TLDR
- 26 hours to get from 1 to 90 on a clean slate.
- 1-70 (Season 1) sucked really badly. Made me not want to play the game
- Season 2 was very fun, I had such a blast it reinvigorated my love for this game
- Above average experience for a 26 hour rpg that was free
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I had the following buffs; clover, Tour of Duty, and VIP. The entire weekend 2x AP/Exp was occurring and some 2x EXP/AP on the weekdays as well. This let me skip side-missions from 1-60. After I got to Rocheste I wasn’t leveling fast enough to skip side missions before season 2 started. I had made this level 1 Delia when she first came out, because I wanted to save the name. I haven't logged in for a long long time so I had a level 1 Delia with a clover. This was on the same account as my Vella/Arisha/Hurk/Evie who are all Level 90 with 400+ titles.
I was really impressed with the changes they made to season 1 episode 1. The new ruins looks really good and the boss cut scenes are a bit less cheesy. I expected episode 1 through 3 to be a snore-fest and it was. Not much has changed here except that I didn't have to go back to town. Color me surprised when the game stayed super easy. In fact the entirety of season 1 was easy. And I don't think it was because I've played this game before. I was literally 1-shotting bosses WITH GEAR THE MAIN QUEST PROVIDED.
It took around 30 seconds to defeat Titan. I decided not to skip the trash mobs at the beginning thinking I’d need the SP. It took longer to kill them them than it did to kill Titan! And this wasn't something new. most bosses died in only a couple of attacks. For almost all of season 1 I never even got to experience the majority of Delia's mechanics. Plus, everything hit like wet paper. I was sorely disappointed to say the least. This wasn't an enjoyable experience at all.
It wasn't all bad though. The new loot system is awesome. I actually cared about picking stuff up because I knew it was going to be useful crafting material. The only problem was I found no reason to bother crafting gear because pre-enhanced gear dropped so often it felt like I was hacking. So while crafting would have been interesting, the entire system is unnecessary the way things are set up currently.
The same goes for enchants. I really like what they've done with the enchanting system, but again it's not even working my time to stop and enchant things. Not to mention your better off selling the elixirs on the market place rather than using them on low level gear.
The transition scene to the next season was well done. But because season 1 content was so easy and completed so quickly it won't be impactful to new players. I got to level 70 right as Season 1 ended. It was perfect timing, and I’m guessing players who did not have 2x AP/EXP, but did all the side quests would be level 70 at this point as well. I'd say I left Season 1 behind at around the 15 hour mark.
Season 2 was such a jump in difficulty I was surprised I actually had to play the game. This is when I started to enjoy playing Vindictus a lot. I still had level 60 armour with 6k defense which meant dodging felt rewarding. I'm so glad they got rid of the stupid map system. A lot of the battles feel like complete experiences and I really like maneuvering around boss mechanics. The only complaint I'd have is the raid bosses of very little HP. Most of them took less time to kill than the average season 2 battle.
Unfortunately, a lot of the quests from Season 2 Episode 3 were bugged. And I don’t mean the dialogue was messed up. It would kick you out of the game entirely with no warning if you did something a certain way. This was very frustrating as it takes a long time for the game to start up (even on an SSD!). What I do like is how the Season 2 Zones level up as you do. They're not all Level 70. As you progress through the episode the zone levels increased as well. They’ve seriously done such a good job with Season 2, it’s a shame with how much they’ve butchered season 1.
I reached Season 3 at Level 85. Keep in mind I still haven’t done any side quests because 2x AP/EXP event is carrying me. This was around 25 hours in that I reached this point. Also, fancy footwork on the first try, now that muir is easy to knock off the ledge.
I breezed through Ben Chenner until I hit a stopping point with Regina. I had to be level 90. No worries though, Autumn Bend took around 2 minutes to complete and gave 5m exp per run. Not to mention that it's also instant restart and no boat scene so it truly was "300 million exp per hour". Needless to say it took around 15 minutes to level to 90 from 87.
How did I keep track of exact timing? The revolution week 1 timer. I only AFK'd for around 2 hours collectively.
and 17 others.
and 17 others.
Comments
Though I'd like to point out that those "raids" aren't actually raids anymore, so if they seem easy then it's because the boss stats and mechanics were adjusted to fall in line with the regular missions. Regina was your first actual raid.
I agree the bosses defense is way too low with the old S2 raids in hero mode. It is in no way hero mode from any standpoint. On my level 90 chars we run them in crazy record time so to hopefully get the departure licenses. S3 as well with respect to how easy the bosses are. I mean I understand they felt the need to scale the runs due to 4-player raids, but come on! And the drops in S3 raids makes me want to cry. They are horrible! By giving away lvl 90 gear most players don't even care about making them orange so the material drops are worthless. Can barely even sell them on MP and that includes the shards. Also, I thought I read that the worthless mats - Eochaids claws as an example - were being drastically reduced. Did they change the definition of drastically? You've got to be kidding, that's all i get. Usually I am really lucky with scrolls and so far since Rise release I have gotten one - Echoing and I had to continually drop the price to 11m. I'm also a little confused as to why enhancing has gotten so difficult. From what I am experiencing the success rate is terrible. I have repeatedly failed armadillo and enduring - low grade scrolls that would almost always succeed with low amount of elixirs. I still try and get the % to as close to 100 as I can on these those scrolls but they still fail!
I do love a lot of changes from the Rise update - being able to enhance and enchant from anywhere, the fast story mode battle setup, the quick dialogue without having to run all over the place, changes in MP search, especially scroll look-up, readily available location of suds and many more. But the changes to battle difficulty...wow that could have been done a lot better. I made the choice to setup new char due to lull times in game waiting on people to get on to do S3 raids...but the lull times are going on forever. The game is truly dead. I can host boats but I can't find players to get on them. Every time I pop over to my level 90's to check for raids - nothing! *cry*
Thank you Nexon for your efforts - I really do appreciate them. Is there anyway you can revamp the old S2 raids at hero mode and S3 raids difficulties to give us back some challenge? I believe people would have stayed around longer if you hadn't made them so easy.
True, but an epic boss dying in 3 hits felt wrong. Especially because the only equipment I had on was what quests had given me and my level was in-line with the battle.
After many MMORPG of mouse target clicking and hotkey cooldown waiting, I came to vindi, action oriented and with monster hunter sized bosses where a team is required to bring them down. It was great, me and my friend learned how to beat bosses with out crappy equipment , we used Spear to knock down and Palala bombs to blind. One of us will aggro while other heals. It was a joy that we have some much control over out characters . Hell the introduction church bell spider fight really drew me in. (Disappointed we don't have carry characters animation) . It is sad to see one of my favorite game has turned in to a Slot machine game, a quick pull and all the prizes comes out. I wanted to play Poker, some skill and luck , playing with other ppl and even with out a lot of chips you can still win.
Nerfing the difficulty of the game pre-level 90 so much is going to drive new players away even more than the slow leveling and impossible grind for low level gear did before, I guarantee it. They should've done the streamlined leveling experience without making bosses die in one hit. Why would anyone play this game if they don't experience any challenge at all before level 90? That's the entire point of the game, without the skill based combat system you might as well play any other F2P MMO on the market (or any P2P MMO, since Vindi's cash shop is so bad the game may as well be P2P).
Even worse, they're going to be totally unfamiliar with their character's skillset and the game's mechanics when they do reach actual content, so if they do slog through all of the pointless pre-90 **** they'll suddenly be thrown into the deep end. Even **** Cromm is pathetically easy compared to even the most basic Wood Elf boss now. Going from barely having to dodge attacks and killing former raid bosses instantly with no gear to dying in a couple of hits from basic bosses is an enormous difficulty spike, especially when you're suddenly having to deal with unblockable attacks as well. Before it felt like too much of the game was a tutorial, now it's like there is no tutorial stage at all, you just breeze through non-content and then get dropped into the deep end.
If anything, this update was only good for existing players because now it's really easy to level alts. I can only see new players either being turned off by how easy the game is, or going along with how easy it is until they reach end game and get their asses kicked and quit because of the huge difficulty spike.
I wouldn't say Season 3 is more difficult in terms of mechanics. There's an occasional mechanic from bosses that I'd say is "unfair", but I feel like the easiness comes from how long the wind-up everything has in Season 3. I remember playing against enraged thor back when that first came out and it felt like I had to be super human to dodge his charge attack. The difficulty from Season 3 is artificial. If you don't have 10k+ defense the bosses weakest attack will 1-shot you. With a level 80 +8 2x rA enchant weapon it took me around 50 minutes to solo regina. I wouldn't say it was difficult though.
Luckily for me I had very good gear I could easily move over from other characters, so the stat increases don't really affect me after I did that. Though after playing gw2 and being able to swap top-level gear between characters for free I felt like I was getting scammed by having to spend $20 on unbinds to move over gear from 1 character to another.
I agree completely, it's still going to be a shock for a new player to go from being able to just carelessly facetank everything and therefore never learning how to dodge, to just getting blown up in one or two hits by attacks that you can't even invuln through (which IIRC is never actually explained to you anywhere in-game, you just have to trial and error it).
Also, the long attack windups don't actually "help" anything. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. New bosses are designed horribly. Old bosses had attack animations that were smooth so you could wait until it was about to hit you and dodge it. Instead of standing there for 2 seconds announcing "I am going to attack soon!" and then basically releasing their attack instantly. Instead of dodging being intuitive now, you basically, again, just have to trial-and-error it until you memorize the attack timings. It isn't reacting to enemy attacks so much as it is repeating a pattern.
Of course this is another problem in and of itself: with few exceptions most new bosses are just garbage, as far as I'm concerned. Now, all of the old content is so easy you can kill anything in under a minute with a trainee weapon. New players will never experience what I still think is the best the game had to offer. They'll have a cakewalk followed by - IMO - the worst season. Season 1 had some really good, memorable raid and non-raid fights; honestly beyond the really slow start of the early episodes, only a few of them were duds - and even then you can find someone that likes every raid (I personally always hated Colru but some people love it). Season 2 was a real mixed bag with some really terrible bosses but still had a few rather good ones. Season 3, honestly, I just hate. The only fight that stands out to me at all as good is Lugh. Glas doesn't count because he's really just a reskin with a new gimmick and slightly different/faster attack patterns. Abomination is my least favorite fight of all time because it takes dumb map gimmicks to a whole 'nother level and makes me pine for Season 2's awful gimmicks. Hell, Season 3 even has gimmicks in the non-raid bosses. Season 1 never had to rely on **** like that, it just had good bosses (though there were some gimmicks towards the end, they weren't overbearing, and were generally just a skill based extra mechanic that added to the fight rather than distracting from it).
By phasing out the older content I can really no longer recommend the game to anyone, frankly. Before I would say it was worth playing just to run through the old content; whether you ended up liking the endgame enough to stick around or not was another issue. Now, if anyone asked me whether Vindi were worth getting into, I couldn't in good conscience say yes.