Tuesday, 2 October 2012

October Update



The Next Month And Onwards




So far this has been an entertaining hobby and there have certainly been release and betas to use as fodder for out loud thinking. Guild Wars 2 may be temporarily on hold as I catch up with Mists of Pandaria, and as the PvP at this very moment doesn't interest me. I'll definitely get back to levelling/PvP'ing in GW2 eventually, but Pandas and Betas are taking priority for the moment.


Planetside 2 is still something I like dipping into frequently, an hour or two here and there. The upcoming server reduction for beta will make it better, given the current problems with one faction on a server generally coming out on top and beating the others back to their respective warpgates. The next update may well stop that kind of occurrence in it's tracks. The new continent is being added, along with another character wipe and a reduction in servers. From what I've noticed, I'd venture a guess that servers are capped out on players per faction, not total. So say the total for a server is around 2000 players, I'd guess it locks each faction out at around 700 players. If the servers can cap out, or almost get there, it should make for some excellent battle. And the new terrain and new continent are something to look forward to for a change of pace.

As far as Mists of Pandaria goes, they hotfixed justice point gear to no longer require reputation. I still stand by the complaint that tying valor gear into reputation is frustrating. Farming reputation and heroic dungeons is enough of a pain in the ass without tying the two together like that. Regardless, I'm trying to focus what time I have to play towards reputation for the moment. Dailies... Seriously boring, but unfortunately there is a price to pay for wanting to raid in a timely manner. The temptation to just throw my hands up and be done with it is a little higher than it was at the beginning of Cataclysm, but I am curious about the raid content this expansion. If it turns out to be utter rubbish, well, I'll have more time for my Mesmer.

For everything else in the near future, closed beta is closed beta and heavily NDA'ed, which covers at least two things I'm currently playing and having fun with. As to things to look forward to, I still want to go back and finish all the class stories in SW:ToR, but I don't believe they've announced a date for Free to Play yet, besides "Fall sometime". The only other thing on my radar I can think of right now is the Neverwinter MMO, but I have some reservations there considering Perfect World is attached to it.


November may also be a slow month, given some previous commitments, but I imagine I'll still find the time to ramble. Especially if something new is out by then, or NDAs have been lifted.



- ED

Monday, 1 October 2012

Mists of Pandaria – One Week In




The Good, the Bad, and the Timesinks.



There’s plenty to talk about when you start looking into Mists of Pandaria. It certainly feels like everybody has heard about it and has an opinion one way or the other. That is to say, they either love it or hate it. On the other hand, I however find myself on the fence between the two. There are things I like about the new expansion, and things I absolutely despise.
 
Let’s get the likeable stuff wrapped up first, given it’s all fairly widely spoken of.

The game is still WoW. There’s no escaping it. But it’s prettier WoW, with excellent story and entertaining if time-wasting additions like Pet Battles. For the most part the classes are the same as they’ve always been; the combat and levelling too. I found the levelling fun, if again a little too brief much like Cataclysm levelling was. From an equipment and aesthetic point of view, the style of the expansion is also a nice change.


I hit 90 a few days ago now, and have been trying to figure out how to get raid ready with the least amount of hassle and grind. The raiding in this game was largely what kept me playing in Cataclysm. What I don’t enjoy is PUG 5 mans and grinding reputation. I was hoping I could get by after having a few things crafted and spending the leftover Justice points from 85, and maybe gritting my teeth through dailies or PUGs long enough to get a piece of Valor gear or two. Just enough to creep into LFR and work the rest of the way up.

But alas, the game has given out a resounding NOPE to such plans. Justice and Valor gear is now purchasable depending on having both the currency to buy it, and now the reputation. Wonderful. I have to grind rep dailies and instances to get Valor gear. And to top it off, there are no rep tabards this time around, so the reputation gains are primarily through dailies. And there are a LOT of dailies.


I do understand that they don’t want people leaping into the content too quickly. But I find myself at something of a crossroads with the game because of this. It’s a case of limited time and immediate gain. I have a limited amount of time to spend on games every day. I have multiple games to play. Out of everything I play, Mists of Pandaria is the only thing telling me “You have to sink X hours into all of these things you hate doing so you can eventually do something you enjoy” whereas other games, such as Guild Wars 2 or the Planetside 2 beta, or other betas under heavier NDAs for the moment, say to me “Jump right in to whatever you want to do here!”.

Now, doing something unpleasant for an eventual payoff can be rewarding on some level. Like how working in a crappy job can be a stepping stone to something greater. But in the context of a leisure activity with alternatives, I’m not entirely sure the payoff is worth the time spent. And other issues pop up because of it too, like keeping up with guild members and fighting for raid spots.

Still, the gear and rep grind is only a single hump. Past that, and I can head in the same direction I did for Cataclysm. That is to say, get into raids and never look back at reputation and 5 mans. I think pre-Mists I hadn’t been inside a 5 man dungeon in WoW since a couple of months into Cataclysm. 


Given it’s only been a week and it could be some time before things smooth out and function well, with the rep dailies potentially taking a few more weeks to hit exalted with anything, I will have to keep trying to stay interested. At least long enough to work out whether or not I want to finally drop the game. But casual folk take note, don’t be like me and hope to leap into raiding without a fair amount of grind to set you up for it.



- ED

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Guild Wars 2 - Thief Build Part Two




Stick 'em with the pointy end!



So far, I haven’t been a fan of condition damage based builds. They function well, but the counter of condition clears seems to be something I run into frequently. Most likely because of how deadly condition damage builds are for most classes, especially in the smaller SPvP setting rather than WvW.

For a Thief, going for direct damage by way of Berserker gear is as viable as bleeding someone out, and personally I find it more fun. The forced movement attached to Heartseeker is slightly less annoying than the flip with Death Blossom, which is a relief when running down ranged classes.
But let’s get stuck in.


The Build at GW2Skills.net



Traits


Deadly Arts, 25 Points. Sundering Strikes for frequent Vulnerability, Dagger Training for damage.

Critical Strikes, 30 Points. Side Strike for extra critical chance, Executioner to add burst for finishing, Practiced Tolerance because little else is directly useful in the line and this build is squishy enough that an extra thousand HP is helpful, though not greatly.

Trickery, 15 Points. This is primarily for the extra 3 Initiative at the 15 point mark. Playing with 30 Deadly Arts instead I found the lack of Initiative at the beginning of a fight unhelpful. Thrill of the Crime for the helpful buffs on stealing.


Weapons


Dual Daggers is primary, as seems common for the class. Secondary, I use a bow largely for the button 5 teleport shot for mobility.


Armour          


Berserker’s gear is a must for the Power, Precision and Critical Damage the build relies on. This will leave you with lower than average HP, so you will die quickly, but that’s the price for the damage output and the reason for stealth skills.


Slot Skills


Again, focus on stealth and movement. Hide in Shadows for the heal, Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder for the slotted stealth skills, and Shadowstep for mobility and a stun break. Unlike with the condition damage build, Dagger Storm makes for a better elite here as the direct damage is higher than the bleed.


General Playstyle


If you’re fighting a pet class, particularly Illusion-dependant Mesmer’s, Dancing Dagger is very good. It has high damage as long as it can bounce between two or more targets, but against a single target Heartseeker is generally better. From behind, the last strike in the button one chain can hit significantly hard too, for no Initiative cost.

Shadowstep to close gaps, or against certain classes remove conditions. Steal is a good use to start a fight if you keep the buffs on stealing trait in Trickery. Use Dancing Dagger to keep a solo runner in range. Double Strike to wear them down, Heartseeker for burst. Heartseeker can hit extremely hard against someone with lower HP and functions well as an execute, especially with the short leap built in to catch someone fleeing.

The stealth skills are primarily to keep you alive. As an alternative to extra base Initiative, it’s possible to run the same build but swap the Trickery points 10 in Shadow Arts for the Initiative gain on stealth, and the extra 5 most likely back into Deadly Arts for the power.



There is room here for personal preference and finding out what works best for your playstyle. A bow certainly isn’t necessary off hand as you primarily use daggers. If it’s possible at all, this would be close to a build you could perhaps fit a main hand sword into, but it’s hard to justify against the solid attacks from daggers. It’s still something I’m working on figuring out, however.

If you plan on testing out a variety of changes to this, keep one thing in mind; Power, Critical Chance, and Critical Damage are the most important stats to keep your damage high enough to justify having a low tolerance for being clubbed. A little can be sacrificed for utility or something that gives play a better flow (in this case, the extra Initiative), but not much before you simply don’t kill people fast enough to survive.



- ED

Sunday, 23 September 2012

Guild Wars 2 - Thief Build Guide Part One



First Build - Watch ‘em Bleed


So far, I’ve come to like two distinctive builds focusing on different aspects of dealing damage. I’m still out for a third; I’d really like to work out a build that utilizes a sword without giving anything up, but so far daggers hold too much utility and damage in a single set of weapons. Bows and pistols seem to function far better as secondary weapons, especially with this build.




In Brief


The use of daggers and pistols here is primary. It’s possible to use a bow instead of dual pistols, but pistols are ideal given the bleed on the button one attack. The short version of the build is get up as many bleed stacks as quickly as possible then hide in stealth while they work down your opponent.



Weapon Skills


The primary ability to be concerned with in the daggers line is Death Blossom in the number three slot. It does an average amount of direct damage if you land all of the strikes or have multiple targets to hit, but the main factor is the bleed it causes on every hit. If each strike lands, it’s a three stack of bleeds on every target. 

The other abilities in the dagger line are primarily for utility. Dancing Dagger has a cripple attached for slowing the enemy, as well as fairly good damage if targets are close enough together for it to bounce. Cloak and dagger has a stealth component, but a high initiative cost. Heartseeker can be good for finishing someone off quickly if the initiative is available. The button one attack chain has fair damage and a poison component on the third strike, which helps deal with heavier healing.

Switching to pistols, and the uses drop off somewhat. The primary purpose of using pistols as a secondary weapon set is for the bleeds on the button one attack, so even if someone runs you can keep up the bleed stacks and keep their health moving in the right direction. The other attacks have some utility but it’s not too useful an initiative sink one on one, and in a group situation it’s likely other classes will bring vulnerability and daze to the mix anyway.


Slot Skills

 

The heal is Hide in Shadows, no question. The high heal compared to the others available mixed with the stealth component make it the only real option. Shadow Refuge and Blinding Powder are also a must. The ability to avoid attacks by hiding in stealth after stacking bleeds is paramount. For the third slot skill I never really settled on anything. I tried Spider Venom for damage, Needle Trap for utility, and Caltrops for a final bleed, but eventually settled on Shadowstep. The targeting took a little getting used to as the max range is fairly high at 1200, but the condition removal on returning helps against any class building similarly condition damage heavy.

For the elite skill, I settled on Thieves Guild. The single charge on Basilisk Venom while potentially useful seems too weak comparatively. Dagger Storm was a tougher call. The trade off is a solid 8 seconds of stability against 8 seconds of essentially being stuck flailing around. The bleed and cripple components up the value of it somewhat, but ranged classes can take it as an opportunity to burn you down. With Thieves Guild, you throw harassment into the mix along with damage at the cost of a fairly long cooldown timer, plus something to keep people busy and put out more damage while you hide in stealth.  


Traits

 

Full power, full condition damage, and the ten points in the toughness line primarily for Infusion of Shadow, the initiative gain on stealth. This will leave you at enough initiative to finish someone off after the initial bleed and vanish. For this build, in the power line Mug, Dagger Training and Panic Strike were the most useful. The extra damage on damage on Death Blossom from Combined Training is also a possibility, and would replace Panic Strike. 

The Trickery line took some messing around with to iron out in a way I liked. Purely with the intent to function solo, Flank Strikes for the extra 5% when at the side or behind an opponent was the first choice. My second was Initial Strike for the extra Initiative Gain, but it’s slow enough that on occasion I’ve swapped out to Instinctual Response to deal with heavy hitters. The last was Hastened Replenishment, to make absolutely sure I have a lot of initiative after burning through all stealth causing skills.

This is changeable based on the situation for larger scale PvP, like WvW, or tournament groups in which you might need to bring buffs to the table to help the group. With Thrill of the Crime in Trickery you can provide short term group buffs at a relatively low cost.

Guild Wars 2 Traits for a Condition Damage Thief Build


The two biggest issues I’ve found with it so far involve how horrible it can be facing a class/build with a lot of condition removal and the lack of control of Death Blossom. In regards to the first it’s self-explanatory. For the second, it could just be that I haven’t sunk enough time into this build to adjust to the constant directional flipping of Death Blossom. I find it’s very easy to only land one or two of the hits when your target is strafing excessively or otherwise very mobile. 

For personalization, parts of the build are more interchangeable than others. Some of it can be switched around for personal preference, as long as the main focus is kept in mind. That is to say, stack bleeds and disappear then repeat if necessary.


In addition to this condition damage based build I’ve tried another focused more on direct damage. So far I prefer it. While this build functions well, I somewhat dislike how it plays and how Death Blossom functions. This could partly be because of latency in SPvP the last few days while I’ve been build testing, but I do dislike being stuck in movement as Death Blossom causes you to be for even just a moment. It’s also partly that I’ve had the misfortune, perhaps, to constantly find myself up against Guardians with a lot of condition removal and such. 

If you’re looking for a solid build, I’d suggest trying it, but it may take several matches to adjust to the timing and bleed stacking.



- ED

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Free To Play On The Horizon




I liked Star Wars: The Old Republic when I originally played it for a few months earlier in the year, just after release. I feel like this might be because ever since the early gameplay footage I haven’t thought of it as a traditional MMO. I’ve been thinking of it mostly as Knights of the Old Republic with MMO functionality built in. That’s because when you focus on the Massively Multiplayer portion of it, it’s subpar compared to other titles in the genre, but as an RPG it was actually fun. The quests were relatively interesting with the voice acting through all of it, and the character stories were amazingly well done, or at least the Sith stories I got into were. 

The MMO portions felt dated, in the sense that other games have gotten past similar issues long ago to the point that there’s no excuse for them. The instances felt poorly designed, with exception to the very first in each faction. The PvP warzones while fun at points were nothing new and while I left very early on in Illum I’ve read a lot of horror stories about their attempts at open world PvP.  Similar stories floated out over the ease of end-game content and having nothing left to do very quickly. The gameplay and abilities were standard MMO fare.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, the character stories were amazing. The voice acting, music, settings and ambience too. 



The Good, The Bad, And The Free



Let’s take a look at the features comparison list so far; SW:TOR's F2P Features List


Story Content 

 

Full Access for Subscribed and Free players. This right here is the primary reason for playing the game. Based solely on this I would recommend people at least giving it a shot. From a business perspective, I’m not sure why it isn’t limited being the single most attractive feature of the game. They could have slapped a one-off charge per class to unlock the story for said class, and I’m positive a great many people would pay it. But from the point of a consumer, the Full Access Story is a HUGE incentive to play, so I can only assume that it’s their hook, and they’ll try and convince people to buy into the other features along the way. 


Character Creation Choices

 

Limited for Free players. Assuming this means races and customization options only and doesn’t limit class access, it’s completely inconsequential. The races are very similar with exception to colouring and Twi’leks. No racial abilities hold any importance.


Warzones

 

Limited for Free players. Having your weekly PvP access capped is largely unimportant unless you like SW:TOR PvP a great deal. You can still do some, so especially if you’re a casual player, this won’t be an issue at all.


Flashpoints

 

Limited for Free players. Again, for the casual player this isn’t an issue. A weekly limit is more than enough to see all of the content, and constant repetition of Flashpoint instances is completely unnecessary. 


Space Missions

 

Limited for Free players. Another weekly cap. They were a fun way to kill a little time and get a little experience, but doing what essentially is a mini-game all of the time will get old fast. Likely no issue if you’re a casual player unless you love on-rails space battles.


Operations 

 

No access for Free Players. This could be a sticking point. If you really want to raid and have that end-game content available you might need to fork out some cash here. If there’s no way to pay for access week by week with their paid for currency (Cartel Coins) and Operations are limited purely to subscribers, this could be a small disaster. I don’t think this will force people to pay the sub. I don’t believe the Operations were of a high enough quality to warrant forking out a subscription primarily for access to them. That and unless you have a guild running them or absolutely love PUGs, you’re paying for something you either can’t do, or something that will turn out to be a headache nine times out of ten.


Travel Features

 

Limited for Free players. This could be a problem, especially if “Travel Features” is not just code for flight points, but also code for a limit on the availability of mounts. I can’t find any solid information on it, so it remains to be seen how this will actually affect gameplay but if you have to run everywhere all of the time this could turn into a giant time-sink. If it limits one or the other to a small fee, it could work out well; either limiting all but key flight points to a fee, or limiting mounts or certain levels of the riding skill to a fee. Super fast mounts for a real money cost, or slow for free, wouldn’t be so bad at all.


Game Login

 

Normal access for Free players. Likely not an issue except potentially in the first couple of weeks of the Free to Play release. But it’s also entirely fair; paying customers get priority access, free have to wait a little bit.


Galactic Trade Network

 

The Auction House, limited for Free Players. Given the subscribers line states “Can post 50 listings” I’m going to assume this will be a limit on listings to maybe five or ten, hopefully not one. But limited access is still access, so it’s not really an issue.


Cartel Market


The last payment-related function being introduced when Free to Play rolls around will be the Cartel Market. This is their in-game store, in which players purchase things with Cartel Coins, which come with a subscription every month, and I can only assume will be able to be purchased in packs separately, as most other Free to Play games offer. This could work as well as it does in everything else, as long as it’s managed well. Aesthetic changes, bank and bag sizes, random collectible pets and mounts; people LOVE this stuff and it’s fairly standard as far as Free to Play gaming goes. This could well be where they make their money if it’s done well and has frequently updated and polished content.



Overall, working with the information so far Free to Play will be worth it. This still boils down to one singular reason so far above everything else it may as well be the only reason; free play through of the class stories. The biggest issue from a business standpoint is that this large hook, this massive draw, so far requires absolutely no payment in any form to complete. Any money they make from people coming into the game solely for the story will be incidental. It remains to be seen how well this will work out for them.

But for the players coming into it, the free story is an amazingly good deal, and I strongly suggest everyone with a passion for RPG tales take a look at it when Free to Play hits supposedly sometime this US Fall. 



- ED