When the Summer Test realm came out, I was very vocal on the Message Boards and Central Forums about how terribly designed the balancing is. While I have opinions about the spell and shadow pip adjustments, I did agree they were mostly deserved, late-game was pretty broken.
My biggest gripe is the implementation. The PvE community was very vocal about how those changes would wreck PvE and the devs rightly took 20% off the health of enemies. And that was it. But right there is my problem. It's a disgustingly simplistic way to treat the game and combat. There are so many unique spells, bosses, and battles that they blanketed the whole thing a few days prior to releasing it to Live Realm. Virtually no changes were made since. Players have left feedback with no one to listen. It's more common for Ratbeard or Matt to listen to the loudest few, rather than the vast many.
I've voiced concerns about TCs being un-nerfed (re: 90% efreets), enemy spells being unchanged (e.g. glowbugs, efreets, novas, etc). To me, it's difficult to talk about how PvP needs all this balancing when PvE is now left in a state of unbalance too. Like I warned, Jading made a comeback, TCs are worth more than ever right now, and battles lengthened. I hate it.
I recently leveled my Storm through Polaris and Mirage, and I've got to say that was the least fun gameplay ever. It was immediately noticeable how terribly Storm got nerfed, and while the enemy health was knocked down a peg, it was hard surviving against the buffed rank 7 spells, Efreet variants, lack of shadow pips, and the long battles. Soloing is so much more difficult than even a duo, it's not even funny.
I tried it with my Death a bit and I have to say it was SO much better. I enjoyed it so much more, but the game is so disgustingly unbalanced (right now both in PvP and PvE) that I'm not even excited for Karamelle and the Crit re-balance. I really feel the design team at KI makes some really solid design decisions and then fails the implementations.
I leveled a Myth, Balance, and Ice through mid-game and some battles really stood out as more difficult than the rest of the lax gameplay. The difficulty, power, and pacing are just so off while questing, it's embarrassing. Devs need to play the game more (cough* without elixirs *cough) because it sticks out SO much. Storm enemies for example are generally too easy now.
I think the Critical-Block changes are excellent and warranted (critical decay is the worst aspect of the game, change my mind), but I don't want to quest further until they do a proper passthrough of PvE. For every shadow pip I get, the boss already has 3-4. I get a shadow pip every 4 rounds or so against mobs without shadow magic and by then I'd already kill with a blade and rank 7 spell combo.
I really like the return of being more powerful as you level (i.e. getting more base shadow pip chance, pip conversion, etc) and critical/block changes. Those are some great changes. However, the gear changes are questionable. Gear without mana is just annoying more than anything. High-health gear just slows down gameplay. I'll say it once and I'll say it again, please balance the game better. Don't wait until Test Realm before saying "we should do this." Plan it out consistently throughout the Dev Cycle. Don't rebalance spells DURING test, do it before and then get feedback.
Everything released in the past few years feels unfinished when launched. It's rarely the worlds themselves, but just the content lacks polish. Monster Mayhem is still really broken (hopefully it's ironed out in test) and the Meleager quest wasn't fixed, no menu chat, and paced terribly. X-rank spells wouldn't use all the pips. Spell animations broke. Hatching is so expensive and cumbersome. Monstrology feels like a decent system without a real reason to use it.
It just saddens me how Test Realm flies and the content is released, fixed or not. The Devs can't address every issue in Test and they push many of them until the next Test, and so on. This leaves the game in a weird state. I doubt the game will be balanced until they finish critical and block, damage and resist, accuracy and power pips, mana, enchantments, treasure cards, pierce, spellements, and pacing adjustments. While we continue the journey to a more balanced game, let's remember to leave the game more balanced each update by implementing the changes thoughtfully.
