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SWTOR Day 3 and a Little Rifting too

16 Dec

So last night I began to play my Trooper in earnest, since all the alts are now logged out in cantinas where I want them.  I didn’t play long since I was rather tired, but I got well into level 5 and completed the 1st early quest series and need to head out to the 1st remote quest hub.

Compared to the other starting worlds, I find Ord Mantell to be a bit lacking.  The quest hubs aren’t well designed, everything’s sprawling every which way. . . I’m running and running and running around endlessly.  Add to it that the combat animations are slooooooow and always have to go off 1st before the ability is actually tripped and I feel like I’m playing in molasses while on this world.

After completing that 1st series of quests in the main hub, I didn’t feel like running out to the next hub, as the completionist in me would feel compelled to finish those quests too and I was getting tired, so I logged out after a little over an hour.

Dyed Dark GrayI fired Rift up, since I’d gotten some new gear the other night that I’d told a friend about and he wanted to see the screenshots which I hadn’t taken.  Got in, took the screenies (see to the left for an example), had enough rested xp for a level, so figured I’d burn it out for about a half hour and see how far I got.

At the end of my time limit for myself, a guild group was going to run an instance and needed 1 more dps to fill the group, and I didn’t want to go to bed yet, so I joined up.  We ran the Fall of Lantern Hook and it took about 40 minutes overall.  Not bad considering it was the tank’s 1st time there.  I got my level in there too, so now my rogue is 44.  Only 6 more to go!

Since I was playing the 2 games juxtaposed so closely, I couldn’t help but compare how the combat felt.  Rift felt snappy and responsive, especially in comparison to SWTOR.  Rift tends to have the skills set as “hit the button, skill fires when the cast time is complete (instantly for instants)” and they’ve done an excellent job of having either an instant animation, or an animation that exactly matches the cast time of the skill.  Interestingly enough, there is 1 move that the rogue does that has a longer animation.  It’s an instant, and does fire off instantly, but it’s a huge swing of both swords way out to the sides, and it takes a little bit to pull back out of it.  This serves as a break in the flow of the animation and if the skill didn’t do so much damage I’d be tempted to take it out of the macro just so it wouldn’t have that clunky feel to it.  And that’s just with a long animation AFTER the skill fired off.

Now imagine that *every* skill felt like that but with the delay happening BEFORE the skill fired off.  And yeah, that’s how I feel in SWTOR.  Every skill (even the instant ones) still has some long-ass animation that has to play out before it applies the skill.  Exacerbating the clunky feel is that the mobs react as though they got hit instantly by your decidedly non-instant skill.

So. . . for now, at least, I find myself preferring the SWTOR “4th pillar” storytelling to Rift’s lore, but I vastly prefer Rift’s combat to SWTOR’s.  I did a short foray into the SWTOR forums and am finding similar complaints from others, so we’ll see if BioWare can improve on the feel of the combat as they move forward.  And I’ll continue to play both games, not exclude the one for the other.  Nothing says I can’t like them both, right?

SWTOR Early Access and Other Sundry Stuff

13 Dec

So… It’s 2:15 pm in my time zone.  I still haven’t received an early access email for SWTOR, yet I was able to log in this morning at 7:00 am. My 1st character auto-joined my guild and everything.  I reserved some names for myself and tonight plan to actually go back in and create the characters’ appearances to match my ideas for the names.

Still can’t get over the fact that I could log in 7 hours ago and yet still haven’t received notification.  Too weird.  and yes, I checked my junk and spam folders — it ain’t there.  Go figure.

Some useful links I’ve seen:

Server List

Holocron Locations

How Crew Skills Work

***

Even though I let my EQ2 sub go, it lasted a few days after the new expansion.  I logged in to check out the new look for Freeport.  It definitely looks nicer than it used to — better colors and lighting, no more dead trees — feels like it’s more alive.  I was a bit surprised that the “racial ghettos” were just plain turned off — I’d have thought that also would have been redone, but no biggie.  I got an email saying the door to my Mistmoor Crag estate had been moved, but even though I went to the inn it said it’d been moved to, I only found doors to the inn room housing.  Not that I cared much and looked too hard for it either.  I thought it odd that that door had moved while the portal to all the other specialty housing had stayed in South Freeport, byut. . . devs decide what devs decide, no?

Sadly, nothing really made me go “this is awesome and I should keep my sub going and log in a lot” so I have let the subscription lapse.  I may come back sometime and buy the expansion so I can check out a Beastlord, but. . . who knows?  I did love the game, and don’t know why it just doesn’t “have it” for me anymore.  Perhaps it was just burnout from having played it more or less exclusively for so long.

***

On the Rift front, I’ve re-discovered the joys of the melee rogue yet again.  I shot up from level 38 to 43 in about 5 hours over this past weekend.  I had a bunch of rested xp, which helped, but I also decided to scrap the “melee ranger” build, since it looks like it’s designed more for level 50 anyway, and go a bit deeper into Bladedancer and Assassin as a hybrid.  I’ve seen variants on this called “BladeSin” or the cruder “AssDancer,” and thought they looked interesting.  At 39 all the base points for the 2 main souls were where I wanted them, and I started adding in Riftstalker for the Attack Power bonus and (eventual) healing on kill, though currently I really don’t need it.  Build is here if you’d like to see it.

It’s pretty much a single-button macro and the parses on solo mobs jump all over the place, ranging from 350-ish to 700-ish, depending on which cooldowns are available, hit rate, crit rate, etc.  Even with that dps being a bit spotty, I’ve soloed even-level elite mobs with it, so I’m pretty impressed with how much hurt it lays out.  The 40% poison proc rate plus Leeching Poison makes me more or less invulnerable to groups of 3-4 solo mobs, and I can pull entire rift groups including the nerfed “boss” of the cycle and come through just fine.  Amazingly non-squishy with that healing poison on.  Downside is the build has no range, but between RS’s teleport and Flash of Steel I can still usually close gaps pretty quickly.

Got into a dungeon finder group last night and tested out my Marksman/Ranger group build to see how it’d do.  Early on the tank had a bit of trouble with aggro, both with me and the healer, but once he got settled in the run went smoothly.  the overall zone wide parse wasn’t terribly impressive, but I still felt like we killed mobs really quickly and my parse was the highest ZW, so I won’t complain.  Got 3 nice gear upgrades from the dungeon too, including a new chest piece that looks nice enough that I changed all my appearance slots around and re-dyed all my armor to match it.  I didn’t get a screenshot for this post, and I’m not actually sure when I’ll play Rift again, what with the “New Shiny” and all of that, so you don’t get to see, but. . .hey it’s free to read and you get what you pay for ;-)

Interest in EQ2, More Rift Stuff, and More SWTOR thoughts as well

28 Nov

EQ2 stuff 1st:  I decided to buy the new expansion coming out early next month and re-subbed to EQ2 in order to re-familiarize myself with the game.  I played a couple of evenings, found a guild of “old-timers” (ages 30+ IRL) to join, had the “Thorg Armor” crafted for my level 90 toons, was very disappointed that it was WAY better than the other armor pieces that I either endlessly ran instances ot get enough tokens to buy or else was rare drops from those instances, and also finally ran the Cella instance on my SK in order to complete my Mythical Conversion quest.  All in all fairly productive time.

And after that I simply wasn’t interested in logging in again.  I don’t feel like leveling up alts, I don’t feel like running instances.  Frankly, I don’t feel like logging in at all.  EQ2 wasn’t boring to me, but it was uninteresting.  So I canceled the subscription, canceled the pre-order of the expansion, and I think I just might be completely done with EQ2 after all.

***

Damn! That's a BIG dragon!Rift dropped patch 1.6 recently.  The only thing in it that’s really affected me is that there’s a new level 50+ zone added for my capped toons to play in and some of the souls in mage and rogue were re-done so I had to re-allocate some points.  I’ve done some minor exploration of the new area (see the screenshot :-P ), but right now I’m more interested in leveling up my 2 non-capped toons on Faeblight, so my mage is now level 32 and my rogue is level 38 and both are steadily climbing.

Something I actually like about Rift is the way the skill trees seem to have enough “good stuff” in them that there’s almost always something just a point or 2 out of reach that you want to level up so you can get it.  Even if that “just out of reach” thing is on a different soul tree.  Right now on my rogue, for example, 1 build I’m working toward is a “melee ranger” (also called the Hoku spec).  It has 23 points in Bladedancer soul, 24 points in Ranger, and 19 in Assassin.  I’ve got the 23 and 24 in BD and Ranger, but only 3 in Assassin as of yet.  And there’s a nice skill called “Puncture” that I get with 6 points in the soul, so it’s only 2 levels away (since I get 2 points at level 39) so…. there’s incentive.  More “good stuff at 12, 15, 18, and 19 points as well, so no goal feels like it’s very far off.  And thus my interest is still piqued and Rift keeps me logging in, even if not on my capped out toons that I don’t want to endlessly grind instances on.

***

Finally, SWTOR Beta.  I was in it 2 weeks ago, but not last week, and then again this week.  No character wipes yet, so I even had rested XP on the ones I’d logged out in cantinas.  TBH, since I know i plan to play as a Trooper at launch and didn’t want to spoil any of that story, I wasn’t all that excited about logging in this weekend.  But since I had the bonus xp sitting there and I did kinda want to see the animations for the dual-bladed lightsaber, I fired up the Jedi Consular and played with it.

Due to having the rested xp and my penchant for “grinding” any red mob between me and a quest objective (no avoiding mobs for me) and also that I got in a group for the “Chamber of Speech” heroic quest, well….. at the point the story seemed to think I was level 7, maybe approaching level 8, I was already level 10.  Once I hit 10 I decided to see if I could go up to the fleet and get my advanced class, and. . . yup, sure could.  So suddenly I had these nice passive skills as a Jedi Shadow and a nice Blue-level dual-bladed lightsaber.  It started green — the consular color — but we all got the pre-order crystal in the mail so I slotted that in and it turned it black with a yellow outline.  I tried to get a few screenies, but the beta client doesn’t do them and apparently it somehow disabled my Windows thing too, as when I tried to paste into MS Paint it didn’t work either.  And no, I don’t have any other things like SnagIt or whatever, so. . oh well.

My next fight vs multiple mobs back on Tython was kinda fun as the toon would flip the saber back behind her to block attacks.  I don’t know that it was actually blocking or just animating that it was, but it did make it look pretty cool.  Sadly, this did break some immersion, as the next series in my story line sent me to go craft my 1st lightsaber.  Except I already had one I’d been given up in the fleet.  But I still got up to “The Forge” and said “Finally!  A lightsaber!” just before crafting it.  And after crafting that (single-bladed) saber (which wasn’t as good as my dual-bladed one so I didn’t use it at all) I went back to my master and the Jedi Council who I’d already talked to with the saber-staff hanging from my belt and they made a big deal that since I *now* had a lightsaber that meant I was no longer a Padawan.  Oops!

After I’d done that, I didn’t really feel like “testing” anymore.  Anything I do will be wiped anyway, and I’m really only interested in the Trooper class to start and didn’t want to go past the level 10 I already did 2 weeks ago on it and just be repeating content once the go-live happens.  All in all, still enjoyable, but I want the launch to happen before I do anything more.

My only complaint about this beta was that the “Next Target” and “Closest Target” keys never worked for me.  I asked in chat and was told they were buggy, so I ended up just click-targeting everything or letting the “auto-target-back” feature move me on to the next mob that was attacking me.  Not really enjoyable as a melee class with a forced close-in camera so it was hard to see or click on things behind me, but not the end of the world either.

More on Rift 1.5 (and a tad more)

4 Oct

While DDO is my “new shiny” right now, any time I do log in to Rift I still have a blast, so I decided to keep my sub going at least until SWTOR comes out and after that. . .we’ll see.  A bonus I got for the latest renewal was that when I logged in last night I got the 12 month veteran reward logged to my acccount, in spite of the game only being out for 7 months.

The vet rewards are really just so much fluff — some XP potions (when I’m at level cap.  Could go to PA’s, but . . meh) and some costume armor.  Up through the 6 month reward the armor is simply given to you, but for the 12 month reward you have to buy the final 3 pieces of the set off your special vet reward vendor.  Not a big deal, it’s not that expensive, but it’s still not feeling very much like a reward to spend 10 plat. . . .

Interestingly, in spite of Rift’s propensity to make the female armor either very low-cut or all the way to “chainmail bikini-dom” the veteran armor is a slightly modified male version of what the faction NPC’s wear.  Which TBH, I am a little annoyed with.  I actually like how the NPC females look.  Ah well.  Some examples:

Defiant Character vs both NPC genders:

Guardian Character vs Female NPC:

Guardian Character vs Male NPC:

Sorry for the dark screenies — it was night in-game and I had to leave for work so I didn’t have time to wait for day.  I did brighten them up as much as I could in a basic editor……

Anyway, I think they still look fine, but I would have loved the female version of the armor too.  Maybe a toggle option?

***********************************

In DDO, my artificer progression proceeds apace.  I’m now up to level 6, so I have the Flame Turret spell.  My only complaint about it is its slow cast time.  Other than that, it’s one of those “wowzers!” spells.  It looks awesome, and it does a ton of damage to the mobs I’m fighting now.

***********************************

My foray into Champions Online is proceeding much more slowly.  I deleted the 2 characters I had and remade 1 of them.  I stuck with the Ice Archetype, since I’ve liked that one the most so far and gave my character an outfit that I think looks pretty icy in keeping with that theme.  Apparently it looked good enough that a few other people I ran by in the tutorial commented on it, so . . yay, I suppose.  Sorry, no screenshot though.  I’ve forgotten to do that in that game as of yet.

In order to remove the chat restriction on new accounts I bought some points, so when I got this character to the point where you select your 1st travel power, I chose to keep more in the theme and buy the “Ice Slide” power.  It’s VERY fast, which is nice, but that speed makes it a little hard to control at times, and you have to fly up a little just to maintain altitude.  It’s still a very fun power, even if I think it looks more like the Silver Surfer’s board than a true ice slide.  Limitations of the programming and all of that….

Still and all — now that I’ve got the power builder thing figured out and am able to tell a bit better which mobs are melee and thus a good idea for my to root, the game’s starting to gel a bit for me, so I plan on trying to work this character up to level 20 or so in the next few weeks also.  I’ve got an IRL friend playing and he said he’d happily come group up with me and show me the ropes, so that should help a bunch too.

Happy gaming!

Rift 1.5 Update 1st Impressions

29 Sep

Almost 900 MB patch file size.  Good thing I’ve got that 12 mbps connection. . . .

Logged in, had mail.  Unsurprising since I had auctions up and expected at least half of them to have been unsold and returned to me, which they were, but I’d also made nearly 70 plat in sales too.  Go me!  Even though I can look at the value of my equipment and realize I’ve probably accumulated and spent nearly 1000 plat on this character overall, it’s never been in a chunk larger than 30 plat and usually right as it came in, so this is as much money as I’ve ever had “in the bank.”  Now… 5th role or mount? /rolleyes

Anyway, I’d really logged in so I could see these new “chronicles” — dungeons designed for duos (or “solo if you’ve got the gear” as the devs put it).  I hit up the 1st one so as to be able to unlock the new Planar Attunements and was teleported to an instance of Sanctum (the Guardian faction capital) set up as a Hollywood event — red (okay blue in this case) carpets and velvet ropes and everything.

So I went in and presented myself to the leaders of the faction, they told me how awesome I was, and a Messenger of the Vigil appeared to “empower me” or something.  The dialog is a bit fuzzy for me.  But that was the gist –  “You are really powerful and did great things so now you’re being rewarded with more power!”

So booyah I got awarded 1,000,000 xp for that — enough to either unlock 2 of the 6 attunement trees, or to unlock a single one and allocate a point into it.  I unlocked the Air tree and put a point into the “Increase spellpower when using a 2H mace” thing, since I use a 2H mace about 99.8% of the time.

And then I had to curse the sudden but inevitable betrayalcrashing of the party by the evil bad guys.  I fought them off then went outside to confront the bad guy leader so as to push back to attack.  Took him down, at which point he respawned and said I was a fool to think I could confront him since he’s an avatar of The Big Bad McGuffin that Rift hangs all of its lore on.  He then summoned some pretty cool looking critter from the Plane of Death.  It was an easy fight, sadly — the thing broadcast every attack it was going to make and helpfully outlined circles and cones and arcs on the ground where he was going to attack so that I could move out of his way, then got tired and just stood there while I beat on him.  And here’s the end result of that fight:

The xp awarded from all the kills in the instance was surprisingly high — I’d gained 10% of an AA level in less than 10 minutes.  Not bad, I thought.

After this was all done, everyone got all happy again and a few quest givers even appeared.  Grabbed their quests, which were simply “go talk to people in Sanctum” ones and left the instance.  And turned in the quest completions.  XP was crap for them, but you’d expect it to be if all you’re doing is running 50 yards to the finisher.

That “chronicle” was designed to be soloed, but there were 2 others in the list that were the duo “(unless you’re leet)” ones.  I hit up the 2nd one, figuring that I can solo elite mobs in the overland areas on quests that say you should have 3 in your group, so I’d try the thing out and if it was too rough I could always leave and beg my guild for help.

Well… it wasn’t too rough — Completed it easily, never in any danger of dying, not even to the named.  Gear rewarded was complete crap, but I got a few Plaques of Achievement, which are never a bad thing, and really good XP — enough that I’m about halfway to the next PA point.  And it was now past my bedtime, so I didn’t do the 2nd chronicle.

Overall, it was “nice” and based on the xp awarded in the 1 dungeon I did, if one does both chronicles daily, then a dungeon run or 2 in a full group, I could see you easily gaining a PA level per night.  Still…. the PA points are so minor and gaining a PA a night would still be about 6 months to get “all of them” so it’d really just be grind grind grind.

Still..I enjoyed myself immensely and am now semi-reconsidering my account cancellation.  I have 5 more days to decide before the time runs out.

A few thoughts on the stat and ability changes for clerics:  I thought I was running around with a touch over 5000 hp before this patch, but now am at about 4700.  I could be misremembering, though, since I don’t think there were any changes made to the END stat for clerics.  INT, though, was bumped to provide a little more mana.  I was running 3800-ish mana before the patch (this I’m sure of) and am now pushing 4300 mana instead.  Mana is completely irrelevant to me unless I’m healing a dungeon, though, and hasn’t been a problem there either so I can’t say I really care about that increase.  Ah well.

As far as abilities go, the only change that really affected me in my “Shamicar” build was that the Lust for Blood ability now procs a flat 40% of the time, rather than on critical hits.  Since my crit rate is 21.6%, this actually represented an increase in its proc’ing for me, and it did seem to be popping up a lot more than before, but it was actually just resetting itself to always be up it seemed — my macros don’t actually use a whole lot of physical attacks.  They’re in there, but toward the bottom, so oftentimes I’m using life attacks from Justicar (for Convictions) or the Shaman’s high-damage air attacks.  Sure, they’re not always up, but it still means that the Massive Blow and Crushing Blow abilities don’t actually gain from the LFB procs before it reprocs anyway.  As a result, the change didn’t really affect me.  Such is life.

******

I didn’t do any DDO last night, favoring the new Rift stuff instead, but thought I’d drop a random screenshot I took of my Artificer in better light and at a better angle than the one in my prior post:

Happy Gaming!

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