| AE II Backstab PVP | |
 |
Category: PvP Server: Cho'gall Class: Rogue Race: Undead |
| application | |
| Raiding Grounds | 3 replies |
| Spirit Healer - Secret Message | |
| General Discussion | 11 replies |
| Antagonist help. | |
| User Interface & Add-ons | 2 replies |
| Triple xp if you recruit a friend | |
| General Discussion | 12 replies |
| How did you come up with your character's name? | |
| General Discussion | 105 replies |
| Welcome! Introduce yourself here. | |
| General Discussion | 1306 replies |
| Top Healer in WotLK? | |
| Raiding Grounds | 34 replies |
| Found an annoying ad? Tell us! | |
| Suggestions and Feedback | 13 replies |
| Paladin Healing in Endgame | |
| Raiding Grounds | 21 replies |
| Live Chat during Live Events | |
| Suggestions and Feedback | 4 replies |
| Bear Hunting |
| by DarthBotto - 426 views |
| Going Vegetarian |
| by Mirith - 1114 views |
| Retro: Keep it Dead |
| by Mirith - 1552 views |
| My biggest regret. |
| by Appendix - 1890 views |
| Misc Crap |
| by Mirith - 1160 views |
select your music stream by myparty.de
| Bluehour | |
| Soul, Chillout, Blues, Jazz and more | play |
| go4rock | |
| Rock, Indie, Heavy, Alternative, Punk | play |
| Drop a Beat | |
| Black, HipHop, R'n'B, Funk, Soul, Raggae | play |
| Club Beats | |
| Vocal/Funky/Deep House | play |
| Future Trance | |
| Future Trance | play |
| Theik's Age of Conan Review | by Theik @ 3 May 2008, 09:15 PM |
| If you have been going to the Scryer bank a lot lately, you might have noticed me missing for the past few days. You might even have wondered where I had gone, in which case, your life is most likely very uneventful, or you're a freaky stalking type. Either way, the answer is simple; I was play testing Age of Conan. During my Open Beta playtime, I decided to write up a review of my opinions in the game, considering they seem to contradict a lot with other beta testers who seemed to find the game absolutely horrendous. So if you're one of those people, who's mind is already set on disliking the game, I advice you not to read the following review, for it is actually quite positive. ----- What is Age of Conan? Age of Conan is a MMORPG by the company Funcom, (in)famous for the somewhat failed MMORPG Anarchy Online. The game is set in the setting of Conan the Barbarian, a world written up by Robert E. Howard before any of us were even born. The biggest publicity attention given to the game seems to be the fact that they are not aiming at a teen rated game like most MMORPG producers, but are instead perfectly fine with an M rating, befitting the Conan world. Graphics Let's start off with the graphics, because this appears to be one of the things the producers have been bragging about for a pretty long time. The graphics are indeed impressive, with the surroundings looking and feeling a lot more lively (and dark) than the ones in World of Warcraft. High definition textures were not yet included with the beta (meaning that switching from medium to high did nothing), yet even without said textures, the game, especially the surroundings, look stunning. Tortage city is a breathtaking place which reminds me of Booty Bay with better graphics and a slightly more sense-making layout. The motion-captured animations look very realistic and fluent, and there seems to be a good enough amount of them in-game to not make every single attack look exactly the same. On the flipside however, there are also negative sides to the graphics. The game seems to be having some mad clipping issues as far as clothing goes, with armour constantly glitching and going through your character's body, or through other layers of clothing, often producing rather ugly looking results while moving. Performance This appears to be the bottleneck for many people in the beta; the performance for them is absolutely horrendous for some weird reason. I had no problems whatsoever with my Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 with 2 gigs ram and a Geforce 8800 GTS, for I was able to play everything on highest settings without any FPS issues, yet there also appeared to be people who, despite putting everything on the lowest of lowest graphics, were having trouble actually breaching 5 fps. (I was at a solid 40-50 fps myself, more than enough to enjoy the game.) Even my latency was a decent 90 ms, which considering the fact that the servers were hosted in America and the open beta serving as a stress test, I found to be pretty impressive. The only real problems I encountered to my performance were the occasional 1-2 second hang-ups I would get if the debugger sent a large chunk of information, which would spike my CPU usage for a short while. Considering the debugger will no longer be around at launch, I think it is safe to say that I'll be enjoying a lag free game by then. Gameplay Gameplay in Age of Conan feels a lot more interactive than World of Warcraft, with the lack of an auto attack function, and button hammering being fairly useless. All NPCs seem to adjust their shields pretty well according to what you are doing (a bit too well sometimes, considering they often shift all three shields to your combo sides leaving your combos doing gimped damage), so just hitting one button all the time does not help your damage in the slightest. You will have to actually pay attention to what your enemy is doing, and change attack sides and combos accordingly. Another difference is the fact that as far as melee is concerned, there's no "target mob" required to do your thing. Depending on the size of your weapon, you will be doing a World of Warcraft style cleave in front of you at all times, meaning repositioning yourself in combat to hit multiple enemies can really pay off. (There was an auto facing option to face your target, but this seems to do more harm than good and I turned it off after five minutes of playtime.) Rangers bow attacks are slightly more like the classical MMORPG style, where you select a target and then go from there. Shields are still in effect, and if you are using crossbows, bolts will actually pierce your target and hit targets behind the first one as well. There is also a "first person view" setting which increases the distance at which you will be able to shoot, making it a nice way to finish off people from a distance, or pulling mobs. Moving on to damage casters, the style of gameplay becomes even more familiar. Shields no longer matter to you and spell casting functions much like in other MMORPGs. Due to casting cool downs you will not be hammering the same button over and over however, so some thought is still required. Hopefully spellweaving at level 40 will bring the casters up towards requiring more thinking, much like the melee classes. Last but not least, the healers. If you're used to playing healers in World of Warcraft, you're going to be in for a surprise. You can't target somebody and then heal them. You have group-wide heal over time spells, cone shaped heals that heal stuff in front of you, point blank heals that heal everything around you, but no heals that just home in on your current target. As such, a lot of the "stand somewhere and just click heal" is gone. Healers will be required to move around to catch as many people as possible in their cone heals. Quests From level one to twenty, you have the option to play in single player instances made specifically for you, to experience your destiny quests. These seem to be different for every archetype, and take you on some pretty interesting quests while also explaining the story about Tortage, the Red Hand and Mithrelle, the evil sorceress who has been corrupting the island. While this type of gameplay deviates from normal MMORPG behaviour, where you are sent on quests with other people around, it does add an interesting way of pulling people into the story. The way it works is that Tortage ignores the server wide setting of day or night, and instead gives players the option to pick for themselves. At night, you're playing solo and doing the destiny quests, where at day you will play like a normal MMORPG and be sent on different quests. I personally really liked the destiny quest chain, and I was somewhat disappointed when I couldn't continue it because I had capped level 13 (max in open beta) and the next part of the chain required level 15. I'll be making sure to play it in retail to see how things end. In depth: Necromancer While I played a variety of classes in the open beta, my class of choice (which I was already planning on playing for retail for a while now) is the Necromancer; as such it is only fitting that I throw out some information on the illustrious commanders of the dead. Necromancers are casters who call upon the unholy powers of death and the freezing cold attributed to the lack of life to deal damage. They summon forth the undead to do their bidding and chill the bones of their enemies. They are a combination of a pet class and a damage dealer, one who seems to primarily depend on damage over time spells with a variety of personal and party wide buffs. I am fairly certain everybody who has ever played an MMORPG will know what damage over time spells are, so I don't think that requires a lot of extra information, I will instead focus on the pet part of the Necromancer. The amount of undead you can summon at a time depends a lot, it works by a system of "summon points". My Necromancer at level 13 had two summon points, and access to one Undead summon, the so called Mutilator. This pet costs one point to summon, meaning you can have two of them out at the same time. This is where tactical decisions come in play, you can combine different pets to form your own army of eight points, for whatever the situation calls for. It is a versatile system which, looking at the talent trees, allows Necromancers to fill the role of debuffers and shadow priests, with certain undead restoring life, mana or stamina to the party. That said; let's move on to aggro mechanics. Unlike what you might have expected, pets do not tank for you. In fact, any aggro they deal, goes straight to the squishy Necromancer who commands them. The only time they will actually hold aggro for themselves is when you activate Frenzy, a two minute cooldown spell which will allow them to tank for a while. This means that the Necromancer is not your usual "solo grind" class such as Hunters in World of Warcraft that can simply go on forever. Your pets are a bonus to your damage, not a group of personal tanks. On to the Mutilator itself, which is a rather useless pet for solo play and does little more than simply adding some damage. Their attacks have a chance of applying a stacking bleed debuff which does next to no damage, but there's a use for them in the long run in group play. When the bleed debuff stacks high enough, the target will start taking more physical damage. From the talents, it appears that many of the Undead summoned by the Necromancer share similar abilities meaning deciding what kind of pets you summon will be a versatile way of determining what kind of supportive role you will add to your damage. All in all, it seems to be a very interesting class with a combination of damage and support; one I'll be playing for certain in retail. ----- And with that, my review of the Age of Conan beta and the Necromancer class is over. It seems to clash with the opinions of many of the people on this site; yet I could not figure out what exactly the game had done to earn so much ire from the community. Perhaps they encountered a lot of bugs that I did not come across, but I enjoyed playing my Necromancer, Guardian, Ranger and Tempest of Set a good bit. For sticking around for the entire review (or simply scrolling to the end, you bastard) you have earned the right of getting a handy link to my picture gallery by clicking here. If you have any things in particular you would like to know about my beta experience that wasn't included in the review above, feel free to throw me a PM with your question. =) Hope the review helped to those people who were looking for more information; and stay tuned for my next blog! |
|
| Comments: 10 | |
Comments
1 Page(s) [
1 ]
|
|||||
.
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
1 Page(s) [
1 ]
