Tree of Savior Forum

Hallways and cooldowns do not interest me - so neither does ToS

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#1

I’ll preface this by saying I’m a huge fan of Runescape (classic), Ragnarok (pre-renewal), Mabinogi (G1-G3), Dofus/Wakfu (pre-1.3), and Elite Dangerous. My interests are niche.

To summarize, ToS is not the game for me. I love bits of it, but feel the bits I love are mutilated by the bits that I cannot stand. In the end, this is just a personal problem and doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of the game. Details below.

Linear games are not my cup of tea. If someone wanted an experience of going from A-B and enjoying a narrative along the way, then this game is great. It looks fantastic, has solid gameplay, and it’s easy to pick up. As far as the narrative goes, I was genuinely interested in what was going to happen next.

However, this is not why I play MMOs. I don’t play an MMO to watch a story unfold in front of me. I play an MMO so that I can write my own story. I play an MMO to integrate myself into a world filled with hundreds or thousands of other players. My interactions with them and with the game world shape my experience - my experience is not fed to me through an IV.

Occasionally I do feel like hopping into a universe with other players where I can progress through a story. When I get this urge, I go play an online coop game. It’s in these types of games that I expect to be the hero called by the goddess to stop the crazy sorceress. It’s here that I expect to fight though hundreds of increasingly difficult areas to reach the final battleground to have a fight that my trying journey has prepared me for.

To me an MMO is about the world first, players second. To summarize the above point I don’t come to an MMO to play a campaign I’d find in a single player game. I find this to be a lazy approach to content design. This has become a standard practice in MMOs of the past decade and a half and frankly I hate it. But this is a personal issue - the popularity of such a practice is evidence of that.

I find the combat pacing to be clunky. This isn’t a comment on the grind. I love a good grind (see preface). ToS definitely delivers on that experience. It’s very easy to pick up a character and understand how they work with regards to their skills and strengths. There’s definitely more than just a DPS fest going on when it comes to combat, especially bosses.

But I hate cooldowns. I was very happy to see such an emphasis on basic attacking when I first started playing. I love it when I see this. I feel this creates a great combat experience. I was ecstatic to find that getting hit would actually cancel the casting of a powerful spell. But to implement cooldowns as a balance element is in my eyes just lazy design. The Quarrel Shooter’s pick up stone skill had an 8 second cooldown. Eight seconds to pick up another rock.

Honestly I feel that ToS would perform just fine if cooldowns were removed all together and some number tweaking done (especially to classes like chronomancer). This would create a great emphasis on time and SP management and give players that up time and downtime necessary to give them a full experience. By focusing heavily on the cast interruption mechanic in place, I feel there could really create an especially dynamic battlefield. I was extremely disappointed to see this was not the case.

Games are made out of limitations, but I find that cooldowns are a pretty basic and mundane form of limitations. To summarize the point above, I feel ToS fell short in regards to the battlefield experience it could deliver. But again, cooldowns are a very common practice in gaming. They’re easy to balance and easy to understand. They even guide the player to a degree. Any issues I have with it are personal issues.

In conclusion, I feel that ToS is made of amazing ingredients. High quality eggs, fresh bread, etc. But the result was not something especially stunning or refreshing. The result was scrambled eggs and toast - something that would appeal to the masses. This doesn’t make it any less of an amazing tasting dish, but it’s just not what I’m looking for.

Thanks for reading.

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#2

You would enjoy pre-OBT Black Desert.

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#3

I’m anticipating the one guy who comes into threads like these and then tells you to ‘gtfo if you don’t like it’ because you used such a bait-heavy title. I:

@Topic
The fixes you suggested aside, I’ll have to agree that when a class isn’t too great at auto-attacks (everything other than the melee str-based?), you end up having to rely on the excessively long and uncomfortable skills.
Most of my game ends up being “run in a circle until my cooldown is restored, then hit the thing and repeat.”
I’m among the peeps with the oldschool hellgrinder mentality, but it’s pretty obvious how boring this particular grind is. Grind will always become repetitive, but it need not have been dull from the start.

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#4

One of the worst things in ToS I would have to say is the weird EXP scaling mechanics… I don’t fully understand them yet, but whatever the case, they seem to force you to grind where they want and remove the reward for being skilful and leveling in hard areas… As far as I can see atm, You are basically rewarded for long boring grinding and penalised for trying to push the limits of your skill. Imagine if an arigopie gave the same EXP as individual zombies or something. You would just stay at zombies for a long ass boring grind and the skillfull experience of arigopies and the sense of reward and accomplishment would never be a thing.

This is what I fear for ToS, and if all there is is the long grind without the skill/reward, I am afraid it wont hold people’s interest =c

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#5

I didn’t notice this at all. I never once saw my experience numbers get scaled, and I spent a lot of time in areas ±10 of my level. Within the scope of the current game, I don’t think the issue you bring up exists.

#6

I can assure you, there are EXP altering mechanics lol (i wish I had more time to test =c)

#7

Good review! If they took cooldown system out… They need at least nerf some skills damage. I dont mind if strong Aoe have cooldown but not almost every skill need a cooldowns like a current Tos.

#8

Archer gets good critical in late game and Monk strong double punch. Wizard is only class does not have strong normal attack and they need rely on long cooldowns which sucks…

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#9

My archer (late ranger build) was Dex 10 points over Str, wich gave me good dodge and critical rate, i leveled Barrage Enhanced to level 20 and i could basicaly 1 shot with overkill most stuff around my level (difference of 10 levels), the only melee class i played was cleric, but since i did a 1:1 of Str and Con (wich i think i messed up badly) i survived well, the skills worked wonders in Tenet Chapel (monsters are demon/undead type) soloed all the bosses in the 1F (i was level 35 if im not wrong) and barely took damage.

#10

Did killing Argiopes really require skill with some classes? I remember just mindlessly firebolting or Magnum Breaking them away.
Farming Anubis’ with a TU Priest on the other hand…
I think I would prefer leveling at higher mobs as well in ToS. In this beta I got like 9 exp or so from mobs 30 lvls away from my level.
+/-10 levels is still okay but go beyond that and you will not get much out of it.
And the exp difference between killing a mob 10 levels below you and 10 levels above you is so minor that killing the low mobs is usually more time efficient.

#11

I think that you touched on some great points that we were all thinking of but not admitting. The fact that it is not an open world game does heavily impact my own personal attraction for tree of savior. It is a graphically beautiful game with a lot of potential, and I did enjoy the gameplay. The only problem I had with the game was the fact that we were forced to stay in the zones that we were meant to be levelling in. They should deifnelty allow us to go to higher level areas with a skilled party for higher exp and rewards. This gives a far better sense of accomplishment rather then what finishing a quest for a terrible exp card would serve.

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#12

Right, then just the magic-based classes.
Monk is str-based and melee, is it not?

#13

Good read. I completely disagree with the fact that the game is linear for several reasons, but that is my personal opinion. (Yes, a few of us already know the game starts branching into different areas with huge level differences in between them later, but I can’t expect everyone to have reached that point, can I?)

However, I completely agree with the cooldown issues in the current build. I would not play anything but a Swordsman, simply because with a fast-paced game like this, high cooldowns really are a killjoy. I do not think removing them entirely is a solution, however lowering them would be great for classes that rely on abilities to deal damage, like Clerics and Wizards and to a certain extent Archers as well. (Tbh, Swordsman as well, if you are building something that does not have Barbarian in it.)

I would suggest to implement cooldown reduction as a stat. Put it on gems or whatever, just give us the choice to build our character for utility OR raw power. At the moment, the only stats we have either boost raw power or raw defense, which is a little bit of a dated system frankly.

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#14

I duno, never leveld there, but I have tried to vertical firewall a few times and I’d say going to arigopies as a low lvl mage, and spending a long time skillfully vertical firewalling training them, when one hit is a KO, takes some skill and balls =P

#15

Branches does not make something non-linear in my opinion. In RO, mantis were present with Mi Gaos. In Mabi, giant black bears were on the same map as wolf cubs. In Dofus/Wakfu, gobballs and gobball war chiefs were grouped up together (best not accidentally attack a group that had a warchief). In ED, you could be interdicted by a harmless shieldless sidewinder and ten seconds later by master imperial clipper.

The whole zone structure is to blame for the game’s linear quality. There is just forwards or backwards. As I mentioned in the OP, there are some good ingredients - one such ingredient is the different types of damage. I had a much easier time in an area +10 my level because they were weak to archer attacks. I had to avoid the casters in the area or I would get my ass handed to me. This to a degree breaks away from the progression’s mundane architecture, though not to a degree large enough to classify the game as anything but linear.

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#16

Good points. So after 3 days of iCBT I got my wizard to level 42 or so and I experienced a lot of what you were talking about. I hated cooldowns and they seem to last forever since boss mobs would be a sponge. It was a lot of running around waiting on CDs. When I heard Korean CBT had a lot higher exp rates, I asked my friend if I could try his.

And I was blown away at how much different it was. From the starting tutorial, the bosses that would take me 20 min to solo, using all manapots as well, took me 5 minutes or less. The exp kept me above the mob/bosses level but not by too much, while in iCBT we were usually far below. This boost in level and experience made me not worry about CDs so much because I wasn’t wasting half my mana pool on a couple mobs.

I feel like once they adjust the experience a little, everyone will see that it’s almost a completely different game. (Korean beta exp is a little too high, I got level 60 in 1-2h)

And the way I look at it (I also love the grind), the grind started way too early due to exp. If the grind started around 100+, we would have better skills, lower CDs, better stats for regen etc. I feel like this is how the game should play when it comes to that aspect

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#17

While I hate even the concept of CDs in an action game, this is an interesting point that I think might improve my own perception of the game pretty significantly.

I also really enjoy grinding and I’m not a fan of quests or linear progression, but I believe ToS max level is intended to be 600, so I imagine I’ll be able to get my grind on later even if the beginning levels are very quick.

Rushing through the scrub levels where you only have a few skills that you have to rotate would be great. Although you’d still be dealing with stuff like, Hail/Meteor CD being extremely long, etc, which just limits what a player is capable of doing with their class…

Maybe I should just switch away from Wizard.

#18

I hate this word applied to any aspect of combat pacing. This is the scrambled eggs of game design.

Raising the experience may alleviate the symptoms, but it does not address the issue (at least, I feel it’s an issue).

#19

Early game bosses need to be easier, defense way too high. Cooldowns as a mage were a turnoff. I do like the fact they compensated it with a charge, but it only goes on cd when you use both charges. Should change to cd/ charge

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#20

Good way to phrase it, and totally agreed; the concept of a “rotation” has always been ridiculous to me.

You’re right, too, the problem won’t disappear unless CDs are removed, but realistically the chances of that happening are zero-to-none. Knowing that the faster paced parts of the game might come earlier is somewhat relieving news for me though, since I’m not entirely convinced ToS sucks yet (I wanna check out what boss farming and pvp are like before I make that judgement).

… Or maybe I am convinced of that and simply don’t want to admit it.