It has been several months since I last wrote anything of substance regarding Webzen’s MU Legend (that was regarding the new Noria continent, level cap raise to 70, and the Spellbinder/Emphasizer class).
I did resume playing the update for a short while in August 2018 (getting my Whisperer to 70 and leveling the Spellbinder to 66) before I stopped playing again a few weeks later. The boring combat and stiff movements (which won’t ever change) are the main reasons why I can’t get into the game. The new continent and its zones also weren’t memorable in anyway, and the game play for the Spellbinder wasn’t anything special.
So the game dropped off my radar again to the point where I didn’t even realize that yet another server merge for NA and EU happened again (now down to a single server per region including the always singular SEA server) and the latest major update had occurred.
On April 30th, Gates of Glory was released; this includes a level cap increase (to 80), new area (Crescent Moon Island) and new class (Black Phantom). So I decided to jump back in again to try out the new class and play the game for what it is worth (I did spend money on this since I am one of the 3,062 who bought a Frontier Pack as a sign of support in very faint hopes they would not mess up the game). To be honest, this is the mage style game play that I found was lacking from the beginning (I’m using the wand and orb instead of the mana chain weapon) with an honest to goodness teleport for its “dash” movement skill. The combat for this class actually feels good but also isn’t enough to keep me engaged for the long haul.
There are returning player events as well as the event for the new class which last until mid-June. As I’ve mentioned before, despite how screwed up Webzen is in many other areas, this is one area where they do a pretty good job at (with a bunch of incentives and catch up provisions). That is probably the extent I’ll be playing though (leveling the new class to max level). I did attempt playing through the new Crescent Moon Island zone to try and level up my Whisperer to 80 but just couldn’t continue doing it (since like the leveling from 65-70, most of it is done via doing the very short main quest there before running the green dailies in the new zones which themselves, are pretty much just repeat style quests).
Side Note: This whole MMO-ARPG genre is just proving to be something that no studio has found the right combination for (I am still undecided about Torchlight Frontiers which Echtra Games sent out surveys for last week for those who they saw had stopped playing the alpha including myself). The Korean OBT for Lost Ark has dropped completely off my radar (not even the new Lance Master class was enough to compel me to login again). And NCSoft has had zilch to say regarding Project TL (that has been stuck in development hell since 2011 when it was known as Lineage Eternal and likely won’t ever see the light of day at this rate).
I think all of this dovetails with how even single player (with limited multiplayer co-op) ARPG’s have fallen out of favor with me (I guess I’ll need to wait and see how Wolcen’s Story Mode works out since that part hasn’t been implemented in their beta test yet). In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy this Black Phantom class in MU Legend until I hit the limited end game grind.
