Hello,
I’ve spent more than 300 hours playing the 2nd CBT and it was the first time i’ve played it. Regardless of the issues i’ve found, i loved the game and i could say it’s UNIQUE. The only way IMC can ruin this game is by totally ignoring player feedback or by monetizing it wrong. There is a huge wall of text below and maybe there are some typos because english is not my mother language, but i hope developers read this because it took weeks for me to write it and i tried to be constructive in my arguments and give suggestions to almost all the problems i’ve mentioned here.
My journey on this CBT:
Since i’m a big fan of magic, my first char was a wizard. When i logged in the game, the first i did was reading the skill descriptions and i liked them because there was no cliche fire/ice/earth/lightning bolts. Instead there was the basic magic that a wizard would actually be able to do, a complete defense/offense/utility kit (later on i figured it wasn’t so complete). After getting through the first quests i got advancement to cryomancer and leveled until 46, which is when i got to tenet chapel 2f and met the first “hard” monsters of the game. After some struggle i found out on the forums that wizard class in general was very weak compared to the other classes such as the swordsman, and due to the unfair difficulty for a new player in my class, i gave up of cryomancer and started a new character, this time i wanted to be
strong.
So i made a swordsman, in the beggining it was really boring because i had 2 buff skills and 2 active skills that didn’t do much damage compared to basic attacks, but i could see the point here: being able to attack 3 monsters at the same time with no mana/stamina cost was too easy, and in about 4 days i got to lvl 90 as a c2 sword c2 barbarian, and i was really strong, everything would die to my seism skill and i could overkill monsters 10 or more levels above. What made me give up on this char was finding out that corsair, the only late game class that attracted me as a melee was not so good at rank 5 and would only shine at rank 6, and at that time there was no one above level 170 to give me feedback about c6 corsair so i decided to let my barbarian there and try other classes.
The next one was archer, but i had a very hard time with the aim mechanics and the basic attacks were REALLY weak, to the point i took 5 or more minutes to kill some bosses. I didn’t get to lvl 30 before running out of patience and giving up on the class. I knew however, that archers were really strong after lvl 100, as Wabble (the first lvl 200 wugushi) described in his review.
After that i tried cleric, which i figured out has by far the most complete kit in the game and the biggest build variety available. I wanted to try a sadhu and went cleric c1 krivis c2 which was a very tricky class to play because the only reliable damage skill was zaibas, which has a long cooldown, so i learned to lure huge packs of monsters properly and kill them all with zaibas, i got to sadhu in about 4 days and there was a HUGE power spike in my character because i could kill monsters in 2 hits now, and everything was really easy until lvl 120ish when i went to starving demon’s way map, where all those flying balls would cast spells on me non-stop, so i just coudn’t grind there properly because the setup (protected zone>OOB>zalciai) took too long each time i had to kill a monster and my only option was using zaibas to kill monsters since all the sadhu skills were nullified in that map. After this experience i figured out maps would only get harder from now on (mage tower/demon prison), and as i play solo, sadhu was no longer an option to me.
After sadhu i didn’t lose my passion for clerics so i decided to make a monk, and i was really pessimistic about leveling as a priest c3, with only autoattacks until lvl 127. Turns out i had a lot of fun with my priest because the attacks were SO strong i could kill everything in 2 hits, and people at dungeons really liked me because i was dps and healer at the same time, and even had strong buffs, so after around 5 days of priest i became a monk and i was really happy with that, because i was starting to get bored of having to renew my buffs all the time (i aways had blessing, sacrament and
monstrance active 90% of the time). As a monk it was a little disappointing in the first levels because double punch wasn’t strong enough at lower levels and going full crit was not working anymore, so around lvl 130 i changed equips, stats and some other things, which included spending around 1million silver on double punch attribute, and my monk was really OP now, hitting around 4k at each double punch, blocking with stone skin and 2 healing skills, the iron skin skill helped a lot at places like 2nd demon prison trees and other places too, it was the most independent class i’ve played. However, it was very boring… Double Punch is basically a stronger auto-attack with an irritating sound,and you can spam it 90% of the time with stamina pills, so the grind is easy but boring, compared to mage or cleric classes,
and it’s the only good skill worth using on monk c1, palm strike helps a little at bosses and will be OP in pvp, but hand knife is just meh. At this point i was at 153 and grinding my way to c2 when i reada review about c2 monk in reddit and found out that the “kamehameha” skill wasn’t that good, and pretty much nothing would change, i would still be using double punch all the way to 200.
When i got the notice beta was going to be extended with double xp, i instantly dropped monk and created a new wiz and got to lvl 156 with it, with 200+ lvl 7 and 8 exp cards stored. I went wiz>pyro>linker>thaum>sorc,
and i have to mention it was the one i had the most fun. Pyro is just too good and linker really makes things easy. Thaumaturge was a bad choice since i play mostly solo, but i can see it shine in groups. Sorcerer was the real deal here and the core of the build, i was lucky i got a Templeshooter card early with a friend, and it just kills everything so easily, that it gets boring after a time. I’ve seen people criticize the AI a lot but to me it wasn’t so bad, the only way to make it better is to give total control of the summon to the player, like attacking/moving, etc. Summon salamion is good but it’s not that strong, i only used it as a decoy for my pyro skills and nothing else. The cat SP buff makes no sense since you’ll be using your summon most of the time and it blocks your regen, and the reality here is that i’ve become dependant on lvl 5 concentrated sp potions and spent around 500k only on pots in a week’s gameplay.
I’ve also tried several other chars that didn’t make it past rank 4 and i won’t bother mentioning them here.
I won’t say anything about pvp in this feedback because IMC didn’t even bother to add it to this CBT for unknown reasons. And duels didn’t happen frequently so i can’t base my arguments on them.
- CLASS BALANCE:
First of all, i want to share what i think about the “grind meta”. Monsters are weak and plenty, and you need SUSTAINED damage in order to grind effectively, there is also the problem with clerics having the same or more damage than wizards and swordsman, which makes them perfect for solo (bokor/monk/paladin) and they don’t need to join parties, and and this leaves only the rare full-support builds available for party play, which is bad. That considered,
melee classes with strong auto attacks like priests/swordsman get advantage because they kill monsters with minimal sp/time cost and they don’t rely on skills too much. Archer and Wizard however, don’t have the aoe melee attack so they need to use skills to kill monsters, otherwise it would take too lonk to kill monsters one by one with their auto attacks. With that given, archers and wizard classes with high cooldowns aren’t good at grinding and get big disadvanges in leveling. People aren’t joining parties because it’s better, but because they aren’t able to survive solo so they have to resort in sharing xp and playing together in order to level up. This is wrong. People should join parties because it’s BETTER than solo and not because it’s impossible for them to play alone, like a wizard/cleric c3 for example.
CLASSES
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Swordsman: Not so OP as people say. Swordsmans are just too easy to play and have very self explanatory skills which makes them a very straightfoward class. Concentrate and Gung-Ho shoudn’t be early game skills because they are boring and don’t add much flavor to the class. As i said early, swordsmans already have strong and reliable auto attacks so they shoudn’t have low/no CD skills. The “sprint” skill shoudn’t be a swordsman passive, it would fit better with archers. Spear classes like cataphract are in heavy disadvantage compared to 2h sword classes like barbarian. Peltasta’s taunt/block is so good that a lot of builds are getting pelt c1 just because of it, and going full damage on the rest, while still fullfilling the purpose of a “tanker” since monsters have poor AI and are weak, and this situation brings disadvantages to classes like rodelero or c2/c3 peltasta, since they aren’t essential in a dungeon. Squire looks pretty underwhelming and should definetly be reworked. The only good thing right now is weapon maintenance, and people only use repair because they are too lazy to warp to city. Squires should have refining abilities and something more advanced that could keep them in pair with alchemists awakening.
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Wizard: Needs more tuning, it’s almost perfect in balance but there is a problem with cryomancer high cooldowns, and wizard c2 being only a filler gap to c3. Removing Energy bolt cd could work, lethargy is totally useless, i suggest it to be an AOE circle that slows anyone stepping on it, with attribute that decreases magic def. Earthquake shoudn’t break joint penalty. Elementalist also suffers from high cooldowns even though you have already decreased them. All thaumaturge buffs are flat numbers and that means they will fall off in lvl 300+, because those 300 bonus damage won’t be much of a difference when fighting monsters with 100k+ hp, and don’t even think about swelling them. Linker has not much to offer in c2 and c3 because the 2 main skills are already in c1 (joint+hangman), so i think one of these should be brought to c2, because if you leave it like that, EVERY wizard will feel forced to pick linker c1. Sorcerer should have more options with the cards, because the only good one right now is temple shooter, and don’t even think about nerfing it without buffing the other cards because it will make the class useless. Hold should have a disable option so you don’t need to re-summon the boss/salamion if you want it to follow you again, and attack ground just doesn’t work at all. The way sp is spent in summon is really bad, because it forces you to have low SPR in order to be able to sustain it with pots. Maybe it could cost a huge amount of mana at once or spend a fixed amount regardless of how much max sp you have. This would encourage sorcerers to spend points in SPR instead of going full int/con. Alchemists are by far the most profiting class in the game because their pots are mandatory in any class and some awakenings (like scale boots) are too OP. However, Dig, Brinquetting and Magnum Opus seem really incomplete as of now, and i hope
devs are still working on them, because if those are the final skills no one will spend points on them and it will be just pot/awakening. Necromancer has serious AI and quality of life problems like not being able to ressumon all skeletons at once and Disinter/Gather Corpse are completely useless since you can buy corpse pots. -
Cleric: The most resourceful class in the game. It has damage, heal, buffs, everything. Cleric tree is also the most versatile one and any path you take is good for something. Some skills like Heal/Cure need better design because it
requires player/monster positioning which is very hard to do sometimes, like in a boss fight. Some skills are just too strong like zaibas for example, it deals the same damage of a comet (14x1k average and comet about 20k), and it has instant cast and 2 charges. Other skills like exorcism are too weak and no one picks them. The buffs in general are good and need no change. If there is one class i think that need buffs, is dievdirby, the idea is awesome and the class is very unique, but it’s far from good right now. Unless your group grinding consists of luring monsters to fixed point, you have to keep building the statues and honestly, the buffs aren’t that good. Priests sacrament for example basically doubles your auto attack damage and lasts 6 minutes. The owl damage is not reliable and the only statue that increases the party damage is Laima, and your group won’t stay much in the place sou you have to make another each time it’s off CD, regardless of it’s duration. I think there should be a healing statue, and a damage buff statue, those would be bread and butter skills in c1, and minor effect statues like Zemyna and Vakarine would be left ti c2/c3, also there should be added some utility skills in c2/c3 that allows you to move/manipulate your statues or make the buffs keep when you leave the range, or even increase the range off screen, because right now it has no mobility. Not to mention that since there is all this cast time/mobility issue, statue buffs should be the best in the game, something really game changing that would make people want a diev in their party. Right now all the diev buffs are very underwhelming. -
Archer: I haven’t had much experience with the class so i can’t say much. But i think they need more versatility in skills and weapons. STR should have nothing to do with bow damage and i’ve never seen it used by ranged classes in any other stat based rpg. They definately should use ammo and fletcher would be the one in charge for making it, creating a whole archer economy with different kinds of ammo that would contribute a lot to the game. Right now archers can deal only one type of damage (missile) with auto attacks and it restricts them to hunt only certain types of monsters, while other classes can switch damage/element type.
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Equipment: There is a total lack of creativity in this area, aside some items like… damn i can’t remember a single one right now, all the equipments are pretty much the same in a design perspective. +x on this atribute, +y on that. All spears give +x flat on small/medium/ big+some range. Rods/Staffs all the same, some give +1/+2 to skills, and that’s it. There are no game changing items, not a single one of them makes you think “oh i could build something around this”. And there is the legendary mandatory arde dagger, that every non 2handed class uses because there is no better option. What about some more funny items? Like weapons that change the way some skills work, or sets that benefit specific builds, like a summoner set that removes summon mana drain but now you can’t cast other spells, or a sword that gives you a new unique skill, maybe a bow that shoots twice but do less damage, anyway, play some Path of Exile and you’ll know what i’m trying to say here. You could also change the way spells work, how about seism dealing it’s damage based on the weapon weight? Or some cleric spells having damage/heal based on spirit, makes sense doesn’t it?
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Monsters: The biggest problem is that there isn’t much skill involved in grinding. Monsters are too easy to kill, and some simple macros like casting spells/auto attacking on a fixed spot would do, this kind of system ENCOURAGES botting, people don’t even need to use a program actually, they just need to keep one button pressed. I’ve spotted dozens of places where you take 0 damage from monsters by standing on blocks/higher ground, and i hope this wasn’t intentional.Hunting should envolve some strategy and coordination, like it happens when killing the 2nd demon prison trees,greene manor lizardmans and mage tower drakes. It adds more hard work/high reward for players and encourages them to play more. This won’t make the game less newbie friendly, newbies can learn all they need in the initial areas, with the difficulty curve rising along with levels.
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Dungeons: a lot of people complain about the grinding/questing and whatsoever, saying the game is too linear.Here is the solution: there should be a dungeon each 20 levels, you could also get a xp card/random reward after completing the first dungeon of the day, this would encourage people to login everyday to play it, isn’t that awesome? So people can avoid the linear progression. Also dungeons make people be more close to each other, but don’t add a dungeon finder like wow,that would make players less interactive and dungeon experience stressful. And please, add some usage for talt or increase it’s selling price, it’s really disappointing to go through the same dungeon 10 times and get 10 talts.
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Guilds: guilds should be the most important community feature in the game, to the point that everyone wants to be in a guild, be it for pvp or pve and mainly for endgame content, and obviously for making new friends, so there should be added guild quests for production, pvp, world boss hunting and reputation, which you gain by completing quests to npcs in certain areas, this reputation could bring unique content like boost potions, foods, exclusive materials etc. All this guild features would add STATUS and FAME to players, and i know a lot that people that only play mmorpgs because the search for these 2 things. Everyone wants to be badass, or be in a badass group, it inflates their ego and make them feel important.
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Companions: the companion system is really poor the way it is now, when it could be one of the main features of the game, since the biggest appeal of the game is it’s cuteness and beauty. First of all there should be HUNDREDS of different pets (it doesn’t need to be a hundred from start, but releasing one each month would be nice), and also pet acessories. Companion level system is bad and should be replaced with a loyalty system (similar to the old tamagotchis), this system can be hugely explored, having your pet doing things for you like looting items in the ground, having some helpful buffs or special quality of life abilities (like teleport you back to city, revive, something like that, but nothing too gamebreaking, revive could have a 1hr cd for example), the pets could also emote and even talk or do tricks depending how loyal/happy they are, does anyone remember those talking porings in RO? Those were awesome! The best thing about this is that you can monetize companions without making the game P2W. Do you realize the rivers of money you could get ONLY with the pet system?
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Graphics: monsters shoudn’t explode into little pieces when dying, this makes too much mess in the screen.
Monster hp bars should be on top of them, not below. It’s impossible to know what you are attacking during dungeons because of the tremendous amount of spell effects, it’s really a mess not to mention the framerate drop. the way damage is displayed is also bad, if you are attacking a boss in the top of the screen, you are unable to see how much damage you are dealing. I can’t think of a better way but maybe showing only your damage would fix it. It’s also hard to know where your char is looking at in the middle of the mess, this affects specially direction based skills like cure/heal. In general i think spell textures should be more transparent and less shiny so we could see what happens in big fights.
The little spark that happens when you hit a monster should be removed or made more subtle.
Titles and party name should be only displayed when mouse hovering a player, because right now the 3 lines together make a mess when people gather in short space. Whenever there is a salamion nearby, it’s health bar will display no matter what boss is near. It should have it’s own hp bar on top of it. -
Sound: i think 90% of the skill/hit sounds should be reworked to be more silent or subtle, being in pvp or dungeons with all those sound effects on creates a noise chaos because of the multiple effects at
the same time, special attention for concentration, that one is by far the worse to hear. -
Game vulnerabilities:
First i want to talk about a situation that happened in RO brazilian server and destroyed it’s economy: With the popularization of a certain bot engine, everyone started botting. The first ones were just using it to get levels, but then the greedy ones started capitalizing on it and putting 50+ bots in the same map, to farm some specific item, and sell it. These same people started selling game currency very cheap, and that inflated the game economy to a point that it ran out of control completely.
Another situation happened in Tibia, where bots were really easy to use and they favored the Knight class, because they could carry more supplies than the other classes and could stay hunting for weeks straight,also they didn’t need to use any skills just auto attacks. This led to a situation where 99% of the top level players in game were Knights.
Anti-hacks never work. If people can hack the government, what to say about games? So what needs to be done? The answer is simple: Don’t give people reasons to cheat. Where there is a will there is as way, so as we can’t stop the ways, let’s stop the will.
I see IMC already had some good ideas with item potential and materials being traded only once (these may look bad but they actually have great impact in the game economy), but also had bad ideas like the Grim Reaper. Grim reaper has two problems: 1st is that it takes too long to appear, and when it does someone already had profit killing a thousand monsters, and this person won’t really be affected because she isn’t even neartheir computer, most times when they come back to their PC the grim reaper already died/vanished. 2nd is that innocent people that are questing/exploring the map will be punished by no reason, i experienced the second issue in mausoleum constructor’s chapel where the grim reaper occuped the 1stof the 4 “afk” rooms and no one could enter or exit that area without dying once, and while that happened, the other 3 rooms were still full of afk people not being punished.
Some solutions:
To prevent stationary grinding (like in demon prison), the devs could create an alghorhytm that would make monsters spawn in areas with less or no players, this would force people to WALK through the map in order to find monsters, and it would make the game more realistic because we woudn’t see much monsters falling from the sky, or unborrowing like zerglings from the ground. Currently there is a land grab for grinding, specially in places like demon prison, where a person/party will occupy a room and never leave the place because it’s raining monsters there, while the rest of the map is empty, and this is bad for the game.
An exclusive anti-cheat department. Your game is full of flaws and some guys on reddit already cheated on your game using CHEAT ENGINE, that is the most humiliating slap in the face i could take as a developer.
Ok, korea has a nice SSN+Phone number control system so you can ban one guy and he won’t come back to your game, but well you’re not in that bubble anymore, welcome to the west. You guys will be banning a LOT of people on release while you fix your flaws, so people are needed, active GMs online mass banning bots and hackers. I’m not talking about 3 or 5 community managers/GMs, you’ll need like 1 for each 1000 players, otherwise this boat will sink in the same waters the games i’ve previously mentioned did.
Considering the amount of development mistakes made, i think you guys should put more effort on this game, brainstorm more, and test more, before giving it to the community. The west is way more sensible to alpha/beta releases and they can’t deal much with bugs/problems like east comunnity does, i’ve seen many people criticize the game as if it were on release, some people even “quit” the beta saying the game was just bad. You are grabbing a huge and very exigent niche of players here, and if you do it well, TOS will be a global sucess and bring your company a lot of money. Also, as a growing company, you should take inspiration from the big ones in the west, there is no shame in that, the real shame is in making the same mistake others already did just because you don’t want to assimilate their idea.
