Achievments and Exploration

A boy lives adventure,

he doesn't just talk it.
And brings it all home -

for Mom - in his pocket.

Hi guys! Chibizilla here!

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!

Chapel Underground Dungeon (Lv 50+)

Attack, attack, attack

Another one bites to dust

Attack, attack, attack

Another one bites to dust

Our experience in the first dungeon

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.