Tree of Savior - Review

Now that I've played for a couple of hours, I've got more things to say.

First of all, the community is foul. There were some things said in chat earlier that were pretty shocking, especially in a game that does have a chat filter. The fact that there is no report button is rather problematic as well. This brings me to gold sellers/spammers/bots. The game has a bunch, and you can't report them so they just kind of stick around, clogging up areas. You can block them so you can't see their chat anymore, but I'm certain that they're clogging the cities more than necessary due to no way to get them reported as far as I can tell.

You do get to job advance at level 15, which is nice. You choose your next class / circle for your current class, and then the game does not appear to let you know that you then need to locate your class trainer to actually change to that class. I was wondering why I couldn't equip a two-handed sword or add any Highlander skills after selecting that I would like to change to Highlander. Turns out I had to locate the trainer!

This brings me to another annoyance, which is learning Attributes (traits). These cost quite a large portion of silver for a new player, but I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that many of these Attributes take 30 minutes to learn, so basically you select that you'd like to learn the attribute and then you wait or run around and do something else while you learn it. It was quite disappointing to change to Highlander only to find out that I'd have to wait in order to equip my new weapon type. Attribute learning does not appear to stack either, so I already had an attribute in progress to learn to wear Plate armor, so it appears I have to wait 20 extra minutes for that to finish so I can begin learning Two-handed Swords. Kind of annoying.

Gameplay itself is decent. I'm getting a bit more used to the wonky controls. I wish that skills didn't take up quite so much SP though. I feel like I'm burning through SP extremely quickly just by trying to kill normal enemies. I got to the first dungeon, which appears to be soloable with some effort. I am mostly spamming my basic attack and going slow so as to preserve SP for boss fights.

Character customization makes me rather sad. Hair looks really nice, but I can't find any way to change the color. Also, armor that you pick up appears to have no appearance, and instead you have to get "costumes" to change your outfit. You get these upon job advancing, and there's some available for real money in the TP store (or whatever it's called). Always makes me sad to see systems like this; I like seeing my character change as I level.

The game is very in-depth and good for people that enjoy messing with systems and min-maxing stats on gear and such. Very reminiscent of older MMOs, so great for nostalgia. You have to assign your stats like many older MMOs, so you need to know your stat builds and such. You also need to level up skills with your very limited amount of skill points. On your basic class you have 15 points to spend between 5 skills, each maxing out at level 5. I opted to max three skills and ignore the other two, but I'm sure there are other ways of going about it. I'm also sure that, with time, optimal builds will form and making your character effective will get easier with guidance.

As I said in my last post, the controls are rather clunky and unfamiliar to someone who has played other MMOs. It is very similar to Maplestory if you select the "familiar with other MMOs" type of control setup instead of the "traditional Maplestory" setup.

Leveling seems relatively slow (undoubtedly to get you to buy some cash shop items which increase your exp gains), especially since I've heard the max level is 200. This game will surely be grindy at later levels. If it's not, then I will be very impressed. The game itself feels rather slow-paced, in an almost relaxing sort of way. Quest givers are not always obviously marked for you, so talking to random NPCs in questing hubs is rather important if you want the extra quests.

There is a gem-socketing system that I cannot figure out. When I hover over gems it says to right-click them to attach them to an item, and then it tells me to click an item...which does nothing. So I don't know how to do that.

The sheer amount of classes is wonderful, but I can already feel the "optimal" and "meta" builds coming already. The amount of classes will be worthless once an optimal setup is found, as anyone straying from it will likely be ostracized from dungeons.

SPEAKING of dungeons. The first dungeon in the game is rather obnoxious. You're brought into it at level 10-ish when everything in there is level 20-ish, and even if you level up to 15 to job advance, it's still difficult. And that's because it's meant to be group content. Problem is, I can't find any groups! There's not an LFG tool that I can find, and there's no groups for it up in the party finder tool. There's a bunch of groups, but all for levels that I'm not even remotely close to, and certainly not for this lowly little dungeon.

The game has really, really nice foundations, but wonky systems are holding it back, I think. I'd rather give up nostalgia to have a better game with modernized systems.