General Suggestions:
Skills and Spells need proper scaling. Most ability have flat scaling which means everything grows linearly. As skills level up, they should be increasing their damage by a % of your base damage + additional damage as it levels up. For example, something like Oblique Shot could start at 100% + 20, then level 2 for example goes to 105% + 36, 110% + 54, etc.
The same goes for Defense and Magic Defense. These types of flat values for defense DO NOT protect a character in the long run due to how high some of the numbers get. These values should always reduce damage taken by a percentage, granting diminishing returns as your statistics increase.
There needs to be a 3rd classification of NPCs. There are Allies and there are Enemies, but nothing for things like Fireball, Ice Wall, Caltrops, etc. These are counted as living things with life and things like Fireball and Ice Wall are considered enemies. My issue with this is that its very easy as a Linker to lose Links because an Ice Wall was up and the game decided to link sections of Ice with Enemies. These kinds of things shouldn’t happen.
Stats:
The current stat system kinda forces you to want to maximize one and one stat only, due to the “bonus” stats you get when you put more points into it. To make matters worse, the “STR” and “INT” stats getting bonuses at Rank UPs and not the other stats kinda makes putting points in other stats something players don’t want to put much in.
It also does not help that these stat increases offer so little, especially for something one would consider secondary statistics, such as HP and SP Recovery. SP goes up by levels over time and potions currently can take care of all your SP issues, so unless your skills require a ton of SP, most players don’t bother with SPI. If it provided bigger boosts to Magic Defense and SP Recovery, perhaps it could find more use.
INT is also an issue. Every other stat offers several bonuses. INT offers nothing but 1~1 MATK, which is very poor. It should give more (considering Magic cannot crit and therefore cannot get the 50% damage bonus for critting, but INT does not benefit from Critical Attack, which makes physical characters scale better. If your spells doesn’t hit multiple times, its near useless in its current state.
Speaking of INT, Magic Amplification is also near useless compared to any other damage increase. If you increase INT, you get 1-1 MATK. If you get Elemental Additional Damage, you get 1 damage to your spell, if you get Additional Damage like Blessing, you get that added to your spell, but Magic Amplification is different. It adds a random value of 0-100% of your Magic Amplification value to your skills, meaning 99% of the time its WORSE than any other form of spell increases. At least make Magic Amplification work as a percentage, for example, 25% Magic Amp would grant 0-25% increase damage for your spell, which is a much more useful increase.
Overcharge
While Overcharge is a nice thing to have on skills, one thing to consider is the time it takes to get back charges. If a skill have a 10 second cooldown and 3 charges, it shouldn’t take 10 seconds per charge to get a charge back. If I’ve only used two charges, it would take 20 seconds to get them back, or I could use a second to cast the spell again at nothing, and put the entire spell on the 10 second cooldown.
If a Skill has overcharge, the time it takes to recharge each should be its cooldown divided by its overcharges
Skills:
Energy Bolt (Wizard 1) - It should not have a cooldown. Early Wizards are one of the most annoying classes to level early because the choices of early skills are lackluster and filled with high cooldowns. This game also wants you to auto attack, but Wand/Staff auto attacks are the worst in the game (even if you animation cancel it by jumping). As the most generic mage spell in the game, it should not have a cooldown as a mage should never be without something to cast at early levels, as in all honesty, a mage should be casting magic.
Burning Ground (Pyromancer 1) - It should have an increased AOE. To my knowledge, an Elementalist’s Frost Cloud is twice the size and does pretty much the same thing, but with Ice Damage. Playing a Pyromancer brings you far too close to monsters on a class that normally excels at large aoe attacks from a range.
Fireball (Pyromancer 1) - It needs an attribute to prevent it from being kicked around by other players. Its Ignite Attribute also needs to have a balanced CD increase. It currently increases its CD by 50% just to add burn to the skill which doesn’t scale particularly well to the point that you’d get more damage with more fireballs over time than the burn.
Psychic Pressure (Psychokino 1) - It should also have increased AOE. For a skill that boasts a lot of targets, its pretty hard to get a group going. I suppose in party play its fine, but for solo play, unless the area has a healthy amount of enemies, getting monsters to play along is a lot of trouble. Some stop to buff when first initiated, others take a long time to think after attacking before advancing towards you again and just makes using the skill to its full potential somewhat an impossibility at the moment. Again, I feel like Mages should be ranged.
Buffs (Priests among others) - Many priest skills are flat increases, which when the game gets up to 600 levels will not mean much late game. The same goes for classes like Thaumaturge’s buffs. Instead of the flat amounts they give, consider a scaling option, such as “Gain 10% of your INT as additional damage” for Blessing, increasing per level up to 150% of INT at Level 15 for example. That way these sorts of buffs stay relevant as the support in question levels.
Quicken (Chronomancer 1) - From videos I’ve seen, Quicken does not work or does not work well. In my opinion, the problem is the lack of understanding to what “+450 Attack Speed” really means to a player. What’s a player’s base attack speed with weapons? Different weapons also have different speeds, so what are they? This sort of information should be in the game, as well as character info. Speaking of which, for a game that has a lot of reliance on Auto Attacking for several classes, there is NO equipment in the game that alters Attack Speed. Why not? In any case, a Quarrel Shooter’s Running Shot’s 30% attack speed bonus seems noticable, so maybe its best to change Quicken to a percentage based system as the flat increase doesn’t seem to help from videos I’ve seen.
Because of scaling of skills, there’s little reason to go to Circle 2 or Circle 3 of some classes because the damage of those skills just don’t match up to those at higher Ranks. For example, Fletcher is Rank 5 and has skills that go up to 1000 base damage. Going 3 Ranks in Ranger, which would be Rank 4, barely reaches 500 base damage for its skills. If you’re going to go all the way with a class, their skills should scale exponentially for each point put into it.
Itemization
Many items in the game prove useless due to the linear scaling of the game. There’s also a lack of replacement options and a lot of incredibly powerful items at low levels that do not have or aren’t replaceable until a very high level. (Vubbe Fighter Gauntlets with its 2 AOE Ratio is hard to replace for example, if there is anything, Gladiator Band has a huge amount of STR, AOE Ratio, and Crit Attack and you can wear two. There are no other bracelets in the game that can replace these, and these are level 75 items, not even 270 gear overcomes these, which is a poor balance).
People flock to things like Arde Dagger because its damage is so immense at the moment due to how “Additional Damage” works. There’s also only few items that over come it. All other daggers generally have no use because there’s not many reasons to attack with a dagger (the only ones I can come up with is a Corsair with DWA or a “Toy Hammer” user that can attack faster with a Dagger to trigger explosoins.) Daggers (and other off items) should have better uses. Instead of having DWA allow you to attack with Daggers simultaneously, this should just come naturally at a weaker rate for all characters, and DWA should instead increase Attack Speed and/or Offhand Damage while dual wielding weapons)
As mentioned earlier, “Attack Speed” should be a stat seen on equipment. Since most of the equipment is lackluster besides the uniques, it might be better to implement unidentified items with random stat modifiers like other games have, leaving specific rarer stat combinations to be found on Purples and Orange items.
I’m sure there are many more things that would be nice to have that others can mention from their own classes, but these are just some things I’ve noticed that didn’t make sense, or cause me to not like certain characters/classes. Sure there’s a lot of issues already, but if skill damage and itemization is poor, overhauling it is going to be a major pain later on, so its best to deal with this sort of thing early.