Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Season 2 Episode 2 New Gear/Raids (Pirate Gear/Weapons are Officially Outdated)/Kai and Evie Revamp (New Spells)

Before you invest all your money in Pirate weapons/gear, take note of this.
The new highest dps/def set is now called Noblesse, known as the ultimate set for all characters.
Also, new raid, Executioner
Take a look at the stats,

Leather Pirate:
6357 DEF*, 736 STR, 291 AGI, 237 WIL, 74 Crit Res

Heremon:
6608 DEF*, 867 STR 311 AGI, 70 INT (I think?), 252 WIL, 85 Crit Res

Noblesse:
6591 DEF*, 917 STR, 283 AGI, 271 WIL, 83 Crit Res




Staff Evie’s revamp will be handled in another developer’s note in the near future.

1.Bow Kai Revamp concept

The first order of business with the revamp was to think on what kind of concept we wanted to work on.
With Lann we went with specializing crits and fury skills, with Fiona we increased the usage of her shields.
And with Kai we decided on ‘fast stacking and consumption of SP’
Yes, this is nothing new and is in the same line with Kai’s original concept, but we believed that developing on this concept would result in a fun playstyle for Kai.

2. Attack Pattern

Let’s first look at the ‘stacking SP quickly’ part. This will be handled with Moving Shot and the new skill that will replace Multi-Shot
Multi-Shot has been changed to Rapid-fire. Instead of spraying out arrows in a cone, it will quickly shoot shots in rapid succession.
The command remains the same, hold down normal attack key to charge up and release the button to fire. Depending on how long you charge, you will shoot 2 or 3 arrows.

But keep in mind that Rapid-fire plays an important role in stacking SP. This is in relation with the new Swiftness buff.
As you know, moving shot with a short bow now can proc Swiftness which temporarily increases moving shot attack speed. This can be stacked up to three times and depending on the number of stacks, the SP gain from Rapid-fire increases.
This will not be as simple as it seems though because if you abuse Rapid-fire too much, you can lose your short Swiftness buff and thus be forced to stack it all over again.
The next thing we want to explain is the ‘Using SP’ part. This will be handled with Steady-fire and Magnum-shot.
First of all, Steady fire is used with a long bow while not moving. In this state the time needed to charge the shot will be decreased by half, the power of the shot increased, can pierce up to two time, and has increased range.
The power of this shot will be in par with other characters’ third of fourth shot when all hits from piercing is added.
With being a powerful ranged attack like this, a penalty is in order. The penalty is that it uses SP. Steady fire will use 100 SP and when you don’t have enough SP, normal longbow shots will be used instead.
Next is Magnum-shot.
Magnum-shot and Steady-fire are now to be used depending on the situation. Magnum-shot can pierce up to four times so when using the same amount of SP, Magnum-shot will be better for targets that can be pierced four times.
[White Tyrant can be pierced four times when shot in a straight line from head to hind]
Also the charging stages for Magnum-shot has been simplified from 6 to 3 stages and the time to make a full charge has been slightly reduced. The sound and visual effect has been modified as well to make the transition between each stage more noticeable.
So Steady-fire and Magnum-shot will be the choice skills to use when you have SP to dump and all other SP skills are on cooldown.
Most of the active SP skills remain the same. Multi-Sniping [eagle-eye something in the NA version, not sure..] and Arrow Storm are still excellent skills for dealing damage. Bending-shot is still good as ever for handling trash mobs.
Yet Dual-link was admittedly overlooked compared to other skills. One of the problem behind this was because it required the player to aim and fire two times.
This part has been modified to be handled in a single bow shot. A single aim-and-fire will result in the target being pinned to the ground. Not only that but if the monster moves away enough to stretch the line too much, it will be electrocuted for steady damage.
So Dual-link is now a skill for impairing movement and dealing damage at the same time. Note that this can also be used in PvP and will hold down a player for 6 seconds.

3. Other Changes

With all these changes it can be expected that Kai will be required to switch bows often. And this is also another aspect that we improved.
Bow switching can now be used while evading and you can switch bows while evading as well.
For example, you can use your short bow then evade while switching to longbow and cancel that motion to go right in to casting Magnum-shot. Or you can be using your long bow and when a monster approaches, you can evade and switch your bow simultaneously to execute a spin-kick.
So now you can attack and switch between bows freely and create your own unique attack patterns.
Besides that, Spin-kick no longer requires SP to use and the range for shortbow has been increased to 600.
The motion for installing the pin for wire-evasion can be canceled with an evasion and the damage, range, stamina use for bow attacks have been adjusted.
Most importantly, playstyles abusing motion canceling have been fixed. We will release more details in the patch notes.

4.Final Word

Though there wasn’t any big influx of new skills or new actions, we believe that we made Kai a more functional and fun character with more room to control.
We also promise that there will be more big or small adjustments to characters in the future


Translation creds to AFKAlmighty

Last, but not least, Staff Evie gets a pretty cool spell revamp.  You can save spells for later as some form of storage.

2 comments:

  1. screw the revamp, when is Vella's dualblades coming out? or Season 2? NA Nexon used to be like running side by side or a few weeks behind Japan nexon. Now NA is so far behind, i don't know if it is like a month or two months.

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  2. btw, this is Kukawa. And i've been playing star trek online recently. Work is long a boring too XD

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