Age of conan, Open beta: May 1st 2008.

[Velorath]

Looks like the finally got spellweaving in.

Though there are six classes in the game that can be considered "magical," only four actually fling magic at opponents as a primary method of attack. Spellweaving is available for the Priest-type Tempest of Set and Priest of Mitra and the Mage-type Demonologist and Necromancer. Basically, it works like a stance. Soldier-type classes, those who're most effective at fighting on the front lines of battle, have the ability to shift between defensive and offensive stances at will, affecting their damage output and capacity for resistance as the situation necessitates. It's the same for casters, able to switch in and out of spellweaving stance whenever it might be appropriate to combat what's onscreen.

Spellweaving's major benefit is that it drastically powers up your spell damage and adds various kinds of special effects, all of which increases in power the longer you're in spellweaving mode. The downside is spellweaving can be lethal to the caster. When the spellweaving state is first entered, your stamina bar (used for things like running and melee combos) begins to drain. Once that bar is depleted, the spellweaving state will then begin to drain health, so you'll need to carefully monitor what's going on or your character might keel over and be forced to respawn. Should you need to, it's easy to stop spellweaving with a simple press of a key.

The longer you manage to keep spellweaving active, though, the more powerful you become. After the state is enabled, spellweaving progresses through six stages, with transition between stages occurring around every ten seconds and occasionally when an offensive spell is cast. Each stage increases a passive spell damage buff, which will max out at around 25 percent, says Funcom's senior systems designer Andrew Griffin. Once stage six is reached, the progression cycles back to stage one and repeats all over again, retaining the passive damage bonus. Additionally, each stage transition is accompanied by a chance to gain helpful or harmful effects. While the positive effects will be short duration, the negative side-effects will last until even after you've stopped spellweaving, leaving you vulnerable to attack. How vulnerable you are depends on how much time you invested in spellweaving.

Instead of writing more about spellweaving's generalities, here are some specific examples of what happens through each stage for a Necromancer. The following was provided by Funcom.

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Necromancer - Positive Effects


Parasite Host: – An eight second buff that causes you to gain a parasitic soul pet whenever you cast one of your nukes, although it costs you some health when this happens.

Arcane Surge: – This is a short buff that causes you to inflict maximum damage with your spells.


Necromancer – Negative Effects


Infested: You become infested with grave-worms that inflict unholy damage over time. This can stack up to five times.

Arcane Drought: Your spells will inflict minimum damage

Frailty: You take more damage from physical attacks. This can stack up to five times.

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While that's not all that's possible with the Necromancer, Griffin gave us a few more details on how another spell is affected.

"For example, the Flesh to Worms spell is the Necromancer's primary DoT [damage-over-time spell]. This is a single-target DoT spell. The first "step" of spellweaving doesn't affect this spell, but it gets modified from step 2 and up. First, the critical chance and critical damage is increased, but it is step 3 of spellweaving that an interesting change happens. At this rank, the Flesh to Worms spell gains splash damage, which means that every time that DoT ticks, it will inflict an amount of its damage to nearby enemies (the percentage of damage inflicted and the number of enemies taking the splash damage increases as the spellweaving step progresses)."

Griffin then went on to detail a few of the changes in play style for the other three casters in Age of Conan.

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Demonologist

Flames of Gehenna, their primary fire spell, will gain increased critical hit chance and critical damage, as well as become a column-affecting spell. Additionally, the secondary burning effect, Incinerate, that Flames of Gehenna places on the target will start to inflict splash damage. This gets interesting when the player has also trained the Field of Fires feat, which causes the Incinerate effect to inflict pulsing area-of-effect damage, so while at the higher ends of spellweaving, a character with that feat trained will be inflicting double doses of AOE damage from the Incinerate effect – one source from the feat, and the other from the spellweaving-enhanced splash damage.


Tempest of Set

The Tempest's main nuke is the Lightning Strike spell, which is an area-of-effect spell. While under the effect of spellweaving, the area this spell affects will increase. Additionally, lightning will start to arc between the enemies hit, so that each enemy hit inflicts splash damage, causing a cascade of arcing damage when groups of monsters are clustered closely together. The same sort of thing will happen with the Storm Field spell, which projects pulsing electricity around the Tempest. When enemies are struck by the Storm Field, they will suffer a higher chance of sustaining critical damage, and also inflict splash damage around them.


Priest of Mitra

One of the feat-trained spells for the Priest of Mitra is the Lance of Mitra. This normally inflicts column-based damage from the Priest, with each target hit inflicting a smaller amount of damage to one nearby enemy. If the player trained the Divine Lance feat as well, the Lance of Mitra causes area of effect healing around all of the enemies that it hits. When under the power of spellweaving, both the damaging and healing aspects of the lance are increased. The Lance of Mitra gains a higher chance of inflicting critical damage on the enemies that it smites, while the energy from Divine Lance heals more damage.

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Clearly this system adds quite a bit to how spellcasting works, and there's actually another layer to it. During spellweaving the caster can activate a special power that turns the 1, 2, 3, Q, and E keys into ability keys that control the ebb and flow of the phase, pushing it into overdrive for increased damage or slowing it down to prolong the process. While we haven't gotten to check it out yet, it sounds interesting. And as a bonus, every class gets specific graphical animations for spellweaving.

[Simond]

OK, speaking as someone who's not in the beta...those negatives looks much worse than the benefits you get, especially for a PvP game.

[Sky]

If you don't have a computer built in the last year, don't fucking bother.

ATI Radeon 9600 (256MB)

[Engels]

Ya, Haemish, come on bro, that card's gettin a bit rusty and you can't judge a modern MMO by its ability to perform on a 2002 card. See my sig for grunk's words of wisdom. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Spell weaving sounds really cool.

[Tarami]

OK, speaking as someone who's not in the beta...those negatives looks much worse than the benefits you get, especially for a PvP game.

I would say PvP games should give small benefits for playing well. A good player is good anyways. Giving large bonuses to good players just creates disparity, no? That all depends on how easy it is for a newbie to screw up with the weaving, though.

Sounds neat anyways. Regardless of actual bonus, it's likely the first thing you'll have to master to be competetive, which may be a shame. It always is when bonuses become mandatory.

[TripleDES]

Though that said multiple new MMOs seem to opt for Unreal Engine 3 for the client and some other middleware to handle the server side. Guess we'll see how it develops.

Does UE3 allow for seamless procedural/lazyload terrain? If not, any MMO using the engine will be zoned and I thought we're past that shit.

[Mrbloodworth]

Though that said multiple new MMOs seem to opt for Unreal Engine 3 for the client and some other middleware to handle the server side. Guess we'll see how it develops.

Does UE3 allow for seamless procedural/lazyload terrain? If not, any MMO using the engine will be zoned and I thought we're past that shit.

Thats not necessarily true, the use of zones or "Levels" is most times a application level (Meaning the design of the game its self) reason, not necessarily part of, or required by the rendering/game engine.

For instance, Vanguard using the UE3 engine does not use what are commonalty referred to as maps/zones/levels.

It is much more common thees days for assets and the like to be "Streamed" off the hard drive, or loaded and unloaded as needed, instead of all at once in the form of a loading screen. Depends on what you are doing.

[tmp]

[Does UE3 allow for seamless procedural/lazyload terrain? If not, any MMO using the engine will be zoned and I thought we're past that shit.

Supposedly yes or at least it's much improved compared to UE2.5 (vanguard)  I don't see zoning as much of problem though, have yet to see (MMO) game that doesn't have it to some extent. Nor the great appeal that's game hitching every 30 secs because it loads another terrain chunk in background vs explicit short pause when closing clear boundaries.

[HaemishM]

Ya, Haemish, come on bro, that card's gettin a bit rusty and you can't judge a modern MMO by its ability to perform on a 2002 card. See my sig for grunk's words of wisdom. 

Modern MMO = World of Warcraft

Runs goddamn fine on my POS. If you can't run that well AND you still look like shit, you need to fire your low-spec render team OR NOT EVEN BOTHER. Just tell me I can't play and move on to your shitty sub-100k subscription levels and move on to the Vanguard halls. Meanwhile, developers who give a fuck about making money will be over here, playing with money hats.

[schild]

WoW being the most played doesn't make it modern. The millions of people left driving Oldsmobiles from the 80s don't make them modern either. In MMOG terms, WoW is a few years old and nearly ancient. Just like your PC. ^_^

[shiznitz]

But Haemish still has a point. Design for his machine and make 1 million PCs compatible or design for mine (3.2GHz CoreDuo, 2GB, 8600GT) and make 100,000 PCs compatible.

[Mrbloodworth]

But Haemish still has a point. Design for his machine and make 1 million PCs compatible or design for mine (3.2GHz CoreDuo, 2GB, 8600GT) and make 100,000 PCs compatible.

Or design for high fidelity graphics, just like bioshock, oblivion, crisis, or any other modern games. What ever way you go, its a dual edged sword.

[HaemishM]

Bioshock, Oblivion and Crysis did not have a subscription fee attached. Bioshock was nothing but black blobs on the screen, which told me all I needed to know about playing it on this card. The sub fee is already a barrier to entry for some, adding yet another because you can't be arsed to make a decent low-spec renderer is another one that needn't have been done.

WoW is the basement level for entry into this market. Hell, take even Guild Wars, which looked and ran decent on a machine half the specs of mine.

[Nija]

Looks like the finally got spellweaving in.

No.

[sam, an eggplant]

Notice they never actually say that it's in the game. Or that it's not. They're just detailing what it'll look like if it were. 

[Signe]

I only upgraded my graphics card because my GeForce 4400 Ti was so old and broken, it wouldn't run anything.  Righ stuck it in an old machine that doesn't do anything even remotely fancy.  The only other updates was another BG of cheap RAM and a sound card that was really cheap on sale.  I won't upgrade anything until this stuff decomposes.  Nothing to do with cost, it's all because MMOs have pissed me off.   I'm tired of MMOs telling me what to buy.  I'll buy a new rig when I fucking feel like it, not when some POS MMO that MIGHT last me a month or so because it runs out of anything interesting to do, tells me to.  I can live with my consoles.  MMOs can go fuck themselves.  Bastards.  If I could make them feel pain, I would.

Dammit.

[Mrbloodworth]

Notice they never actually say that it's in the game. Or that it's not. They're just detailing what it'll look like if it were. 

They already said many times its not in the beta. One of those things they are going to surprise us with at launch.

Time will tell.

[Nija]

Ah yes. Surprising people with untested core combat systems at launch. Time has already told us what happens. Dozens of times.

Too bad the fanboys never, ever listen.

[sam, an eggplant]

I'm not all that surprised.

[UnSub]

Notice they never actually say that it's in the game. Or that it's not. They're just detailing what it'll look like if it were. 

They already said many times its not in the beta. One of those things they are going to surprise us with at launch.

Time will tell.

I suspect launch will be less a train wreck than a train wreck that was carrying toxic waste that ploughed straight into an orphanage which exploded.

And then things will get worse.

[rk47]

Ah yes. Surprising people with untested core combat systems at launch. Time has already told us what happens. Dozens of times.

Too bad the fanboys never, ever listen.

nice catch. Really nice. I knew something was amiss. I re-read the sentence a few times just to make my grin broader. 

[Zetor]

The basic 'caster stance' concept isn't even that new (though they do expand on it a bit with the 'timer' and 'positive/negative side effects' bits). WOW priests have shadowform, LOTRO minstrels have warspeech, both of those are 'stances' that give up survivability for pewpew; arcane mages have a spell that costs more mana and casts faster the more you use it in a X sec period. I'm sure GW has plenty of similar skills...


-- Z.

[sam, an eggplant]

Another major title currently in beta does essentially the same thing as well. It's not an innovative mechanic, but that certainly doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If it were in.

[WindupAtheist]

Far as I'm concerned, this game debuts when it comes out on the 360.  PC people will just be paying to beta.

[schild]

Far as I'm concerned, this game debuts when it comes out on the 360.  PC people will just be paying to beta.

This is how I feel about it.

I'm still getting the wooden box though.

[Sky]

I'm still getting the wooden box though.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

[Morfiend]

Far as I'm concerned, this game debuts when it comes out on the 360.  PC people will just be paying to beta.

This is how I feel about it.

I'm still getting the wooden box though.

Way to talk with your wallet.

[schild]

Far as I'm concerned, this game debuts when it comes out on the 360.  PC people will just be paying to beta.

This is how I feel about it.

I'm still getting the wooden box though.

Way to talk with your wallet.

This is Funcom we're talking about. Not EA or Nintendo or Acclaim.

Funcom.

They put out like 3 games a year. At most. If that. More like one or two. IF THAT.

[Nija]

If I only pooped 2 or 3 times per year, would you buy a turd of mine?

I mean, I only poop twice a year. Buy a turd. C'mon.

[Wershlak]

If I only pooped 2 or 3 times per year, would you buy a turd of mine?

I mean, I only poop twice a year. Buy a turd. C'mon.

Does the turd come in a wooden box for $70?

[schild]

If I only pooped 2 or 3 times per year, would you buy a turd of mine?

I mean, I only poop twice a year. Buy a turd. C'mon.

If your poop was near as awesome as a Conan art book in a wooden box. I'd buy one. Most definitely.

[Signe]

If I only pooped 2 or 3 times per year, would you buy a turd of mine?

I mean, I only poop twice a year. Buy a turd. C'mon.

I would sell your poop on eBay.

[Nebu]

I would sell your poop on eBay.

If you claim it to be in the vision of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, it will fetch a pretty penny!

[Nija]

I would sell your poop on eBay.

That's how I lost my last ebay account!