The Grind: The grind so far is fine. People who complain that it’s hard have never tried actual grindfests >_>". The game isn’t super railroaded so if you attempt to only do quests, you will realize you will hit a wall where you’re much too weak to take on the mobs of the following quests. This is a good thing. Railroading can lead to very boring gameplay because you just go from quest to quest with very little interaction. It’s also sometimes difficult to get parties because since everyone is on a perpetual quest line, it’s harder to find people with identical quests.
Unlike most MMO’s out there, it’s somewhat hard to solo even from the beginning so people often get parties. This becomes extremely noticeable in the mine area where the first few difficult bosses appear.
There is almost no grind between levels 1-25 although there are very sweet grindspots if you want to avoid quests like the Giant Kepa outside the mines. Afterwards is a different matter. Quests become much more limited and you’re forced to grind. And grinding alone at higher levels is very tedious, slow and costly so I had to organize a party. It was a proper party with 1 tank, 2 DPS’s, 1 mage and a cleric. It wasn’t some ragtag group of 5 people that could easily grind the area. I taunted and tanked for the mage. Our cleric ran around focusing on heals. And the DPS’s did dpsing. It was a fun experience. I’m currently a level 24 Peltasta.
The Interface: The interface currently is rather buggy. My client in particular has a bug where the chat box is half the screen. It is very distracting… Certain functions like rightclicking on other characters to open up a menu seem to be bugged for me as well and only seem to work 10% of the time. The shortcut to alternate between chat channels is Alt+Tab which is honestly quite stupid because everytime you tab out and comeback, you’re in a different chat. And everytime you try to alternate the chats… you tab out. All necessary information however, is provided and it looks great. Though I would like more access to customization. Why they don’t let you adjust the sizes of the interface baffles me. Likewise to the chat box, why isn’t there a relocate feature where we can drag it around? Why don’t they allow for custom chat tabs. I want to see regular chat, whispers and party chat but NOT shout because it’s spammed endlessly.
The Ping: I don’t know if its just me but as a player from SEA, I had to deal with fluctuating pings at times. Occasionally I got booted out. When the ping spiked, mobs all took delayed damage and they would die only 2 seconds after I hit them instead of instantly.
Gameplay: Very fun but I am disappointed over some stuff. For example the scaling of the skills? Now that I’m level 34, my auto attacks seem to do more damage than my basic swordsman skills. Why is that so? That makes no sense. Clearly they shouldn’t do more damage than later class skills but less than auto attacks? Huh? Elemental type and sizing damage type while existing don’t seem to matter that much currently. I don’t really care that slash does +50% to certain mobs because even though its a whopping 50%, it doesn’t seem to affect gameplay that much. We all still grind in the same spots. Bosses are rather dumb and they almost never successfully hit you. There are waaaaay too many bosses IMO. They don’t even feel like bosses, just tanky mobs. It’s more tedious than difficult to fight them.
Variation: Ragnarok… yes I am comparing them, Ragnarok had an incredible variety of maps in the beginning. As it stands ToS is rather linear in exploration. Everyone grinds and quests at the same place. In Ragnarok, if you wanted to train from level 1-20 for example, there were countless different places with different mobs for you to do so. You don’t have that luxury here in ToS. This makes me rather sad. Each level range has a very low variety of mobs…
Enjoyment: I was initially ticked because I thought the quest exp was off because it was impossible to progress. Then I realized it was because it wasn’t rail roaded. I was also ticked about how impractical it was to be a solo player but I did appreciate partying up with people. While soloing should never be more efficient than partying in any mmo, it’s far too hard in ToS because of the bosses can tank soooooo much that it takes forever and while it’s easy to dodge their attacks, some bosses slowly build up countless traps and you have no time to destroy them so you get boxed in by a rather dumb mechanic and die.