Since someone posted his thought, I would like to share mine as well, after years of leaving the game. Here are some of my observations of what the game has improved on and what problems/issues I have encountered.
Improvement
- Raid materials become team storable and tradable in market. That helps me big time in catching up with gears.
- Chapter rewards incentivize me to complete the story quests. And they also help me catching up.
- Class system is simpler now. Back then I wondered what would happen when there were 12 ranks. I guess IMC came up with an answer.
- Game is running much smoother. Back then I had an AMD CPU. I switched to Intel, and maybe that’s why.
- The new healer system with assister for solo healer content is innovative.
- The teleport statue has a bookmark list. Neat.
- Overall the UI is more polished.
- Personal housing OP!
Issues
Decent damage requires critical hits
Somewhere in my build there has to be crit-rate buff or crit-resist debuff skills, otherwise it won’t work. Bonus for crit damage buff. We went from build-full-DEX-full-crit at launch to build-a-class-that-can-crit now. Kinda the same.
Tank is a pipe dream in TOS
Despite IMC pretending that there is something called tank (e.g. set effect for tanks, shield effects for tank, having a class called Peltasta, etc.), no one buys it. The force-aggro skills, which would be a characteristics of a tank, are overshadowed by the provoke attribute. A two-hand leather-armor swordman can hold aggro in raid by turning on provoke attribute. Who needs tank?
End-game power creep
To be honest, I think IMC tried to avoid this, but unfortunately it still happens. I can clear Misrus hard in 2 mins, but I can only get to about 80% of stage-1 Tel Harsha. I can carry in Moring raid normal, but I am getting carried in Moring raid hard. Just one step up, the gap in power is vast. (Not daring to run Glacia)
Weird material shortages
I can’t seem to find ways to get blessed shards and blessed gems to transcend my gears. (I ended up buying transcended gears from market) IMC changed everything to drop mercenary badges, but badges cannot be converted to shards, causing a shard shortage. I don’t want to rotate my alts to run dungeon 60 times a day. It’s gonna burn me out and force me to quit. Arch stones are also very hard to drop, so I already gave up on getting the more power arks.
I want to enjoy TOS more than just CMs
What I want to do:
- daily CM in weekday
- play raid content in weekend
- craft better gears over time
- sell off extra to market and move on to next raid in weekend
What really happens:
- daily CM in weekday
- cannot play the raid cause I am not geared enough
- spam more CMs in weekend to get silver
- buy myself the better mats/ichor/gears
- play the raid to sell the same mats/ichor/gears I just bought, but no one buys them cause they are outdated
- cannot get into the next raid cause I am not geared enough
- In order to buy better mats/ichor/gears from the next raid, spam more CMs in weekday and weekend
Machine translated story
Not kidding. I think the texts they have in the dialogues are machine translated. Come on IMC, you can do better than that…