The scent of grass Magic missles soar You have been hit! Oh! What a Childhood!
Hi guys and girls!
I was busy exploring the wizard, archer and cleric tree, just to find out that I love wizards. After experiencing the power of swordsman I wanted to have a character that is able to merge into almost any party and also not be underwhelming. So first my thoughts on archer and cleric. Archer I found to be really fun in the early levels. It feels really strong but falls a bit off later into the game. For the cleric I wanted to make a full support type and later switch to oracle. What made me turn away from cleric was a bug in the itemdistribution system during early release, where you would not get any items if you played full support. I don`t know if IMC fixed this yet or made it a feature. :^) I think that because of a reason. While I am at it, I will actually explain what this is about. So far I have turned in 4 support tickets. Two for team name change, one for lost starting TP and one for team size, since one slot was occupied by the pet. The team name issue was solved easily, since everyone had it. My TP were not refunded, even though I did not use them, which I find really harsh. I think the issue with the teamsize is what they actually turned from a bug into a feature, because when I first submitted a ticket I saw that there was an issue with the pet taking up one character slot. They even announced it on their own website. A few days ago I asked what happened to it and got the answer that it was actually supposed like that, which seems a bit dishonest to me, but I won`t judge, because I obviously can`t know the details and I also did not invest too much time into researching this. But overall I feel a bit disappointed with all the replies, even though the support team answered really fast, which I think is a good thing. I am mostly sad because of the lost TP, which makes me think less good of IMC overall. Also the prices of the real money-shop are horrible, you could argue that it is at least not pay to win, since those exp tomes barely do anything, but still, I think it would be smarter to lower the costs, so more people would buy something. But guess that is not a popular opinion. I think this makes me think of IMC as a more greedy company and usually that`s not too healthy for a game. Maybe I will ask if I can transfer an item, I bought with TP on a diffrent server can be transferd to another server. That probably will not be possible. Worth a try none the less. Ok, that was my little rant, now back to where I left off. After I left the cleric behind I switched to wizard. This time on a new server, fresh start, hooray! My planned classes are as following. 3 times Wizard, 3 times Elementalist and one time Warlock for a late game damage build with lots of AoE (Area of Effect damage). So far it is fairly easy. You have a good amount of damage and nice SP reg. My stat distribution is 1 CON every 2 SPR and 4 INT. In the beginning I went only with the 4 INT and 2 SPR and only added more CON when I felt that surving got more difficult. For Wizard I went with Magic Missle, which is really strong. the other spells seem not that important to me, but one really needs the Quick Cast, which has an attribute that gives a 50%+ on your dmg. I also went for a level 10 reflect shield, since I felt it might help solo leveling. For Elementalist I am rolling with Electrocute lvl 15, Hail lvl 10, Prominence lvl 5, Meteor lvl 10 and Rain lvl 5. I like Prominence a lot, but I feel like it lacks reliability. Sometimes you hit a mob of monsters and sometimes you hit nothing, which makes it a nice combination with Hail, since I feel the same way about that skill, but Electrocute is what I am mainly using anyway. It does not only look great, but also deal some reasonable damage. With that I got a solid AoE build with some obvious flaws, but strong damage. It is basically a glass canon build, that is not very difficult to pull off, since you just one-shot everythign while grinding. Right now i am level 131 and I must say that was not very hard to reach with wizard, while I struggled a lot with archer around these levels. We are not even talking about swordsmans here, because if you want something easy to play just take that. It is called haha-man in korea for a reason. During the first few weeks of the early realease 9 out of the top 10 players on the server I played on have been swordsman. I think the last one was a wizard.
Collections Rushing to max level, which is right now 280 - and going to be 600 - can definitely be fun, but after some hours I learned that I don`t think that it`s the right way to play this game. ToS is a nice game if you want to relax after work and shut down from the stress of the day. Exploring is really rewarding in this game. Every map has a collection you can farm. Those collections give you diffrent benefits. I only got a few collections yet, but got a total of the following stats:
crit res +1, sp +54, hp + 260, crit rate +2, mdef + 2, evasion +1, accuracy +1, sp reg +3 , magic amplification + 4, hp reg +5, matk+ 4, def +1, atk + 2 So how does it work? First of all find one of the collections in a map of your choice. Here is a list of the collections on the first few maps. The numbers next to the links show the level of the map, since it is all in korean that is the only thing you can look out for. The first few maps are the Orsha maps, the later ones are from Klaipeda.
Click me :3 After finding one of the collections of your choice go to the Magic Association NPC in either Klaipeda or Orsha.
After inserting the collection you can proceed to add items into the collections. A few collections you will get from the main quests, all others have to be farmed on specific maps.
Some items you can find on multiple maps, so it is worth to keep them and later see if you can insert them. The amount of needed items is around 3-9. Even though the benefits will look small in the beginning they do add up, since oyu can also gain the benefits on your other team characters.
As a small recap I can say, Elementalist is a lot of fun in dungeon groups and solo farming as well as in parties. Farming collections is well designed and adds to the fun of the grind. I wish you a lot of fun in the world of Tree of Savior ;) See you around!
What have I been up to? Well, first of all, I was ill :( So the only thing I did the last few days was staying in bed, drinking tea and cure. I already gathered some material from my Barbarian, but did not continue to play it.
Instead I started out with a cute Archer, which I changed to Ranger in second circle. It is currently full SPR, so i basically spam skills the whole time. One word: Awesome. Make it two: Overkill.
Revisiting Old Maps
I always love going back to the old maps, bathing in nostalgia or, well just helping out friends with their new characters. Of course it is already fun, because I can help out, but even on top of that going back to the beginners maps can be entertaining.
What is there to gain?
First of all you can find chests and hidden quests which eventually lead to hidden boss monsters, which again might drop keys for chests.
Secondly, there is an exploration percentage for every map. If you reveal the whole map, then you usually get around 60-80% then you still gain % for hidden quests and so on. In your adventure journal (F4) is a page named "MAPS" where you can see the % of every map you have visited so far. In other words: You gather points for your adventure journal rank.
The last reason to go back might be to gather points for achievements, but I will explain that later in more detail.
Is it overall worth going back? From my point of view it would be yes and no, depending on what you enjoy in a game.
The answer is not really easy. Because on one side the exploring can slow you down in level progress and on the other side it can benefit you greatly, because of the sidequests.
I tried both already: grinding and only doing the main quests; and exploring everything and also doing the hidden quests.
Should I go back now?
Yes: If you enjoy exploring maps and killing boss monsters. Finding hidden chests or items. If you overdo it, then you will slow down in level growth by a great deal, but that is always the downside of exploring, right?
No: If you like to level really fast and have strong items. Grinding, if you are dedicated, is a really fast way of leveling in Tree of Savior.
Getting set Items from mini bosses is just an example.
Here you can see the set I got from a mini boss located in Srautas Gorge. If you only follow the quests then you will probably miss out on mini bosses, that drop those nifty looking items or one of the blue, silver or golden monsters. That you will stumble upon more often when grinding.
Blue monsters give more experience, silver ones drop a lot of, well ... silver. And golden monsters drop a lot of items.
In other words: if you only grind, you will miss out on experience cards and hidden boss fights or treasure chests and if you only quest and not grind at all you will - at some point, miss out on silver and rare items, that make leveling easier.
Exploration
What did I find so far? By starting in the very first map, I already found a lot. You can find several treasure chests, those that you can use without keys and warping stones. Those are stones that teleport you to hidden areas on the map.
I could not find a use for those areas, but I think they are for later on. Maybe it is not even implemented yet, since it is only closed beta.
Here you can see one of the warping stones. Later on you get a "Seal of Space", which lets you teleport to a hidden area. The one shown below. As I already mentioned, I do not know what this is supposed to do, since the area is completely empty, but it will reveal the whole 100% exploration for your adventure journal for the first map of the game.
What else did I find? I found a lot of hidden quests and treasure chests. In the first few maps there are still enough chests that you can open without a key. But for the level two and higher chest you will definitely need a level two or higher key OR a Corsair, which got a skill for opening chests. The loot from the chests is fixed, so you will get the same item with every character. I found myself a cute headgear, namely Goat Horns, which was a recipe from a level two chest.
The chests are hidden in almost every map and with hidden I mean hidden. I found several level 2 chest and even one level 5 chest, which I could not open yet. The level 5 chest was so well hidden, that you had to stand in one cell and you could only interact with it if you turned down. I only found it out of pure luck. Which makes me wonder of many I have missed.
What was disappointing to me, was the inability of farming experience cards for your other characters. I really hoped that I could clear the hidden quests with my main character, earn the cards and then transfer those to a new character for some sort of super-fast speed leveling. But indeed. There is no shared storage. This means you have to trade your items - if they are not untradeable - to a second person and then trade them back to your new character. Another option would be to open up a buy-in store on the new character, set all the items you want on 1 (one) silver, go back to your other character and then basically sell the equipment to yourself - again only if it is tradable.
Achievements
This will be my first rant. It bugs me to no end that you can not see all achievements when you only play with a keyboard. You need a mouse for scrolling, otherwise the scrollbar will not appear. The moment you have scrolled even once it works perfectly fine with keyboard again. Great. Took a while to find out. Once I knew the firsts thing I did was this:
Yep, killing 500 of those fluffy little creatures unlocks you the optional hair color black. Neat. Took around 20-30 minutes. But I did it. Next in line is crafting 100 items for white hair. I will keep you up to date! Overall achievements are more of a grind than anything else. They unlock you hair colors or titles, but that's it. I hope you found this informative, see you next time :D!
I always loved dungeons. Exploring an separate area within the bigger story of a game. Fighting strong enemies with a party of your choice. Having a balanced team composition with damagedealer, healer and tank. That's how I imaged the first dungeon to be - and I indeed got my fair share of that. But somehow I was still disappointed.
The very first dungeon in Tree of Savior can be found at level 50 in front of the Tenet Chapel Entrance. The dubbed Chapel Underground Dungeon consist of known enemies we have met in the earlier stages of the game when we were grinding/questing from level 40+ with the twist of them having way way more health. It's kind of disappointing that there is nothing more to them. The interior design of the dungeon is quite flat as could just go a straight line to the boss himself.
I thought there would be some puzzles to be solved first. Like activating key altars to unlock pathways or jumping puzzles. Anything that could remotely be seen as obstacle. But there is nothing. Just a bunch of enemies you could ignore while running to the boss, who is luckily somebody we didn't encounter before. He did have some special moves that could be a problem but he never accomplished to wipe us all at the same time (we did that Dungeon at least 5 times).
Overall it was quite disappointing for me. The only good thing that comes out of the dungeon is the experience gain you get while killing the lesser enemies. Otherwise there were no significant drops or monetary gain in the Chapel Underground Dungeon.
Tip of the day: Be sure to have a Linker in your team. It makes the big healthbar of the enemies look like a joke.
The first few hours of the closed beta of Tree of Savior have passed and we are standing proudly in the top 5% ranks of the adventure journal in Tree of Savior! It's been an exciting ride and we are back here to write down how we felt during those first 45ish levels.
As we’re writing down our thoughts we’ll be focusing on several things we deem important to a game and worthy mentioning. That means story, atmosphere, music and gameplay.
Story
Let's start slowly! The story is told quite simple. We (as the playable character) have dreamed of a goddess which was missing for ages and were on our way to the capital to see any meaning of it. During our journey we come across the monsters that has plagued the citizen and soldiers of the land. Plants and animals have evolved to dangerous levels and fantasy creatures such as kobolts and orcs or rather "Vubbus" are attacking the people. We of course have helped them by freeing them out the clutches of those monsters in general. At one point we're going down the mine of miners village in the outskirts of the capital to rescue kidnapped villagers in their peril. It was by no chance but rather fate that we've found a stone tablet encased in ice at the end of the tunnels after exploring the dungeon to the 3rd level. We found a stone tablet of the goddess Lamia which we've brought back to town to find more clues. As it turns out: There are 3 stone tablets overall which gives the player messages of the goddess herself and why she disappeared. We learned that our dream that we got has been fate and we a kinda the "chosen one". And here we are now on our way to find the rest of the two stone tablets!
Atmosphere
Even the biggest critic can`t deny that IMC Games quite nailed it when it comes to atmosphere in Tree of Savior. If you are a fan of Vanilla Ware games and always enjoyed their flare as in Dragon`s Crown, then you will find yourself at home in Tree of Savior. The lights are well placed, the boss fights are looking great. Always wanted a to see a fat- ass boss rolling into the screen and screaming at you, shooting 4 lasers around the screen? Yeah, no problem. Hey.. Let's also make it explode at the end into thousand pieces and fill the screen with a huge amount of experience bubbles and items, which makes killing it feeling like an accomplishment.
Here we prepared for you the two starting screenshots of Dragon's Crown and Tree of Savior. Makes you wonder, do they even start in the same tavern?
Music
The next thing I want to mention is the music. It’s friggin amazing! Part of why the atmosphere is so good is because of the music. The soothing soundtracks in a wide open field or city. The nice beat in a dungeon that never goes stale even if you have to grind and of course epic music which goes to bossfights that makes your blood pump and appreciate how much work they have already done.
Seriously! Check out yourself here:
First few Issues and Gameplay
Crashes, Crashes and more Crashes.
Since it was the first day of the closed beta no person in their right mind should expect something else, so we were satisfied with the amount of time we could actually play. The lag was sometimes overwhelming and sometimes not present at all. The most exciting part was trying to start the game at all, whenever you tried to enter a server you would just get kicked out with an error message in weird ASCII-Code when the server was overcrowded. (Luckily they fixed it the next day and now you can always log in without a crash).
So things that made you crash: Login in, login out to Character Select, Changing Maps, Talking with NPCS, using certain Items and basically everything that had to do with teleporting or changing to the loading screen. IMC Games did a good job in dishing out patches for most of the problems, so you are still experiencing lag, but the crashes are less frequent.
UI Mode
The first huge issue were the hotkeys. You can not rebind the hotkeys ingame as you please. In the screenshot below you can see that you can switch to Joypad, Keyboard or Mouse or just keep Auto selected. But that's about it.Why was this a problem? The answer is, that the jump hotkey is “X” and next to it is the “Z” hotkey for attacking. Normally that would be the case, but not for G German keyboards. Instead of the “Z” you have the “Y”, so whenever you wanted to attack you would have to get out of your comfort zone and grab over half your keyboard or just switch to the joypad.
Chibizilla: Since i played with the keyboard I will go into detail here. If you have a keyboard with different keybindings as well, then you can count yourself lucky, because you will find your hotfix in the next few lines. If not, you are lucky anyway, because you don't have a problem, jeez… So how do you fix it? There are several ways.
First go to your Tree of Savior folder. You will usually find it in Program Files > Steam > SteamApps > Common > TreeofSavior > Release there you will look for a hotkey.xml, open it with your editor and replace the content of the xml with this:
There you go, enjoy your comfortable jump and attack- hotkey. (THE LETTERS ARE WHITE, don`t worry :D )
My gaming experience with the keyboard is quite good so far. You have 4 basic bars for skills, items and weapons. I do not know how many skills you will want to hotkey, but I chose a new class every circle and I am managing fine with the amount of skills I have so far. Which is around 9 (by now), excluding items, which I also put in there. So I could pretty much enjoy my time, cuddle up in bed with only my laptop, not needing any mouse, which I really enjoyed, because you can even access the UI with your Keyboard in “UI-mode”.
I made you a fast screenshot of the keyboard controls. The “Z” is for me replaced with a “Y”, which you can`t see in here. I also need to hit “Ü” to hit the UI-Mode, which would usually be entered by pressing “[“.
From what I found out so far, you would definitely want to play swordsman class with either keyboard or joypad and only use mouse for range-based classes like wizard, to have more accuracy in kiting backwards. That was my take on the keyboard, I hope it was helpful, Llwellyn can surely tell you more about the Joypad.
Llwelyn: Sure I can! The Joypad is not completely build up to all aspects of the game. It’s great for fighting of course! The game is not set of a console specific controller but for joypad in general. I myself am playing with a PS4 controller via Bluetooth. Left analog stick or d-pad for running and square to attack, x to jump, triangle would be the c-button and circle replaces space. The shoulder buttons are used for the various skills and useable items as shown below. As someone who played Final Fantasy 14 before: Awesome.(It resembles the control scheme greatly!)
But there are things you can’t do with the joypad. Maybe it’s because I’m using a PS4 controller but I doubt it is different for anybody else. I can’t use the joypad to browse through my inventory for example. That means no equipping armory or weapons. No way of going through the options. Besides basic interaction with NPC’s which you can do perfectly fine with the controller, you have to use keyboard and mouse on your PC. I think the usage of a joypad was implemented last beta so I’ll give them the benefit of the beta-phase.
Combat and Enemies
The combat can be quite simplistic and yet really beautifully designed. The most basic form of fighting is facing an enemy and pressing the attack button or the skill you want to use against him. As a swordsman or any other melee fighter that will be your bread and butter ability. Attack, position yourself, dodge spells if needed or do a skill of your own, attack, rinse and repeat. The archer for example will target an enemy automatically in the approximate direction. As skills he has an arrow that has an area of effect. This arrow isn’t aimed be targeting an enemy but rather the area you want the arrow to direct to! As a priest you don’t target your team member to heal like in common MMO’s. Since this game is isometric you literally leave squares of healthfields behind with your Heal skill. Those squares can be used to attack the enemy with holy damage too so you have to take care where to place them and when since they do have a hefty cooldown. The various enemies resemble the faceless soldiers in the Dynasty Warriors series. While they are beautifully crafted, you actually just go through them like a lawn mower. This happens especially in the lower level of the game. But you won’t get bored of them later on since they seem to gain special attacks like freezes, petrification and magical skills! So the grind won’t get stale if you ever have to, since there are tons of quests to finish before reaching the next level. There are fetch and kill quests but also protecting the “NPC while he does his thing”- quests and various other! I can’t wait to see if IMG Games got any other ideas.
Boss fights are always a highlight in Tree of Savior. They are beautifully designed and always catch your attention. The fights are between challenging and underwhelming, just holding down one key ( or square!) for the entire fight can make things boring. But that was only the case with the higher level bosses. We figured that the reason might be due to balancing issues or focusing on early game enjoyment. (Pretty sure they will make the bosses more challenging at some point, because IMC games seems to listen to their community, which is also quite rare nowadays.)
Classes
Chibizilla: I thought for Tree of Savior I might step out of my comfort zone and play something I usually would not play. What did I pick? Swordsman. Prepared for battle with my awesome two-handed sword, looking completely badass. I went from Swordsman to Highlander and then continued with Barbarian. You start off your character in this very cute starting screen called your lodge.
You can even move around in the login screen and buy a different appearance and more space for characters with real money currency. On my way to becoming Highlander we had to go through several quests, finding treasure chests left and right, missing quests and fighting boss monsters. Sometimes we would even miss a quest, because some of those quests are hidden and unlock boss fights with monsters you could not kill otherwise. One of my last tasks was a quest in the Crystal Mines before changing to Highlander. You have to make a Class-Change-Quest whenever you reach class level 15. Yep, there is a class level and a character level.
You can see me here changing to Highlander. The class seemed quite popular regarding how many people were lingering around in the class master's area. After The change I had my first grinding experience, trying to craft a rare recipe I found for gauntlets. What did I need? Vubbu Fighter Blood. From Vubbu Fighters. A mob that only exists 3 times on a map and only spawns every 60 seconds. I am really glad I got help in my hunt, otherwise I would have given up. But in the end we got the item, I could craft it and it was worth the time. During our journey we learnt a lot about the story, the missing goddesses and whatnot. The boss fights were a lot of fun and I found a cute headgear from one of the bosses mentioned before.
The Barbarian Quest was quite difficult it reminds one greatly of dark souls. It was an 1on1 Bossfight. Every hit hurt like a truck rolling at you with full speed, dishing out about 200-400+ damage and as you can see: that’s less than 10 hits! My first attempt at killing this guy went horribly wrong and I died the first time in the game. Two deaths and 12 health potions later I did it! That was one happy moment in my life, because who ever would have scored the next hit would have been the one dead, as you might notice from the screenshot. There was a lot running and kiting needed to bring him down. But kiting a boss works really well! There are indicators in which direction he is going to attack and you can dodge it by moving out of the way or block it by charging up a defense spell like the block from the peltasta or the shield spell from the priest class. While it does take considerable amount of time to beat a hard boss by yourself, it’s always nice to be in a well rounded group of tank, dps and support. Only downside: This boss had no indicators and you had to do it ALONE. He was basically running after you, with more movement speed and chopping away from your health, also having a skill attack that would cost you 2k of your health, which basically could have killed me with two hits. I found it very entertaining, since I always love a little challenge but for people with less tolerance I would recommend to level up some more and then try again at level 50 or even 60.
What do I like best about my class so far? You can go full glass cannon build or tanky damage, all up to you. Also the best thing about swordsman: press the same arrow key twice and you sprint!! So AWESOME! And also female swordsman classes look equally badass and cute at the same time.
Llwelyn: I picked up a priest for myself! I might have mentioned it before but I really want to recreate my Monk I had in Ragnarok Online. It's gonna be a long long ride for me since all my attack skills are purely INT based right now. I'm going full support until I get my first attack skills with my 5th Class change into Monk! It was possible for me to go around and solo stuff since I started the game a bit earlier then the rest of the group but it was a long ride since the boss fights were getting quite hard as a squishy Priest. Luckily I rejoined the group when I was level 30 and it's really easier to play in one. The one thing I mistakingly did was changing into a Dievdirby later on. That class is really bugged right now because of the server lagg. You are basicly a sculptur with the skill to carve statues out of wood. Those statues are really nice since they give you sp regeneration and a cooldown reducing boost. But all it's skills can't be used right now which makes it probably worthless until they fix it. I really hope so! My plan was to be support and leveling up all "buff" skills and then later on going to be a full attacking monster with the buffs behind my back.
That's it from us for today! Hope to see you here again!! =^_^=
