At the early levels in Tree of Savior, mobs drop a lot of gear and a lot of quests give gear as rewards. This isn't any different from a lot of other MMORPGs.
But somewhere around level 60 or so, mobs mostly stop dropping gear. Instead, they drop recipes that can be used to craft gear. Likewise, quests transition from giving you gear as rewards to giving you recipes to craft gear. There aren't fixed crafting professions in Tree of Savior, but if you have the recipe and materials, you can craft the gear, period. The materials are often pretty common mob drops.
When grouping for dungeons, a lot of mobs basically don't hurt me, as I've got pretty good gear. But I commonly see other players in groups taking massive damage and sometimes even dying. It was obvious that they didn't have as good of gear, so I tried inspecting people to see what they had.
In groups for dungeons with level requirements of 115 and 130, I've seen a lot of players wearing a lot of two-star gear. That is, gear with a level requirement of 15, and they're still wearing it more than 100 levels later. Some players have empty gear slots, or have some gear that is broken and they haven't bothered to fix it even before the start of a dungeon run.
As best as I can tell, what such players are doing is to equip gear that they happen to get to drop. And when the gear stops dropping directly, they stop equipping better gear. I tried to convince some people that, even if you're not willing to pay for the 1 million silver pieces of gear, at least get the cheap upgrades that can be had for 20k on the auction house.
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"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I've never really liked "gear score" requirements in games, but it does do a good job of weeding this type of stuff out.
Apart from what I have said, I agree that bots are usually poorly geared. With time, you can tell apart a player or a bot almost instantly.
Edit: My goodness the art is very nice
I didn't explicitly state that people doing this weren't equipping gems, but well, they weren't. Cafrisun also only lets you equip one gem per piece, which greatly diminishes its relative effectiveness once gear lets you equip two gems per piece. And while I did see some cafrisun gear, the users weren't exactly equipped with arde dagger+agny necklace.
Sounds like the game has some lazy or inexperienced players as all games do which is why many eschew PUGs.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In some cases, it's reasonable to keep gear from one tier even all the way through the next. For example, my current "five star" gear includes Lydeka, Zachariel Bangle, and Shade Hands, all of which are very nice four star pieces and I didn't see any five star gear pieces of their respective types that I liked better. To take a piece that is mediocre for its own tier and still use it three tiers later is rather less reasonable, however.
Another important point about buying gear is that you can use it for a while and then sell it on the auction house once you get something better and get most of your money back. So you could think of it as gear rentals rather than gear purchases. There is an auction house commission of 10%, or 30% if you don't have a token, plus 1%-2.5% to list the gear (depending on how long you want it to be on the auction house), but you still get most of the money back.
As Torval mentioned earlier, the gear system is extremely clunky, there are no outright paths in terms of gear progression, leaving certain gears in favour over others(cafrisun). The other problem is the games' mechanic in typical, leveling pve content. I believe most of us that played ToS could relate to siauliai mission, where everyone would attempt twice/thrice daily per char once hitting level 100; almost every boss attack could be dodged by jumping. Even a full naked party without any gear except maybe a weapon can clear it, as long as the player knows what he's doing. With content like that as the daily leveling staple, perhaps most people couldn't even be bothered trying to gear up their characters(alts).
My 2 cents
Even then I would definitely gear up my character if I am playing the characters seems really odd to leave them so poorly geared.
Like most MMORPGs, the game is mostly about combat. Combat is the overhead "three-quarters" view that is today sometimes mistakenly called isometric, but the underlying graphics methods are very much 3D. The game just launched last year, so it very much has modern graphics. It's not terribly demanding on hardware, either; to experiment, I just turned off vertical sync and was getting well over 100 frames per second at near max settings (I turned off camera vibration, but that's it) while fighting mobs, using a Radeon R7 360 video card that cost under $100.
The economy is more or less player driven, but it's not deep. Other than quest items and some event items, hardly anything is bind on pickup. Some things (e.g., recipes and materials) become character-bound when traded to a character on a different account, though not when traded to one of your alts.
The game is "free to play", with an optional $9/month subscription ("tokens") that gets you most of the buyable advantages. Token advantages are account-wide, not per character. Token advantages are considerable (e.g., +30% bonus to experience from killing mobs, +10% movement speed, auction house commission of 10% rather than 30%, etc.), but beyond that, I wouldn't call it pay to win.
The game does some things that are fairly unusual for MMORPGs. I list some of them in this thread:
http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/455785/interesting-game-mechanics
In my opinion, IMC isn't doing much to make people feel the need to change/upgrade out of certain gear(till end game).
http://www.tosbase.com/database/items/equipment/
Then you can check the auction house and buy it if you see something you want. Some of the gear listed doesn't actually exist in the game, or is very rare and expensive. So don't hold out for the very best pieces of gear listed on the site.
I don't think it's really that unintuitive. It's perhaps a little different from most MMORPGs, but only a little, as there are plenty of other games where gearing up is at least partially about buying things off the auction house.
If you get something good that you don't have use for yourself, or have leveled past gear that used to be good for you, do be sure to sell it on the auction house. That's a major source of revenue to buy the gear you want. Even some quest reward items are valuable, though many of them are junk. For example, every character can get a Zachariel Bangle by doing quests in Royal Mausoleum and perhaps buying a few Vikaras Cores, depending on how many drop for you along the way. But the crafted item is still worth about 400k on the auction house.
Tree of saviour also has PVP Arenas.
Orsha is a dead server...lol
about gear, only class who go after armor to defend himself on each tier is swordmans, since you will want to keep your defense high enough so you can mob and kill everyone around, now if youa re a ranged dps(archer and mage) you only care about big hits, there is a reason most bots on this game are not warriors they are warlocks most of then
The game did have a rough launch, with poor performance even on good hardware. The launch was actually bad enough that, even after launch, they decided to close the game to new players for some weeks. Existing players could continue, but new players could start. Those restrictions were lifted sometime around last May or June, and the performance problems have long since been fixed.