.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Fellowship Maneuvers

I mentioned fellowship maneuvers yesterday. Do you know what these things are? They’re pretty sweet, one of the neatest reasons to team in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢.

At random against elite foes or when a Burglar starts one, everyone on your team can pick one of four colors, which stand for damage, healing, damage-over-time, and mana recovery. This is a nice bonus, lowering the boom on them or picking you back up. But scroll down the page to combinations. Some combinations of colors give bigger bonuses, mostly poker hands of flushes, straights, and full houses. If you can get people to do the right colors in the right order, the fight is pretty much over right then.

And that’s the hard part: getting people to do the right colors in the right order. Even getting people to stick to a flush other than “go red!” seems to be very hard.

: Zubon

Grouping Wall

This is Zubon at level 29. I have run out of solo content in the Lone Lands, with a big stack of remaining quests in Agamaur and GA. No, you’re not expected to know what that means; it means that I need a group because all the enemies in my Lone Lands quest line now have three to five times as many hit points as I do, not to mention that some of them are invisible. So my play is at a wall until I can get a group there. Since I never played EQ, I am not willing to stand at the zone wall and broadcast “LFF: Agamaur and GA” for 45 minutes hoping for a Minstrel and a Guardian. So I can log in, wait some amount of time, then get bored and leave. Maybe I can do some fishing or deed grinding to entertain myself.

Yes, I could hit North Downs, since I still have solo quests there and maybe folks who want to do the group content, but I really want to see what is going on in that big red swamp. I don’t hear people looking for GA groups two zones over, and the global channels I joined are not having much activity. I think I spelled one wrong when joining, so I’ll keep trying variations until I get a populated one.

This is Zubon at level 21. I have another alt at the start of the Lone Lands quests. Around level 20 is when players start learning how to group in this game. You might be able to guess who is on a first character/first MMO. They don’t know what fellowship skills are or why you should not attack the mesmerized enemies in the back. Explaining does not seem to help. They vary between unrealistic optimism after the inevitable wipe or just leaving. Actually, those are the good ones. Some people do have the patience to broadcast for 15 minutes for a group, but then they quit 1/3 of the way through the quest because they did not have that much time. They see three elite enemies and panic, when fights with five are coming up. Did these people do their Great Barrows quests? They must be the ones bringing along level 40 Guardians and Minstrels, which is helpful but keeps folks from learning how to play in these slightly difficult situations.

Can I go back to “they can’t be taught”? As a Burglar, I explain fellowship skills to literally every group I join. If we do not have a Minstrel, I say, “just click green.” This isn’t that complex a plan, is it? Where do those reds and yellows come from? Or did you think that two greens was enough, so now it’s time to pick at random?

Oh, and the holy trinity exists. Working without a Minstrel is hard, when not suicidal. I was proud of myself for playing something other than a healer, and now I want to make one just so that I can find one for a team. That’s okay though, since the teams without Minstrels usually lack Guardians as well. I assume they’re all off in better-organized guilds than the random ones I connected with.

: Zubon

Update: since first writing this, the upper level character got her group for the GA half of that list, complete with Guardian, Minstrel, and the Minstrel’s level 50 friend. Fishing while waiting seems to be key.

Biased Samples

I have been hearing people in [game X] say that [game Y] isn’t very good, or at least isn’t as much fun as [game X]. Well yeah, these are the people who left Y for X, or tried Y and came back. If you only ask the people who are playing X whether X is better than Y, you should get a lots of yeses. If you went to Y and asked about X, you would hear the same thing in reverse. Only those guys in game Y are just a bunch of biased jerks who don’t like X, your game. You would expect that from a bunch of fanboys.

: Zubon

Age of Conan – After a Week

I’ve been playing AoC for about a week now and I’d like to share some additional early impressions.

Character Slots

The game gives you eight character slots regardless of server. Therefore, if your slots are full and you want to play on a different server, you must delete a character on the old server to make an open slot. This really doesn’t bother me as I feel eight slots is plenty. Really, if I had eight slots per server I would probably have to create name holder characters on each server. I can’t do it in AoC, so I don’t have to. I like that.

Continue reading Age of Conan – After a Week

Hyboria Raids Middle Earth

Creeps’ numbers on our server are down. That is, in Player versus Monster Player play, we have fewer monsters. This makes sense: these are the Killers, and Age of Conan is designed for them, while the freeps are the folks who have done 50 levels of PvE. This will presumably repeat when WAR launches. This hurts when the creeps’ main advantage is having more bodies. The creeps can only hope for a PvE grindfest to arise and deplete their foes’ numbers.

: Zubon

Gameplay Content

Jeromai had a good comment that deserves a post in response. After listing all the stuff that City of Heroes has added in the past year, he asks: “Does ‘content’ just equal progress of story, or does it include all of the above?” I leaked terms. I started the post by discussing “gameplay,” then switched to calling it “content” at the end. It all goes back to sphexishness:

The actual content is what is new. “Kill ten rats” and “bring me ten rat tails” only add content to the extent that the quest text is novel. If you add an “orc shaman leader” that also has a freezing spell, that is new for the seconds that it takes me to work out “orc shaman + purple tint + second fireball with less damage and a slow effect.” City of Villains has endless newspaper missions, but really it is the same mission with a narrow range of variation.

The storyline is frequently the smallest addition because there is so little of it. A big update will have 10-15 minutes worth of reading, spread out across a number of quests and contacts. You read it once and you’re set. A new enemy group is added; most of them will have 2-3 powers, and the interesting ones will probably be using existing powers.

Take Issue 9’s Statesman Task Force. This is good stuff, and it probably took a long time to make. It is also 5-10 minutes of reading, 3-4 novel fights, and 2-3 hours of fighting the same Arachnos enemies that were already around. Take Issue 9’s revamped Hamidon fight. This is almost entirely new gameplay, with new things to learn and do. It is one of the purest gameplay additions City of Heroes has had. But that is one raid encounter.

I am not an especially visual person, so graphic upgrades don’t mean a lot to me. Issue 11 added dozens of new hairstyles and weapon appearances. You see them once, done. Issues 10 and 12 added new tilesets for missions. You learn the half-dozen new rooms and hallways, done.

A wolf is a rat with different numbers and graphics, maybe a different ability. The fundamental is the same. A goblin is a bipedal wolf, an orc shaman is a goblin with a fireball spell, and a dragon is a flying shaman. Almost everything in the game can be understood as fiddling with variables on a fairly simple template.

Most new content is a way of fiddling with the existing variables, possibly with new decorative touches. Hours of padding and repetition hide the fact that the “new” is only a few minutes long. Some of these are really great, but we are still killing ten rats. Really exciting new things go beyond the template.

: Zubon

The Next (two) Best Things (pt. 1)

Our playgrounds and virtual worlds are getting larger. This isn’t something that catches people by surprise; it’s pretty much commonly agreed. And they will only get larger and larger.

Donning my prophet hat on, I’d say that at some point -not really far away into the future- these games will become so massive, in terms of their own virtual expanse and number of subscribers, that “business as usual” as it relates to the way these games are managed, just won’t cut it anymore.

Perhaps in 10 or 15 years (no further than that, I’d say) we’re going to see the emergence into the mainstream of two very important things which will shape that generation of games. No, it won’t be the number of polys they cram in there, or how many gigs of VRAM you need on your card to hold all the textures properly, or anything like that. It’ll be something much less technical: The adoption into the mainstream of user-created content and the emergence of the Police Department.

Continue reading The Next (two) Best Things (pt. 1)

Proposed Stalker Changes

“lolstalkers” has been a long-term issue for City of Villains. It is a great class for running newspaper missions solo or for ganking people in Warburg. For anything else in the game, you will want another class. Stalkers are one-trick ponies: burst damage from stealth. It is a very good trick, the kind of trick that one-shots lieutenants, but that’s all. The last attempt to bring them up to parity went a bit too far, so that small groups of Stalkers could take out Giant Monsters quickly. Now on test:

  • Increased Stalker Melee damage multiplier from 0.9 base to 1.0 base.
  • Increased Stalker Hit Points multiplier from 0.95 to 1.125
  • All Stalker melee attacks now have a chance to critical while not hidden. This chance is equal to 10% plus 3% per additional team member within 30’ of the stalker at the time of the attack. This only applies to PVE targets. Stalkers old chance to critical Held or Slept targets now only applies to PVP targets.
  • The Critical portion of Energy Transfer operates exactly as if you were criticalling from Hide — it eliminates the Self Damage, rather than increasing damage to the target.
  • Using an Assassination attack and missing will no longer suppress Hide (though lesser stealth and invisibility powers will still suppress) if the attack misses. If the attack hits, Hide suppresses normally.
  • Hide Suppression for Stalkers reduced from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
  • Assassination attacks now cause a demoralizing effect on PVE targets that survive the attack. Demoralized targets To Hit value is reduced, and the target may be frozen in terror.

Adding all those together, that is about a 50% sustained DPS increase in full groups, plus more survivability and utility. Is this enough without scaling Assassin Strike? Is Assassin Strike love coming? Stay tuned!

: Zubon