Abstract

There has been a lot of talk and anticipation around the Musa rework, as well as a lot of discussion in my personal friend group among those that have played the class with speculation on what or where the logical place the next steps might be. As someone who has mained the class from when it came to the north american servers and then mained awakening since its release, I hope to vocalize some of the main pain points that Musa has in the grand scope of the game in both pve and pvp. I understand that Musa has been a challenge to balance correctly since inception and there are many issues that cannot be fixed with simple number tweaks, so I will do my best to discuss systematic issues as well as my personal thoughts and opinions about more number centric issues as well.

Major Issues

I want to be clear. The class design of Musa awakening is excellent. The skills, fantasy, and feel of the class are all excellent apart from some minor uses with terrain movement and animation locks. That being said however there are some glaring issues with the class compared to other classes and reworks.

Mobility

With the design of recent classes and many of the reworks adding in general ease of combat movement and an upward trend in mobility between skills, Chase and Fiery Angel are very underwhelming. The stamina cost of Chase, while I understand its need for implementation in the early days of class balance, really destroys the class fantasy that Musa (and Maewha) used to provide as being the mobility class. Being able to dash around to get off a few quick bursts of cc and damage was vital to the class identity in pvp. The traditional counters to that style, (cc heavy classes like tamer, warrior, and berserker) have given way to aoe slows and burst damage, destroying even the ability to reliably engage with enemies outside of small skirmishes or 1v1 scenarios. This is coupled with the previously mentioned mobility creep, meaning that Musa gets cc'd and outran by the majority of classes at the point in the game.

Adding back in super armor or frontal guard to Fiery Angel would go a long way in mitigating this issue or alternatively reducing the stamina cost and increasing the distance traveled of Chase to be more in line with other class mobility with also work.

Utility

The majority of Musa utility used to come from its mobility and reliable disengage. As discussed previously these are problematic at best in the current landscape and Musa gets outshined considerably by classes like sage, sorceress, and lahn. Most of Musa's current utility comes in the form of the vacuum of Projection, the recent bug fix on the duplicated damage from an animation cancel hitting the reliability and damage of the skill considerably. While this was intended, I feel that the impact of the change was underestimated and removed much-needed kill potential and utility from the awakening kit.

While many people have been discussing adding a grab to Musa, it's my personal opinion that a grab doesn't add anything significant to the kit and actually destroys some of the current class fantasy. I would prefer some more unique utility added to Musa like the current block shred we've seen from corsair added to Eradicate, a cc cleanse added to Musa Spirit or temporary resistance increased to immunity on Musa's Soul.

Damage Consistency

Accuracy issues aside, the majority of Musa's damage output currently comes from crit stacking via Blind Thrust, Skill Enhancement: Musa Spirit and skill add ons. Crit, when combined with other special attack modifiers, leads to a wildly inconsistent amount of damage output depending on the situation. In higher-end grind spots, for example, mobs are rarely ever cc'd and tend to increase kill time for Musa to be unreasonably higher than other classes and forcing a much higher AP bracket investment to have a similar clear time. 293 with Kutum on a Musa is more comparable to 281 or 285 on a striker for example because of that loss of special attack and damage outside of critical hits. Pvp is a similar story, forcing awakening Musa's to start engages in pre-awakening just for reliable cc catches in Dragon Bite and to cancel directly into crit buffing via Blind Thrust, before you can even swap to awakening to have any kill potential.

This unfortunately is not a simple numbers game though, as I understand the issues that simply doing so would have. Buffing animation speed of skills, adding in consistent lingering protections, and removing animation locks from certain skills could mitigate these issues I feel while maintaining the class identity and not over buffing damage considerably. Spinner, Flow: Nemesis Slash, Flow: Backflow, and Black Spirit Rage: Projection are the primary offenders.

Minor Issues

Now that the major flaws of the class have been outlined, some minor issues still exist within the play loop of the class. While not direct power issues, they do affect gameplay and character fantasy to the extent that I feel they need to be mentioned as a side note to the overall class discussion.

Terrain Traversal

Movement is a core identity to the class and class fantasy of Musa. The inconsistency of traversing different elevations in the terrain is more than annoying, especially while using Chase causing clipping, desync, and animation irregularities on everything from stairs to small rocks or a gentle declining slope. The worst issues actually cause the player model to clip into the terrain and hitbox detection to go haywire, forcing you to either use the escape function, swap characters, or relog the game to fix the issue. Fixing these issues would be a godsend.

Outfits

I understand the historical significance of the Musa class and the real-life warriors that Musa was fashioned after, however, outfits for most other classes break their aesthetics frequently and allow for some truly eyecatching and cool outfits to exist. Musa however is relegated to mostly eastern aesthetics in the outfits released for it unless the outfit or theme comes to all the other male classes, constraining personal character expression and design to these mostly eastern themes. More outfits like Luanwolf and Leonidas and less like Western Frontiers and Tormented Soul, please.

Conclusion

Musa awakening is honestly in a fairly decent spot in terms of class fantasy and design; if some solid quality of life changes and major and minor pain points are removed I feel the majority of players who have stuck with the class along with the many who like the design but are dissuaded from maining the class by some of these issues would be satisfied by the changes. This discussion is obviously just from my perspective of playing my Musa for over 12k hours and things I've discussed candidly with people I've known who have both tried and rerolled off the class. This is an open discussion and I welcome any insight or nuance to the things I've discussed or things I've forgotten to mention. Musa awakening mains are a dying breed and I really just want the class to be the best version of itself it can be so that people can love and enjoy something I also love and enjoy. Hopefully, this can spark productive discourse on a spec that deserves some much-needed love.

Good writeup, but I want to interject on one statement.

This is not accurate. Class exclusive outfits, for the most part, stays strictly within their specific theme. Otherwise, we'd have warriors running around in a cotton gi with dragon motiffs, or zerkers running around in wizard robes.

Striker/Mystic always has an eastern martial arts theme (gi/dragon motiffs/etc.)

Sorc always has a dark magic theme (runes/spikes/etc.)

Warrior always has a medeival warrior theme (western full plate/full face helms/etc.) 

Witch/Wiz always sticks with the theme of magician (robes/heavy ornamentation).

Archer always has a forest dweller theme (animal motiffs/Elf (LoTR) clothing).

Etc.

The problem isn't the east asian warrior theme, it's PA not creatively engaging fantasy elements with said theme. This is apparent in all east asian themed classes (Lahn, Tamer, Maehwa, Ninja, and Kuno). The theme isn't the problem, it's PA not blending more fantasy elements into new designs. Most likely, this is because western fantasy designs are much more mainstream than east asian fantasy. So instead, PA reuses designs from previous outfits.

We can really see this in Western Frontiers vs Tormented Soul; they are the same outfit,one is just an updated/streamlined version. In contrast, Striker/Mystic avoided this problem for the most part because each outfits tends to blend a new element with the original theme, creating a very diverse set of outfit aesthetics that still retain the original theme. If PA did this with the other east asian themed classes, we wouldn't have this problem of replicated outfit designs.