While Epic Seven is praised for its gorgeous graphics and fast engine, what dissuades newcomers away or frustrates its existing playerbase are certain gameplay mechanics and features.
- The Gear Unequip cost is a Money Sink that could easily drain a player's gold if they constantly unequip end-game items (Lv.70 and Lv.85 gear respectively cost 25,000 and 50,000 per piece). Free Unequip events exist to help ease this, but it developed a mentality of waiting and swapping only when this event occurs, otherwise, the F2P could waste millions swapping end-game items. While the fanbase might agree that gear unequip costs don't have to be removed entirely, at least reducing them for end-game gears could suffice, especially since there are other gold sinks already.
- The layers of RNG on equipment can make the grind feel unrewarding. It's a major turn-off for players if the gear becomes junk when it rolls on unwanted stats despite costing a lot of gold. Imagine spending so much effort and money just to end up with junk gears.
- By "unwanted substats", it's possible to have high rolls that don't complement the Hero's playstyle (like a healer having high DPS substats). These are simply swapped for better-suited equipment. In other words, the main stat and set can be good, but the substats can be crap because of RNG. Also, equipment that rolls too much into Effect Resistance is considered useless for many players unless they are building Elena or Angelic Montmorancy (the only Heroes who scale well with this stat).
- Exclusive Equipment rolling into two layers of RNG (The main stat's value from a given range, and the skill upgrade out of three possibilities) means that it's possible for the player to be unsatisfied with the results, thus having the need to farm the Hall of Trials again for another attempt at getting a better EE. While the Sanctuary gives players the freedom to craft their own specified EE, they need to sacrifice several Exclusive Equipment first.
- The process of Enhancing/upgrading gears is also reliant on several RNG factors (The chance of getting Good or Great enhancements, what old substats are buffed or new substats are added for every +3 threshold). But with the Gear Unequip Cost, there are two Money Sinks to deal with if you want to upgrade and swap gears outside of Free Unequip events.
- A QoL was added to reduce some RNG layers; Equipment Conversion helps players to choose the main stat and set, but it also requires resources and gold while the substats are still random. As of mid-2020, these resources are "Cores" that can be extracted from unwanted Lv.58+ equipment. However, this feature or QoL is seen as something that beginners can't easily reach just yet.
- The entire Promotion mechanic, especially when promoting a Hero to 6★. It takes a long time to level-grind lower-rarity fodders just to sacrifice them to higher-rarity fodders and so forth. It's seen as a Fake Longevity factor.
- 15% Innate Effect Resistance. As officially explained here
, the chance of inflicting a debuff cannot exceed 85%, so no matter how high your Effectiveness stat is, there's still a 15% chance for the debuff to fail. Heroes with "Ignore Effect Resistance" can bypass this. But for a lot of players, this mechanic shouldn't exist since it's just another RNG factor that could mess with Heroes who rely on debuffing enemies. - Skill Enhancement is dreaded by the F2P since MolaGora and MolaGoraGo are two precious resources that don't come often. Problem is, it requires dozens of these to fully enhance just one character, especially if those are natural 4★-5★ Heroes (although 4★ obviously use fewer Molas than 5★ heroes). The F2P would most likely take months just to enhance a Hero's skills to +15, and it's generally more convenient to level up certain 3★ heroes (even for whales) since there are 3★ who can do the job just as good as (if not better than) their higher rarity counterparts (and enhancing skills for 3★ only cost stigmas, a currency that's VERY easy to farm).
- For years, Epic Seven doesn't have a 10x/multi-draw feature in most banners despite having it in Selective Summons and Friendship Summons. So if you're unlucky and had to hit the safety net for the featured hero, you have to tap the screen at least 121 times. A QoL was added to skip the "Draw again" prompt to save some time.
- The last quarter of 2019 had updates that were deemed mediocre by the veterans, namely Pets/Repeat Battling requiring Homemade Snacks, costly Equipment Conversion requirements, and underwhelming Word Boss rewards. The Real-Time Arena at launch also had a repetitive meta made up of Game-Breaker characters. Several updates solved these concerns, but only after the game had been review-bombed on the Google Play store. The hate for the Homemade Snack even made the E7 Reddit to set it as their downvote icon for a long time.
- While it was nice to finally have a Story Journal that allows players to rewatch story cutscenes and dialogue in-game, Side Stories require the player to own the specified Heroes first, otherwise, the stories can't be accessed. This is frowned as an odd choice as it requires luck from the gacha. There's also the fact that the Story Journal doesn't contain all the side stories the moment they get released, you have to wait for future updates hoping that they will be added. Players would just watch the story on YouTube or read text summaries instead because of these in-game limitations.
