My concerns lie in how easy it is to level with friends, the replayability value of the game ( making new characters ), class diversity/viability, and the debuff system ( for PvP/GvG ).
Levelling with friends:
The game is largely driven by questing and running dungeons, and there isn’t much open world grinding ( which is really confusing, because your CEO said that ToS is a grinding game, but where is the grinding? ).
Dungeons help somewhat, since within a certain level range you are able to level with any of your friends that are also in that range. However dungeons are also bad, because they remove people from the open world. Quests are really bad for this, because in order to pair up with a friend you have to be exactly in sync with them on a certain questline. I’ve had several session with people where we spend 1-2 hours redoing the other person’s questline just to get sync’d up, and then one of us has to leave and the problem starts all over again.
If open world grinding were made viable, you could simply party up with a group of friends within a larger level range, and just grind together.
This also would help with the replayability value of the game:
Currently, the most efficient way to level is to do all the quests, because exp cards are so much better than the exp given by killing monsters. If you start a new character, you are going to do all the quests again, your path is already decided. Even the addition of Orsha didn’t help this, because exp cards are just too strong still. People now just do all the quests in both Klaipeda AND Orsha. This makes creating new characters fairly boring.
If instead there were many varied viable grinding maps, that allowed a choice for different characters ( based on how good their class was at efficiently killing these mobs ), you could play the game differently on each character. You could pick and choose which quests you wanted to do, grind when you felt like grinding, or if you wanted to go dungeoning for a bit. There would be more choice, and through that the game would be more interesting.
Class diversity/viability:
At each rank, it should be a tough decision to choose your next rank up. Clerics and Wizards do this very well, while Swordies do this very poorly. I think the Swordie tree could use a bit of a rework, around making mixing and matching ranks, and having more skills that aren’t weapon locked.
Here are some examples of what I mean. Classes that do this very poorly are Cataphract and Elementalist. It’s not a viable choice to take either of these classes as just a rank 1 or rank 2, you’d be a complete fool to not go Elementalist/Cataphract c3. This is bad, because it pre-determines your class route if you want to take this class. Chaplain also does this poorly, by requiring you to be a Priest c3 before becoming a Chaplain. Anything that causes your build to become pre-determined is not good.
Cleric and Wizard mostly do this very well though. The change to Cleric’s heal tiles was a really great example of this. Each level of heal gives you +1 heal tile, which is a pretty great boost at any level. This change alone makes it so that taking Cleric c2 at rank 6 is actually a good choice. You could also take Krivis at rank 6 for Daino / Zalciai.
The debuff system (PvP/GvG):
Currently, the debuff system needs a bit of a rework. The way debuffs are “ranked” is kind of broken, especially since 3 cleric classes provide a way to completely nullify most of the important debuffs. ( Pardoner’s dispeller scrolls, Oracle’s prophecy, and Plague Doctor’s bloodletting ). Debuffs are part of what make a character unique and viable in PvP/GvG, yet you are allowing them to be completely ignored.
There shouldn’t be skills that simply apply a buff making your entire party immune to most of the important debuffs in the game. This isn’t skill based gameplay, and it’s not very interesting to play with since there’s no viable counterplay ( other than just not picking classes that apply debuffs ).
I honestly think that cleric classes should be reworked to be active cleansers, with the ability to cure debuffs but not completely prevent them. Then, a PvP based cleric build would be encouraged to build heavily in SPR so that they could resist debuffs themselves, and be free to cure debuffs from other party members. The cleric is now actively watching for debuffs and actively removing them, instead of just applying a buff to the entire party that completely nullifies incoming debuffs ( more skill based gameplay ). If the cleric is killed, then the party has lost their debuff control and is vulnerable.