Cutting straight to the point; this combined 113-114 patch is pretty bad. Old Island of Dawn is now indeed a separate instance (however, they eliminated the scroll purchase that was part of 113, and made it a teleport via the portal manager at the North Dock). The zone is only filled with level 68-72 BAMs with ultra inflated health pools and damage, even with the new gear, it’s chipping away at them (absolutely no one was in there farming them).
The new Frost Flower Tear gear is handled out in Highwatch (as has been the case with the prior two gear sets). Players who have been grinding and enchanting their prior mythic tier Mahtnan gear, must feel pretty angry by now since the power creep on the base legendary tier of Frost Flower, is pretty insane. I previously tapped out with a bunch of purchase Mahtnan gear (when both legendary and mythical tiers had flooded the auction house). I never bothered enchanting them so I peaked at just 500 item level. The base Frost Flower boosted me to 512.
There’s a short main story line that eventually leads to the “reincarnated” argon queen. The entire story line is “lazy” as it is essentially just Argon Invasion part 2; but this time in Baldera (so parts of the map now look like Val Tirkai and Val Kaeli with its Argonized dark grays, blacks, and blue). None of the NPC’s involved voices anything (Gameforge can’t be bothered with hiring voice actors). The other part of the quest takes you back to Kaiator, then back to Velika (and the Goddess Velik) where you go back to Granarkus in order to fight the new level 70 version of Shandra Manaya (the Argon Queen). The Shandra Manaya part however left the original Korean voice acting (better than nothing). Some of the rewards for the quest line are the new enchanting materials.
As expected, even the solo mode boss is overtuned for the new gear (sort of like how the original Exodor solo dungeon with Kalligar and the then new Exodor gear, was timing your i-frames where you tried to avoid the one shot mechanic as you allowed the NPC Jelena to distract him, and then whittled away when you had a chance to DPS him). It’s meant to be a challenge in order to get the backslot cosmetic.
As for the new gear, it seems there is no way to utilize the prior Mahtnan gear (the mythical tier). It seems the new gear just supercedes it (I’m not sure if maybe options can be transferred over but judging by chat, it seems not). Remaining players who continue to “buy” into this (by buying enchanting material crates from the cash shop) are of course part the problem with enabling this type of lazy design. So long as both developer and publisher can milk the player base this way, they’ll continue doing it. Basically the just looking around again (post update), it didn’t bring back a lot of players (many are probably playing Lost Ark right now).
On a related note, Bluehole and Krafton are going all in on the blockchain BS with NFT’s, crypto, and the metaverse. They are thus joining most of the other Korean game studios in wasting resources on this BS scam. The irony is that all of this won’t be available in South Korea because it is ILLEGAL to deploy this type of games there. This is the ultimate in trying to milk other regions (the backlash may cause irreparable damage to their game industry if they do not take security seriously; given the holes in many existing Korean MMO’s, I have my doubts and won’t install any of this junk on my system).
