Tree of Savior has a great combat system for a grinding game. It’s enjoyable to keep fighting monsters for dozens of minutes and hours, exploring and looking for new monsters and drops, forming parties to kill stuff, and forgetting about running to NPCs all the time to get quests. The problem is: the way it’s now, ToS is a quest based game, making all of the above “features” poorly used.
If the developers actually wanted to focus on quests, I think that some parts of the player progression should be adjusted and my arguments here are mostly invalid. However, with all the discussion about how ToS looks like older games and Ragnarok, I’m pretty confident the grinding style is something that the developers wanted, and that is why I created this topic.
Some people might say that you have the option to choose whether to make quests or grind, but that’s not an option here. The player will pick up the fastest way to level up, which for now is clearly by doing quests, just like any other quest based game. In that games you can also kill the monsters to level up, but the exp will also be horrible compared.
There are some level gaps where quests start to run out and the player is forced to grind. This will not make ToS a grinding game. It’ll just make some players quit playing, while others will grind in despair to find new quests.
If you want to make a grinding game, you have to balance the exp rates for both quest cards and monster experience. The easy way is making quests totally worthless with bad exp that no one will care about. But of course the game maps have a level design and a storyline made to support the progression of these quests, so we don’t want to throw away all of this hard work.
For a grinding game, experience rates from monsters should have a linear increase according to player’s level. There’s no problem giving some boosts at some key points, so the player can feel stronger and more encouraged to fight harders monsters. For now that will not happen, with monsters giving decent exp only in the first few levels of the character. You have also to keep in mind that the areas are crowded, and most of the monsters will be killed one by one, instead of the “neat 50 mobs aoe for nice exp” which many may expect.
Then, what to do with quests? I don’t think the exp from quest cards should be lowered at first, but you need to know how long you want the player leveling up from level X to level X, and adjust the monsters and cards exp based on this. The other way around is focusing more on rewards, like equipment, than the exp itself. So the player can choose to make quests or hunt for the drops.
I don’t want things to be easier, and of course I don’t want people to get max level in only 1 or 2 months, but this is a game where you can level up to hundred of levels, and some of them are required for the high rank classes. It’s not hard leveling right now with quests (regardless of some inconsistency), but for anyone who ever considers the grind option, the progress will be incredible slow to even get the first rank classes.
Anyway, it’s impossible to make everyone happy. Some people will look for a good storyline, others will want just to kill everything. Some players will play all day long, while others will have a shorter time to play.
Other than that, I don’t see a problem with the quests design like some people are talking about. The quests are a simple go and kill or go and check, but it’s this way for side quests in every game. On a game based on grinding, I don’t really care about how creative the quests are, because I’m playing for the combat, which in Tree of Savior is really nice.
Thanks for reading. That’s everything for now.
I’m having far more fun farming than I was questing, specially because I am a peltasta tanker and no one wants to party with me hahaahah