Thanks, PrinceKen, for participating in the interview and shedding some light on the intentions behind the cube. I hope developers will continue to give interviews, since making statements and then getting trash talked by players is important to the process of improving the game.
Let’s get this started with my Keista potion stack from opening the cube:
But I’m really here to address the “catch up” and “wouldn’t trivialize the effort that the hard-core players put into clearing end-game content” sections most of all.
Therefore, I discussed that with a hardcore player who cleared the 40th floor of Earth Tower. He said “You can’t even do ET (Solmiki) without the practonium weapons.” His group’s damage dealers and those of other groups that got the first clears on iToS servers used orange practonium weapons. When I asked about getting Solmiki weapons using only Lolopanther weapons, he said “It’s not even possible. You’d have to spend like 60 million silver plus one month running 20F ET, which no one is ever going to do, and on top of that the ET weapons are too weak for Solmiki.”
- How many players bothered making Lolopanther or Solmiki weapons in Korean ToS? Does the staff keep track of such numbers? Did anyone in Korea beat ET 40F without using practonium weapons on their main damage dealers?
Mystical cube RNG can cause different members of the same ET group to have different progression rates, and his opinion on this was “It’s a stupid design, I don’t see the point of locking the practonium behind RNG.” I suggest designing rank 9 progression so a group playing together will all keep up with each other.
Personally, I don’t think weapons are practical as final floor rewards because of the balance issues involved. I asked the 40F clearer whether something else should be the reward for fully clearing: “…but even if weapons were actually good for all the classes instead of like 1-2, it’s pointless because no one is going to spend 2½ hours every day for months to get a weapon upgrade, especially when there’s so many bugs and random game crashes which can ruin your run instantly. It’s not a very fun experience and completely pointless, so yes they should change the reward to something else.” Note that “weapon upgrade” in context is an upgrade that happens after all current content has already been beaten.
Also, a bonus opinion:[quote]“End game content” is a joke too, because it’s just about abusing melstis + ausrine and then stacking high transcended damage classes such as pyro or doppel.[/quote]
I agree that transcendence has been bad for balance and ausrine+melstis+glass mole/chapparition is a problem for encounter design, so these mechanics should be redesigned for rank 9.
The catch up part is also flawed:
The unstable cube can expire and become unusable (even though the text on the unstable cube itself claims it’ll safely turn back into a mystical cube if you don’t click it, so that’s a bug). Many expirations were caused by technical issues such as internet connections going down. This is catastrophic for players who want to catch up but instead find themselves forced to roll entirely new characters to get practonium. Such a massive setback is very discouraging, so such valuable items should not be able to expire.
When rank 8 first came out, an exploit allowed people to use TBL to reroll their mystical cubes many times in one day. But even without the exploit, the RNG leads to people choosing group members based on cube luck instead of their skill as players. That harms its effectiveness as a catch up mechanic.
On the plus side, I do like the idea of having the UI warn people when timed items are going to expire. I lost some dungeon reset vouchers which were buried among my large piles of consumable items and premium items with similar icons. It’s hard to keep track of items on alts, so I hope the new UI is teamwide.
If any other players who cleared ET are here, please post your opinions of the interview https://treeofsavior.com/news/?n=849 and these issues.
For a future interview topic, how about asking why ToS focuses so heavily on dailies?
