Hi there,
Even though I only got a beta key for the last 3 days of the iCBT I still tried to make the most of it and discover as much of the features in the game. I’ll be posting my pet-peeves about the game and the overall experience I had during my playtime.
Party play
I personally had a bad experience with parties since either I was 7 levels higher than the other guy and only ended up helping him with bosses/quests, or the party was disbanded (or I was kicked) after 5 mins. From what I noticed about the experience division it looked fair especially with option of making the exp be determined by level. When inviting other people to party I barely got a positive response since I needed a damage oriented player but those do much better KSing other people or just standing in a field 1~2 shotting everything. This comes to one of my pet-peeves about the game.
KSing and why it is so efficient in terms of money & level grinding.
Since I was a tank oriented Peltasta without a party I decided to provoke as many mobs at once (without intentionally taking enemies from others), but since I needed 3~5+ normal hits most of the time IF someone else came along they just took all my provoked mobs (80~100% HP) with either one AoE skill/spell or 1 or 2 AoE hits from their basic attacks. I didn’t mind that all that much since the grind wasn’t too bad even at 40+ until I noticed that last hit determines drops aswell as the exp jackpot from a blue monster. I had 2 occasions where I had almost killed a blue mob completely, but along comes a hunter or mage that just hits it from range and takes basically all the exp (might be bug?).
So here is a suggestion: remove the current last hit mechanism and try to adjust it so that it takes in account the total % of damage done. This is fairer in most cases and also is a more logical approach in my eyes.
Bosses
To me personally I found that there was an overload of bosses. If I saw something that I could click (non-quest related), I instantly knew that I had an 80% chance or more that there was going to be a boss fight (crystals in crystal mines). Some bosses also seem to have no reason at all to be in such a place for instance the stone whale in crystal mines or the cyclops in both the crystal mines and the tenet chapel basement (the latter had more reason than the former). Though I must admit that most boss fights were a challenge at times though mostly because my damage was so low (I quit a few bossfights because the damage I put out was just too low (3~4 damage for my basic attacks).
It was fun to learn the boss’s pattern and visual cues to certain abilities they used. Personally I’d like a less quantity and more quality approach. Maybe make the traps they use less randomly placed.
Overall artstyle, music, field layout
Personally the artstyle is great and everything seems to fit together. The only thing I found quite immersion breaking was that especially with the auras from traps and monsters you could see the boxes in which parts where created. (i.e. the box in which the hair was placed or the boxes where the plants where placed).
Music was as I expected from soundTeMP, fitting to most of the areas. Not much else to say about this.
Field layout was both a yay and a nay for me. The fields itself where well crafted as they branched out when it started to feel as if I was still running in the previous fields. The various little plateaus and such that are not always seen by the careless adventurer made for some great leveling spots since it was so unused. (yay fewer KSers)
Alas it lacked diversity in the sense that you had to follow a certain path in order to still be able to level somewhat. Compare that to the directors previous work where you could actually travel in atleast 4 directions from each beginning town and be able to level effectively. You could walk from picky’s all the way to peco peco’s for your first 30~40 levels or do something similar starting from prontera or geffen. This is something I really think is needed in Tree of Savior to not only make it feel more inquisitive towards the player but also to spread out the populace (30 people in 1 field with 4 places where mobs continue to spawn indefinitely is not balanced nor fun for most).
Story
I personally feel little for the story even though we are in the center of it. It feels not fleshed out enough (yet), but that might be because you get disconnected from the story since our levels can’t keep up with it.
EXP
While experience gain overall was not too slow in this iCBT a very slight increase is welcome to pretty much the entire playerbase, The penalty on monsters 5 levels below you or more was not too restrictive, but I feel as if players should get rewarded for trying to survive in places 10 levels above their level (maybe a chance to drop exp cards and additional experience[50%]), my reason for this is again to disperse the population that we will get.
Blue monsters were a nice break in the grind and were basically a moral upkeeper. They are however too much of a boost at the moment, so much so that if you get a little bit lucky you can do 2 hours of work in 30 mins thanks to blue monsters. So a lot of soloists and even parties just run around and channel hop to find those illusive blues because it is simply a lot faster. (especially if u overkill them [*3.55 exp])
The level cap on both class rank and character level seem to be in sync with each other.
Equipment and gems
The level gap between equipment upgrades seem to be a bit too high, though this might be because of the used exp rate. A thing I noticed aswell is that there are plenty of mage and hunter weapon drops, but fewer cleric and swordsman weapon drops in the early levels. Same could be said for armors but in reverse, here mages and clerics aren’t in a good spot since they barely get cloth armor (max Sp increase = more sp recovery), while hunters and swordsmen have more luck with their leather and sometimes plate armor.
The idea of gems seems interesting and I like the fact that u can upgrade the level 1 gems into high level gems. It makes it so that players aren’t limited to low level gear, instead they can give a serious boost to their gear. I personally made a level 4 blue gem and was amazed by how well the bonuses already were. (+19 block for instance) The availability of them was ample since u get them from certain boss fights aswell.
Overall it is already looking better than what EA would ship out, and though many things can improve/alter I would already play this game for a decent while. My biggest concern is still the last hit mechanic that was implemented and the overflow in bosses. ( 6~7 in crystal mines 1, 2 and 3, and 3 in first floor of tenet chapel basement). Keep up the good work and I hope this is some good feedback for the devs.