Hello, I recently started playing ladder slasher about a week ago and I wanted to share my thoughts on it from the perspective of a potential new player. Hopefully, it can lead to improvements and ergo, some more activity from new people.
1) without a doubt, the biggest issue is that it is impossible and pointless for new players. I was struggling through exploring the lab by myself and managed to get to lvl 25 before partyplanner, my guild leader, randomly msgs me and invites me to do the MQ with him. didn't believe how that was possible but then he bought me some basic gear (lvl 25-30 gear for 20 fg) and our party goes 1-71 in TWO HOURS. I was pretty much useless after lvl 30 but that didn't matter.
I spent 3 days just grinding out 1-25 and in two hours, we do the entire MQ. That's absurd. The game is extremely unbalanced for the gap to be that large. There is no point in trying to solo this game. I was on the brink of completely stopping before he had msg'd me. The fact that I need the charity of someone else to have any chance at all of playing this game past lvl 25, let alone lvl 50, is a big problem and I feel the great majority of new players that have tried and stopped this game see this monumental task and immediately realize it's pointless.
2) The marketplace is too inactive to find decent newbie gear. There's simply not enough of what you need to be able to effectively progress beyond lvl 30 in a timely manner. You will dying too much and your gear will become obsolete pretty soon. You then have to refresh most of your gear every 10 levels. I can only imagine how difficult it is to find decent gear after lvl 50. I'm sure most rpg games have this issue but, to me, it seems like this item "decay" is much more prominent here.
3) The "Master Quest" is a game of luck. This whole time, I thought it was this big bad monster you had to fight at the end as a challenge but it turns out to be putting a key in a slot and hoping that you guess correctly. That was extremely disappointing.
4) The proficiencies take too long. I have to do the effusing/transmuting one like 200-500 times before I lvl up once. That seems like way too much work for a moderate improvement. Same goes for fishing and cooking. It should be easier to lvl up at the beginning and much harder to level later on to make it seem like it's worth it. I honestly just got discouraged by how long it takes and stopped completely which seems like a consistent issue across the board.
5) There's only one gear stat that matters, ee. The rest is pointless. I feel that a lot of time and creativity was spent coming up with these stat properties on items (most of which are really interesting) and none of them make the slightest difference. Most of the time, it's unnoticeable. An item could have max stats on almost every other property like mana consumption, damage return, jubilance, power shot, etc, and it wouldn't be worth anything without ee.
Those were my biggest issues with this game. I tried it, and I'm not quite sure how much longer I am willing to play.
For most of the old school players here who have great gear, I can definitely understand how it may be a fun game, especially in a party, but for me, someone who's just starting out with a relatively modest budget, there are simply one too many hurdles to jump through and not enough payoff. Seems like there's just such a gear inbalance that at some point soon after starting, new players are going to stop completely because they keep questioning themselves if it's worth it.