The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[Dofus] 450k subscribers, take a look.
King Boo Hoo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There seems to be some generally negative vibe about Dofus on this forum; I don't know if it's because it used to lag or lack features or whatnot, but it's currently got a fairly massive player-base of over 3 million, over 400,000 of whom are subscribers. They also have 2 US servers now so there are no latency issues (if that was the problem?). So I figured I'd provide a thorough post on the game to entice some.
Overview:
Dofus (not an acronym) was released in 2005 by Ankama Studio. It's very pretty in a simplistic elegant way, made in flash and played in 2D, so it's not hard on the hardware. It's got all the usuals: large world, tons of players, crafting, guilds, quests, dungeons, pvp, housing, mounts, etc. It has a Free to Play option, and despite all it's numerous limitations it's still got the essence of Dofus so playing free until you hit the level cap (40 or so?) is a great way to figure out if it's your kind of game. Furthermore, subscription is only ~$6 a month, so it's considerably cheaper than the others.
The combat system is very much like Final Fantasy Tactics I'm told (never played) and has a large pvp following because of it. Lastly, it oozes cuteness and good humor. I'm playing with my room-mate and being able to fight alongside someone raises the complexity and fun-factor exponentially. Leveling isn't difficult, monsters provide a ton of exp and there are quests everywhere. The game is genuinely fun. You play it, and you enjoy it, and that's something not to be taken lightly.
Classes:
(copying largely from http://dofus.wikia.com/wiki/Class)
You pick from 12 classes (10 if you're free to play) and this decides your race as well:
Cra: Archer class, uses long-range bow and arrow attacks.
Ecaflip: Gambler class, with attacks that can be either beneficial or harmful.
Eniripsa: Cleric class, casts healing spells and ally buffs.
Enutrof: Treasure-hunter class, specializes in increased drop rates.
Feca: Defensive magic-user, casts shields which reduce damage. Has very few offensive spells as a result.
Iop: Paladin class, close range melee class. High damage. Ally buffer.
Osamodas: Summoner class, summons various monsters to fight along side them.
Pandawa: Boozer class, a race of panda people. Only available for the P2P members.
Sacrier: Brawler class, melee attacker, relies on taking damage to increase stats.
Sadida: Invoker class, plant people that conjure plants and totem "dolls" to attack.
Sram: Assassin class, combination of traps and invisiblity. High damage melee attacks in higher levels.
Xelor: Denial attacker, most of their attacks counter, reduce or steal the opponents AP (ability points).
The names may look somewhat weird. As I said before, the game prides itself on not taking itself too seriously, so a bunch of the class names are meant to be read backwards, or are inside jokes. A couple examples:
Cra -> Arc: French word for Bow
Ecaflip: Pilface: French for 'Heads or Tails'
Sram (Mars), Feca (Cafe) and Iop (Yop) are named after the developer's favorite snacks while making the game.
Once you pick your class you get to customize it to some degree:
The world:
You enter the world in some sort of green grassy locale climate.
You move around in top-down view like you would in Diablo for example, and can interact with all the other players via trade, dueling, chat, etc.
Levelling up:
Every level you get 5 attribute points, and 1 spell point. The 5 attribute points go into the usual Strength, Agility, Intelligence, etc. However, if you're a mage you don't just automatically dump all your points into intelligence. Strength will increase the damage of Earth spells for example, whereas Intelligence increases Fire spells.
As to the spell point: As you level up you acquire new spells automatically (no class trainers). All of these are level 1 when you get them. You use spell points to increase the level, and thereby effectiveness, of your spells. To go from level 1 to level 2 takes 1 spell point, then 2 more spell points to reach level 3, 3 more spell points to reach level 4, etc. Until the max, which is usually 6. The effectiveness isn't just an increase in damage, it can also lead to a reduction in Ability Point cost.
Here's a picture of a spell window, unfortunately in French because I'm too lazy to take screenshots myself and upload them, so this is the best I could find on GIS:
Combat:
Once you find a monster or, more likely, a group of monsters, you click the monster and you're teleported to an instance. You're in the exact same zone as you were prior, with all the same obstructions and such, but without any players in it. You can fight by yourself, or with people you've invited into your group, or if you allow it, you can just allow strangers to join your fight while you're still setting up. You have the option of starting in any of the Red Spaces, and the monsters are confined to the blue spaces they randomly got:
Here it turns into a turn-based strategy match. You have a certain number of movement points (MP) and ability points (AP), reset every turn. The spells and abilities are pretty interesting and can lead to fun strategies. For example, one of my spells allows me to heal someone, but it roots the person in place for the next 4 turns. Sometimes I use this to heal to my room-mate to prevent him from dying next turn, but often I'll use the heal on a monster I know only has melee abilities, thereby allowing the two of us to nuke him to death easily.
PVP:
I can't say too much about this because I'm not yet a subscriber, but from what I understand guild PVP is a huge aspect of this game, largely because there is so much skill involved in the intricate combat system I'm guessing. I have dueled a few times, and it gets really fun trying to predict your opponent's moves while still pulling off your own.
Quests:
What's nice about this game is that they don't try to force anything onto you. You don't have to group, you don't have to run dungeons, you don't have to grind. My room-mate and I find the combat to be really fun so often we just wander around looking for fights, but periodically we do quests because they're pretty fun, funny, and cute.
For example, we came across a little girl in a city named Kry-Babby who said one-armed bandits stole her dolly, and requested we return it. Upon reaching the bandit camp, you find that the bandits are, in fact, one-handed, and have to fight five of them at once to retrieve the doll.
Dungeons:
The dungeon system is also fairly interesting. It's a series of rooms you go through, each of which has 1 set of monsters you have to beat to move onto the next room. What's great is that the dungeon isn't instanced, which is really helpful because the rooms get progressively more difficult. Although my room-mate and I beat the first 3 rooms, the next one looked far too challenging. So we just waited for like 30 seconds, another group of 2 players entered the room, we all grouped up and took on the monsters.
Last Comments:
I don't know if I managed to portray it well enough, but the point I'm trying to make is that this is a MMORPG that's actually... fun. I actually enjoy taking parts in the fight, they actually take skill, have unexpected turns, etc. I enjoy the quests, because the text is genuinely cute and funny. I enjoy the world, it's simple but very, very, pretty. The music is cute and relaxing. I leave the game with a good feeling. Try it, it's free for the first several weeks you'd be playing after all.
By the way, my character's name is TreeTux and I'm on the Rosal server.
-Edit-
The Dofus main website has a bunch of neat screenshots you can look at so as to be assured that the graphics are very pretty in all sorts of scenarios:
http://www.dofus.com/en/mmorpg/online/images.html?cat=4
Also, here's the Wiki page for more info on classes, abilities, etc.:
http://dofus.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Overview:
Dofus (not an acronym) was released in 2005 by Ankama Studio. It's very pretty in a simplistic elegant way, made in flash and played in 2D, so it's not hard on the hardware. It's got all the usuals: large world, tons of players, crafting, guilds, quests, dungeons, pvp, housing, mounts, etc. It has a Free to Play option, and despite all it's numerous limitations it's still got the essence of Dofus so playing free until you hit the level cap (40 or so?) is a great way to figure out if it's your kind of game. Furthermore, subscription is only ~$6 a month, so it's considerably cheaper than the others.
The combat system is very much like Final Fantasy Tactics I'm told (never played) and has a large pvp following because of it. Lastly, it oozes cuteness and good humor. I'm playing with my room-mate and being able to fight alongside someone raises the complexity and fun-factor exponentially. Leveling isn't difficult, monsters provide a ton of exp and there are quests everywhere. The game is genuinely fun. You play it, and you enjoy it, and that's something not to be taken lightly.
Classes:
(copying largely from http://dofus.wikia.com/wiki/Class)
You pick from 12 classes (10 if you're free to play) and this decides your race as well:
Cra: Archer class, uses long-range bow and arrow attacks.
Ecaflip: Gambler class, with attacks that can be either beneficial or harmful.
Eniripsa: Cleric class, casts healing spells and ally buffs.
Enutrof: Treasure-hunter class, specializes in increased drop rates.
Feca: Defensive magic-user, casts shields which reduce damage. Has very few offensive spells as a result.
Iop: Paladin class, close range melee class. High damage. Ally buffer.
Osamodas: Summoner class, summons various monsters to fight along side them.
Pandawa: Boozer class, a race of panda people. Only available for the P2P members.
Sacrier: Brawler class, melee attacker, relies on taking damage to increase stats.
Sadida: Invoker class, plant people that conjure plants and totem "dolls" to attack.
Sram: Assassin class, combination of traps and invisiblity. High damage melee attacks in higher levels.
Xelor: Denial attacker, most of their attacks counter, reduce or steal the opponents AP (ability points).
The names may look somewhat weird. As I said before, the game prides itself on not taking itself too seriously, so a bunch of the class names are meant to be read backwards, or are inside jokes. A couple examples:
Cra -> Arc: French word for Bow
Ecaflip: Pilface: French for 'Heads or Tails'
Sram (Mars), Feca (Cafe) and Iop (Yop) are named after the developer's favorite snacks while making the game.
Once you pick your class you get to customize it to some degree:
The world:
You enter the world in some sort of green grassy locale climate.
You move around in top-down view like you would in Diablo for example, and can interact with all the other players via trade, dueling, chat, etc.
Levelling up:
Every level you get 5 attribute points, and 1 spell point. The 5 attribute points go into the usual Strength, Agility, Intelligence, etc. However, if you're a mage you don't just automatically dump all your points into intelligence. Strength will increase the damage of Earth spells for example, whereas Intelligence increases Fire spells.
As to the spell point: As you level up you acquire new spells automatically (no class trainers). All of these are level 1 when you get them. You use spell points to increase the level, and thereby effectiveness, of your spells. To go from level 1 to level 2 takes 1 spell point, then 2 more spell points to reach level 3, 3 more spell points to reach level 4, etc. Until the max, which is usually 6. The effectiveness isn't just an increase in damage, it can also lead to a reduction in Ability Point cost.
Here's a picture of a spell window, unfortunately in French because I'm too lazy to take screenshots myself and upload them, so this is the best I could find on GIS:
Combat:
Once you find a monster or, more likely, a group of monsters, you click the monster and you're teleported to an instance. You're in the exact same zone as you were prior, with all the same obstructions and such, but without any players in it. You can fight by yourself, or with people you've invited into your group, or if you allow it, you can just allow strangers to join your fight while you're still setting up. You have the option of starting in any of the Red Spaces, and the monsters are confined to the blue spaces they randomly got:
Here it turns into a turn-based strategy match. You have a certain number of movement points (MP) and ability points (AP), reset every turn. The spells and abilities are pretty interesting and can lead to fun strategies. For example, one of my spells allows me to heal someone, but it roots the person in place for the next 4 turns. Sometimes I use this to heal to my room-mate to prevent him from dying next turn, but often I'll use the heal on a monster I know only has melee abilities, thereby allowing the two of us to nuke him to death easily.
PVP:
I can't say too much about this because I'm not yet a subscriber, but from what I understand guild PVP is a huge aspect of this game, largely because there is so much skill involved in the intricate combat system I'm guessing. I have dueled a few times, and it gets really fun trying to predict your opponent's moves while still pulling off your own.
Quests:
What's nice about this game is that they don't try to force anything onto you. You don't have to group, you don't have to run dungeons, you don't have to grind. My room-mate and I find the combat to be really fun so often we just wander around looking for fights, but periodically we do quests because they're pretty fun, funny, and cute.
For example, we came across a little girl in a city named Kry-Babby who said one-armed bandits stole her dolly, and requested we return it. Upon reaching the bandit camp, you find that the bandits are, in fact, one-handed, and have to fight five of them at once to retrieve the doll.
Dungeons:
The dungeon system is also fairly interesting. It's a series of rooms you go through, each of which has 1 set of monsters you have to beat to move onto the next room. What's great is that the dungeon isn't instanced, which is really helpful because the rooms get progressively more difficult. Although my room-mate and I beat the first 3 rooms, the next one looked far too challenging. So we just waited for like 30 seconds, another group of 2 players entered the room, we all grouped up and took on the monsters.
Last Comments:
I don't know if I managed to portray it well enough, but the point I'm trying to make is that this is a MMORPG that's actually... fun. I actually enjoy taking parts in the fight, they actually take skill, have unexpected turns, etc. I enjoy the quests, because the text is genuinely cute and funny. I enjoy the world, it's simple but very, very, pretty. The music is cute and relaxing. I leave the game with a good feeling. Try it, it's free for the first several weeks you'd be playing after all.
By the way, my character's name is TreeTux and I'm on the Rosal server.
-Edit-
The Dofus main website has a bunch of neat screenshots you can look at so as to be assured that the graphics are very pretty in all sorts of scenarios:
http://www.dofus.com/en/mmorpg/online/images.html?cat=4
Also, here's the Wiki page for more info on classes, abilities, etc.:
http://dofus.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
King Boo Hoo on
0
Posts
male nipples?
was that a big group of monster (7 and above ) will need a big group of players.
Since this is a turn base game, the time you are just sitting and waiting for your turn to come is too much to handle for me.
Neat. I used to play a Sram back when the game was young. Not a bad game, even if it was distinctly...odd.
Goozex referral pimp sig, click Spoiler to see it.
PSN: Dyvion -- Eternal: Dyvion+9393 -- Genshin Impact: Dyvion
Also, I thought it was boring.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Aha! Finally got to the bottom of why you PA folk aren't fans of Dofus. I was confused because by all accounts, people really like Final Fantasy Tactics, and this is just a MMORPG version of it with cuter graphics and humor.
Anyway, the game already has all the typical MMORPG elements -- crafting, pvp, rvr, grouping, dungeons, instances, levelling, etc.
But then it also brings in a new concept -- enjoyable fights with deep strategy and heavy player skill (none of that 'my level 70 warrior ran instances you cant even pronounce so i have 2x more health than you and 3x more damage BS').
And then you just place all this in the context of a cute, funny and pretty world, and I figured -- tada, just what PA players are looking for?
Maybe I just have a biased viewpoint because playing with friends is always more interesting and complicated, especially in this game.
But really: the people who made this game are a bunch of assholes and that's really bad marketing in the MMO business. There's so much alternatives out there that won't spam your inbox and forums.
:P
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Pretty much.
XBL
I didn't mean to come off as if the OP isn't good, or anything.
XBL
But yeah, game-wise, I wish they'd take the art team and make a "real" MMO. Because it would be made of awesome and pretty.
Ahem. Wakfu!
I couldn't get into Dofus too; I felt the engine was one of the clunkiest piles ever, and while I liked the art style, the in-game avatars looked like total ass. If you're going for 2D sprites, make sure they look good.
Now Wakfu on the other hand? I check the website every now and then, just waiting for that beta to open up. Watch the trailer for a better idea of what it might look like as a finished product.
protip: don't make a female character
I think ... I think I'm someone's girlfriend ... he gave me a level 19 item, so that means we're dating
A gambler is a gambler, not an Ecaflipamaringdingdangdong.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
I've had this happen before to me in another game. Only, I'm a guy and he started calling me bitch, so I turned on maximum swearing and eventually he got the hint and ran away.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
No, and I watch my foreign movies with subtitles. But this isn't based on any foreign language, is it? Because it sounds like some silly made up language.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
From what I've found, the original names are rarely kept in regard to forum talk / in game talk. Am I a level 70 warrior specializing in the protection talent tree? No, I'm a 70 Prot War. Say that aloud, "Prot War", that sounds about as silly as any of the names this game has, IMHO.
Usually mobs are referred to by the first 3 letters of their name, or their position -- "sapping caster".
I dunno, the silly names didn't particularly bother me because I realize no one uses regular names.
I didn't know that viral marketing was so big on these forums, enough that you guys had to verify when and where I post, lol.
If you had paid attention to anything at all, you would realize that drunken pandas are a pretty common image throughout most anything. Even then, Pandaren aren't actually pictured in WoW; they're only seen in WCIII. Did you accuse WAR of stealing Warcraft's style, as well?
Edit: Revising this, I guess it's somewhat anecdotal. Google revealed many Warcraft references, obviously, but also others. So, there.
I get a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction when I hear people say "This thing totally ripped this from this and should fess up." For instance: I have heard people say, multiple times, that Hellgate: London is a D2 clone (of which part of this was intentional, but it was not the complete and utter infringement of copywright law that some people have made it out to be.) That WoW was a D2 clone. That <anything with a skill tree and monsters> is a ripoff of D2. (and they have the gall to call it "obvious") Yeah, if that's the case, anything with guns and bad guys to shoot is a ripoff of Wolfenstein. Honestly, people, can we move on from this shit?
One of the greatest things for me was when Cliffy B went up at GDC 07 and told everyone exactly what games inspired him and where he lifted various ideas from. After months of seeing Gears coverage I kept saying on various forums, "this seems like Kill.Switch with the blindfire..." People would either respond with "stfu, GoW is awesome. they didn't rip any1 off!" or "I've never heard of that game before..." Originality is a great thing, but everyone borrows from someone else. It's like when people complain about so-and-so riping off LotR. Guess what? Tolkien ripped all that off of Norse mythology and Germanic fairy tales.
It's one thing to have a direct copycat clone of a game and quite another to borrow inspiration from various sources and attempt ot expand, twist, and improve on them. And for that, IMO, people should not be punished for not being Earth-shatteringly original. Besides, so much video game lore is horrendously generic anyways.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
I play Blazblue, Soul Calibur 4, Street Fighter 4 and soon Tekken 6... yeah... so add me if you want to play any of those.
That being said, the terms rarely-if-ever come up in game so vOv
Precisely.
Anyway, another update. Room-mate and I are now subscribers, and it's all sorts of fun to see new places and never have to wait for a spawn or anything. I can't help thinking about how the fights are so much more interesting than they were in regular MMORPGs like WoW -- at worst I'd be sitting there auto-attacking until my cool-downs were up and I could use a special attack again, at best my rogue would have like 30 or more abilities but it was all just a routine you timed and followed, not an interactive strategy.
In this game, every mob and fight is different. In one fight, it's one big melee monster who hits like hell and periodically can give himself a full heal. So you try to keep him rooted, and keep his ability points down below the point that he can self heal. In another fight, I'm fighting 5 weak melee mobs, but we all start out in an enclosed pen with only 1 exit, guarded by 2 mobs, so I'm stuck trying to kite mobs in a tiny environment, pick out the weakest, and watch for an exit opportunity.
The point I'm dragging out is that the game makes you pay attention for a change, which is nice.
psn: lankyplonker