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A Genuine new player for DAoC
Lyolas
Member Posts: 59
Hi all. Well, miracles do happen for aging games, especially the great ones. I am a vet of nearly 5 years on EverQuest and have recently left the game forevermore. It was a fun ride, I saw it all, raided the end game, etc. and I am completely done.
Their latest expansion is just milking the game for revenue while they put thier hopes in Vanguard, which I predict is going to fail miserably (I bet Microsoft thought so too, which is why they sold out now) after the initial hoopla post-release dies down. No doubt, the EQ faithful, past and present will try Vanguard as will some others but in the end, they are going to find a new Verant game run by the same old SOE and leave. That of course is simply my jaded opinion but I would be willing to bet real money it plays out pretty much that way. As Bob Dylan once put it, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Speaking of which, I am well aware of DAoC's age and current state of decline and I think I can deal with that OK. It's not like I am not already accustomed to playing a game in a similar state of affairs, except in this case, I am betting DAoC is a far better game and I wish I had made the move a long time ago now.
I come to this expecting the journey from 1 to 50 on my main to be a relatively lonely solo one but that isn't the end of the world. I actually enjoy solo play in persistent worlds anyway, even though I like grouping better and these days, raiding sometimes ie, on a sane schedule.
The RvR in DAoC and the Battlegrounds sound like great fun and I am sure that fighting other players is far more entertaining than npcs in PvE, even though I have had plenty of fun at that too. No npc can ever duplicate the wide range of unexpected behaviors, varied levels of skill, etc. that you will find playing against other players, no matter what game it is.
I enjoyed the PvP in GW when I played the last beta although that is MMO-light of course. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as the Sienfeld gang would say. I just enjoy a game with more depth myself. I think GW is great for what it is and will probably continue to play it off and on, just for some instant pvp fun.
I played a cleric main in EQ all those years, who was eternally gimp solo and I never even considered pvp for him, as limited as it was in EQ on a standard server as there's no point in suicide really. Who needs the shame, you know? lol
I will never play a cleric class toon again. I have always favored fighter types although EQ did teach me that playing caster classes (anything but a cleric) can be good fun. I know zero as of now while my install is updating about classes, races or much else in DAoC, except that ToA was almost universally hated by the players. As such, I am going to make my toon on the busiest Classic server and test the waters there. I think its called Gareth or something like that but its easy to tell by the numbers in the launcher its the busiest server in the game when I checked it late last night and early this morning. So, that works for me.
I think I am going to try some form of necro since I expect them to be far more independent that what I've been used to elsewhere and that will be nice leveling up. I also think that in general, the whole thing of being a necro is cool, so I think I will enjoy the class and wihle he's not a sword swinging kinda guy, I am sure he can hold his own plenty of the time and I like that.
So, I am pretty excited to being starting off in what I consider to be one of the best games out there today, despite its age and low population vs new titles. Those things are not the measure of quality as I know you guys know. The lore of the gameworld, the RvR that I have never seen, the battlegrounds, and even all the PvE that is completely new for me, should all be a lot of fun for a long time.
My second choice of class is Druid and I may roll one of them too, just to try both of my newly preferred class choices and see how they both play.
Sorry if you hate long posts, I just wanted to share a little history behind someone who would choose DAoC over WoW, GW, EQ2, etc. as a brand new player who's played MMO's for years. I cut my teeth on the original Asherson's Call and liked it a lot, went to EQ and for a long time liked it, despite its many and sometimes deep flaws and now I am here.
I left a high end raiding guild in EQ to do this, in good part because I wanted a change of game and more importantly because I want to return to some semblance of normalcy and enjoy more RL time. So, I am planning to play casually with maybe a lot of hours some weeks and maybe few hours others and I hope to find a nice family guild on the server when I get situated there. I don't want anything but companionship and some fun there. I can earn my own way and find that a lot more satisfying anyway, as it should be.
With all that said, if any of you DAoC vets on this classic server are playing low level alts and would like some company, by all means let me know here and I will send a tell in game once i learn how! lol
I'd welcome the company and the insight a seasoned player of this game could share. I'd welcome just as much someone who is as new as myself. I learned in EQ that I am not "here for the gear" I am here for the fun of adventuring and doing stuff with other like minded friends who I could never hope to meet any other way.
Thanks a lot for reading if you got this far. Yes, I already know I talk too much. ;-)
He who hesitates is lost.
Comments
I meant to add to all that, I installed the 14 day trial but I already owned the Gold Edition (obsolete now I know), ToA and Catacombs retail boxed expansions.
What I wound up doing was installing the trial edition download and patching that up to current version. Then I installed ToA and patched it to current version. Then lastly I installed Catacombs and patched that to current version. I have nice hardware to play on and so I went ingame to options and cranked up the details, went with newest models (default anyways I see), etc. and the quit back out.
Do I need anything else installed at this point? I won't bother with the latest expansion just now unless there is some good reason I should as a brand new player. I recall that Frontiers I think it was, was a free downloadable expansion that added housing or something, didn't it? Do I need to get that or anything else or does it just patch in nowadays anyway?
The other thing I saw on the patch updates page is there appears to be a new tutorial patch that requires the catacombs engine be installed, which I now have. Would that have been patched in with a full file scan or should I download and install it? I don't want to screw up my good working install here, which took several tries and fails of various downloads, etc to get up and running right. But a tutorial would certainly be nice for this newbie so please let me know if I ought to install that.
I think i will go fool around in BF2142 demoland for a while until hopefully someone is kind enough to point me in the right direction here.
Thanks a lot in advance for any help or advice you might have for me starting out brand new. :-)
He who hesitates is lost.
Anyway, as for you questions, you only need to install the Catacombs engine. You can remove all of the other versions of the game (unless you are going to use those clients).
As for the tutorial, I think you need to download it seperately. http://www.darkageofcamelot.com/patches/
As a new player the most important thing to do is have Catacombs. The next expansion Darkness Rising only adds content for 30-50. Most of that content is quests. They are fun quests, but still you do not need them for anything but XP. It adds "champion levels" at level 50. You really do not need them. You can get a faster horse, but that is about it. It is an expansion you will want to have eventually if you stick with the game, but not something you need now.
There is another expansion coming out soon. It is mostly high level content I believe. There is a new race/class. CL will be up to 10 now. There is a new huge dungon with it. If you stick with the game and get involved in RvR then you will want to get this expansion (and this means the one before it as well).
I am not an Alb and I do not play on the Classic servers so no help there.
Necros are a good solo class for Alb. In RvR I believe people view them as a weak class, but I am not sure. Druids are good at soloing if you spec that way. But in doing so you are not that useful for a group. You might want to look at the pet classes given that you mentioned necros and Druids. There are some good choices for RvR and PvE.
Also, if you want to be a solo tank you can play a Vamp. It is designed to be 100% self-sufficent. You are a hybrid tank and can kill non stop to level. You do well in RvR, but tank classes tend to be weaker in RvR because of the lack of distance. Archers and Casters do most of the damage at a distance.
I Play Mids Classic Gareth, altho they are clustered and it doesn't matter which classic you choose. I also play Hibs Igraine and Albs Merlin.
For Hibernia, Yes, Vamps are nearly unstoppable. I also like playing my Warden, groupable too.
Mids, I mostly play a Shaman or Skald but Valkyries have become popular with the last bit of luv Mythic sent their way. They do have to be female tho...
Albion, I either play a Fire Wiz or a Friar. I am often solo as I level, but don't have a lot of trouble finding groups either.
I agree that Catacombs would be important to have and Darkness Rising can wait - but the Champ weapons and the new Epic armor are nice to have.
Thanks guys for the helpful info. I didn't login yet and roll my first toon. I thought I would wait on some feedback here and do some homework. I thinK i mentioned above, I played a healing class in back of the fight for nearly 5 years in EQ so anything that lets me deal damage from tanking to casting works for me. A self-reliant class is nice sometimes just for fun, but I think especially so now as I am likely to be on my own most of 1 to 50 it sounds like. I have a feeling that won't take so long once i get the knack and I will probably enjoy it as everything for me is new. I wish I had been around at a time when pve flourished too but oh, well. I will see if I can't make the most of it just the same. Again, for me where virtually everything is new, I think I will have fun at it even if I am alone doing it a lot until I am older in the game.
I read about the clustered servers and that seems like a great idea. In EQ they just merge them and force people to move into a new server, which is not always the best thing for them or the server they move to, but that's SOE for you.
I think I will look over the class choices when I get into character creation and just figure that for my first toon, this is a learning thing. if I screw him up, I will learn a lot next roll. Hopefully not but it isn't the end of the world. I can't really expect to walk in cold and roll the perfect toon for me on the first try.
The Vamp sounds pretty fun as a tank that can solo. You don't see that really in EQ. These days I would say SKs and almost as well, Pallys solo ok in EQ but not great. Warriors, forget it. So of course, they all bot healers, slowers, etc. I don't like bots myself. It ruins the immersion for me and makes gameplay become more mechanical than fun. This isn't old school SP RPGs where you manage a party, at least not for me.
So, I just might roll a Vamp for the heck of it. I can imagine how it might be tough later in RvR tho if he's running into a hail of arrows or whatnot, but I imagine there are ways to deal with such things and if not, well I will have learned plenty by then if nothing else. lol
I forget how much I described of my install but what I wound up doing was this:
I installed the 14 day trial, and then since i already owned the obsolete Gold Edition, as well as the ToA and Catacombs retail boxed expansions, I patched up the trial install, installed ToA, patched that, installed Catacombs, patched that and now I have a 14 day trial that has everything up to Catacombs complete. If all goes well and I like it, I will continue subscribing with what I have and do the digital download of the latest expansion when my toon is old enough to use it. And, if that happens, naturally I will get the new one, etc. and continue on from there.
I may be brand new to DAoC but at least I have played this sort of game for a long time, and more than one of this kind of game. So hopefully I will pick it up quick enough and not take forever to level my first guy. I do want to try and enjoy the ride some though so I am not going to go nuts grinding to 50 as fast as I can. I want to play the game. ;-)
Thanks again for your advice. I will be making my first toon soon but its getting late now, so maybe tomorrow I will in the evening. I think I'll give Vamp a shot for sure. If he solos well, good enough for my first one.
He who hesitates is lost.
He who hesitates is lost.
Just thought I would report back that I began playing last night, got through the tutorial with toon number 2 after screwing up the creation of toon number 1 and I love what I see so far and I was thankful to meet such nice and helpful people on Gareth server where I made my guy.
I wound up decideding to give the Warden class a shot, learned about the pros and cons of that choice with the help of those online at the time and I think I will have a lot of fun and learn much about DAoC playing him in the coming months.
I will probably make a toon in each of the other two realms within the classic server cluster I guess if that is allowed, so I can see those worlds too along with experiencing other classes for fun. The Warden however, sounds like the kind of toon I used to wish my cleric could be. I understand he is not the best at anything he does, but I love the versatility he offers me and I think he'll be great to level in the PvE world solo when I am not able to find groups of lower level players who want him/me... lol
So thank you for the helpful advice and info here and I'm sure I'll be around these and maybe the vnboards forums in the future to talk about the game, etc.
He who hesitates is lost.
go to the VN forums. There are not words in the english langauge
to bit how horrible that place is without using profanity and making
some new profane words up. The place is mostly filled with bitter
crybabies, canceld accounts, tolls, flame fests, etc.
If you like to keep up on boards, the only margionally decent DAOC
board is daoc.catacombs.com. It used to be better and it slowly
sliding into VN teritory to still better than VN.
Thank you for the heads up. I should have known better given they are part of the gamespy network... which I normally avoid like the plague... LOL
I bookmarked that, thanks again.
He who hesitates is lost.
It is true that there is lot smack talk going on vn, but there is also lot of valuable information you can't find elsewhere.
Lyolas,
I just wanted to take a quick moment to commend you for doing what a lot of people don't take the time to do before playing a new game: you did your homework! I think that will pay off for you in the long run.
I read with some bemusement the tale you told of your journey to DAoC from EQ, which was very similar to my own. I was SO addicted to EQ when it first came out, for YEARS. I eventually became a part of the Guide program there, and there was a time when I thought that there would NEVER be anything that couldl/would take me away from EQ. And then, DAoC came out.
In the early days of my guild on Gawaine, we had a bit of a discussion on our online forum about where people came to the came from, and how things seemed to be more 'evolved' in DAoC than in the games from whence we came, etc... and I wrote a fairly lengthy post then about what I liked about DAoC vs EQ. I thought I'd reprint it here, even though the info about DAoC is a bit out-dated, being 4+ years old:
---
When DAoC first came out, and I began to check it out, I was very pleased with a lot of the differences I saw between the game that I'd BEEN playing for 2+ years (EQ), and DAoC. These differences ultimately led to me 'moving' to Camelot for good, and I did the then-unthinkable: I cancelled my EQ account in January of this year (2002).
Corpse Retrieval; OMG! In EQ, it was HORRIBLE... you died, and your NAKED corpse wound up back at your bindpoint, and you had to make your way back to where you died, where an image of your fully-equipped body lay. You had to loot your own corpse, and put each piece of equipment back on, by hand. Depending on where/how you died, this was a PAIN IN THE TUCHAS sometimes! If you weren't a caster with invisibility, or a Rogue, or a Monk (who didn't need weapons to fight, anyway, really)... you were screwed sometimes. Not only that, but looting your body didn't return any XP to you, you just got your stuff back. There was also this little feature that your corpse (and all the stuff on it) would decay within 24 hours ingame time, or 7 days real time, whichever came first. Time spent playing other characters counted towards the 24 hours, etc... so if you weren't careful, and didn't feel like looting your corpse right away... you might lose it!
Here are the things that I liked (and still like!) about DAoC, that differed from EQ:
A) Group/Party Size; in EQ, you could only have 6 people (max) in your group. While I don't always care for 'larger' groups, its nice to have the option, for when I DO like them. ;-)
C) I really like how customizable characters are in DAoC. In EQ, if you were a Cleric, every cleric in the game would receive the same spells every 4 levels or so. Not all spells could be purchased from your class trainers... some you'd have to find the scrolls as drops, or go to the far reaches of the continent to purchase them. The point I'm making, though... is that the main way to ATTEMPT to customize your character in EQ had more to do with the equipment you wore, rather than the choices you made about your own character development.
D) I really like the various chat channels we have available in DAoC, and the fairly sophisticated way in which we have to manage which chat channels we want to see. It makes coordinating things much easier, at times. In EQ, we had group, guild, ooc, auction, and tells... but I like the interface in DAoC a bit better.
E) In EQ, if you were a caster, until you hit 35th level, every time you sat down to med, you stared at a spellbook that filled your entire screen. You had no way of knowing what was going on around you, and had to rely on the non-casters, or the folks in the party that weren't medding at the time, to clue you in on what was happening. For the most part, I didn't have a huge deal with this, because in a way, it seemed fairly realistic (not necessarily the spell book part, just the part about if I were truly caught up in a meditation, it would stand to reason that I'd be less clued in on what was going on around me)... however, since playing DAoC, I've come to realize that I really like NOT having to do that ;-)
F) I like, as a player, how aggro is handled in DAoC better than in EQ. In EQ, if you were a heavy damage dealer (read: Wizard), or a powerful healer (damage healed on your partymates would count as damage done TO the mobs), then you would grab aggro 9 times out of 10. Timing became very important, and in situations where you had multi pulls and no mezzer (or if you didn't have a good one), then what ensued is best described as a rather interesting game of Duck Duck Goose, typically ending with at least a few party members dead.
G) I absolutely LOVE the fact that in DAoC, its much more difficult to twink lower level characters with übergear. Sure, it's possible to a certain extent... but in EQ, you could create a level 1 character, and throw level 50 to 60 gear on them, and they'd be able to garner the full benefits of it. (This, in my opinion, is but ONE of the reasons why EQ's game economy is much more vibrant that DAoC's.) Not only that, there was no such thing as item decay, really. In this, I much prefer the realistic approach, even though in EQ, it was easier to twink.
H) There was MUCH more 'zoning' in EQ. I like how DAoC seems a bit more seamless, when traveling great distances. That being said, EQ's world seemed a lot larger... but then again, we Albionians see our homeland, and some of each of the three Frontiers... but if we were to add up all the real estate between all three realms, it might give EQ a run for it's money. Maybe?
I) Combat Styles! In EQ, you hit your attack button, and waited for the fight to be over. /wretch. Sure, SOME of the character classes had special abilities that they could use during combat, but for the most part, it was pretty bland. I really dig DAoC's combat style system (including the styles that chain off of one another), and the visual component to them is great, imho. I love watching my Friar evade, parry, and beat the crap out of something, swinging that big glowing blue stick around... ;-P
J) Loot randomization... I can't TELL you how many fights broke out in EQ because some jerk would ninjaloot during battles. If you were the person to do the looting, it fell into YOUR inventory (except coinage, which would be evenly split, as much as possible).
K) Character class variety; I love having so many of them to choose from in DAoC (of course, I'm including all three realms' classes in that statement). When I get tired of playing one, I have so many others to choose from.
L) Downtime is MUCH less here than in EQ. From medding to healing, etc... it could take a GOOD full five minutes to med to full. Couple that with having to look at a freaking spellbook for the entire duration (pre-35th lvl), and I'd go crazy sometimes.
---
Like I said, things (in both games) have changed a great deal since that post in 2002... but I was hit with a moment of nostalgia when I read your original post.
Anyway, good luck with your foray into what DAoC has to offer. Like many others here, I've played lots of other MMOs over the last 6-7 years or so... and I always find myself returning "home" to DAoC. In my opinion, it IS one of the best games on the market. Yeah, it's 5 years old now, and the community is much smaller than what it was in it's heyday... but I suppose I remain eternally optimistic that one of two things will happen: A) more people that left will come back after a lengthy hiatus to try "that other mega$$$ game", or
new players like yourself will give the game a chance (helpful when they do their homework like you've done!), and stay because they like what they see.
Keep us posted on how you're doing on Gareth!
I have played DAoC on and off over the years and I have to say it is the best mmorpg experience I have ever had. Having played over 30 mmorpgs in the last 2 years and currently not playing one right now, I am almost tempted to play the classic DAoC server. For someone who has never tried DAoC i would say give it a shot, I do not think you would be disappointed with it. DAoC was the best, and it might still be one of the best, if not the best mmorpg out there right now.
Since then EQ has been "dumbed down" considerably. It (and DAoC for that matter) are a lot more fast paced these days then they were back in the day. Honestly, if all MMORPGs were as slow and tedious as EQ was at launch, I never would have gotten into them. DAoC was a breath of fresh air when it came out. Drastic mistep with ToA, but pretty much every other expansions has improved the game measurably, imo.
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.