User blog:Talvis/Thoughts on Episode 14.3

Well, it's been a few months now since iRO implemented the 14.3 update, the final battle against the great fire demon Surt,  I mean Satan Morocc. Spoiler warning to those who like being surpirsed by the story lines.

First and formost, the testing phase was done stupidly. The way the Sakray test server was set up, you couldn't properly test the update. Literally the only thing on the test server was the new content, but even that wasn't fully there. Some quests weren't avaliable for testing, including the quest needed to gain access to the Flame Basin area. Needless to say, when the patch went live it was bugged.

Now for the content itself. The patch brings 2 open maps and 4 Memorial Dungeons. The open maps, Flame Basin and Fire Cave (I think that's their names) are accessed after doing  a series of quests, OBNOXIOUSLY TEDIOUS HUNTING AND ITEM GATHERING QUESTS! One personal pet pieve with this is that the inital npc to start the quest doesn't even have a quest marker. RO now has a quest journal system that allows for markers and such like modern mmos, but it still doesn't universally use them. Not using them on old quests is one thing, but all new quests should make full use of the quest journal window. Once you've finished the initial quests, you can start the progression of 3 Memorial Dungeons related to killing Satan Morocc; Bios Island, Mores Cave, and Demons Temple. Initially you have to do them in order, but after that they can be repeated daily.

Conclusion:

This update is both fun and tedious. At least the bosses don't go down in under a minute like a lot of mvps and bosses in the game. However, the battles are almost too long with little danger in them. It's a step in the right direction, but more balancing is needed. The focused too much on making the battles long, but made the attacks too weak, so it seems more tedius than challenging. My recommendations would be to probably drop their HP but drastically up their attack powers to make it less tedius and more challenging. Though, some of the boss gimmicks do make the battles interesting.