You are most certainly missing something.
First off, in order to get your stats after you level, you have to visit the stat trainer and pay him money to fight him so he will raise your stats. I didn't notice this untill level 30! You get 5 stat points at a time, and can only train 1 time for each level you have gained. If you have trained and still can't kill stuff, you trained the wrong stats. You can untrain stats by dying and doing a quest for the grim reaper. You have to click on his hourglass to start it. It also took me a while to figure that one out.
The easiest way to do this is to do the werewolf quest and get the Dual Saber, it drains health and magic sometimes when you attack with it.
And I leveled every job to lvl 5 (highest you can go without becoming a gaurdian) and did most of the quests. I am now lvl 86 and I have a house and some art on the walls and a bunch of pets.
Pet rock is your friend. It's free, just go in the shop where you can take the quest to it adds 1 or 2 damage per round to your attack, which isn't much after you get so far, but it really helps 1-30 or so. Cause it's free.
Don't worry bout different shields, there is a quest where you can get a "Frogzard Shield" which at one time was the best in the game, and still is unless you become a guardian.
Oh yeah, the best job by far and away is Necromancer. You turn into a lich when you die and it just gets nasty for whoever is on the oppisite side of the screen.
I give this game 3/5.
It's quite funny at times, it's got some cool artwork in places, massive amounts of gear, more than I could ever concievably tryout by myself. The battle is simplistic and somewhat boring. Most of the Job quests are basiclly the same as a coffer key hunt. They update things a lot and listen to the users. Noone will do anything about people hacking because it doesn't affect other players as it's just an rpg minus the MMO. The most common hack is to make yourself fight only 1 kind of monster, some sort of slime you have to have a certain weapon to kill and it gives tons of xp and gold. In response to this, they limited the amount of xp and gold you can accumulate in one day. I have never reached the limit, cause I don't cheat at anything, so I don't know how much it is.
