Um, isn’t Lineage 2 revolution is P2W and Aute-play garbage. Pubg optimzation is as bad as Tos too. You would have score my Hue points if you have said " See you guys in Monster Hunter/ Bless online.".
6 Likes
Rank 9 is definitely a success. I see more variations in builds. Classes (krivis, paladin, musketeer, dragoon…etc) are slowly getting balanced/buffed, slowly…
At the very least, R9 made me come back to this game after quitting for almost half a year.
I love rapiers and they gave me more rapiers.
I have nothing to complain.
2 Likes
it’s a success or should be called trap strategy in term of pushing player back into TOS?
Well, the new DLC force bait allow existing/new player to continue login for 14 days. This is their marketing strategy tho.
Sorry for too much typo 
Varena is pretty much alive right now so I’d say Rank 9 managed to succeed to some degree in SEA.
Edit: Personally, what I enjoy about this game is the lore. I love doing things that let me know more about the world of TOS.
1 Like
+1 for Varena love.
Fun fact: There is a hidden Taiwanese Community dwelling in Varena and not many people realize that 
They are a very nice/united community i would say.
Being of the earliest back to 2016 that I suggested random stat gear Diablo3-liked, i’m glad what is delivered. As also suggested, the second stage to solve Itemization is the Special Effect thru Special Gems, gems that like giving back the effect of Ignition/Audra/Temere to the random stat gears, and even Gems Set like Rune in Diablo2 that give set effect like Manahas’s extra attack line. Or Charm on the shield that was planned since beta.
With this, IMC never worry need to spend development time to keep creating new gears.
IMC failed on TBL/GvG big time, the only redemption of “Dynamic Content” currently is only itemization.
Some new classes are interesting, they synergy well with wide range of existing classes (except swordie tree), but few new class remain under-performing,
3 Likes
Slow but good start
I have seen players turned off from this new itemnization though. They took it as a bitter pill since it’s technically a double layered RNG
It also open up to more builds like stacking Dex for enchanter etc .
4 Likes
yup, you can easy get +100 stats from all this blue random armor no problem. it is good to test new build without reset stats.
love the patch
20chars
Pretty much doesn’t help that the crafted orange gear are, with a few exceptions, potentially much weaker than a well rolled random orange one. 3 green slots is pretty hard to compete with.
1 Like
They just covered the lack of new content with a neverending farming system RNG based, to buy time.
Now that Rank Reset event is over, the fangirls hype is lower and we’re back to our dailies, people will start to realize that nothing has really changed and there is still nothing (new) to do…
8 Likes
All of TOS problems are due to the sh1t engine they used instead of buying a license for unreal. We are still stuck at 5 man content because of this.
2 Likes
not bad for me im still playing since headstart 
after another disconnection at challenge mode stage 5 i decided to stay away for a while.
i’m also really looking forward an optimization of the game,
and can’t even select a target with my archer using mouse.
2 Likes
Yep, now that the reset is over the hype will soon be gone and it is the same old ToS, just with higher level and more farming lol
1 Like
So far, Rank 9 was a big disappointment.
There are several reasons:
- weapons became even stronger
especially the twohanded version with up to 6 random stats+ 5 gem sockets, aside from the usual attack growth through level&star count
- equipment disparity
although we already have the weapon issue, I still have to mention that the new recipe-based equipment is far from being balanced, especially considering the abnormal stats on e.g. Masionios Musket, while other weaponry like Masionios Onehanded Mace is just crap;
Also, let’s not forget the other equipment, which totally lacks CON and useful stats on the Cloth set, making it far inferior to the random stat gear
- monster HP issue
although we already faced this issue at the previous cap after the rebalancing patch, monsters just have their defence and HP increased, while their attack didn’t grow significantly.
Basically, the strongest monsters at Rank 9 have around 30-40% more attack than the strongest Rank 8 mobs, making them pretty much a joke attackwise.
The only real increase they got was their HP pool and their defence (mainly magic defence) to make people with bad equipment feel miserable by taking longer to kill them while not feeling any threat.
- challenge mode
While it might seem to be a nice activity to spend time, we have another chore that’s limited by character, so another reason to continue the tree of alts-army that already exists to farm Blessed Shards in Saalus. It also unnecessarily increases the feeling of repetitive content.
The spoils are pretty bad, you mainly just get random blue and purple equips, and all the increasing stages do is increase the time required to kill a monster by boosting their max HP and defence (again, especially magic defence), enforcing to whale out your characters weaponry.
However, the requirement of killed monsters does not decrease, causing some party constellations to last longer/shorter, depending on how good their equip&support is.
Basically it’s just another DPS-race similar to ET with highly repetitive content and no real gains aside of portal stones.
- new raid dungeon
Although the idea of infinite entries per day sounds great, in fact it would be stupid considering you need to sacrifice 2 blessed shards per portal stone and the amount of portal stones used increases with every consecutive entry on the same day, making it only feasible for RMTs/whales to do in the 1st place. The spoils from the dungeon are also quite bad, leaving you with dust most of the time in exchange for 20 opal,20 mithril ore and 8 blessed shards (with token discount) required to enter.
It’s also highly repetitive and frustrating, considering you can’t expect a real growth even when acquiring the recipes and crafting them.
- new item crafting
I think that the new items are a lot easier to craft because of the higher acquisition rate of their material items. However, at the same time I’m disappointed that the drop rates of level 315 unique weaponry material wasn’t adjusted at all, creating an artificial gap between both weaponry categories although they basically require similar materials (70+ farmed drops + 2 practonium + precious stones/stone powder).
This is also counterproductive if we consider the fact that the acquisition of 315 unique weaponry recipes and practonium were increased dramatically, flooding the market with their presence.
I know that the material drops from challenge mode cubes, thus dropping their market value, but farming should be an option considering the low chances to get the material you need…
- Increased Class disparity
While at the previous Ranks (6/7/8) Classes often were designed nicely with many skills and attributes to complement the skills and presenting Circle C3 as the pinnacle of the Class, Rank 9 did not do this equally good.
In fact, it felt really rushed and not fleshed out at all, leaving some Classes with an incredibly good skill and nice attributes (e.g. Cannoneer,Musketeer) while others were really bad/felt misplaced (e.g. Kabbalist, Featherfoot, Warlock).
It’s especially bad in contrast to the new Rank 8 Classes that are a lot better/stronger/more useful to clear the new content because they have better skills/capabilities to clear content even with bad equipment (e.g. Shadowmancer, Taoist, Inquisitor,Zealot, Enchanter).
This is creating more imbalance between the Classes and basically made a lot of Classes/builds less viable, resulting in an even bigger Class disparity than before Rank 9.
It also isn’t fair that some Classes (Musketeer,Dragoon) got 2 skills at Circle 3 while the other only got 1.
- lack of endgame content
while I wouldn’t call anything endgame content until we’ve reached a niveau where we can call the characters ready for something, there simply isn’t anything worthy to farm/gear towards.
PVP is just a kill-hell where the developers nerf retaliation/survival skills so that people actually have to die sooner or later if they are mere supporters/have support Classes in their builds,
ET is outdated and still not once a week, so a daily chore,
Saalus is another daily chore to enhance mainly your weapons for PVE or armor for PVP/GVG [which is also unimpressive with less gains, basically just another chore to fill the void between Rank updates/levelcap increements],
field bosses are just HP sponges and drop things that are only required to craft 4 accessory sets [which are pretty bad for the most part],
the challenge mode and raid dungeon are limited to daily entries and thus a repetitive chore,
silver farming became less important due to events flooding the participants with attribute point vouchers, thus leading to inflation,
etc.
- Hunting Grounds
The change of Hunting Grounds to be the only place where you can farm useful equipment was a pretty bad move, especially considering that it has an issue with AMD processors, allowing only people with newer AMD processors or other processor types to enter without FPS drops.
It resulted in a scarcity of Monster Card Albums, punishing non-guild members with less card-availability,
made playing without looting chance on armor on fields an unprofitable chore and created another wall for people without the ressources/builds to bring down the monsters with 500k+ HP.
This seems to be an attempt to make the players focus on their weapon first to be able to clear every content of the cap once they managed to do so,
the problem with this is the high amounts of repetitive chores absolved to achieve this goal,thus making a lot of people get bored/despair,thus quitting the game.
It is outright strange,though, that you need a good weapon first, because once you’re done with this task,the armor you can farm has become useless to the point that you only wear it for the sake of the statboni to increase your INT/STR/DEX/SPR/CON (the substats don’t matter),
making unique 350 gears with 2-4 green and 0-2 purple stats the best possible item one can wish for;
after acquiring such gear you just farm items to scrap them and use the dusts to reroll the stats to further increase you damage…
However, as this is not required at all, it becomes more and more boring the longer you try to keep it up. It’s just so you can kill the spongy monsters faster,not to survive anything (aside from maybe PVP/GVG).
This fact combined with the inability to effectively farm unique rarity gear in the fields makes Hunting Grounds one of the biggest failures of the Rank 9 changes.
- Looting Chance
This is the worst feature of the whole Rank 9 content, as it only influences the drop rate of random equipment and only by a small margin (600 Looting Chance for less than +100% drop chance is just ridiculous,looking at how rare the stat is and how often you get numbers far below 100 per armor). There seem to be potions and events planned to increase the Looting Chance, but I don’t think that it will have that much impact unless you’re using it inside of challenge mode or Hunting Grounds.
All in all I think that the Rank 9 update did not fix the games issues, it only added to them,
making bad Classes worse, good Classes even better, keeping stupid monsters non-threatening HP-sponges, introducing more repetitive content, introducing more daily chores, making events less enjoyable, making grinding more efficient than questing (thus leaving the lore in an even more sorry state than it was in before), giving no incentives to explore the world, creating more meta with new items/stats, more balance updates that overbuff some Classes [e.g. Krivis/Falconer/Hoplite/Musketeer] while nerfing others [e.g. Oracle/Linker(pending)], bringing Rank Reset inmidst of rebalancing/changing Classes/skills and, worst of all, changing the Class concept of newly introduced Classes, resulting in them being far better than the previously released Rank 2-7 Classes.
I’d give the update a 3/10 for the attempt to make the game more enjoyable, resulting in more chores&meta-building in the end. Who knows what will come out in 2018,
maybe they’ll be able to [at least partially] pull the wagon out of the mud.
8 Likes
The above post nailed it.
Personally for me, the biggest frustration with the patch is the ungodly level of RNG introduced by the randomized stats. They intended for the crafted gear to be a reliable, but longer method, to match the randomized gear, but randomized gear blows the crafted gear out of the water. Let’s compare, for example, a leather piece:
Crafted, Fietas Leather Armor:
+57 STR
+46 Evasion
+24 Crit Rate
vs.
Random, Primus Jevenellis Leather Armor can potentially have:
+up to 50 STR
+up to 50 DEX
+up to 50 CON
+up to ~20? crit rate
…yeah, no contest really. Even if you picked a Purple piece instead, it could have up to 40 on each of the stats.
You see this on weapons for most classes as well.
Crafted, Masinios Two-Handed Sword:
+90 STR
+30 DEX
+445 Crit Attack
+some useless proc
vs.
Random, Primus Raffye Two-handed Sword, potentially:
+up to 90 STR
+up to 90 DEX
+up to 90 CON
+200 or more Physical Attack
+200 or more Critical Attack
+last line that can be useful like race damage up, SPR for mp hungry classes, etc.
Couple that with how RNG the refining process is, that nice perfect rolled sword you have? It’s stuck at +5 0 pot. At least with the old stat system, if you ruined it during refining, you could go and make another, exact same piece. Now tell me, how likely are you to find another perfectly rolled piece (if you could even find one in the first place)?
This feels like it never ends.
2 Likes
I do understand your point of view, but I don’t agree with several statements in your post.
- weapons became even stronger
2H weapons are supposed to be strong and they don’t offer that much advantage over 1H weapons+offhand though, specially when there’re so many Thaumaturges now. Even if they decide to change how Swell Right Arm works (they reverted the nerf temporarily), using a shield wouldn’t be affected by this nerf.
- equipment disparity
I completely agree with you on that point, but there are more good Masinios Weapons. I’d say at least half of the new weapons are better than a good Primus Raffye weapon. However, the new armors are very underwhelming. They have the same pdef/mdef as the Primus lvl 350 armors and they don’t offer anything besides their sub-stats.
- monster HP issue
You’ll only have issues with the hunting grounds monsters if you try to grind/farm there alone. But I got it and it’s sad, because ToS fell for the trap and turned into a game of numbers. There’s no strategy or gimmicks involving killing monsters in the game, only dumping numbers on them until they explode.
- challenge mode
I like challenge mode a lot. Doing it in a full party allows for pretty much any build to be able to do it.
- new raid dungeon
I agree and it doesn’t really feel like a raid at all… The new boss is kinda nice though. They called it Unique Raid, but is there any difference between First Shelter and Fantasy Library?
- new item crafting
They need to rethink the disparity between crafting an item and farming items with RNG sub-stats. Making lvl 315 orange weapons is still a burden and I’d never do it since I can buy cheap Berthas/Primus Pevordimas weapons instead.
- Increased Class disparity
I wouldn’t say the R9 patch increased class disparity because many classes are now viable or became viable again. Today, the game’s a bit more than having your mandatory Murmnobi, Chrono, Falconer and Miko Taoist in your party. However, you’re on point when you said they rushed. That’s so true they even had to already rework Matador, Dragoon and Musketeer after releasing it on live server.
PS.: you’re wrong about Kabba, FF and WL, specially WL3.
- lack of endgame content
Unfortunately, this is true. The game is too focused on gearing up your character, but for what? GvG was removed and Neutrality+Transcendence killed PvP, so, to keep myself busy, I make more characters. The ride never ends.
- Hunting Grounds
HG340 is our Gulag and R9 sentenced us to work there until death. Just kidding, but farming in field or dungeon maps isn’t that bad. Monsters outside of the hunting grounds are a lot easier to kill, so a few classes end up farming more effectively there. I prefer farming in Challenge Mode though. It’s fast in a full party and it gives lots of equipment to all party members.
- Looting Chance
I like the new stat, but I’d like it better if it worked with items other than the unidentified gear. Stacking lots of Looting Chance is already noticeable, I don’t think +100% drop chance for 600 looting chance would be needed or fair.
Overall, I’m having more fun than before, but people will get tired from the new content really soon. I’d like to see more creativity in boss designs and situations where gimmick classes could shine. And I’d like to have stuff to do outside from killing stuff. Also, I’d like to add another negative point that’s still present:
- unbalanced monster population
I really hate how unbalanced is the monster population among the new maps. The Hunting Grounds are supposed to be the maps where you should grind/farm in a party, but mob density is very low compared to questing maps. Trying to do quests in Valandis Room 2 makes me want to pull all my hair off. Mobs in the coastal maps are also very annoying since they’re extremely aggresive and follow you from one corner of the map to the other.
3 Likes
This also goes back to the class balance problem, some classes do a job, and do it extremely well, making it almost impossible for other classes to compete. Take for example the Linker-Thauma-XX build. Not only does it kill groups of mobs very easily, even with minimal investment, but also double their drops as well! There’s close to no point in farming with anything else really. Then you also have the Murmnobi which is by and far untouchable for bossing.