SlyGoat

pootisman wrote: »

Put it this way, they fine tuned the normal mode for leveling, and hero mode for people who actually want challenge.

If you don't wanna do hero mode, there is always 4 man S3 raid and ein lacher for you MLGPRO players who think this game is too easy.
My experience over the last 2 weeks tells me half of the parties require hard carrying. There is at least one player in each of these parties that is just a dead weight, so you really have to try sometimes.

IMHO this game plays the best when someone has the skills to solo.

The problem is, once again, there is no challenge until you're max level. You can't do (most of) S3 until 90. You can't do hero mode until 90. All that's left is what is essentially easy mode. Plus, the game goes from 0 to 100 on the difficulty scale because you aren't challenged before you hit 90 and therefore you never learn game mechanics or how to play your character. You just facetank meaningless boss attacks and kill them in two combos. Then you try to do that to Regina and get slapped to the floor constantly.

Ellease wrote: »

These are the kinds of people RISE is trying to retain, for them to invest more time into the game. It is not for the vets who can handle themselves at this lower content. Besides, once you reached endgame, did it really make sense that you can kill Neamhain within 15 minutes, but it would still take you 4 minutes to kill a dragon you fought when you were 100x weaker?

Easy mode already existed. Those players already had it as an option. Now potential players who want a challenge have no option.

Arix wrote: »

are people actually surprised old bosses turn into a joke over time

A joke for a fully geared max level character? No ****. A joke for a first time player with trainee gear? That's a problem. What's the actual point of any of the pre-endgame content if there's no challenge to it, and why would anyone continue playing the game long enough to reach endgame if they weren't challenged by it at all?

Again let's all be honest here, the reason they did this is to brush off the game's past and try to forget about it, since they've decided to move the game in a new direction of gear2win. Back in the early days you would grind out bosses that kicked your ass to get new gear because it was a status symbol. Now everything is just absurdly overtuned stats and enhancement fodder and the goal is to reduce your raid time as much as possible. Nexon's ideal endgame is for a fully geared wallet warrior to just walk up to a raid boss and oneshot it.

They know you aren't actually going to play for 60 hours a week. They just want a bunch of players online even if they're AFK so they can pretend the game isn't dead.

I'm really surprised you even felt challenged in S2. All the content is nerfed to hell - S1 the most, but S2 and S3 as well. I just ran through the story even beyond S2 without ever stopping to equip the new gear I'd gotten or level up skills and everything was a cake walk. In S2 you can at least take damage, but the bosses still die insanely fast.

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.