f13.net

Well, since I know some more of you fine folks got invited, make with the info.

I've gotten to the point where it's becoming tough to solo certain quests, not impossible, but still it's a little frustrating to spend 30-45 mins carefully working through one to die due to a mob swarm ambush or not having a good counter (i.e. wraiths being incorpreal and thus immune to regular weapon damage).  I like the challenge, but realizing you earned no experience (actually took a small hit from the death) and having to repeat the whole thing is taking a certain adjustment of mindset.

I tend to play maybe 30-45 mins early am or lunchtimes, plus 10pm of after EST.

Xilren lvl 1 wiz
Nerlix lvl 3 cleric

Xilren
PS Two things to keep in mind; rate of leveling is slow compared to typical mmorpgs b/c there are only 10 levels, and right now the action style of combat makes missle > melee > spellcasting...

I'm obviously Haemish, a lvl 1 Rogue because I'm unoriginal and what not. I also won't be playing til next week when my new computer arrives.

Then you break it and have to wait another week for it to get fixed.

Denver, lvl 1 rogue.  The bulk of my playtime will probably be after 9 PM PST.

Oh... I missed this thread.  Twee.  Cookie Cutter Fighter.  I don't think I'll keep this character long, however.  Fighters are just easy to suss when you first start a game.

How do I get a cape?

Well, despite not having a lot of playtime, I now remember why I haven't played at all. I keep getting these patcher errors, the dialog box says unknown error (thanks, heh), but the patcher in the background says error reading dat files. It's happened the last few patches that I'm aware of, I've played once since the last wipe, iirc.

So...oh well. It's alpha, no support. I'll drink some beer, that should fix it.

Re-install.

While drunk.

I'd have to download the whole thing over again. That's a lot of work for a mmorpg imo.

You are very lazy and you don't deserve to have fingers.

I forwarded this to our team. I haven't heard of any ongoing patching problems, but if they give me any information I'll pass it along.

Do guilds work?  If so, could we set one up so as to be able to find each other easier?

Hey, thanks Cal. I didn't expect any support, I just give 'er a try every few days.
I'd agree, except that you haven't heard me play guitar yet. Hey, that'd be fun on TS...why isn't Sky tanking that mob? *guitar squeal*

But yeah, I've been egregiously slacking with this game :(

When I used to play Planetside we had someone in our Outfit that would play the guitar in the background while waiting to respawn. Since he only did it after he died, he figured it would make us try harder to keep him alive. Kinda backfired though once we learned we didn't get grief points for TKing squadmates. ;)

Guilds are not implimented yet. They are planned though.

That makes me feel better, I was wondering why I couldn't get that tab to do anything useful.   :-)

Ok, I finally realized what name I used to register for the alpha. I was trying to use my non-alpha login and was getting irritated that I couldn't log in. Yes, I'm a moron.

With that said, I will try to play a bit tonight.

After you fix the forums. I have to redownload and install all my games anyway.

Fix what? They work fine! Oh, you mean re-arrange.

Can't log in at the moment, so I made a second character: Samwise (lvl 1 bard).

Before I got booted out I spent about five minutes dancing around in front of Signe, but she didn't seem impressed.   :-(

I guess I was daydreaming.  By the way, The Wayward Lobster no longer heals me.  Well, it wasn't... I had to WALK all the way to that other pub.  It was FAR!

If a tavern isn't healing you, have some food.  Enigmatic beef stew is great.

I'd also like to comment that /lfh is the best emote EVER.

Well, it heals me sometimes, I've found and sometimes it doesn't... food doesn't seem to matter.  It's only after I die.  If I have more than 1 hp the inn heals me, otherwise I have to go to another inn.  I thought lfh was a good one, too.  I have to complain about the dance, however.  It makes me look even more stoned than I usually am.  It's the goofiest dance ever... it's what Elaine would have looked like if she had smoked crack before dancing.

Foozle, level 1 ranger.

Mixolydian lvl 1 bard
Corellon lvl 1 thief

Signe, have you tried a bard? Jack of all trades, light tank, some thiefyness, some clericality, some magerization. Mixo is an elven bard with the dual wield feat and I took Cure Light Wounds as his first tune. I call it "Freebird", since I imagine it might get a lot of requests. He can sneak a little, he's fast with the dual wield, and with 80 spell points, that's 8 Freebird renditions between rests (plus the three CLW potions he's found in 3 newbie dungeons).

I've only played fighter so far... mainly just to become familiar with the game.  I nearly always find it the easiest, if the sometimes the most boring, class in the beginning.  I'll give other classes a go shortly, including bard which sounds fun and I've never played one in an MMO,  right after I get Twee (which sounds more bardy than fighty) to level 2... that's about 1100 points.

DING!

The lost brothers quest is AWESOME.   :-D  Stealthed my way through the whole thing.

im gonna redownload this and roll a new thief. It'll be good times. I'll probably play all night. Keke.

Took me ages to remember Samwise was Denver... he had me so confused.  But I'm glad I did... definitely HAVE to have a rogue when you quest in this game.  Regardless of what some people are saying, they are necessary!  Twee took a level of Cleric, as everyone suggested, and it definitely makes a difference.  One of the biggest advantages is you spend very little time in the inn... mana regens much faster than hps so you can heal yourself and by the time you're done, your mana is full.  Who needs food?

Yeah, grouping is much more fun than soloing.  I had a blast tumbling around the bad guys to distract them while Signe beat them up.  It was also nice that I could run ahead and grab keys from side branches of the dungeon so we could skip right to the main objective.

I'm pretty certain that sneak attacks do work, but I'm still not sure if I get sneak attacks for flanking, or just for my first attack against an unaware opponent.  I did find that it was pretty effective to let the bad guys run past me to Signe and then poke them from behind.

eek!  Somehow I feel as if I've contributed to your dirty pleasures now! Dammit!  :-P

How exactly does one perform a tumble?

Hold down Shift and then any direction (WSAD).  If you have the Tumbling skill, you'll do a tumble in that direction.

You guys should choreograph your tumbling, make up a routine and perform!   :thumbs_up:

Player-created content FTW!

Busteth a move!

THOU GOT SERVED!

Samwise the bard is now lvl 2.  I like bard.  It sucks solo, but really shines in groups.

I was getting tired of picking up all these cool-sounding weapons and wondering what it'd be like to actually get to use them, so I made a barbarian: Stoney the Angry Dwarf.


I'm looking forward to guilds being implemented.  It'll be so much easier to keep track of everyone.

I saw a guilded character Tuesday night. I remember when I had enough free time to play games. Now I don't even have the time to play Civ4, let alone an alpha :( Goddamned life. Hope you folks are having fun  :cry:

I've not been able to play the last few days but I like barbarian.  They are very smashy.  I can't, however, do those quests quests where you have to kill less than something and that's a bit annoying.  The bulk of the quests, the ones where you have to kill lots or  you don't have to care about how many you kill, are a peice of piss. 

Yeah, after originally testing a thief and being upset at how much combat was mandatory, I rolled up a barbarian. I was pretty disappointed...the very first newbie quest included mandatory combat. I play my thieves as greedy pacifists, in Thief I always try to ghost levels (not be seen at all by anyone). The system has potential, but it's a long way off yet, that's partly why not being able to test more bums me out...it has the potential.

But yeah, barbarians are great solo characters, I was running a dorf with max str and two handed weapons + toughness.

Since they upped the experience requirements for levelling, I haven't made level two, first to a wipe and now from lack of playtime, heh.

Barb is great if you want to play "smash everything".  I like it especially if I've had a rough day and I'm in a bad mood.  There is no finess or skill involved, really.  I rolled a Warforged Barbie... I assume they are some sort of golem... and it plays as mindless as it looks.  I'm teeny bits away from level 2 and haven't even found the need to use berserk.  All I do, really, is swing at what is in front of me and everything falls over.

I actually made a Bat Country guild, you can to that, the Guild tab just doesnt do anything with it yet...

Xilren

Cross posting just in case.

Jhazira Khan - female human cleric
Barghest Bazrain - male dwarf wizard
Rhylla DeVine - female elven rogue

Huzzah!  The friends list expands.

I haven't been on much since getting The Movies, but once they fix the XP for the 1st level quests (most of my characters are 1st level so the lack of useful 1st level quests makes the game feel pretty grindy) I'll probably be logging in more regularly.

So you mean the wonderful 33 XP I got for the Miller's Debt quest is not typical? Good. I was getting worried. I tried re-doing it several times thinking I missed something. Also kept wondering if dying meant a drop in XP but never saw anything in the XP summary about death penalty to XP...

No, the 33 XP is supposedly going to be fixed soon (knock on wood).  The Goodblade quests are more in the neighborhood of 400-500 so theoretically Miller's and similar quests will be tweaked to give at least that much.  I keep seeing posts on the beta forums about how it's been rebalanced internally but for some reason that change hasn't made it out with the other patches. 

I'm a little worried; the fact that they didn't instantly say "DUH, that's no good" and fix those quests instantly to be more in line with the others (as in the first day of Beta 1) smells to me like they might be rethinking their advancement curve, which would almost definitely be a change for the worse since there has to be tremendous pressure from above to add more grind to the game to keep people subscribed for longer.  I'm trying hard to ignore those bad thoughts.


As far as I can tell, the XP penalty for dying is based on level; there's no penalty at 1st level.  (Even at higher levels it's not too bad, something like 30, which is paltry next to what you get for doing a non-broken quest.  Just enough to make you want to avoid dying; not so much that it ruins your day)

Actually, i think what they have been doing is identifying low level quests that were being exploited or were just too short and nerfed the xp to 33-66 while they work to change it.  If you remember the original Miller's Debt, it was very different that it is now. There just not done yet (same with Osgoods Basement, Bringing the Light, Resucing the girl from necromancer, etc etc.

The good news the market quests seem to be acting normally. :)

Xilren

That's what I figured at first, but as of the start of Beta 1 the quests were no longer exploitable... if anything, those quests are all much longer now than anything else at that level.  (Osgood's Basement in particular is ridiculous due to all the very slow sewer wading involved.)

Like I said, trying hard to ignore bad thoughts.   :wink:

Yea, the low level quest XP isn't where we want it. It's something we're working to fix. Not sure if it will be in this week's update or not though. I'll find out.

My thought on xp advancement: you cannot have a game that is enjoyable and fair for both traditional mmo 'grinders' and casual players.

Just a thought as I read about how people play DDO, and my experience with mmo since 1997™.

WoW has done this, IMHO. I've seen very happy grinders in WoW and boatloads of happy casual players in WoW. Their advancement system and pace simply works. I would still be subbed to CoH and possible CoV if its advancement rate were on par with WoW.

Ok, you may have something there, though WoW completely falls apart toward the end imo. I made lvl 58, the highest level I've been in any mmo ever, including EQ which I played for two and a half years on and off (lvl 54).