In the end, I quickly lost interest in Lineage ][. Why? It's very easy to see why Lineage is ranked as one of the hardest, most monotonous grind games in the online gaming market today. After playing around with the private server, a character that's level 70 with normal attainable equipment and skills can only go around level 5x areas for efficient exp, because the level 70 monsters are way too hard. And healing skills are terrible. So even with a large party it'd still mean some of you will die very often, especially the less-defensive classes. Heck even the offensive skills aren't very damaging.

Here's an example. I was running around with my GM character in the Ketra Orc Fortress, which is supposedly a level 75-85 area. My GM is level 80 with all S-grade equipment upgraded to +100 each (you can't even get +100 equipment in real servers). I still couldn't solo the place without dying. I tried using +30 equipment in a level 70 area and it was still hard. It took ages to kill a single monster, and if you take ages to do that in an aggressive area, you could end up with 5-10 monsters all attacking you at the same time, which means death.

So with a party, I could probably handle the level 70 area alright at level 80. And the killer of exp in this game is that the higher your level in comparison to the monster's, you get greatly less exp as well. That's why it's so hard to grind in this game.

It disappoints me a little. For a game with beautiful graphics, it sure lacks the oomph and excitement of fighting. I guess it's because I got carried by the trailer videos of this pretty elf destroying a bunch of wolves and such. I actually thought fighting would be like that.

If you ask me, I prefer higher damage areas with monsters that die quickly. It means you could die quickly too, but fighting will be fast-paced and action-packed. And in that case, healers are much more useful and necessary in fact (unlike getting a heal of like 800 HP with a long cooldown time when your max HP is like 6K in the current set-up of Lineage).

To conclude, without GM powers, Lineage isn't nearly as enjoyable as I'd hoped.