I had high expectations about the new content… and of course I got disappointed
The story: it’s nice to finally see the Centurion master after six years, and it’s always lovely to do quests with Pajauta… but every quest in this episode is the same repetitive “kill x mobs and find x soldiers”. And it seems the quest finishes abruptly without any transition, no final epic battle (for those who started to play Lost Ark and get to the first big battle they know what an epic fight is…), no introduction to the new raid (you just click F10 and start it)… and where the hell is Beholder or the red haired girl from the intro screen? Also the new episode doesn’t give enough exp cards when you start at level 460, which forces you to do many CM runs to reach level 470 and start doing new content.
New gear score: problematic. Characters that had 490 gear score and could do Vasilisa raid now start with 6400-6700 at level 460 and can’t do the raid anymore. Of course, the automatch version is now dead so you should do the solo version, which is quicker and doesn’t require gear score, but still that’s an overlook from the devs. Now for the new raid, you need 7000 for the solo version and 7250 for the party (automatch) version. Since my main was created later on compared to some of my other chars I was not able to reach 470 with it yet so I cannot tell, but I’ve leveled up a few alts to 470 (those early chars who had a lot of leftover level 16/17 exp cards), equipped the “fodder” earring and Isidavie accessories… and my gear score on these are a little bit under 7200. Since they are “alts”, they only come with +16 Goddess equipment (no investment other than the 2 weekly solo snake runs), +1/+2 Boruta seals (no access to these except a few fragments here and there from Fedimian lottery due to not participating in Blockade raids anymore) and low level arks, and I don’t see how I could spend more time or resources on alts at this point (dead market, high requirements for main char, lack of parties to do content faster…). So yeah… I can’t do the automatch version of the raid with these chars.
Problem #1: one of them is my healer, and there’s no way I can do solo raids with it. So I need to invest more until I can break the 7250 mark… and that score REALLY increases slowly. This means using the resources I was devoting to my main DPS to my healer. And at this point, FAILING to upgrade a Boruta seal from +2 to +3 would be a disaster…
Problem #2: mouse mode.
“Fixed the issue that when clicking the monster during mouse mode, basic attack activates when using skills.”
“Fixed the issue that you cannot move with the mouse for 3 seconds when the mouse cursor is on the monster or character in mouse mode.”
So yesterday I finally leveled up a DPS alt to 470 and reached 7000+ gear score so I decided to try the new Delmore raid for fun and get a preview of what it’s like. And man… what a shitfest it is. I thought Vasilisa was bad… this is worse. At least the Vasilisa solo raid is trivial, this alt was already able to finish it in less than a minute at level 460, even with mouse mode and bugged hit box slowing down the process. The new raid took me… 25 minutes. And I didn’t count the number of Soul Crystals I had to use (ok the first run was a “blind” run so I didn’t figure out the wipe mechanic immediately)… but most of these deaths were due to the two above bugs CLEARLY not being fixed. When you’re locked in AA when targeting a skill at the boss and you have a millisecond to react it surely cannot end well. Plus 99% of the time you get those red boxes on the floor symbolizing the paths of the boss’s attacks and in mouse mode you simply CANNOT move when they appear since they block mouse clicks… so you’re stuck on the spot until you use keyboard to move (and that’s with WASD if you didn’t remap those keys… good luck with that). And to finish with mouse problems, some of the skills that require a target will fail miserably (invalid target prompt + going on CD) if you don’t click the PRECISE pixel that activates the boss target box (can’t tell how infuriating it is to try casting Damballa with Bokor for half a minute while clicking everywhere on the boss to find the spot that activates the skill… and the Delmore boss is a DOOR – it’s NOT MOVING, imagine now a boss that MOVES!!!).
After all that hassle… you get 14 fragments. Yeah that’s just enough to +1 your three accessories. This is gonna be problematic for alts. At this point, I will have to level up my main and see how it plays with a better equipped char and also try to fix my healer to be able to try the automatch version and see how it plays compared to the solo version. Anyway, this will probably be adjusted in the future like everything else…
Memory of Flame: well… you need 7300 gear score, will have to wait for a while… At this point, the best way of getting earring fragments is to participate in guild raids, this will force every remaining player to join a guild that can do these. I feel bad for the small group of friends that started a casual guild years ago and can’t clear these guil raids weekly…
Arcanum Brewing: doesn’t work
Archaeology: who the hell has time for this???
Oh well… time to resume exp grinding…