Big Feedback regarding the Underwater Faction

[crisp dawn]

I’ll try to put into words my experience (550~600 RP) throughout the entire faction and highlight both the positive and negative points. Since I play on a high-rate server, I won’t comment on profit or waste regarding the spawns.

Part 1

Piranhas
Great spawn overall. The mechanics are fun and well designed, and there are many different hunting grounds to complete the task. Collecting tidecut shards, pearls, and exploring all the treasures across the map felt rewarding and enjoyable.

Thornfin
A good spawn. I do wish there were additional places to hunt thornfins, even if they had a lower kill/hour rate, but overall it’s still a solid hunting ground.

Part 2

Eelwyrm
Excellent spawn and a very solid hunting place. Even after finishing the task, it still feels like there’s room to continue hunting. It’s a chill spawn with good experience and a legendary drop. I do wish the skins had more uses (I’ll mention skins and grinding later).

Tideshrimp
This was one of the weakest parts of the faction for me. The lap feels extremely repetitive, and having only tideshrimps in the entire spawn makes it very boring. I can’t imagine coming back here except to help friends with the task.

Part 3

Cryolure
This spawn feels uninspired. It’s the same creature throughout the entire cave, with no real challenge or interesting mechanics, just running around killing it.

Bloodscale Naga
A great spawn. The ranged/melee mechanics, legendary drop, and multiple paths makes it very enjoyable. You can build your own lap and try to optimize it. I helped friends from all vocations with this task: EK felt a bit too easy, while RP/ED/MS can be quite deadly, which adds some balance considerations.

The art, map, and overall design are flawless. Everything looks beautiful and very well polished.

...continues (character limit)

Good Points
Almost everything (aside from missions) can be done solo.
Tasks are usually fast, rarely taking more than 3 hours.
Daily missions are well designed and thoughtfully implemented.
The final reward is excellent: +10 INT/DEX/STR is a must-have for anyone, making this faction unskippable.

Bad Points
Too much empty walking. There are many areas where there’s simply nothing on the map, which makes traveling feel unnecessary and tedious.
Most hunts offer low experience.
Skins and grinding feel unbalanced (in my opinion). I wish there were meaningful uses for skins from Parts 2 and 3. Being forced to grind Part 1 repeatedly becomes boring and repetitive.

Main Issue and Improvement Suggestions
There are many creatures and many different locations, but not much actual hunting to do. I don’t feel motivated to grind for god knows how many hours crafting equipments just to hunt one or two places that give the same experience as Sheol.
If I have a 3-man team that wants to hunt this new content, where can we go? Realistically, only Sea Dragon and the Dungeons. Everything else quickly falls off to around 3kk/h or less.

I wish there were a large city with a dense variety of creatures (similar to Ythog Dungeon), where teams could hunt efficiently and really engage with the content. In that scenario, upgrading the set would feel necessary and rewarding. Right now, most hunts lack replayability, once the task is done, there’s little reason to return.

Bottom line is, this is good content, but it feels like there could be so much more. The map is huge, there are many different creatures, items, and systems, yet a lot of that potential feels underused.

[sage gulch]

Just to complement a bit, I think you can include more TH spots like sea dragons to have more options as a 3-4 man. You already included the duskfin dragonet on bloodscale naga, why dont we have a duskfin dragon spot, for example? The dungeon is also really nice in terms of monster variety for a TH zone, could be something similar as well.

The city of Ryleph could be enhanced to a real city with temple, depot, NPCs, houses and etc. add some TH spots routes from there to make it attractive to have a house.

In my opinion a part IV update needs to be considered if not yet