To start it off I really enjoyed the beta and think it holds a lot of potential, there are a ton of cool things here with many of them that we have seen already implemented well
The game was fun and surprisingly stable for a first test, even with the small size of people inside.
It brought back that feel of community where I would party and work together with people and curse the names of people in other parties as we successfully or unsuccessfully shared/fought over zones.
Many skills felt good, support skills were great, rare mobs were something that got me excited every time, it was a ton of fun and y’all should feel good for what you’ve done so far.
That being said it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and that is ignoring bugs, glitches, and translation/missing text errors since we all knew that was coming since that’s what the CBT is there for, to test things and find out what’s broken and why.
Also ignoring the rates cause those were set as they were and such for a reason.
To improve you gotta know what’s wrong, so most of this is gonna be me pointing out and harping on things I found that were less than good, cause otherwise problems might be missed.
Let us start
On UI, Interface, and Effects
Krivis’s zalciai seems like a good starting point. When a mob walks onto the circle it becomes blue, just like the rare exp pinata mobs. Not only does this crush the hopes and dreams of everyone around the krivis, it is kind of bad design to have multiple things create the same effect, it makes it impossible for the player to know what is what. There are skills that make mobs flash or quickly turn various colors and it makes telling if a mob is actually a loot, equip, or gold pinata very difficult.
Rare mobs should have something to differentiate them from mobs under various debuffs or status effects because as it is the range of “colored flashing mob” is far too cluttered, confusing, and just nondescriptive.
The chat log is not badly done but has a real problem: it is fairly unnoticeable.
The chat log is placed fairly out of the way considering that you are almost always focusing on your character and skills which are in the center of the screen. The chat log disappears after some time closed, which in a way is nice, is not helped by the fact that the notification for when you someone says something in party/whisper chat is very small and not vibrant enough to really catch the player’s eye. The lack of any option to give the player notification (like a beep sound or an exclamation point over your head) when party/whisper chat occurs makes this even worse, meaning that it is very easy for someone to say something to you in party/whisper chat and you not notice it.
UI settings should be universal, not continually changing when I switch characters.
If I had disabled some things like showing exp or team names on one character, but then realized I liked it when I was playing another then it shouldn’t reset to disabled if I change it on character B and then I have to do the same on character A. This is a minor thing but a bit annoying.
An option to see the lvl and class exp bars numbers or percents without mousing over it would be great. Just above the bars, it is very nice to have actual numbers on demand without mousing over the very, very thing bars.
On Instancing
I get the need for it, but honestly it felt pretty bad.
First, the problem of you never knew when something would shoot you into an instance, if there was some sort of warning when you accepted the quest that said you’d be going into one, that would be wonderful.
Second, there should be an option for party members to enter an instance with a player instead of just forcibly dragging all party members into an instance, it is really annoying when someone just walks up to a flag location or something and suddenly everyone is dragged away from grinding or whatever with no choice on their part. Just a little pop up of “X is starting Y instance, do you wish to join y/n?” with say a 10s timer for people to choose, defaulting to no if no answer is chosen.
Third, there isn’t really a reward for doing instances with party members, the exp for the bosses is garbage and you don’t get rewards unless you have the quest, so you helping out with them is kinda pointless.
Fourth, it just kinda sucks when you find something, enter the instance, complete it, and then it’s gone forever. I can’t really explain it other than ‘that was neat but now I can never do it ever again’
Take crystal caves for instance, the very end of the part that we, the lowbies could realistically beat was a big ole circular room with an instanced boss. Sure there was a field boss that could spawn on either 2f or 3f, but it could spawn in either place and not at this end area you had worked to reach. There are all these places I see that originally have an instanced boss, but after that have nothing else ever. They really feel like a nice, hard field boss would fit in perfectly and make either getting there or grinding there even more rewarding instead of feeling like you already road the ride here now you should go ride the next one.
On Giving Information and Parties
This may sound bad but you gotta assume that to a point the player is retarded.
The first time the player plays the game he/she will have absolutely no experience with the game and is likely to be incredibly dense in ways that will make someone more experienced feel extreme amounts of second hand shame.
So you gotta really explain the systems of the game a lot better than they currently are.
Take the status screen for instance
You can mouse over the stats for instance, you can mouse over str/int/con/dex/spr to get a description of what they do, but not for anything else.
How is the player supposed to know what magic amplification does, how crit atk actually affects critical damage, does increasing ice atk give a straight up +X damage or is it +% damage, how does block penetration work, when do I actually regenerate hp/sp
There are all these things there that are never, ever explained and can lead players to be confused and make bad decisions.
It isn’t solely in the stats screen either
When I see a skill say it has an atk of 58 or an atk of 345 that means absolutely nothing to me. I don’t know how that 58 atk works into any formula,it is absolutely useless to me to really know how effective the skill is.
Same thing goes with the enhance attributes, when it says it increases the skill by 1% does that mean it just does 1% more damage, does it scale with something by 1% more, what?
This game is theorycrafting heaven yet the info we have is lacking in many crucial ways.
Also being able to see what the max level of an attribute is before having maxed it would be a godsend.
What about party quest sharing or party events, neither is really explained and confuses a lot of people when they see the party quests which makes them think quests that can be done with a party yet is just you being able to see your party member’s quests and teleport to them.
Party Events are even worse, there is no notification when one pops up nor any info on how to get access to one, heck there isn’t even any info that they exist in the first place.
Party Events seem like a great thing to break up the grind by going off, doing a party quest, getting some nice rewards, and having fun with your party members. But at the same time they are also too limited.
To do a party event you need to be in a full party of 5 people, you need to be in this group for a while too in order for the event to appear in the party menu, and you need a full party to enter it.
This makes the requirements kind of steep and unfriendly, especially since you won’t always be partying with 4 other people.
What if I’m just playing with 1-2 friends or I’m in a party grinding at a place that is best for 2-4 people? Then we cannot get a party event ever, which is kind of shitty for having fun when we could break up the grind with cool stuff but we can’t because our party is too small for reasons.
I mean I get that the events should be difficult and scaled for full parties, so why not have events for full parties, events for 3-4 man parties, and events for duo parties, it’d give people more freedom to do what they want and be more fun.
On Enemy CC
On one hand I am always glad for enemies to have strong CC and debuffs that make the players have to worry about them and deal with them
on the other hand the CC in this game is kind of ridiculous.
When you get frozen/fall asleep/petrified you can lose complete control of your character for up to 8~ seconds. If the mob that did this is capable of doing damage to you then you would be in deep trouble from it and all its buddies if the CC lasted half the time, but with up to 8s long CC like this you are just stuck watching and annoyed. This isn’t a matter of it being too strong for players to handle, it is a matter of the player losing control of their charcter for long enough that they sort of fall out of the state of playing the game and enter the state of 'waiting to be able to do anything while quickly becoming annoyed"
This applies even more so to silence because while preventing the player from attacking is great CC, it is handled in the most obnoxious way right now. Instead of it being a penalty for getting hit by something bad it is the penalty for a random attack by tiny floating hats in the chapel or if the boss decides that today it is just going throw restrain traps everywhere. Those traps have a range that makes hitting them with a non-spear using melee character an exercise in frustration.
Also on traps there needs to be a limit on how many a boss can summon, and if there is then it needs to be lower. Fights should not turn into 'I need to kill these traps ASAP because all the various auras are killing my framerate"
On Mobs and Bosses
Mobs need a larger aggro-leash, faster movement, or preferably both, if even think of walking offscreen from a mob it will lose interest in you and walk away, when a big thing in this game is mob trains, that is kinda real bad. The fact that without swashbuckling they move real slow doesn’t help either, doesn’t help make them threatening or make pulling them less tedious at times.
I like that mobs have skills and try to use them, shamans using heal, archers using multishot, those circles with legs launching magic mortars at you, these work well and hopefully at higher levels make them more of a threat.
However boss skills do not work.
They do not work well at all.
You have bosses with attacks that have no animation, attacks that hit you even if you were nowhere near the attack itself, and attacks that basically come down to 'wait for the boss to stop being invincible"
Too many bosses have many elements to them that are outright broken, combined with the fact that until you get overwhelming dps via something like a C2 pyro, hoplite’s stabbing and pierce, or the barbarian super crit combo, you can be plinking at hp walls for days.
The worst example I can think of is one of the first days I hit the boss Cabrias, that goat dude boss with the scythe. I was a priest with heavy investments in str cause I wanted to become a paladin and smite things.
Well however the damage formula works, obviously takes class into account since my auto attack was absolute garbage compared to swordsman, so with a grand total of heal, cure, aspersion, and Z, I had to fight this boss.
Basically nothing I had did reasonable damage to him on a decent CD. The boss took just about 10 minutes of just holding Z, smacking it, popping sp pots, and using skills whenever off CD. That was very unfun and felt like I was just plinking at a wall until it felt enough pity that it collapsed to make me feel better.
And it’s a shame because bosses do have some real potential, sure the final boss of the crystal mines was easy, but it had style, it had hopscotch gimmicks (that I totally had my party ignore through liberal use of safety zone), it had kick ass music, if it had been a good 3-4x harder it would have been an absolutely fantastic boss fight. Boss fights can be good but in the state they currently are in they are usually more tedious than anything else.
On Damage Types
So the damage graph works like this
Pierce is super effective on leather and not very effective on cloth
Slash is super effective on cloth and not very effective on plate
Blunt is super effective on plate and not very effective on leather
Magic is neutral on all but super effective on spooky ghost armor
All forms of non-magic attack are not very effective on spooky ghost armor.
On one hand I really like that if you are smart with your weapon loadout and skill set you can generally take advantage of a monster’s physical weakness to score 50% extra damage, it rewards being smart and adapting, I like that.
On the other hand classes can be far too limiting and basically screw the player just cause. Are you in the archer tree? Almost everything you have deals piercing damage so you are basically screwed if the enemy resists stab, same thing if you want to play around with hoplite and its skills.
The negative modifier is too strong and basically makes it a lot less fun to play with certain things because you realize “well if I do X then I’m basically screwed for a good 1/3 of the monsters in the game”
50% bonus damage is a lot weaker than having your damage halved. The negative far outstrips the positive, and it really kinda sucks. There should be a negative modifier for not following the weapon triangle, but as it is it is too strong andjust discourages many types of play.
I should not hit a sheep with a sword and do 260 damage, then hit it with a spear and barely do 80, I mean what if I was solely a spear or a shooty class?
Suddenly that type of monster makes me completely ineffective just cause.
Make the penalty a little less harsh because there are classes that cannot do anything to deal with that and that is not good.
Physical classes basically have no way of dealing with spooky ghost armor, meaning they get to have all the fun with half damage regardless of what they do. Makes bosses like chappirition super fun cause now it effectively has 2x hp because it is impossible for me to do damage to it that it doesn’t resist.
Monsters have bad AI and player creations like fireballs should be flagged to be ignored by your summons and helpers and such.
On Skills and Balance
Too many skills are useless right now.
Why should I take concentration when it gives an absolutely piss-weak buff that lasts for almost no attacks?
Why are there so many flat boost skills in a game that is much more about percentage increases being more important.
Why does wagon wheel do less damage, hit less enemies, and only have one charge while Cartar Stroke is stronger, hits more, and has two charges?
Why do blessing and aspersion both have 1 charge, require an item that costs gold, and have a rather large CD, yet both are very, very underwhelming in their effects (okay the def buff on aspersion is great, but the rest is rather underwhelming)
In nearly every single class there are a bunch of skills that are really weak and borderline useless. They need to be brought up to snuff with the other skills.
If a skill requires a consumable to use or has a hefty CD or only has one charge then it better be worth it.
Synchro thrust is really weak yet has 1 charge and a hefty CD, pommel bash has a longer CD and and higher SP cost than bash, and less charges than thrust yet it only hits one enemy and gets no extra cast change or anything.
So many interesting builds and possibilities are ruined do to the fact that so many skills are just too weak.
Why do attributes have this mobile-style ‘you must wait X amount of time to learn this attribute’ attached to them?
It is not fun at all to go back and forth or just sort of tab in and out going ‘oh now I need to wait 40 minutes to get this attribute levelled up, again’
It is something I’d expect in an p2w f2p mobile game.
I am already dedicating at least 1 circle, 1 skill point, and an unknown amount of money in order to level the attribute, why do I then have to play the waiting game?
If it’s to prevent people from just buffing up lowbie chars by boosting their attributes to max ASAP then it really doesn’t do anything, the person coudl just spend a while waiting while levelling whatever attributes they want and still have a lowbie char that comes out strong. It’d be better to just level lock breakpoints on attributes instead.
As it is the only thing adding these time locks does is annoy the player that just wants to have the things the player is paying for in gold and skill points already.
Why can we not see all the info on a skill before we purchase it?
You cannot see the CD, the sp cost, nor the charges on a skill before you buy it
all of these are very important in knowing whether you want to get the skill or not and really hamper the player’s decision making ability.
On Items and Upgrading
I hope there is more variety in terms of the weapons and armor later on in the game instead of
lvl 15 sword, lvl 15 sword with slightly more damage, and rare lvl 15 sword with even more damage and +stat or +damage against X type of monster
But other than that I don’t really have any complaints.
The upgrade system is actually really good, you have to choose how you spend your points (Do I want to spend my potential trying to get a high upgrade, on the item world awakening, or socketing gems, how do I want to do this to make it as good as possible)
and the anvil system is something I am very, very glad you did.
The fact that it increases linearly so that if +1 = +4 damage, then +127 is also another +4 damage
This removes a lot of RNG from the system making it into a tedious land that is a gold seller’s paradise.
I like it very, very much and I’m glad you did it this way.
It means that if someone gets lucky and makes say, a +11 weapon they are gonna have a good boost in damage from it, but it won’t be the be-all-end all, oh my god your weapon isn’t +13 leave this party and never come back.
The upgrade system looks great and I am very pleased with what you have done with it.
Random Final Thoughts:
Why do you get reduced exp from monsters that are stronger than you?
You are already going into the danger zone by fighting monsters that can easily do a lot of damage to you and will be harder to hit. The player taking these risks should be rewarded, not punished, yet that is exactly what happens. It limits exploration and playstyles.
The card game is really stupid and I love it because of that. Throneweaver is best card because it has 8 legs and nothing is gonna beat that.
Your inventory with your cards should be up the moment you join a cardgame and not close after every individual round.
There should be the option for ‘friendly’ matches where the cards are not at stake.
Also the ability to limit the options so you could do something like take off things on the wheel so it could be contain maybe only ‘longest name, most legs, or tallest’ instead of all the options always since that just limits the game to just RNG instead of also having an element of strategy as well as RNG.
This will probably mean nothing in the long run, but I can hope someone reads and listens to these suggestions and the game comes out in the best possible state it can be in.