Evuls thought about current state of Ascalon.
tl;dr There's no tl;dr either read the whole thing or go away.
First off all let's start from berserkers:
Removing attack speed from items and capping armor penetration should do the trick. Cause what's the point of armor when you have 100% armor penetration, might aswell remove that
The point with berserkers is they keep growing no matter what, too many factors affect how strong they get. Attack speed is making them kill 1v1 fastest from all clases also giving them survivability in form of natural lifesteal, pair this with rending weapon which is another enhancement to their kit. Having all this let's add armor penetration to the equation, let's say a mob has 50% armor and on level 350 berserker can hit close to 100% armor penetration with right items which gives roughly another 100% damage boost. Of course theres also rampage spell and the infamous fury, I will just leave this without any comment as there's no need to. Let's not forget about core element of the OT which are stats, meaning atk, def, healing. At this point a berserker can be a killer machine or a semi tank with insane healing capabilities. All this cumulated makes the perfect solo class which can kill most of the stuff alone (not talking 'bout Torvora, but there are things a capable berserker can manage too, perspective of around level around 400).
General thought about balance:
All in all it's insanely hard to balance all the classes in such a custom OT to make everyone happy. Also there's neverending dispute about having everything perfectly balanced which will rarely or even never be the case, anything will stand out at certain point and there will surely be people not happy about it. That's partly why mobas are so popular among people, cause of the ever changing meta.
In my personal opinion this ot should be aiming for party play more than solo:
It's much more fun playing with someone. There's so much content like world bosses (which imo require some overhaul), dungeons (same story as world bosses, overhaul), quests (a slight overhaul I will go about it later on) and huge map with various secrets. Of course solo playing should not be impossible, nono, I don't mean that in any way. Getting experience and completing tasks still is possible solo. But bosses close to your level should not be possible to kill solo.
What in my opinion this server requires to stand out:
This server advertises itself as a RPG server yet the only quests we get from NPCs are kill quests and fetch quests. Of course there are some quests hidden in the wilderness, but you just find them and do them with no RPG feeling like 'oh I found a lever gotta click it'. Doing death ring quest is close to impossible to do with a team of only new players, same goes with G8 weapon quest and SoT. There's no real lore visible or anything. Numerous times I offered myself to help in this department. What's the most obvious are the bugs and shortcomings, mostly in ever being quests and tasks, rarely map bugs and some other minor things. There's also alot things that are hard to catch up on like event tokens, alchemy coins, area tokens, symbols of sarcifice, herbs, tools, hell even crafting. Imo all that I mentioned is in dire need of an overhaul.
A thing or two about dungeons:
Current idea of dungeons is something like this. You get a party, kill everything in dungeon, get loot and experience, rinse and repeat. Sooo if you can get experience and loot from dungeons what's the point of all that content in the OT apart from getting ability stones and gems to upgrade all your stuff you got from dungeon?
Here's my idea of an overhaul. Since for some reason dungeons start off from a boat(?) why are those even dungeons? Let's make it something like expeditions which you can do daily. I imagine something like an area you explore completing side objectives or going straight to a boss fight at the end with a reward chest. Pair this up with an NPC that gives you corresponging quests and awards you points for completing them. An Explorers Society, you get the point. Those should scale like the dungeons do and you could get let's say a party of any size, which makes a good community driven event in the server. Higher levels can take lowers to get rewards for themselves and help other players in their growth. I fully understand that's alot of work and testing, but it is not impossible. It can start off from a simple 1-2 expeditions with 1 side objective and 1 main and later on grow to much bigger and much more challenging ones. Wrap it up with a quest line discovering unknown territories and researching new materials and herbs and you have a huge, huge, huge content to work around with as you wish, which should be appealing to most.
Thought about resources:
Herbs, event tokens, alchemy coins, area tokens, symbols of sacrifice, tools. All this stuff should have a way of obtaining (yes I know you can get them, keep reading instead of writing post stating I am dumb).
Herbs: a farm that you can plant shit to grow. Doesn't have to be a farm in physical way, you can talk with NPC which will do it for you for a cost and waiting period. For example you want ember quessias (yes I know you get them from treelings in Ridge), you pay farmer a set amount of monies and after let's say 6 hours he gives you some herbs. Lower tier herbs are obtained faster, you got the point by now. This acts as a money sink, cause having piles of crystal coins on higher levels is nothing special.
Event tokens: yes they are obtained by winning events, but sometimes it's a tough competition and as playerbase lowers events become negligible beacause noone joins. I have no specific idea for this, but something can be worked out in no time by someone. My shot would be expeditions/daily stuff
Alchemy coins: what are those even, I know there's alot of stuff to be bought for those, but noone knows what are these even, you just randomly get them from mini quests and hoard them in backpacks. Also needs a specific way of obtaining. Same as with event tokens expeditions/daily stuff
Area tokens: you wander around an area, find a lever, place artifact and bam you have a boss which may or may not drop you one token (world bosses too as far as I am concerned), you are like 'cool let's see what I can buy' and then bam you need 250 of those to buy something, like what? Not to mention world bosses spawn once 10/15/20 min and to summon bosses you need artifacts which are not too common. I believe I have never bought anything for those tokens. I say let those drop from area mobs, like ridgfire tokens drop from any monster in Ridge with a chance getting higher as monsters are stronger capping at like 10%. Also reworking rewards to make those appealing and not overpowered, so theres noone farming endlessly tokens to get 2983479283% attack. Even simple exchanging for event/alchemy coins/tools the latter being in high need.
Symbols of sacrifice: just let those be crafted. Not only this helps with training crafting (apart from dusting ground for 10 hours straight) but also helps with anything mentioned previously.
Tools: Everyone needs those as much as ability stones and gems, cause while there's not so big problem on lower grades where you can just loot a weapon again and try getting an ability on it with higher grades it gets worse. For example reward from G8 weapon quest, you cannot re-obtain it so you have to use tools and sometimes alot of them. Not to mention G8 weapon from quest is worse than some G7s and generally much much worse than G8s you loot (I will get to it in a moment).
Items, monster drops etc:
Currently monsters are dropping 'rare items' more often than regular graded items. Let's take an example from red dragons which drop shit load of times with bonuses that are much better than normal graded items and that's not only red dragons like this. Obtaining items like this should be rewarding. A simple workaround would be to make only skulled monsters drop those or something like this. Because currently noones using regular graded items starting from G5 I think, a bit of an exaggeration I know, but it's close to that. I had given out any duplicate of those I had and that was much more than I had regular graded ones. This made getting money even easier cause you just monetize anything that has no special bonuses, of course that's normal, but not when you have 10 'rare items' and like 2-3 normal items from a hunt, smh. Also there should be boss loot system like from real Tibia, anyone who participates gets a share of loot based on how well he did during fight. Because I just farmed world bosses for 3-5 days straight not letting anyone get a chance of loot (berserker life).
Ending speech:
Ascalon has so much potential and could wreck most OTs or at least be on the same level with proper care and sensitive approach. It's better to carefully plan and slowly introduce new things than ruch out with content that's mostly broken, unplayable and totally wrecking current balance. I haven't touched other classes because I simply dont know them too much. I also deliberately didn't talk about some other things as I want to leave those for later and private hearing only. Positive criticism is welcomed, but keep it civil please, don't even bother.
To anyone who read the whole rant
Evul signing out.