Suggestion #12354

Disabling Firework Rockets in MobHunt isn't the correct solution

Recently, the suggestion to disable fireworks in mobhunt event was accepted, deemed too unskillful and unfair. While many of the players agree that it is unfair, it is by no means unskillful and a braindead strategy where you just jump to the arena, fire a couple of rockets, and win each every time. The problem seen with firework rockets in mobhunt is that its a 1-trick unskillful strategy, but behind the scenes there's more than just firing rockets.

The recipe and materials to craft enough rockets for the 15-minute duration of a mobhunt is absurd. On average, I waste 11+ stacks of rockets, which is like 2 double chest of materials combined. It is very expensive and time consuming to participate in a mobhunt event and thus our party can only allocate 2-4 rounds per day to participate. The rest of the day is spent on gathering materials and crafting (5 steps of crafting by the way, one of the most complicated crafting recipe in the game) to even have enough for a few rounds. Try it out, craft a double chest of rockets and see how painfully tedious and expensive it is ^^

One argument is that crossbow rockets are too unskillful, which is just false. Time and time again I, and others, would compete to someone with equal amount of rockets and yet we can still edge out the most kills because we have the skill and have trained for it for many many rounds. We don't just fire rockets anywhere and expect the explosion to do the rest. Because of the limited ammo we have and the amount of players competing, the skill to estimate the blast of the fireworks, to preserve the ammo throughout the duration of the round, hotkey the items from inventory to offhand, to roam around looking for the best spot to fire the fireworks, maintaining health, and keeping focus for the entire 15-minute duration all takes SKILL. It is not something that you can be better just by using crossbow rockets. You need time, good judgement, and skill to learn the strategy. Heck, in most cases, some of our fairly skilled party members using fireworks are edged out by skilled swords/axes because they are not as experienced as our top players.

Here, a screenshot of the recent mobhunt I participated using an axe. I won 1st place without fireworks with 510 mob kills. More points than someone using fireworks. A good demonstration that a skilled sword/axe user can win against a player with crossbow fireworks with some experience. It shows that crossbow fireworks itself isn't that braindead of a strategy as people might think it is: https://imgur.com/a/YeU4jyO

One thing that should be changed instead of having firework rockets disabled is removing the squishy 1-tap mobs as a roster in the mobhunt, specifically slimes, silverfish, and magma cubes. A secret that we have is to aim for squishy mobs to make use of the radius of the blast. By having the squishy mobs gone, crossbow rocket strategy would now have an increase skill level to have a better aim in maximizing damage to mobs with high health. It takes 4-5 shots to take down a mob on average, and having those squishy mobs removed means we would need to spend more rockets and keep focus longer to participate and compete against the axe/sword strategy which can 1-tap. This would buff swords/axe strategy as strength 2 and speed 2 are good potions that can buff the damage and still allow 1-tap kills due to the stacking effects of sharpness, bane of arthropods, and smite, and sweeping edge to the mobs. Further, adding more mobs like ravager (high health), blaze (immune to fire), zombie piglin (swarm and high health), etc... can greatly increase the effectiveness of axes/swords due to their high dps, a major problem for firework rockets. This change would balance out mobhunt as a player can opt for either 1-tap, high damage, low cost, easy skill strategy with axes/sword + potion or go for a highly expensive, high skill ceiling strategy with firework rockets.

To end this, disabling firework rockets in MobHunt event isn't the right solution. Mobhunt is only one of the three possible events. Difference in time zone, activity of the player, and skills of an individual already ensures that no one player dominates all the events and their is a healthy cycle of winners of the event. We can only do 2-4 mobhunts daily due to these restraints, and its not a guaranteed 100% win all the time, but how about for the rest of the day where events are taking place left and right? Others are winning those events and we don't complain about it. Most of the time its consecutive envoys and cta and we don't complain about them. If a mobhunts would take place where our top players are inactive or when we have no rockets in stock, we will let others win. But when we form a strategy to win as a party, god forbid nerf them? take that strategy away from active players trying to enjoy the game? It's not the right call. We play events as a party and communicate. If helping out other party members in the event to secure the win isn't allowed then what's the point of parties? Other parties may use are strategy as well and we're not opposed to that. It creates an even competition. It's now just a matter of how much of their time will they invest to becoming skilled with using a crossbow rockets.

This should give a clear idea that firework rockets is a skillful and hard-to-master strategy. Please understand the situation in both sides of the coin. If you have any more questions that needs clarification, write your comments and insights. I'll be glad to answer them whenever I can and help with balancing out mobhunts for everyone to enjoy :D