Hero

The 3 Warrior classes had a slow wind-up towards breaking into their individual class identities as their job advances. 2nd Job warriors barely had much distinctive skills and mechanics from each other, so we brought in the concept of Specialized Skills adapted from a later version of MapleStory.

Combo Ability 2nd Job

To start off, the Hero class now gets its signature Combo Ability at 2nd Job. Hero had a very limited number of skills to spend combo orbs on, and we felt this change allowed us to include more combo skills throughout the job progression.

We also looked at underused skills and played around with how to improve the skills, without taking away from the class identity experience.

Shout 3rd Job

For example, Shout was an underused skill, and it was obvious why. It had a base cast delay of 1.5 seconds. That is around the same cast delay used for most Full Map Attack (FMA) skills, yet it had less than half of an FMA's hitbox and dealt way too little damage.

So while we could just mindlessly amp up the damage of Shout, it would turn Hero into a Pre-Big Bang FMA-spamming Magician, and that's not how we want the levelling experience to feel for Hero.

So instead, we chose to drastically lower the cast delay (close to insta-cast) and add a combo cost to blend it in with Hero's class identity, while naturally restricting bot-like spamming of the skill while mobbing. This makes Shout sort of like a "taunt": you can seamlessly weave in Shouts between mobbing attacks, especially to aggro mobs on a higher platform to improve farming efficiency.

Puncture 4th Job

Hero at 4th Job was mostly a 1-button class spamming Raging Blow, something that unfortunately plagues the endgame experience for most other classes as well in this version of MapleStory. So the least we could do is give it 1 more button to press, yeah?

We imported Puncture, which uses 4 combo orbs to deal damage and inflict a Damage-over-Time (DoT) effect, shown by the fire icon above the mob. While this DoT is active, both the Hero and the party deal increased Critical Damage against the mob. This creates a window of opportunity for the party to go ham with their attacks.

The class fantasy

And this sums up the sneak preview of the changes we made to Hero. Just to be clear, we overhauled its entire skill kit, but we can only show you so much in one go. For now, this is our class fantasy for Hero that we want to present to you.

A simple but foolproof Warrior, capable of dealing swift and enormous damage lines, and one of the premier damage-dealing classes you would love to have with you in your Boss Expedition.

Keep a lookout for the next Class Design Diary, where there will be teasers for more classes! There will be stuff that hopefully will delight the self-acclaimed highly mechanical players amongst us...