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!! =^_^=
Everything has a beginning. Every story in history and every sausage ever made and so does this blog.
Welcome to Blog of Savior! We are proud to introduce you to our sweet, new Blog and hope you enjoy our articels as much as we enjoy writing them.First things first: Who are we? My name is Llwelyn. I’m a huge game nerd, photography enthusiast, foodporn director and hobby artist. My favorite games of all times are those of the Legend of Zelda series and Life is Strange in particular at the moment. I don’t need huge open world games when I have one good written story with a nice gameplay. The Last of Us comes to my mind when I think of my ideal game and of course I do love the Last of Us too! Though I have always been playing MMO’s. I fondly remember my time in Flyff, Tera and Ragnarok Online. Not because of the games in particular but rather because of the fun I had playing with friends. I’ve been basicly playing all kinds of games since ever. And by the way - since I literally live in the internet you can write me on Twitter @BlogOfSavior or catch me on Twitch on www.twitch.tv/llwelyn.
I like to play games and I like to write stuff. So hey listen! Here I am combining those two elements with my lovely buddy Chibizilla. :)
Hello fellow Tree of Savior fans, I am Chibizilla. Born in the ‘90s and since my birth been into gaming. I study IT, live in germany, love cooking, baking, hanging out with my lovely friends and also have a lot of other hobbies you might or might not find interesting. I enjoy drawing, both traditionally and digitally, if I get asked to stream you might even catch me online on twitch, right here: www.twitch.tv/chibiziiia/. When I am not surfing the internet or chat with friends I am usually writing. I love poems and long fantasy stories, so if I am not reading them, I try to write them for myself. I am currently trying to finish a bigger project of mine which is already several hundred pages long, but sadly in german language. Stories in which you can dream yourself into are most enjoyable to me, since I’m somewhat a daydreamer. That is also an aspect I like in good MMORPGs, if the dialogs and the background story are well written, you can definitely get the feeling of the world you are currently playing in. So Tree of Savior might be interesting for me as an inspirational source for my short stories as well. One day I hope to be able to work in the gaming industry myself, being able to inspire people and make them think is what makes it challenging. I would not mind any job that comes with it, may it be backend, frontend or even the story behind the game or the overall project management. From a player perspective I always liked the good old Final Fantasy games. With Final Fantasy 8 being my all time favorite game ever. With the years I played myself through several game types: MOBA, shooter, point and click, but somehow ended up with multiplayer games. GTA, FF, AC, name a big title and I have at least looked into it. When it comes to MMO there was only Ragnarok Online 1 which kept me interested for a long time. But while I am at it, here is a list of what I have played: Flyff, WoW, Cabal Online, Tera, Aion, Ragnarok Online 1 +2, Aura Kingdom, Dragonica, LotGD (indeed more a role play browser game) and i have always been waiting for Blade & Soul to make it to the western market, since it always looked promising. I hope this was enough to have a good overview of who I am, since I do not want to fill the whole blog with my introduction. Let us have a good time together and welcome again to our new blog! (◕‿◕)♥
So what is this blog going to be about? Definitely not Tree of Savior. Wait what?! No, jokes aside. Of course we are going to play the second closed beta of Tree of Savior! It’s a Korean MMORPG made by IMCGAMES. Let us summarize some facts about them:
They are known for making Granado Espada which is quite a good game back then when it was released. Currently it holds 66 out of 100 points at metacritic while the most prominent points of 90 were given by PC Gamer. They are also developing Wolfsknight and made 2 mobile games called Black Citadel - a game which is downloadable for Apple IOS - and Solitaire League but that's not why our guests are here right?
Tree of Savior is what you are here for and we’re going to write down our everyday impressions of the 30 day long european close beta! And by the way: since we were both fans of Ragnarok Online we are pleased to hear that the head developer Kim Hakkyu is the same who lead the development of RO back then! The only reason he left was because arguments against the ingame cashshop. We are basicly safe from pay2win! We are hyped up and can't wait to log in! And who knows - we might see each other at the start in Klaipeda! :)
