Tree of Savior Forum

Suggestion on changing the Rank System in a way that will make Rank Resets obsolete

First a quick thought on Rank Resets.

They have been a hot issue from the beginning all the way up to the form that got implemented eventually due to the huge demand (and if I’m not mistaken, they are still seen as somewhat controversial by some palyers, or?)

Regardless, at least to me they never felt like a real solution.

Yes, they address the issue, and they work very smoothly on a technical level, and now that they exist, they are a super convenient way to calm people down whenever there is big balancing changes… but they don’t fix the actual issue in the long-term and bring with it a bunch of other issues that don’t feel natural to the gameplay.

The biggest concern people used to have in regards to RankResets, was that it can be abused to conveniently change a build optimized in leveling into a build that would otherwise be a pain to level.

To avoid strawmanning I will flat out concede that this is not really an issue anymore, due to how easy leveling has become over the years, as you can now get an alt to 300 in a few days without bothering to gear them up with anything decent, or distributing any of their stat points… you can easily keep getting pardoner-buffs and autoattack your way through a majority of the game up to the last handful ranks.

Nonetheless… I would argue that Rank resets are merely a bandaid that needs to keep getting repplied over and over, while feeling like a cheat or an officially sanctioned loophole to the originally intended system. Firstly because of how instant the change is, and secondly, sure, you can fix your build if its broken, but after using the Reset you have the exact same pressure to get it right this time as you had the first time…

On top of that, they are a very desirable thing, while at the same time being distributed on “special” occasions in some arbitrary amounts. It just creates this huge unnecessary turning drama-wheel of people having to keep begging for them and the developers having to keep considering how many and when they will make them available… (and for someone with over 30 characters, it’s always a big hassle to having to overanalyze which characters to use however many Resets we are getting at that time…)

And just for me personally, out of all the times I’ve made use of Rank resets, I figure that at least over 30% of the time it was to revert a build back to something I had before I used a Rank reset on them the first time xD…

With that said, let’s consider: What is the actual issue the Rank resets are trying to address?

The issue is that Tree of Saviors Rank/Class system as it is, has always been contradictory.

On one hand, it has a huge diverse selection of fun looking classes to play.
I’ve seen it every single time I introduced someone to the game: as the new player reaches new ranks, they see the class options opening up to them, and they get excited and want to play around with them.

On the other hand, there is as I mentioned a sort of ever-present pressure to not ruin your build by wasting any number of ranks on class-circles that don’t work well with everything else in the build, bring some of their own restrictions with them, etc.

In my mind, the optimal state of TOS would be one in which you don’t have to worry much about making dumb choices out of curiosity as you progress with your characters.

One way for that to be possible, would be if you could change your mind on any part of your build, and had the option of working towards changing it.

At this point it’s worth bringing up a more recent feature that I felt was a small step in the right direction:
The class rollback System.

Basically, you can abandon your current circle entirely, going back to classlevel15 of the previous rank, being able to re-pick your class for the lastest rank. (of course losing any class-progress you had in that rank before abandoning it).

On paper it sounds like a perfect way to allow players to experiment with any individual rank, being able to abandon it before they get too deep into it, if they realize it is not what they imagined it would be.

It doesn’t help in that regard at all however, due to a number of restrictions for using the class rollback. You can only use it once per Rank, meaning you have one shot at trying something for fun, and then if you abandon it, you have to be sure that the 2nd time your pick will be the better choice.

And even more importantly, this feature doesn’t in anyway allow you to change any earlier ranks that you might feel were a mistake or simply find you aren’t making use of at all anymore.

So while also severely inefficient at addressing the issue at hand, mostly due to an overkill of restrictions applied to it, at least this feature doesn’t feel like a cheat, because it stays within the “rules” of the game so to speak (you still have to grind the classlevels for the newly picked classes)

And now I get to my proposed solution to it.

Right now, we have a single “Class Level” that starts with level 1 and caps at 15.
In other words, whenever you advance to the next Rank, the maxed ClassLevel is replaced by a new one for the new class or circle…

Step 1: Keep individual Class-Levels for each Rank.
Meaning, on a Rank4 character, you don’t just have the classlevel for Rank4, you also have 3 Classlevels corresponding to the past 3 Ranks (which would normally all be at level 15 at that point).

Step 2: It is possible to pick which Rank is your current active rank. You can only have one Ranks Classlevel active at any point. A Rank being “active” simply means that the Class-EXP you are gaining are all going into the Classlevel of that Rank, instead of any of your other Ranks.

Step 3: You can abandon ANY of your Ranks at any point. Meaning, you can pick your Rank3 class, decide to abandon it, pick one of the other class-options available at Rank3, and have that Ranks Classlevel drop back to Classlevel 1.
(naturally, for Classes with multiple circles taken, you would abandon multiple Ranks, one of the reasons being to avoid having to reset skills for the entire Class anyway)

So abandoning a previous Rank means you can replace it with whatever else you could have chosen, with the consequence of losing the EXP you originally invested into that rank.

You can then decide to make Rank3 your active Rank, and regrind the classEXP for it whenever you like. You could take a break at Classlevel 7 and continue grinding your highest Ranks classlevel for a while before activating Rank3 again and finishing it.

Step 4: Set fixed EXP-penalty roofs for each Rank.
The point being to prevent you from “regrinding” the lost EXP extremely fast by grinding mobs of your current level. You would have to go back to an area with mobs that are somewhat normal for that specific Rank. Of course being an overpowered R8 class and having your 300+ characterlevel will speed things up quite a bit when you’re slaughtering those lv50 mobs for regrinding your Rank3 classEXP, but the aim here is to make you do have to at least do something to “earn” the newly picked class.

Step 4b: Define “Ranks” for maps and dungeons.
Obviously optional to the implementation of this, but it would certainly make setting the Class-EXP-penalty relating to Ranks a lot easier, and also make it obvious what maps to go, or what low-level instance DG to join, when trying to regrind which Rank.

Step 3 Clean Up: Redefine Circle2 and Circle3 as extensions of the Class itself.
If you are a Cleric, reach Class15, and then pick to continue Cleric for another Rank, instead of the classLevel going to Classlevel1, jsut make it go to Classlevel16 with a new cap at 30.
Same for the final circle, 31-45.
Just to make things simple, and to get rid of the term “circle” altogether, because I swear 95% of the players don’t get the difference between ranks and circles and use them interchangeably any way…

And that’s pretty much the suggestion I have. I tried to boil it down to the essential parts, with the aim to come up with a permanent feature that feels like an inherent part of the games class system, rather than a special occasional handout of a loophole-item that breaks the RPG-narrative of building your character and only works as a limited instant fix in short-term.

I know I wrote a wall of text…I’ll see if I manage to create some visual examples of the idea presented to make it easier to imagine.

EDIT:
Here is an example of a build that was Wiz1-Wiz2-???-Cryo1-Wiz3-Cryo2, that paused at Rank6 class12, decided to abandon whatever they had at Rank3, and picked PSychokino1 instead, and are now leveling that up instead of their Rank6.

I know it looks like crap, it’s not meant to look perfect, just a quick example with copy-pasting of a screenshot lol, but it should get the idea across.

I like your idea. It would make the game lighter.

But people would just gather EXP cards as they are based on your Character Level, not class level. So it would be too easy. And sometime you will get to a point where you don’t have EXP cards anymore. So everyone will have to grind on low level maps. But this is soooo boring. You are giving players freedom, but locking them on the same character.

People may start thinking " This character has already many attribute points so I’ll just realocate them to another class. ". This will change the way they feel about creating new characters that won’t have any attribute points.

If you give EXP Penalty and Rank Limit to dungeons you are just limiting players choices. The right way to do this (inside the way you created) is by adjusting XP gained for ranks. If you go into the Castle Dungeon grind for a Rank 3 class, just change the XP amount you’ll get. This way people will have freedom to choose where they wanna “regrind”. And right now we have already some " limits " for dungeons as we need to be on a specific Rank to enter them. But you can’t just link Dungeons to Ranks with your system because we have Character Level too. It won’t make obvious where whe should go because our character level would be totally different.

And If you give players levelling limits, it will become boring.

About Cicles: I think they are ok. I don’t know anyone that have problems with that. Even new players are doing well with it. I really don’t know where from you get the idea that 95% of the players don’t know the difference between Rank and Cicle.

I agree that we could level up directly. It would be more intuitive. But you forgot that for this to work, they have to rework all the EXP Class table as the first Cicle levels need less XP. If you go by that, there must be a continued XP table that goes from 1-45, always getting higher. But this would make it easier for the ones with only one Cicle. Or just make XP milestones like in character level.

You see, it’s a lot of work just to make people create less characters. And c’mon… What is the problem of levelling other character just like every other MMORPG?

I think IMC’s objetive is to make players create as many characters as possible. They give us more EXP for total character level, making the whole levelling process easier everytime you creater a character.

ToS is about that. Hours studying a build. Creating a character and levelling it just to know the build won’t work. Start all over.

As you said, Levelling is easy now and it’s really not a problem anymore. This system only make players know what the character would be with a different build but maxed attribute points, high gear and acess to end game content. In other words, it will make players lazy.

But I really like some your ideas. Maybe you just need to polish them a little more. (this is why I’m here o/)

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Of course EXP cards would follow the same penalties introduced with step4.

Or even better, they might as well separate the penalties of characterlevel and classlevel completely.
characterlevel determines the penalty for regular EXP with the usual table that we already have (penalty increasing above and below certain level range), while class EXP is regulated by what rank the classlevel is that you’re leveling. So for example being Rank4 and getting classEXP on a Rank1/2/3/4 map will give you 100% of the classEXP, while Rank5 map would give say 70%, Rank6 40% and above that almost nothing (no special thought was given on specific numbers in this example~)

I’ll reply properly to some of the other points as I get around to it, but thank you for the feedback so far :smiley:

EDIT:

So the two main points I gather from your post are that the proposed Rank-rework would add more limitations and that it would deincentivise players from making alts.

In regards to the first, I don’t feel like what I imagine brings as much limitation as you got from it.

The only thing I am adding penalties on here, is to the classEXP of lower Ranks that you change.
The reason behind it is to make regrinding individual past ranks require at least some work (instead of just going to your current grinding map and doing 1 CM to max that low rank to class15 in half a minute).

You just go to a lower area or a lower dungeon to get EXP on that low rank you re-picked. You would still go to your best grinding place for the actual grinding of your characterlevel/latest rank of course.

I feel like it could be quite funny when a handful of level ~120 players are queuing up for the 120 dungeon, just to notice that a 350 character joined them. Realizing that that player probably re-picked their Rank5 class or so. They are getting that rank back to max and the actual 120 players got in faster and get the dungeon cleared faster with the highplayers help xD

And in general I feel like anything that might make highlevel players go back to some lower area map for a bit would be a plus. And in terms of EXP cards, it could be interesting as well, because right now there is waaaay too many maps and quests in the 1-150 range. On most of my characters I only focus on doing the main quests that give stat points and I keep being like 50 levels overleveled… I never get around to doing any unnecessary quest, as there is absolutely 0 reasons to. With this system hoarding some low Rank EXP cards might actually have a purpose all of a sudden xD

But either way, I’m not set on how hard the penalties for regrinding past ranks should be (I’m sure IMC has some statistics and people with calculators to figure that out properly), I am most of all advocating the idea itself, the rest is details that can be adjusted as the developers see players making use of it or not, and their reactions.

As for the point about players not making alts… I didn’t think about that as deep, it’s an interesting point.
But simply from my personal standpoint, the RankResets already de-incentivise making additional characters more than this system would…and that didn’t prevent me from making more than 30 characters so far XD

I’m sure I’m not the best example tho, and yes, lots of people are probably investing heavily on their “main” characters.

I question whether this would have that much of an impact on whether they would make more characters or not, compared to the current situation.

I do believe that TOS was always intended to be a game about making many characters (the Lodge system and Teamlevel are clear indicators), rather than focusing on one, and I have been waiting for the developers to add more reasons for us to make big teams… so in that regard I’d add that they still need to deliver in adding incentives for players to make alts, and when they do, this will become less of an issue in the context of this topic.

In regard to the 1-45 example. I was merely imagining it to be an aesthethic and terminological change, while it would still function pretty much the same :smiley: The exp tables would stay the same and everything. It would just be a shared EXP bar so that you cannot abandon priest1(R2) without abandoning priest2(R3) along with it :smiley:

Actually there is a point to do so. Journal Rewards. Some players still fight for the higher positions. Those players are aiming to do all game content and I think they deserver better reward (maybe A Rank Reset?). Maybe if the rewards become better more players would start doing quests and game content.

I really think giving such freedom about their character isn’t a good a idea. This would require much effort and changes on many aspects of the game that don’t need attention right now.

And most builds need different stats distribuition. Will players get an status and skill reset potions every time? Because if they won’t, there is really no point in the new system. But if they will, some things will became a mess.

Just saying, btw

Won’t reply the post anymore, just wanted to give you some more things to think about. Gl o/

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Why not make a system like FFXIV, you can pick any unlocked “ranks” anytime you want, but you have to level them individually. For example: you currently are wizz (15)> pyro (15) > linker (15) then want to test an alternative rank 2 and change to wiz (15) > cryo (1) > linker (15) to see how it goes, but you still have your pyro (15) if you want to go back later. This feature could be restricted to be used once per day to prevent people abusing impossible class skills combos.

I know it’s a bit difficult to understand, but I hope you can get the feeling of it.

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in a way that will make Rank Resets obsolete

Dont think IMC wants that…

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That’s one thing I know that’s good in FF14. You can try them anytime as long as you’ve unlocked them already.

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penalty of losing the previous exp gained could be heavy enough for most players to simple do not use the system at higher ranks and thus most would prefer resets; after all at rank 9 alone the exp required for class is already huge, rank 10 will increase even more; and in the end the system you suggest is the same as the reroll system implement by imc, the difference is that you system is a little more complex and could be used at all ranks; where imc limits to one rank only, but if this limitation is removed both system would function the same with the imc one being simpler and better suited for most players.
; to be true this would not work well, and people would still choice resets because at rank 9 and 10 the exp is huge; so if we are gonna change something would be better to follow ff14 path for example; allowing us to change class at will and at anytime; but you would always need to level up the class from zero too, but once you leveled them they are there for you to change and use when you want: and of course so we do not make this too easy for tos, we could add quests to allows the change; and exp penalty like (increasing the rank exp proportional to level rank; so even if you reset to rank 1 class at level 360; you would need more exp than a normal rank 1 class needs) and of course i suppose there is no need to mention this but i will so some people do not say i have not explained enough; ranks of classes would only be taken at the ranks they’re supposed to be taken or higher.
this would be a better system; every time we could change at will what will have; but we will have to level them up again(the first time using the class); would be the same as making multiples chars in one and in the end only keeping the attributes point that would be refunded every time we release a class so we could use on other, this could be a better system for a game with so many classes; but it would work? not!.
ff14 have a month payment; so he does not need the money from character slots and things like that; even the little the money invested for character slots and now for those new haircuts that you need to buy in each character helps imc to keep the game on so the only true hurdle we have today should be the attributes, because maintaining the current system with multiples characters and resets since we can pass items trans already , seems to be the better option for a game that does not receive month payment.

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