Originally Posted by
Selphea
I'll just use this thread as my notepad for what to mention in the next survey. PSO2 broadly has a good formula but there's a lot of small details that need tweaking.
I feel like newer PSO2 is becoming quite inaccessible to newcomers. Numbers wise, yes EXP is easy, Dim is easy, welfare gear is easy but a few things:
First is the affix gap has grown a lot because of Grace boosters, Ether Factor, Mana Reverie, 8S being the norm and things being so focused on making pre-fodders and gambling upslots during boost weeks.
Second is that if you don't have gear to brute force content, you need to memorize a LOT because quest design and enemy design is so busy nowadays. Armada is like, red laser fences, giant red laser mechs, giant red ship lasers, flyby red lasers, things dash around all over the place and rotate and block your camera... there's just too much junk going on nowadays.
Third is getting to the fun as a new player takes way too long. Because of power creep, everything up to Extra Hard is just a bore because you just hold one button and wait for your EXP bar to fill while things insta die. But you have to endure hours of snoozefest to get to the fun... except there's speed bumps along the way. The classes they want people to play are Hero and Phantom which are significantly more responsive and versatile than basic classes, but you need two classes at 75, then you need to grind Hero or Phantom to 85. They don't seem to have learned the lesson from the original "advanced" classes, Fighter, Gunner and Techer. The playerbase was at it's highest after these requirements were lifted.
And the reason I care about newcomers and casuals is they form the bulk of the playerbase - the same playerbase that shrunk hugely in Ep5. Less players = less spenders. Less spenders = less budget. Less budget = less content, and the content right now is seriously awful compared to Ep3 and 4 where it wasn't great but at least enemies weren't just a giant, stiff polygon ship with painted on textures.
Class balance is "ok" on a surface level, in that if you look at a spreadsheet the DPS numbers seem OK. But mechanically it's like, good luck as a Hunter trying to get top DPS when Persona decides to swing around wildly or Masquerade teleports around. It doesn't have the kit because it doesn't have a vertical tracking, homing, superfast gap close. Even Braver's Guren can't hit the right spot nowadays because the time it takes for the second SHING to come out is an eternity for today's enemies. They'll fly or teleport or zoom away and then you hit some silly non-weak spot so your DPS in practice is like, 20% of what it's supposed to be on paper. I don't think old classes are OK, if they were OK we wouldn't have half the playerbase on Hero or Phantom, and wouldn't have this many unhappy Hunters and Bouncers.
Another thing that bugs me about classes is, it's seriously not fun as an old class to be subject to so much more specific gear requirements. Hero and Phantom don't need any special L rings or S4s/Orgei/Jupiter gimmicks, they just work. Meanwhile old classes need this weapon to press this skill for a lower cooldown, then they swap to that other weapon for this S4 for higher damage, then they swap to this other weapon to regenerate PP, then this weapon for Shifta, this one for Deband... it's incredibly clunky.
Also, skill trees are so meaningless now. To me, it should either offer meaningful choices, or just do away with them and offer everything straight up, no choices needed. Right now you pick everything with the oodles of skill points 90 levels can give, so there's no choice but you still need to deal with the admin.
Speaking of admin, there are too many drops now. So the mass tekking and excubing is admin, managing all these stone types is admin, sorting gear for good affixes to save is admin, making affix fodders is admin, all these passes and tickets and crests and expiry dates are also admin... I think most players will want to just hop into the game and kick some ass but you eventually need to sort all the junk you get from a quest and that's seriously not fun.
As far as endgame gear goes, it is what it is - best in slot comes once every 1-2 years, you have your oodles of collection to do. I wish there were multiple parallel paths to different series of gear. Like the Raid EQ Lightstream route should be a fast route to middle-of-the-road gear. Then maybe some solo elitist route to a squishy high damage series, and grinding mobbing UQ/UH is a slow route to a tanky series that can handle chaotic mobbing situations. I'd rather have that than a single route that needs a bit of everything for a single series of best in slot. They had a good system going from Austere to Qliphad, each series was different and had it's own advantages. Some needed a bit more thought but the intent was good and there was always a reason to get a new series' weapon.
As a whole I think they've completely lost the notion of KISS and kept piling random junk on, and they're still piling on even more. Because of that, things are now hard to balance and horribly bloated. They really need to simplify things.
Despite all that ranting, PSO2 is still fun at it's core. There's no other action game quite like it, the aesthetics are dated but the art style lets it age well. It just needs some cleaning up after accumulating 7 years of bloat. The Advanced Quest shops are a start, but there's a lot more to do.
Connect With Us