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#1
08-16-2020, 09:15 PM
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Where is the love for shadowbane
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#3
08-19-2020, 12:08 PM
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#4
08-20-2020, 05:33 AM
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WoW feels like some cheap all inclusive club for vacation to me in PvE.
I you want to achieve anything, do the club dance (for raids), otherwise get things delivered to you for free. It's fun for a few weeks but gets boring fast. BGs used to be fun in classic and first few expansions but did suck last time I tried, Arena was fun during WotLK but last time I tried it it became one shot fest, felt more like CS than a MMORPG. EQ was always like, here is our world, live with it and adapt. Became less so since all know everything about the mechanics behind though. UO was the biggest cheating and exploiting festival I ever played... (I played from release up to a few months in)
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P1999 Blue <Riot>, ex<Core>, ex<Europa>
[60 SHM] Tortok | [60 ENC] Palanthus | [60 CLR] Palantha | [60 NEC] Zssah | [60 SHD] Gamrog [58 WIZ] Palantrox | [57 ROG] Palantrog | [56 MAG] Worms | [52 DRU] Yells Vallon Zek (1999-2003) <Boten der Apokalypse, House T'Sai, Innoruuk's Legion, Orden des Lichts, Ancient Orden, Ancient Dawn> [65 Barb SHM] Stear | [54 DE CLR] Palanthas | ||
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#5
08-20-2020, 04:00 PM
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Character customization was simply put: you could pick any skills from the list to either "train" or "specialize" in, which cost you "skill credits" depending on how strong / useful they were (You had X number of skill credits ar char creation and would gain more as you gained levels). Your attributes (str / endurance / quickness / coordination / etc) would effect these skills all via different formula (IE: Melee Defense = quickness + coordination / 4). As you gained XP, you spent that XP like currency into your individual skills or attributes. So if you were specialized in the Sword skill, you used swords and if you "pumped some XP" into your sword skill you would hit harder and have a lower chance of being "evaded." The higher your melee defense, the more of a chance you had to evade other mobs / players melee attacks. Same thing applied for the magics + magic defense....with a whole shitload of other utility skills to go along with it. If you wanted your character to run faster or jump higher, you had to put XP into those skills (or spend XP raising the attributes in the skill's formula). Mage spells and archer arrows could be dodged, the spell casting system allowed for certain animations to make your casts faster or harder to predict. The depth to PvP was insane. The strongest guilds battled over the best loot / xp dungeons constantly to allow their farming guild mates further into the dungeon more time to hunt uninterrupted for a chance to score super strong loot. Guilds tried hard to keep their newest / best spots hidden (there was no /who features at all), but would eventually leak out and create a new place to battle over. The XP system allowed a vassal / patron relationship where your vassals who swore fealty to you would "pass up" some of their XP to you as their patron. It was an incentive to bring newer players under your wing and help them along. Eventually guilds figured out a way to maximize the system and formed XP chains, allowing the big boys at the top to spend their time defending the popular XP / loot spots from enemy guilds trying to come in and take it over for themselves. I would say the only things EQ did better was (obviously) the idea of a "raid" scene and single group grinding just being more social and co-dependent. AC was heads above anything else, though. Keep in mind they had a very active, live playerbase until early 2017 when they closed the servers down. I just can't get back into the emulator stuff...so I decided to pay homage to a big title from that 99-04 era when I played AC and try EQ for the first time on P99 and I haven't been disappointed. | |||
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Last edited by kjs86z; 08-20-2020 at 04:23 PM..
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#6
08-21-2020, 12:07 AM
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It does sound like there are some interesting facets for PvP, I wouldn't be surprised if that setup was overall designed better for PvP than EQ was, but there's still the lack of other interesting mechanics at work. Where are the Mesmer type abilities, the complex heal/protection roles, movement control, tracking? Quote:
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#7
08-21-2020, 10:36 AM
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(1)+(2) The dodging was mostly a PvP thing, although in very difficult PvE quests you would want to be on your toes and avoid some of the more dangerous stuff. Most of the time your character would be able to handle taking shots from PvE and healing / surviving it. Also the term "mage" is pretty loose in AC. The classic archetype that is casting offensive "war magic" (think elements like lightning, fire, acid, cold, bludgeon, slash, pierce) had a whole slew of different style spells to cast that all tracked / traveled at different speeds and ways. So for instance a "bolt" spell tracked your targets movement and would go that direction they were headed when it released, but would move slow enough that a good player on the receiving end could dodge it. A "streak" spell would move insanely fast and be almost impossible to dodge unless you were really far away, but it would do significantly less damage. Streaks were used to finish off low HP targets in PvP. These same mages could also cast frontal aoe (volleys), PBAoE (rings), etc. However, there was also a school called "Life Magic." Almost every character wound up at least training in this, and all mages specialized in it. Life Magic had a line of spells that were non-projectile based, unavoidable "drains" that would siphon HP from your target and give it to you, and also "harms" that were direct damage. Life Magic also allowed you to transfer your "vitals" (HP, Stamina, and Mana) into any other vital. So if you had a ton of stamina and low hp, you could cast a quick spell that would drain your own stamina but replenish your HP. You could do the same for stam to mana, mana to hp, and any other combo. Life Magic also allowed you to heal other players as well, which was needed in some PvE and PvP content where you had dedicated front-line melee tankers protecting your mages / debuffers in the back line. (3) At release, people thought the "max level" was 126. The only reason this was because the game couldn't store any more than 4,2xx,xxx,xxx (I forget the exact number) XP, which was exactly how much total XP it cost to maximize a single skill. The game devs put in this huge fireworks animation when you hit 126, but you could still earn XP and keep raising all of your skills and attributes. So, as the game continued, you'd have more and more level 126s running around but no one could tell how strong you really were (could assume a bit based on trying to "con" other people, we called it "assess"). So, while a person may have appeared as a "max level," you always wanted to be gaining more XP (I guess you could sorta equate it to AAs later in EQ?). Eventually a 2nd expansion came out that fixed the visible level cap, and it wound up being level 275 which equated to the total amount of XP needed to fully maximize every single attribute and skill you had spec'd and trained. Some people logged in for the first time when that expansion dropped and instantly went from 126 to 200+ because they had been gaining XP all that time at 126. The amount of passup experience from vassal to patron, and then from that patron's patron, etc was staggering. Monarchies formed these "XP chains" to maximize passup. I was a core in the biggest monarchy (Blood) on the Darktide PK server and as a result got placed super high up in the chain. I hardly had to hunt at all and was gaining insane amounts of XP making my character stronger by the day. I did a quick google search on Asherons Call and found this cool little paper/report written in 2003 by a student at Stanford that does a great job describing AC and the PK environment: https://web.stanford.edu/group/htgg/...lin_2003_1.pdf The thing about the PvP server is anyone could attack anyone else at anytime. There were absolutely no rules. You dropped items on death but you could protect yourself from losing your gear by carrying very expensive "death items" like mana stones, magi robes, etc that you could buy at high end vendors. If you died too much and lost all your death items, the next death you would start dropping your gear. I remember killing this super high level archer. He dropped his entire suit of armor and bow, I looted it all and made an archer character that same day. The guy made a post on the old forums about it, deleted his character, and quit the game because it was such a huge loss he could never recover. It was literally years of his time I looted off him. It was the most rugged, brutal, no pussy-footin around environment where the boys cried back home to the carebear servers and the men stayed to do battle. The best PKs in the game could fight 1 v 3, 1 v 4, even 1 v 5 at times depending on the skill / strength of the opponents. Reckful, that famous WoW streamer that committed suicide recently, was one of the best mages to ever play Darktide. He was never high level, but known for taking down opponents with 5-6x more experience than he. Another one of the greatest, Rookie, came to the scene a little later: https://youtu.be/4hOZQI2K6I4?t=223 At about 3:45 he portals into this dungeon and starts fighting 1 v 3 (I think it turns into a 1 v 4 later) and is winning. | |||
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Last edited by kjs86z; 08-21-2020 at 10:50 AM..
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#8
08-17-2020, 03:02 PM
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I would go with City of Heroes, personally. Character design and builds had flexibility I've seen almost nowhere else, and it had difficulty settings to prevent the gameplay from becoming too easy or too difficult for whatever skill level you were playing at. Its instanced and an incredibly different game from P99, but I love them both for very different reasons. City of Heroes edges it our for me though, I think.
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Jayya - 60 Rogue, Officer <Auld Lang Syne>
Sanctum Low Man Vindi Kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZfNjvsDRE | ||
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Hybrid Mode
