I know this is a drop in the bucket at this point, but some of these Dan tests are absolutely rancid. I just finished S rank on Charging Strike Dan 2, and although I passed it with the required rank on the first try, I couldn't help but notice that it continues the same trend as a lot of the other Dan tests: you need a lot of luck. In the charging strike test, your success is entirely dependent on how often you do or don't hit enemy passive defense without critting. If you do, you can easily lose 10 seconds to retaliation and the constant double aggro, often forcing you into situations where you must necessarily get hit due entirely to random chance because you've been stripped of almost all your retaliation skills in the test. If enemies go into deadly, this can happen, too, and you don't even have time to prime the enemies with a normal attack due to the very high aggro speed of the gremlins, and the chance of your animation taking too long due to passive defense. It reminded me a lot of the shuriken charge dan test, where when going for dan 3, I passed the 1st day's test on the 1st try, but the 2nd day took 21 tries of doing the exact same thing to get the same result. I looked up videos of the test and they were using the same strategies I was, it was just luck. The test was entirely dependent on random critical hits, random deadly status, and random spawn placement (because you need the splash damage). Some tests, like human magnum shot, are random enough to pass in perfect conditions, but might even be impossible if you live on the east coast and don't play through ethernet due to micro lag causing issues like Defense having a roughly 1/4 second buffer period where it doesn't work even though it's fully loaded, effectively preventing its use in a lot of close-quarters scenarios. I saw a strategy for preventing some time loss due to heavy gargoyle aggro in the Magnum Shot dan test, where you hit the heavy gargoyle with a normal arrow and then charge defense, let him hit that, and then use magnum shot. When I use that strategy, I can't even aim the magnum shot before I get hit, and if the gargoyle is too close when he gets hit with my arrow, then the aforementioned defense buffer period becomes an issue, and causes me to get hit and go flying backwards with a fully charged defense bubble over my head, and my connection is perfectly playable, it's just not west coast perfect.
The Defense dan test is also a particularly bad offender, as your ability to fulfill the requirements is dependent entirely on random chance. Random enemy aggro, random enemy spawn locations (which often determine the aggro), random enemy AI, random enemy crits on your defense (because, from my experience, you must have near max health at the end in order to pass with the required rank) and random poison chances from hits that are often unavoidable because, again, you have been stripped of almost every reasonable recourse, and in the case of the defense dan test, killing enemies (especially the snakes) while they're not charging defense is detrimental, and could easily result in you failing, or not passing with the required rank.
All Dan test issues could be easily fixed by simply increasing the points gained for fulfillment of a goal. The Potion Making dan test is a great example of it being done right. There's enough time to get ~14000 points in each test, the randomness involved is minimal (99% crafting rate), and 99% of the test is about actually learning what you need to do, as opposed to 99% of the test being gambling on whether or not the objectively best strategy will actually work or not. Potion Making requires you to learn the minimum amount of potions of each type that you have to make, and requires you to watch the NPCs to see when to give them the potions, and how many they need. If you can get the potions, the amounts, and the order right, then you will pass.
I don't expect them to redesign any of the tests, but they should definitely increase point gain values on most of them. As it stands now, most combat-oriented dan tests are only testing two things: your sanity and your wallet.
