My opinions on the game (not including bugs/stability issues):
Mobs in general:
- Mobs attack animations are usually extremely slow and miss if you move the slightest between your attacks
- Mobs have extremely low damage and hp making partying mostly pointless
- Mob density is terrible in most maps leaving nowhere to grind outside dungeons
Bosses:
- All the non-field bosses are currently tied to quests.
- 50% of the time you can face tank the boss, 49% of the time move out of the big red circle and 1% of the time a boss may actually do some surprising burst damage and kill you instantly.
- A challenge 0% of the time, just like all the games content currently
Field Bosses:
- Not enough of them exist for the purpose of actually hunting
- 4 hour spawn timer allows an easy monopoly once your guild has killed it once and know it’s time of death.
- Ridiculous amount of HP and damage means they are nothing more than a zerg PvE gimmick or for parties that out level it by a ton to farm with no real chance for a party of similar level of actually challenging the boss. It’s like the polar opposite of regular bosses.
World Map:
- No maps exist for the purpose of party grinding.
- Extremely small, cramped and almost everywhere is a quest location
- Map progression is linear to the most extreme. You can basically play connect the dots with the world map and even guess where quest’s still be at any specific level.
- Feels like the world was designed around quests, as if they were written and then zones created to hold the quests and not the other way around.
Channels:
- Great at game launch to help alleviate congestion but is a symptom of the current generations feeling of entitlement to having a place to grind or quest without any interaction (negative or positive) from other players.
- Channels don’t even need to exist beyond launch week if we actually had some larger maps with mob density worth grinding in a party.
- Immersion breaker and propagates anti-social tendencies in games design
Dungeons:
- Dungeons are a boring band aid solution to the current games world map design.
- I hate dungeons/raiding in an mmo (ill go play coop games like d3/poe if I want instances) so this is more like a bonus if dungeons weren’t the only good place for group xp right now.
- Immersion breaker and propagates anti-social tendencies in games design
Quests in general:
- Boring and forgettable if you even bother to read this crap. Spoiler alert “You and you alone are the chosen savior who will save this world from evil”. Like we haven’t seen this level of crap writing since every mmorpg ever.
- Quests give a ridiculous amount of xp compared to killing mobs. Currently mob XP is 3x while I expect XP cards to remain the same on release. Causes the mentality that it takes forever to grind when used to such fast gains during questing.
Stats:
- Take full Int/Str and have 1400-1700 at 600 due to rank bonus and scaling
- Take full con and have 80k+ hp compared to 8-14k (32k if your swordman) +800 crit resist
- Take any other stat and gain mostly useless bonuses to anything.
- Mix your stats and lose out on the bonuses of full damage
Skills:
- Flat amount of scaling means later on you can just 1 point anything that does not increase something other than damage per level
- Multihit skills are broken due to above point, each hit is like a separate skills worth of damage later on.
- Any skill that isn’t multiple hits or provide some insane utility is just filler/useless the higher your level is. Imagine your current skills with +300dmg when you have 5000 attack already, may as well autoattack and save sp rather than get 5300 dmg. Likewise imagine stab with only 100 damage but 15 hits. 5100 times 15 anyone?
- All the support abilities don’t scale with Int or Spr at all making full Con support a likely pick, if support is needed at all once our stat growth outscales the game’s terrible buffs (Aspersio aside).
- Same for heals. Percent HP based and doesn’t require any stats to be useful. A monk or a sadhu who has priest 2 for group heal is probably a better pick than any pure support later on.
Things I actually like:
- Interesting classes and class progression
- Leveling without quests takes a very long time, won’t be max level for at least a year at 1x rates. We’ll see how long before they cave into casuals and the game dies two months later when everyone hits max level and quits.
- Best game soundtrack ever
- Non soulbound equipment
- Good crafting system and upgrade system (could use some more interesting “mod” effects from gems though)
My suggestions:
- Give Mob’s and Bosses a regular attack with a quick/undodgeable animation
- Double the HP and XP of all mobs
- Create 2+ extra maps for grinding for every quest related map using the same mobs and art/tiles to expedite the process
- Don’t take the easy way out and make another channel instance/dungeon instance game
- Have quest bosses HP scale to party size
- Remove the big obvious red circles from pretty much every boss/mob
- Create more field bosses, put 1 in each of the new maps you just created for grinding in
- Downgrade the xp on cards in exchange for some xp scaling on mobs
- Remove the Int/Str bonuses that making taking other stats seem pointless at higher levels
- Have skill damage scale multiplicative with level (something tame like 1.0 at level 1 and 1.5-2.0 at level 15)
- Have multihit skills calculate total damage first and split it among hits with a multiplier bonus per hit to keep the skills relevant (rewards hitting more hits without giving straight up damage*hits)
- Scale buffs/heals with Spr or Int (or a bit of both)
- Allow magic damage to be evaded (but not status effects)
You can probably tell im part of the diehard oldschool mmo players who much prefer open world to instances/channels and grinding to quests but I tried to keep my criticism and objections to general problems.