So I ended up rolling my toon on set, and have since hit 80 on my first character. It ended up being a tempest of set which has been a blast, but the guild I am in needs a Priest of Mitra so I decided to re-roll and am almost to level cap with a bit of help from the guild.
Overall my impressions of this game have not diminished, but they are certainly better than what I would have expected from reading some of the dribble on the web. First and foremost, leveling is easy on the PVE servers, plenty of quests, very little grinding now and a lot of instance groups once you hit around 30 on up. There is no huge need for the latest and greatest gear and people seem generally willing to help each other.
Endgame is rather nice as well; there are several raid instances that are farmed by guilds and pugs alike. They are on a once a week timer, where as the single group instances have no timers on them, it is run it as often as you would like zones which is nice if you need to farm for items.
Player crafted items are very useful and I have found crafting leveling to be fairly rewarding for the most part. It is not the best, but it is not the worst out there. With very little grinding involved in it.
I am impressed with the game so far, it has provided a lot of things to do with continued additions coming down the line.
Yep that is right, in fact Global chat in AOC is worse than Barrens Chat in WOW, which is kind of hard to achieve considering the poor choice in topics there. At least it is entertaining.
So, like all games you try and hit level cap as quick as possible so that you can get a real feel for what the game is like. I am sitting at just over 4 days played total and I am close to level cap. In War, it took a similar amount of time, and even in WOW is was close, but there seems to be a greater feeling of accomplishment with the higher number that AOC provides.
Now there is more to level in War then just hitting level cap, there is renown rank, which AOC does have PVP rank, but it seems to be way less important than hitting RR 80 in War. Ontologically, they are focusing on different areas. Where as War focuses on getting your character to 40 then the real grind begins because the best items are PVP related and earned, AOC has the PVP caveat for those who like it, but that are encapsulated in a raiding environment where PVP is not the core.
In both instances you will end up doing the same thing over and over, but in War you will end up doing that substantially quicker due to the limited scope that endgame seems to focus on. Now with the huge expansion on the horizon that might change, but that is still a ways off and it could be the Trials of Atlantis that plagued DAOC being brought to war. I say that lightly, but we are not 6 months after release and we have seen several huge promise that where made by Mythic broken.
So when I started out playing AOC a couple of weeks ago my buddy fatpork was coming over with me. He decided that he was going to roll a necromancer, so that was off the table so I tried out a few classes over a couple of days while he got the game downloaded and installed. First I tried the demonologist, your basic heavy direct damage/aoe DD caster class. It has low survivability but hits like a Mac truck. You get a naked succubus, or partially clothed incubus if you are into a guy trailing you around. Overall, I enjoyed the class, but I was not interested being so dependent on potions and healers.
The next class I played was a Herald of Xolti, this class I know will be my first alt, she was so much fun it was staggering. I read on AOC Forums
This is not a class I would recommend for beginners, it has a limited number of tools to deal with most situations and PvP. If you're looking for AE damage with more survivability and versatility, the overwhelming consensus is to play a Tempest of Set. If you're a masochist, want a little extra damage, and if a fire-slinging, sword-wielding, crocs-wearing battlemage sounds fun to you, roll up a HoX.
That just struck me, a melee mage that has almost the best of both worlds, of course there is the huge weakness in being a clothie, but you get a self restoring shield and so on. I passed on this for now since I would be grouping with a buddy, and there was only one other class that just stuck in my mind.
The tempest of set and healers in general in AOC are probably the best healers of any game I have ever seen. You can heal moderately well, and you can dps like any other dps class. In some cases, priest of mitra, you have a ton of CC as well. There are down sides, you have little survivability, healing in AOC is not like healing in other games where you can full heal yourself with one spell, it takes a lot of work, so you have to live by killing.
Onto the tempest, tempests are aoe healers and very heavy aoe dps. They can put out very high numbers if speced properly, and can heal very well while doing it. I chose this class largely because I like the idea of being able to heal well and dps well all in one package. It is Shadow Priest 2.0 + extras. Being that AOC relies a lot of group pulls of mobs and so on the aoe ability is key to leveling quickly, and with my buddy at the helm of a necromancer we are off.
I will give more details soon a few notes.
AOC so far is a great game, a lot of the commotion that was around when it was released has been fixed and the game is on much better footing.
Classes in AOC in some cases are very different and in others are very similar to what you have seen before.
Combat is very interactive for melee classes, you have to control combos, actively block, positions and so on to be effective, which is something button mashing games don't offer.
Finally, the graphics are amazing, as I have been leveling I have seen oceans with tropics, to the frozen tundra’s, in some areas it makes Crysis graphics look weak.
Well I have not posted in a bit, and when I last posted I was having issues of being burned out on Warhammer and as I have taken my break I have yet to have the desire to go back. There are several reasons why I feel this way. The first of which is that I have seen and done all of the endgame PVE, and to be honest what is there is lackluster and un-polished. They are zones the size of AQ40 with no way for fast transportation, or even original fights. In fact every boss fight is a spank and tank.
Now to the core of the game, PVP. I feel that there was too much of a push to do scenarios. The carrot that was dangled was too great to ignore that you had to go after it which meant that oRVR was left to rot. Additionally even after limiting the number of people in sieges, of which I was a vocal opponent, there is still to much lag and it is not smooth as promised prior to launch. It leaves me with the feeling that there are so many things that are un-kept in this game that should have been looked at and where not. Look at the city siege, doing PVE in order to get to the king in a process that is very one sided on most servers with balance any where form 2:1 to 4:1 ratios.
These are just some notes on why I am not happy with Warhammer. My buddy Fat and I decided to try our AOC since it has been out almost a year and we are having a good time so far, but it has had a year to polish and that is what has happened. Mythic has had almost a year to polish and all they had done is adding content and nerfing classes. I wish you all the best in your adventures.
Happy Hunting
Enslaver
Just like last Sunday, it is here again. Post whatever you would like to talk about and I will address it on Monday.
As many of you have seen, there have been several issues with the 1.2 patch, the first thing that stuck out on the list of issues was:
Nepentheon Tonic: This item can no longer be used to resurrect allies while the player is affected by the Terror debuff. In addition the cooldown for this item is 15 minutes
This was the new way to get around the terror debuff that was preventing rezzes during boss fights and it has been taken away as well. I have to ask, does Mythic think we are glutens for punishment. I have been in N'kara fights where you get here to 1% she bugs out and 1 shot the group, and others where no matter how much you taunt her wont get off of your healers or dps in the group. So I hope people like the 10 min runs back in the Vale because that is what you get to look foreword to. I have a lot of pity for those of you who did not learn the fights before these changes. It will make things a lot harder.
Suggestions on this would be to A. If you are going to do this, make it so you don't rez in the warcamp outside, have people rez at the spirits in the zone. They can already remove the debuff, so why not have people rez there. B. Allow mounts, give a run speed buff or something to speed up transportation in the zone. C. Fix your buggy bosses. Nothing sucks more than getting a boss to sub 10% only to have them reset on you.
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