Quote from Xeno;1188217:
How is any race useless? Every race can completely destroy given the current skills to choose from in the game. Every race can get multiple skill-sets that do enough damage to completely eradicate even the hardest content in just a few hits. So how exactly is any re-balancing going to change that fact? Is it so awful that at a hypothetical top end, race A can clear a room 5 seconds faster than race B? No.
What the game needs is new goals for everyone to drive them to rank the skills in the first place. This game doesn't need to be balanced at all: It never was, it never will be, and it doesn't even matter in the slightest if it is. It's a team PvE game. Not League of Legends where balance actually needs to be a thing.
We have primarily been running Shadow Missions and NPC (Martial Arts) for years now. They need to add more basic content into the game like that to keep things fresh: aka Dungeon Revamp. Dungeons are useless. They give minimal exp, and awful rewards. Ciar Adv HM is a good baseline for how fun and challenging a re-vamp to the dungeons could be, even for super reforged characters. I just wish it actually gave worthy rewards and exp, and that there were OTHER classic dungeons that could get near or above that difficulty.
All they would have to do is add a mission board similar to those in Tail/Tara to each dungeon to let you choose a difficulty and then jump right in. Dungeon passes wouldn't be needed anymore. Add a gold/exp reward at the end and throw in some ES/items people want into the chests. Add a difficulty past Advanced, and bam, we have tons of new content.
The issue isn't x race can clear y dungeon/mission z minutes faster. The issue is one race has no advantage over the other two races. It could be as unbalanced as they want, but there should be some significant advantages of picking an elf over a human or giant. But the difference is a small amount of int and dex, arely in the double digits for dex. And the skill advantages are mostly all disadvantages. If you say a race is not useless because they could all be efficient given the effort, then you have no excuse to say dungeons are useless. Just because x new content is better than dungeons doesn't mean dungeons are useless, and there are still things that can onyl be obtained from dungeons.
I agree that new content would be good. But new kind of content, not the same old mission/dungeon framework. What's the point of dungeons if you make them exactly like missions? What is good about mabi is that it splits into combat, life/gathering/production, and exploration (although exploration has been neglected). In my opinion, what this game needs is more intricacy not necessarily more complexity but more simplicity would be even worse. What I and many others find fun about this game is that there is a lot of variety. You don't have to perform combat, you can get just as high by just doing life skills, daily quests, buying and selling stuff, and never have to touch combat once. Likewise, you can do the opposite. (You could do exploration too but you can't really benefit exploration by doing more exploration.) And considering that, it divides even further into different fields of combat, different fields of wealth, different and a few ways to get AP and spend it, likewise with gold. Mabinogi is intricate by design and initially intended to be unrestricted, the C2 director was pressured into making Elves and Humans different, initially he only wanted storyline to be different with no skill, stat, nor equip differences besides clothing. The idea of racial differences was a way to make Mabinogi more generic, like other MMOs. Generic isn't exactly a bad thing, but what attracts people to mabi is usually its differences and uniqueness. They tried that again in G13 with the original destiny system, and all hell broke loose. People got made because it was heavily restrictive and had so many disadvantages you must endure to accept the advantages, and DevCAT knew the playerbase doesn't like that. Which is why the destiny system ended up being the 2x skill training, slight advantages in relevant stats, etc system it ended up being on final release of G13, and later turned into the Talent system in G17. I feel, the existence of races just steers away from that, and had races come out in G13 rather than G5, they would have recalled racial differences like they recalled destiny/class differences. Mabinogi is a game where anyone can do everything and can choose to do only some things or do it all, and Races just gets in the way of that, especially when one race gets disadvantages for none of the advantages.