Name Lips
05-12-2009, 12:50 PM
No license purchase - if you buy, it's only the $15/month subscription. Makes it easy to switch from other MMOs because frankly you're paying that much already.
Sufficiently large "play-for-free" zone to get your feet wet without subscribing at all.
Interesting world style. Art is very non-"world of warcraft" ish. Fantasy, but unique enough that I don't feel like I've seen it a thousand times already. Shattered world, floating islands, "shardships" traversing the space between.
Interesting class system - you pick an "archetype" (spellcaster, warrior, or rogue-y type) and get to specialize into one of 3 classes for your archetype around level 5.
Strategy-based combat. This is the part I'm starting to really, really enjoy. It's the part of play that feels the most different from other MMOs. At first glance, it's the usual. You see a little action bar at the bottom with combat abilities in it. But when you activate one, the entire bar automatically rotates (it's actually a cylinder), revealing more options. You pick one, it executes, and the bar rotates again.
You have complete freedom to customize your bar. Open up your skill library, drag and drop skills into whatever slot on whatever "level" of your bar, and try it out. But very quickly you end up with more skills available than open slots on your bar (more slots slowly open up as you level). You have to make real, strategic choices about how you build your "deck" of skills. When the bar is on level 1, you ONLY have access to the skills you've chosen for level 1. Skills scale up with you and never become obsolete. So do I want my buff/debuffs on level 1, and my damage skills on level 2... or the other way around? Melee attacks in the first slot so I remember where they are (hit 1 repeatedly to attack), or mixed in with other skills? Different players with the same class and the same skills can be MASSIVELY different in combat, depending on how cleverly they build their "skill deck." A clever min-maxer can take out opponents much higher level than himself (or be taken out by somebody 5 levels lower if they figure out the holes in his strategy).
Non-gear based. Most gear is completely cosmetic - if you like the look of your character at creation, you can keep that stuff the entire game. Gear has "sigil slots" that can be used for customizing it (somewhat akin to jewelcrafting in wow). Some players collect extra gear so they can put different sigils on it, and then switch between gear sets, but lots don't bother.
Personal Experience Points vs Fame. "Fame" is what you'd normally consider xp. You gain levels with it which unlock new skills and points for your attributes. PEP works differently. You can only get up to level 5 Pep, but each level gives you a distinct bonus (at level 1, for instance, I got +1 to all attributes (which is huger than it seems, because some attributes are measured on a scale of 1 to 10 and are only increased by buffs/debuffs/pep), 10% extra movement speed, 10% extra damage). Pep is reset to 0 if you die. This provides a death penalty that makes you paranoid (I spend 2 days getting my pep level up and don't want to waste my bonuses). But you're still a perfectly viable character without it. (PvP kills don't reset pep levels).
It's a new MMO, but I'm running into very few bugs. They seem to have a philosophy that they don't release content until they're sure it'll work. So the content seems a bit light... only 2 races to pick from, for instance. But everything they add actually works. Everything in the game feels rich and like it belongs. The quests are well crafted and interesting (even if there are the same old fedex and kill x number of y beastie ones).
If you feel like checking it out I'm Namleips on the PvE server. I'm a level 7 Void Seer, which is some sort of buffer/debuffer/melee caster. Only well-considered use of debuffs makes my melee at all effective. Apparently I'm going to get the best heals of all the casters, but they can all heal in a pinch. Right now my main heal spell sticks a debuff on a mob that heals everybody who hits it with a melee weapon a small amount. I also have a debuff that reflects a chunk of damage from monsters who hit me back onto them. For some reason there's no mana which makes the spellcasting feel very different.
Sufficiently large "play-for-free" zone to get your feet wet without subscribing at all.
Interesting world style. Art is very non-"world of warcraft" ish. Fantasy, but unique enough that I don't feel like I've seen it a thousand times already. Shattered world, floating islands, "shardships" traversing the space between.
Interesting class system - you pick an "archetype" (spellcaster, warrior, or rogue-y type) and get to specialize into one of 3 classes for your archetype around level 5.
Strategy-based combat. This is the part I'm starting to really, really enjoy. It's the part of play that feels the most different from other MMOs. At first glance, it's the usual. You see a little action bar at the bottom with combat abilities in it. But when you activate one, the entire bar automatically rotates (it's actually a cylinder), revealing more options. You pick one, it executes, and the bar rotates again.
You have complete freedom to customize your bar. Open up your skill library, drag and drop skills into whatever slot on whatever "level" of your bar, and try it out. But very quickly you end up with more skills available than open slots on your bar (more slots slowly open up as you level). You have to make real, strategic choices about how you build your "deck" of skills. When the bar is on level 1, you ONLY have access to the skills you've chosen for level 1. Skills scale up with you and never become obsolete. So do I want my buff/debuffs on level 1, and my damage skills on level 2... or the other way around? Melee attacks in the first slot so I remember where they are (hit 1 repeatedly to attack), or mixed in with other skills? Different players with the same class and the same skills can be MASSIVELY different in combat, depending on how cleverly they build their "skill deck." A clever min-maxer can take out opponents much higher level than himself (or be taken out by somebody 5 levels lower if they figure out the holes in his strategy).
Non-gear based. Most gear is completely cosmetic - if you like the look of your character at creation, you can keep that stuff the entire game. Gear has "sigil slots" that can be used for customizing it (somewhat akin to jewelcrafting in wow). Some players collect extra gear so they can put different sigils on it, and then switch between gear sets, but lots don't bother.
Personal Experience Points vs Fame. "Fame" is what you'd normally consider xp. You gain levels with it which unlock new skills and points for your attributes. PEP works differently. You can only get up to level 5 Pep, but each level gives you a distinct bonus (at level 1, for instance, I got +1 to all attributes (which is huger than it seems, because some attributes are measured on a scale of 1 to 10 and are only increased by buffs/debuffs/pep), 10% extra movement speed, 10% extra damage). Pep is reset to 0 if you die. This provides a death penalty that makes you paranoid (I spend 2 days getting my pep level up and don't want to waste my bonuses). But you're still a perfectly viable character without it. (PvP kills don't reset pep levels).
It's a new MMO, but I'm running into very few bugs. They seem to have a philosophy that they don't release content until they're sure it'll work. So the content seems a bit light... only 2 races to pick from, for instance. But everything they add actually works. Everything in the game feels rich and like it belongs. The quests are well crafted and interesting (even if there are the same old fedex and kill x number of y beastie ones).
If you feel like checking it out I'm Namleips on the PvE server. I'm a level 7 Void Seer, which is some sort of buffer/debuffer/melee caster. Only well-considered use of debuffs makes my melee at all effective. Apparently I'm going to get the best heals of all the casters, but they can all heal in a pinch. Right now my main heal spell sticks a debuff on a mob that heals everybody who hits it with a melee weapon a small amount. I also have a debuff that reflects a chunk of damage from monsters who hit me back onto them. For some reason there's no mana which makes the spellcasting feel very different.