Alright, I am no god of MMORPGs, but I have played around my fair share of games. Below is my genuine review, and some issues I have with the game.
EXP Rate
This is the most common complaint from many people in Beta on the forums, so lets get it out of the way right now. the EXP Rate is perfect the way it is, if this game was going for a hardcore feel. The current EXP Rate does not lend itself kindly to casual players who only have 2~3 hours per day to play. To fix this we don’t need increased rates, but instead reworked monster and character level progression. Some people are complaining they are level 25 with a class level of 5, and that is fine until you take into the fact that your quests are in the level 35+ area. This gap is deterring alot of players from grinding out the extra levels to get more stats and gear. Either characters need higher stat progression to accommodate the monster levels, or the monster levels need to be better balanced towards the quest progression of the player.
Bosses
There are way too many. The level of bosses do break away from the constant quest -> grind -> level -> quest type of formula, but I shouldn’t be fighting a boss every other quest. We need quest chains to where you actually explore the area. Maybe a quest chain that has 5 quests that leads into a boss to spread them out more, but currently I was just blasting through maps as if the mobs have no significance. I know this is a new game but I also feel there is a lack of variety of mobs within any one map. there are only about 5 or 6 in the total map.
Two more issues Ive found were 1) Bosses need to not be able to hit us when we are clearly out of the indicated range. I’ve died a couple of times even though the boss itself is no where on my screen. 2) The boss health bar seems to disappear when you are too close to the boss itself and only comes back whenever you run off-screen.
Gear
This pertains more towards drops but I feel there should be a set drop for each class and mobs tend to drop more of that type of gear. For example, Clerics shouldn’t be getting Leather gear as evasion isn’t more important than Max SP and M.DEF. I find myself running out of SP more often than actually getting hit. I can understand Leather on a class like Monk, but Clerics need more Cloth than Leather. Also there is a lack of Mace drops in my opinion.
Class Skills
We need more information in this part. We currently have Damage, Cooldown, Buff Duration, SP Usage, Recovery, and Attribute Bonus. This is the least amount of information possible you could give us. The Information we actually need is not present, such as Scaling, Base Damage, Charges (Some skills can be used twice in succession), Better Descriptions, and Attribute Descriptions. By Attribute Descriptions, I would like to hover over a skill as see any benefits I have on it, such as Heal having a 2% chance to auto-cast on myself along with the forward cast of the skill itself.
Another issue I have with skills is the charging mechanism punishing players who don’t spam skills. I understand the appeal, but it hurts us more than helps us. I think the chargeable skills should have multiple cooldowns, one for each charge. this way whenever you use the skill once, you put the first charge on cooldown, so when you use the second one, it doesn’t reset the cooldown. Many times I will only use heal once, and until I use the second one, It seems the first charge will not come back. After using the second charge, it puts both of them on a longer cooldown rather than one at a time.
Overall
I love this game, and I was glad that I was able to join in the Beta and help test it out. Ive sent in my fair share of Bug reports as I’ve com across them (Im looking at you Shovel T-Pose) and I continue to play as long as I have access. Other than the above mentioned, this game seems like it will be popular among the Ragnarok lovers, and even a newcomer like me can enjoy it thoroughly. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see constructive comments.