I will defend the number of points required to unlock new clade gifts (long-term goals are essential), but I also believe that every creature killed should grant some experience toward the next clade unlock, even if it is just a single point for killing non-fighting animals. Regardless of the sort of mob they are after, players should be rewarded with clade gift experience.
This is supposed to be skill based game not grind based game, i agree that getting skills up and builds done require time to do so but when a small piece of content, essential to pvp requires massive time effort for completing a build it will create a really big gap between new and old players.
Character progression should be easy, getting materials, gear, spells, pets and mounts should be the challenging part.
Idk, in my opinion having such a grind to complete a clade tree or at least get the basic stuff will make combat to be grind based, the more nolife u put into it the better at combat.
A complete different story would be if the first 15 clade points were easy to get that would level the ground for new and older players.
Look at what combat was when x100, people could bypass shitty game design (accounts, characters and progression) by rerolling and leveling stuff back, with not a super tedious clade points grind players would be on even fields, "when skill matters", everyone could access their clade abilities and this made it fair game.
Now, imagine a 1 month old character with 15+ clade skills vs a starting nublet with 3 clade points. How can anyone compete with that, not only gear crutching but also clade crutching. Do we want pvp to be MORE grind based?
I'm not against progression, at all. I like grind and i used to grind a lot in MO1 but when combat is such a key part of the game, shit should be accessible to players and not a grindfest.
Main problem is the x100 speed was working really well in my opinion, they haven't tried the mechanics with 1x (as far as i know) and i think its gonna suck balls in terms of balance, and i think its going to cripple player income by rewarding grind time the way it does.
To be honest, x100 felt really well. Felt organic, fun and definitely not tedious. 50x would still be amazing good but 1x... They really didn't thought certain progressions very well.
And lets not even mention theres NO CLADE TREE RESET OPTION YET, and until then people will be forced to reroll on 1x and lose any character and materials progression unless you pay to win and get a 2nd account.
Grind has to have a purpose higher than the timeframe for exhausting content. This was one of the issues with MO1, certain mechanics would be completly based in time grind and what should have been challenging was instead tedious. For me, thats a wrong approach. People should be required to think instead of repeat the same action one million times, this repetition based model was from another era of gaming.
edit
Last clade point 19 to 20 on my thursar, takes 18300 clade points. Translated in graveyard zombies thats 3660 zombies, considering GY population and respawn time 1 kill every 45sec thats like 46 hours of constant killing zombies, with an average of 3h of gameplay a day thats 15 days, 3h a day of constant zombie killing to get last clade point.
Bandits give 12 cp, with an average 2m per kill thats almost 51 hours of constant bandit killing.
Idk how many points the other clade lvls take but by the looks of it seems like a severals months of farming.
Its understandable the very last clade point takes a while to get, but it would be cool to know how many points per lvl till reaching max lvl.