While the beginning game leveling and gearing is largely fine thanks to the Advanced Eden Gear, I feel like the next steps could still use some smoothing out. This is important, since an enjoyable entry to the game can help retain new players and grow the server population.
Currently, standard advice usually involves farming Zeny for a Glacier Weapon, then farming Zeny to proceed to your end game gear. This can be effective, but it skips large swaths of the experience and also concentrates newer players into a few profitable maps.
My suggestions involve 3 categories: Illusion Gear Enchantments, Old Glast Heim Challenge and Oz Dungeon 2.
Illusion Gear Enchantments
The pieces of gear themselves are great and can serve a player well into the late game. However, the caveat is that these pieces need to be well enchanted to do so.
A perfect enchant system could give players who don’t want to rely on RNG an eventual end goal when farming Illusion Stones.
The numbers could be tweaked, but something like 500 for the first enchant and 750 for the second enchant.
Alternatively, there could be a more expensive random enchant option that only pulls from the Rune Enchant pool.
Old Glast Heim Challenge
The current Temproral Circlet Enchant system is perfect and I see no reason to make any changes to it.
The main issue is with acquiring the materials for the process. My suggestion is to adjust the boss drops table so that the current Level 5 rewards now drop at Level 1. But rather than increasing the drops as you scale up in level, I would suggest lowering the ranges (i.e. Level 10 now drops 7-10 Sealed Temporal Circlets) in order to make farming the Instance more consistent.
This also allows players to begin saving up for their eventual Time Dimensions Rune Crown.
Oz Dungeon 2
Another category where I feel the system is currently fine as is. The issue is that the process is very tedious, especially compared to anything else a newer player has farmed for up to this point.
My suggestion would be to increase the mob density in Oz Dungeon 2 by something like 25-30%. The Dungeon is very large and it’s not uncommon to Teleport 2 or 3 times before finding even small groups. You could also slightly increase the Zeny gained from mobs in the area to help newer players offset the current Perfect Enchant costs.
PvP/WoE
Improving accessibility to the Gear from the above listed categories also has the benefit of easing entry into PvP and WoE, as various Third Classes can continue to use those pieces as characters transition from Mid to Late game.