1) My path:
I picked up wizard -> Cryo -> Linker -> Thauma 2 -> Necro
ALL THE DAMAGE SKILLS TAKE THAUMA 2 MAXED BUFF INTO CONSIDERATION. FOR MY CASE THAT MAKES THEM MORE POWERFUL THAN C3 CRYO OR C3 WIZARD. THAUMA BUFFS ALMOST GIVES ME 500 MATK.
Wizard:
Still terrible, sleep and energy shield might have some use, earthquake and energy bolt still do terrible damage, i’ll come back in a later section as to why.
Class needs a complete rework or some serious loving.
Cryo:
Ice bolt is bad, but at least unlike energy bolt it freezes your target, you’ll still do more damage jump auto attacking against one target even with some attributes upgrade.
Ice pike is decent damage but the cd is atrocious for what it actually does, decent/mediocre skill as a result.
Ice wall is meh by itself but with linker combo (and psyko as far as i can tell) the skill does pretty good damage.
Ice blast is terrible, it’s situational, will never work against bosses due to them being immune to everything, single hit, absolute garbage skill.
Personally i think ice blast needs to be removed/reworked, Ice Pike cd to be reduced to like 20s, Ice bolt to 10.
Linker:
Hangman’s knot and joint penalty are godly skills in dungeon or in general pve. You can literally be useful in a dungeon only because you picked up linker.
Personally not fond of their other skills at C1 but the two above more than make up for it.
Thauma 2:
The two damage buffs (or defence) are incredible at my current level if upgraded at least (i have them at maxed out). Completely justifies going thauma.
Transpose is bad cause you won’t heal with con increase.
Reversi is good but extremely situational, works against some boss traps but generally not that useful. Probably a good pick for pvp.
Swell body is good for exp/drop/gold increase especially against shinies (note: it didn’t work on most mobs in demon prison for some reasons, is that a feature or a bug?). Personally i think that part of the skill should be an attribute as you can’t use it to take advantage of size increase (for hoplite for example). Attribute were good i guess but one felt mostly useful for pvp. Doesn’t work against boss, which i find dumb.
Shrink body only useful with attribute but it’s ok otherwise (+140 damage when using swell left arm is pretty noticeable and up to -75% damage is insane), again no use against boss is a complete waste. I’dargue both of those skill are mostly good during dungeons. After trying a bit more i found myself using shrink body alot in regular pve, it’s basically like having another arde dagger against shrinked mobs and they would barely scratch me (yes, even the op ranged mobs).
Class is overall decent but needs a bit of polish, probably one of the best full support class due to the damage increase in a game that is mostly all about damage. I fear it will need love at later level due to their buff not providing much damage anymore but that remains to be seen. Seems to be extremely underrated atm.
Necro:
I only went to job 3 so don’t take it too seriously, i only tested what i was interested in and without attributes.
Flesh Hoop: Decent damage against the same target or against linked enemies, terrible against a horde. The skill feels kinda mediocre.
Skeletons: If they weren’t bugged and stopped responding 90% of the time it would be decent free single target dps. I’m kinda worried they will die extremely fast though.
Gather corpse: Hey look! Another energy bolt variant! Damage sucks but can gather corpse, one point wonder.
Disinter: Aoe gather corpses in a small area (almost melee actually), one level, get it for corpse gathering.
Flesh Cannon: Pretty good damage but long cast time. Good skill overall. I love how the character laughs when using this skill.
Eye Tower minion: meh damage but can be intesified with links because it’s poison.
Personally i wasn’t found of the corpse gathering mechanic therefore the class was more annoying to play than anything, but i feel that if you want a minion class (as long as they fix the ai) that isn’t specialized in dealing with hordes of mob then the class has some potential. Also i’m not fond of the outfit.
Recently discovered you could buy pots that would give like 30 corpse per use but didn’t motivate me to try it more, the skeleton AI kinda ruined the thing for me. I would not even use gather corpse or disinter anymore which for me kinda tells the class mechanic is simply not working well at all.
General thought on the build:
I actually didn’t find it bad as long as it wasn’t against a huge pack of mob (i felt useless in demon prison 2 for example outside of being a buff slave and the occasional double exp on harugals (because the other mobs are immune to swell/shrink).
The bosses in the level 170+ areas would die or close to die in one single linked ice wall due to the extreme damage boost from thauma + arde dagger so it definitly had a burst. Regular mobs would die decently if linked be it by jump auto attacking for like 700 to 1k damage or by using ice bolt/ice pike/necro minions.
Mob with large hp pool were kind of an issue though because overall dps was weak outside of the crazy ice wall burst, and probably flesh cannon if i played a bit more than i did.
The two first circles were the horrible part of the game for me, linker made it slightly better and thaumaturge massively helped.
2) Some thoughts about formula and more:
Magic damage vs physical damage:
To put it blunt physical damage is highly op in comparison to magic damage in this game (and probably one reason magic feels so bad when auto attacking).
To begin with, magic weapon matk values are generally at the bottom of the damage range of physical weapon (if not less) for god knows what reason. This already doesn’t really make any sense to me.
Then magic cannot crit, when you spend points in str, you’ll both increase crit + base damage, and you can add on top of the % increase of crit themselves. Int doesn’t get that, it’s 1 point, no % increase. Instead you get a ridiculously low amount of magic amp (no stats increase that despise it being bad), stat that isn’t even that good itself.
Another problem, but that didn’t affect me personally and it seems to be rare anyway, is that some mobs seems to absorb your damage and convert it to health, which is kinda harsh against focused specs like a pyro.
Those points will lead to the next section.
Multi hit vs single hit:
Multi hit skills in this game are broken when compared to single hit and more often that not have the same cooldowns and barely scale worse in base damage. Honestly single hit unless the base value are ridiculously high or have a good % scaling are almost guaranteed to be worthless, and that’s where alot of imbalance comes from.
That’s the reason energy bolt or earthquake are terrible skills for example (energy bolt isn’t a true multi hit and i think earthquake can hit twice with lethargy but that doesn’t change anything at later levels), on top of magic damage getting screwed in every possible way, those hit once, with shitty base value even if you increase the skill with more points.
And that’s also why some classes seems completely broken like pyro and their army of multi hit that scale in damage and amount of hits, or Krivis with zaibas, or druid, or cyclone, or hexen dropper, or that hoplite skill with a ■■■■ tons of hits.
Meanwhile classes that gets none are basically screwed and it’s even more true for mages due to the previous point. Of course you have skills like meteor that have ridiculous base values + % scaling but that’s how retarded it has to be for those kind of skill to even compare to multi hits.
Personally i feel some balancing has to be made, multi hits should be weaker and single hit should be stronger than they currently are. All you really need to think about is getting the maximum amount of spammable multi hits aoe as a mage if you want to do damage to the point it feels like a band aid for how bad magic damage truly is.
They also take far more advantage of additional damage stuff like the arde dagger, not sure if blessing also works with skill but if it does that’s just another one to add to the list.
3) Grinding and the lack of diversity:
Basically it’s the same (but worse) as last beta. It still only promotes aoe grinding as the mob exp is streamlined as much as it can. Single hit classes are getting screwed and have no real purpose (especially when multi hits aoe are just as strong if not more sometimes). There needs to be map with mobs that give more exp for those kind of build.
That’s also a reason i think swordie looks so over the top, they constantly have an aoe cleave at their disposal even when out of sp, and because they are not magic users they don’t get completely screwed by the horrible damage that comes from it.
Blue mobs are far too rare now, they might aswell not be a thing anymore, and after several hours of boring aoe grind you can’t even wake up anymore due to finally finding one now and then.
Most maps are currently useless as a result, the spawns are bad, aoe killing or mobs that respawn almost non stop is all that matters, it’s really boring to grind in this game.
Funny thing is that dungeons are actually good spots for more specialized classes but they feature a daily timer. Awesome!
I also think grinding exp is bad in general, especially compared to quests. Grinding being a better source of money but giving less exp is fine, but that’s far too harsh. Either reduce card exp and increase grind exp to make up for it, or increase grind exp in general.
4) Mob balance:
Game is pretty easy but near 130+, the game start throwing some mobs with insane amount of health which are simply a torture to kill unless you’re one of those godly dps class that will simply keep facerolling the game.
It also starts throwing some ranged mobs with unavoidable projectiles doing an insane amount of damage, those are completely broken to be honest, their damage should be avoidable like anything else. I don’t even care if they hit me for ten thousands of damage per hit but please let me avoid them.
Basically after 130 the games feels broken, of course you could always party with a dps cleric (support is bad anyway unless you can increase dps) and a barbarian/corsair and destroy everything with no effort, it’s an MMO afterall, there should be need to party.
If i was a doujin artist, i’d already be starting new stuff about my character encountering the kobolds archer and/or mage lizards.
5) Damage is king in pve
Basically, because of several issues i listed and the fact you can avoid most damage unless it’s auto aim ranged auto attacks in general, some dps classes dish out so much damage that there is no reason to pick anything else unless you can somehow increase said damage (that’s why linker is considered good and i personally think Thauma is currently worth it).
Seriously guys, forget your full support builds that increase resistance or whatever. Want to play Cleric? Roll krivis->sadhu->druid or Krivis/Priest -> Paladin/Monk with variants of int or str builds. Forget about everything else, none cares.
And that’s were the supposed diversity dies, because those dps class are so broken they make everything else look bad, you pretty much have to pick them yourself alongside the strange support classes like linker or Thauma that are actually decent because they increase that damage even further.
Of course you could increase every classes damage to near their level but it would just turn the game into a more solo experience than it already feels like.
DO NOT ROLL FULL SUPPORT FOR PVE. Mage might be the only exception but i’d argue you’re better going pyro 2 -> linker -> Thauma 2 (or skip linker and go thauma 3) than what i did unless you have pvp in mind.
6) Boss immunity
I understand the need of boss being immune to CC or other effects in a way but that just screw some classes really hard. Try to find a good way to allow those more pvp/cc support/debuffer classes to not feel useless when they encounter a boss (and more often than not feling the same in regular pve).
Another thing that is insanly frustrating (and even more for class that relies on setups like psyko/linked ice walls) are bosses that goes invincible whenever they feel like to. It really doesn’t offer anything than absolute frustration. I saw that you removed this for ginklas (i complained about that one in my first cbt feedback) but please do the same for every single bosses.
7) Linearity
This game is extremely linear and you’ll pretty much experience it the same way with all your character minus maybe afew grinding spots.
Yes sometimes you’ll have to go back and forth of multiple area, but that’s generally because you’re too low level to keep up. Look at mage tower for example, i pretty much went to mage tower, went to some kind of forest, back to mage tower, back to the next map of the forest, etc.
Personally i can deal with it because i’m not a altaholic but i could see it being pretty boring for those who like to level multiple characters.
Then there is the problem of map being corridors for the most case, there’s a few exception but i think it kinda ruins the art of some place when you don’t feel free to explore them. It’s probably impossible to change that aspect though so i’ll simply deal with it.
8) Mouse control:
It’s ok overall but please, for the love of all that is sacred, i’d like it to completely ignore pets, drops, players or whatever else that make it harder than it should be to target a spell, i can’t count the amount of ice bolt that went flying randomly because the moment i decided to throw my spell something that wasn’t the target met my cursor and ended up wasting my spells.
Recently i had a quest in a monastery with a npc that would keep following non stop (and now that i think about it it was the same ine mage tower), those were so annoying, walking around like idiots and sometimes screwing my autos and such.
There’s also a few quest or NPC like that icoin lady in Klapeida that can’t be done with mouse control. I think one was in a area with lots of altar near that pilgrim path map for example.
Lastly a few quests that requires to interact with mobs prevents you to auto attack them with the mouse as a whole, it’s extremely irritating.
9) Stats:
I feel stats aren’t as good as they could, nor balanced.
Dex for example seems completely over the top, even if evasion is impossible against some of the strongest mobs, crits are actually extremely op to the point it almost feels like investing in str is a waste, accuracy and evasion are simply a plus. Edit: Actually i found going str far better later on, dex can be left at like 100 or even lower and you can still do just fine with gems or gear.
Int feels weak but that’s mostly because it will only really matter for multi hits after some good investement (it still increase your single hits don’t get me wrong).
Str as i said felt weaker than Dex, and is arguably better than int because it also increase crit damage by 1. You should still get points in that stat alongside dex though. Edit: As the last edit, i feel str is superior choice to dex later on.
Con is good but i feel healing potion should scale with your con even if it means having to lower their base value.
Spr is probably mostly useless once you can get an infinte amount of alchemist pots, it’s a early game trap. I feel making mana pots scale off spr and maybe adding more spr scaling across the game could be something to explore.
10) Sprint being exclusive to swordmen and the STA stat:
If this was really added because swordies and their pvp performance, i’d suggest removing this ability for other classes in pvp but let them sprint in pve.
It feels horrible once you have tasted it to let it go and it would make stamina more useful for every classes as a given which i think is a good thing.
This is another issue actually, the stamina bar is completely useless for most classes outside of monk and swordies (ok, and linker but nobody uses that skill to be honest). I personally think it could be an interesting mechanic but is currently massively underexploited, and the stamina pills are far to effective for it to even matter to begin with.
11) Instanced quests and the feeling of isolation:
Personally i have never been a fan of quests as they generally feels like you are put on a rail and it is the same in this game despise the fact you have to basically speak to every npc or items on a map to be sure you won’t miss any (not hard to do).
Generally i feel it doesn’t motivate you to party as the players might not be on the same chain, but it’s still manageable if you, or they are nice enough to wait for the player that isn’t at the same point to catch up.
But instanced quests are extremely annoying imo, as i never wanted to teleport someone ahead of me that might have been doing something else at that time while waiting for me to catch up, which personally made the game feel even more like single player experience than other quest based mmos.
At least i think adding an option to refuse joining a quest you already did would be a good idea.
12) Random idea: Early Rank choices skill scaling
Personally i’m not fond how early game classes are left in the dust and how newer ones gets stronger non stop. That makes investing in early game classes generally seems like a complete waste unless they have extremely powerful abilities (like linker) or multi hit attack skills with a massive amount of hits and possibly low cooldown.
My idea would be for every classes, at every new rank (or at the first point the class couldn’t be upgraded anymore if you focused on it the first time it was available, rank 4 for wizard for example), to have most of their skills brought up to par for them to not become obselete (be it in damage, values for buffs, multi hit amount, etc). That way, early game classes you picked up would automatically scale to your newfound class (or would become even stronger if you invest more in the same).
I am aware it would require a serious effort in balancing (which is already not that great at all) but i think it is worth the price.
13) Cooldowns are too long in general:
I’ll be honest, i thought that auto attack being a huge part of the game could potentially be interesting but to be honest, they are far too weak for it to be worth considering, at least for archers and wizards when the game isn’t really friendly for single target users and wizard suffers from the lack of crit and everything i mentioned back then.
As a result, i’d rather have shorter cooldowns and/or more 0cd skills on every classes (energy bolt could be one for example, it would grant wizard a spammable aoe skill, simply add an attribute to remove the knockback on top to make it more party friendly, ice bolt could be another one to consider) to make the gameplay more exciting that it currently is.
I recently tried a sapper and i feel the class would be really great with shortened cd in general for example.
Final thoughts:
Despise all those issues and my personal thoughts of the formulas (be it defence or damage) being kinda messed up (i shouldn’t have to fear for the Thauma buffs to become obselete later in the game, or crits being op, or picking good multi hits being a safeproof way to build any good character), i had fun messing around with my character.
But i really feel this game needs a ton of work before being able to pretend at a full release, and i really would like to enjoy playing this game as much as possible because i feel the potential is there. And because i want the game to be the best it could be, this feedback is overall extremely harsh. Some points might be completely off the mark and i could adapt to them if i really had to but that’s 100% how i feel.