The Mog Blog

Once in every great while in any online RPG or MMO, you start questioning if there’s enough content for you to keep your interest in the game. Especially with how Phantasy Star Online 2 was like a bit before new classes were added, things felt really dry and off-paced. With the recent update that introduces Very Har mode and the new level cap to 50, we went in hoping that it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to hit 50 within a week and hope that we weren’t be starved for content yet again.

… We never expected it to be this bad.

Very Die Hard

Very Hard mode was introduced to all quests. Nothing too different from what you would expect. The biggest change is rare bosses and rare mobs that can spawn only in Very Hard. Though, what’s most important is the additional items that you can farm. This now also includes 10* rares, new Photon Arts, and Photon Arts that go beyond level 10. There is a catch, though: 10* rares and Photon Art Discs 11+ are bound to your account. This means that you cannot camp the player shops and obtain these items.

To push the point further, the devs decided that the value of meseta is quickly decreasing and would cause new players to struggle with purchasing equipment. To alleviate this, the NPC sell prices for most items have been reduced. I’m not much of an economist, but I’ll be one to admit that all I really spend my meseta on is for grinding and costume parts. Especially now with the rare items I want that are account bound on pick up, I really have nothing to really buy except for aesthetics. Though, I would love to spend all the meseta for affix upgrades, but that’s a huge money sink and I usually reserve that for higher level gear.

Overall, I have less meseta on hand, items are cheaper-ish on the player shops, but I don’t see this fixing the initial issue at hand.

41-50

Unlocking the next set of levels proved to be a surprise for a lot of players. Upon completing the Client Order and leveling up to 41, the exp required to hit 42 probably made a lot of people upset. While I do not have a screenshot of it (even I was too shocked at it), 41 to 42 required around 2x the amount of EXP needed to hit 1-41. The ridiculous long grind was implemented early in the development of the game and the original idea was to prolong the game enough so that players who hit cap later on in the year will still have things to do with their plan to implement an “EXCUBE” system that would be used to reward players with the additional EXP they grind beyond the cap.

Of course, everyone was upset about the fact that they have to grind for weeks in order to even hit the next level. SEGA opted to recurve the EXP requirements, and while it’s still a rough grind (I have yet to find anyone who is level 50), getting the required levels to hit the VH areas and the new +5 Skill Point client order is not as steep and impractical as before.

I’m currently sitting at 45 Gunner and 43 Ranger. While I’m not sure if I’ll be able to hit 50 on both before International Release, I’m not stressing out over it either. It reminds me more of the time in PSO1 where once you hit a certain point, levels generally do not matter too much. While there is a purpose to leveling in PSO2 (Skill Points and level unlocks), I never felt so inclined to reach the cap in either of those games. After all, PSO is about rare hunting and that is something I’ve concentrated on almost exclusively at this point.