Prototypemind

@Rezi
Which is exactly why Delia become extremely repetitive. You say combo into other moves, but her block turns into a smash after the fact, same as her dodge. Delia lacks variety. The only setup that feels more rushed is Hurk's gunblade mess. Fiona is far, far more enjoyable, and again the main point is that with equal gear Fiona will have much better QoL than Delia without being fully scrolled out and having a crazily high enhanced weapon.

If they ever tidy up Fifi's counter so that it offers a little better window to allow it to flow better then it would really, really be no contest. Getting bonus damage on your next smash of choice provides far more variety than anything Delia offers. I have a +15 on my Delia and only a +10 on my Fiona and Delia comes out far less often because she is the definition of monotony.

Your weapon has to be fully orange because DevCat wants you to suffer. You have to risk losing the investment of all those shards rather than just the main essence, which in turn makes you more likely to buy the guaranteed runes that are being sold in most regions, or to farm your soul out to get seals to trade in for the special protection rune in the shop. That's the theory anyway, but lots of people have just run away and never looked back.

All of this is based on the decision of one person with no preemptive feedback from players before it was fully implemented, so it's not surprising that it's not something most are fond of.

The update brought tons of quality of life fixes that players had been asking for over years now, but it also took away a lot of what the game is. Raids are gone outside of Season 3, seals are gone outside of the raids and the special arenas, and almost everything is four players only. The game changed for the worse in a lot of players opinions, and because Vindi was mostly a lot of smaller groups who played together regularly many of those groups have moved to other games. The game is in a horrible place, and it seems that the hope that all the changes would keep new players around longer isn't working out because they power to 90 only to find that few people are playing and suddenly hitting a high level of difficulty. When I got on last night there were two boats up for the new raid and that was it, and to run it you need to be pretty close to stat capped, which again eliminates a lot of players. My friends list and guild are empty most of the time--the last other member was on 9 days ago--and everyone on Discord is playing other games.

There are lots of other issues, but they've all been discussed in detail. We'll see what comes down the road with new characters and such, but the game has become less social with the Rise changes and that pretty much defeats the point of any decently sized online game.

Nexon hasn't bothered with their own weekly contest since March. That to me is not a sign of a company staying on top of its game. Further, Nexon cut all communication with players before they dumped Dragon's Nest off to another publisher. I know that is unlikely to happen with Vindi as they produce it in house via DevCat, but if the end is drawing near or things are simply horrible I don't expect it to be acknowledged. The simple fact is that Rise might be doing what the DoL wanted, keeping new players around past very early game, but it has been very divisive for long time players. I and most of the people that I played with are not playing for hours a day and then turning around and pretending otherwise; we simply rarely log in anymore. On one of my accounts that I used to get on daily I got the Returning Mercenary package when I hopped on.

People are free to see things however they like, and I don't like what I see. I voice it here on the forums, and I make it clear by spending on other games rather than Vindi as are many others. Feel free to enjoy the game if it appeals to you, but don't think that trying to tell anyone else that they just need to suck it up and enjoy the game as is will change that Rise carved the game up in a way that hurt a lot more than it helped. It's harder than ever to obtain capped stats because the resources for it aren't being farmed in near the volume that was occurring.

I guess time will tell if the new players are willing to stick around and grind through the wall that they hit with 90/95 content, but taking away the community aspect by removing even small incentives like seals and larger parties when it comes to doing former raids doesn't sit well with me and I don't want to support that.