Hooflung i think your comment of avoiding pvp was directed at me not pepsei. And its not that i don't want pvp, I just want slightly less pvp which is why I want the 'racial" server.
No it wasn't aimed at you. There is nothing wrong with racial PVP if that is how you want to experience the game.
That is actually what I was refering to. I just didn't want to quote it but you've forced my hand.
Anyone that can't 'get into it' early shouldn't really even worry. The game doesn't start really to lvl 40 when you get your mount and until then it is leveling, getting used to the game play and the world PVP.
The true content of the game revolves around PVP through and through. If Pepsei is playing it as a standard MMO he is going to be more heart broken at 80 than he is at 10-20. It is as community goal oriented as Anarchy Online was in its early days.
I wasn't into it at first because I didn't understand how to do combos. I was doing a mix of whack a mole and hitting the combo button whenever it flash like in WoW. Once I understood that a combo required you to look at a completely separate button pops up I stopped losing to two mobs the same level as me and had a lot more fun watching fatalities and such. Barbarians are a ton of fun. I havent tried dodging or blocking anything since I am having my hands full just attacking with two hands.
I have a Follower of set and I havent understoof how to really use magic beyond nuking and tanking. Once I figure out how to properly use roots adn stun as a caster I think that'll be more fun as well.
This game is a lot better than I thought the first 14 or so levels I started playing it.
I have a Follower of set and I havent understoof how to really use magic beyond nuking and tanking. Once I figure out how to properly use roots adn stun as a caster I think that'll be more fun as well.
This game is a lot better than I thought the first 14 or so levels I started playing it.
Just thought I'd chime in here. Been playing a whole bunch of AoC since the Early Access started on Saturday and have had a blast with it. For reference, I've played EQ, AO, DAoC, EQ2, WoW, Guild Wars, and a few others extensively. AoC really does beat the crap out of them, so far at least. I'll just do a quick bullets on my experience so far.
Tortage/Instancing: First, I'm just going to say it: you don't have to kill a single freaking rat, snake, piglet, wolf, or tiger. I love Funcom for this alone. Tortage is the starting city, where you do the first twenty levels. When people complain about the game feeling like a single-player, it's because a lot of the quest content at the noob levels is instanced. The basic way it works is that there are two types of quests: your normal MMO quest that take place during the day and the Destiny quests that take place at night. Daytime content is semi-instanced much like cities in Guild Wars, where each zone has a certain number of people it can contain, then it spawns another instance. There's a button on the mini-map that lets you select which instance you want to go to so you can join friends or leave an instance that's too crowded for your tastes.
Anyway, the Destiny quests are actually a lot of fun. They do feel like a single-player game, but they're heavily story-driven and because all of the content for them is instanced, the quests will always run smoothly and you won't have to wait around for a spawn. You can easily switch back to daytime if you want to just run some random quests or run around and grind with friends.
World: The world is huge. Really. The zones themselves are quite big so once you leave Tortage, so you won't find yourself zoning very often. Load times between zones are roughly the same amount of time it takes you to run through transition areas in WoW, usually 2-5 seconds or so. In terms of design, it's very different than most of the games that are out now. The scenery is pretty lush, and I'd call the overall style sort of a gritty realism. The jungles and forests are pretty, and the battle grounds look like real battlegrounds with dismembered bodies and puddles of blood laying around. You'll also find bodies and heads impaled on spikes, and if you go to the northern part of Conall's, you'll even get to find the hanging tree, with probably 10 or 12 bodies being hanged, a bunch of crows flying overhead, and another pile of corpses on the ground with flies buzzing around. Very much not WoW-cartoony. That said, some of the pathing is a little annoying every once in a while, and one of the resource-gathering zones (Lacheish Plains) seems to be very bugged and will make you crash repeatedly until you leave the zone if you spend any time in it.
Combat and healing: Really fun. Actually feels a lot of like old-school Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat sometimes when you're using your combos and switching them up to get around the other guy's shields. As a former WoW raider, I can probably best sum up combat and healing like this: it's impossible to watch TV and play AoC at the same time, i.e. if you're healing, you can't watch health bars out of the corner of your eye while you watch. Both combat and healing are too active and require a great deal of micromanagement. Healing, you need to keep your two HoTs up at pretty much all times, then help mitigate damage through your own DPS, stuns, knockbacks, and CC while saving your burst heal (30 second cooldown) for real emergencies.
Combat, you need to watch your enemy's shields (NPCs only, really. Too much micromanagement for players to worry about them now, while we're all still learning the game). The shields mitigate a ton of damage, and popping your biggest combo on a side that has all three shields will get you about a third of the damage you'd normally do. Crits happen, but the game doesn't seem to be very crit-dependent, which is nice as it reduces the luck component. No idea if this changes at higher levels, though.
PvP: Still too early to tell, honestly. All classes and specs seem viable for PvP so far, and pure PvE specs like healing and tanking in WoW are flat-out impossible. Everyone can do DPS and everyone is expected to. The fights I've been in (level 33 now) have been a lot of fun, and skill in choosing your combos and supporting each other correctly makes a huge difference. Again, though, no one's 80 yet (well, not without exploiting) and there aren't enough people high enough to get a real sense of the classes yet. Based on experience so far, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic.
Anyway, need to wrap this up, but overall I'd definitely say the game had a great launch with a few hiccups. It's been nice and stable all the time, with the only crashes I've had in the bugged zone. The game seems to almost always crash shutting down, though. Annoying, and something they'll hopefully fix soon.
Tortage/Instancing: First, I'm just going to say it: you don't have to kill a single freaking rat, snake, piglet, wolf, or tiger. I love Funcom for this alone. Tortage is the starting city, where you do the first twenty levels. When people complain about the game feeling like a single-player, it's because a lot of the quest content at the noob levels is instanced. The basic way it works is that there are two types of quests: your normal MMO quest that take place during the day and the Destiny quests that take place at night. Daytime content is semi-instanced much like cities in Guild Wars, where each zone has a certain number of people it can contain, then it spawns another instance. There's a button on the mini-map that lets you select which instance you want to go to so you can join friends or leave an instance that's too crowded for your tastes.
Anyway, the Destiny quests are actually a lot of fun. They do feel like a single-player game, but they're heavily story-driven and because all of the content for them is instanced, the quests will always run smoothly and you won't have to wait around for a spawn. You can easily switch back to daytime if you want to just run some random quests or run around and grind with friends.
World: The world is huge. Really. The zones themselves are quite big so once you leave Tortage, so you won't find yourself zoning very often. Load times between zones are roughly the same amount of time it takes you to run through transition areas in WoW, usually 2-5 seconds or so. In terms of design, it's very different than most of the games that are out now. The scenery is pretty lush, and I'd call the overall style sort of a gritty realism. The jungles and forests are pretty, and the battle grounds look like real battlegrounds with dismembered bodies and puddles of blood laying around. You'll also find bodies and heads impaled on spikes, and if you go to the northern part of Conall's, you'll even get to find the hanging tree, with probably 10 or 12 bodies being hanged, a bunch of crows flying overhead, and another pile of corpses on the ground with flies buzzing around. Very much not WoW-cartoony. That said, some of the pathing is a little annoying every once in a while, and one of the resource-gathering zones (Lacheish Plains) seems to be very bugged and will make you crash repeatedly until you leave the zone if you spend any time in it.
Combat and healing: Really fun. Actually feels a lot of like old-school Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat sometimes when you're using your combos and switching them up to get around the other guy's shields. As a former WoW raider, I can probably best sum up combat and healing like this: it's impossible to watch TV and play AoC at the same time, i.e. if you're healing, you can't watch health bars out of the corner of your eye while you watch. Both combat and healing are too active and require a great deal of micromanagement. Healing, you need to keep your two HoTs up at pretty much all times, then help mitigate damage through your own DPS, stuns, knockbacks, and CC while saving your burst heal (30 second cooldown) for real emergencies.
Combat, you need to watch your enemy's shields (NPCs only, really. Too much micromanagement for players to worry about them now, while we're all still learning the game). The shields mitigate a ton of damage, and popping your biggest combo on a side that has all three shields will get you about a third of the damage you'd normally do. Crits happen, but the game doesn't seem to be very crit-dependent, which is nice as it reduces the luck component. No idea if this changes at higher levels, though.
PvP: Still too early to tell, honestly. All classes and specs seem viable for PvP so far, and pure PvE specs like healing and tanking in WoW are flat-out impossible. Everyone can do DPS and everyone is expected to. The fights I've been in (level 33 now) have been a lot of fun, and skill in choosing your combos and supporting each other correctly makes a huge difference. Again, though, no one's 80 yet (well, not without exploiting) and there aren't enough people high enough to get a real sense of the classes yet. Based on experience so far, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic.
Anyway, need to wrap this up, but overall I'd definitely say the game had a great launch with a few hiccups. It's been nice and stable all the time, with the only crashes I've had in the bugged zone. The game seems to almost always crash shutting down, though. Annoying, and something they'll hopefully fix soon.
VashHT
Diamond Member
- Feb 1, 2007
- 3,351
- 1,431
- 136
Here's my first impressions:
Bought this yesterday, installed and patched fine in Vista x64, took me about 20 min to patch I think. I joined a pvp server, Shadowblade. So far I'm playing a conqueror, and its good fun so far. Runs much smoother than the beta, and loading times are way better. A lot of the little annoying things from the beta are fixed in the retail, its running really well so far. I didn't play a lot yet, but so far its a lot of fun, the combat is fun and so far I haven't even been ganked.
One problem I have already is the urge to make an alt lol, so many classes sound so cool that I can see myself making a ton of different guys. The DT sounds really cool, same with barbarian and assassin, hopefully I can force myself to stick with conqueror long enough to see what they're really like.
Is there any point to doing the single player night thing? It seems like a lot of the quests disappear at night, is there anything that you HAVE to do as single player?
As far as graphics go, I'm playing at 1920x1080 (37" screen heh), I set the defaul "high" setting then turned on 4xAA and changed the shader model to 3.0(it was 2.x for some reason). I get around 40fps most of the time, dips down occasionally so I might turn my AA down to 2 but so far I haven't run into any hitching that got int he way for playing the game.
Bought this yesterday, installed and patched fine in Vista x64, took me about 20 min to patch I think. I joined a pvp server, Shadowblade. So far I'm playing a conqueror, and its good fun so far. Runs much smoother than the beta, and loading times are way better. A lot of the little annoying things from the beta are fixed in the retail, its running really well so far. I didn't play a lot yet, but so far its a lot of fun, the combat is fun and so far I haven't even been ganked.
One problem I have already is the urge to make an alt lol, so many classes sound so cool that I can see myself making a ton of different guys. The DT sounds really cool, same with barbarian and assassin, hopefully I can force myself to stick with conqueror long enough to see what they're really like.
Is there any point to doing the single player night thing? It seems like a lot of the quests disappear at night, is there anything that you HAVE to do as single player?
As far as graphics go, I'm playing at 1920x1080 (37" screen heh), I set the defaul "high" setting then turned on 4xAA and changed the shader model to 3.0(it was 2.x for some reason). I get around 40fps most of the time, dips down occasionally so I might turn my AA down to 2 but so far I haven't run into any hitching that got int he way for playing the game.
The quest rewards at the end are pretty awesome. Biggest thing you get is a blue weapon that you'll be using until at least level 30, when you can finally get an upgrade. I got mine from one of the Ymirish quest lines in Conall's Valley (Decimate the Horde line), and you can get a few different pieces of very nice blue armor along the way.
The rewards and exp from the night quests are way better than the daytime quests. I'm playing on a PvP server and I keep getting ganked. I really don't understand how cc and dodging works in this game. At level 14 I was stun/rooted by both a tempest of set and a ranger. They just kept me at a distance and kept firing away and I coudln't figure out how to counter it. When I was fighting a rogue he kept sidestepping and my attacks were going right through him.
I think the biggest part of the problem is that at low levels casters have all their CC tools, but melees don't have their anti-CC tools quite yet. Soldiers get a good basic charge, some of their own anti-root and snare abilities, and some other stuff to help close. My bear shaman just got Grace of Nature a few levels ago, which helps out a ton, too. 5 seconds of group root immunity on a 40 second cooldown, very cool ability. Ranged is pretty evil at low levels, but it seems like it evens out a bit more later. Still tough to call, tough.
I'm on Cimmeria (RP-PvP server) and the ganking really hasn't been too bad at all. It does sound like a few of the servers have basically devolved into a team death match, though. If you got one that's just a cesspool, you might think about just starting over on a different server. Once you learn the area, you can get through the first twenty levels on Tortage in a day or two easily enough, and to 13 or 14 in 5 or 6 hours. I really haven't seen much on the RP end - which is fine with me, went there for a chance at an older crowd rather than RP - but there's plenty of PvP going on. Re-roll to an RP-PvP server might be somethng to think about if your server just sucks (it happens).
Gothgar
Lifer
- Sep 1, 2004
- 13,429
- 1
- 0
:thumbsup::thumbsup:
Played last night after the long ass install... this game rocks, smooth and polished (at least low level) better than WoW was when it first came out easy.
The story is great too! The night-time quests are interesting, and it almost feels like a standard story driven RPG, which is awesome! And with a click of a button you go back to day-time standard MMO style play.
My biggest grief: I think I am going to spend way to much time playing this game.
Played last night after the long ass install... this game rocks, smooth and polished (at least low level) better than WoW was when it first came out easy.
The story is great too! The night-time quests are interesting, and it almost feels like a standard story driven RPG, which is awesome! And with a click of a button you go back to day-time standard MMO style play.
My biggest grief: I think I am going to spend way to much time playing this game.
A friend gave me a 7 day pass and all of my old wow guild mates are playing. From what I've read the game seems very interesting. There seems to be some "ganking" going on. Is this something you can elect like in wow PVE servers or do you just have to endure the backstab stuff? I don't miss wow but I do miss the MMO with my friends.
Here is my first impression.
I played for 20 minutes and the servers were taking down. They won't be back up until after i go back to work and i won't be able to play again until tomorrow now.
So....yea i have no comments on the game other than i enjoyed the first 20 minutes.
I played for 20 minutes and the servers were taking down. They won't be back up until after i go back to work and i won't be able to play again until tomorrow now.
So....yea i have no comments on the game other than i enjoyed the first 20 minutes.
I have a level 16 Dark Templar and this class is great in pve, but I get my ass handed to me in PVP. It seems a lot of the higher level DTs are having the same sort of issue in the higher levels (40+) as well. What's funcom's track record on balancing?
The Destiny quests are generally pretty unique and interesting, and it basically works like an epic quest line that takes you all the way to 80. Tons of great rewards and such along the way, too.
A lot of the other quests are, at a basic level, standard drop and kill quests, but the way the game plays they're much more interesting. The game is actually fairly dark and this comes out in a lot of the quests. You've got some revenge quests from dying men, a few of them standing around with one arm, and bloody guys just kinda laying there. For the drop quests, though, you'll always get a quest drop you need from a quest spawn. The rewards are really good, too, both in terms of item rewards and exp. Some of the bigger quest chains will be worth a full level of exp or more, as well as just being fun. Really had a blast in a full group doing the Ymirish quests in Conall's Valley. Fighting's really frenetic, with lots of pathers and respawns, and you have a lot of those "oh, crap!" moments where you're just about to finish a big fight, then you get an add and have to squeak out just a bit more.
The other thing that makes the quests a lot more interesting is that the game switches around to a cutscene view and you get actual dialog options, and the dialog is fairly interesting. Easily some of the best quest dialog in any MMO, especially with lines like "By Crom's balls ..." and "... you could gargle a bucket of wolf piss, for all I care." Then there's the quest from the madam of the Tortage brothel who gives you a quest to kill some pirates and get their cash because they were sleeping with her girls and not paying for it.
It's a pretty cool aesthetic, actually. They really manage to capture the over-the-top nature of the Conan series without making it too campy or too cheesy.
Anubis
No Lifer
WoW has been out for nearly 4 years and blizzard still fails at estimating server downtimes, dont expect Funcom to figure it out anytime soon
novasatori
Diamond Member
- Feb 27, 2003
- 3,851
- 1
- 0
Yeah, seriously. EVE and SWG are the only two games that have every been consitantly up on time. Also, its early into launch meaning they might be hot fixing bugs they've been profiling for a while.
Just like when I used to make lvl 50s in CoH in 12 hours with a friend for 2 years after release.
Fun indeed
They were banned.
As for which PvP server to avoid all-out gankfest, I think that the Goon Squad from Something Awful went over to Deathwhisper, so that would be one to avoid if you don't enjoy that.
I've read that alot of players on EJ and FoH are going to Set, which is an RP-PvP server?
I'm also glad to read that combo's are in the game. They had something similar to this in FFXI, where you had to coordinate special attacks with your group, and if you timed it right and did certain special attacks in the correct order, you would get bonus damage at the end. It made the game really involved (minus the hellish grinding) and actually made you seek out good players who/knew could do the combos. Now if they could implement the subjobs like FFXI then I'd jump in.
Anyone have a pass they'd want to share?
Age of ExtendedMaintenance, IMO.
I played in the beta and then early access. The beta client was trash. If I didn't pre-order before I played beta I probably wouldn't have bought the game, but as it turned out the retail client was much better and fixed almost all the bugs in the beta client.
The game play is much like WoW. Quest system is virtually the same, as is xp and combat feel, though the interactive combat system is a lot more fun.
Graphically, the game looks amazing and yet doesn't really require obscene hardware to run.
PvP needs a few kinks worked out, for example spawn camping is a little stupid right now, but I do prefer FFA PvP over WoW's artificial horde vs alliance system.
The only thing I can complain about so far is the horrible downtime. Early access was supposed to be 3 days, what a joke. Server openings were delayed by some 5 hours, servers were brought back down for emergency maintenance Sunday morning, then Monday right at prime time servers were brought down for what ended up being about 9 more hours of downtime. Instead of 3 days to play, early access was about 30 hours. And now, after retail, we have more unscheduled downtimes. This is terrible.
I played in the beta and then early access. The beta client was trash. If I didn't pre-order before I played beta I probably wouldn't have bought the game, but as it turned out the retail client was much better and fixed almost all the bugs in the beta client.
The game play is much like WoW. Quest system is virtually the same, as is xp and combat feel, though the interactive combat system is a lot more fun.
Graphically, the game looks amazing and yet doesn't really require obscene hardware to run.
PvP needs a few kinks worked out, for example spawn camping is a little stupid right now, but I do prefer FFA PvP over WoW's artificial horde vs alliance system.
The only thing I can complain about so far is the horrible downtime. Early access was supposed to be 3 days, what a joke. Server openings were delayed by some 5 hours, servers were brought back down for emergency maintenance Sunday morning, then Monday right at prime time servers were brought down for what ended up being about 9 more hours of downtime. Instead of 3 days to play, early access was about 30 hours. And now, after retail, we have more unscheduled downtimes. This is terrible.
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