So Blessing is incredibly strong right now (It’s adding something like 2k damage per hit), throughout level 1 and 330. You buy it before you leave town. You return to town to buy it again frequently. Rebuying it after every dungeon/mission run. It’s a quick way to boost up some levels. It’s too valuable to pass up. To be honest, it sucks. On that note, the meta (for new character leveling or otherwise) involving Blessing, Sacrament, Cafrisun, any +Xdamage hat enchantments, any skills that increase the number of damage lines that your basic attacks can produce, all of these things together, it’s all ■■■■. All of it is just pouring water onto the current (and old) combat system. It dilutes the power increase you’d see from leveling up most skills. It also makes this weird (and intended, as stated by IMC) thing where multi-hit attacks deal an incredible amount of damage versus their single-hit counterparts, because the multi-hits are reapplying all that bonus damage with every hit.
With the way the game is now, IMC might as well make all pardoner Buffs permanent on every character. I do not think the pardoner shop is adding anything to the game. And I certainly don’t think the pardoner shop is making Non-pardoner Priests any more relevant in parties. The Pardoner shop, the skills involved, need to be either changed in some way, or removed from the game entirely. The amount of time the buffs remain active, changing the buff to apply on&off via the purchaser’s discretion and reducing it’s time remaining when it’s on, greatly reducing the amount of damage it provides, etc.
I, and many other players, have already established a routine to buy all these buffs before leaving town. But all new players I’ve talked to about this have said it’s strange as hell to be purchasing these buffs all the time; even some of the returning players who didn’t bother buying into it pre-patch.
I don’t think this is taking the game in a good direction. All the game content at lower levels has become trivial, you can just bum-rush through all of it (Some of you guys who have pained your way through before might say this is a good thing, I mean the content should be rebalanced in some way but not with the OPAF (overpowered as fuck) shop buffs).
The way the stats work now, I think most people can appreciate (still weird that Dexterity has nothing to do with accuracy now-a-days). But ever since the first Dossier was posted, I could not help but feel like the stats were still not going to supply enough damage to attacks, and I still believe that, post-patch. Although I do greatly appreciate that skills work via a multiplier rather than +flat damage. I still think the damage provided by gear be reduced, and that the gear cut is made up for via stronger stats.
Dexterity’s substat, attack speed, needs to be better implemented. Rather, the way that the server determines whether or not you are attempting to basic-attack needs to be changed. If I had to guess: the client is sending a basic-attack request to the server > the server makes your character basic-attack > the server tells your client when the basic-attack is over > and the cycle repeats. It’s slow. It should be: the client sends a start-basic-attack request to the server > the server makes your character basic-attack indefinitely until > the client sends a end-basic-attack request to the server. The first request is sent when you first press your basic-attack button, then sends the second request when you release the basic-attack button; rather than sending an attack request every time a basic-attack is performed and resending/rechecking if the basic-attack button is still held down. This logic would also alleviate some of the problems with getting stuck in place when trying to use a skill (this happens because the skill request packet is lost, but the client is still waiting for a response from the server). The only downside is that the basic-attack request would sometimes not make it to the server and you would subsequently not start basic-attacking about as often as your skills make you stuck; but, your skills would not make you stuck, so that’s a fine benefit.
I think removing critical rate from any stat sucks. So I think the game would be more open to reintroduce critical rate but tack it to a new stat, like, Luck or something (bringing the game up from STR/CON/INT/SPR/DEX to STR/CON/INT/SPR/DEX/LUCK). Only using Luck as the name because RO had Luck. It gave you a weird kind of dodge stat and it also had critical rate. So I don’t know what other substats we could associate with Luck in ToS. Maybe a weird regen tic crit chance; where your 10 second regen provided by CON/SPR would have a chance to be a huge regeneration tic. This is also a good opportunity to point out, Dexterity providing both dodge chance and hit chance was a weird design choice, and I hope future rebalances don’t bring back any weird stat like that again; same goes for accuracy on gloves & evade on shoes. So thanks for that.
Think I’m out of stuff to rant about… for now. Willing to discuss other rants in here as well. But lets bring all the weird stuff to the forefront, like buying blessing all the doggamn time.