Last weekend was another double exp event in Runes of Magic. My character entered at 40 Druid/41 Rogue and came out the other side at 47 Druid/42 Rogue. I've learned several things from my trek into the 40's.
How to stop worrying and ignore the Rogue
Your two classes in ROM have separate exp bars, and it's your choice how you choose to deal with this. You can attempt to level each class separately, which becomes more and more grindy as content starts to get low at higher levels, or you can park one of the classes and use it to turn in daily quest items farmed up by the other.
The pairing I really enjoy in the game is the Druid/Rogue, which is a DPS caster with a focus on DOT's and a primary nuke spell fueled by the Rogue's energy bar (a relatively unusual mechanic in an MMO). By contrast, the Rogue/Druid side of the house was a very good combination at lower levels (it's a rogue that can heal itself) but has become more and more frustrating as my levels advance.
Rogue energy regenerates at a slower rate than you see in other games because players are intended to use attacks from their secondary class (i.e. Warrior rage, Warden or Knight mana-based melee, etc) to fill the gaps in their rotation. The Druid side of this particular pairing does not contribute any attacks that are useful in melee gear, so I find myself in combat taking hits and waiting for the energy bar to regenerate. Anyway, I looked ahead and the 45/45 Elite Skill for the Druid side is not a high priority and the 50/50 Elite is only usable in groups, so I decided to park the Rogue side and wait for daily quest exp to push that bar along.
Perhaps this will change when I can pick up my third class if I take something that plays well with the Rogue, perhaps not. If not, I'll get by somehow.
Cash or Grind
The other thing that's really noticeable is that with double exp, the amount of experience from doing regular quests (and dailies that are sitting next to regular quests) is enough to level a single class. At the normal exp rate, it looks like I'm either going to have to do extra grinding of daily quests or pay for exp potions.
I'm not necessarily opposed to paying - my guesstimate is that this will run me about a dollar a night. Then again, I'm also not necessarily opposed to grinding a bit. I'm not always in the mood to log in and slaughter 150 mobs in rapid succession, but some days that's the level of brainpower I'm willing to spend. Otherwise I might sign on for long enough to do 10 trivial dailies to collect my daily tokens at best (or not at all). Or I might just wait until the next bonus exp weekend.
In a system where I pay for the amount I play (if I pay at all), rather than a fixed monthly subscription, I'm okay with this. It'll be interesting to see if this whole excursion grinds to a halt as I get beyond the launch level cap and into content that was balanced around superior gear (which I am unlikely to either earn or pay for), but ROM remains a nice secondary MMO in the mean time.
Picking Amongst the Free
Earlier this week, Spinks asked whether there are now so many non-subscription offerings that the model is no longer a selling point. If and when we get there, I think this will be a good thing.
For now, we're looking at two trends. First, games that do choose to stick to the old pay to play model are meeting a higher bar, and it seems to be catching some of them unexpectedly on the chin. Being free to try is not necessarily a huge selling point, but being pay to try may be an increasing detriment in a world where even the paid games have free trials.
Second, the non-subscription offerings that are out there may be increasingly fighting for time in gamers' schedules. Over in EQ2 (both the subscription and non-subscription sides), we've had large cash store sales. However, exactly as Spinks predicts, this fails to interest me because I'm not in the market for cash store loot, and I am in the market for bonus exp. This was absent from EQ2 (which usually offers bonus exp on holiday weekends but just came off a welcome back bonus week), and present in Runes of Magic this weekend, so that's where my time went.
At the end of the day, a sale or a discount (including all the way down to "free admission") is still only a good deal if you actually want the thing that's on sale - the biggest wastes are the things you purchase on sale (whether in cash stores, as Nils points out, or in traditional stores) that you don't end up needing. I, for one, look forward to the day how a game makes its money can take more of a backseat to whether it is worth the money.
For now, we're looking at two trends. First, games that do choose to stick to the old pay to play model are meeting a higher bar, and it seems to be catching some of them unexpectedly on the chin. Being free to try is not necessarily a huge selling point, but being pay to try may be an increasing detriment in a world where even the paid games have free trials.
Second, the non-subscription offerings that are out there may be increasingly fighting for time in gamers' schedules. Over in EQ2 (both the subscription and non-subscription sides), we've had large cash store sales. However, exactly as Spinks predicts, this fails to interest me because I'm not in the market for cash store loot, and I am in the market for bonus exp. This was absent from EQ2 (which usually offers bonus exp on holiday weekends but just came off a welcome back bonus week), and present in Runes of Magic this weekend, so that's where my time went.
At the end of the day, a sale or a discount (including all the way down to "free admission") is still only a good deal if you actually want the thing that's on sale - the biggest wastes are the things you purchase on sale (whether in cash stores, as Nils points out, or in traditional stores) that you don't end up needing. I, for one, look forward to the day how a game makes its money can take more of a backseat to whether it is worth the money.
Ill Omens for Gods and Heroes
Gods and Heroes is a standard fantasy MMO set in a version of ancient Rome populated by such mythical creatures as Minotaurs, Harpies, and (playable) female Roman Legionnaires. It also has the distinction of having been canceled, disappearing for a good long while, and resurfacing recently for a second chance at a launch, which would usually mean that the worst can only be behind it.
Unfortunately, this game is not looking like it's ready to compete in the crowded pay to play subscription MMO market place, which bodes poorly for the game's second lease on life.
Early Impressions
I was contacted by the game's marketing team, who offered me a beta invite. Pete at Dragonchasers was apparently also on the email list.
I decided to accept the beta invite, because I was vaguely a fan of ancient history back in middle school, and I was curious how the game turned out. I have put a bit more effort than usual into this post and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether that amounts to me being cautious not to be the blogger who gets blasted for criticizing a game they haven't played "enough", or whether I'm giving Heatwave special treatment for giving me a beta key. (I'm not too worried that anyone who reads the entire post is going to think the latter.)
Rolling as the Romans Do
The first concerning sign is at the very first screen, where two of the game's six planned classes are greyed out. A brief search through the forums indicates that these two classes were not going to be ready, so the developers dropped them to focus on the remaining four (which sound like the standard tank, healer, melee DPS, and caster DPS). While I respect the devs for making a tough call where needed, this is what the Romans would call an ill omen.
(I don't know when exactly in beta this change was made, but it seems strange for the very first thing a new player sees when they sign into the game to be that a third of the classes didn't make it for release. Perhaps they're going to make a new character generation screen before launch that removes the unfinished classes, or perhaps they're just that honest.)
Beyond your gender (no playable non-humans here) and your class, you will be asked to choose a deity from the Roman Pantheon. Each class has two choices, but I was not able to tell whether the differences are primarily cosmetic. If this is an irreversible choice that affects gameplay, there's not nearly enough information to make it (nor, in fairness, is the character generator a good place to present that level of detail).
Other than that, you pick the colors of your outfit - which I presume are overlaid onto any gear you obtain, as well as your NPC minions' appearances - and customize your character's body and then you're ready to zone in.
Kill 10 Romans
If you've played any MMO's recently, you'll have a decent idea of what to expect when you do zone in. Gods and Heroes has questgivers with floating icons above their heads, hotbars, global cooldowns, and quests to kill various numbers of the local mobs. There's a map, which shows your quest objectives. Newbie mobs will drop bags for your empty bagslots (which the developers named in pseudo-latin by sticking a "us" onto the end of "sack" to give you the red, green, and leather "saccus", which is not in an Latin dictionary I remember). And so on.
It was hard to tell how the game's combat is tuned, since the starter quests top out at level 3 and I reached level 6 with a minimum of unnecessary bloodshed. I was mostly spamming a single attack button for most of the levels, until finally obtaining a carbon copy of the World of Warcraft Paladin mechanics from 2004 - a judgement-like spell that removes my 30-second self damage buff to do additional damage. This is no longer the way WoW Paladins work for a reason, but I may have myself to blame for picking the tank ("soldier") class.
There are some neat UI tweaks to be had. For example, the level up window provides a clickable version of your new skills that you can drag onto the hotbar button of your choice rather than having to open a spell listing or having it dropped randomly in an empty slot. Overall, though, the basics mechanics are familiar.
Roman Suicide Squad
One place where things are different is the game's "squad" system for NPC helpers. The UI informs me that there are 127 soldiers I can collect for my army, and it appears that they're going to come in all the major character archetypes. It appears that your minions will automagically color coordinate with your chosen colors, and each has a brief story blurb. (A female tank I recruited in the intro has a story which says that her father didn't want her to become a gladiator. I wasn't aware that any Romans voluntarily became gladiators unless they were already slaves or prisioners, but more power to this early pioneer of women's rights.)
The two soldiers you get at low levels are a tank and a healer, but you are limited to only one minion out at a time until you reach some higher level. I'm not sure how many you can eventually use at once, whether these replace the need for partying with other players, whether each human player gets their full army of NPC's in groups, etc.
I will say that the pathfinding AI on NPC soldiers is less than ideal. If you jump off something, your dude will get stuck. If you run too close to a wall in an attempt to avoid fighting mobs, your dude may get stuck. They'll eventually teleport to you, and there are AI settings (with the caveat that the "aggressive" setting's tooltip says that it is not currently working), but I could see this being problematic if you're highly dependent on multiple minions and they all have pathing issues.
An Unfortunate End of the Line
I was about to get poor Dasypodidus off the newbie island and to his housing estate - supposedly a major and interesting feature of the game - when disaster struck.
Quest mobs are located in the non-instanced world, and take several minutes to respawn. When I saw another player running towards an area with a mob I needed, I invited them to a group in the hopes that we could share the kill credit. He accepted the invite, but apparently didn't need this quest (or declined to complete it), as he ran by the mob's corpse and took the boat on to his estate. I waited for the respawn, turned in the quest, and took the boat to my instanced estate.
Then I noticed that I was still in the group with the random guy, who was probably as puzzled as I was at how to leave. After digging around for a bit, I found the leave group button in the social panel and clicked it. I received a message saying that I would be removed from the instance in a minute if I did not rejoin. I did not think anything of this. 60 seconds later, I was ported out of my estate. Apparently it didn't know where else to send me, since I had yet to zone into the real world, so back to the newbie island I went.
The problem is that it does not appear to be possible to get back into the zone where the boat off the island was, because I had already completed that quest. A forum poster informs me that has been seen previously in beta, and it means that my character is trapped. Hopefully a GM or someone would be able to deal with this type of issue in a live paid service, but it's still pretty concerning that something this show-stopping has gotten this far into the beta, which ends on Tuesday.
Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware
I am not a journalist and this is neither a review nor a preview. I cannot claim to have scratched the surface of what the game may (or may not) have to offer, and it is certainly possible that the game will improve between now and its June 21st launch date. All I can report is one player's experiences during one set of play sessions.
Based on 2-3 hours, six levels, several bug reports, and an issue which left my character permanently stranded on the newbie island, I cannot recommend paying the $50 box fee on launch day. Given the state of the beta, the relatively low $10 monthly fee feels more like an admission that the game would not be competitive at a higher price than a genuine bargain. If there legitimately is a unique, interesting game lurking behind the rocky introduction (an area that's usually the most polished in a game as MMO's hope to pad their review scores), you will hear about it because people will be playing it. If not, those who pay up front will be out $50.
As the Romans say, caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.
Unfortunately, this game is not looking like it's ready to compete in the crowded pay to play subscription MMO market place, which bodes poorly for the game's second lease on life.
 |
| I named my Roman Dasypodidus. He is green. I blame Tipa. |
I was contacted by the game's marketing team, who offered me a beta invite. Pete at Dragonchasers was apparently also on the email list.
I decided to accept the beta invite, because I was vaguely a fan of ancient history back in middle school, and I was curious how the game turned out. I have put a bit more effort than usual into this post and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether that amounts to me being cautious not to be the blogger who gets blasted for criticizing a game they haven't played "enough", or whether I'm giving Heatwave special treatment for giving me a beta key. (I'm not too worried that anyone who reads the entire post is going to think the latter.)
Rolling as the Romans Do
(I don't know when exactly in beta this change was made, but it seems strange for the very first thing a new player sees when they sign into the game to be that a third of the classes didn't make it for release. Perhaps they're going to make a new character generation screen before launch that removes the unfinished classes, or perhaps they're just that honest.)
Beyond your gender (no playable non-humans here) and your class, you will be asked to choose a deity from the Roman Pantheon. Each class has two choices, but I was not able to tell whether the differences are primarily cosmetic. If this is an irreversible choice that affects gameplay, there's not nearly enough information to make it (nor, in fairness, is the character generator a good place to present that level of detail).
Other than that, you pick the colors of your outfit - which I presume are overlaid onto any gear you obtain, as well as your NPC minions' appearances - and customize your character's body and then you're ready to zone in.
Kill 10 Romans
 |
| Invisible Roman: Due to some display bug, equipping the belt I received as a reward from the first quest in the game caused my character's body to disappear, leaving only a floating sword, shield, and hairdo (but no face). |
It was hard to tell how the game's combat is tuned, since the starter quests top out at level 3 and I reached level 6 with a minimum of unnecessary bloodshed. I was mostly spamming a single attack button for most of the levels, until finally obtaining a carbon copy of the World of Warcraft Paladin mechanics from 2004 - a judgement-like spell that removes my 30-second self damage buff to do additional damage. This is no longer the way WoW Paladins work for a reason, but I may have myself to blame for picking the tank ("soldier") class.
Roman Suicide Squad
 |
| My Poke-Romans: Let me show you them. Also, don't click the red exclamation point on the right side of the soldier's box - it may show you their stats or it may crash the client. |
The two soldiers you get at low levels are a tank and a healer, but you are limited to only one minion out at a time until you reach some higher level. I'm not sure how many you can eventually use at once, whether these replace the need for partying with other players, whether each human player gets their full army of NPC's in groups, etc.
I will say that the pathfinding AI on NPC soldiers is less than ideal. If you jump off something, your dude will get stuck. If you run too close to a wall in an attempt to avoid fighting mobs, your dude may get stuck. They'll eventually teleport to you, and there are AI settings (with the caveat that the "aggressive" setting's tooltip says that it is not currently working), but I could see this being problematic if you're highly dependent on multiple minions and they all have pathing issues.
An Unfortunate End of the Line
Quest mobs are located in the non-instanced world, and take several minutes to respawn. When I saw another player running towards an area with a mob I needed, I invited them to a group in the hopes that we could share the kill credit. He accepted the invite, but apparently didn't need this quest (or declined to complete it), as he ran by the mob's corpse and took the boat on to his estate. I waited for the respawn, turned in the quest, and took the boat to my instanced estate.
Then I noticed that I was still in the group with the random guy, who was probably as puzzled as I was at how to leave. After digging around for a bit, I found the leave group button in the social panel and clicked it. I received a message saying that I would be removed from the instance in a minute if I did not rejoin. I did not think anything of this. 60 seconds later, I was ported out of my estate. Apparently it didn't know where else to send me, since I had yet to zone into the real world, so back to the newbie island I went.
The problem is that it does not appear to be possible to get back into the zone where the boat off the island was, because I had already completed that quest. A forum poster informs me that has been seen previously in beta, and it means that my character is trapped. Hopefully a GM or someone would be able to deal with this type of issue in a live paid service, but it's still pretty concerning that something this show-stopping has gotten this far into the beta, which ends on Tuesday.
Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware
I am not a journalist and this is neither a review nor a preview. I cannot claim to have scratched the surface of what the game may (or may not) have to offer, and it is certainly possible that the game will improve between now and its June 21st launch date. All I can report is one player's experiences during one set of play sessions.
Based on 2-3 hours, six levels, several bug reports, and an issue which left my character permanently stranded on the newbie island, I cannot recommend paying the $50 box fee on launch day. Given the state of the beta, the relatively low $10 monthly fee feels more like an admission that the game would not be competitive at a higher price than a genuine bargain. If there legitimately is a unique, interesting game lurking behind the rocky introduction (an area that's usually the most polished in a game as MMO's hope to pad their review scores), you will hear about it because people will be playing it. If not, those who pay up front will be out $50.
As the Romans say, caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.
EQ2 Pre-Raid Progression In Practice
One of the big complaints about EQ2 today is that the current cap - level 90 - is not really the end of pre-raid progression. I must be in a weird demographic, because I'm perfectly happy with the way things are running right now.
Beyond Levels
Key, class-defining abilities are handed out through the game's alternate advancement system, and it is very easy to hit the game's level cap with a substandard AA count, especially if you didn't spend time farming AA's at some previous level cap in expansions past. I hit level 90 last summer with 173 AA out of 250, a cap that rose to 300 in the new expansion. Raiding guilds are currently asking for players to have 277, as required for access to the top ability in the "Heroic" AA tab added in the expansion.
(Only this last ability is a real choice - the rest of the 50 point tree are small passive state increases.)
On top of this, there is gear progression. In the new model, critical hit chance is a contested stat that is mitigated by a boss mob's resistances, which means that values greater than 100% are once again in high demand. I have been told that I did not meet the gear check bar for an instance group because my crit percentage is too low, but all of the "upgrades" I have seen include Critical Hit Bonus (which magnifies the size of the Crit, once you have guaranteed it) which does nothing to help me meet the bar for higher instances. These upgrades are sitting in my bank as a result in favor of objectively worse gear that contains the crit chance I still need.
Progress
That said, where am I in progression right now? I have currently run six of the nine single group instances in the current expansion. I did Pools, Shadowed Corridors and Ascent three times each (one of the Ascent runs broke up on the final boss due to bugs), but I have only completed the other three dungeons (Umbral Halls, Haunt, and Spire) once each. I have yet to max out any factions, half of the quests in Eastern Wastes (and a few in the dungeons I have cleared once) are still incomplete, and I have yet to complete a single piece of Shard reward token gear (though I'm definitely excited that one of the pieces will remove the concentration requirement from one of my buffs, a previously raid-only perk).
I'm now sitting at 225 AA's and gaining about one per dungeon run (more with bonus exp). Now 40-50 dungeon runs does sound like a bunch, but I also gain AA for any number of other things I'm working on, and I'm maybe 1-2 gear upgrades (if I find any that have crit chance instead of crit bonus) from qualifying for the final three instances, which I have yet to see. A new patch slated to hit in the next few weeks will then add three more.
The bottom line is that it's my own fault for focusing on the easy stuff if I run any content into the ground before I hit the bar that qualifies a new character for raiding. I don't really care about that mark because I'm not looking to raid. The group that is not happy right now are the folks who would like to skip over the single group dungeons to join their friends in raids (an issue we're also seeing in Rift).
There are real problems - including itemization woes and instance-killing bugs - in EQ2's single group game. That said, as a player who enjoys running moderately challenging single group PUG's, I am literally picking EQ2's instance game over both WoW's (my mage has only cleared a single heroic) and Rift (where I left my Cleric at level 35). Either I'm doing something wrong or they are doing something right, but I'm having fun either way.
Beyond Levels
Key, class-defining abilities are handed out through the game's alternate advancement system, and it is very easy to hit the game's level cap with a substandard AA count, especially if you didn't spend time farming AA's at some previous level cap in expansions past. I hit level 90 last summer with 173 AA out of 250, a cap that rose to 300 in the new expansion. Raiding guilds are currently asking for players to have 277, as required for access to the top ability in the "Heroic" AA tab added in the expansion.
(Only this last ability is a real choice - the rest of the 50 point tree are small passive state increases.)
On top of this, there is gear progression. In the new model, critical hit chance is a contested stat that is mitigated by a boss mob's resistances, which means that values greater than 100% are once again in high demand. I have been told that I did not meet the gear check bar for an instance group because my crit percentage is too low, but all of the "upgrades" I have seen include Critical Hit Bonus (which magnifies the size of the Crit, once you have guaranteed it) which does nothing to help me meet the bar for higher instances. These upgrades are sitting in my bank as a result in favor of objectively worse gear that contains the crit chance I still need.
Progress
That said, where am I in progression right now? I have currently run six of the nine single group instances in the current expansion. I did Pools, Shadowed Corridors and Ascent three times each (one of the Ascent runs broke up on the final boss due to bugs), but I have only completed the other three dungeons (Umbral Halls, Haunt, and Spire) once each. I have yet to max out any factions, half of the quests in Eastern Wastes (and a few in the dungeons I have cleared once) are still incomplete, and I have yet to complete a single piece of Shard reward token gear (though I'm definitely excited that one of the pieces will remove the concentration requirement from one of my buffs, a previously raid-only perk).
I'm now sitting at 225 AA's and gaining about one per dungeon run (more with bonus exp). Now 40-50 dungeon runs does sound like a bunch, but I also gain AA for any number of other things I'm working on, and I'm maybe 1-2 gear upgrades (if I find any that have crit chance instead of crit bonus) from qualifying for the final three instances, which I have yet to see. A new patch slated to hit in the next few weeks will then add three more.
The bottom line is that it's my own fault for focusing on the easy stuff if I run any content into the ground before I hit the bar that qualifies a new character for raiding. I don't really care about that mark because I'm not looking to raid. The group that is not happy right now are the folks who would like to skip over the single group dungeons to join their friends in raids (an issue we're also seeing in Rift).
There are real problems - including itemization woes and instance-killing bugs - in EQ2's single group game. That said, as a player who enjoys running moderately challenging single group PUG's, I am literally picking EQ2's instance game over both WoW's (my mage has only cleared a single heroic) and Rift (where I left my Cleric at level 35). Either I'm doing something wrong or they are doing something right, but I'm having fun either way.
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