anyone coming to tree of savior should not expect this game to be the same as iro. in general, if you approach tos like a different game serving a different purpose for a more casual audience, you’ll get more enjoyment out of it. the purpose of this post is an opinion piece aimed at people who come here from iRO specifically.
as a veteran ro player (10+ years off and on iRO) and someone who has almost 900 hours logged on tos, here are my 2 cents. the game has been and is currently as such in comparison to ‘vanilla’ iRO:
-
visuals are similar
-
music is not as memorable (i like the music, i just liked the more upbeat bgms of lutie, prontera, alde, etc.)
-
no events have been held in itos to this day. no double exp, hide-and-seek, etc. at least, not since i started in cbt. i really miss the hugel mini-games they did or the dragon voucher thing in ro.
-
guilds have no emblems. it feels sooo strange to me as an ro player. emblems used to be part of an identity of guilds in iro. also, i don’t think guild titles are displayable. the guild gui tells you a lot less. you don’t get member’s portraits, class, or levels (you can get an add-on to see levels). there are no messages for when your guild members login. i don’t even think you can see a daily msg in chat like you could in ro. guilds just feel a lot more… invisible (for lack of a better word). leveling in guilds is not done by slaving exp either. no more ‘guild exp parties’ where you grabbed your entire guild and taxed the killers 50% to level your guild. guilds are also capped at 35 rather than the 56. they feel a lot smaller and cliquish.
-
no realms with castles, no guild dungeons
-
game still has huge fps issues, despite optimization. this is especially apparent when fighting at world bosses with more than 10 people.
-
less base classes than ro - ro had swordsman, acolyte, thief, archer, merchant, mage and then the expanded classes + super novice. tos has swordsman, cleric, archer, and mage. as an ro player, you start to feel it when you want to make ‘something different.’
-
less towns/less population in towns. having everyone separated into channels kills this. also, the game can’t handle more than 100 people at any given map at any time.
-
less social than RO. maps are more widespread and you don’t spend a long enough time in maps because of linear questing. also probably has to do with how leveling works in tos. in ro you could lvl in lvl 90 stings map as a lvl 40 archer/mage. tos has restrictions in place making this sort of thing impossible. in general, there is less interaction between people, guilds, etc.
-
questing with more than 2 people is annoying. so many bugs and issues with summoning people to your quest.
-
less grind areas in tos than ro - ro had so many interesting leveling spots and intricate areas for specific class-types. tos has nothing of the sort. it only has 4 leveling maps after 210 and they’re all equally mind-numbing/boring. ro had so many options of where to level at any given level it was insane.
-
silver is sparse in maps and even nerfed in comparison to its korean counterpart. in general, it is a lot harder to get money in this game compared to ro.
-
very little gear is universal. for example, in ro you could get an immune muffler or superior sandals and get a lot of usage out of it. in tos, you essentially have to hunt for the same things over and over again. you have to do the same quests over and over again on the same maps.
-
monster exp is ■■■■■■ in world maps. exp tomes do not work properly on them and it’s pretty much a scam unless you’re in a dungeon map.
currently no gear that enhances exp. ro had the all the racial type increases with the damage penalties. also, nothing similar to mental sensing(180% exp buff) and even if there were, it wouldn’t apply the same because of how the exp modifier works.
-
crap ton of restrictions. market steals 10% of your sales plus a comission fee upfront. takes days for you to get your silver after you sell an item through the market. you can bypass by shouting and selling for talt, but doing so usually is taking a loss in profit. you cannot trade silver(zeny) and the storage is small. the team storage is 1 unit at the start…
-
overupgrading is insanely more expensive in this game than ro. in ro, if you had the eluniums, every + was what… 5k? in this game the + scales with refinement levels, quickly going above 500k silver. it was fairly easy to make a profit overupgrading equipment.
-
you almost never want to sell your monster loot to the npc because a lot of the times it’s necessary for a recipe.
-
you cannot power level your friends like you could in ro - in ro you could take a lvl 10 archer to dark frames and get all your friends lvl 70 with it. there’s virtually little powerfarming. you have royal m from 70-100 and that’s about it.
-
combat is a lot easier than ro to master. everything is ground-tiles/aoe with large cooldowns. generally, skills are not spammable(unless you’re a monk w/ double punch). you cannot influence cdr or attack speed by leveling up stats such as ro had. supporting feels terribly passive. no pneuma or safetywall to cast at long ranges. no stat recov. no assumptio or ke. playing a cleric feels so sloppy. mouse-mode on tos is terribly buggy.
-
stats in general are a lot more limiting than in ro. con(vits counterpart) does not influence status resist. spr is rumored to and it’s capped at 80%. it does not change the duration either. a lot of CC in tos has crazy long times.
-
no ‘hard’ leveling dungeons like biolabs. tos has an ‘end-game’ dungeon called earth tower that can be done twice a day. you need 4 other people for this and unless they’re your friends, you’ll need a meta build.
-
aggro works largely differently in tos than ro. it’s very disappointing. a lot of lategame leveling maps require a swordsman to bring in decent exp, otherwise the monsters are too widespread.
-
smaller party cap - party caps at 5. this is really restrictive to meeting people and forces small cliques to form. ro had 12 party size and it was often hit in lategame dungeons which made the game feel more epic. there is none of this in tos.
-
more questing than ro - this is a turn-off for hardcore ro players because of how mindless it is.
-
no pvp/gvg systems in place (sure you can duel or declare war on guilds, but it’s meaningless and uncommon) - if you’re looking for a large-scale WoE battle filled with people fighting over economies, large alliances, gvg drama, well… you’re in for a huge disappointment.
-
skills have attributes that cost insane amounts of silver. this is to guarantee people have to play their characters for a long time to ‘max’ it out. now, there is scaling and it is easier to get the attribute levels in the beginning stages, but this doesn’t change the fact it is an annoying time-waster.
-
world bosses just… stop appearing late into the week. demon lords take very long 30+ mins and often give you talt. feels like a slap in the face.
-
not really necessary to mention but no tirades/ragnainfo forums drama - seems like most people are just getting older and care less about drama/trolling. this is a good thing for some
-
earth tower gear is not tradeable or transferable between chars. lol it is also easier than most people make it out to be (biolabs was much harder).
-
headgears are similar, but different. firstly, you have 3 spots for headgears (upper, middle, lower). second, they are all visually displayed on your character model. you can choose to tick the box to not display them if you’d like. they differ in that headgears are almost a separate entity of sorts. you cannot upgrade them with refinement and they have no slots. what you can do is purchase enchantment scrolls from the premium shop to have a chance at getting a good stat for your char. you can redo the enchants as many times as you like without any drawback. you can get up to 3 different stats, but they’re all random. it is really hard to get good ones. it’s one of the few pay2win things they have in place.
-
recipes over already crafted items - feels like most things are dropped in recipes rather than the actual item drop. it’s just another timesink. you do a world boss or dungeon run, you get a recipe for an item you want and now you have to buy all these materials to make it. it’s lame and makes it feel a lot less rewarding to hunt for things. it doesn’t feel as nice to find a rare drop because recipes sell for ■■■■ most of the time. even the more expensive recipes are dropping in price like crazy (glad band and petamions).
the devs made a post stating they are making a repository merge sometime in the near future. this should bring about a lot of the updates people have been complaining about such as battle league, gvg, card buffs, and necessary class buffs.
