Dragon Better Mounted Combat Skills for certain dragon types

[thenewguyinred]

Hello, have you guys ever went to the Dragon Riding Skill Manager and got your first Mount Combat skills, only to find out that the mounted skills you got aren't as cool or fun as you thought they would be? That's what happened to me with Skytouched and Phantom dragon families. I'm always big sucker for the more wyvern-like dragon designs and seeing the two coolest dragon families having the least impressive skills is rather disappointing. I wish the current DEVs could update the game and add more useful and cool skills, Like a three hit combo skill that involve the dragons slashing their wing talons at enemies, a close range attack that involve the dragons jumping and unleashing a flurry of slashing kicks, and a short range fireball attack that leaves and explosion dealing great damage. I honestly don't think the current server managers could pull off such a feat, but what do you guys think, is it possible to make these dreams a reality?

 

[Seiichi]

This may happen when we do balancing, the issue is that almost everything with Dragons is pretty hardcoded to be difficult to work with.

 

[thenewguyinred]

This may happen when we do balancing, the issue is that almost everything with Dragons is pretty hardcoded to be difficult to work with.

I knew you'd say something like that. But at least you left room for possibilities.

 

[Seiichi]

I knew you'd say something like that. But at least you left room for possibilities.

Skill design in dragons prophet is very vague and complicated, to the extent it's equivalent to learning as much as we already know of the data and backend all over again. There is also no consistency between similar skills if they're done at different times.

What you're asking isn't so much to 'make skills better', but more to replace and rebalance existing dragon families.

This won't really be considered until we've got source completed, some tooling completed (for easier data development), and then class rebalancing as that's going to require a lot of research that will carry over to Dragons.

The issue with Dragons is that the majority of mechanics related to them are extremely restricted in how expandable they are.

The other issue is how do you deal with dragons with legacy skills, or do we just update the existing skill

 

[Kazunokun]

i mean tbh you can do a lot with phantoms already, they're one of the strongest in terms of mounted combat, not because of their personal damage but their utility. They can debuff enimies for up to 30% mag def (and also phy def iirc), they can give you a bunch of int once you demount, somewhere in the 600's if you stack it up to 3 and you have the skill at level 5 (wich you probably won't have anytime soon, but it's usually the most useful dragon riding skill to level for magic classesconcidering you don't abuse bugs). To be fair you normally wouldn't stack the debuff up to the full 30%, more like 10%, same with the int buff, you'd normally only really go for the 200 int from the first stack, that's still plenty utility concidering you also get int and da dragon inheritance aka mount buff wich usually means that your damage is doubled to trippled already from that if you adjusted your values and the dragon's values correctly, plus soul binding wich is another 25% damage bonus wich is added seperately at the end. so yeah, dragon's pretty broken, but i agree that mounted combat isn't really that fun and usually it's sadly not viable to go for damage with mounted combat.

 

[Kazunokun]

also skytouched heals is like the crutch that mages cling to, to survive like a slime hitting them since the poor guys can't spend dragon soul on heals if they just play pure double god xD

 

[thenewguyinred]

also skytouched heals is like the crutch that mages cling to, to survive like a slime hitting them since the poor guys can't spend dragon soul on heals if they just play pure double god xD

Really, you can do all of that? Cool, but unfortunately, I see dragons' usefulness not by their buffs or healing skills but by their combative prowess. I'm the kind of guy who throws strategy out of the window in favor of hitting something really really hard. Ancients and Fabled Ancients are the best in terms of sheer strength, they plow thru most bosses like nothing. Maybe I can find more use to these non-combative dragons if I had an actual party, but I doubt I'd make any significant progress with how small the player base is.

 

[Kazunokun]

Really, you can do all of that? Cool, but unfortunately, I see dragons' usefulness not by their buffs or healing skills but by their combative prowess. I'm the kind of guy who throws strategy out of the window in favor of hitting something really really hard. Ancients and Fabled Ancients are the best in terms of sheer strength, they plow thru most bosses like nothing. Maybe I can find more use to these non-combative dragons if I had an actual party, but I doubt I'd make any significant progress with how small the player base is.

I mean if you wanted to go for full on damage with mounted attacks then play ranger with DA and full ele dmg on a fabled ancient. That's the highest mounted combat dragon damage you can reach. Still way worse than just running a normal mage or oracle, but it's not horrible. Here's a guide i made on it a while ago