Introduction
Warning incoming huge wall of Text. But hear me out.
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Although Tree of Savior, in it’s own right, is its own unique game, it doesn’t take a genius to see that a lot of the game was designed with Ragnarok Online (It’s predecessor) heavily influencing it.
What was Ragnarok Online like?
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Ragnarok Online to me was the greatest game for its time in terms of Korean MMORPGs, and is still a great game to this day.
Why was Ragnarok Online it great?
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-The Art Style was good
-Great BGM (Kreygasm @ Prontera)
-Kawaii Hats
-Competitive bossing
-Hard Grind, but also very rewarding
-RNG
-WoE (This is the main factor)
-Grounds for Socialising
-PvP was pretty smooth
-Players developed their own mechanics and skills (Two Stepping/Crtl Stacking in WoE, Double Strafe stepping, Vertical Fire wall)
Ragnarok Online was my all time greatest childhood MMO, so much that I, up until ToS was released, was playing in private competitive WoE servers just because how good WoE was.
Here is a video of iRO Scrubs in action in a server ran by HotshotGG called GG-RO.
Now for most of you who didn’t play RO, you guys are probably thinking, wtf is this ■■■■. Basically in RO the skill effects are just as big as they are in ToS, so if you can see all the effects during a GvG you won’t know wtf is going on, so the (PLAYERS) created a program called RCX, which changed all skill particles to correspond with the color tiles, so people can tell what they are stepping on etc etc.
Every guild emblem represents 1 character, as you can see WoE in ragnarok online can be massive scale. 50 v 50 is very common, you can imagine the amount of coordination needed.
WoE in Ragnarok online was VERY COMPLEX, every class had a duty and if anyone doesn’t do their job your whole guild could get wiped, I’m not gonna explain the mechanics of each class but basically every play has a counter play and you have to try and beat each other by being the stronger unit.
So Whats Similar about Ragnarok Online and ToS?
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-Competitive Bossing (Except in RO its not top 6 DPS and Parties, Its Top Party DPS and in most cases it doesn’t drop anything that’s worth mentioning. Some Bosses in RO had ludicrously long spawn times (12 hours), when comparing that to ToS’s 4 Hours, it seems a lot less hardcore.
-Choices with Job Change; in RO you could go swordsmen into paladin/knight, acolyte into priest/monk and etc.
-Every play has a counter play, in ToS’s case, people keep crying about Kino raise and Pole, you can counter raise with tham’s reversi or cleric’s fade, you can counter pole by interrupting/CC the caster (its a channel). Most people don’t understand that ToS has been made in the vision of RO (Team based PvP) if you are 1v1ing it doesn’t really mean anything at all.
-Grind to Max level, its a Korean MMO guys, expect a grind, its much much much much easier than RO.
-Death penalty, In RO you lose 1% (Which equates to a couple of hours at the higher levels). In ToS you get penalty depending on how many stars the map is.
-Kawaii Head gears. Enuf said.
-RNG, Its a Korean MMO, stop crying about bad RNG >.<
-Multiple and Diverse Builds, In RO you would see 2 Biochemists, having completely different builds for a different purpose, 1 for bombing and 1 for potion pitching. In ToS, its different, you are not limited to that class, you can branch out into other classes to fit the purpose you want your character to do. A support or a DPS, or a bit of both.
-Weapon swapping/Gear swapping.
-Class Unbalances for PvP, It’s only natural that in every GvG game some classes will just not be useful, in RO Lord Knights, Assassin Crosses and Whitesmith was pretty much redundant in WoE, you only need maybe 1 Assassin cross or 1 White smith, thats just how it was and how it is in every competitive PvP games.
But yes, they should try and balance it so everyone can play the classes they enjoy competitively.
-No DR on CC, but many ways to “remove the CC”. We got fumigate, cure, blood letting, beak mask + link and a few other skills.
As you can see, there are massive design similarities in the game, people keep saying don’t compare, but why not? Ragnarok Online was a great success, it is only natural to compare its successor to it’s predecessor.
Tree of Saviors Potential
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In my opinion this game has a lot of potential, most of the community says that PvP right now is a joke, but the truth is most of them haven’t experienced a organized large scale GvG or PvP, if they did, they would see that there’s a lot of potential in the game, The reason why people conceive that the PvP in Tree of Savior will never be good is because we have yet to see a Meta in Organized Group PvP, the game is relatively new, even for Korea and lets be honest here, Korean’s have never been known for their PvP in MMOs, in RO, they weren’t the ones that set the meta. (They have never won a RWC (Ragnarok World Championship).
Conclusion
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IF IMC can fix the problems we are having currently, i.e FPS drop, Lag, Server issues and such, I believe that ToS will have a very bright future, PvP will be relavent and this is gonna be a great game. Its all up to IMC, the ground work has been laid.
Tree of savior is basically a much more casual and less hardcore version of Ragnarok online, so all of you people who claims to be RO fanboys/fan girls have no right to complain about the difficulty of ToS when bossing/leveling.
And for those of you who complaining that they can’t get boss cubes etc and crying about the leveling curve, find a less hardcore game :L. The development team of IMC took into consideration the feelings of their loyal RO fans.
