air*, and that would already solve most of the problems. And you know what's funny? That sounds a lot like Dark Knight's Hyper Skill. Gee Nexon, why was Dark Knight allowed to have Dark Synthesis overhauled with Destiny so that you could jump with the skill, but you forgot to apply the same change to Rage Uprising?
Also it's kind of interesting to see that Rage Uprising's animation became Soul Driver. It literally does the same thing where it drops multiple swords, with the addition of axes. Wait a minute... if Rage Uprising became part of the forced swordsmanship agenda, then why didn't they change the name? Why isn't this a "Swordsmanship" (→ chapter 6.4) skill? Heck, why were they so lazy that they couldn't even be bothered with to update the skill's sound effects?
Well then. Remember when I mentioned in chapter 4.4 that there were to winners in the Destiny update? In a stark contrast with Rage Uprising, the changes made to Valhalla are almost perfect. Just like with Self Recovery, it's really close in nailing what should've been done with the skill to elevate it to newer heights.
With the removal of Raging Blow's reliance on Valhalla and Sword of Burning Soul for maintaining Enhanced Raging Blow, Nexon had to go back to the drawing board. Because Enhanced Raging Blow is now inherently tied with Combo Attack, Nexon found the perfect solution: when casting Valhalla, you will now instantaneously receive all Combo Orbs, assuming Combo Attack is active. And that's not even the best parts about the new Valhalla.
Valhalla originally was a much smaller skill when it was released. Back when damage cap was a thing, it was catered towards increasing Hero's damage cap alongside Epic Adventure. Reflecting its smaller scope, its cooldown was a practical 90 seconds, while also giving you a 50 Attack boost, 100% Elemental Resistance and Status Effect immunity.
Now, Valhalla became bloated after a couple of updates because Nexon kept jamming new stats to Valhalla, such as the 30% Critical Rate, Superstance and the now defunct Raging Blow enhancement. The problem with this, is that all those extra stats would force the skill's cooldown to go from 90 to 210 (!) seconds, which they later reduced to 150 seconds. In the continued effort of improving burst cycles, Nexon improved Valhalla's cooldown to be in line with the current standard of 120 seconds. This means you'll now always have Valhalla ready for Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct (→ chapter 7.3), which is great. Still, I would prefer to see it back at 90 seconds, though.
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| Notice the yellow slashes that appears around Dusk's eye? Those are Valhalla's newly added afterimages. |
- Combo Instinct can only spawn rifts by using Raging Blow. Valhalla however has more options, as long as you use a skill that's labelled as a "Swordsmanship" skill: Brandish, Brave Slash, Raging Blow and Incising.
- Unlike Combo Instinct, you must hit a target with Valhalla for its afterimages to spawn. So you can't spawn afterimages with a "Swordsmanship" skill if there is no target in range, limiting Valhalla's flexibility as you can't spawnkill with it, like Combo Instinct or Sword Illusion are able to.
- Unlike Combo Instinct, afterimages are not spawned where the attacking skill was used, but where the target was hit instead. For stationary bosses, the afterimages are spawned in their "dead center". Dead center is the location where the game displays combat-related information such as damage lines and debuffs, but it's also the direction homing projectiles, Final Attack and players using hookshot are sent.
- Like Combo Instinct, afterimages have their own unique hitbox, but it is in fact smaller than Raging Blow. So the skill can miss the target if it is too far (or has moved) away, or if it has a disjointed hitbox. It's not like Final Attack, where it copies the hitbox of the attacking skill that activated it.
- Because the afterimages deal three separate attacks, it can defeat up to 18 enemies by itself. However, since afterimages cannot be spawned unless you hit a target with a Swordsmanship Skill, the actual total number of enemies you can defeat with a single attack will be much higher.
- Like Combo Instinct, Valhalla's afterimages cannot recharge Combo Orbs, it cannot activate Final Attack, but the target count can be increased (i.e. Pipsqueak Luminous and Inner Ability). However, unlike Combo Instinct, Valhalla's afterimages do not receive a higher line count with Ryude's Sword.
But what is perhaps the most important aspect of Valhalla's afterimages to be wary of, is that it does not provide an unlimited amount of afterimages while the skill is active. It's not like with Combo Instinct where you can hold down Raging Blow and have as many activations until the skill runs out. Valhalla has an ammunition count, and you'll only be able to activate its afterimages up to twelve times. So that's up to 72 additional lines every two minutes. This does also mean that Valhalla is much more punishing than Combo Instinct when you accidentally waste afterimages, which can happen because the game blindly activates Valhalla if a "Swordsmanship" skill lands any hit.
While I'm very happy to see Valhalla boost our damage output considerably, I'm not the largest fan of the ammunition count. It is very common to see afterimages go to waste*, and you'll burn through those twelve activations long before Valhalla expires. Remember when I said that the initial test server run proposed a much better revamp for Hero? Not only did it propose a much better Flash Slash than what we ended up getting, it also proposed a much better Valhalla.
During the first Tespia round, Valhalla would deal two separate attacks that did four lines of 500% damage each, and it had unlimited activations like Combo Instinct. Add an Enhancement Core with 3% per level, and you'd have a terrifying eight lines of 1400% damage each! Its cooldown would've been 150 seconds and it did not have the ability to recharge Combo Attack yet. But this Valhalla is so much better than what we ended up getting, and the more we look into how much Destiny butchered it, the uglier it gets. You can blame the dumpster fire of the KMS feedback forum for this one.
Valhalla was designed to be like this because Nexon wanted to improve Hero's performance, so they got rid of Combo Death Fault's ghost orbs (since Combo Attack would no longer consume orbs) in favor of making Valhalla an additional burst skill. I think that this decision was a really good one, as CDF's ghost orbs wasn't reliable as a buff because you had to sacrifice your invincibility frames for it, and the skill had to hit a target for the buff to activate. The buff was also awfully short. Valhalla's jaw-dropping burst output was so ridiculous that CDF's buff couldn't even come close to it.
Unfortunately, that dumpster fire of a forum was full of idiots. Instead of celebrating Valhalla's ascension to greatness, welcoming this huge improvement with open arms and demanding Nexon to keep this like any sane person would, the majority of reactions blasted Nexon for taking away CDF's ghost orbs for weeks. They hated this change so much that they flooded the forums by spamming the lying down emoji until Nexon caved in to their demands. This kneecapped any further civil discussion or feedback related to the entire revamp, as it would get lost in spam.
In round 2, Nexon reduced Valhalla's cooldown from 150 to 120 seconds to suit the unified burst cycles, but they had to cut its duration from 30 to 24 seconds and nerf the afterimages. It became two separate attacks that only did three lines of 420% damage each. They brought back the CDF buff, but apparently this change wasn't enough to satisfy the community because another round on the forum blasted Nexon again, accusing the development team for being lazy because they blindly reduced Valhalla's duration by 20% only because the cooldown was reduced by 20%, leaving the skill's duration at an awkward 24 seconds that doesn't play well with other (staple) skills' duration.
But seeing that Valhalla's burst output was almost halved at this point, Nexon rectified this for round 3 as they buffed the damage per line to 535%. Its duration and cooldown remained unchanged. However, the Enhancement Core for Valhalla dropped from 3% per level to 2%. I'm willing to chalk that one up to being a copy-paste-oversight because it replaces Panic's core, which had 3%. The nerf sucks, but the buffed base damage meant that a fully decked out round 3 Valhalla would do more or less the same damage as round 2. This was the final state of Valhalla in the test server.
While not as great as the original proposal, Valhalla would still hit like a truck. But as is with every other skill from this damn revamp, we just can't have nice things. Without warning, they absolutely gutted it with the official release. The ammunition count was added and paved the way for a 30 seconds duration. While the afterimages went from two sets to three, the damage per line dropped from 535% to 370%. None of these changes were included in a prior test server update, so it came out of nowhere. Valhalla's damage output went from jaw-dropping to meh in a mere three weeks. Combine that with that shitshow on the forums, and you end up with excruciating pain. What a way to disappoint, y'all.
But despite all of this, the afterimages of Valhalla are more than welcome. Sure, it might not be as powerful as Combo Instinct, but smart use of Valhalla will prove the skill to be invaluable. Because even ignoring the burst, the fact that Valhalla's cooldown went from 150 to 120 seconds also means we have Superstance more often*, and always ready for our next burst cycle. That is something that can't be understated. But if you ask me, they should get rid of that ammunition count. Twelve activations is just way too few for a skill with a cooldown of 2 minutes, and if they want to keep it, the damage output should go up drastically for these twelve activations. Its damage per line is nowhere near any of the Tespia rounds, as it's been overcorrected so much that even if we had unlimited activations, the damage per line is still only two-third compared to Valhalla's final state in Tespia, and only one-third of the original proposal.
It's just stupid that Nexon tried to cater to both sides of the debate by keeping CDF's ghost orbs and Valhalla's burst. They should've stayed with the initial proposal of Valhalla and remove CDF's ghost orbs all-together. Because believe it or not, Valhalla's not the only one that had a rough transition from Tespia to official release. CDF also ended up on the chopping block, details of which I'll discuss later in chapter 7.4. And you know what's ironic? The whole ordeal between Valhalla and CDF could've easily been solved or avoided, and it was possible to please both sides of the debate. Nexon just decided they didn't want to have both busted Tespia Valhalla and CDF's ghost orbs.
Here's a few annoying problems with Valhalla. I suspect that all of these have been exclusive to EMS/GMS, and weren't present in the Korean release, as otherwise these issues wouldn't have been around for this long.
If you die while Valhalla was still active, it floods the chat with the message Cry Valhalla has disappeared*. The less ammunition you have left, the more instances of this message will appear. No notification occurs if Valhalla expires.
Because of this bug, Valhalla has pretty much been unusable at way too many locations for almost a year now.
When this bug happens, the more afterimages you activate, the more your framerate is going to drop. Not even high-end PCs can avoid this issue, even when using the "1366x768 (Full Screen)" resolution with "Basic Numbers". In most cases, the framerate drop is noticeable but not significant enough to harm gameplay. However, at its worst, such as at Monster Park Extreme, the framerate is going to drop below 5 FPS, which is unacceptable.
Between Savior and New Age, it was not possible to use Valhalla anywhere for mobbing without tanking the client's performance. The New Age fix is better than nothing, but its still nowhere near good enough.
It's not necessarily related to maps that are heavy on the GPU. In example, the performance issues aren't really there at Urus (which is arguably the heaviest GPU-content in the game) or the many maps in Morass. However, maps like Guild Castle's Cache of Greed is almost as bad as Monster Park Extreme.
Now, here's the interesting question: why do these problems happen? I believe that is because Valhalla is a poorly optimized summon skill. If we look at the nuanced differences between Final Attack, Valhalla, Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct, Valhalla's behavior is surprisingly different from the rest:
- It doesn't activate Ryude or Final Attack, it cannot recharge Combo Orbs. The only other skills Hero has with this behavior are Sword of Burning Soul, Spider in Mirror and Crest of the Solar: all summons. This provides evidence that Valhalla's afterimages are in fact, summons, and not attacks like Combo Instinct.
- Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct are activated at the player's location, and they can be activated regardless if a target was hit. Valhalla's afterimages however, are only summoned when a target was hit, and these afterimages are spawned at the target's location. So each time you hit a target, the game has to generate an afterimage at a specified location with its own unique hitbox that will also do several separate attacks. Additionally, the game occasionally mirrors the afterimage's skill animation for variety's sake, so that also had to be programmed in. It is considerably more complex of a function than it needed to be.
- Unlike Sword of Burning Soul and Combo Instinct, Valhalla has an ammunition count. This means that each time Valhalla is used, the game has to keep track of how many attacks are left. Combined with the game having to calculate where to summon the afterimage, it causes a bottleneck on the client. Because remember, the client has to relay this information with the server all the time on top of everything else.
- Further evidence that proves Valhalla's afterimages are a summon are given by the aforementioned Cry Valhalla has disappeared messages. The only other skills where we receive a notification in chat are Sword of Burning Soul, Spider in Mirror and Crest of the Solar: all summon skills. We do not receive a notification for Combo Instinct or Aura Weapon. Even worse: Valhalla is our only skill to send repeated notifications if we die; it does not give any notifications if the skill expires, even with ammunition left.
The repeated notifications imply that there's something off about how Valhalla is programmed. I would almost go so far as expecting that the main reason why Valhalla tanks the client's performance is related to these notifications.
My best guess (and this is just pure speculation) is that each time afterimages are created, the memory allocation for this remains occupied until the skill ends. So instead of flushing the memory each time an afterimage ends, it just keeps on indefinitely stacking until Valhalla expires. As afterimages activate twice, you effectively get double the load.
So by the time you've activated Valhalla 12 times, 24 (skill) instances would occupy the game's memory. This theory could explain why, sometimes after using up all ammunition, the game's performance remains unplayable until the skill ends. It doesn't seem to be related to the afterimages, but rather how the game keeps track of the ammunition count.
And you know what's perhaps the most baffling part about this? If they designed Valhalla with unlimited afterimages like the original proposed post-Destiny Valhalla in Tespia, or if they just copy pasted either Sword of Burning Soul, or Combo Instinct, and modified this code into Valhalla, none of these issues probably would've happened.
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| Who would've thought that Memory Keeper would become the 5th Job instructor? A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. |
You are probably surprised to hear that Destiny, an update that presents itself as a full Adventure remaster, hardly does anything for 5th Job. Most of the changes were added in later, either during the Ignition update half a year later, or within smaller updates released in the next year between Savior and New Age.
Well yes but actually no. Most of Destiny's attention went to skills between 1st and 4th Job. Beginner, Hyper and 5th Job skills were sidelined because of that. And as you've read in previous chapters, if you only update 1st to 4th Job skills thoroughly but neglect to update the remainder on an equal amount, you're bound to create issues.
All of Hero's 5th Job were designed with its pre-Destiny state in mind. This resulted in a cohesive skill tree, as 5th Job would either provide classes with a logical expansion to their already existing toolkit, or double down on their strengths by catering to their needs. So, the unfortunate truth is that what was the right choice back then, may not necessarily apply now. If the direction of a class is fundamentally changed, then 5th Job needs to reflect this as well. Otherwise you'll end up with redundancy as seen with Aura Blade (→ chapter 4.3), or worse, Rage Uprising (→ chapter 6.3).
And this isn't just limited to the mechanical aspects of our skills; it also applies to the appearance and style of Hero skills. Destiny chooses a completely different art style, with softer edges, flashier colors but less color difference. Not everyone is going to be bothered by it, but you may notice some things like the six year difference between Sword of Burning Soul and Valhalla upon closer inspection, which is supposed to depict the same sword. It's kinda like how the appearance of NX clothes and hairstyles have changed over two decades. The old pre-Big Bang style was inspired by early 2000s manga and gave everything sharper edges and a black pixel outline. Nowadays they take the "KPOP boy band" approach where everything appears softer and has colored outlines instead. You can tell the difference without much effort by simply looking at them. They are not the same, and this is also true for Destiny's visual skill overhaul.
But I'm not going to cover every 5th Job skill, because not all have seen changes. I will however, examine how 5th Job behaves in relation to the rest that was changed, and also give some additional thoughts that are not related to this revamp (like what I did with Maple Warrior in chapter 5.7). In case of Aura Weapon, I've already explained how it conflicts with Aura Blade in chapter 4.3. For AW's change made between Savior and New Age, see chapter 7.8.
Look, I'll take whatever improvements we'll receive, even if they have to come much later. But I think it says a lot about the state of Destiny as a revamp once we realize that most of the significant changes made to 5th Job were postponed to future updates, with some released during the Ignition update (half a year later) and others fifteen (!) months later.
Hero's first 5th Job skill. How did Destiny's transition treat Sword of Burning Soul? Not bad; could've been worse.
As mentioned in chapter 6.2, activating Sobs will now instantly fully recharge Combo Attack. It is identical to Valhalla (→ chapter 6.4), but it's even better here. The instant recharge occurs every time you (re)cast the skill, although there currently is no practical application for this.
Personally I would've preferred to see Sword of Burning Soul's cooldown removed, or its duration become equal to its cooldown. That and to be able to cast the skill in mid-air. None of that happened with Destiny. Maybe later.
Three changes were made, however. Its hitbox has been improved (Destiny), stationary Sobs can no longer return to the player by itself (Ignition) and there's a new shortcut to immediately cast stationary Sobs (post-Savior).
Sobs was originally designed to have a feature for its stationary form. The skill would automatically return to the player and change into its default form if the player wandered too far away from where they installed it.
When it was released, this feature received criticism because you could never be too far away from Sobs. Three years later with the Glory update they would expand on how far away you could be from stationary Sobs. At this point, it can only return once it's no longer visible within your field of view. This hit a sweet spot, because it did have its merits.
You do not always want to have Sobs in its stationary form. The damage output is considerably lower than its standard form. Even if you aren't able to attack every second with default Sobs, it would still be way ahead of stationary. Unlike popular belief, attack speed does not matter for Sobs. The skill can only activate once every second, and Final Attack is able to activate it, so you'll never miss the timing because the server latency is incredibly forgiving.
In the past, you could quickly change stationary into standard Sobs by simply walking away. It was much quicker than having to press the skill key. Not to mention, you could still perform other actions. And because toggling now suffers from terrible latency, it takes forever for the game to register your input. Plus, toggling Sobs through its skill key costs MP, which prior to Destiny's Self Recovery changes (→ chapter 4.4) was a problem.
Unfortunately because Glory softened the threshold for stationary Sobs to return, it would be no longer possible to use this trick to its fullest potential because most boss maps are too small to even meet this requirement. But with Destiny, they removed this ability all-together, and no longer having the choice of utilizing this option is a significant downgrade.
The reason why this feature was removed is entirely because too many players complained about it. Few understood its value, and too many want to be lazy with it. However, those who are lazy are quite frankly, ill-informed. This feature existed for good reason. As you see, loading zones are a thing.
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| An easy observation anyone can do. Place stationary Sword of Burning Soul north in a map such as Sharp Cliff 4 (accessible through Maple Guide), then use the map's teleport to move south. Observe through Battle Analysis and your EXP gains that no monsters are killed when you exit the north loading zone, and that Sobs will only start defeating monsters once you teleport back. This is one of the oldest and easiest methods to observe, and confirm, the existence of loading zones in MapleStory. |
Summons seize to function if the player is not close enough to them. This is especially the case if you install stationary Sobs inside a different loading zone, which is more often relevant than you think. If you've been playing MapleStory for long enough, you are familiar with how the Mini Map displays other players and Hunter Portals. Sometimes they will temporarily disappear on the Mini Map*. This is because you've entered a different loading zone. Install any summon in a different loading zone than the zone you are currently in, and it will be disabled. Every map has different loading zones, and some map designs unfortunately lend for a terrible distribution of (unequally sized) loading zones. There's nothing you can do about it; it's just an inherent part of how the MapleStory engine was designed in the late 90s.
So keep in mind that when you use stationary Sobs beyond the now-defunct threshold, it might not do anything. Aside from reverse engineering the loading zones of any map in question, the only way to find out if a remote stationary Sobs does anything is by observing your EXP gains or Soul Weapon recharge, or by listening to the game's audio. The latter might also not always even be an option because volumes are affected by distance and have their own loading zones. And to give you an idea on how drastically different loading zones in maps can be: the now-defunct Dream Breaker has no loading zones (meaning you can install stationary Sobs to occupy a room of choice), despite that its contemporary Hungry Muto has at least three, and several high-end (weekly) boss maps have multiple.
Now, here's an interesting question: would it be possible for Nexon to reduce the amount of loading zones per map by increasing the average size of them? The answer to that is always yes. What I'm about to discuss is speculation, but I believe that the reason why loading zones are relatively small is because the 32 bit client couldn't handle larger zones. Since we now exclusively play on the 64 bit client, it should be possible to eliminate this problem. However, reworking loading zones for so many maps to address what is essentially a "skill issue" is not worth it.
But seeing as we can no longer change Sobs except by its skill key (or changing maps), we have to talk about one an awful universal change made to toggles that was implemented with Destiny. As alluded in chapters 3.2.3 and 5.5.3, all toggles now have a brief cooldown. Sobs, despite being a summon skill, is no exception to this rule.
Having this cooldown makes using stationary Sobs far more cumbersome than it should be, and in most cases it's not worth switching to stationary because it wastes time to do so. When you activate Sobs, it will always start in its default form, so if you casted it this way, you will need to spend two seconds to change to stationary. Knowing this, Nexon did try to address this problem between Savior and New Age. Emphasis on the word "try", as it doesn't address much.
By using the command input ↓ with the skill key, Sword of Burning Soul will start in its stationary form. For whatever reason, this shortcut will only work once, and it'll only work if you start Sobs this way. The command input doesn't do anything if Sword of Burning Soul was already active.
Honestly, when they announced this change back in Tespia, I expected the shortcut to work at all times. Like, you use the shortcut to start with stationary Sobs, then go to a different platform, use the shortcut again to relocate it. It makes less sense that it doesn't work this way, and that it exclusively only works at the start of the skill. Dammit Nexon, you were this close to something good again and yet somehow none of y'all realized that. Why does this keep happening?
Add insult to injury, the toggle skill cooldown goes both ways: if you used the shortcut to start with stationary Sobs, and you want to change it to standard, you are going to have to deal with the toggle cooldown nonetheless. And the irony is, if the community wasn't foolish to demand getting rid of the return feature, we would've had a workaround.
Nexon really should make Sobs an exception by removing its toggle cooldown, because as it currently stands, it only slows players down. It's just silly that this wasn't a problem for Sobs for years until Nexon, for whatever good reason, had to change this with the revamp. I'll simply ask: why? Add to that: why the half-assed command input?
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| Keep in mind that this comparison is for base Raging Blow. The difference is far more significant for ERB and Incising. |
In chapter 5.2.2 I've explained that Raging Blow is a crucial balancing tool for Hero's other skills. If the hitbox of RB becomes larger, it necessitates other skills to follow suit. Seeing as most of Destiny's skill changes do not properly adhere to this rule, it is no surprise to hear that Sword of Burning Soul is yet another example of where this happens.
When Sword of Burning Soul was released, Nexon made sure that its hitbox was longer and taller than Raging Blow. This made sure that Sobs would always be able to hit the same target, making it a very reliable bossing skill. It goes without saying that each time Raging Blow's hitbox is changed, Sobs needs to be adjusted accordingly.
The hitbox of standard Sobs isn't greater than post-Destiny Raging Blow's. The horizontal reach is longer than Raging Blow's, so at least they got that right. But its vertical hitbox is considerably shorter than (Enhanced) Raging Blow's, and that is a problem for grinding. You will often come across situations where RB is be able to clear two platforms, but Sobs can't*. This is not good, because we need that extra damage that Sobs provides. There's a good reason why the hitbox for Sobs used to always be greater than Raging Blow's. Maps are only becoming larger, y'know...
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| This is a great example of a little increase for a hitbox making all the difference. |
Stationary Sobs however, is pretty good. Its hitbox has become wider and taller. It's considerably taller than standard Sobs, and it'll comfortably clear multiple platforms under the right conditions. Although, I'll have to admit, the stationary hitbox does not reach far under the platform were it is placed. It would've helped the skill's appeal if it did. On top of that, if it didn't suffer from its newfound problems (chapter 7.2.1), using stationary Sobs could've been easier.
Because Nexon updated the hitbox for both Sobs forms, they've also updated its animation accordingly to reflect this change. Unfortunately, as mentioned in chapter 7.1, they didn't update its appearance. You see, Sword of Burning Soul used to depict the same sword as Valhalla. Seeing as they updated Valhalla with this revamp, you'd expect them to update Sword of Burning Soul too. Unfortunately, that did not happen, which is a missed opportunity.
But before I delve into that, I want to highlight a particular oddity that I have with post-Destiny CI. In chapter 6.4, I've mentioned that Valhalla introduces us to a new feature called "Swordsmanship", where all skills that are labelled as "Swordsmanship" are able to activate Valhalla. I think that this labelling system is a great addition and I want them to do more with it. At least, expand the list of what are considered "Swordsmanship" skills, because high-damage skills like Rage Uprising and Combo Death Fault could really use it.
I was surprised to see that they didn't use this "Swordsmanship" mechanic with Combo Instinct. It's weird to see that a skill like Valhalla can be activated by both Incising and Raging Blow, but Combo Instinct is still exclusive to RB.
Combo Instinct is a skill that greatly benefits from the several changes made to other skills during Destiny.
The orb consumption on skills such as Panic, Incising and Combo Death Fault proved to be detrimental for Hero's performance with Combo Instinct, as CI halves Combo Attack's recharge rate while it's active. Destiny got rid of the orb consumption, so you'll never lose orbs mid-burst, which also means you'll no longer lose out on Final Damage.
Before Destiny, Incising's short duration on its status effect meant you would have to reapply it during Combo Instinct. This would've required you to sacrifice a Combo Orb that you can't reclaim as easily due to CI's halved recharge rate (losing Final Damage in the process), and it would also force you to interrupt your own burst, which didn't make for the best gameplay loop. And if you forgot to reapply Panic before starting Combo Instinct, you would have to consume two orbs for that one as well. Because Destiny has increased Incising's duration, made Panic to reapply itself and removes the orb consumption for all Combo skills, it makes so much of a difference for Combo Instinct, by changing so little.
Ignition elevates Combo Instinct to newer heights by addressing its most apparent flaw: the four minute cooldown.
Cooldowns often reflects a skill's power. Combo Instinct's absurd damage output somewhat justifies a four minute cooldown. But it left a lot to be desired because you would rarely have the skill available for when you want it (i.e. Elite Bosses, Inferno Wolf and Mu Lung Dojo). There is a noticeable gap between burst cycles of different cooldowns, as this fast-paced game favors those with the shorter, more practical approach. Destiny's shift towards unifying all burst cycles to a two-minute format acknowledges this, as it aims to give a more even playing field between characters.
If you've read most of this blogpost so far, you might expect that Combo Instinct suffered the same fate as many other of Hero's skills. But to my pleasant surprise, what they did with Combo Instinct is more typical of Nexon's better days before the Pangyo truck protest incident in early 2021. Combo Instinct's cooldown has been halved from 240 seconds to 120 seconds, and its duration went from 30 seconds to 20. The damage per line has been reduced slightly, from 440% to 355% at Level 30. Basically, we get to have Combo Instinct way more often, and even for 10 more seconds.
I think that this change is fantastic. The duration of 20 seconds with a two minute cooldown is just the right amount, and the difference this brings was immediately noticeable when this change was implemented:
- For player-versus-player competition such as Mu Lung Dojo this meant you were no longer disadvantaged because you can now have three Combo Instinct bursts for the last couple of floors where it matters a lot, instead of only having one burst for those floors because of the old four minute cooldown.
- Due to maps having a lot of systems working independent from each other, such as Elites, Runes, Hunter Portals, Haste Boosters and Burning Fields, it creates an environment where a lot of randomized elements coexist. Some of these compete for Combo Instinct's attention. You could for instance spawn a Stormwing Hunter Portal and for that you might want to use CI to maximize your EXP gain, but that comes at the risk of having it on cooldown when you need it for an upcoming Elite Boss or Inferno Wolf. Shorter cooldowns means these punishing scenarios where necessary skills are on cooldown become less frequent.
- If you are clearing your (weekly) bosses back-to-back, it is all too common to not have CI available for the next boss where you might want to use it. In example, you want to skip most of Damien's Phase 2, so you burst with Combo Instinct to clear it. You then wouldn't have CI for another four minutes. You could risk your only Hell Gollux entry for the day, or do Lotus Phase 1 or Chaos Papulatus without burst. Even if you would make short work of these with CI, it just sucks to wait for the cooldown to run out *cough* 5th Job Holy Symbol *cough*, or you'd risk snowballing a run into failure. Having those shorter cooldowns (or none at all) just make for a better game experience, period.
Prior to Destiny, the skills Sword of Burning Soul, Valhalla and Combo Instinct were necessary for our mobility cycle.
The old mobility cycle was to maintain Enhanced Raging Blow, which in layman's terms is to give Raging Blow a larger hitbox with the intent of maximizing grinding performance. The effect of giving Raging Blow that larger hitbox was tied to having Sword of Burning Soul, Valhalla or Combo Instinct active, so without these skills, Raging Blow sucked.
Now, Destiny did fundamentally change how Enhanced Raging Blow is activated (→ chapter 5.2.1), so we no longer need to use Sword of Burning Soul, Valhalla and Combo Instinct during grind. However, there is still demand for some mobility cycle because of Grandis Force maps. As these monsters have ridiculous amounts of HP, players need all the damage they can get. But because Valhalla's and Combo Instinct's durations and cooldowns have been retrofitted for the two-minute burst cycle format, our mobility cycle is also changed.
The original mobility cycle was Sobs → Valhalla → Sobs → CI. The new mobility cycle is Sobs → Valhalla → CI, or Sobs → CI → Valhalla; depending on whichever you prefer (it doesn't really make much of a difference).
The main difference between the two cycles is that you no longer have to alternate between Valhalla and CI after each Sword of Burning Soul, and that you can use both of them back-to-back to sit out Sword of Burning Soul's cooldown.
Although there will be instances where you might not want to use Combo Instinct for mobbing, and that is because of the Extreme Inferno Wolf, which was introduced with the Ignition update.
Being able to kill the original Inferno Wolf was possible for too many players, so Nexon stealth-nerfed the system by forcing high level players to be sent to the new Extreme Inferno Wolf instead*, and then also shrunk the room's time limit from 30 seconds to a mere 20. Extreme Inferno Wolf's HP is absolutely ridiculous, and because Nexon refused to adjust the reward system, everyone redirected to Extreme Inferno Wolf got less rewards than before because they went from a Critical Damage rating to Moderate Damage or Significant Damage, depending on how strong they are.
I prefer to receive larger-sized reward pouches as they contain better loot, so I'm forced to keep Combo Instinct and not use it until Inferno Wolf spawns in. Even worse, because Extreme Inferno Wolf has so much HP, it can't be killed as soon as possible. This delays the reward distribution as everyone now has to wait until Inferno Wolf's hourly reset, instead of receiving them within a couple of minutes. As you can't enter another Inferno Wolf until after you've claimed these rewards, you will also see far less Inferno Wolf portals. Whereas before Ignition you'd see a consistent spawn of Inferno Wolf portals every few minutes, it has now become unreliable as it can take forever until the next. This also means everyone on the server will receive less pouches and EXP because they see less Inferno Wolf portals.
This brings a problem with saving Combo Instinct for Inferno Wolf: as you no longer know, or influence, when the next Inferno Wolf spawns in, you are forced to lose out on EXP, no matter what. If you use Combo Instinct to grind EXP, as mentioned in chapter 7.3.2: you will lose on precious Hunter Portal/Inferno Wolf EXP*. But if you saved it for Inferno Wolf, you will lose out on grind EXP. You are left with a grind that can't possibly be optimized to your liking.
One solution to this problem, at least on the side of Inferno Wolf, is to change its hourly reset into every five minutes. Another solution (and perhaps the best one) would be to just distribute the Inferno Wolf pouches at the exit, the same as what happens with Fritto's Hunter Portals. This wouldn't interfere with the hourly reset, and would allow players to enter Inferno Wolves as frequently as before the Ignition update.
But you know what's the worst part about Extreme Inferno Wolf? Less Inferno Wolf visits negatively affects the (daily) amount of cubes players will receive. They should've scaled the rewards up to compensate for the less frequent portals and the reduced pouch/EXP rewards, as whatever it is right now doesn't cut it. To give you an idea how poorly designed the current reward distribution is: a Level 300 character can receive less rewards than a Level 199 mule.
This is why Moderate Damage on the Extreme Inferno Wolf should give at least two Superior Hunter Pouches, and any higher ranking should provide even more. Because this kind of approach where changes fails to accommodate for every (type of) player is one of the reasons why we had the "suicide Kanna me(n)ta(lity)" to begin with.
If we look at the current state of Combo Instinct, it's clearly in the best state it's ever been. Aside from my minor nitpick regarding the undesired effect from having skills with cooldowns, there is one flaw left in Combo Instinct to fix.
When I originally covered Combo Instinct in its dedicated blogpost, I've mistakenly stated that Combo Instinct's three rifts each have identical hitboxes. This is not true, as the hitboxes are different, albeit the difference is miniscule.
In most cases, you are not going to see or notice the difference. However, that by itself is entirely dependent on the hitbox of your target. The smaller a hitbox, the more likely this can occur. And guess which location has an abundance of bosses with small hitboxes, and where you'll frequently want to use Combo Instinct? Mu Lung Dojo.
Some of the Dojo bosses are programmed to occasionally rush away from the player in the opposite direction you are facing, such as Leviathan. The easiest way to game the system is to use one of the oldest tricks in MapleStory's book: use Rush to push the boss into the corner of the map, and then have your back face the wall of the map so the boss will always rush into the corner, meaning it'll stay in range. In this technique however, do we experience the different hitboxes that Combo Instinct has. Leviathan hugging the Mu Lung Dojo walls in the opposite direction often means that one of the rifts can miss Leviathan. It's not an easy thing to notice with your own eyes, because of CI's visual clutter, but it is something you'll hear if you play with sound effects on. Combo Instinct's rifts will play a distinct sound effect thrice (one for each rift), and if one of the rifts miss, you'll hear that the rhythm of Combo Instinct is different.
Thankfully, this hitbox difference is a very easy thing to fix. Would be great if they did that. Surely, this is not going to be a problem that's going to grow worse after 6th Job, right? Right!?
I've consolidated these two skills into one chapter because the changes made to either skill are related to each other.
As explained in chapter 6.4.1, there was a back and forth regarding Combo Death Fault's ghost orbs. It was originally planned to remove the ghost orbs, and in return to buff Valhalla. That plan was discarded, so CDF remains the same. The only change that survived Tespia was the removal of CDF's Combo Orb cost.
With CDF becoming a traditional AoE without consuming Combo Orbs, you can now cast it regardless of the state of Combo Attack. But as I've described when this skill came out, if you wanted the additional Final Damage that the ghost orbs provide, you had to expend your invincibility frames for it. Or, if you wanted those invincibility frames, it was often at the cost of not having ghost orbs for more ideal scenarios. Sometimes you would have the opportunity to have both, but more often than not, one had to be sacrificed for the other.
Now, as Combo Orb consumption is no longer a thing, players gave feedback between Destiny and Ignition regarding the state of Sword Illusion. It was great for recharging Combo Orbs, but seeing as that's not longer relevant, its only benefit was that it hit hard. Here, a clever solution for both Combo Death Fault and Sword Illusion were found.
A very simple, yet effective change was made when Ignition arrived: CDF's ghost orbs are given to Sword Illusion. Excellent idea, this works really well. By moving the Final Damage to Sword Illusion, it allows players to save CDF for when they need it. We would no longer have to choose to sacrifice one or the other. We can have both now. Although it's important to know that Sword Illusion's Final Damage buff will only be given if Combo Attack is active.
Even better, Sword Illusion's Final Damage buff sees several improvements over its predecessor:
- They vastly improved the activation requirement for the ghost orbs: the buff will automatically apply upon skill activation. Previously, CDF would need to connect a hit with an eligible target. If there are no nearby monsters, like when a boss runs invincibility frames on certain attacks, CDF will not hit anything - meaning you won't get the buff. Imagine if they kept this "on-hit" requirement for Sword Illusion.
- With Sword Illusion having a much faster casting speed than CDF, we no longer unnecessarily lose the first (two) second(s) of the Final Damage buff because CDF's casting animation is simply too long for this.
- As Sword Illusion sports a longer cooldown than CDF, it justifies a longer buff duration for the ghost orbs. CDF's duration was only five seconds, which more than often was too short to make good use of. Sword Illusion upgrades it to eight seconds. Although because of Sword Illusion's cooldown, you won't be able to activate it as often (i.e. CDF could be used thrice every minute, Sword Illusion only twice). However, the longer duration is far more practical as it gives you more mileage out of other skills such as Combo Instinct.
Unfortunately, Combo Death Fault did not go through Ignition unscathed*, despite the split being in CDF's favor. You see, Combo Death Fault's cooldown was changed from 20 to 25 seconds. Nexon's justification was that "because CDF's utility and Hero's survivability increased, they inevitably had to increase its cooldown". I don't think this is a good argument, because they allowed CDF to be as it is for 5,5 years. Even when they added in Upper Charge, Leap Attack and modern Blink, CDF's cooldown was allowed to stay at 20 seconds. And the problems only start there.
I don't think that for experienced Hero mains the five seconds longer cooldown is going to matter when it comes to survivability. Movement skills, such as Upper Charge, Leap Attack and Blink have warped the game so much, that invincibility frames have become a luxury. Remember that these skills warped the game so much that they had to give every class the same movement options. Why bother to spend your invincibility frames when you have so many great movement options that does the same job, is more reliable, easier to use and has no cooldown?
However, the 25 second cooldown is noticeable*, and because Destiny butchers so much of Hero's toolkit and utility, having CDF less often is devastating. Because of the removal of Shout, because of Flash Slash's cooldown, because of RB's new hitbox making no tangible difference, because Aura Blade becoming far less useful later on, and because of the slower Incising and Rage Uprising, we need CDF's large hitbox now more than ever.
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| Eight years later, and Combo Death Fault's vertical hitbox still leaves a lot to be desired... |
Funnily enough, giving CDF a 25 second cooldown would've also been a perfect excuse to justify an update its hitbox so that it becomes full-screen. There are still many practical scenarios where CDF's lack of vertical reach makes it unable to clear maps. They also refused to adjust CDF's skill damage to offset the new cooldown.
So, while I may be positive about the improvements for Sword Illusion, I'm not all too fond of what Combo Death Fault got. If you ask me, the nerf to CDF was unnecessary. I understand the thought process, but I disagree on it. Whatever Nexon told us is not a strong argument, and increasing the CDF's cooldown brings far more problems than it's worth. They aimed to balance Hero's bossing, but in reality it hurt where Destiny tried to improve on: Hero's mobility.
I think that the actual reason why they nerfed CDF's cooldown is because a lot of players have complained for years that CDF's 20 second cooldown is way too good*. That sentiment is a dead giveaway to how poorly versed someone is on the subject matter. You should've seen how many non-Hero mains celebrated in the first round of Tespia, only because they read that CDF's ghost orbs were removed. Ha, if only these fools realized that the trade-off would've been a bonkers 8x1400% Valhalla (unlocked for free at Level 140) that would outdamage Level 30 Combo Instinct.
Oh, by the way: due to some poor English translation, the GMS skill description for Sword Illusion mentions the skill uses a combo orb. No you silly translation team, it doesn't. Not that the Korean one is any less misleading...
No changes were made to Body of Steel until one-and-a-half year after the Destiny revamp. With all of the changes made to other skills during either Destiny or Ignition, Body of Steel is one of the few skills that kinda needed a buff the most. And when it finally got an update, it did more harm than good.
Seeing how much of a glow up other 5th Job staple skills received, whatever happened to Body of Steel is a shame. Skill improvements for Erda Nova (chapter 7.6), Erda Shower (chapter 7.7) and Maple World Goddess' Blessing (chapter 7.8) have been so significant, that it's hard to fathom how they could fumble the bag with this one.
With the shift towards the two-minute burst format, many skills have been adjusted accordingly between Destiny and now. Many of Hero's other skills have adjusted to this two-minute format, although that has been a hit or miss.
Valhalla (→ chapter 6.4) has been grossly overcorrected to accommodate its two-minute cooldown, and arguably Combo Instinct (→ chapter 7.3) was the only skill to see its performance improve. Body of Steel, a skill that was mid to begin with, somehow got treated worse than Valhalla.
So, Body of Steel's cooldown has been halved to fit the current two-minute burst format. However, its already short duration has been cut in half too, meaning that at max level, you'll only have it for an awkward 18 seconds. That's simply too short for a lot of scenarios (not to mention the long casting time). It's too short for Monster Park Extreme, quick weekly boss runs or any bosses with a substantial runtime. It's also too short for the many burst skills of at least 20 seconds. I don't see a good reason why they couldn't have kept its 35 second duration with a two-minute cooldown. If Valhalla (Hyper Skill) is allowed to have Superstance for 30 seconds with a two-minute cooldown, then why had it to be different for Body of Steel (5th Job)? It's not like Body of Steel's effects are stronger than Valhalla's, anyway.
Body of Steel's main appeal was its half-minute Superstance. Everything else around it is unfortunately superfluous because the skill's duration has always been too short for the stacks and Status Resistance to matter. Cutting Body of Steel's duration to a measly 18 seconds only hinders the good parts about this skill.
In an attempt to accommodate halving its duration, Nexon reduced the maximum amount of stacks from 11 to 6, and buffed the Total Damage-per-stack from 3% to 6%. While this is an improvement, in practice it doesn't mean much. It doesn't address any of the inherent problems these stacks always had (as I've thoroughly explained here). You still need to get hit to receive a stack, the skill's duration is too short to get mileage out of it, and it remains in conflict with Scarring Sword (Panic). The stacks have never been a good idea; they should remove the stack gimmick and give the player a static damage boost immediately like Maple World Goddess' Blessing.
And if Nexon is adamant on keeping the stack system as it currently is, they have to rework how stacks are rewarded. There are so many practical situations that, for whatever reason, do not count towards a stack. Panic's blind (Scarring Sword) causes regular enemies to miss more often, most notable during Mu Lung Dojo. Certain boss attacks also do not count towards a stack. Damage over Time does not either. Body of Steel, a 5th Job skill FYI, is far more restrictive than a throwaway 3rd Job skill such as Combo Synergy, that also has a gimmick built around getting hit.
Honestly, I just find it hard to believe they had the gall to do this to Body of Steel after how poorly they handled the Stance distribution (→ chapter 5.8). The thing is, while Body of Steel has its niche, for a 5th Job skill it's been rather underwhelming. And yet somehow, instead of taking this golden opportunity to improve it and to compensate for the Stance distribution, they gutted Body of Steel where it hurt the most. In terms of Superstance usability, whatever good Valhalla brought us* is immediately cancelled out by Body of Steel's nerf. Why? Why would you do that?
Wow, what a glow up. Destiny might have been over two years ago for KMS at this point, but it can't be understated how much of an improvement the buffs for Erda Nova are. It is a perfect example of how Nexon is able to give a skill exactly the improvements it needs. This level of care and attention has been lacking lacking in both the Destiny and Ignition revamps. And it's a damn shame that what they did for Erda Nova used to be the norm.
So, what did they change about Erda Nova? Pretty much everything. All of what didn't work with the original skill was removed. The single target? Gone. The long ass cooldown? Gone. The awkward homing projectile? Gone. The awful casting speed? Gone. They Final Fantasy 14'd the skill and rebuilt it from scratch, with the only code from the original that remains being the skill ID, its name and the post-Awake failsafe where Erda Nova can't be used if there aren't any eligible targets in range. Not even the skill icon survived the nuke. In exchange, we got one of the finest 5th Job skills.
At Level 30, Erda Nova is now a solid AoE that can bind up to 10 enemies, with a very generous cooldown of only 100 seconds. The simple change of making Erda Nova behave like a normal AoE gives it all the skill properties it needed, and they even allow it to adhere to the two-minute burst cycle. There's not much else to say other than kudos, Nexon.
The only thing you have to be aware of, in terms of hitbox, Erda Nova isn't going to hit much underneath you. It'll only work if the monster hitboxes are tall enough, or if vertical platforms are close enough to each other.
But wait, there actually is more to say about it! Did you know that Erda Nova can deal damage on enemies under the effects of Super Cast? It's something I haven't seen other players talking about, but the ability to ignore Super Cast has always been extremely rare. Not many skills have it, and this kind of niche is the stuff of greatness. For how much Destiny seemed against niches within skills, Erda Nova is an exception to the rule.
Wait a minute... Remember that in chapter 5.4.1, I gave a history lesson on Magic Crash? I mentioned that towards the release of 5th Job, binds have fully replaced the need for Magic Crash. I just realized that Erda Nova being able to hit through Super Cast further proves how stupid Nexon's negligence on Magic Crash is. Man, this makes me even more upset because Erda Nova is available on every class (with a bigger hitbox and it applies damage, too). Sure, Erda Nova doesn't remove Super Cast, but sometimes being able to bypass it and deal damage is enough.
This bypass certainly has a place and it'll be faster than having to cast Magic Crash followed by an attacking skill. And no, before you ask, Erda Nova doesn't bypass Super Armor or Damage Reflect. This'll only work against Supercast.
And if you thought Erda Nova was impressive... wait until you see Erda Shower. The Ignition update changed what used to be a good skill into what is perhaps one of the best 5th Job skills. This same update added an additional mode: Erda Fountain. While this counterpart is far more popular, I dare say Erda Shower is the better option.
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| Notice that hitting 15 enemies with Erda Shower now drops its cooldown to 5 seconds. You know where I'm going with this. |
When Erda Shower was released, I rated it as a pretty good skill that has its uses. The skill does what it needs to do just right. It didn't break the game, and neither would it overshadow other AoEs in the game. I suppose you could call it a perfectly balanced skill. But the Ignition update decided to break this skill, as Erda Shower has been juiced up that much, that it's a better AoE than Combo Death Fault and has the potential (heh) to be without cooldown.
Erda Shower has been improved on three facets, and all of these contribute towards this skill's newfound power.
For starters, Erda Shower's hitbox has been drastically improved. It might not seem like much, but it's just enough in all directions to reach additional platforms it could not before. Even better, you can now use the skill while jumping!
For each enemy hit by Erda Shower, the skill's cooldown is now reduced by double the amount: two seconds. If you manage to hit fifteen monsters, the skill's cooldown is reduced by thirty (!) seconds. While that's not always going to be possible, the cooldown-reducing effect often drops the skill so much that it is ready more often than most other AoEs. Would I prefer to see a normal cooldown instead? Yes, as that would be more practical. But this works too.
And last, but certainly not least, Erda Shower's base cooldown is reduced from 45 to 40 seconds. With the right set-up, its cooldown can be reduced to 0 seconds, making it one of the most busted skills in the game. An AoE without cooldown; the likes of which we haven't seen since Big Bang. The return of the forgotten era of the Ultimates.
So basically, slap a lot of cooldown reduction on a character, and nuke 15 monsters with Erda Shower. Because the Mercedes Union grid effect and cooldown reduction Potential from hats are applied first, Erda Shower's own reduction is calculated after - that's how you drop the cooldown to zero. This is why they never should've allowed cooldown hats to work with 5th Job, because it tends to produce these kind of game-warping oddities.
And even if you don't have multiple cooldown reduction lines on your hat's Potential and Additional Potential, the skill is still incredibly powerful through its own cooldown reducing effect. Because monster respawns in maps take forever, you can still get one Erda Shower for each respawn cycle with only one or two lines on a hat. Even without the hat, you'll have Erda Shower at least once every two respawn cycles.
So, a few years ago I wouldn't have given Erda Shower priority over other 5th Job skills, but with these it is now one of the skills you want to have unlocked as early as possible. And ironically, because Destiny and Ignition has gutted so many classes, Erda Shower has become more important than ever.
But what baffles me the most about Erda Shower is the level of improvement it got, as other Hero skills didn't see any of that. Skills that are available on every class tend to be weaker than class exclusive skills - but with recent revamps being so negligence on many class exclusive skills, we're at a point where Erda Shower is even better than the likes of Rage Uprising and Combo Death Fault.
Anyone that tells you that you should use Erda Fountain over Erda Shower is wrong. No, I'm dead serious on that. Erda Shower completely outclasses Erda Fountain. The difference even worse when spawn modifiers are involved. There is almost no reason to use Erda Fountain, and even its hypothetical "ideal scenario" is a paradox.
But let me explain Erda Fountain first, because well... this skill is new and some explanation is warranted. Fountain is an alternate mode for Erda Shower, like what happened to Shout and Combo Force. By using the skill key with the command input ↓, you'll use Erda Fountain. And as you might have guessed: Erda Fountain suffers from all the same problems that plagued down-Shout and even modern Blink. It's almost as if Nexon didn't learn from these.
When Erda Fountain is activated, you'll install it as a stationary summon. Think Sword of Burning Soul. You can't install it in mid-air, and that does hinder its map coverage. Its duration and cooldown are equal: 60 seconds, but it shares its cooldown with Erda Shower. So as long as Erda Shower or Erda Fountain are on cooldown, you can't use either.
But there's a catch. Erda Fountain only does something under a certain condition: after defeating twelve enemies, your next (non-summon) attack will activate Erda Fountain. Furthermore, Erda Fountain's attack intervals have an unlisted cooldown of one second. Thus, there is a hard limit on how often you can activate Erda Fountain.
There also lies the inherent problem with Erda Fountain: activation. It is incredibly difficult to optimize Fountain's usage because you cannot control when it attacks. The skill will just blindly activate once the activation threshold is met. It doesn't care how many, or even if there are any monsters are in range. Because Erda Fountain always activates last, it cannot compete with regular attacking skills, including Erda Shower. This slow behavior means that the skill will only be at its best if you dedicate a portion of the map for an isolated Erda Shower to defeat monsters by itself.
Ignoring the matter of loading zones (→ chapter 7.2.1), using Erda Fountain as a "comfortable" way to clear the map is counterproductive, as far as the respawn mechanics are concerned. Maps respawn are forced to appear quicker if an entire map is cleared of mobs. This is why people used to grind in Mysterious Path 3 with a party (which by itself is worth an entire blogpost, as that influenced the creation of Kishin Shoukan/Frenzy Totem), or why Hoodoo's were so popular during the 3rd Job era. Erda Fountain is simply too slow to for this endeavor because it requires twelve kills. Furthermore, not only does it not activate often enough, it's also not going to provide many additional kills either.
Because if we were to optimize Erda Fountain's usage, we would first need to find the ideal map. For that we need to utilize all of the technical know-how about monster spawn density (MSD), a rather specific knowledge about the game surprisingly not researched or known by many. It's only known through observation and reverse-engineering.
- Not any large map will do; it must be a specific type. A tall map with at least half of its traversable height not used ("wasted air") so that it maximizes monster spawn density. It artificially makes the map larger in size than it really is, but it contributes to a higher maximum monster spawn capacity (MSC). Long hallway-styled maps are not always ideal because it is faster to move vertically than it is to move horizontally. Additional, consistent performance of 10+ MultiKO's should be taken into consideration as well.
- Narrow but tall enemies to force a larger amount of enemies-per-platform (EPP), because wider enemies occupy more space so less of them will appear per platform. Tall enemies are also much easier to hit.
- Because how monster respawning behaves, it encourages map design with the least amount of platforms possible. The game is designed in such a way where if you clear a platform of enemies, that same amount of enemies will respawn, but a portion of that number will respawn on a different platform. So, to avoid "respawn staleness" for specific platforms, you are expected to continuously clear every platform in the map consistently to keep each platform's EPP score fresh. This is why three to four major platforms within reach is ideal, and why remote platforms are undesirable (especially if you don't clear them often enough).
- The higher the MSC and EPP rates, the more it will benefit from spawn modifiers such as Frenzy Totem. The faster we can clear the map, the quicker we force the game to respawn enemies. The more consistent we can clear the entire map before the respawn occurs, the less we have to deal with "respawn staleness".
Once found the ideal map with a good MSD score*, we would then need to optimize our killing speed to feed Erda Fountain's activation requirement. We would need to be well-funded, run maximum attack speed, have Frenzy Totem and a cooldown hat so that we can have our AoEs as often as possible. Then you realize... this is actually a paradox.
When you try to optimize Erda Fountain, you actually make Erda Shower even better. At that point, with all of the ideal scenarios in play, Shower's cooldown would be at a point where it's always available. When that happens, Fountain will never be able to become better because Shower will continuously defeat 15 enemies instantly, whereas Fountain will always remained limited by its activation requirement and a lower amount of enemies hit.
The only time Erda Fountain "could" become better than Erda Shower is the hypothetical scenario where the game speed is powercrept to such an absurd degree where MapleStory becomes a high-octane fast paced action game. At that point, Erda Shower faces its own physical limitation: its cooldown can never be instantaneously reset (like what happens with cooldown skip) due to the trajectory speed of Shower's "cooldown orbs". But if we ever get to such a point in the distant future, the game's drastically different, so none of our current discussions would be relevant.
So if Nexon really wants to make Erda Fountain useful, they will either have to reduce the kill count and give it a buffer so that the skill waits until enemies are in range, or simply make the skill like stationary Sword of Burning Soul or Spider in Mirror where it'll attack at set intervals. Furthermore, Erda Fountain should have some use for bossing.
Comparing Erda Fountain to one of its predecessors, Battle Mage's Death skill, gives us further insight on how Erda Fountain can be improved to work against bosses. Battle Mage activates Death not only by defeating enemies, it also activates after hitting bosses a certain amount of times. I believe this would be a great addition for Erda Fountain. As it is however, Erda Fountain is lacking in every department where it should shine. Erda Shower is just the better choice.
The few places where Erda Fountain could outperform Erda Shower are few and far between. These do exist, and there are maps that have spots where Erda Fountain can be useful. But more often than not, these maps are subpar and you'd be better off picking a better one. You also need to keep in mind that because of its one minute cooldown, disconnecting or exiting the map (i.e. by queueing or Hunter Portal) will cancel the skill and you won't be able to use Erda Shower or Erda Fountain until its cooldown has run out.
Also, the following might not be relevant for everyone, but is still worth mentioning: Erda Fountain deals lower damage than Erda Shower because of its lower line count (6 → 4). This can make a difference to one shot. Because Fountain is a summon, it also loses out on a lot of effect activations that Erda Shower does have. For instance: Erda Fountain cannot apply Scarring Sword (→ chapter 4.2.3), and neither can it activate Ryude's Sword.
While Body of Steel didn't see any meaningful changes, both Maple World Goddess' Blessing and Aura Weapon have. The changes made to both skills are a good example that even small improvements can make all the difference.
Both skills were changed from traditional skills into ones with ammunition (a type of skill introduced in 2015 with Pink Bean's Blazing Yo-yo), which changes their behavior in a couple of ways. They are our only skills with built-in ammo.
For both skills, their 180 second cooldown are removed. This has been replaced by an ammunition regen, where you'll generate one skill every 180 seconds instead. You can only hold up to two Goddess' Blessings and Aura Weapons, and their respective durations of 60 and 140 remain unchanged*. It requires 6 minutes to fully prepare each skill.
Unfortunately, because of how ammunition skills inherently work, we can't say that we received "double the Blessings" without a trade, or that the current Maple World Goddess' Blessing and Aura Weapon are better in every scenario.
With the old Blessing and Aura Weapon, if their cooldown has run out, these skills were ready to be used whenever*. As all cooldowns are saved by the server's memory, you can disconnect, enter locations that either reset or disable your skills, and none of these would interfere with their cooldowns. If Blessing or Aura Weapon was off cooldown, it was off cooldown, so it could be used whenever you want. With built-in ammunition, this is no longer the case.
You see, built-in ammunition are not saved by the server's memory. Disconnecting will reset your stacks like what happens to Soul Weapons. So each time you disconnect, you'll lose all your Blessing and Aura Weapons, forcing you to wait three minutes to restore the skill once. Six minutes if you want to fully restore them. It is an unnecessary issue that you're now forced to deal with, and this will happen a lot.
Fortunately, event maps that reset buffs and Mu Lung Dojo do not reset these skills, and neither does dying. However, entering Urus will reset your stacks, so keep this in mind.
Not having stacks saved by the server's memory is usually not a problem for a lot of skills with ammunition (i.e. Kain), because most of these only require a few seconds. Having Blessing and Aura Weapon require three minutes however, greatly hinders their usage. It's kinda like with Self Skills on 5th Job. You can't simply relog without being forced to sit out their three minute cooldowns. What's worse is that cooldown reduction, resets and skips do not work with ammo.
I'm sure that most would call this nitpicking, but you'd be surprised how often you unwillingly dump your ammo stacks. It's unnecessary and it annoys me every time it happens. It's no different from crashing during grind and losing your Self Holy Symbol and House EXP buff. As we all know, the game has a habit of accusing players of botting. Losing once-per-day buffs and ammunition without compensation just sucks. It really needs to be better.
As long as you know these ins and outs that comes with the new Blessing and Aura Weapon, you should be fine. In general, the ability to store up to two Blessings is a substantial improvement as it gives you another full minute. In Aura Weapon's case, you'll now have it up indefinitely as long as you start with two stacks (although that's assuming without human error). I fail to understand however, why they just couldn't make Aura Weapon a normal buff without a cooldown*. It basically would have done the same as it does now, but without any of the stupid problems that ammo currently has. Also, why we are not allowed to use Aura Weapon or Blessing on pet auto buff is beyond me.
Although in either case, they come with the unfortunate jank that's inherent to ammunition skills. To be honest, this jank shouldn't exist. Really, think about it: why won't they allow us to keep ammunition and Soul Weapon upon logout?
My last point of concern about Blessing and Aura Weapon is a small one: the quick-slot interface is not clear enough when skill ammunitions are empty and have yet to prepare one. These slots should appear like skills that are on cooldown (where the quick slot is darkened) or skills that are currently unavailable (where the skill icon is grayed out).
Not much to say here, other than the fact that you can finally use Spider in Mirror and Crest of the Solar* in mid-air. Man, I don't get it why Rage Uprising can't be used in mid-air. It's OK for these and Erda Shower, so what gives?
But back on the change: this does help Spider in Mirror a lot. You see, even if the reach of Spider in Mirror's summon is really good, it's not infinite. Before you could use it in mid-air, there were situations where Spider in Mirror was just short on reaching enemies. Now we can install Spider in Mirror anywhere, and this opens up new opportunities.
Kind of weird how you are allowed to install Spider in Mirror in mid-air, but you aren't with Sword of Burning Soul and Erda Fountain... Is it too much to ask for some consistency with these rules?
But in either Spider in Mirror or Crest of the Solar's case, the ability to use it in mid-air is also beneficial for the initial explosion. As you can use it in mid-air, you can now use it with Upper Charge or War Leap to further extend its reach.
Because Panic was changed to Scarring Sword (→ chapter 4.2), it is no longer available on Enhancement Cores. All instances of Panic on Enhancement Cores are replaced by Valhalla.
Unfortunately, the changes made to Enhancement Cores were without transfer or compensation. So unless you had the Nodeshards, you'd had to break bank or grind your ass off. As everyone had to redo their notoriously-expensive Enhancement Cores in such short notice, it drove up the pricing for Nodestones even further. Keep in mind that we didn't know 6th Job was coming out until one-and-a-half year later. In hindsight, having 6th Job give out free Matrix slots to everyone only makes this situation worse because everyone that reworked their Enhancement Cores were screwed over by this change. Those affected paid for their perfect Enhancement Cores twice, myself included.
Having this forced upon everyone is just not a good thing, and it's one of the reasons why I've never been too keen on Enhancement Cores in the first place. At the time there was plenty of demand to soften the financial blow, and Nexon could've easily given us relief. But obviously, they couldn't be bothered to do that. And even if you had more than enough Nodeshards to spare, you'd still need to cut deep to craft a new pair of cores. Nobody was spared from this.
The reason why I mentioned this, is because Valhalla on an Enhancement Core is mandatory. Panic was rarely used in any set-up, so when this was changed to Valhalla, pretty much everyone had to redo their Enhancement Cores to include Valhalla, because 5th Job slots were limited until 6th Job came out almost two years later.
The ideal Enhancement Core has Raging Blow, Final Attack and Valhalla. As explained in chapter 6.3, Rage Uprising is replaced by Valhalla. If you wanted to keep RU, you would have to build a second pair of Enhancement Cores for Valhalla, and that's not always an option because they are expensive, not to mention the limited 5th Job slots.
Now, I did say that Valhalla is mandatory. That's because Valhalla's burst adds way too much damage, especially with the Enhancement Core boost. It makes a good skill even better. Then again... it's not like we have better options.
Weirdly enough, while the Enhancement Core for Valhalla boosts the damage of the afterimages, the bonus effect at Level 20 does not increase Valhalla's target count by one, but instead raises its Critical Rate by 5%. I believe that this is an oversight, as Valhalla is our only multi-target skill that does not receive the target +1 from Enhancement Cores. Remember that Valhalla is affected by other sources of +1 targets, so there's no reason for it to be 5% Critical Rate.
Remember when Big Bang addressed bad skill designs and blatantly false skill descriptions, and made Hero, a class that was already great, even better? Remember when Jump and Advance of the Union further refined Hero to greater heights? Remember when Nexon announced that the RED update stands for Revolution, Evolution, Delight, and delivered on that by redefining what a class overhaul should be like? Remember when Champions, Reboot and Heroes of Maple raised the bar even further? Remember when eight 5th Job waves added more fun toys to play with? Forget all the 13 years worth of good will that they've built up. Destiny hardly reinvents the wheel, it doesn't push the game to greater heights, it forgoes and undermines all of Nexon's own work, and it is offensively mid.
And even after writing all of this, I still feel like I haven't gone over everything. If you've looked at the Table of Contents, you know there are still chapters left. Basically, whatever that doesn't fit in previous chapters will be discussed now.
This revamp is a great example of being the opposite of the saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Because every skill sees a problem or two, it starts to add up once we assemble the complete picture.
I've given the skill changes released during Destiny one-and-a-half-year's worth of in-game testing, and the post-Ignition ones over a year. I believe I have spent more than enough time with this revamp to form a good conclusion. No matter how I look at it, I keep stumbling across growing pains that we didn't have before. I don't say this lightly.
Even though Destiny strived to improve Hero's mobility, the only thing it improved was our damage against bosses. Less time is wasted reapplying Panic and Incising, longer Raging Blow provides easier kiting, and both Valhalla and Combo Instinct perform better. On the other hand, Raging Blow's line count was butchered to a historic low.
For Hero's mobility, I don't have much positive stuff to say. It says a lot about a supposed "mobility-focused revamp" when time spent on runs in Monster Park or Maple Tour are unchanged with the new toolkit. I am not kidding here.
On average, both before and after Destiny, I clock 70 seconds at Monster Park, with lucky runs dipping to 60, and at worst 80. The reason why this hasn't changed is because the skills that do the heavy lifting are the same. Incising is still our most effective map-cleaner. The removal of Shout and Combo Force kills our consistency, meaning that any meaningful improvement Destiny made is directly offset by what it made worse. Hero is now unable to consistently clear all platforms; seeing a handful of monsters left at inconvenient places has now become commonplace. We lost the skills that would've prevented this, and their replacements are not good enough. They're all too inefficient.
And play-testing Monster Park Extreme doesn't give a positive look for our future. The height between platforms are way too much, and monsters are spread out too thinly. It screams for a vacuum skill like Combo Force to group them all together, or to use Combo Hookshot to quickly scale the map without cooldown. Lacking a good AoE like Shout doesn't help either, and Aura Blade's value is greatly diminished because it doesn't hit that many monsters and Monster Damage doesn't work there. Maps will only continue to grow larger, which has me concerned.
Ask yourself: is this kind of outcome desirable for a revamp? Any previous Hero revamps gave the class significant improvements. Destiny is a zero sum. That is simply not good enough for a revamp of this fanfare and caliber.
If Nexon refuses to address the root causes of our butchered mobility, there is, ironically, an easy way to fix some of it. So let's say, if we were to leave everything (awful) about post-Destiny Hero as it is, we have a golden solution: homing projectile. They are, for better or worse, one of the easiest and low-effort band-aid solutions to "fix" poorly designed class (*cough* Adele and Demon Avenger *cough*). At least that would help clearing hard-to-reach enemies. Wait a minute... Valhalla got wings, but they couldn't be arsed updating Sword of Burning Soul? The Damien-style homing sword writes itself!
From the community's side:
- The Pangyo truck protest incident in early 2021 was a bad idea. Whoever participated was far too naive and ignorant. The relationship between Nexon and the community has since further gone downhill.
- Without this incident, Nexon might not have been forced to rush updates and to hire a bunch of new employees that do not have the extensive knowledge (yet) required to run this game.
- Backlash towards Nexon has become more aggressive ever since, and also more common. It buries and draws attention away of any civil discussion. But well, this is the internet, I guess.
- The KMS community consists of far too inexperienced players without appropriate knowledge.
- It provides lackluster feedback, and that negatively influenced this revamp. When Flash Slash received a cooldown, or when Shout was removed, few players bat an eye. But when ghost orbs are removed on Combo Death Fault, way too many lost their damn mind.
- The community's obsession with powercreep and the sentiment between server types leaves a very narrow and limited discussion about the game.
- Feedback forums were a dumpster fire (i.e. Valhalla versus Combo Death Fault, chapter 6.4.1).
- Because MapleStory is incredibly old (and niche) for MMORPG standards, a lot of information is either lost, no longer easily accessible, or find itself held back by the many language barriers.
From Nexon's side:
- Nexon's company structure is optimized around maximum profit for the least amount of labor. Development teams for games are as small as possible, planning of updates are months in advance. This provides for a controlled environment, with a stable and consistent quality output. The protests have upset this balance.
- More staff has been hired, but there is a limit on how much work can be done at the same time. Additionally, new employees need to be trained on how to work with the old code.
- Less time is now assigned per update, and planning updates far ahead of time is no longer always an option. It's clear to see that content released starting Destiny has cut corners.
- The introduction of the Reboot servers meant that Nexon now has twice the workload. It is pretty much a completely different game, and yet it has to receive the same major updates as regular server.
- As evident by the Supreme server, it's just a matter of time before one server type will go, or have both merged. One of Supreme's biggest problems was handling class revamps. This is why LAB circumvented them by being an event, or why class rebirths never got past Tespia.
- Nexon clearly was unable to assess whether if they had the manpower to develop such a revamp.
- Not only did they admit it, they dropped their initial plans to update all classes to skeleton animation all-together after missing the mark with Destiny and Ignition.
- There was a lack of a clear direction for this revamp, which made it an incoherent mess.
- It wants to improve on Hero's mobility, but it fails to do so because of the removal of important toolkit skills, the sluggish behavior added to existing skills and the changes to skill cooldowns.
- It wants to introduce a new identity to Hero's appearance, while trying to keep Hero's other two characteristics. Because Nexon can't decide, the three identities now compete with each other.
- Nexon tried to overcompensate on weekly adjustments, while in reality only little change was needed.
- Flash Slash, Aura Blade and Valhalla were much better in the original Tespia rounds; they were gutted for the official release. If they stayed true to their initial proposition, Hero would've been improved. Instead, what we got was far different - and worse - from what was initially promised.
If you asked me what damned the Destiny revamp the most, it would be that Nexon had less time to figure things out.
The deadline for the release of this revamp was seemingly sacred; they didn't allow for delays. Because they hyped the deadline for the 27th of January 2022, there was only three weeks for Tespia, which clearly wasn't enough.
To reach this deadline, it's evident that they had to cut corners. And if I had to make an educative guess, they stopped consulting the past: crucial information about why classes and their skills are as they are. From all the changes made to Hero that I've experienced in the past thirteen years ever since 2010's Balance Patch, it's clear that in every revamp prior to Destiny, historical documents about class revamps were consulted and involved with decision-making.
But for whatever reason, they did not decide to consult this document enough when it comes to the Destiny revamp.
I can't tell you whether if it was due to a lack of time, or if this document has been lost, or if the new employees didn't care enough to seek advice from it. But fact is, there is a quality difference between previous revamps and Destiny.
Hero hasn't seen a revamp before where it missed the mark this much. Previous revamps had a good grasp on Hero as a class and would evolve it further, while respecting its history. It adhered to the saying "if it aint broke, don't fix it". At its worst, nerfs to certain skills would at least come with a worthy trade-off. Destiny has too few of this.
I do believe that there is a good foundation with Destiny, and that there are good ideas in here for the class to move forward. If you've paid attention to this blogpost, you are aware of that. But somewhere along the way, Nexon fumbled the bag. There are so many fundamental issues with this revamp, all of which I've described in painstaking detail.
And if anything... if Nexon lost their documentation on Hero's history, then here: I made sure everyone has one now.
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Slash Blast and Power Strike. 2010: Big Bang update. 2011: Jump and the Advance of the Union revamps. 2012: Champions revamp with Hyper Skills later that year. 2013: RED revamp together with 2020's release of Upper Charge and Leap Attack. 2022: Destiny revamp. |
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Corporate wants you to find the difference between our new skill icons. They're all the same. My problems with this revamp's all-consuming obsession with dyeing every Hero skill in orange accumulates to this very simple conclusion:
I genuinely have a hard time telling certain skill icons apart, for a multitude of reasons I will discuss in the next several chapters. It's important to note that a lack of visual clarity on skill icons is something many classes now struggle with, and is not just a problem that is exclusive to Hero.
Previously, Nexon made sure that every skill icon is distinct. From the skill icon alone, you could immediately tell which skill it was. This was mandatory because the Mastery Book and Skill Book system required it. Sure, even then not all skill icons were perfect; but they were distinct and unique enough so that there could be no confusion between them.
The thing is, even if I criticize Destiny's skill animations for being "a lot of the same", they could've still had proper skill icon designs that made it easy to tell them apart. They are not mutually exclusive. Poor skill icon design is a problem by itself and is regardless of the appearance of skills they represent.
To give further credit to the underappreciated composition of good skill icon design, some smart choices were lost in this revamp. Some of the new skill icons are simply awful. The worst examples are those that value their appearance at the cost of function. This achieves the opposite effect of what it's supposed to do. Sometimes, simple is just better.
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RED (2013) |
Destiny (2022) |
Combo Instinct |
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Also, for some reason, they forgot to update Combo Instinct's skill icon. It still depicts the old Enhanced Raging Blow. This is Advanced Combo Attack all over again, where it took KMS literally 14 years to update the skill icon despite they should've done that the first time after 7 years when they changed the orb design during RED in 2013.
Not all skills easily translate into skill icons without some extra help. This is why Nexon includes character silhouettes (a stickman figure, if you will), so that it explains the skill's functionality. However, for whatever reason, did Nexon get rid of several of these with the Destiny revamp - and none of that was for the better.
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Rage |
Spirit Blade |
Power Stance |
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Look at Rage. Any of these are perfect. From its simple skill icon design, you know exactly what it is. It also strikes the right amount of negative space, as the skill icon is not too busy. For its replacement Spirit Blade: it's accurate, but the removal of the character silhouette makes it harder to stand out from the rest. Essentially, Spirit Blade's skill icon (and animation) is too generic - one could mistake either as the (original) Power Stance, which is visually too similar.
Although, if you were to argue that adding a character silhouette to Spirit Blade's skill icon would make it identical to Power Stance - that is true. However, the main problem with Destiny's skill icons are with the active skill icons. Either way, if they just kept Rage as it was (seeing there was nothing wrong with it), we wouldn't have this discussion...
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| Once you see it, you can no longer unsee it... |
And no, the weird appearance of Spirit Blade's skill icon in this blogpost is not an error. I didn't realize this until working on this chapter's images (as late as January 2024). The skill icon from Spirit Blade is missing a single vertical row of pixels on the right side of the skill's border (notice the vertical row of white pixels). I double-checked the skill icon in-game, and I'm surprised I didn't catch it earlier. It really does appear like that in-game. How did this even happen?
This issue will be resolved with the Dreamer update, though. The disadvantage of taking forever to have this blogpost published, comes at the risk of having findings become outdated overnight. But at least it proves that Nexon was able to figure it out by themselves before reading this blogpost. I'd rather have that, than having to tell them myself.
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Enrage |
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Enrage arguably got the worst change when it comes to skill icons and (the lack, or removal of) character silhouettes. While I've praised its animation in chapter 5.5, its skill icon is awful compared to any of its predecessors. The removal of the character silhouette and Combo Orbs hurt. It's ironic that the new animation includes orb consumption (even if it's no longer a Combo skill) but isn't reflected on the skill icon, while before it was basically the opposite. It would have made more sense to keep the old style and update the skill icon with orange orbs. Now, it's incredibly difficult to tell whether if you have Enrage active or not as this skill icon sits next to others that appear too similar to each other.
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Leap Attack |
Monster Magnet |
Combo Force |
Flash Slash |
Falcon Dive |
Vortex Cross |
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Skill icons for movement skills such as Leap Attack and Flash Slash would be better with character silhouettes. There are many good examples of other movement skills that have them. In fact, there are too many, but I'll give you two. For Leap Attack, take Hayato's Falcon Dive as reference. For Flash Slash (and Aura Blade), you could place emphasis on its diagonal inputs to make it stand out from our other skill icons. Jett's Vortex Cross was a movement skill with several directions that did include a character silhouette. In case of Flash Slash, going from the distinctive Monster Magnet (a literal magnet) and Combo Force (a grappling hook with a rope) to just another generic orange skill icon doesn't help.
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Rush |
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Great skill icon designs are usually those that take the minimalistic approach. Instead of shrinking a skill's animation into a small icon, it's far more effective to only focus on a simplified depiction that will immediately capture the skill's essence or functionality, and to leave out as much bloat as possible. As explored in the previous chapter, the original skill icons for skills such as Rush and Monster Magnet aren't anywhere close to how the skills appear, yet at a glance these icons communicate so much by themselves. That's a sign of good icon design. Usually, the simpler, the better.
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Raging Blow |
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For instance, a skill icon that has remained perfect is Raging Blow. While it omits some of its appearance and detail, it just relays enough information with what's shown. You don't need the full picture. I would even say that Destiny's skill icon is an improvement over the original, because it's the only skill icon that we have that's facing to the right.
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Incising |
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Another example. Incising is almost perfect. While I feel its depiction is perhaps too intricate and needs some clarity inside and around the sword (by adding more negative space, see old Incising/RB icons), it does stand out among our other skill icons because it's the only one that's pointing towards the bottom left corner at a steep 45-degree angle.
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Magic Crash |
Upper Charge (2020) |
Upper Charge (Destiny) |
Scarring Sword |
Valhalla |
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Sharp Eyes |
Combat Orders |
Speed Infusion |
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Generally speaking, the more accurate a skill is depicted in a skill icon, the worse it is. Overly detailed or intricate skill icons are a no-go, unless they are already distinct enough to stand out, such as Magic Crash (which is fine by me).
- Upper Charge is too intricate, and it lacks well-defined edges on the sword (compare it with the edges on Paladin's hammer). The older skill icon, or the new one for Swordsman (yes, they made one), is far better.
- Scarring Sword contains far too many edges for its size, it should've been simplified further. It also does not need the circle drawn around it, as it barely appears in the skill's animation. Too similar to Combat Orders.
- Valhalla is not only too intricate, it also removed way too much color and contrast. The original was fine, as it stuck to the essence of the skill's appearance: the center mass of the sword. The post-Destiny one not only tries to cram too much detail into one skill icon, it also doesn't have the highlights from the animation (such as the colored gem or the darker hilt) that could help this skill icon to stand out.
- Optional, but staple choices in many builds: Sharp Eyes, Combat Orders and Speed Infusion are awful.
- Sharp Eyes at first had a better icon, because it stuck to the essence of the skill's appearance: the big eye. The newer skill icon crams in too much of the skill's animation into the small frame.
- Combat Orders has the same issues as Sharp Eyes. The original skill icon is better because it focuses on the rising emblem that appears at the start of its animation.
- Speed Infusion's older skill icon had multiple character silhouettes appear because it is a party skill. The newer icon tries to depict the animation, but it's far too messy and off-center.
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However, this advice is not always enough. In Destiny's case, there are several skill icons that have the right amount of simplicity to them and they would communicate enough in a vacuum. But because so many skills appear similar, so do their skill icons when placed side-by-side. In such cases, more should be done to further distinct them. They are:
- Slash Blast, Leap Attack, Brandish, Flash Slash and Aura Blade
- Scarring Sword, Valhalla, Enrage and Crest of the Solar
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Once we throw all the skill icons together, the problems explained in the previous chapters amplify each other. Toss all of these skill icons on your quick slots and notes; you can't tell the difference. Look at your active buffs, it's a mess.
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Previously, it was easy to tell skills apart, but because everything looks the same now, that no longer is the case. This is even worse once we factor in 5th Job and other common skills, as a large amount of Hero's skill icons have become too similar in appearance to pre-existing skill icons (i.e. CDF, Sword Illusion, AW, Blitz Shield, Potential Skills).
It's silly how most of these issues would've been avoided if they kept the old Hero color coding. To recolor both Flash Slash and Scarring Sword blue and both Advanced Combo Attack and Enrage pink would solve so much. Heck, take a page out of Aura Weapon: add some contrast. But if they want to keep the orange, they should try out different hues.
During bossing or combat, you won't have time to be messing around with reading skill icons. At a glance, they must be clear immediately. This was true for most of the older skill icons. With the newer ones, I've had plenty of times where I can't tell whether Enrage was active, or what skill alarm (→ chapter 8.3) went off. And with so many modern skill icons reshuffling the order of skill icons, the top right corner has become a cluttered unreadable mess.
The lack of updates to the active skill icon interface has gotten to a point where it's becoming bad game design. In terms of basic functionality or clarity, it's starting to leave a lot to be desired. Even if they improved and reorganized it, it still won't be enough to make up for the declining quality in skill icon designs. Enrage was our only pinkish skill icon (alongside T&C). You could immediately tell if it was active or not. Panic and Combo Force were blue, Shout had its tiger, Rage Uprising had its black background to aid visual clarity. Every attacking skill icon was distinct enough.
Now, one could confuse Self Combat Orders with Crest of the Solar, Scarring Sword, Spirit Blade and Enrage. Or Flash Slash with Slash Blast, Leap Attack, Brandish or Aura Blade. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
It's been two years since the Destiny revamp came out in KMS, and I still struggle with getting used to it. This is yet another reason not to run any other fullscreen resolution combination other than the old 1366 x 768 together with not changing the user interface size, as anything else makes the game look blurry and the skill icons even less readable.
The Skill Alarm feature is a much welcomed addition to Maple's user interface, released with Destiny. Something like this has been overdue. GMS dubs it the "Note system", and I find that to be a poor non-descriptive translation. It even conflicts with the actual note system that some versions of Maple have, where players can send personal messages through notes. EMS used to have it, but they got rid of it during the migration. Anyway, I digress.
The Skill Alarm feature allows you to receive notifications for skills that have ran their cooldowns. A pop-up notification with sound will appear when this happens. You can have up to six alarms, but they'll all appear and sound identical.
Unfortunately, as this system is relatively new, its use is limited (hopefully they'll expand it at some point):
- Only supports the traditional active skills with a cooldown; does not support passive skills with cooldown.
- Skills with selectable modes (i.e. Bishop, Xenon): only applies to the most recent and active selection*.
- Will not apply to active skills with a cooldown of less than 3 seconds (i.e. Paladin's Mighty Mjolnir).
- Will not notify you for the passive cooldowns on active skills; only the cooldown for active skills.
- Will not notify you for regenerating skill ammunition (i.e. Maple World Goddess' Blessing).
- Will not notify you for secondary or tertiary cooldowns (i.e. Viper's Sea Serpent).
If you ask me, Skill Alarms could've used different colors and sound pitches for each alarm, because as it currently is, you can only tell the difference through the skill icons. Which uhm, as you've read in chapter 8.2, not gonna happen.
I also find six slots for the Skill Alarms to be on the low side. You have to make some choices here, as we can't have a Skill Alarm for every secondary or tertiary attacking skill. I'm currently running alarms for Aura Blade, Flash Slash, Blink, Blitz Shield, CDF and Sword Illusion. For that selection, I had to sacrifice Rage Uprising and Erda Shower. Personally I would've preferred to have unlimited slots. Classes like Evan, Cadena, Ark and Zero need a lot of them.
By the way, if you cooldown skip a skill that has an alarm set for it, it will play that notification. Although I have to say, because the notifications (and sounds) are identical for all skill alarms, it's difficult to keep up with them if you use it for a lot of skills with short cooldowns. That's also why having different alarm sounds and pop-ups would help a lot.
Remember when Hero had the ability to wear multiple weapons? Nexon clearly still does, as evident by the new animations for Rage Uprising and Enrage. And yet, they seem to simply have stopped caring for axe animations.
For their push towards a visual make-over, they sure as hell dropped the ball in the animation department. Because let me tell you something: they didn't bother giving additional animations for important skills, despite they used to do that.
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Before Big Bang, Brandish had a different animation for one-handed and two-handed weapons. This includes the character moving differently, like what happens with base Raging Blow (modelled after two-handed Brandish) and its Enhanced version (modelled after Brave Slash).
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For Brave Slash and (Enhanced) Raging Blow, they added a separate animation for axe users in later updates. At this point however, Brandish lost its distinct animation between one-handed and two-handed weapons, and had only one.
But ever since 5th Job, someone at the animation department stopped caring. We don't see axe animations for skills like Sword of Burning Soul, Sword Illusion or Combo Death Fault. The same applies to Paladin as well: it used to have different animations for swords and blunt weapons, but has become hammers-only since 5th Job as well.
Because Destiny replaces all of our previous skill animations, all of the additional animations for Brave Slash and Raging Blow are removed. If you liked this attention to detail... tough luck. I'm somewhat baffled by Nexon's laziness, because they used to be consistent about it for way longer than they haven't.
Look, as a sword guy, I understand that the love for axes are niche. But it's difficult to ignore the fact that they used to at least give additional animations for important skills. There's a valid argument to be made that skills like post-RED Panic never received any axe animations, but then I should remind you that Panic used to have ten animations before they even did any skill balancing at all. To include extra animations is not a lot of effort on Nexon's end. Look no further than the long history of Nexon kitbashing sprites, which could warrant its own blogpost. Or, take a look at post-Destiny base Raging Blow (→ chapter 5.2.3). Point being, there's no argument to be made in favor of this laziness.
The way they handled this just feels like the bare minimum. Considering that Nexon admitted they were short-staffed at the time for this revamp, it's no surprise. However, it's been two years now. Such argument doesn't last forever.
My coverage of the Destiny revamp is perhaps not complete if I didn't mention the inclusion of a voice actor for Hero. Only the skills that are exclusive to Hero (with the exceptions being Magic Crash and Rush) have voice lines for them. Every skill with voice lines has between two and five different lines, most of which are shared with others.
Ever since its introduction in 2012, MapleStory's English voice acting has been a controversial topic. I would admit that the quality of the English acting was... subpar at best (complete with cheap microphone quality). However, for the past couple of years, I have been positive about recent improvements to the quality of Maple's English voice acting.
The voice acting for all the major story chapters as of recent has been consistently good. Some English voice actors, for characters as Hawkeye, Brighton, Grendel and Carlisle, are fantastic, in my opinion. Although with so many classes requiring an unique voice, it comes with many new voice actors, and not all of them have been good.
But you might be surprised to hear that I'm happy with whoever did the male English voice acting for Hero. It falls under the category "it's so bad, it's actually good". There are so many VA's in the Destiny revamp where their tone, intonation and delivery falls flat, and is void of life. But in that sea of mediocrity, comes the Hero's male VA with all the ham and hoarseness. While I certainly prefer the original or Japanese, I can't get enough of the English one either.
If only they could include an option to change between different languages for the voice acting... that would be great. Strangely enough, there are some voice lines exclusive to Brandish and Brave Slash. So, once you have Raging Blow, you're probably never going to hear these again. That's a shame, as I find these to be among the better lines. Perhaps they can be added to Raging Blow, which would help to add some variety to what voice lines are said when using RB.
The legacy of both Destiny and Ignition are not a good sign for the game's future. For all the complaints that I've given about Nexon removing staple skills from Hero that we used to run for over a decade, this type of poor decision making is not exclusive to Hero. In fact, this level of regressive decision making permeates in every aspect of the game now.
Employees come and go within the company, but as I've explained in chapter 8.1, documentation is always left behind by predecessors, so that it can be passed down to newer employees. If certain mistakes were made in the past, it was far less likely to ever happen again. If a decision was made, "why" is documented. Staple skills, game mechanics, the removal or introduction of content, what worked, what didn't and why it didn't - all of it. This "book of infinite wisdom" is necessary to keep a long-running game afloat, as without it, there is no solid direction for future updates.
But as I've also explained in chapter 8.1, Nexon no longer has the required manpower for updates. This means that shortcuts have to be made, and Nexon is not the type of company that excels at making short-term decisions. If they have to make shortcuts, Quality Assurance (QA) is usually one of the first things to go. And that is what happened.
Anything released since Destiny that isn't a simple quality of life improvement, has seen a clear decline in overall quality. QA isn't as sharp as it used to be, and that is evident with the resurrection of an old exploit: Instant Death.
At the time of writing, the exploit still worked, but it was fixed in May 2023, the same month I wrapped up writing.
To give an explanation: Instant Death is an old mechanic that would, instantly kill an enemy. It used to be commonly available, most notably Adventure Rings. Back then, the damage cap was only 100k, so Instant Death was a bit too good to be true once Nexon started to introduce higher-health enemies (most notably event monsters that could be killed by Instant Death). Because it warped the game that much, Nexon got rid of it and introduced Instant Death immunity. This immunity has been duct-taped on everything-that-is-not-a-normal-monster ever since, to ensure we'll never have a repeat of that era again. Basically, Instant Death immunity was standard QA procedure. Until Destiny.
For months, Instant Death worked in Monster Park Extreme (released with the Ignition update). It wouldn't kill Extreme Bigfoot, but as it did work against Mysterious Jackalope, anyone can just casually obtain Kurama's Claw* and trivialize the in-between rounds. This exploit has also been heavily abused in Punch King, and the fact that this problem kept coming back shows how sloppy Nexon has been lately. That's not to say what else might return.
But you know what? Old bugs and exploits returning can be fixed. What was far more damning about Destiny and Ignition was the lukewarm reception for both revamps. It's what killed Nexon's drive to continue their initial plan to update all the old classes*. As the game shifts from CPU-based content to GPU, replacing everything to skeleton animation is the future. This was the main reason to do these revamps, as they can do far more with GPU.
Thankfully, not all is doom and gloom. There have been plenty of signs that Nexon did learn from Destiny, because they downscaled their workload with Ignition. They only needed to convert everything to skeleton animation, and that is what Ignition mainly did. But this is also why I don't understand why Nexon didn't opt to do another rework with the Savior update. Perhaps they just haven't sorted out how to deal with the required workload. But that also brings the problem that, at this current rate, it's going to take years for them to convert the remaining classes. And because Union will become their next major income (as is inevitable with all MMORPGs), they can't indefinitely delay that.
Also, it's probably worth mentioning that ever since Destiny came out, the amount of adjustments to Hero have been few and far between. There have been a lot of smaller updates that include rectifications for Destiny's and Ignition's revamps, and the majority have skipped Hero entirely. So yes, we're lagging behind the others right now. It's not good. Somewhere I hope that this blogpost is able to get Nexon back to work and start giving us some fixes too, y'know.
I just don't get it. I don't get why so many people believe post-Destiny Hero is better. It's clearly not. I don't get why Nexon thought that the swordsmanship motif was the way to go, and neither do I understand why they changed so much from their original proposition. That one would've at least improved Hero on some ways, despite the trade-offs.
The only logical reason I can come up with to make any sense of it, is that both the community and Nexon themselves are at a point where they lack the knowledge, awareness and experience to come to the same conclusion as I have. But even this deductive reasoning doesn't hold up against scrutiny. Has everyone grown this complacent?
There's a reason why we have the saying "too much of a good thing". They tried to do too much with the revamp. More than what they could handle in such a short amount of time. And in fact, I would go as far as saying that a lot of these changes weren't even necessary. They didn't need to change Hero's motif. They didn't need to change Combo Attack's appearance. They didn't need to reskin and rename most of our skills to fit the new swordsmanship agenda. They didn't need to replace Shout with Aura Blade, and they didn't need to remove Combo Attack's orb consumption.
This is what sets Destiny apart from Big Bang and RED. The latter two strived to improve Hero, but would also get rid of stuff that simply didn't work. Destiny however, tries to change too much of Hero, and especially made changes without understanding what made Hero's skill tree work. All what Destiny really needed to do was to improve on Enhanced Raging Blow's uptime, make Combo Hookshot less janky, and improve on underperforming skills such as Combo Force, Self Recovery, Magic Crash and Power Stance. We really didn't need more than that.
But the more they tampered with the class, including the many Tespia revisions on the Destiny template, the worse it got. Look at Aura Blade, Valhalla, or the state of Combo Attack. It's a shame really, because all that time trying to add band-aid solutions to a class that didn't need it, could've been better spent in revamping the other classes who need it far more than we do*. And even then, for the mess they made out of Hero, there are so many simple fixes that would go a long way. Yet, there's been far too few of those updates, or even attempts, in the past two years since Destiny.
And when it comes to utilizing the newest mechanics in the game, Destiny barely uses any of it. From a technological standpoint, Destiny is lacking. Whereas other revamps tried to revolutionize things, Destiny played it far too safe, and barely does anything interesting with the currently available tools*. We now have things we couldn't do ten years ago, such as secondary and tertiary cooldowns, skill damage scaling per level, ammunition, auto-toggles, or effects when skills are on cooldown. Wouldn't it have been far more exciting if this revamp tried to push the boundaries?
What I probably dislike the most about this revamp is that whoever worked on these classes, decided to partially forgo the typical MapleStory class identities that made them stand out*. It doesn't choose to go all-out on the new, nor stick with the old. They turned Hero into stereotypical swordsman, that keeps random bits and pieces from its old identity. It doesn't work. What made MapleStory's Hero stand out from other games, was that it made no sense. The rage motif, Combo Attack with orb consumptions - that is MapleStory's Hero, not "generic swordsman" found everywhere else.
It's even worse for other classes, if you ask me. Paladin going from elemental attacker to elemental tank, to losing all of its elements except for Holy is another example of going from unique, to flat-out generic. Captain summoning the Nautilus fauna (Gaviota and Octopi) alongside battling in a miniature pirate ship, turning into a generic gunslinger that summons (now nameless) crew and (now unmanned) boats just doesn't feel the same. The wackiness of MapleStory is what makes it unique, and I feel like Nexon should embrace and incorporate that more. They still do this from time to time, but that's less found in class identities now than it has ever been, and it's nowadays found elsewhere.
What is even weirder about that forced swordsmanship identity is once you realize that it makes Hero more like Soul Master in appearance, with the emphasis on a yellowish tone in color and soul swords in skill animations. Whereas Soul Master faces an identity crisis since Cygnus Returns because its skills and motifs have little to do with its class name, and is more in line with "Dawn Warrior" (the shitty and unnecessary class renaming that's only used for GMS). And seeing how Soul Master was originally a bootleg Hero (the likes of which Mikhail is today), it's off-putting to see this switcheroo. But seeing as this was a decade ago, the current outcome is probably an unintentional coincidence.
It's a shame that the main selling point of Destiny and Ignition (the revamps) were such a disappointment to many. Because if we were to ignore those revamps for a bit; the rest of the updates were actually really good. Most notably, Ignition's massive EXP rewards for doing Grandis dailies and Monster Park Extreme are unheard of. Alongside many quality of life improvements, such as the removal of Elite Boss killstealing and new Hunter Portals. If anything, the QoL and new story chapters were the true reasons to be excited for these updates.
And that's pretty much most of what I have to say about the Destiny revamp. Unfortunately, getting all of it on paper in such an organized manner took me almost two years to do so. Despite that I'm able to process this amount of info in a matter of only several hours (as what you've read now were my conclusions from two years ago), it's so much stuff that it's hard to get it all on paper within a reasonable amount of time. I'm simply not that capable of publishing articles that fast, which also makes it impossible to ever share all of my MapleStory knowledge. If working on this blogpost is anything to judge by, it would take at least 150 years to get most of that on paper.
I started writing this blogpost in July 2022, when Destiny was released in EMS. I initially expected it to take only two weeks (as is the usual time it takes for any of my skill wave blogposts), but I then stumbled across a fundamental problem: how do I even organize it? I realized that understanding the problems that Destiny caused requires in-depth knowledge on the history of Hero's skill changes. Most people will not have this. Without that context, it'll be difficult to convince anyone. So, I would have to provide that context. But providing that... proved to be quite time-consuming.
Despite that I do have a sizeable amount of in-depth blogposts about certain subject matters... I've only done these types of blogposts since 2016. I didn't really go in-depth about anything prior to 5th Job. At least, not to such a degree. Sure, you'll find some early blogposts such as this one, but I never got to write dedicated articles on how impactful the Big Bang, Jump, Advance of the Union, RED or Champions revamps were at the time of release.
So, I started with that: a breakdown of that entire history on Hero's skill changes. I then stumbled upon a practical problem: how do I organize this? Do I organize it by update? Do I mention every small skill change? This approach quickly turned into an bullet list with seemingly no end to it. And starting the blogpost with such a heavy load of info doesn't flow well into the Destiny stuff, as that would end up being rather short by comparison. The balance was off and this approach wouldn't provide for a good reading experience*.
Around that roadblock, it was already like what, October 2022? Both Xenoblade 3 and Gunvolt 3 came out in the same week, and I realized that this blogpost is going to end up long-term as seen with my Xenoblade Definitive Edition article. I decided to take the appropriate amount of breaks every now and then*, and after a while I came to the right answer: just write this blogpost in order of Job Advancement, and only include historical context when necessary.
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| Soul Rush, one of several old Hero skills that didn't make the cut because discussing it had no place in this blogpost. This relatively short-lived skill (2011-2013) eventually became War Leap, which signaled the end of the mount meta. |
Taking that approach made for a much cleaner reading experience, although providing context per skill does mean I had to leave out a couple of minor things about Hero's history (including a handful of short-lived skills; see above for one example), or leaving out discussions about how impactful certain revamps were (and why) at the time. Fun fact: prior to taking this approach, there was no a Table of Contents. Can you imagine what this blogpost would be without?
As this blogpost took forever* to write, the rate of updates arriving in EMS far exceeded my ability to keep up with it in writing. Post-Destiny skill changes were very frequent. Every major patch since Destiny would include a long list of finer adjustments to clean up the mess they made. While a lot of classes received much-needed improvements, Hero almost saw none of it, leaving it in a pretty bad spot. Although ironically, that was to the benefit of this blogpost, 'cause it meant I had to (re)write less. Ignition was the "big one", and unfortunately, the only one to bring some substantial changes to Hero. At the time I was still halfway through writing this blogpost, so I had to include it.
As most of Ignition's changes had such an impact on the state of Hero, it warranted their own individual chapters. If Ignition made something worse, the only way to make it abundantly clear why it was worse was to provide the context of what it was like around Destiny, to then follow it by how Ignition changed that. The same applied for the opposite.
But as I continued to slowly work my way through this blogpost, I managed to wrap up the initial draft in May 2023. The announcement for New Age was just out, and I decided to take another short break until they revealed what they were going to do with this update. Y'know, just in case anything happens that might threaten this article to be rewritten for a fourth time. Which, of course happened because they revealed 6th Job, so any discussion regarding future 5th Job skills had to be removed. Anyway, at this point, the only things left to do was some cleaning up of the text (since the earliest chapters were written long before Ignition, Savior, 6th Job or the removal of Jett and Beast Tamer), and to add the sheer amount of GIFs that go with it. I didn't start with that until July 2023; only after I took a peek at 6th Job.
To no one's surprise, the absurd amount of GIFs that were required to finish this blogpost also took several months*.
I originally intended to only include GIFs based off gameplay recording, but I had to expand that plan by the time I decided to include skill icons and skill animations, since they honestly add a lot to the reading experience.
All of the skill icons and skill animations included in this blogpost were manually extracted from my personal archive of EMS builds*. No "duplicate" skill icons were copy pasted (except two). All were painstakingly sourced directly from the correct build to ensure I didn't miss any (i.e. notice the subtle difference for Improved MaxHP between Classic and Big Bang, or that Destiny slightly adjusted the colors for passive skill icons such as Mastery and Self Recovery). If you really want to, you can confirm it's true by painstakingly verifying all icons through your browser's "Inspect Element".
Dare I say, the amount of time and effort that was required for this was not worth it. But seeing as I already had set-up an efficient way of extracting images from the game files, I threw in the skill animation GIFs as well (which also wasn't originally planned). But then I had to also add a custom line of code to allow Blogger to show multiple GIFs in a row. And for good measure, I downloaded CMS to get the names for Mo Xuan/Lynn's skills for the Power Stance chapter.
As for GIFs based off gameplay recording: getting good footage and fine-tuning them has been exceptionally time-consuming. In particular, finding archival footage (i.e. chapter 3.2.2) that was decent enough for this blogpost was hard to come by. That involved many hours of searching in the depths of the Rayque3 archive, and in most cases I just had to make do with the best footage I could find. You see, when it comes to quality, I can be incredibly picky and feel an obligation to deliver the best possible product. Bitrate, loss in video quality, composition, framerate and disabling the infamous Sony Vegas "video resample" option, that kinda stuff. If you are a video editor, you know what I mean.
And while it might seem like I have an outstanding amount of archival footage to source from, I'll tell you bluntly that anything I used for this blogpost was found by pure coincidence. Most of what I wanted to use, no longer exists as I deleted those raw files a long time ago. Storage space was prohibitively expensive back then, so I tend to only keep the finalized videos, such as my High-Dex Hero series. This series provided some archival footage for this blogpost. Others were from scrapped and unreleased MapleStory videos that were in development at some point in the past, which for whatever reason I still had the original recordings for, buried somewhere deep in the Rayque3 archive.
While I usually plan ahead of time, I did not expect to be needing archival footage to such an extent for this blogpost.
If I knew that I would eventually write it, I definitely would've put more effort in preserving my original recordings, and I would've made sure to record more reference material for future use*. I probably would've elaborated more through GIFs if I had the footage for it, especially for the historical chapters. But alas, such is life.
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| This can of worms could provide its own dedicated blogpost... |
Speaking of the Power Stance chapter, it was a pain in the ass trying to find information about Mo Xuan (namely what skills received the universal stance change) and having to update certain chapters to accommodate the removal of Jett and Beast Tamer. Imagine spending days per paragraph (including proofreading) to then see you're going to have to adjust all of them again. I also had to recalculate the Power Stance numbers as I had to include Lynn last minute. If there's anything about this blogpost that tested my sanity, it's the sheer amount of rewrites for every chapter. All of 'm.
I wrapped up the GIFs and images by March, 2024. The last thing to do before publishing was to proofread this entire blogpost one more time, and after publishing I had to manually add the hundreds of chapter URLs as this could only be done after publishing. That's just an inherent limitation of Blogger with the custom Table of Contents code.
Fun fact: weren't it for a bit of experimentation on my blog, this blogpost wouldn't even have one. To add the Table of Contents, I had to manually add an entire new script to this blog's source code and then I had to add yet another one, just for new headers to work with it. Getting all of that to work without destroying my blog took a few days. But now that this feature is added to my toolkit, I'll be able to provide you all with better organized blogposts moving forward.
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Also, you do not want to know how much manual programming was required for this blogpost to look this good. I had to basically learn some html coding last minute, as otherwise including the skill animations and icons wouldn't have really worked out this well. Safe to say that it added about another two months; there was a lot of manual clean up. Most notably, a lot of the tables that showcase skills or icons have been reprogrammed from scratch at least twice.
But having the ability to add tables also gave me the opportunity to consolidate large bodies of text into tables, such as chapter 5.8.1, which was originally just an endless wall of text that was just unwieldy to read.
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| Man, I'm exhausted. Work on this blogpost has been a long two years, and I'm never getting that lost time back. |
You might ask: why would I go through such lengths in writing and publishing such a niche blogpost? Not gonna lie, several times during production I've asked myself that same question.
It is one that almost nobody is going to read, but that's irrelevant. This blogpost is precisely for the few that are going to read it. Whether if that's going to be someone eager to be better informed about the game, or one of those Nexon employees that are tasked to keep tabs on me (you know who you are). Change has to start somewhere. Writing this has also been a way for me to give my frustrations and disappointment a place, as I'd want to be able to move on.
To give you all some perspective: at some point, Destiny will be just a memory, just like Big Bang, Jump, Advance of the Union, Champions, RED, Reboot and 5th Job. If you didn't like Destiny, remember that eventually all of it will be phased out, like the revamps that came before it. Let's just hope that the next one doesn't take another nine years.
And if 6th Job is anything to go by, then working on this blogpost has been worthwhile. Because if 6th Job (or any future revamp for that matter) solves any of Destiny's issues, I can just refer to this blogpost, link to the corresponding chapter and continue my explanation from there. In a way, this blogpost is going to end up useful for future reference. Because remember, like all of my other blogposts, it's meant to stay online. I'll make sure of that as long as I'm alive.
I'm going back to bed now. It's been a long journey, and I need a break. I'll work on the Crest of the Solar and 6th Job blogposts another time. Wake me up when the next 5th Job skill wave is announced. when 6th Job comes out. GDI
this was a really good read, enjoyed it!
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