I made this topic to give my feedback of this second iCBT hopefully it will be useful and matter of discussion.
1- STAT POINTS: Strength vs Dexterity
Before giving my feedback about leveling and grinding i’ll write about some stuff that bothers me a lot.
During the first iCBT my first character was a FULL STR swordman and now in this second beta i could test a FULL DEX swordman instead.
And oh boy, i was right, as i kept leveling i only agreed more and more with my statement that “DEX” was infinitely superior to STR (And if i recall correctly they nerfed the dex stat on KCBT3 or something.) Not only you get evasion so the crowds of monsters will miss you most of the time, but also it increases your accuracy and crit rate (Although you never get enough crit rate to stay near the 100% of crit chance since they removed aggressor and cleave 5 second long crit bonus is a joke)
STR only increases your maximum and minimum attack, and it’s not very noticeable, it also increases your critical attack and weight limit. Even the critical attack increase you get when you invest stat points into STR is pitiful*. Only when i used the Golden Falchion and Strength pendant (Both items gave +176 critical rate together!) the critical damage increased to an acceptable level and i mean that combination gave me an incredible amount of +176 critical attack, and i’m certainly sure i’m not going to invest nearly 140 stat points into STR to get a similar result, jesus christ.
And i still talked with every other highlander/barbarian who went the full STR path, when they did 300 damage my crits did 550 (Not like i felt overpowered or anything, as you level up you will ALWAYS need more critical rate since critical resist is a thing.) So, what’s the point of leveling STR?
My opinion is that STR it’s a bit underrated in terms of performance, it adds flat damage? +1 to maximum and minimum damage per stat point invested? (Not counting the bonus) that’s a joke.
Edit: I may be wrong here, but STR doesn’t seems to be as rewarding as DEX, that’s all.
2- BOSS FIGHTS
Really why, who thought this was a great idea?
Bosses are currently huge HP sponges that barely do anything and even if they do something, they will most likely spam a massive AoE/unavoidable attack that takes a good chunk of your health… in all honesty; they’re just boring, and it’s not only that, the way the game and quests force you to take down 1 to 2 or 3 BOSSES PER MAP later on, it… infuriates me, really like this could be one of the reasons of why i would not come back to a third beta or play this game on release.
If anything the only reason why i always bought a ton of SP potions was because a potential forced boss encounter, and yeah, they make you came back to Klaipeda to repair your stuff and restock potions (kinda a waste of money) since they take so long to take down and eat your weapon durability.
And even then, the system of boss drops feels wrong. You have one or two chances to fight a boss (since some of the boss battles use the same boss you killed before or share the same drops) to get an item, for example: if you’re a highler and you want to craft a better 2Handed sword at level +40 you would like to craft a ‘Colossus’ right? Then you have 2 or 3 chances to get one from a boss in a map with similar level. What if you didn’t get it? You can’t fight the same boss again, if you had bad luck you will need to buy it from the market, no exceptions (And getting a colossus recipe from a level 64 boss is… come on, at that point you will get better stuff already upgraded)
Example of boss fights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy_YyI4Mezc
You guys can say all you want “The massive lag bugs some bosses, the IA is bad, etc” but Boss fights shouldn’t be like this, they’re even more painful if you take them down solo. (I also happen to have a lot of recorded footage of bosses doing the exact same thing…)
TL;DR: Boss fights take too long, they’re not really rewarding to be honest (The bests recipes i’ve got were from common monsters with low drop chance or some final quest monster)
3- Leveling-Questing and Grinding
This time leveling felt a lot more fluid, even a bit too fast the first levels, it was great, comparing it to the first iCBT, that XP rate was abysmal, that forced you to grind at earlier levels (24 to be exact, and of course it wasn’t fun to grind 1 hour to get from 24 to 25 and so on. Don’t get me wrong i have no problems with grinding, in fact it’s my prefered way of leveling, but at such early levels with just two skills maxed out and not even at RANK 2 was unbearable)
In fact it felt kinda smoothly until you reach level 60, at that level EVERY mob as you progress gives you the same amount of XP, if you’re level 60 in a level 65 map you will recieve 0.1 to 0.3% XP if you’re level 70, leveling in a level 73 you will recieve 0.1 to 0.2% XP (even 0.05% if you go back to level 50 maps)
What do i mean with this? you kinda need to kill around the same amount of monsters no matter what level you are and the monsters don’t get any easier, they get more HP and defense as you progress, and obviously they hit harder.
Also one important thing that should be fixed in the future… please IMC try to make multiple maps for the same range of levels as other maps, as an alternative to level/grind in another map, the game feels a bit too linear and there aren’t other alternatives plus the lack of channels in every map except in the starting zone + klaipeda make this even more chaotic.
Vs Questing
Honestly, grinding to level up at level +70 felt like a punishment, even discouraging, compared to the XP cards that gives you almost 7% to 10% Killing monsters was not a rewarding method of leveling, it felt like a waste of time honestly. (I could blame the ridiculous XP curve that dies at level 85 and then cames back to level +120 iirc)
Basically reaching level 70 was an unpleasant experience overall.
4- Endgame & Bugs
I know ToS is still in beta but the current state of the game is just quest-quest-grind-grind to… reach rank 6 and that’s it, nothing else. But even when i thought about it, a guildwar based activity would not even work, since the optimization of Tree of Savior is… well, it’s really bad, even one party can kill your framerate (And i have a decent rig myself)
I’m not complaining and this is not a rant either, it’s just something that worries me a bit.
About bugs and glitches i’m not going to talk too much, since i know the recurrent glitches from the first iCBT are still there (for example the friendlist not working, adding and unblocking doesn’t work either and stuff that’s not reall thaaat important) and most of the ‘new’ bugs were caused by the lag and instability of the servers (this didn’t happened on the other beta) but if IMC knows this could happen the next beta or most likely when they release the game… then please, PLEASE don’t make so many quests that forces you to interact with objects, when the server is lagging hard they don’t work!
And that’s it, i’ll probably make another topic about sworman’s skills since thats a bit too specific. Overall the game is still great and fun to play, but some stuff just gets bit frustrating/repetitive.
Thanks IMC for letting us test this game once again, you guys have great potential with this MMO, seriously.