I prefer the new victoria island map to the old. The chief complaint I'm seeing is that it lacks details compared to the old, that it's bland and uninteresting. The key thing I like about the new one is there's far more contrast now between map dots, paths between them and the background than there was before. The map structure is still the same as what it was prior to the change, but it's been cleaned up and, honestly, feels easier to look at and seems to make it much more apparent that there are certain areas(nautilus, elodin, kerning tower, etc) that can be clicked on for an expanded view of just that area.
Let's be real here, the game already only had seven separate worlds, just with the alliance worlds it looked like there were more than what was really there.
It's 7 to 4, not 18 to 4. The alliance worlds are one server with six(or two for broa/khaini) access points. All this amounts to is getting rid of three servers and cleaning up the world list.
Shade is fun, but a double-edged sword of sorts. The class has a whopping three buffs; maple warrior, spirit bond max and heroic memories(the latter two being 140/190 hyper skills respectively), so dying in a boss or something yields very little rebuff downtime. Has two passive skills to cheat death, one's a guarantee with like a 30-minute cooldown(summon other spirit) and the other has a 10% trigger chance and doesn't have a cooldown I don't think(close call, also the link skill). Is fairly tanky(for a pirate, anyway), has a beginner passive that restores 1% HP per hit, gives 100% knockback resistance and reduces incoming damage by 30%(including percentage-based boss attacks)
But on the other side of the coin there are no buffs to increase attack power, so the class is a bit more reliant on potential than other classes might be.
