Posted 14 June 2012 - 10:45 PM
Mindless grinding in the same location for hours is what made pre-renewal RO fun. Oh, how I do miss Sleepers and Turtle Island...
Renewal's pidgeonholing of players into Eden quests and weekly turn-ins are part of what made post-renewal not fun anymore. There's no more mindless grinding, just lots of traveling and party searching and barely any combat, unless you solo grind (the exp from solo grinding is typically not worth it compared to doing daily quests or turn-ins.) Also so many 3rd class skills are situational (or random) so even during combat, you have to think too much, and it's mentally draining to some players. IMO that was fine for places like Biolabs, Abyss, Thanatos, and Thor Volcano which weren't meant to be soloable anyway, but to require that for every zone after a certain level just makes the game frustrating.
In other words, what I miss is being able to just run around on a 90+ monk and 1-hit or 2-hit enemies with Occult Impaction, get decent exp and fair loot (mostly things to sell to NPCs in high quantities from grinding so long, not so much rare valuables or anything.) Also, playing mage classes and vertical firewalling enemies--this can seem complicated at first but then the "Tetris Effect" sets in and you start doing it in your sleep, so it soon becomes automatic and you don't have to think about it. The only things you had to think about in battle, for the most part, were your HP/SP and what/how many monsters you could handle, lining up the monsters for your attacks (fire wall, ankle snare, grand cross, bowling bash, just to name a few.) Cast times of your skills, a few short global cooldowns (but no huge individual cooldowns like the 3rd class skills have. Storm Gust had enough of a cooldown, considering its power as a 2nd class skill.) Gear/weapon/ammo swapping in combat, if applicable (usually by hotkeying) and things like buffs/aspd pots. All of this can be followed in an autonomous pattern which only changes if you switch characters/builds/hotkeys, and is quite simple to grind through once you get that pattern. But when the pattern is thrown off, like renewal has done, it screws up this "mindless" method of leveling.
Of course, there are times where we wanted to actually think and focus on stuff while playing RO. We called those "quests" and "MVP" and "WoE/PvP". Renewal has really low quest EXP rewards for most of the old quests that used to give a lot more, like up in the millions. Those need to be reset to their original amounts for the pre-renewal server. Many of the quests I'm referring to were long, and often challenging; they would put players in dangerous combat zones such as Biolab and Thor to try and slip through a portal or interact with an NPC in the far corner of the map, which would often have heavy mobs of powerful enemies built up in that spot.
MVP drops should be worth something again--get rid of the Eden gears, they're not challenging at all to get, but they're a bit overpowered for noobs to be using. You know there's a problem when Eden gear is better than some MVP gear, even if it's just from one of the soloable MVPs like Orc Hero. (referring to Orcish Sword, as an example.) Renewal MVPs give better exp, which I thought was an okay improvement from pre-renewal but the drops (the real reason you'd hunt MVPs in the first place) need to be worthwhile--the closed-minded nature of the renewal market really screwed over their value, necessitating a "gear trader" NPC to get something useful (Eden Merit Badges) out of some of these uncommon, but unwanted gears. Also the MVPs should be challenging, some soloable, some not, but not overpowered like they have been. The Veins update made even the low MVPs overpowered, I hated that--I'd really like to see the old MVPs that wouldn't one-shot a moderately-well geared, level 90+ player built for MVPing with overpowered moves like Earthquake and Hell's Judgment. Really, those skills should have been reserved for Valk, Ifrit, Beelz and stuff. But that's just my opinion, take it how you will. >_>
I think all of this should be taken into consideration for the development of the pre-renewal server, to ensure its success.
