This game is quite addicting and fun to play if you find the right class. Right now I'm playing a Mage and having fun playing again. Everyone I've gotten to play RoM likes the game and can't ubderstand why I'm so critical. Maybe I'm too hard to please. Don't miss this game if you are looking for a new game to try.
You are playing class that is horribly overpowered atm and everyone will tell you so, even the mages. When it will get properly ballanced - and it will have to be - you will be doing one half to one third of your current damage. I am looking forward for your posts then.
Almost everything is in place to make a great game, in large part due to shameless will to incorporate what other games perfected (but you do not reinvent the wheel). What can drag the game down are two things:
1) publisher greed - they recently overtuned levelling instances, possibly to encourage more gear upgrade purchases from CS. The issue they have is not that people do not want to spend money (they will buy mount and stop there), the issue is a) offers are too overhelming in quantity and too underwhelming in description b) people do not know how to do gear modding because it is poorly documented and not user friendly c) level gaps are so huge it is not worth it (most players mod white unbound gear so they can resell it). Only when you reach late game the CS incentives are present, before that it is not only expensive and not worth it, it is even not fun. Go to Ystra and most of players will not uderstand how you tier up gear, why you are selling fusion stones, why some statless white gear is more expensive than blue or why more stats is worse than less. The whole group of XP debt removal CS tools also feels forced and totally unfun when faced with OHKO mobs wandering about.
2) The attempt to reballance whole game without proper knowledge of the principles it is build upon. One day Warrior is CD limited the other day is rage limited. Literary one day one way the other day completely different apporoach. Heals go from fixed to scaled, forcing healers (already rare commodity) to double or triple their investment into the game and shifting their passive defense from right behind tanks to rock bottom. Healer ability that made it possible to actually outheal incoming damage aka actually made it worth healing in 1v1 (with large CD and hefty cost), made inadequate for the job. 10min abilities designed to faciliate solo kills of elite mobs (2-3 man party otherwise) get changed to minor DPS boost (if anything they should be turned into WoW PvP trinkets but this basic idea never came to their clueless mind). They hardly know what they are getting into if they just now started to turn this heavily PvE game into ballanced Arena playground - the CC skills need complete revamp, skillsets need changes (heal debuffs missing, CC removal missing, the whole spammable multitarget non-diminished CCs, most melee without snares) - and this all in a game with heavy impact of CS gear and 30 quite different subclasses (Warrior can be magic damage dealer in certain combination, Priest can go from clothie healer to paladin type to melee DPS to soloing DoTter). And then they start to atually take raw ideas from forum frequentants without second look, something no good dev will actually do for a very good reason except as inspiration.
Frogster took a good fun game by semi experienced and succesfull developer (Cabal Online besides this Radiant Arcana) and started to tinker with things they do not understand and with what I suspect is very undermanned crew (as expected and normally understood from F2P publisher). It is surprisingly good game but publisher is on the right track to break it.
I've never played a game at release that I didn't play in OB, so no, I don't think that is the solution. This is the only game I've ever beta tested that decided it was a good idea to change the entirety of the way classes work just a couple weeks out from release. Essentially, this became a 2 week beta test as everything we had been testing up until that point was changed...for the worst I should add. Me quitting isn't a result of me thinking this game doesn't have potential, it is a result of thinking the people that are in charge of this game have no clue what they are doing and therefore are pretty much guaranteed to run it into the ground. I'm not going to invest time and money into a game with that definite end.
Wow...scary how right I was. They shut the servers down at the end of OB promising a huge patch and many features at release. A 5-minute patch downloaded today, and the game is the exact same. They didn't release the new area that they said was going to be open. They didn't put in the lvl 35 elite skills they said were ready. They didn't give a full tp reset, which they have been saying for months they would (just a half class reset). This on top of all the non-working skills and recipes that I had no expectation of them fixing, and they didn't. Just an enormous fail on what they promised to release...things they promised just a couple of days ago, not months or years. These guys are clueless. I logged in and gave everything I had away (which was a significant amount), and then uninstalled the game. I'm warning you guys, this game is not going to bring you pleasure...move on, or get dragged down with it.
I've never played a game at release that I didn't play in OB, so no, I don't think that is the solution. This is the only game I've ever beta tested that decided it was a good idea to change the entirety of the way classes work just a couple weeks out from release. Essentially, this became a 2 week beta test as everything we had been testing up until that point was changed...for the worst I should add. Me quitting isn't a result of me thinking this game doesn't have potential, it is a result of thinking the people that are in charge of this game have no clue what they are doing and therefore are pretty much guaranteed to run it into the ground. I'm not going to invest time and money into a game with that definite end.
Wow...scary how right I was. They shut the servers down at the end of OB promising a huge patch and many features at release. A 5-minute patch downloaded today, and the game is the exact same. They didn't release the new area that they said was going to be open. They didn't put in the lvl 35 elite skills they said were ready. They didn't give a full tp reset, which they have been saying for months they would (just a half class reset). This on top of all the non-working skills and recipes that I had no expectation of them fixing, and they didn't. Just an enormous fail on what they promised to release...things they promised just a couple of days ago, not months or years. These guys are clueless. I logged in and gave everything I had away (which was a significant amount), and then uninstalled the game. I'm warning you guys, this game is not going to bring you pleasure...move on, or get dragged down with it.
You're mistaken/wrong on several points.
1. Where did they "promise a huge patch"? I've never seen that, feel free to prove your claim.
2. The game is NOT exactly the same. For example, most of (almost all?) the translations were finished for release. Other examples of what's fixed, includes corrected tooltips and text that now fits correctly in the chat windows/boxes.
3. They are keeping their promise about full TP reset. In fact, they're actually doing it better than expected. They gave us one token for resetting one class once. And they will send another token in mail soon, they've announced it ingame all afternoon/evening. This is better because you can either use both tokens for a full reset, or you can save them and use them whenever you want.
4. They NEVER claimed Ravenfell (the new area) would be opened at release. This is their announcement on the subject:
"High-Level explorers will have the opportunity to make their way to Ravenfell - for a little dip into the water or a rough brawl with one of the pirates - soon after our release on Thursday, 19 March 2009, Runes of Magic's big day!"
Check what I underlined: "soon after our release".
The game has (imo) a lot of issues that needs to be fixed. But with all the new quests, and the nerfing of the overpowered mobs in the instances, I'd say they're taking steps in the right direction. The combat system revamp with the nerfing of most classes was more than a couple of steps back, but I hope they get this right too in the near future. Just as bad was the "chance to hit" system change - it's bloody annoying when you miss your target 5-6 times in one fight, a mob that's normally easy can sometimes be lethal just because of this.
The new quests are joke. Most of them are just fedex that gives you enormous amount of XP for a short jog along a safe road. They have no gear rewards. They are just XP stuffing. The saddest part is they have a huge number of well developed Qs in two very nice zones, but they are little known (lack of world map does not help here) and mostly redundant at their level range.
Then we have new "Epic" Q line, that starts with a drop from a common lowbie mob that you find if you take forum under microscope and stops cold with bug after a fews steps. Exciting.
By late game you still grind ants as always. They even nerfed the only alternative there was to the mind numbing ant raids.
They only good thing is the reintroduction of levelling bags. They contain surprisingly generous gifts, albeit their distribution in bags is done by retarded ape (here is clue: one fusion stone is totally and uterly useless by itself except to destroy your gear and getting yet another orphaned stone ten levels later hardly helps, unless you are lvl 50 and got it all at the same time).
Sadly, the result is as mentioned by people above, that a very good game is being run to the ground by incompetent publisher. The release brought almost none (way below 10% growth vs beta, according to publisher propaganda numbers) despite the fact it is a rare F2P avaible as boxed game too.
The new stuffing quests, the combat rewamp, this is all tasks they did not need to do or not at this extent, not doing them would make the game better and more succesfull and they could instead spend their resources on finishing really new stuff. At one hand they lack resources to finish work in time on the other hand they waste them at spoiling their product. It is just that bad businnes right now.
Edit: I wonder when i get the TP reset for my secondary class. So far it takes them days. They forgot how their game works, then promised, then failed to deliver in timely fashion. On a very basic thing they advertised weeks before and is usually doable by GMs (spawn and item to player mail). No, I do not need it. Yes, they are that incompetent.
Your "review" is highly exagerated. RoM is not perfect, the publisher is not very experimented, but you're presenting the current situation like it's the game's obituary - when in fact a lot players continue to enjoy the game and a lot of new players joined in - visit the low maps and convince yourself.
How many are rerolls and how many are genuine new players? The empty nightmare has to be somehere. And they are all interested in levelling only, none in instances. They are very well versed in current game ballance, rolling mostly mages. Frogster numbers show stagnant population. It may go up next week but release was not large increase. And even then, experienced player will create new account for an alt.
I had visited them, very througroughly. How many are rerolls and how many are genuine new players? The empty nightmare has to be somehere. And they are all interested in levelling only, none in instances. They are very well versed in current game ballance, rolling mostly mages. Frogster numbers show stagnant population. It may go up next week but release was not large increase. And even then, experienced player will create new account for an alt.
All four US servers were High population Sunday and xfire numbers showed 50% increase over last week.
Been playing since Open Beta. I have one character maxed and 7 other characters around 25/25-35/35. Today I decided to quit. Every single patch in OB severely nerfed some aspect of the game that was fun. After each patch, I would get pissed, but I would just assume that they had something in mind and it would get better...unfortunately, it never did. Now we are days from release, and another severe nerf was just patched into the game. It isn't fun anymore. I was planning on playing this game for quite awhile as it had a lot of great features, and I only had to put in as much money as I wanted to. However, now I'm looking for the next MMO to spend my time on, I've given up on these guys figuring out what the hell they are doing. It is still incredibly amazing to me that the game was so much better the first day I played it than it is now, several months later, days before release. I'm done playing games from this company.
Oh well, sorry it wasn't for you. Good luck with your next MMO.... buh bye.
my god I get so tired of hearing about peoples class getting nerfed. Maybe the skill shouldnt have been over powered to beging with? You should not play games in BETA I repeat BETA if you can not handel class balancing, or for that fact anytime within 4 months of a release date. Last I knew BETA was for working on a game. Well have fun in WoW.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I never heard of this game until this past Saturday, but decided to download and try it out. The download took some time but that was to be expected and the update took some time, but it wasn't too bad. I gave them a break considering it's a new game. I couldn't have been more surprised at what I got. It reminds me a lot of several other mmo's, but contains a lot of what I liked about each of them. The diamond idea is the way to make some money and I have no problems with that at the current time. What a pleasant surprise and something fresh, in my opinion.
my god I get so tired of hearing about peoples class getting nerfed. Maybe the skill shouldnt have been over powered to beging with? You should not play games in BETA I repeat BETA if you can not handel class balancing, or for that fact anytime within 4 months of a release date. Last I knew BETA was for working on a game. Well have fun in WoW.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I never heard of this game until this past Saturday, but decided to download and try it out. The download took some time but that was to be expected and the update took some time, but it wasn't too bad. I gave them a break considering it's a new game. I couldn't have been more surprised at what I got. It reminds me a lot of several other mmo's, but contains a lot of what I liked about each of them. The diamond idea is the way to make some money and I have no problems with that at the current time. What a pleasant surprise and something fresh, in my opinion.
Well, before you agree to much with the rant of the guy you quote, you should know that the major changes didn't happen 4 months before release, it happened just days before. And the fact that the cash shop opened a good while earlier, where they accepted money, then made changes that broke the game for a lot of players, that's also an issue to consider.
Kinda silly to just "couldn't agree more" when you have no idea about what happened more than just a few days ago, what the devs promised and never kept, what they downright lied about, etc.
I haven't played in weeks, mostly because I haven't had time between work, family and other games that caught my interested. None of my characters was higher than level 17, but I did have characters in every class and several combinations (trying them all out to see what I liked to play best). I downloaded a multitude of patches today and loaded RoM up again and I had just as much fun today as I did before. I mostly played my rogue/priest and rogue/scout and I even rolled a new scout (soon to be a priest/scout) and had fun with all of them. No complaints here, at least for my low level characters.
the only game where I actually questioned nerfs/buffs and thought the devs didnt know what they were doing was in AoC. They buffed my already OP'ed soul swarm to do more dmg then just a week later for them to severly nerf it to where it was useless. They had no clue what they were doing. I knew from before the buff of soul swarm that it was going to get nerfed, its just that it baffeled me to no end as to why they buffed an already OP spell. I knew it was going to take a major blow sooner or later. I took full advantage of it before it got nerfed. went from 70-80 in just half a day, it seemed. Point is you cant expect to run around pwning everthing and think nothings going to change.
Should have played Anarchy online for a while first.
Then their cluelessness in AoC wouldn't have shocked you at all.
First, the game operation, the pure engine itself, is very well done. The dev's on this project should be congratulated. Other than the well know lag when in a crowded town, the game engine itself is well done. For those who have the graphics power, turn up those settings. The game defaults to fairly low settings.
The introductory quests in the starter town are also well done. Most of the quests are kill X mobs, collect X items. But this is how most MMORPGs operate and its what a lot of us are used to.
The negatives for this game are almost all purely game design decisions as far as I'm concerned, not dev problems! I'm basing this on the release, not beta, although many bad decisions carried over.
First, the decision was made to make the game last longer. How did they do this? Lowering xp on some mobs and quests would have been low impact and still kept the fun (nope). Raise the amount of xp to level (nope). Change the amount of damage you can do to a mob by giving them large resists for each level diff (yes). Increase the power of all mob attacks (yes). Funny story here, a popular mob to kill is the hairy frog. I've killed hundreds of them with my priest/rogue. Went there with my mage/priest after release, attacked a level 21 (I was 23) with my flame, he turned and did 1043 damage to me in one blow. Never happened again after 20 more frogs, makes me wonder about their crit system.
Second, they have some of the most outrageous (what were they thinking) quests I've ever seen in any game. Kill crafty bernok, its a level 17 or so quest I believe, turns out bernok is a crown elite wolf that kills anyone below level 35. There are many other quests that end with an elite that is anywhere from 4 to 6 levels higher than the quest level. How does everyone deal with this? They yell out on the zone chat and hope a kind high level comes and helps them out. Great game design? (no). There is a level 19 or 20 quest that involves killing a crown elite dragonfly that usually takes several characters that are level 40 or greater! I've seen raids formed just to take this dragonfly out, pretty good for a level 20 quest eh?
Third, I've been over quite a bit of the map and a lot of it is wasted. There are some great low to mid level areas that are pratically untouched since no other quests lead you to those areas. Reifort is practically empty, but its a great place to level up your second class. So instead of spreading out, everyone crams together in the varanas area.
Fourth, there have been mods to spells and classes that basically destroyed the usage of that class. This is AFTER release. Example: Priest dots were outrageous before release and were corrected by putting resistance (although overdone) on the mobs. After release though it was decided that priests should a) not be damage centric (GMs own words) b) should stick to healing. So dot damage was cut 45% even with the best gear. This destroyed the priest rogue whose basic powers were... dots (we won't even mention that they refused to make any off hand bludgeons or wands, who cares if all other classes with rogue secondary get dual wield). They have stated that even now further changes are coming to all combat. Reason stated for this? People are leveling in one month, there is no end game so people will get bored if they can get to 50 so quickly and will leave. Thus they make no money, thus they must slow everyone down.
For those of you yet to try this game, its worth it, kind of. If your the type that likes great damage that can actually kill an elite that is within a level of you, I would suggest a mage primary. Its the only class, at least up to mid level, that can do so without quaffing the heck out of potions. The game is full of mage/priests as the flavor of the month right now. At the time of this writing many people are expecting the "ruins of nerfdom" to swing a bat at mages soon (sorry for the pessimism, my current char is a mage/priest like i said Those who like tanks should go for Knight/warrior or Knight/priest, Knights get the plate armor and best defense. Good DPS can be had from Rogue/Scout or Warrior/Rogues.
Comments
You are playing class that is horribly overpowered atm and everyone will tell you so, even the mages. When it will get properly ballanced - and it will have to be - you will be doing one half to one third of your current damage. I am looking forward for your posts then.
Almost everything is in place to make a great game, in large part due to shameless will to incorporate what other games perfected (but you do not reinvent the wheel). What can drag the game down are two things:
1) publisher greed - they recently overtuned levelling instances, possibly to encourage more gear upgrade purchases from CS. The issue they have is not that people do not want to spend money (they will buy mount and stop there), the issue is a) offers are too overhelming in quantity and too underwhelming in description b) people do not know how to do gear modding because it is poorly documented and not user friendly c) level gaps are so huge it is not worth it (most players mod white unbound gear so they can resell it). Only when you reach late game the CS incentives are present, before that it is not only expensive and not worth it, it is even not fun. Go to Ystra and most of players will not uderstand how you tier up gear, why you are selling fusion stones, why some statless white gear is more expensive than blue or why more stats is worse than less. The whole group of XP debt removal CS tools also feels forced and totally unfun when faced with OHKO mobs wandering about.
2) The attempt to reballance whole game without proper knowledge of the principles it is build upon. One day Warrior is CD limited the other day is rage limited. Literary one day one way the other day completely different apporoach. Heals go from fixed to scaled, forcing healers (already rare commodity) to double or triple their investment into the game and shifting their passive defense from right behind tanks to rock bottom. Healer ability that made it possible to actually outheal incoming damage aka actually made it worth healing in 1v1 (with large CD and hefty cost), made inadequate for the job. 10min abilities designed to faciliate solo kills of elite mobs (2-3 man party otherwise) get changed to minor DPS boost (if anything they should be turned into WoW PvP trinkets but this basic idea never came to their clueless mind). They hardly know what they are getting into if they just now started to turn this heavily PvE game into ballanced Arena playground - the CC skills need complete revamp, skillsets need changes (heal debuffs missing, CC removal missing, the whole spammable multitarget non-diminished CCs, most melee without snares) - and this all in a game with heavy impact of CS gear and 30 quite different subclasses (Warrior can be magic damage dealer in certain combination, Priest can go from clothie healer to paladin type to melee DPS to soloing DoTter). And then they start to atually take raw ideas from forum frequentants without second look, something no good dev will actually do for a very good reason except as inspiration.
Frogster took a good fun game by semi experienced and succesfull developer (Cabal Online besides this Radiant Arcana) and started to tinker with things they do not understand and with what I suspect is very undermanned crew (as expected and normally understood from F2P publisher). It is surprisingly good game but publisher is on the right track to break it.
Wow...scary how right I was. They shut the servers down at the end of OB promising a huge patch and many features at release. A 5-minute patch downloaded today, and the game is the exact same. They didn't release the new area that they said was going to be open. They didn't put in the lvl 35 elite skills they said were ready. They didn't give a full tp reset, which they have been saying for months they would (just a half class reset). This on top of all the non-working skills and recipes that I had no expectation of them fixing, and they didn't. Just an enormous fail on what they promised to release...things they promised just a couple of days ago, not months or years. These guys are clueless. I logged in and gave everything I had away (which was a significant amount), and then uninstalled the game. I'm warning you guys, this game is not going to bring you pleasure...move on, or get dragged down with it.
Wow...scary how right I was. They shut the servers down at the end of OB promising a huge patch and many features at release. A 5-minute patch downloaded today, and the game is the exact same. They didn't release the new area that they said was going to be open. They didn't put in the lvl 35 elite skills they said were ready. They didn't give a full tp reset, which they have been saying for months they would (just a half class reset). This on top of all the non-working skills and recipes that I had no expectation of them fixing, and they didn't. Just an enormous fail on what they promised to release...things they promised just a couple of days ago, not months or years. These guys are clueless. I logged in and gave everything I had away (which was a significant amount), and then uninstalled the game. I'm warning you guys, this game is not going to bring you pleasure...move on, or get dragged down with it.
You're mistaken/wrong on several points.
1. Where did they "promise a huge patch"? I've never seen that, feel free to prove your claim.
2. The game is NOT exactly the same. For example, most of (almost all?) the translations were finished for release. Other examples of what's fixed, includes corrected tooltips and text that now fits correctly in the chat windows/boxes.
3. They are keeping their promise about full TP reset. In fact, they're actually doing it better than expected. They gave us one token for resetting one class once. And they will send another token in mail soon, they've announced it ingame all afternoon/evening. This is better because you can either use both tokens for a full reset, or you can save them and use them whenever you want.
4. They NEVER claimed Ravenfell (the new area) would be opened at release. This is their announcement on the subject:
"High-Level explorers will have the opportunity to make their way to Ravenfell - for a little dip into the water or a rough brawl with one of the pirates - soon after our release on Thursday, 19 March 2009, Runes of Magic's big day!"
Check what I underlined: "soon after our release".
http://www.runesofmagic.com/en/index.html
The game has (imo) a lot of issues that needs to be fixed. But with all the new quests, and the nerfing of the overpowered mobs in the instances, I'd say they're taking steps in the right direction. The combat system revamp with the nerfing of most classes was more than a couple of steps back, but I hope they get this right too in the near future. Just as bad was the "chance to hit" system change - it's bloody annoying when you miss your target 5-6 times in one fight, a mob that's normally easy can sometimes be lethal just because of this.
The new quests are joke. Most of them are just fedex that gives you enormous amount of XP for a short jog along a safe road. They have no gear rewards. They are just XP stuffing. The saddest part is they have a huge number of well developed Qs in two very nice zones, but they are little known (lack of world map does not help here) and mostly redundant at their level range.
Then we have new "Epic" Q line, that starts with a drop from a common lowbie mob that you find if you take forum under microscope and stops cold with bug after a fews steps. Exciting.
By late game you still grind ants as always. They even nerfed the only alternative there was to the mind numbing ant raids.
They only good thing is the reintroduction of levelling bags. They contain surprisingly generous gifts, albeit their distribution in bags is done by retarded ape (here is clue: one fusion stone is totally and uterly useless by itself except to destroy your gear and getting yet another orphaned stone ten levels later hardly helps, unless you are lvl 50 and got it all at the same time).
Sadly, the result is as mentioned by people above, that a very good game is being run to the ground by incompetent publisher. The release brought almost none (way below 10% growth vs beta, according to publisher propaganda numbers) despite the fact it is a rare F2P avaible as boxed game too.
The new stuffing quests, the combat rewamp, this is all tasks they did not need to do or not at this extent, not doing them would make the game better and more succesfull and they could instead spend their resources on finishing really new stuff. At one hand they lack resources to finish work in time on the other hand they waste them at spoiling their product. It is just that bad businnes right now.
Edit: I wonder when i get the TP reset for my secondary class. So far it takes them days. They forgot how their game works, then promised, then failed to deliver in timely fashion. On a very basic thing they advertised weeks before and is usually doable by GMs (spawn and item to player mail). No, I do not need it. Yes, they are that incompetent.
Your "review" is highly exagerated. RoM is not perfect, the publisher is not very experimented, but you're presenting the current situation like it's the game's obituary - when in fact a lot players continue to enjoy the game and a lot of new players joined in - visit the low maps and convince yourself.
I had visited them, very througroughly.
How many are rerolls and how many are genuine new players? The empty nightmare has to be somehere. And they are all interested in levelling only, none in instances. They are very well versed in current game ballance, rolling mostly mages. Frogster numbers show stagnant population. It may go up next week but release was not large increase. And even then, experienced player will create new account for an alt.
All four US servers were High population Sunday and xfire numbers showed 50% increase over last week.
www.xfire.com/games/
Oh well, sorry it wasn't for you. Good luck with your next MMO.... buh bye.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I never heard of this game until this past Saturday, but decided to download and try it out. The download took some time but that was to be expected and the update took some time, but it wasn't too bad. I gave them a break considering it's a new game. I couldn't have been more surprised at what I got. It reminds me a lot of several other mmo's, but contains a lot of what I liked about each of them. The diamond idea is the way to make some money and I have no problems with that at the current time. What a pleasant surprise and something fresh, in my opinion.
I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I never heard of this game until this past Saturday, but decided to download and try it out. The download took some time but that was to be expected and the update took some time, but it wasn't too bad. I gave them a break considering it's a new game. I couldn't have been more surprised at what I got. It reminds me a lot of several other mmo's, but contains a lot of what I liked about each of them. The diamond idea is the way to make some money and I have no problems with that at the current time. What a pleasant surprise and something fresh, in my opinion.
Well, before you agree to much with the rant of the guy you quote, you should know that the major changes didn't happen 4 months before release, it happened just days before. And the fact that the cash shop opened a good while earlier, where they accepted money, then made changes that broke the game for a lot of players, that's also an issue to consider.
Kinda silly to just "couldn't agree more" when you have no idea about what happened more than just a few days ago, what the devs promised and never kept, what they downright lied about, etc.
I haven't played in weeks, mostly because I haven't had time between work, family and other games that caught my interested. None of my characters was higher than level 17, but I did have characters in every class and several combinations (trying them all out to see what I liked to play best). I downloaded a multitude of patches today and loaded RoM up again and I had just as much fun today as I did before. I mostly played my rogue/priest and rogue/scout and I even rolled a new scout (soon to be a priest/scout) and had fun with all of them. No complaints here, at least for my low level characters.
~Ripper
Should have played Anarchy online for a while first.
Then their cluelessness in AoC wouldn't have shocked you at all.
Hi all,
I thought I'd chime in with a bit of my opinion.
First, the game operation, the pure engine itself, is very well done. The dev's on this project should be congratulated. Other than the well know lag when in a crowded town, the game engine itself is well done. For those who have the graphics power, turn up those settings. The game defaults to fairly low settings.
The introductory quests in the starter town are also well done. Most of the quests are kill X mobs, collect X items. But this is how most MMORPGs operate and its what a lot of us are used to.
The negatives for this game are almost all purely game design decisions as far as I'm concerned, not dev problems! I'm basing this on the release, not beta, although many bad decisions carried over.
First, the decision was made to make the game last longer. How did they do this? Lowering xp on some mobs and quests would have been low impact and still kept the fun (nope). Raise the amount of xp to level (nope). Change the amount of damage you can do to a mob by giving them large resists for each level diff (yes). Increase the power of all mob attacks (yes). Funny story here, a popular mob to kill is the hairy frog. I've killed hundreds of them with my priest/rogue. Went there with my mage/priest after release, attacked a level 21 (I was 23) with my flame, he turned and did 1043 damage to me in one blow. Never happened again after 20 more frogs, makes me wonder about their crit system.
Second, they have some of the most outrageous (what were they thinking) quests I've ever seen in any game. Kill crafty bernok, its a level 17 or so quest I believe, turns out bernok is a crown elite wolf that kills anyone below level 35. There are many other quests that end with an elite that is anywhere from 4 to 6 levels higher than the quest level. How does everyone deal with this? They yell out on the zone chat and hope a kind high level comes and helps them out. Great game design? (no). There is a level 19 or 20 quest that involves killing a crown elite dragonfly that usually takes several characters that are level 40 or greater! I've seen raids formed just to take this dragonfly out, pretty good for a level 20 quest eh?
Third, I've been over quite a bit of the map and a lot of it is wasted. There are some great low to mid level areas that are pratically untouched since no other quests lead you to those areas. Reifort is practically empty, but its a great place to level up your second class. So instead of spreading out, everyone crams together in the varanas area.
Fourth, there have been mods to spells and classes that basically destroyed the usage of that class. This is AFTER release. Example: Priest dots were outrageous before release and were corrected by putting resistance (although overdone) on the mobs. After release though it was decided that priests should a) not be damage centric (GMs own words) b) should stick to healing. So dot damage was cut 45% even with the best gear. This destroyed the priest rogue whose basic powers were... dots (we won't even mention that they refused to make any off hand bludgeons or wands, who cares if all other classes with rogue secondary get dual wield). They have stated that even now further changes are coming to all combat. Reason stated for this? People are leveling in one month, there is no end game so people will get bored if they can get to 50 so quickly and will leave. Thus they make no money, thus they must slow everyone down.
For those of you yet to try this game, its worth it, kind of. If your the type that likes great damage that can actually kill an elite that is within a level of you, I would suggest a mage primary. Its the only class, at least up to mid level, that can do so without quaffing the heck out of potions. The game is full of mage/priests as the flavor of the month right now. At the time of this writing many people are expecting the "ruins of nerfdom" to swing a bat at mages soon (sorry for the pessimism, my current char is a mage/priest like i said
Those who like tanks should go for Knight/warrior or Knight/priest, Knights get the plate armor and best defense. Good DPS can be had from Rogue/Scout or Warrior/Rogues.
Codger