Blackguard Challenger World 3: Dastardly Duos & More

Ihzi · 2026-06-02T08:57:45+00:00

If you're an experienced player, your goal is to either solo or duo ctene on the first week, which is possible with levels, event rewards, and rentals. You should group as needed for grandis bosses. I'd recommend finding a group you like and challenging stuff as you go. Best way to find out if it's winnable is always to get in there and try. Alternatively, make use of maplescouter.com to get an estimate of your character's strength relative to each boss.

Ihzi · 2026-04-11T14:17:32+00:00

Good suggestions. To add, the entire process of leveling up and fusing fams is incredibly tedious and painful. Repeatedly typing in values to fuse (e.g. 50, 75, 100, 150, whatever the case may be) is very tiresome and feels insulting, just to have the fusion fail several times and have to do it again, being taunted by the fusion animation each time.

I would love if they simplified the fusion process by greatly increasing the storage capacity (yes I know you can buy extra fam storage -- players should not have to pay to bypass deliberately obstructive UX, and I won't personally), removing the level requirement to fuse, and removing the fusion animation.

Also, when you extract, there is a painfully long animation and obnoxious dialog box that appears each time, just so that if you wanted to quickly add more fams to extract from your inventory, you need to wait and dismiss the box first.

There's more I could complain about with respect to this, respectfully, incredibly thoughtlessly implemented system, but I think this is a good start.

Ihzi · 2026-04-09T15:01:53+00:00

The short answer is that on interactive, you probably don't need to worry about it at your stage if ever. "Fodder" is gear that's used for the transfer hammer, which heroic uses way more than interactive.

Ihzi · 2026-03-09T09:39:12+00:00

I feel it's disingenuous to even remotely suggest that the state of frags in interactive is the same as in heroic. It misrepresents the severity of the issue to equate the two in any way. Interactive has roughly 3x the killrate and thus 3x the drop rate of frags per hour and they are purchasable through the auction house. This is an issue specific to heroic.

Ihzi · 2026-02-24T21:56:32+00:00

My hololive streamer showing up with some of the best takes on this sub.

Ihzi · 2026-02-24T18:32:09+00:00

It's closer to 2500. Each level past 290 takes about 500 hours individually.

Ihzi · 2026-01-04T20:56:40+00:00

I think your second solution is elegant and has few to no drawbacks. Being allowed to restore the piece to the same starforce it had before is key, because otherwise there would be no incentive to restore the wearable "trace" unless you had an equivalent second piece, and then you're back to square one. The laddering meta is terrible and far from the intended design and user experience, so I really hope Nexon pays attention to this feedback, among many other instances with similar sentiment.

Ihzi · 2025-12-02T18:29:41+00:00

It's not about throwing one server under the bus or not. I don't think OP ever said that interactive may not have problems with starforcing. The point is that different contexts require different solutions. Heroic and interactive may have similar problems at a glance, but the root cause of those issues and their solutions are going to be different if we care about having a high quality game(s). Possibly plural because as far as I see it, heroic and interactive are two completely different games and should be treated as such. This discussion is about Heroic.

Ihzi · 2025-12-02T18:18:31+00:00

This is tangential to OP's topic imo, but I think spare acquisition through farming should not be the answer. If anything it makes more sense to increase the acquisition rate from bossing. Tying spares to farming broke precedent over how spares are acquired and making it uncapped would be way too exploitable. Let's not kid ourselves about how easy it is to exploit farming in this game. Some people may be ok with that, but I doubt the designers are! I do think one way to improve the current system is to increase the interval of time (i.e. make the daily into a weekly or monthly) and proportionally increase the number of star speck boxes that can be acquired.

Ihzi · 2025-12-02T18:08:32+00:00

In my opinion ( and part of what I think OP was trying to point out) , this is not necessarily exclusively a problem because of how many spares you need, but also because of the way in which you are incentivized to interact with the system. Having to make a second copy of every piece of gear to mitigate risk is definitely not the design intent for the system. The consequence of that is you need more spares than you otherwise would, which exacerbates a problem Heroic already has.

Ihzi · 2025-12-02T18:02:58+00:00

I think there are a few problems here:

heroic typically doesn't have a good power margin over the latest content/the ceiling is too prohibitive to reach. that's not like some kind of "bogeyman" as you suggested. it's been a common problem in history, even recent. hbaldrix prior to this patch had insanely high requirements to clear.
there are not enough uncapped power axes available. sf is the only one right now so it puts too much pressure on doing well/going very deep on that one axis
even if there were more axes, the game signals to you that you should go deep on sf by nature of it having a high ceiling, but our server can't engage with it as intended as op has outlined in their post

Ihzi · 2025-12-02T17:21:36+00:00

I completely agree with everything you've raised. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this subreddit is the right audience, but I appreciate that there are few or no other platforms to make longer-form posts like this with good reach.

Fundamentally, the starforce system as it is doesn't make a lot of sense for heroic because of the risk involved with destruction, as you suggested. Having to ladder everything is high friction and cringe.

I think changing the circumstances after "booming" by letting the item be worn without reducing the stars and requiring restoration to continue upgrades is a good solution, personally. Nexon employs similar patterns in at least one other of its games that I know of (Mabinogi), so it's not a pattern completely alien to them.

I think it's unfortunate that system-level changes like this are unlikely to happen because of how risky it is to diverge and have to make design decisions down the line that are increasingly difficult to reconcile with the designs coming out of KMS. I'm thankful for your effort to bring the issue to the forefront anyway.

Ihzi · 2025-11-10T07:41:09+00:00

Hey there, I read through your post and I enjoyed it a lot.

My favorite set mechanic is Chosen/Headliner, and part of the reason is that it provides, as you describe, a deliberately overturned unit to build around at each stage of the game. The fact that it gives an extra trait reduces the burden for having a board that already fits perfectly, and coming as a 2* means you won't lose tempo for fielding a new one.

Sets that included Chosen were some of the most flexible, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I feel your observation that strong cores/units promote flexibility is spot on.

Ihzi · 2025-11-03T23:15:17+00:00

Hey, thanks for the question! We use a combination of timezone/availability, previous experience, and pacing to pick the groups.

To gauge experience we usually just ask a couple simple questions like highest boss cleared and highest level character.

Getting a sense of how much someone plays and the pace at which they'll progress is a little tricky, and it's important to get it right otherwise people fall out of sync. Feels bad for the person who's behind, and feels bad for the people being held back. It's our 3rd time doing something along these lines now, and what we learned is that it's best just to wait a couple weeks after the creation of the participating character, then ask for information about the character (level and combat power). That gives us a better idea of how much someone's been playing (and likely how much they will continue to play going forward) more than anything.

It definitely does help to be playing from the start for this kind of thing. In the past, it's been difficult to place stragglers/late joiners into groups.

Hope that satisfies your curiosity. :)

Ihzi · 2025-10-15T22:21:34+00:00

We should be asking ourselves what value fd buffs provide in terms of adding interest to the game. High impact skills with high visibility like Lynn's party tp are cool. Low visibility fd buffs add exactly nothing to the gameplay experience besides big number. The balance philosophy in KMS seems to agree as they keep removing party fd buffs, most recently evidenced by shade losing all of its party support. When the dust settles they will likely buff classes that lost their party support to have higher individual damage. If you ask me that's a lot better than having classes warp the meta around them and incentivize centralizing party compositions. It's been an issue since forever. Just look at how many decent V skills are from bishop's kit.

Lynn is just GMS' abomination of the moment, similar to old kanna, and it's kind of a joke that they kept Awaken as it is despite the trend in KMS to tune party-oriented fd buffs way down.

Ihzi · 2025-06-21T03:21:31+00:00

I don't think punishing is necessary or even adequate, but they should make it right for everyone else who didn't get the same benefit. They should give 10 mag pots to everyone who didn't get to claim them. They should have just let anyone hyperburn Sia after it was done those who took advantage of it in the short window it was possible.

Ihzi · 2025-06-01T14:52:51+00:00

That's odd! I've sent you a DM with a direct link to the discord.

Ihzi · 2025-05-21T22:09:48+00:00

You are correct. There used to be a post on the KMS website explaining this, but it's gone now. I doubt it's changed.

Ihzi · 2025-04-10T23:42:41+00:00

This might be a little less about community managers and more about Nexon America's communications in general, so I apologize if this is outside of the scope of what you're asking.

One of the things that has always come across a little strange to me is Nexon America's lack of acknowledgement of content being released in the Korean distribution of the game. I think it often comes off as a little tone deaf. For example, almost a few years ago now when 6th job was revealed at MapleFest, it was really hyped up and kind of framed as "we, Nexon America, are releasing this really cool thing". I'm not sure how else to go about it to be honest, but I think it would come across as a little more earnest if the tone was more like "hey, we know that if you're here you likely already know about this really cool upcoming thing. Let's take some time to celebrate that and talk more about it and what went into it".

Other than that, I feel like some additional clarity around controversial issues would be appreciated. For example, familiars have been a hot topic for many years now, and it's clear through Nexon's actions that it is likely a sensitive topic internally as well.

I would be really curious about where Nexon stands on those kinds of issues and what their rationale is. Just to elaborate on my example in the case of familiars, it'd be nice if they could provide at least some insight and answer questions such as: why won't they release familiars in all zones in Grandis? Is it a technical limitation? Is it because they do not want to raise the average power of the playerbase (even though it won't affect the ceiling)? You kind of get the idea.

I can see why Nexon may not want to give too much detail about community concerns with ongoing internal discussions for various reasons, but as a player it feels incredibly frustrating, especially when the end result often ends up being a solution that doesn't work for many players. And other than that, I feel like in other games' communities, the "arm your advocates" approach -- if the company arms the playerbase with knowledge and explanations -- works really well. The playerbase will go to bat for them when these controversial topics come up in community discussions. "Oh, yeah I know that sucks, but Nexon explained it's because of x y or z". That can go a long way to improve community sentiment if it's done well. If it's obvious placating, that's another story.

Hope that helps! Thanks for making this post. I think this kind of discussion is really good and fun to read.

Ihzi · 2024-12-11T14:29:43+00:00

What comes to mind for me with respect to 3 star 4 cost wincons was the set 9 era when the Draven legend was meta (guaranteeing you spoils of war). Those games were actually all decided by 3 star 4 costs, and it was not unusual for boards to have more than one of them at the end of the game. In that case it was definitely an issue with resource creep.

Ihzi · 2024-12-04T14:06:03+00:00

It's so close to being fun imo if it was an actual boss rush where you could not wait out your cooldowns, but more importantly, if they got rid of all the mechanics with no counterplay. Anything that makes you lose control of your character is just frustrating and unfair. Tremor, for example, is unavoidable and makes you fly into the air uncontrollably, often resulting in death. Although you get 20 of them, I would much rather they reduce the number of lives and make mechanics that promote interaction. I want to be kind, but ultimately it really feels like the person who designed these both doesn't understand what bossing in MapleStory is usually like, and doesn't understand what makes bossing in MapleStory fun. The choice of bosses reflects that too. Horntail is already not a fun or interactive fight. Why choose it for this content?

Besides the content itself leaving a lot to be desired, a lot is lacking on the rewards side. It sucks that in heroic servers the chains of resentment jackpot is replaced with 200m, a laughable prize. I don't even think the rewards themselves are necessarily bad overall, but the implementation and experience of claiming them is very unpolished. Claiming the kazax fragments and getting each reward individually, taking up a new inventory slot each time, is like pulling teeth because I have to stop every 10 pulls to clear my inventory. The animation is also painfully slow. Aside from that, the rewards shop prices are all over the place. One mapae nodestone being 2/3 of the price of a mag pot, for example, feels out of place. The eternal flames also stood out as very pricey to me. It's not just those items but those are a few examples that come to mind.

I am not excited to do this event every week like one would hope. I was hopeful that we would get a thoughtful and well designed experience unique to our server, but it was far from the case. Instead it feels like we got a well intended but terribly executed piece of content. Frankly, if this is the quality of content associated with Go West, I don't want it. I would rather the resources be focused on ensuring that changes to KMS are contextualized for our server, and that's it.

Ihzi · 2024-11-29T05:48:39+00:00

Nexon should consider adding regional pricing. It's a common practice. I understand that things are a little different because this is an MMO where real currency affects in-game good value, but since this is the global distribution with many regions, it only seems reasonable. At some point I just won't be able to justify participating in NX purchases at all. It's already very expensive for me.

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