Blazing Sol isn't giving two stacks of Combination Fighter on the start of new round after activation, which was the stated additional effect for Speed of Light Solbladers.

How to replicate:

Step 1: Equip Solblader, make sure to slot in Speed of Light.

Step 2: Get in any fight and keep pressing Solcharge until you cap it at 6.

Step 3: Push the Blazing Sol button.

Step 4: End turn and wait for the next round.

Step 5: Check your character status and see if it gives you the Combination Fighter stacks.

most consistently happens with light on high if you're knocked down your hotkeys can't work and you have to select a move manualy, they're not grayed out or anything it's just that if you hit the hotkey nothing happens

i think this might happen with other knock downs but it's easiest to replicate with getting KD'd by light on high

The Shinobi elemental art Firestorm creates the field effect for 2 rounds.  The next turn enemies take fire damage and Burned as expected, however the turn afterward the Firestorm fades without taking effect.  If it behaves like status effects (for example poison), I would expect a second instance of damage as it fades.

To replicate:

- Equip Shinobi, get into a fight with anything
- Invoke Fire - Fire - Mountain - Wind.
- End turn, note damage and burn.
- End turn, note no damage or burn inflict occurs from Firestorm before it fades.

It's that time of year that Trex makes another thread titled 'Grinding Sucks'.  

To preface this, I want to say that the numerous changes have roughly balanced each other out, edging more toward the negative. Repeatedly having things made more tedious and efficient setups gutted has been a constant toll upon me and many others. While I am thankful for what QoL we have received forcing players to spend more time in the grind loop does not make for engaging RP.

Some players enjoy this, and that's fine. The option should exist to not force everyone into dungeons to attain progress, so the monster farming enjoyers still have their fun and those who'd rather not their career be backed off how many Firespitters they killed can ascend via other methods.

I'll be breaking this up into the following sections:

1. Reflecting on the last thread (Grinding Sucks 3) and what if anything was addressed.

2. The remaining issues and how they could be handled.

3.  Balance changes (primarily in relation to their impact on PvE).


How Far We've Come -

Lets look at the most recent thread I made in this series 5 months ago here. Pretty short compared to its prequel. It really only focused on the issue of how quickly dungeons were choked out of spawns, and that was actually addressed in some manner! We got faster monster respawns. 

What wasn't addressed was the item pool. That problem was only made worse. We got way more items added into an already bloated drop table that everything in the game shares. No new Ancient Charges have been added since to make getting anything else easier albeit in a slightly nerfed form. Poultry and beef are still only found in chests. Lava Lake got made far more tedious to clear. I'm still competing with people farming Dark Shards to get any EXP in Sea of Clouds.

Now lets dial it back to the earlier thread dating back to around this time last year, Grinding Sucks 2. Did we fix anything since then? 

Issues noted:

1. " high level players to be farming content far beneath them and depriving lower level players the means by which to progress" - Still a problem. We got a few more dungeons as a band-aid and faster spawns, but with Lava Lake far less newbie friendly an unskilled player is going to be seeing the vets swiping their more feasibly farmed content out from under their noses for the sake of grind speed to fuel their dark shard supply.

2. " The vast majority of items come from the global drop pool, with a very small number made craftable. Not a single non-puzzle item added post Korvara (2022 Q2) has been made craftable." - Still a problem. Sort of. I say 'sort of' because of Ancient Charges, they fix the issue but not really? You get worse versions of rarer items to make the normal version still feel good to get, though people will still feel compelled to hunt down the non-ancient version of items affected by the negative quality, and there isn't Ancient Charges for everything. 

Three years and we haven't even gotten our hand-slot item crafting book from G6 back. Did you know Green Gloves are craftable? On G6. I think someone just has to remind Dev to add that book somewhere in Korvara, I think he legitimately forgot. Otherwise it's pretty bleak that we've got MORE items and still not a single Korvara item has been given a recipe while the global drop pool only gets worse.

Very similar to the most recent thread it seems. Global drop pool still sucks and newbies trying to crawl their way through content are going to suffer all the same if they aren't guided by a more experienced player.

The Problems and How to Fix Them -

We'll start with the two clearly highlighted from my prior threads that haven't had a satisfying solution yet.

1. High level players want to farm the same content that lower level players do, as it's required for them to do the higher level content (dark amplifier).

2. The global drop pool is only getting worse and we've only gotten band-aid solutions for a handful of the items in it.

Now how do we fix these? There's a lot of options and it entirely depends on the direction Dev wants to take the game in.

For 1, we've seen a few more sources of Dark Shards crop up such as the Duyuei Wall Raid Crescendo Phase fights, though for the amount of effort required to clear combined with the massive inconvenience that's yet to be addressed at all with the wild times the raid can start at, I can't really consider that a solution at all. What we need is places like Minotaur Labyrinth to yield Dark Shards at a higher rate, or bosses like Radigal, Medis, and Relei to drop them as well to encourage clearing those fights and rewarding higher level players for their effort. So they feel less compelled to wipe out the Sea of Clouds hourly if harder bosses yielded say, at least 6~ dark shards per kill per player. That's one T3 Dark Amp run per person.

How it's actually addressed is not in my hands, I can only point desperately in the direction I'd prefer. What we need is more incentive to run harder content that isn't solely the Dark Amplifier fights, since those require you to run other content to sustain, meaning those higher level players are having to wipe out dungeons lower level players would've otherwise used to progress. 

For 2, it's really as simple as making more crafting recipes or Ancient Charges if Dev is committed to only giving players access to slightly worse weapons/armor rather than giving us the means to craft the normal item again. With how build defining some items are it's hard to have a comfortable in between when you envision your character around something like say, the new Shotgun Tonfa. People like to design their characters with a specific load out in mind, and make a basic grind setup for until they get there. Normally in this time period they aren't inclined to roleplay much if at all. This of course is not everyone but the mechanics as they stand are not very conductive to roleplay. Perhaps you wanted your character to have learned to fight from some sort of military school? Why would they start at Level 1 and only get stronger by watching you slaughter jammers? That's why people don't always want to have their grinding journey be an entirely IC affair, as the levelling system is not one that is IC. People do not look at you and go 'Ah, you are Level 60, just like me' ICly. At least I certainly hope they don't.

I think items could still be made plenty difficult/time consuming to acquire but in a way that encourages an actual economy and trade/interaction between players in having recipes that require certain rare but consistently sourced drops (like say Purging Flames for example). The drops as they are only encourage people to exclusively trade amongst their friends as it's increasingly unlikely they'll ever see certain rare drops more than once in their time playing the game.

Now this leads me into the last issue I'll directly address:

3. The game doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to be an MMORPG and a roleplaying game. The mechanics are designed in a way so as to be very awkward to acknowledge without translation ICly. Are you really just casually slitting people's throats in spars? Is all poultry and beef exclusively sourced from chests? Is it really more efficient to let the Wall be destroyed so we can harvest it for its Boulders?

The 'Always IC' nature of Korvara has only made this more confusing. The line is blurred and the mechanics only get harder to work smoothly into most roleplay. There is not much for people who aren't fans of fighting monsters to dig their teeth into if they want a mechanical representation of their IC. We've yet to get anything like the Clinic or Water Sourcing of G6 to provide non-mechanical combat options for some form of progression for characters mechanically.

We've seen the start of such systems vaguely in the Wall Raid for Duyuei and I'd hope to see something given to each nation down the line to encourage activity and provide a means to represent growth/an alternative avenue to progressing one's character mechanically outside spamming dungeons/dummies.

The Balance -

We ate a veritable wall of nerfs with the advent of the second Diastrophism. I'll go through and comment on each change.

Quote:Multiple Classes
- Combination Fighter's damage scaling reduction now applies near the end of the damage calculation (instead of being an amplification multiplier). This means that it will more effectively reduce damage dealt.

Quote:Boxer
- Asura Fist; Dark Scaling reduced to 100% + 10% per Rank (from 120% + 10% per Rank). Travel Range increased by 1.

Quote:Curate
- Purity Edge now gives +1 Power/Hit/Crit per Rank (from +1/+3/+3).

Quote:Dark Bard
- Shadow Mosh no longer give bonus momentum if an enemy was also targeted by the attack that destroyed it.

Quote:Druid
- Viper Wrap; Evade reduction changed to LV x 3 (from LV x 5).
- Wolf Howl; Can no longer critically hit, fixed a bug where the Call version could get higher pattern size if Druid was Invigorated.

Quote:Grand Summoner
- Judgment Blade; Effect adjusted. Damage is now +Rank x 5% if the target is treated as a youkai, and additionally +Rank x 5% if the target is a summoned unit. (Independent conditions, stacks additively.)

Quote:Heron
- Ancient Song can no longer be turned if Momentum used is less than 3.

Quote:Human
- Divine Eyes; Damage is now equal to level x 4 (from level x 5).

Quote:Omina
- Racial skill now also reduces attackers' Hit, Evade, and Infliction by 3 when attacking the Omina.

Quote:Oracle
- Modifications to Evade and Hit are no longer percentages but a flat +10/-10 (-1 per 10 Scaled SAN). Range at which Hit penalty starts increased to 2 (from 1).

Quote:Void Assassin
- Deadly Arms lowered to 1 Rank and gives +10% Critical Damage (from 5 Ranks and +5% per Rank).

Quote:Items
- Daggers are now Small weapons.
- Bakaga Shuriken's Smokescreen LV reduced to 10 (from 30).
- Spiked Axehead Crit Damage lowered to 5% from 10%.

Quote:Battle Mechanics
- Flanking base changed to 5 (from 10), and Flanking per GUI reduced to 0.5 (from 1).
- Hit chance after all calculations is now capped at 5% minimum.

Quote:Talents
- Effects from Weaponry talents that reduce Battle Weight now only apply to the highest applicable value (IE, they do not stack for weapons with multiple types).
- Axe Mastery's Deadliness Critical Damage reduced to SR x 0.5% (from 1%).

Quote:Monsters
- Wounded monsters can now find you even while you're Sneaking. The distance they can do so increases the lower their HP is.
- Lava Lake enemies have received some adjustments.

Quote:ETC
- You can now change classes while inside of a dungeon.
- Struggle now reduces affected status effects by half of your level + your total STR (this is the skill given when Frozen).
- Respawn rate for monsters in all Korvara dungeons is increased (similar to Deep Abyss Cavern).
- Untreated Fracture wounds now decrease CEL instead of Move.
- Deep Wastes One-Time-Chest can no longer spawn for characters below level 55.

Kasa-Obake's Umbrella Flap skill simply doesn't function properly if the Obake is soaked.

I'm uncertain if this is caused by the soaked status itself OR if it's because of the method of acquiring said status (by having the Obake stand on a water tile and waiting)

Either or, the range appears to expand, but no damage is done and umbrella up does not apply.
It just does not work.

Quote:Tactician attacks Arcane Desert Armadillo with Runed Gorgon Remains Engraved Katana!
Glancing! Arcane Desert Armadillo avoids the brunt of the attack!
Arcane Desert Armadillo takes 12 Slash physical damage. (Runed Gorgon Remains Engraved Katana)
The battle has ended.

If an object, that is aeroshifted, hits a target and deals damage to said target that they resist.

The person who aeroshifted the object loses momentum.

Threw a flower at my friend and lost 1m. Feels Bad Man.

Needle's detonation doesn't seem to heal confused allies, even if the caster+detonator isn't confused.

Can we have asago housing for eventmin keys? We have the ability to make maps right here in the game, but we can't use it the current system of event stages is nice, but it requires us to ask mappers to do extra work, when they're already in high demand. Making maps in game is also better when you want to make a dungeon or generally an interior with separate rooms