Let's talk Kihop
There was a nerf to Kihop over a month ago, that went under the radar for most people, because it only affects taekwon classes, which are already very unpopular, the only popular subclass being Soul Linkers. Even they are used as buff slaves only, without ever considering dealing damage. I took the time before starting a discussion about this, because I didn't want to go all in rage mode without testing the changes first, and also stopped playing for a while because of how bad my tests turned out. Changelogs The changelog also mentions another gitlab issue, regarding to why it was changed.
Important! I understand why this change would seem like a good change to the right direction. The original issue was dividing, actually having many likes and dislikes both. On the comments there, it seemed that people not playing the class consider TKM super overpowered, while people playing know it is not as strong as it looks. I do agree that there are some problems in the TKM w/ multiclienting worth fixing. I believe the changes do not fix the core issue, while also punishing many other people. I consider myself an expert on TKM mechanics, and taekwon classes in general, helped many people on the server already with their builds and ideas. I'll try my best to collect things up and explain my thoughts in order to change the balance in a good direction.
I have been thinking, exactly what would be the best course to explain why these changes are poorly made. They do not exactly solve the problems mentioned, while also making taekwon lovers (such as I) very sad. I could attack the original gitlab issue's problems, or go into game design questions, or bring up my personal stuff, like how it made me quit the game for a while by making my characters delete-worthy, and the economical damage done (e.g. hundred million zenies to me).
Since I don't want this to thread to be crazy long, I'll try to keep it compact, mention only the important bullet points of why changes might be needed, and why this nerf doesn't work well, but even then it will be long. After the mechanics, I'll bring up some personal experience on how TK classes function. At the end I offer some of the solutions in my preference order.
Insights to boss TKM builds:
- One TKM can only mark one Large MVP. If you want to kill more MVPs with one TKM, the others need to be Medium or Small, a very limited choice of possibilities.
- Field MVPs, that you wouldn't need devo or other support for, they are already so weak, its only a question of teleport luck. One shot with asura, 2 seconds with AD. Can contest with a properly built Hunter even and secure kill in just a few seconds. Monopoly cannot be achieved whether a TKM is included or not.
- Fix spawn MVPs are TKM's strong points, which are rare to begin with, and they often have stuns and other ways that makes your SP bar nonexistent and cancel Heat. Marking Moonlight Flower was the biggest mistake I made with a taekwon master, and trust me I did a lot of weird stuff.
- Strong MVPs need a lot of support for the TKM, in which case, the TKM could also be of any other DPS class. Stacking buffs on a single damage character is what makes strong MVPs die, not the class of the character. Look at bio3 mvp parties, detale, vesper, amon ra, or any non-trivial boss competition. They all rely on getting DPS of 100-300k+ on one particular character most fitting the boss.
- Further limiting the options, any MVPs with summons of opposite element as themselves cannot be killed with Heat, because those drain the SP bar immediately and cancel Heat. Examples could be Turtle General: Fire against Heater, Orc Hero: Fire against High Orc, Detale: Holy against Gold Acidus, etc.
- While using consums for SP, you cannot use HP consums, making the kill very dangerous whenever your SP runs out.
Attack of gitlab issue:
- Any guild can choose to create 12 chars for a specific purpose and gain monopoly on that particular boss, get incredible dps and buffs on their killer. This is true whether a taekwon is the killer or not.
- Try any class with gospel all stats, double atk, imposito, assumptio, devotion, box of resentment, lvl 10 provoke, and 3-4 different song effects, and even battle priest should do 100k+ DPS.
- One MVP per one character is a lot of gears already, but 12 characters for every one mvp is ridiculously high. You dont have to do this at all, it is among the worst choices you can make.
- Thanatos is super weak. TKM or not, any proper party can destroy Thanatos before it moves a cell. I already did that with a single beast strafer sniper, not even glasscannon build. It is possible to kill him with a level 80 sniper, or even as a hunter, if you have no competition. (Already did that too.)
- Thanatos is designed to be a reward for climbing all the way through the tower. Thats why it gives 10x as much exp as a Detale, while having half the health. It gives exp in the range of bio3 bosses, while having the lethality of a Chimera.
- Mistress is the only small MVP. TKMs can only mark her as an opponent of the Sun. Seeing a boss killer TKM at Mistress is no surprise, they literally have no other choice. It is a field MVP nonetheless, so it is already a question of fly wing luck, and not of class.
Design:
- Nerfing Kihop also changes Soul Linkers and Taekwon Kids, who have nothing to do with boss TKMs at all.
- TKK cannot equip any weapons, removing all 20% damage cards. Kihop is the only way to counteract this problem on small levels. TKM can use books, losing the spurt bonus and a lot of the most needed aspd. Unless you have fully carded books for the specific mob, it is generally advised not to use weapons.
- Kihop is meant to be a way to make TKM and TKK at least somewhat viable on parties (they are still bad). They do single target damage only, in melee, which already are two factors why noone ever recruits them.
- Boss TKMs are very high dps, but bound by so many constraints, that is what keeps them in check. Even if their DPS should be reduced, it should not be through Kihop.
- You can agi/bless yourself on another map if you want to keep master exp or kihop, while still having access to buffs. If a TKM gets a miracle, they cannot leave the map however. There is no way to get your basic buffs with miracle, unless your duo partner/trio partner is a priest already. That is, if you want to keep kihop bonus and/or master acc exp. The MA system was made to make basic self buffs more convenient. With this, you cannot do that anymore.
- There are much much stronger self buffs you can use than Kihop, that people use all over. There are dex+agi LKs farming abyss lake, which should be unusable if it weren't for bragi. When they leave, then 4 song sniper FAS parties show up. Hell I even saw someone do 8 song setup with sniper, because duo songs can stack at the same place without dissonance. Most stalkers walk around with linked blacksmiths. Is Kihop really the biggest self buff concern? I understand if you want to limit it some, these all go over the board with the convenience of the MA system, but completely removing Kihop is not a great solution, it just feels unfair.
Personal clues:
- As of now, I have 6 TKMs and 4 soul linkers all above lvl 90, while also having 5 more taekwon kids.
- I never did 12 clients solo Kihop. Even when I wanted to test how high my damage can possibly go, I asked others to help me log in that many characters.
- In general, I was mostly leveling other chars with playing TKM, for fun and efficiency reasons. This means the party is on even share, with only the characters I leech. I'm not abusing Kihop damage. That 10%-20% Kihop basic bonus would be very much needed however.
- Not all, but many of my builds are made unusable by the nerf. I can still oneshot Tarou in culvert, no changes there, but I simply cannot kill Marcs anymore. That was a blacksmith buff setup already. Because of my +8 skel worker girl's diary, my fly kick Munak/Bongun build seems saveable with BSB and other expensive gears (with also losing sohee card), but it's not even sure, calculators cannot really be trusted for TKs.
- Point is, this nerf is as if some of my characters were deleted. Even if I would reset feels (with tens of hours of doridori with so many characters), the skills and the stats are intertwined and locked up much more than other classes. I can't just equip a different bow and be done with the problems, I have to choose specific Wraths and Protections for proper days to the skill build.
- I have not leeched a TKK before.. before the nerf. Now I did. It's not worth leveling a TKK anymore, just do the good old archer leech. Example is in the next section. None of my builds depend on 12 man kihop, but having some option to go slightly higher is a must to counteract the lack of weapon cards. I started a new taekwon today, and what happened I believe is a great example of this, showing how important 1 or 2 kihop stack can be.
Leveling a TKK - the example:
- I went on my usual route of tarous, wolves and pecopecos for lvling TKK.
- Tarou: santa poring dagger as novice, kicking them as TKK for first job levels to get Sprint.
- Wolf: Sprint on, novice potion attacks to kill some and get fly kick. Use sprint fly kicks after to do 600+ damage, finish with autoattack. Low aspd sprint fly is very hard to perform, and high sp cost, but worth it with the SP refill of lvlups. Full str to reach one-shot with sprint fly kicks. (This is very similar to how an archer starts, but their DS just does more damage, faster and with less sp consumption.) Transfer base lvl 40+ when wolves are slowing down.
- Pecopeco: I transfer to pecopecos and peco eggs, because wolves are over populated, sprint fly kicks are heavy, and have no real good drops, while having similar expgain. Pecos drop sandals, and peco egg and drops cards are invaluable, while oranges keep the SP up just as strawberries at wolves. And this is where the Kihop nerfs come in. While archers can transfer to geos, TKK can't even one-shot peco eggs. Literally.
The picture shows how a lvl 43 taekwon cannot do 420 damage to a peco egg with fly kick, with 100m+ gear, having lvl 5 imposito and other priest buffs on. No job levels enough for Mild Wind, and fists cannot be endowed by sage, no weapons or weapon cards are equippable. With Orc Warrior pet it's still around 400 damage only. This 64 str is already too much, not having any agi, and this isn't enough. Especially for a Soul Linker, they lose a lot of aspd for this high str. I would have started putting agi at 54, I just went 10 str higher to prove a point here. The only solution to hit 420 damage is to bring a bonus blacksmith for power thrust and keep imposito up. If there was a single 10% kihop bonus from the priest, there would be no need for any more characters, and you could farm nicely with just the lazy priest.
In the meantime, an archer somewhere is hitting geos 2k DS with a cheap ass bow and 12 sp each. Even an acolyte does 1k heals to undeads at this point.
My Thanatos experience:
- I did many Thanatos Tower climbs, and never lost competition at Thanatos with my TKM. Not even against other TKMs. As it turns out, playing TKM well still wins you the kills.
- I preferred climbing with my TKM as DPS. She was able to help out the sniper against some of the tougher mobs (despero, dame, owl baron) nicely.
- My TKM has lvl 8 Shadow of the SLS. Climbing 12 levels in a dangerous dungeon, as a squishy melee DPS character while completely and permanently blinded is hard and highly exhausting. Getting some reward in terms of usefulness for it is the bare minimum.
- One time we climbed without a sniper even, just my TKM as solo dps. That climb took over 3 hours, even with me being efficient with the class in maximum gears. Turns out self buff bragi with FAS is stronger than all Kihop can ever do.
- I also climbed once after the patch. That was my breaking point for quitting the game. We had 1 pally, 1 sniper, 4 high priests, and my TKM. The result of this climb was, that next time we climb, I should just go play the 5th high priest and lex some, and autofollow with my TKM, in order to climb faster.
- There was even competition at the boss that climb, and I had won. The results were roughly 250k TKM, 100k our sniper, 40k their sniper, even with Kihop gone. The nerfs didn't make Thanatos any stronger, it'll always die before spawning mobs. It just made using TKM terrible while climbing, while still beating everyone on the boss. The reason why TKM is best at Thanatos is a combination of many factors, ghost element, high defense, fix cell spawn, and boss summoning is started by players. All of these favor TKM. Until you delete the class, it will be faster than any sniper build against Thanatos. Thanatos is extremely weak against TKM, while being immune to asura and AD, shifting the balance a lot.
- Honestly, I would rather have Kihop during the whole climb, and having not marked the boss at all. That would be roughly the same damage on boss, but I can at least be useful during climbing. That way I could play the character I like. TKM is one of the most fun characters in my opinion, the class I love most, being reduced to "just autofollow with him so you don't have to touch it until the boss" is honestly heartbreaking.
**Opinion: ** I think MVP TKMs are OK as they are. The real problems are with 12 char kihop setups farming at hard places. Self logging 12 chars, and farming geffenia or abyss lake is a problem for sure. When instant spawn boss protocol monsters start coming in, e.g. Odin and Thor hits, it gets worse. However, going straight 0% Kihop if anyone else is on the map, whether I have actual teammates or not goes against the whole master account concept.
My solution ideas in preference order:
- Best would be to limit Kihop to a number less than the party size, like 6 chars or so at most. 6 chars = 60% is fair to substitude weapon cards. It wouldn't be a necessity to fill out the party anymore and play way too many characters. Even for multitask-liking people, going above 6 is usually a hussle anyways, people going way above that are in some sense abusing the convenient MA system. Can attend 3-5 MA parties with dual clients while still being as useful as possible.
- Nerf Heat hits/sec while restoring Kihop to its original. This only makes one of my TKMs useless (..lol), but gaining an edge in competition and be rewarded for playing the class well with my other TKMs. Also, TKKs and SLs don't suffer at all.
- Give Kihop bonus for all chars that are from a different MA, even if the same MA has chars on map. This is good for 3-5 MA parties just the same. I feel like this isnt best, but would help recover the core loss of the nerfs. Sadly this mechanic is counterplayable in the MVP situations mentioned, it would translate to people doing guest access on all chars, and TKM solo client, so they have 12 man kihop damage on bosses. But at least people who like playing the character don't suffer as much while leveling or farming, and enhance cooperation between people.
- Restore Kihop to how it was, and forget this change was a thing.
- Remove Kihop from the game, give all TK classes +5 skill points to spend on anything. It's almost always 0% now anyways, could use the points a lot better.
- Reset stats, skills and feels on TKMs who request it in an attempt to save their time in deleting and remaking chars.
TL;DR: Self logging 12 chars to maximize damage is annoying, definitely not pretty, somewhat abusive of the system. TKMs can get very strong when farming hard places solo with 12+ clients, might want to limit it. Boss TKMs are ok as they are, because of the many constraints they have. The referenced gitlab issue has barely any valid points. The current changes were to adress Thanatos issues. Thanatos is designed to be a reward for climbing the tower, not a competitive MVP. If you want to make it competitive, change Thanatos, not Kihop. Taekwon classes struggle, as current Kihop nerfs affect heavily melee SLs, ranker and leveling TKKs, fly kicker and agi kicker TKMs. Kihop is meant to be a substitude for weapon cards, and to make TK classes at least somewhat viable in parties (they are still bad). I brought up examples, and some solution ideas that do not cause collateral damage. Changing Thanatos is still an option.
PS: To prove my point - if you guys see someone say something like "LFM> TKM" in #party, so I can potentially attend a party where Kihop does any damage at all on current patch, send me a screenshot proof and I give you a special gift in return.
PS2: If anyone wants to consult me, either for their builds, or regarding this issue, feel free to contact me, happy to help if I can. Ingame messages sent to Layven should find my inbox. I do have videos about many things talked in here, can show them when asked for.
Edit: Added TL;DR as per requested in comments.