Guild Wars 2...Months Later

For a game that I was extremely excited for, Guild Wars 2 ended up being a bit of a disappointment. This isn't because of the game itself (well not completely), but because of the way my friends reacted to it. Since the Old Republic, my friends and I have been routinely playing together (on Wednesdays and Thursdays) for quite some time. We did TOR, and then Tera, and had a blast with both games.

For one of my friends, he was against the game from the start, and I'm still not sure I understand why. Well, no, I'll take that back. I do know why. Though he no longer has the time for it, he is a hard-core MMO raider. He is into the gear grind, endgame, and progression. And ultimately Guild Wars 2 doesn't have that in the way that he wanted. And because of that, he just wasn't that interested in even hitting 80 because at that point he was already 'done'. In that regard, the game was never going to please him in the way he wanted...and I'm sure that he was not the only one with this problem.

In addition to that he also had two other problems with the game. The first was that the game did not really promote grouping while leveling. This one seems odd on the surface--GW2 is very forgiving with working together on quests with random people. But, heart quest progress isn't shared in groups; and for every other type of open-world encounter you receive no real benefit for being in a group. And in fact, due to the somewhat distracting nature of the content, formal groups of people tend to get pulled in different directions because of the distractions. That is, if one guy sees some new event and goes off that way, inevitably not everyone would follow.

The second problem he had was the level capping. This is designed to keep the entire game challenging throughout--you can't overpower content at any point. But in reality, rewards are always worse in lower-level areas and the level capping mechanic tends to make the feeling of power progression non-existent. And this in turn is made worse by the fact that you unlock your weapons and skills so early.

Another of my friends had a more ambivalent approach to the game. He was interested, and played, but ultimately he had absolutely no interest in grouping up in it. The game was too easy, he said, and you get no real benefit from grouping. This was often quite frustrating, but emphasizes to me the way certain players interact with the game. Because leveling content was so easy, there was never any incentive to actually group up--it didn't speed things up at all, and in fact grouping often seemed burdensome in the game because you couldn't just go off and do things at your own pace.

Another friend absolutely fell in love with the game, and to this day spends almost every non-working moment playing. He has numerous characters, many of them at high level, and he massively enjoys virtually every aspect of the game. I think he is a perfect example of the type of player this game specifically caters to--someone who is interested in exploring, and performing a wide variety of different activities and challenges without any real sense of grind. Guild Wars 2 excels in that above any other MMO I've played.

For myself, I got a character to level 80 (an elementalist), and greatly enjoyed the game. But, as I continued to level and my friends mostly stopped playing as a group, my interest began to wane. MMOs, even good MMOs, aren't that interesting to me as a solo activity and the group just wasn't interested in doing things together. After spending some time grinding at 80--dealing with Orr, which I slowly grew to hate--I realized just how pointless it was. Orr is buggy, and a pain in the arse to navigate, and the major events presented nothing but frustrating repetitiveness. Maybe things have gotten better there, but Orr was just not a very good end-game experience for me. And so after a few weeks at 80, and puttering around with other characters, I just stopped playing and moved on to games like Borderlands 2, and XCOM.

Finally, I want to mention something about the dungeons. The dungeons are basically the main grouping content in the game. And they are relatively hard. Now I say that with a bit of a grain of salt here, because as has been very obvious with my friends for a long time, not all of them are very good at that sort of experience. And since we were just 4 people instead of 5, and certain members just didn't want to include a 5th outside of the group, we were forced to do these dungeons a man down. With people who were not properly geared, and weren't necessarily good at that content in the first place. To put it bluntly, attempting these was a disaster, and it was just an exercise in frustration--certain individuals in our group just couldn't adjust to the difficulty, and didn't have the patience to try to learn the dungeons. As such, our attempts were mostly a failure and in fact to this day I haven't actually seen many of the dungeons.

I mention this because I think it would have been nice for them to include a more casual mode--even the story mode dungeons are pretty hard for a very casual group (which we were), and explorable mode was mostly out of the question. Some form of dungeon-finder tool would have been nice as well...for the most part I found it very hard to find groups and those groups I did find universally couldn't complete the dungeons either. I think this was because of the difficulty difference between the dungeons and the rest of the content--there seemed to be less patience with the dungeons because everything else was so easy.

Overall, Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I've played that I've really enjoyed, but completely stopped playing less than 2 months after release. And it shows me just how much the social aspect of an MMO can be--while the game is fine, good (even great), without the social aspect its just another single player experience. And as a single-player experience Guild Wars 2 doesn't have any benefits over any other game. Sad, perhaps, but true.

Guild Wars 2 Stress Test...Tonight!

Every since the end of the 3rd Beta Weekend I've been steadily getting more and more hyped for the game. There have been two stress tests since then, but both during work hours so at most I got to spend about 30 minutes in game before it ended. Tonight there is going to be a 3rd stress test lasting from 6 PM to 10 PM central time and I am psyched.

For several reasons I deliberately limited my time with the 3rd beta weekend. For one thing, I really wanted to keep my experience with the game as fresh as possible. This was coming off a very good experience with experiencing Tera w/o any foreknowledge about the game coloring my actions. I just wanted a taste of the character creation and a quick peak at some of the classes and beginning areas in the game. But I deliberately avoided doing very much just so when the game did release it would remain fresh and new.

Since that beta weekend I've become more and more interested in reading up on the game's core mechanics and classes and I've started regretting the fact that I really didn't spend much time with the beta when I had the chance. Since that beta there have been two stress tests, one last week and one yesterday. Both during hours that I work, and in both cases I was able to get in only about 30 minutes before they took the servers down.

Tonight there is going to be a third stress test, and it's going to be happening between 6 PM and 10 PM tonight. This will be a good chance to see the game in action again, and a chance to spend some time actually looking at the classes in (a little) more detail. And this is more important that I originally thought it would be because Guild Wars 2 limits you to just 5 character slots. That means that you can't just create 1 character for each class.

*while I assume that you'll be able to buy more characters slots once the game ships, I don't know any details about who many, or how expensive that will be.

At this point there are several classes that seem very interesting to me: Elementalist, Engineer, Necromancer, and Ranger (in that order). The other classes all have things of interest I like (Thief, Warrior, and Guardian). Mesmer actually sounds cool, but the 10 minutes I spent with one didn't impress me. Though I am well aware that it's impossible to base a real impression on a class based one look up to level 3, with just the default weapon (and not all of the skills unlocked).

At this point I would really like to spend some quality time with the Elementalist Class. When I first played it in the beta, I got to level 4, and 'unlocked' the staff. But now I realize just how off I was. I now know about elemental attunements, and skill chains, and etc. So really I just have unlocked the Fire skills on the staff; and nothing else. Heh. There is no weapon swapping for the Elementalist and I can see why: with elemental attunements Elementalists have access to 25 skills at any given time. 10 more than the other classes (at least from what I can tell). The Elementalist may have a limited weapon selection, and no swapping, but they seem to actually have even more flexibility. This has increased by interest in the class even more.

Another thing I want to spend some time with is key bindings. The default key bindings in the game are, in a word, unpleasant. Considering my mouse and keyboard setup a different binding setup is going to be required. I spent some time with that last night, but with game time so short I really just set one thing and wondered around until the game kicked me out. Hopefully I'll get some time to refine things a bit without feeling like I'm having to rush.

Tera Midgame

I've been playing Tera for about a month now. I've had a chance to see many of the game's systems in play and I'm now past the honeymoon phase. The new look and feel shine has worn off a little bit, and the reality of the game is starting to sink in. At this point I have a level 41 sorcerer, my original priest is level 36, and I've played both Warrior and Lancer into the 30s. I've done crafting, and instanced dungeons, and grouped up for BAM fights. And while I have no idea what Tera's endgame is like, I feel that I've had enough time to figure out the leveling game. Fortunately, I'm still having fun with Tera, enough that I'll probably be keeping my subscription past the release of Guild Wars 2.

  

There are some harsh realities that have set in though. The most obvious is the fact that Tera stays too close to the WoW foruma--and it's the vanilla version of that to boot. Tera's game systems are rather simplistic. There are fewer gear slots and fewer meaningful stats. It's questing system is beyond simple, with a very limited variety of quest types. It's crafting system is even more simplistic than WOW's, if that is even possible. It's dungeon finder tool is next to worthless, and it's LFG channel is a cess pit that's worse than I've seen in most MMOs (and that is saying something).

All of these were problems with SWTOR as well. However, while The Old Republic tried to make up for that with story, Tera tries to make up for it's deficiencies in it's combat system and class mechanics. And without this combat system, Tera would be a true flop. As it is, though, Tera's classes and combat save the game even into the mid levels. It's not fresh, or exciting anymore, but it is still fun.

Leveling from 1-20 is very simple, and takes a very short amount of time. 20-30 is slower, sure, but still very fast and painless for pretty much every class I've played. So when I say that I've gotten 3 classes into the level 30 range that's not saying much. It's only at around level 30 where the leveling slope starts to turn verticle and the newness of the game starts wearing off.

It makes me wonder...would a game like this do better with a much higher level cap (say in the 200 range), but with faster levels? It would necessitate a lot of marginal power-up skills, but most of these MMO systems are designed to scale well anyway.

Anyway, it's around level 30 where you hit the leveling brick wall and everything slows down a lot. I've read that a lot of people give up on the game at this level, and I can understand why. Everything is the same...it just takes longer. Kill quests get longer, and give a percentage smaller amount of XPs for the next level. And by this point, the simplistic quest design really starts to show the failings of the system. Levels 1-30 does not feel like a grind. Levels 30 to 40 most certainly do.

The pace does settle, though, and it remains pretty constant from levels 30 to 40. And in reality the amount of time it takes to level isn't all that bad--a few hours at most per level, less if you know where everything is (which I do not). I think I've read where it's possible to get from 1-60 in about 72 hours, and I can certainly see that. And while the quests do not become any more complex, the environments and monsters most certainly do.

This is a common feature of most MMOs, especially when leveling. It's not uncommon for characters to actually feel LESS powerful as they go up in level because the monsters outpace the power of the characters. This is partially by design, especially at low levels. Developers want you to get comfortable with the system before upping the challenge. But in Tera, this difficulty usually manifests itself as monsters having more HP. This is a very bland way of upping the difficulty because it means that the monsters you are fighting aren't really substantially different to what you fought earlier...they just take longer to kill.

Sorcerers seem less susceptible to this, but this is mostly because they seem almost rediculously overpowered in the 20s, and they still do very well in the 30s. Lancers, however, seem to start moving at a glacial pace because everything takes way too long to kill. And at the same time, it becomes much more difficult to solo BAMs in the 30s. Doable, but more difficult. I've had very good luck doing this on my Warrior and Lancer, but very little luck with Sorcerer and Priest. Even then, the fights just start taking too long for the rewards to justify it. My lancer can still pretty much solo any BAM, but at 10-15 minutes per fight it's simply not worth it.

  

While the quests and the classes don't change much, the environments you encounter in the 30s do open up a bit. Not only do you find some large open environments, deserts and such, but you all start finding various open-world dungeons. There's a mine, a pirate cove, and a wizarding school that comes straight out of harry potter. These open-world dungeons are a bit more difficult, mostly due to tight corners and limited space limiting movement (a big deal in Tera combat). Not to mention the trains and adds that inevitably pop up. The variety, though, helps and does create some more focused experiences and story lines. But it's still not something that makes you forget the grind.

There is a lot of talk about some of the negative aspects of Tera here, but really I'm still having fun with the game. I just wish that as a whole Tera was in a more polished state. And I'll admit that I'm a little concerned about how 'gridy' the game is getting. Right now it's about 'right'--slow enough to make each level seem like an accomplishment, but not so slow that it's painful. My goal at this point is to try to hit 60 on my Sorcerer, but at this point that seems less and less likely. Guild Wars 2 is less than 3 weeks away at this point, and while Ive decided to maintain my subscription for a bit after the GW2 launch, I'm not sure how much time I'll be spending with the game past the 25th.

Guild Wars 2 Guilds

When my friends and I began playing The Old Republic, we decided to create a guild for ourselves. In hindsight I think that was a bit of a problem, especially for me, as it limited me from the social aspects of the game more so than any other. And since at least one of my friends is very anti-social (in an online sense), trying to join another guild wasn't really possible. He would have quit first before ever considering that kind of switch. So, my options were limited in that regard and by the time I hit 50 I really had no social pull for any of the more difficult content.



With Tera we have not created a guild at all, though at this point we probably should go ahead and make one. I'm certainly not interested in the political aspects of the game--they are cool and all and present a more interesting form of end-game. But it is also something that is just as much of a commitment as a high end raiding guild. To be successful at that you need a big group, and you really need to commit to it to be successful in any meaningful way. And even if some of the Vanarch seats aren't heavily challenged, it's still way too much of a commitment for a game that I'm really only planning on playing for another month.

With Guild Wars 2 it looks like I can have my cake and eat it too. Apparently in Guild Wars you can create, and join any number of guilds, though you only 'represent' one guild at any given time. That means that we can create a guild just for our friends, but still reach out and join other guilds for more focused content (such as PVE, or PVP, etc). This is a very cool concept (FFXI had something similar, and hopefully this won't take up inventory space like Linkshells did in FFXI). This is again something that points to the way Guild Wars 2 seems to invert core basic concepts with an eye towards usability and openness.

Guilds also seem to include some leveling functions that allow you to increase the abilities of the guild. I looked at this, and this seems cool, though less impressive than the guild leveling I've seen in Warhammer Online, and in World of Warcraft. Of course, this could be expanded later and probably isn't really necessary for release. But I'm not entirely sure it's worth it just to purchase basic 24 hour buffs--it's cool, but not cool like some of the abilities you got in, say, World of Warcraft.

Thoughts on Guild Wars 2 Classes

Thoughts on Guild Wars 2 Characters

After my short experience with the beta I'm looking at playing several different characters. At this point I'm not sure what I'm going to be using as my main (and I won't for a bit), but here's what I'm considering at this point:

• Human Elementalist
• Asuran Engineer
• Sylvan Necromancer
• Char Warrior

Elementalist seemed like a lot of fun the time I spent with it. It's certainly fits with my play style (being a closet mage and all). Lots of options, lots of effect types, and lots of pew-pew. Glass Cannons, however, seem like they will have a hard time in this game, so this may or may not be the best class pick outside of PVE. I also have a friend who is definitely playing this class, so I might have to pick another instead. You can definitely make some very cool looking humans to with this game.

My next choice is an asuran Engineer. The asuran Engineer starting zone is just awesome. I really liked the human starting zone, but the asurans are just cool. The Engineer itself is a cool class, though I didn't get access to all of the class's weapons, I generally liked the mobility and flexibility of the class and it looks to be a lot of fun. It takes a bit of work, but you can also come up with very cute/ugly looking asurans through character creation.

Past that I'm looking at a Sylvan Necromancer. The Sylvan starting zone was the least interesting to me story-wise, but has a cool alien aestetic that I really liked. Everything I've read from people were stating that Sylvan = Elves, and that is definitely not true. They seem much more Fae-like to me--more like nature spirits than anything. The Necromancer Class itself looks a lot of fun--and it seems like it could be a very effective class. The mechanics of the class seem very interesting to me--and my work as an alternate spell caster if Elementalist doesn't pan out. Sylvans are somewhat hard to make look 'good' in the game, though I managed to make a few 'ok' looking characters.

My last thought was to try a Char Warrior, or possibly Thief or Ranger. I spent the least time in the Char zone, so I didn't really get to see much of it. Warriors look OK, and are apparently beasts in PVP. I usually don't like melee classes, but since there are very few true melee classes in this game I think Warrior might be good.

Honestly I didn't do much with Warrior (I only got to level 2). I never even touched Ranger, Thief, or Guardian, though a thief for PVP seems like that might be good. Whatever my main turns out to be, I'll probably be creating at least 2 other characters to play around with, and with those other characters I'd like to hit a wide variety of play styles.

Oh, and as you might have noticed I haven't mentioned Mesmer here. I did create one, but honestly I didn't like it very much (though admittedly I only got to level 3 before I quit). Mesmer is the only class that I'm not planning on touching at launch.

Guild Wars 2 (Beta Impressions)

So I failed. My intention was to completely skip the Guild Wars 2 Beta even though I had already preordered the game. My original plan was to simply look at the character creation options available, but not play the game at all so it would be fresh and new when I started playing next month. Instead I ended up playing the game for about 6 hours, including the end-of-beta event. And as expected I very much liked what little I saw of the game.

During my time with the beta I created 6 different characters of various races and classes: a Human Elementalist, a Auran Thief, a Norn Engineer, a Sylvan Necromancer. and a Char Warrior. The highest level I got on any character was level 5. This was enough to see some of the basic mechanics of each class. It was enough to unlock several weapons, and to see the 'heart?' quests and dynamic quests in action.

I have to say that Guild Wars 2 could very easily be relabeled ADD Wars and with good reason. Maybe it's just the game front-loading the starter zone, but with the heart quests, dynamic quests, and world events going on it became very hard to stay focused on one task. Event were popping up left and right, making the world seem very active and packed with content. This was both good, and bad. Good in the sense that there was always something to do, and it was easy to just get caught up in it and lost in the world. But bad in the sense that it quickly became a bit overwhelming at times. And this was made worse considering the sheer numbers of people in the game doing the events, where there were often scores of people doing the same thing at the same time. Things often became confusing and hard to follow, and since the world doesn't wait around for you it can sometimes end up with you getting lost, or missing out on things because you couldn't keep up.

The chaotic nature of the game made my transition with the interface itself a bit problematic. My fingers are now used to Tera, which has an interface different than most MMOs. Guild Wars 2 has a slightly more traditional interface, but it was one I was having a hard time adjusting to. I don't think this will be a major problem for most people, but I did end up heavily modifying the default interface to get it to where I liked it. By the time I was done, and Hunger Royal started, the interface wasn't bothering me so much.

I never figured out how to gather (I guess you have to purchase items to enable this but I never got a chance to test it). I also didn't get to do any crafting at all, so I don't know how good or bad that system is or how good the gear is. I avoided doing story quests (except for the ones you have to do in the starter area). Instead I primary focused on heart quests and dynamic quests, and a bit of exploring. I did a couple of skill challenges, found several vistas (which are very Assassin's Creed-like). There will be a LOT of possible exploring in this game, which should really help with the longevity of the game.

Overall my first impressions with the game are is that it is very beautiful, very smooth, and it can clearly scale pretty well. Combat is very tight, and combines some of the best elements of WOW and Tera. It seems faster paced than either of those games, though, and the game does suffer from having so many effects on screen that it can be sometimes hard to stay up with the action. I'm also not quite convinced about the way skills are tied to weapons. From what I can tell it doesn't take very long to unlock things, so it's pretty obvious that you can unlock all of the abilities of your character very early on. Weapon swaps will certainly help, and I presume will be a cornerstone of the system when that ability unlocks.

I'm definitely excited to get a chance to play the game in late obvious. Perhaps more excited than I was before. In the meantime, I've still got Tera to play around with and that's what I'll be doing in the short term I think.

On another subject, I finally cancelled by subscription to Star Wars: The Old Republic. While it had it's problems and the game lost its luster long too soon I have to say that I really enjoyed the game and will remember it fondly. Too bad TOR's end game was so boring. I have about 20 days to log back in and do stuff before my last play period expires.

Tera Mystic (First Impressions)

After getting Priest to level 30 I've now manage to get a Mystic to level 25. This wasn't really my intent, but as my other friends have been playing now I decided to create another healer to run through Bastion of Lok, and leveling Mystic to 20 was pretty easy. While I'm no means a master of the class, I do have a few things to say about it at this point, though keep in mind my impressions are limited to the level 1-25 range.

And unfortunately my impressions of the class up to this point is that it is a poor man's priest, and no where near as interesting.

Offensively Mystic works very much like a Priest (except with fewer spells). Mystics have a standard ranged attack (just like Priest, and Sorcerer), a short ranged cone-based AOE (like Priest), and a short ranged high damage strike (just like Priest). This combination is very effective at low level, just like priest, and I have to admit I was MUCH faster soloing this time around. But this isn't because Mystic is faster or harder hitting (quite the opposite I think), it's because my soloing tactics have changed due to experience.

While I leveled this range as Priest I stayed at long range, plinking and jumping to stay at range. This is a mistake, in fact. At low levels (up to 25), it's much more effective to pull packs of mobs, stay at close range, and chain your AOEs at close range while circling your opponent to avoid most hits. While before I was taking on 1 mob at a time, I'm doing 4+ as a mystic. And with packs of small mobs I'm pulling 3-4 packs at a time, and AOEing them. Priest could do the same thing, but I just didn't even think about it at the time.

Mystics do get an effective lock-on poison effect that is very effective and has the advantage of being castable in motion. This is a cool spell, which can stack up to 3 times on a target, but is hampered by a 10 second duration, which means that you will be casting this a LOT. Too bad, because with this spell, and other DPS spells, the Mystic would be much more effective, but as it is it can actually be somewhat annoying to keep 100% of the time this up while healing.

As a healer Mystics just don't have the options that a Priest does. Mystics can drop healing orbs, which are very nice. And they have an effective lock-on heal. They also have a lock-on cleanse...and a very expensive healing fairy that stays up only for a few seconds. That's it. Priest definitely feels more versatile.

Of course Mystics DO get summons, but in practice I've not been enthused with them. Besides the tanking summon, most of the summons don't last very long (10-20 seconds), have a high MP cost, and aren't  that affective anyway. The tanking pet, for example, holds aggro 'ok', but on average is hitting for about 28 damage and gets knocked down a LOT. The Thrall of Vengeance, a ranged attacker, lasts for less than 20 seconds, and does just about 180 damage a hit (about the same as the primary nuke at this stage), and uses a lot of mana so you can't just leave it up even if you wanted to.

In fact even with using my main nuke, with the DPS pet, and the poison debuff at 3 stacks I feel like I'm doing...less damage than any other class than perhaps priest (at range anyway). And this is simply not sustainable for very long even under the best of circumstances.

And unlike Priests, Mystics seem to have a mana issue. While Priests can easily get mana back pretty easily Mystics only have Circle of Corruption at this level and this is a low damage AOE that's short range and returns a relatively small amount of damage (though on the plus side it provides mana to everyone in range). From experience the spell is not that useful solo, and is harder to use in a party where there is a lot of movement and AOE. That's not to say it's worthless, but the spell would be much better with a slightly larger radius, or a reduced channeling time.

As for evasion the Mystic class gets Teleport (just like the sorcerer), which is a pretty cool spell by itself. But priests get two evasion skills, one with a damage component, so even in that regard Priest seems more versatile. Fighting BAMs solo, I definitely preferred the two jumping skills that Priests get over Mystics single (if cooler) teleport.

At 25 I think I have enough information to say that while the class is not broken, it may not be the one for me. It's features mimic those of other classes too closely and it's distinctive abilities (such as its summons) are just not that cool. They need to last longer, and be more effective than they are right now (it would also be useful if you could heal them). Party Auras are much more useful (at this point I've only got the party speed buff), but burn mana which is already a scarce resource.

The two Bastion of Lok runs I did with the Mystic showed me that unlike Priest, who can still DPS in a fight, as a Mystic mana was too much of a precious resource to burn. Every time I tried to heal and DPS, I ended up having to stop for fear of running out of mana. And Circle of Corruption was completely worthless in a boss fight--it wasn't worth the risk of getting that close and staying in one place long enough for it to be effective. At least 50% of the time I tried, I'd get knocked down, and loose the channel anyway.

So at this point I'm not likely to take my Mystic much farther. I might do a few more BOL runs, or possibly SM?, but I'm much happier with Priest at this point and am looking forward with the rest of my group catching up to 30.

Tera Priest (Impressions)

I decided to try the Priest as my main in Tera. This is not my normal choice—as this blog suggests, I prefer mage/wizards (the Sorcerer seems to be the Tera equivalent for the play style). I chose priest mostly because as a Priest I’d have an easier time getting into instances and seeing other content, which is especially important if I’m doing this just by myself. And I’ve gotten used to healing from my time in The Old Republic, so why not give it a shot?

At first you don’t really get a good feeling for the mechanics at first. This is very true of most MMOs, but it is especially true of a game like Tera which relies on skill chaining ability sets to distinguish the classes from one another. I didn’t really start getting a ‘feel’ for the class until around level 16 or so, and I suspect that this is true for all classes in Tera (and why the prologue provided starts at 20).

As a solo class, Priest is slow and steady with no downtime but taking some time to kill stuff. They are adequate solo, and effective but I’m sure other classes are better (or at least faster).

(And you’ll have to forgive me in advance. This is an impression post, and I do not remember the names of the abilities I’m describing here).

Priests have two main ranged nukes—a low-damage bolt with no cool down; and a higher damage bolt that you can fire in groups of 3 before hitting short  cool down. Both of these bolts chain into other abilities. Some of these are auto created for you, while others you get to set up and customize. This is one of the reasons why Tera’s combat is so interesting, and figuring out how to do this takes some real time and experimentation. 

For example, my main low-damage nuke chains into a short range cone-based AOE (useful for close mobs), which in turns chains into a staff-strike which does considerable damage to any enemy directly in front. The triple-strike bolt also chains directly into staff strike, so if you time it right you can hit them with that, and then immediately fire off a hit with the staff for high damage. Priests also get a short range ball of lightning that does considerable damage—and chains directly into the staff strike. That last example is a particularly heavy hitting damage, even though it’s short range.

As for moving and positioning the Priest has two key abilities:  a jump back, and a jump back-with-fire which does the same thing, but also does a little damage to everything close by. But you often have to do a lot of running, and these abilities are more useful for getting out of the way instead of kiting. This may change at higher levels, but I doubt it. Priests, from what I’ve read, are one of the least mobile classes in the game.

Priests have two abilities that give them a considerable amount of sustainability. They have a short-cast self-heal that heals for a considerable amount of damage (about 25% of the character’s health at this level), and a channeled mana regen that can be used in combat, and while moving, which can restore up to 800 mana in one channel. Both of these abilities mean that Priests can heal themselves, and keep doing so for an effectively indefinite amount of time. If a priest or someone in the group falls, it is normally due to the priest either being out of position, or simply overwhelmed by the amount of damage being thrown around.

As for healing the experience is a bit different than in other MMOs. Since you don’t really target people, healing is most definitely NOT whack-a-mole. Instead Priests heal primarily through lock-on abilities (which have to be targeted), and AOE abilities which affect an area of the ground (and this changes based on the ability in question).

Lock on heals are interesting in that when you use them you target them. You hit the ability, then have to lock on to them by aiming at them, and then you trigger the ability again to cast it. Priests have a lock-on heal that affects 2 targets (and up to 3 with a glyph). It’s a cool mechanic, actually, and it’s affected by line-of-sight which is frustrating, but again speaks to the fact that positioning is critical.

AOE heals vary a bit more (and I’ve not seen all of them by any means). Priests get a potent HOT with a relatively short targeting circle; and a much smaller HOT with a much larger radius. They also have a cleansing AOE, which cleanses friendlies within the range of the circle. This creates a different healing play style, since healing involves using the right heals, and then targeting them in the right location. It’s even more important since some of these abilities have fixed ranges/areas, so targeting them involves moving into the right position to cast.  

Other heals show up later, including a group shield and various hot-like effects. But the basics seem very straight forward, and they do a good job of showing just how Tera plays different than most MMOs. And while the classes damage options are relatively limited, they are effective enough and the class doesn’t lag far behind when it comes to soloing performance—if it lags at all. At this point, I’m not sure that it does.

At this point I’ve only scratched the surface of the class, and of Tera itself. Priest is fun with a variety of options on how to play. Its only downside is its lack of options when it comes to DPS—the abilities it has are fine, it just doesn’t have a LOT of them (at least through level 20 or so). If anything, I’ve heard people say that leveling Priest is easy-mode, which may or may not be true.

Either way I’m going to stick with the class until at least 30 before moving on to try some other things for a bit. As I go I may continue to post my impressions of the whole thing and if I do I’ll continue to post them here.  I’m definitely wanting to spend more time with Sorcerer, and Lancer, both of them look like fun, useful classes that will be worth checking out.

True Blood (Season 5)

So, am I the only person out there that thinks that True Blood Season 5 is much improved over last year’s disappointing season? I remember liking a lot of the individual episodes in Season 4, but taken as a whole, the season was a major disappointment.

And on the surface, Season 5 seems to have some of the same problems.

• Too many characters I don’t care about.
• Too many plot lines to keep track of taking up air time.
• Too many characters doing stupid things in service to the plot.
• Sookie
• Tara 

Yet, none of these things have bothered me so much this year. Even though so far Season 5 has spent way too much of its time with THE AUTHORITY, and vampire politics that have always bogged the show down. I’m not sure why this is, honestly…has my tolerance for the show simply gone up since last summer? Or is it that I find the character interactions much more interesting this year.

Whatever the reason, I’m finding that I’m much more interested in what’s happening on screen this year. I like the interactions between the characters more even if the plot is moving at a pretty glacial pace and Russell (presumably the main villain of the season) hasn’t even been fully seen yet.  I just have the vague impression that the whole thing is leading to some form of Vampire/Faery showdown, though at this point the season could veer off in virtually any direction at this point.

I just hope that the show does a better job including all of the main characters in the story as a whole, like it did in Season 1 and Season 2.  

Tera First Impressions

So I’m pretty much done with Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I’m pretty much committed to playing Guild Wars 2 in September. And while I’ll still be playing TOR for another month or so, mostly doing 4-mans with friends once a week, I really have no interest in trying to level another character to 50, or even doing more on the Imperial side. To make things worse, I don’t really have any new single-player games to play right now. So, I went ahead and downloaded the Tera trial and installed it.

Tera is a fairly straight forward fantasy-based MMO. I’m told it is a Korean MMO, though I haven’t done ANY research on the game. It came out earlier this year (May, I believe), and what little I know about it has been its combat system which has been mostly praised from everything I’ve read. The game definitely has a distinctive Asian theme to it, that’s both pretty and colorful, and the game itself is gorgeous.

The reviews I read indicated two things: first, the game’s combat system is very good. And second, the game’s leveling system is about as generic as you can get. And now that I’ve spent some time in the game (I have a Priest at level 26) I can say both of those statements are very accurate.

As First Impressions go, Tera is a little bit of a mixed bag. Like every MMO I’ve ever played, you pick a server, and create a character. You have a good variety of characters you can make, and you can customize the characters more than most MMO’s I’ve played. And you can make some very cool looking characters in the system—it’s better than SWTORS by far, while offering considerable flexibility. And it gives you a chance during creation to view the character under multiple different types of gear which in itself is useful to people who care a lot about the look of their characters.

Character classes seem fairly varied. You have tanks (Lancer, Warrior…though apparently there is some debate about the effectiveness of Warrior tanks); Slayer and Beserker for melee DD, Sorcerer and Archer for Ranged DD, and Priest and Mystic for Healing. This is actually one of the areas where the game really shines: because of the way in which the combat system works, there are a lot of new ways that a class can distinguish itself compared to a lot of other MMOs.

The game starts with some ‘epic’ cut scenes, and a rather bewildering ‘Prologue’ which also serves as a form of tutorial. I’m not sure if this was just for the 7 day free-trial, but the Prologue makes your character level 20, with a full set of abilities, and then shows you some of the basic mechanics. I did this as a priest, and I was a bit frustrated by it mostly because in the end you fight a boss as a healer, but actual healing didn’t seem to work. In hindsight, I think I understand why…you can’t heal NPCs not in your party…but it never TELLS you that.

The story itself is rather bland and doesn’t really explain things very well. Basically there are two sleeping titans, who formed the continents (or, I think ARE the continents), and now some new island has formed. And the combined nations see this as a threat of some form, though I have no idea why. An expedition was sent, yet everyone died. So, now you are part of a second expedition of level 1 characters who will have to succeed where all of the established veterans failed. And while you are there you are to find out what happened to the leader of the first expedition that was with you in the prologue.

This is where Tera certainly missteps. The graphics are pretty, and the art style is great. Yet the story and presentation is lacking in every way. Most of the quests in the prologue involve you being sent from person to person to person, not really doing anything but running back and forth and reading quest text. And this definitely follows with the ‘and the questing is as generic as it gets’ point above.

Tera is a quest-based leveling game that is definitely very WOW like in regards to leveling and execution. You go to an area. You receive a group of quests to kill/collect something with genetic quest text that you can fully ignore, and then you run in a circuit doing everything the quests ask you to do. Then you turn everything in and move on to the next area. There is actually LESS variation from what I’ve seen than WOW…WOW had the benefit with Cataclysm of revamping the questing system and using new scripting tech to increase the types of quests they could present. Tera shows little of that. It’s ‘kill 10 things, or ‘collect 5 things’, or ‘kill things till you get ‘x’ drops’.  It’s simple, and mindless, and deliberately designed to flow easily. But even at its best it’s as generic as it gets.

On the plus side questing help is very useful and things are easy to track. Hyperlinks in quest descriptions allow you to identify objectives, and follow things; and you can easily arrange the orders of quest in your screen however you want. And the quests are definitely designed to flow together—though they are generic and boring, they are designed to be inoffensive as possible. So when combined with the combat system the game actually flows pretty well.

And speaking of the combat system, Tera’s is good. I’ve seen several classes now and the game rewards being actively engaged with one’s target and situation far more than most MMOs. And skill very much reflects on how well you do rather than gear and mindless stats. Gear lets you do things faster, but not necessarily ‘better’. This is because positioning, avoidance, and maneuvering is more important in the game—you avoid damage by NOT BEING HIT. And a lot of the game’s mechanics involve maneuvering into positions to attack (say from a flanking position or from behind), all while avoiding being hit yourself. Combat therefore takes a bit more time in Tera, but it’s more engaging and more fun, and feels much more mindless.

Then there are the BAMS, or ‘Big Assed Monsters’—their name not mine. These are larger mobs designed to be taken by a party. They are basically like mini-bosses (though some of the lower level BAMS I’ve encountered actually have more mechanics that saw an old Molten Core boss in WOW. I’ve killed some of these solo—but this can take 10 to 15 minutes to kill and I’m not sure that the rewards are worth it. The risk involved is relatively high, but it’s also good practice and I suspect this is fairly indicative of the game as a whole.

At this point I’ve gotten at least one class to Level 26 (Priest) and I’ve played several other classes past the starter area (Lancer, and Sorcerer). Each of these classes plays different from the other, and in ways that I like. The start zone itself doesn’t change though. And I suspect that the level grind pretty much has the same problem SW:TOR had—it seems very likely that you will have to follow the same level path through the game, with only a little variation to keep things moving.

Despite these minor problems and nick picks the game has proven to be very fun and I’ve had a blast playing it. It may be generic question, but the combat and new scenery makes the experience as a whole anything but boring. And now seems to be a good time to be playing it. The server I’m on seems active and lively, and there is plenty of content to see that is new. I’m looking forward to checking out some instances as a healer (healing in this game as a Priest is definitely more involved), and I’m interested in seeing if some of the higher level content shakes things up a bit.

I don’t know how long I’ll be playing this. Certainly up to the time of Guild Wars 2. But, who knows, I may end up keeping up with the game past GW2 if the end game is interesting and accessible enough. It certainly seems like the game will keep my attention at least to the level cap at 60.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (Final Thoughts)

Star Wars: The Old Republic was the game I knew for a while was going to be the game I quit World of Warcraft over. Several of my WOW friends were invested in the game, and so burned out on WOW that there was no way they were going to stick around after TOR came out. Even I quit WOW before The Old Republic shipped—there was no point in playing any more when everyone I knew was pretty much gone and raiding in Cataclysm had become too much of a social drain.

I had high hopes for the Old Republic, and at first the game made a very good first impression. The idea of a story based MMO was very cool to me, and the presentation of the game was worlds above that of any other MMO I’d played. I had various fantasies about my days with FFXI, which had some very interesting stories wrapped around a completely unforgiving social system that left people spending more of their time waiting to get into a party than actually in a party. And I had a core group of friends that I had to experience the whole game with.

And now, some 6 months later, I see SW:TOR as something of a failed experiment for Bioware and EA. Yet, I also think the game shows a blue-print for how other companies might very well be able to succeed moving forward.

Yet I did call TOR a failed experiment. And I truly believe that. The problem is that TOR tried to take a traditional single-player WOW experience and wrap its quests around a central narrative. This, I think is actually a very good idea as it turns what is in every other MMO the least interesting part of the game into its central feature. But, in reality Bioware completely failed in the execution of this concept.

TOR may have had 8 separate storylines, and two completely different experiences, but simply put it ALL sucked. In fact it sucked hard. At first I really tried to get into it—but very quickly the reality of it set in and it was apparent that TOR’s storylines were bland, disinteresting, and in many ways completely infuriating. It took something that should have been truly grand and epic, and made it very much like watching C-SPAN.

TOR’s story presentation was about as bland as you can get. Almost every cut-scene was simply about people talking. Actual action was rare, and poorly presented. I mean when the War starts—the one hinted at for 40 levels, you don’t even get to see a newscast or a single ship. Instead someone just says, ‘The War Started. We’re already almost defeated and about to lose the war. Here have a quest that has nothing to do with that.’

It doesn’t help that the Republic storylines were horrible. And as a Republic player who hit 50 with 2 characters I can say with certainty that the Republic should fall. And just about every senator and military official should be shot as a traitor, or shot for complete incompetence. J

To put it in better terms, a Star Wars story should be epic. It should be epic-feeling. It should have serious consequences. It should be about the battle between good and evil, and the shades of grey in between. Yet, SWTOR’s story never at any point showed any evidence of being epic. Mostly the storyline was presented in the most boring and generic manner possible. You go up to a quest giver, you watch him spout off whatever BS he has to say, spout a few agreements/insults in return…knowing that none of it had any real consequence at all. Because consequences would screw up the quest line for the zone you were in, and the game couldn’t compensate for that.

Just how many times can you directly disobey General Garza, only for her to bitch you out one second, only to give you praise and a new mission in the same conversation before you realize that none of it matters? How many sith agents can you uncover before you realize that if the Republic was that heavily infiltrated that you might as well hand them the keys to the Kingdom (and of course, in some cases, like on Corellia, that’s exactly what happens).

Let’s face it. TOR’s leveling game was short—yet STILL extremely boring and unfulfilling.

There are other areas where the game failed. Its combat system wasn’t tight enough, for example, especially in instances or PVP where it really mattered. The game engine just couldn’t handle it without lag. Its end game (at least non-raiding end game) was a snooze-fest of dialing and instance grinding that got old fast. Its PVP was at best annoying (and I’m beginning to realize that faction-based PVP, especially 2 faction based PVP is a very bad thing), and each class just had too many abilities to feel comfortable at high levels.

It wasn’t all bad. The companion system was cool (and really helped keep solo combat interesting). Its legacy system was good. Its starter 2-man dungeons were kinda nice—and I would have liked to see a lot more of that honestly. And the gearing/mod system is something that is actually pretty cool. I won’t comment on TOR’s raiding game, because I’ve never experienced it. It could be awesome, I don’t know. I do know that there are several very active and successful raiding guilds on my server, so it’s certainly not horrible.

Despite its troubles, TOR remains one of the better MMOs out there. And while it’s not even a year old and already in decline, that I think is more of a general MMO trend, and one inevitable with TOR’s more story-based design. There is still a lot of promise in the game, and if Bioware can pull off regular story-based expansions that actually feel more like a epic single-player experience with an MMO attached to it, I think they can keep this game going for quite some time. (In some ways I think TOR would benefit from the Guild Wars model…no monthly description, but you buy regular expansions).  

But, for me, my time with the game is quickly coming to an end. I’ll be quitting soon, and really I’ve only been logging in for ‘game night’ for over 2 months now anyway. I’ll probably come back to check out its next major expansion (just like I plan to come back to WOW for Mists of Pandaria, even if it’s just to level to 90). But TOR wasn’t able to hold my interest in the long term. And I probably wouldn’t have stayed as long as I had if not for the group I was with taking so long to get to 50 in the first place.

Still, those first two months were the game were a blast, and that while the polish certainly wore off, I’ll probably still look back with my experiences with the game with fondness years from now.  I just wish the developer's had not stuck so close to the WOW formula, and really worked towards making a completely different story-focused experience. The concept feels right to me, and who knows, maybe there's still time for an expansion to fulfill that goal. Or for some other company to take the core concepts in TOR and execute them well.

My Life as a Retired Raider

(but not a retired MMO player)

It’s been over a year since I quit World of Warcraft, and quit raiding. The reality of it was that my personal life, despite not being married, is just no longer compatible with the raiding life-style, and hasn’t been for quite some time. I seriously stressed over it for a long time in WOW before I gave up, and I would have probably stuck with it even longer if my friends had remained playing. But, people moved on, and the reasons I had to stay evaporated just as my patience with trying to revolve my life around a 3 or 4 night a week raiding schedule ran out.

But even though I’ve quit raiding, I’ve not stopped playing MMOs. After WOW, a group of my RL friends began with The Old Republic, which we started when it came out. After the initial rush, we settled  into a 2-night a week schedule, where we leveled as a group and did instances. It took us a long time, four months, to hit level 50 (in a game where even semi-core people were hitting 50 in 2-3 weeks). And in that time I played several different characters, getting 3 others into the level 35 range, and another to level 50.

The SWTOR end game is very much like WOW. It revolves around raiding, and hard mode instances for gear in PVP; and badly unbalanced PVP grinding for PVP. Raiding is pretty much a no-go for me. Even if I was interested in it, none of my friends are, and those that do are in the same boat as I am. Raiding is fun, but it’s not worth the time commitment anymore.  

This has completely changed the end-game for me, for obvious reasons. It means that as a level-capped character, I am pretty much limited to daily grinding for tokens for better gear…and I’ll pretty much never be able to keep up even if I wanted to. And daily-instance grinding just isn’t that fun by itself.

Playing with a group of RL friends really helps with an MMO, but the specific way we went about playing the game also hurt us. For one thing, we formed our own guild. It was only the 4 (and later 6 of us), it was just a group for us to have a shared channel, etc, and in that regard it was perfect. But it also meant that when we were together, we never really made contacts with anyone else. The entire experience of the game became very sheltered—I’ve yet to do any instance with anyone outside of my friends (even though I’m a Sage healer, and shouldn’t have too much trouble getting a group).

And since I played SWTOR much more casually, I never even now understand all of the mechanics of the game. MMO mechanics—changes to game systems, item lists, crafting, new vendors, etc, are usually pretty cryptic. The developers pretty much expect you to look this stuff up yourself. And even now I find myself out of the loop. SWTOR is a game that needed a lot of polish and changes, and I’ve not really tried to keep up with them.

Of course part of the problem is that as a group, I’ve pretty much just played with my friends and have no outside contacts in the game. And as a non-raider, there is something of a glass ceiling—already I’m slowly reaching the point where better gear becomes a near impossibility without taking the next step. I’ve hit level 50. I’m in the instance-grind. But when I’m done, then what?

This is a core issue with most MMO’s I’ve played, but one that’s never been a real issue because I’ve always been on the other side of the ceiling. Most of the raiding guilds I ever played in were always in the top 5 of the server I was in—capable of doing the most intense raids, but not as quickly on the uptake as the best.  And most PVE end games cater to the raiding crowd, at least in the games I’ve played. And that leaves the rest to always sit in second place, at best.

I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But it also means that my commitment to any one game isn’t as great, unlike it was in WOW. My time with SWTOR is almost done. I’m ending my subscription in 2 months, when Guild Wars 2 comes out. My friends and I are pretty much committed to making that switch. And in a lot of ways the game sounds like it will fit my new play style very well.

In the meantime, I’ve tried Tera, which I’ve also had a lot of fun with even with the short amount of time I’ve spent with it. It shows me that even now, I like the MMO style. Tera may have an interesting combat mechanic, but in every other respect it’s a traditional Everquest/WOW like MMO. Yet, I’ve enjoyed the questing, even if it’s as generic as it gets. Everything is fun, and new, and interesting. And I’ll probably stick with it for the next 2 months, or until I hit 60 (which is the level cap in that game right now). I may even do some PVP and other activities. And then I’ll move on to Guild Wars 2 and start the cycle all over again. And then maybe I’ll try the Secret World, or another MMO that has already come out, but I never checked out the first time through.

This is my life now as an ex-raider. I’m still playing, still having fun, but as my commitment towards a specific game is much lower so is my loyalty to it. It’s not that I’m burned out. But, as the best rewards require more commitment than I’m willing to make—or more specifically the methods of obtaining them are simply not fun enough to go far—in most cases I’m not even bothering to try. I’m much more willing at that  point to switch to something new and different than stick with the grind. This is a perspective that I know most hard-core people strongly abject to, but the reality is that the non-raiding game just isn’t as interesting because of the lack of social context. And because of that I have no incentive to continue, and little loyalty to any one game.