Any plans for a PA Defiant pvp guild? Or is it going to be just Guardian?
I think the idea was to run the beta as Guardian because we were going Defiant (PVP) at release. We didn't want to burn out on the Guardian quests in the beta, and then have to redo them after release.
Any plans for a PA Defiant pvp guild? Or is it going to be just Guardian?
I think the idea was to run the beta as Guardian because we were going Defiant (PVP) at release. We didn't want to burn out on the Guardian quests in the beta, and then have to redo them after release.
And honestly, it was a good plan, because I've run the Guardian starting area like, 30 times now. At least, it feels like that.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
Any plans for a PA Defiant pvp guild? Or is it going to be just Guardian?
I think the idea was to run the beta as Guardian because we were going Defiant (PVP) at release. We didn't want to burn out on the Guardian quests in the beta, and then have to redo them after release.
Oh nice, that makes me happy then. Is the plan to have the guild on an rp-pvp server to avoid some of the nonsense that a regular pvp server has?
We did Guardian because, in order of importance:
-Warfront queues were instant instead of minutes+
-The vote we had in the thread was pretty close (+/-3)
-I was making the guild and I know more about the Guardian side stuff
I don't think there's any way we can sustain four PA guilds at launch (PvP/PvE, Guardian/Defiant). Two (one PvP, one PvE) seems possible. I'm pretty sure the PvE guild is going to be Defiant. Nothing has been decided for the PvP guild yet.
Trying to form multiple PA guilds in a new MMO is a bad idea. Spreading people across two servers makes it more likely that both guilds will implode when people inevitably lose interest.
PA people are great, but they have the attention span of chipmunks. They will slowly drift away every major game release or WoW patch.
One PA guild makes it more likely that a strong enough core will form for the guild to survive until people drift back.
Also can someone speak about bards, specifically do they need any kind of constant song twisting to be effective?
Bards don't really work like EQ bards where all you did was refresh your songs.
You have a couple of long duration (1 hr) buffs called "Fanfares" you can cast, but only one can be active at a time. These are your basic stat buffs.
You have a couple of "toggles" called Anthems, again one active at a time. These are your increased speed or armor buffs. They don't have a duration, you just flip whichever one you want on and leave it on.
You have some instant cast short duration buffs called Motifs (15-30 second depending on your spec). These are the most "EQ-like", but you only need to spend a few global cooldowns every 30 seconds to keep them up. These give you buffs like +5% crit, -5% damage taken, and so on.
When you aren't refreshing your Motifs, you use your channeled dot/heal to build combo points for your finishers, which either do damage, debuff the target, or heal your party.
Trying to form multiple PA guilds in a new MMO is a bad idea. Spreading people across two servers makes it more likely that both guilds will implode when people inevitably lose interest.
PA people are great, but they have the attention span of chipmunks. They will slowly drift away every major game release or WoW patch.
One PA guild makes it more likely that a strong enough core will form for the guild to survive until people drift back.
The problem with that is we have people, like myself, who have had horrible experiences with PvP/PvP servers and wouldn't roll on one period, and people who really want to play on PvP servers and wouldn't really like to be on a PvE server. So, we could either alienate a group of people...or just make two guilds. I can see the problem of not having enough people to sustain a PvP and a PvE guild, but, honestly, I'd rather give it a shot then say to either the no PvP or no PvE crowd "Sorry, you can't play with PA-ers".
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Madpandasuburbs west of chicagoRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
I figured as much playing around with the character builder. My main worry was anthems or fanfares had a "fading" thing where you could run two at once if you kept switching, thus needing to twist.
From my understanding at launch it was going to be a Defiant rp-pvp server(probably the Mouths and folks) and a pve server also Defiant. This way we have folks able to play both. I mean if this game does well it shouldn't be a huge worry. They might not be the monster guilds in the long run they are now(think we were like first in pop for a while on Sunrest) but it will be big enough to do things and find groups.
So, in beta 5 I played a Marksman/Ranger up to level 30, and thought that was pretty fun. I basically only did quests and the occasional rift all the way up, no instances or any real grouping. In the last few hours of my last night playing (which was Thursday because I was going to be gone Friday and Saturday), I grouped up with a couple of other 30s and we ran around doing the zone puzzles, which is what really cemented me wanting to buy this game. The fact that they heavily reward you for exploring with the ancient cairns, the puzzles, the artifacts, and even achievements/titles, is pretty awesome.
This beta, I made a new character and spent more time doing rifts and invasions, trying to keep myself at a reasonably close level to friends that were also playing. Riftstalker/Bladedancer was incredibly fun to play as. I tanked fae and died a lot at first because while I was a little over leveled for the instance, my friends (one of which was the healer) were kind of underleveled. That first boss is rough. But once he leveled up to 15 and got some new talents, it got a lot easier. I unfortunately did not get my Guardian Phase until we killed the Fae Lord, at which point I realized the run would have been a lot easier if I'd had that. We ran DD last night and that was fun, though the Fae dungeon was a lot better in my opinion.
But aside from that rough spot, tanking rifts and invasions was incredibly easy. Holding aggro on a large group of mobs was easy to do, and as long as I had at least one healer (or lower level mobs to build combo points to heal myself with when they died), I was pretty much unkillable. I found I could also solo multiple mobs of the same level and come out with full health at the end of the fight, which was pretty nice. So I'm pretty sure that is what I am going to be playing as for quite some time.
The only problem I've noticed with tanking rifts/invasions, is that I will start out the long fights with a high contribution rating, and then it will gradually get lower and lower as the fight goes on, and it gets a little difficult to manage a gold rating on the bosses. I will be hovering around that little line by the end of every big fight, and it's really annoying that I might not get the best reward despite the fact that I have been there tanking for the entire thing.
Seriously, two guilds will be made, and they will both fail. There is not a single MMO other than WoW that has had guilds survive the attention span of forumites.
Seriously, two guilds will be made, and they will both fail. There is not a single MMO other than WoW that has had guilds survive the attention span of forumites.
Just cause I've been seeing a lot of people delete characters and making alts....
Rift - Where we kill Alt-idis!™
People are going into this game not satisfied with their characters or builds and wasting all their hard earned cash respeccing before level 20. FEAR NO MORE!
You unlock all the souls for your character via simple quests that boil down to "be around to close a rift, then summon a dude and kill him". You can have all souls unlocked by your mid to late teens without any problems.
On top of that, you are given 4 role slots. "What's a role???" you ask. You know how WoW lets you spend a fuckload of gold on being able to switch between two talent sets? Well, Rift gives you FOUR. You buy them from your training in increasing costs. The first one is a chunk of gold, second is like 2plat + some gold, etc. You can have all four slots unlocked by level 30-ish if you really want.
Certainly won't cure alt-itis, but I think two characters will hold most people over.
It'll certainly make grouping with folks a lot easier since you should have a ton of access to tanks and healers. plus a lot of folks like to be self-sufficient healing wise, so they'll role alts to pickup a few more professions.
figure the average person can have their PvE spec, PvP spec, Tank/Healer spec and still have one more "when i'm bored and wanna completely change things up" spec.
(the ultimate alt-idis game was pre-cu SWG. you could literally pick any of the 32 classes on a whim and grind out a full template in a day or two).
This is probably the least alt-friendly game I have seen. There's little reason to make more than one character of each calling. Unless you are going to a new server or want to check out the other faction, four characters let you experience every soul in the game.
I really can't see a reason to have more than 4 characters ever. If, for some crazy reason, you need more than 4 specs, respecs seem to be cheap enough to make it not worth leveling another character. So, that just leaves you with leveling one of every class to have pretty much every spec in the game available to you just by switching characters.
Even with the ability to pick up 3 professions per alt, 4 is really the maximum number per server. Unless you go both Guardian and Defiant on one server. Is there official word on the amount of avatars per shard and if you can or cannot have both Guardians and Defiants on the same PvP shard?
I'm getting either 9 or 11 professions depending on if the internet is correct about weaponsmithing being split 3 ways (or if its correct about it not being split that way). Either way, that gives you between an alt and 1/3 of an alt with duplicates.
I think that leveling an alt in this game is going to end up being a great way to burn yourself out on the early game though, since I don't really see any options beyond a single linear path per side (I could be wrong, but it seems all the races end up in the same first real zone for each side). Do you get experience from the Rift battlegrounds (and, if you do, is it enough to level on)?
Played the beta. Seems kind of fun. I really like the soul system.
I tried playing a rogue. I made it to level 6. I died way to fast in the starting area.
Switched to a Warrior. Chose Reaver, Void Knight, Paladin.
That was more enjoyable, and I lived a lot longer. It was hard trying to take 2 mobs of my same level before I hit level 10.
The one thing that I wish they would do is highlight some the the key abilities of each soul. Something like the way blizz did with the new talent system in cataclysm.
I will play more beta, not sure if I'll play on launch though, have 1 friend who is new to wow and some friends, dont think they'll switch over.
You definitely need to check out all the available souls in your Calling. If you choose something similar it is a real waste of Soul Points.
Has anyone gotten their pvp soul? Im not sure how I feel being pigeonholed with a soul I p much have to use for pvp. Seems to go against the point of the class system.
Or am I wrong? I'd like to hear opinions from dudes pvping.
I had the favor to buy mine at about level 20. I resisted actually using it until I started being annoyed by the stunlock+thwackthwackthwachthwack=instant death that was happening in scenarios. The purge ability is "free" but on a really long 5 minute timer. The main disadvantage is that you can't do anything above tier one until you get to level 50, so you can't do much with it aside from the zero and 5 point skills and bumping ONE of the tier one abilities to level 5. Still, it's better than nothing and I'm liking the Purge ability better than my old zero point third soul.
In other news, I like the new "Ascended Courage" buff you get in Warfronts if you're low level. At level 12, I was fifth in damage done as a melee rogue.
Gotta agree with this! I make no claims to being a pro-PvP player (although I do enjoy it) and I'm consistently in the top 50% of the charts in almost every category at level 22->23.
Currently you get 3-10? plantarite for a rift which really isn't anything towards an item, you would have to do 25 for a decent item.
I think you might want to try something different and examine why you aren't getting more contribution. I usually get 5+ planarite, one or two of the blue mystery gifts (open for a random reward) and a planar item for a garden variety rift event. I've gotten over 100 planarite and two or three of the blue/purple planarite currency things from a single "Invasion" event.
Speaking of knockbacks, I kind of miss that I can't knock enemies off ledges. The knockback mechanics with terrain are smart enough to keep the enemy on the ledge/island/rock we're standing on instead of letting them plummet several feet below.
I'm already hating knockbacks in Rift as much as I hated them in WAR. I've only been playing Rift for four days (beta 5 and now 6) and I've already lost over a dozen kills to some shmoe punting my target away from me when I was two to three hits away from killing them. As a melee, I have to run to their new position to finish them, but they usually take the opportunity to exit the fight.
I noticed something interesting that I thought I would share, however. There seems to be little or no reason, which playing a character, to follow their suggested soul pairings. Each soul provides a full set of abilities for their specific type (healer, melee, caster) with a heavy dosage of talents that encourage you to only use abilities from that soul.
Meaning, if you pick up two offensive caster souls and you're forced into a bunch of +elemental damage talents that only benefit their respective abilities you end up splitting the baby and not gaining any real power through speccing.
If, however, you spread your soul options out between one of each type you gain the benefits of all three types of abilities with no wasted effort. This is doubly-effective when you consider that all of the caster talents directly add to melee ability effectiveness through the spell power -> attack power buffs that all of the melee Cleric classes get.
This leaves me with a character that can Nuke a target effectively from range, switch to hard-hitting melee abilities when they close, and heal myself up without any difficulty when confronted with challenging scenarios. Combine this with the use of Roles that let you switch to a pure healing or dps spec and you will have a leveling character that can take advantage of every part of the game effectively.
TL;DR: If you're looking for an effective, flexible character, consider grabbing three different soul types (melee, healer, caster, tank) and enjoy abilities that don't overlap each other in effectiveness.
I think that this is going to be the first differentiator between the min/max players and the real "casual" players. Taking two DPS trees and you end up with a lot of duplicate abilities that have little or no synergy. Taking a DPS soul and a tank-like soul gives you more overall robustness since you can spend points and get more unique abilities that complement each other.
The trick is picking soul tress that have abilities that actually _do_ compliment each other. Just because they are different doesn't mean they will work well together.
Shaman/Justicar/Druid (Off/Def/Off) was working out for me pretty well last night. I went high enough into Justicar to get the Hammer of Virtue (increased damage with maces) talent, and 2 convictions (AoE Heal/Self Heal). The rest will go into Shaman for a while, I think. With Druid rounding it out at the higher levels. I'm sad that I only discovered that class late last night.
This was my starting spec too. Justicar for the self heals, Shaman for the melee damage buffs. I dropped Druid in favor of Templar, and loving it. Once you get the melee proc that does a 6 second snare, it gets super easy. I can go toe-to-toe with ANY class and win, but (as expected) ranged classes with snares give me problems, often killing me before I can even get close to them. The self-heals can't keep up with multiple enemies either, and that's basically the only defense you have.
Played the beta. Seems kind of fun. I really like the soul system.
I tried playing a rogue. I made it to level 6. I died way to fast in the starting area.
Switched to a Warrior. Chose Reaver, Void Knight, Paladin.
That was more enjoyable, and I lived a lot longer. It was hard trying to take 2 mobs of my same level before I hit level 10.
The one thing that I wish they would do is highlight some the the key abilities of each soul. Something like the way blizz did with the new talent system in cataclysm.
I will play more beta, not sure if I'll play on launch though, have 1 friend who is new to wow and some friends, dont think they'll switch over.
You definitely need to check out all the available souls in your Calling. If you choose something similar it is a real waste of Soul Points.
You realize that respeccing is currently zero dollars, right? I mean, you could mess up completely and fix it about 10 minutes into the starting area.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
You can level exclusively from PvP after level 10 if you want. The only downside is that there does not appear to be lowbie PvP armor. The only vendors I saw had stuff for level 25-50. But like in WAR, players can drop gear and coins just like mobs so I guess you could buy stuff from crafters or the AH. Plus knock out a few quests in between queues.
Also I want to say from what I noticed from the low level Armorsmithing on my Warrior that the crafted gear was pretty good, even better than some quest items of similar level at times.
Not sure if I like my setup of Armor/Mine/Rune, with the option to break down my armor into ore or dust was conflicting at times to keep everything evenly skilled.
As far as crafting goes, I went ... whatever the one that lets you make wands/stave/rings/necks on my mage and found that I was using crafted gear unless I picked up a blue from some rift or dungeon. Of course, the other thing I found was that with the ability to break down the stuff I made I would use the same 15 copper bars to make 30 items, which meant I would milk some item for points until it went grey. While its fairly resource efficient, I think I would have spent my time better to make the items, sell them, go gather more mats to make more items, simply because there's nothing less fun than pressing the disenchant (Effectively) button, clicking loot, rinse/repeat until out of items, create until out of space, rinse, repeat for 15 minutes.
edit: as a consequence of that my skills were never evenly matched. Either my gathering skills were up by 20 points and it was time to go craft or I'd just finished a crafting cycle and it was time to gather/quest again.
With the dominator soul's focus apparently on CC, how powerful is CC in the game? Minor annoyance due to availability of escape cooldowns or potential game winner if not immediately dealt with?
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The game seriously needs some punch to the combat displays.
It's been said before: combat feels hollow. It doesn't feel visceral.
In many cases the only way I know I hit my opponent with my spell is the portion of life that vanishes from their bar. Fireballs should explode. Water should drench and sound wet, lightning should boom and run in sparks over the target for a few seconds after.
When the beta ended, I headed back to WoW on my destruction warlock for a bit of self pity pvp. Wow...the spell animation is night and day. The sounds are far more impactful.
Meh...this is a simple thing. I don't know why Trion missed it.
The little bit of crafting that I did was as outfitter. Disenchanting only gave me a 30-60% chance to recover something and overall I felt didn't give me as much return as auctioning or vendoring. Of course, it did save me time from gathering more mats.
I did Butchering/Mining/Armorsmithing. I should have dropped Butchering for Weaponsmithing cause I ended up selling all the skins for $Texas later on. Wait... that's a good thing!
Anyway, I hit 100 on Armorsmithing just fine although I seemed to have skipped skilling up on Iron entirely thanks to the insane amount of Copper I would get after a day's worth of questing/rifting.
In many cases the only way I know I hit my opponent with my spell is the portion of life that vanishes from their bar. Fireballs should explode. Water should drench and sound wet, lightning should boom and run in sparks over the target for a few seconds after.
I do agree, even though my limited time in the beta, I found it difficult to read the battles going on. Especially with ground snares, the only way I can tell I'm caught in one is due to my movement, it was very difficult to see the effect on the ground since it meshes in with the ground.
The game seriously needs some punch to the combat displays.
It's been said before: combat feels hollow. It doesn't feel visceral.
In many cases the only way I know I hit my opponent with my spell is the portion of life that vanishes from their bar. Fireballs should explode. Water should drench and sound wet, lightning should boom and run in sparks over the target for a few seconds after.
When the beta ended, I headed back to WoW on my destruction warlock for a bit of self pity pvp. Wow...the spell animation is night and day. The sounds are far more impactful.
Meh...this is a simple thing. I don't know why Trion missed it.
I think it is mostly the sound and the animation. The animation just feels a little off for this game, honestly I don't think any semi realistic visual game is every going to be comparable to WoW in that regard. Also the sound on the abilities, I will never forget (I know..nerd) when I was a hunter in WoW beta and I used the call of the eagle or whatever the spell is, it was so over the top and awesome, it was fucking perfect. A giant eagle screech and an eagle popped up. This game the buffs are so...lackluster and as a hunter all the abilities are subdued.
I'm thinking mostly purifier for the single target heals, then templar and justicar for pvp survival. It's not meant to do much damage, it's meant to survive long enough to heal for a ton. What do you all think?
Any plans for a PA Defiant pvp guild? Or is it going to be just Guardian?
We have a Defiant PA guild on Faeblight right now. Next time you get on, talk at me (Davi) or Relm, or one of the other people who can toss you an invite. The guild is named Lookouts, and we're awesome.
Seriously, if you want to play Defiant next Beta, come roll with us. Waiting is retarded.
Seriously, anyone praising the animations in WOW while slamming the animations in this game just gets a big WTF from me. There are lots of things to like about WOW, but the animations are certainly not one of them.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
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And honestly, it was a good plan, because I've run the Guardian starting area like, 30 times now. At least, it feels like that.
Oh nice, that makes me happy then. Is the plan to have the guild on an rp-pvp server to avoid some of the nonsense that a regular pvp server has?
PSN: Hellcore- Steam MWO: Hellcore
-Warfront queues were instant instead of minutes+
-The vote we had in the thread was pretty close (+/-3)
-I was making the guild and I know more about the Guardian side stuff
I don't think there's any way we can sustain four PA guilds at launch (PvP/PvE, Guardian/Defiant). Two (one PvP, one PvE) seems possible. I'm pretty sure the PvE guild is going to be Defiant. Nothing has been decided for the PvP guild yet.
PA people are great, but they have the attention span of chipmunks. They will slowly drift away every major game release or WoW patch.
One PA guild makes it more likely that a strong enough core will form for the guild to survive until people drift back.
Bards don't really work like EQ bards where all you did was refresh your songs.
You have a couple of long duration (1 hr) buffs called "Fanfares" you can cast, but only one can be active at a time. These are your basic stat buffs.
You have a couple of "toggles" called Anthems, again one active at a time. These are your increased speed or armor buffs. They don't have a duration, you just flip whichever one you want on and leave it on.
You have some instant cast short duration buffs called Motifs (15-30 second depending on your spec). These are the most "EQ-like", but you only need to spend a few global cooldowns every 30 seconds to keep them up. These give you buffs like +5% crit, -5% damage taken, and so on.
When you aren't refreshing your Motifs, you use your channeled dot/heal to build combo points for your finishers, which either do damage, debuff the target, or heal your party.
The problem with that is we have people, like myself, who have had horrible experiences with PvP/PvP servers and wouldn't roll on one period, and people who really want to play on PvP servers and wouldn't really like to be on a PvE server. So, we could either alienate a group of people...or just make two guilds. I can see the problem of not having enough people to sustain a PvP and a PvE guild, but, honestly, I'd rather give it a shot then say to either the no PvP or no PvE crowd "Sorry, you can't play with PA-ers".
edit: key received. thanks!
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This beta, I made a new character and spent more time doing rifts and invasions, trying to keep myself at a reasonably close level to friends that were also playing. Riftstalker/Bladedancer was incredibly fun to play as. I tanked fae and died a lot at first because while I was a little over leveled for the instance, my friends (one of which was the healer) were kind of underleveled. That first boss is rough. But once he leveled up to 15 and got some new talents, it got a lot easier. I unfortunately did not get my Guardian Phase until we killed the Fae Lord, at which point I realized the run would have been a lot easier if I'd had that. We ran DD last night and that was fun, though the Fae dungeon was a lot better in my opinion.
But aside from that rough spot, tanking rifts and invasions was incredibly easy. Holding aggro on a large group of mobs was easy to do, and as long as I had at least one healer (or lower level mobs to build combo points to heal myself with when they died), I was pretty much unkillable. I found I could also solo multiple mobs of the same level and come out with full health at the end of the fight, which was pretty nice. So I'm pretty sure that is what I am going to be playing as for quite some time.
The only problem I've noticed with tanking rifts/invasions, is that I will start out the long fights with a high contribution rating, and then it will gradually get lower and lower as the fight goes on, and it gets a little difficult to manage a gold rating on the bosses. I will be hovering around that little line by the end of every big fight, and it's really annoying that I might not get the best reward despite the fact that I have been there tanking for the entire thing.
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That said, I don't think predicting doom is a productive thing to do. City of Heroes had a successful guild for years, so it's not impossible.
Certainly won't cure alt-itis, but I think two characters will hold most people over.
It'll certainly make grouping with folks a lot easier since you should have a ton of access to tanks and healers. plus a lot of folks like to be self-sufficient healing wise, so they'll role alts to pickup a few more professions.
figure the average person can have their PvE spec, PvP spec, Tank/Healer spec and still have one more "when i'm bored and wanna completely change things up" spec.
(the ultimate alt-idis game was pre-cu SWG. you could literally pick any of the 32 classes on a whim and grind out a full template in a day or two).
Empire - Veela Server
edit: and beaten by Rorus
PSN: Hellcore- Steam MWO: Hellcore
I think that leveling an alt in this game is going to end up being a great way to burn yourself out on the early game though, since I don't really see any options beyond a single linear path per side (I could be wrong, but it seems all the races end up in the same first real zone for each side). Do you get experience from the Rift battlegrounds (and, if you do, is it enough to level on)?
I tried playing a rogue. I made it to level 6. I died way to fast in the starting area.
Switched to a Warrior. Chose Reaver, Void Knight, Paladin.
That was more enjoyable, and I lived a lot longer. It was hard trying to take 2 mobs of my same level before I hit level 10.
The one thing that I wish they would do is highlight some the the key abilities of each soul. Something like the way blizz did with the new talent system in cataclysm.
I will play more beta, not sure if I'll play on launch though, have 1 friend who is new to wow and some friends, dont think they'll switch over.
You definitely need to check out all the available souls in your Calling. If you choose something similar it is a real waste of Soul Points.
I had the favor to buy mine at about level 20. I resisted actually using it until I started being annoyed by the stunlock+thwackthwackthwachthwack=instant death that was happening in scenarios. The purge ability is "free" but on a really long 5 minute timer. The main disadvantage is that you can't do anything above tier one until you get to level 50, so you can't do much with it aside from the zero and 5 point skills and bumping ONE of the tier one abilities to level 5. Still, it's better than nothing and I'm liking the Purge ability better than my old zero point third soul.
Gotta agree with this! I make no claims to being a pro-PvP player (although I do enjoy it) and I'm consistently in the top 50% of the charts in almost every category at level 22->23.
I think you might want to try something different and examine why you aren't getting more contribution. I usually get 5+ planarite, one or two of the blue mystery gifts (open for a random reward) and a planar item for a garden variety rift event. I've gotten over 100 planarite and two or three of the blue/purple planarite currency things from a single "Invasion" event.
I'm already hating knockbacks in Rift as much as I hated them in WAR. I've only been playing Rift for four days (beta 5 and now 6) and I've already lost over a dozen kills to some shmoe punting my target away from me when I was two to three hits away from killing them. As a melee, I have to run to their new position to finish them, but they usually take the opportunity to exit the fight.
I think that this is going to be the first differentiator between the min/max players and the real "casual" players. Taking two DPS trees and you end up with a lot of duplicate abilities that have little or no synergy. Taking a DPS soul and a tank-like soul gives you more overall robustness since you can spend points and get more unique abilities that complement each other.
The trick is picking soul tress that have abilities that actually _do_ compliment each other. Just because they are different doesn't mean they will work well together.
This was my starting spec too. Justicar for the self heals, Shaman for the melee damage buffs. I dropped Druid in favor of Templar, and loving it. Once you get the melee proc that does a 6 second snare, it gets super easy. I can go toe-to-toe with ANY class and win, but (as expected) ranged classes with snares give me problems, often killing me before I can even get close to them. The self-heals can't keep up with multiple enemies either, and that's basically the only defense you have.
You realize that respeccing is currently zero dollars, right? I mean, you could mess up completely and fix it about 10 minutes into the starting area.
Not sure if I like my setup of Armor/Mine/Rune, with the option to break down my armor into ore or dust was conflicting at times to keep everything evenly skilled.
edit: as a consequence of that my skills were never evenly matched. Either my gathering skills were up by 20 points and it was time to go craft or I'd just finished a crafting cycle and it was time to gather/quest again.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
It's been said before: combat feels hollow. It doesn't feel visceral.
In many cases the only way I know I hit my opponent with my spell is the portion of life that vanishes from their bar. Fireballs should explode. Water should drench and sound wet, lightning should boom and run in sparks over the target for a few seconds after.
When the beta ended, I headed back to WoW on my destruction warlock for a bit of self pity pvp. Wow...the spell animation is night and day. The sounds are far more impactful.
Meh...this is a simple thing. I don't know why Trion missed it.
Anyway, I hit 100 on Armorsmithing just fine although I seemed to have skipped skilling up on Iron entirely thanks to the insane amount of Copper I would get after a day's worth of questing/rifting.
I do agree, even though my limited time in the beta, I found it difficult to read the battles going on. Especially with ground snares, the only way I can tell I'm caught in one is due to my movement, it was very difficult to see the effect on the ground since it meshes in with the ground.
I think it is mostly the sound and the animation. The animation just feels a little off for this game, honestly I don't think any semi realistic visual game is every going to be comparable to WoW in that regard. Also the sound on the abilities, I will never forget (I know..nerd) when I was a hunter in WoW beta and I used the call of the eagle or whatever the spell is, it was so over the top and awesome, it was fucking perfect. A giant eagle screech and an eagle popped up. This game the buffs are so...lackluster and as a hunter all the abilities are subdued.
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00Grx.xgkEIzzo.Vukz.xx0R0c0V
I'm thinking mostly purifier for the single target heals, then templar and justicar for pvp survival. It's not meant to do much damage, it's meant to survive long enough to heal for a ton. What do you all think?
We have a Defiant PA guild on Faeblight right now. Next time you get on, talk at me (Davi) or Relm, or one of the other people who can toss you an invite. The guild is named Lookouts, and we're awesome.
Seriously, if you want to play Defiant next Beta, come roll with us. Waiting is retarded.
XBL: Torn Hoodie
@hoodiethirteen