General

Equip Balancing Discussion

This thread is just to discuss some balancing issues. These aren't proposals, but just thoughts on some problems.

There's two serious issues that I think need to be addressed by Nexon: overalls and tyrant gear.

Overalls:
The problem with overalls started with the introduction of the potential system. Before, overalls compared to tops/bottoms were fairly balanced given the number of slots and the base stats. But since the potential system came out, choosing an overall over a top + bottom isn't as good because you lose out on extra potential lines.
The introduction of the cRA set made this way worse, making overalls an eccentric choice at best. Sweetwater and Absolab gear simply doesn't get used because of that damned overall (as well as other reasons).

So how on earth could Nexon possibly balance out overalls?
Some ideas come to mind:
1) double the effect of potential lines on overalls.
2) add more potential lines to overalls.
3) reduce the effect of potential lines on tops and bottoms.
4) reduce the number of potential lines on tops and bottoms.

Of the options, I think 1 would make more sense. Extra lines = more garbage chances. And good luck landing 5-6 lines of your main stat on a single item.
Tyrant Gear:
When Tyrant gear was introduced, there was no starforce system. There were no "no booms." Hard Magnus was nearly unbeatable.
The Superior item system was intended to be high risk, high reward. But now, tyrants are easily available to even mid-funded people and a constant supply of no-booms is added from every philosopher's book event (or clones of it) and marvel. Starforce also removes an immense amount of risk.

When added, do you think Nexon even thought anyone would get past 7-8 stars given the boom chances and superior wards ending there? At 7*, tyrants are amazing (even 5* alone is a massive amount of stat), but at 10+ they become insane. 15* tyrants are just plain broken compared to any other equip you could use.

Tyrants are so good with starforce and no booms that it's impossible to rival them with any other equipment set. So now, Nexon is stuck with a catch 22: do you make an even more overpowered set of equipment that further breaks the game? Or do you piss off your players by nerfing items they've spent so much money perfecting?

There are some options here:
1) reduce the total number of stars for tyrants (and royally piss off everyone that got more than that)
2) reduce the total amount of stat added per star (more reasonable, but would still piss people off)
3) reduce the max stars, but grandfather out existing tyrants and make them untradeable (would still piss off a lot of players)
4) make new equipment that outclasses tyrants - ie - when perfect, these items would have >100 att and >160 stats. (and continue the cycle of broken gear.)

Of these options, I think the most reasonable would be 2. It would still make people really angry, but it would help reduce a lot of the balance issues surrounding tyrants.

The only other option is just to throw balance out the window and milk as much money out of the game as possible as it enters its twilight years. Depressingly, this seems to be Nexon's current agenda.