DAoC Origins-questions

[Amiga]

I must say that in a PVE point of view ToA is great (great locations, quests and items).. And for those who likes pve toa must have been a fantastic expansion..

Me on the other hand cant stand the grinding (and in the old days, camping) just to get a toon "ready" for rvr.

So when classic came along i was a happy bunny. I did play it for a few months but then realised that this is just a normal server without toa. Everything else was there, cl's, toa bonuses, nf, classes etc etc.. It didnt feel old school to me so i left it together with 95% of the population ;p

Now with origins i feel the same way again, joy, for this is what i was really looking for. Only classic zone (with SI in the future maybe) with OF. I really hope this will be a great server. Only thing i dont like is that they keep much of the current game (styles, archery system etc) but i guess its too hard to roll back to the old system.

So in other words, if the end game of WAR sucks i will roll on this server for sure.

[pjuppe]

Originally Posted by Amiga

I must say that in a PVE point of view ToA is great (great locations, quests and items).. And for those who likes pve toa must have been a fantastic expansion..

sorry, i couldn't agree less. the way toa was worked in the beginning was beyond terrible. it would have been good if they put some effort in making things interresting (and some things where fun (like ML5)) but it was for the most part just endless grinding.

just take the golden scarab vest for example. to get the thing you first needed to farm setians like crazy just to talk to the NPC that gives you the quest. after that you need 50 magical scarab wings. those drop from a typ of mob that has a 33% (or something similar) chance of spawning when you kill another type of scarab. that mean that you have to stand at the same spot and kill 200 scarabs (minimum). after that you have to hand in the wings one by one (!!) and you get the artifact. but to activate it you need to farm other mobs that drop the scrolls (although in this part you can get other scrolls which you can sell and trade to other players). when you finaly gathered all the scrolls needed you can activate your artifact but it doesn't end there. now you have a useless chestpiece that you have to level into something good. and what does it level on? yes, more scarabs. and it's slow. and they are low con... so there's shitloads of more scarabs that you have to farm.

and when you've gone through all this for ONE artifact it get's worn down and eventually breaks and is gone forever. and that is just shit.

i think that if they had to make a PvE heavy expansion they should at least have made it good PvE, i.e. not mindless grinding. For example you search for the scrolls in some other way than killing mobs. maybe some scrolls is hidden on a island and you have to solve clues to get there and kill mobs on the way? and when you activate an artifact you get all the stats but you have to complete a quest to activate the /use1 and /use2.

that would have been loads better imo.

[Amiga]

well you got a point there.. its lots better nowdays though.. only 4(?) years too late.. but i wouldnt know what a hardcore pve'er thinks of it.. i mean theres lots of stuff to do there at least ;p

i never liked toa anyway so for me it was just lots of hazzle including the prydwen/mid bug that made toa almost unplayable for a week or 2 =(

[bufferer]

Originally Posted by pjuppe

sorry, i couldn't agree less. the way toa was worked in the beginning was beyond terrible. it would have been good if they put some effort in making things interresting (and some things where fun (like ML5)) but it was for the most part just endless grinding.

just take the golden scarab vest for example. to get the thing you first needed to farm setians like crazy just to talk to the NPC that gives you the quest. after that you need 50 magical scarab wings. those drop from a typ of mob that has a 33% (or something similar) chance of spawning when you kill another type of scarab. that mean that you have to stand at the same spot and kill 200 scarabs (minimum). after that you have to hand in the wings one by one (!!) and you get the artifact. but to activate it you need to farm other mobs that drop the scrolls (although in this part you can get other scrolls which you can sell and trade to other players). when you finaly gathered all the scrolls needed you can activate your artifact but it doesn't end there. now you have a useless chestpiece that you have to level into something good. and what does it level on? yes, more scarabs. and it's slow. and they are low con... so there's shitloads of more scarabs that you have to farm.

and when you've gone through all this for ONE artifact it get's worn down and eventually breaks and is gone forever. and that is just shit.

i think that if they had to make a PvE heavy expansion they should at least have made it good PvE, i.e. not mindless grinding. For example you search for the scrolls in some other way than killing mobs. maybe some scrolls is hidden on a island and you have to solve clues to get there and kill mobs on the way? and when you activate an artifact you get all the stats but you have to complete a quest to activate the /use1 and /use2.

that would have been loads better imo.

its so true !

[Dorin]

So you didnt enjoy camping GoV for hours, killing bugged ml mobs or or or farm scrolls that had low drop rate and ofc high con mobs droped em... my personal experience was that when i finally had fully SI geared toons (two stingers on shade etc), my joy ended quickly as toa came out 2 weeks later.

you you damn anti-pve'r !

BUT:

Toa was really really bad, atleast at launch. But after it has been tweaked i could bare with it. From a certain point of view it made caster classes more useful, had some nice abilities (Fop, cure ns) and it ended the era of 4svg's on stick. With a little bit of creativity it would have been an "ok" expansion. So in my oppinion it had some potential as in concept, but was fucked up in the process.

I think SI dungeons and bosses were fine, you had cool looking drops which made you UnIqUE with a little bit of +util, but didnt make you overpowered against a spellcrafted toon, toa couldnt carry that on respectively.

Anyhow, 1.65 was okish... enjoyed it after had the grindig behind me . Daoc wasnt really killed by toa, sure it had a great part of it but imho it was NF, the 3rd day i have played it i knew it will be sucky, shitloads of camping spots, just way too big, no real "hotspots", no odins gate (QQ). daoc got burried and the few that stayed had catacombs with stupid classes and the last expansion which i dont even remember the name in their hands.

Speaking for myself i'm really looking forward to this server as i have a really bad feeling about Warhammer (warha - warcra eek jinkiees, split up crew), not sure if it will be teh next mmorpg with decent endgame. If this new set just makes the old camelot feeling for 3-6months, bring it on, will enjoy every second of it :-)

[Kagato]

I have to agree with one of the earlier comments.

ToA by itself did not kill DAOC though it was bad...awefully, terribly bad, most people still loved the game to stick with it, however New Frontiers was the nail in the coffin.

If you look at NF you can 'see' what they intended with the open expanses and the rope bridges, bottlenecks and to steep to climb hills.

But it just didn't work, those things never ever got used due to player mentality, you knew the quickest routes and you used them unless your a soloer hiding out the way, in which cases you'd walk around without seeing anybody for hours on end.

And the water combat was simply a joke!

The whole 1 frontier concept was ok but the maps needed to be seriously reconsidered and the 4 towers / 1 keep system redesigned but we've all had this arguement many times before.

To my mind the only 'good' expansions were shrouded isle and darkness rising, I do actually like what they did with DR, it was more how ToA should of been, giving you the chance to gain extra abilities to flesh out and personalise your character without giving you anything to over-powering. That is balance.

If all expansions were like that i'd of been a happy paying customer, now it's to little to late.

[Cromcruaich]

Originally Posted by pjuppe

sorry, i couldn't agree less. the way toa was worked in the beginning was beyond terrible. it would have been good if they put some effort in making things interresting (and some things where fun (like ML5)) but it was for the most part just endless grinding.

just take the golden scarab vest for example. to get the thing you first needed to farm setians like crazy just to talk to the NPC that gives you the quest. after that you need 50 magical scarab wings. those drop from a typ of mob that has a 33% (or something similar) chance of spawning when you kill another type of scarab. that mean that you have to stand at the same spot and kill 200 scarabs (minimum). after that you have to hand in the wings one by one (!!) and you get the artifact. but to activate it you need to farm other mobs that drop the scrolls (although in this part you can get other scrolls which you can sell and trade to other players). when you finaly gathered all the scrolls needed you can activate your artifact but it doesn't end there. now you have a useless chestpiece that you have to level into something good. and what does it level on? yes, more scarabs. and it's slow. and they are low con... so there's shitloads of more scarabs that you have to farm.

and when you've gone through all this for ONE artifact it get's worn down and eventually breaks and is gone forever. and that is just shit.

i think that if they had to make a PvE heavy expansion they should at least have made it good PvE, i.e. not mindless grinding. For example you search for the scrolls in some other way than killing mobs. maybe some scrolls is hidden on a island and you have to solve clues to get there and kill mobs on the way? and when you activate an artifact you get all the stats but you have to complete a quest to activate the /use1 and /use2.

that would have been loads better imo.

I might have to spoiler this. It's giving me nightmares again even thinking about it.

I also hated the way toa dumped on the feel of the game. It was all celtic and norse - kinda real and gritty then along come fucking toa with its deserts and egyption shite.

[Tuthmes]

Originally Posted by Cromcruaich

kinda real and gritty then along come fucking toa with its deserts and egyption shite.

Wtf Crom!

[kirennia]

Basically they should have sat down for longer and thought of how to make more people happy with a RvR/PvE balanced game before releasing ToA. What really made DAoC and other games great before ToA? It's not all about waiting for 12 hours to have something appear, only to then have someonelse win the drop. It's also not about the arguments generated from a system which had huge potential for abuse. Okay okay so getting the final hit on a mob just after leaving a battlegroup wasn't abuse as such (according to the CoC at the time) but that is NOT what a GAME is about.

So so many things were wrong with ToA when it first came out. I honestly can't beleive the stupidity of people sometimes. Bugs are inevitable but to sit down and think that having an item which was required to make decent templates only spawn once every 12 hours (CS/GoV as examples) on a server with a population of 3000 is beyond stupidity. It makes my brain hurt it really does...

On the other hand, they did make things right and these days ToA isn't a drag. I actually quite enjoyed the last character I levelled up with TT as you had options of going about it a different way. The problem was that the damage had already been done...


And as for NF, great concept if the servers were stable enough to hold consistantly more then 3000 people but not enough measures were put in place to keep the balance right. No-one wants to run around for hours looking for fights, no-one wants to have to run for miles because a single person took a tower, no-one wants to have ridiculously unbalancing relics and at the end of the day, the general population would meet at bottlenecks and that was about it. Most of the maps were hardly ever used which is a big shame. If only they had of had a realm map which scaled up/down dependant on the population and adjusted other bonuses according to population bias as well.

It's sad because DAoC had the potential to be a long standing bout of genius but instead, some memories are tarred by sheer lack of common sense on both mythic and goas part. The strangest thing about the whole game is that despite the massive differences in playstyles and opinions during the game, I think most people felt the same way throughout about the more core problems with the game. If only player feedback was listened to more.

[Danord_durin]

Welli think toa would have been better if it had been splt up. Like a pay for expansion with some free ones following. Like starting with artifatcs and the new continent. And later introducing ml's and other fluff. That might have given less of the shock it became to alot of players.

[Zoia]

I remember that my skald spent well over 20 hours in Malmo leveling Phoebus Harp. :\
I played a lot at that time and got it done fairly quickly, but it must have been a nightmare for a casual player that played 2-3 hours a day a few nights a week. Must have taken almost 2 weeks of playing just to level one single artifact, like Phoebus.
That's after you got the encounter done and all the scrolls, so say 2-3 weeks of playing for that one arti. No time for RvR or anything else, it was insane.

Originally Posted by Kagato

However anything that lessons the damage is a good thing, i'd come back in an instant if they took the game back to the Shrouded Isle days with old frontiers, that for me was DAOC at its peak.

Hi, Kagato.
They said they wouldn't include SI on origins, but might in the future. They are redoing some of the drops atm. The chest pieces in TG, etc, have already been done.
SI is definately my favorite expansion and i would love it if it was included in Origins at one point(without the classes).

More about Origins can be read here:
VN Boards - Origins FAQ from the Herald
Some info, like the release date, isn't accurate anymore.
There's also a couple of links to some IRC Developer Chat from june in the 3rd post.
Developer IRC Chat - June 4, 2008 -- Dark Age of Camelot: Labyrinth of the Minotaur Vault
Developer IRC Chat June 5, 2008 -- Dark Age of Camelot: Labyrinth of the Minotaur Vault

[Maeloch]

I think there's no question the extra toys and abilities from ToA improved the game, more complex, more things to do...

Just the grind. I could see where they were coming from, all the ToA grind gave players PLENTY TO BE GETTING ON WITH. That'll keep them busy a while getting immersed in all that shit.

But, alot of stuff was simply not doable by a casual player and even a hardcore player needed serious guild backup to get a lot of stuff done. Some players running about with 25% resist pierce, crock mode, etc fragging all, some with pretty much zero. Huge difference between the two ends of the spectrum then.

[Kagato]

Originally Posted by Zoia

Hi, Kagato.
They said they wouldn't include SI on origins, but might in the future. They are redoing some of the drops atm. The chest pieces in TG, etc, have already been done.
SI is definately my favorite expansion and i would love it if it was included in Origins at one point(without the classes).

Hey Zoia, hows it going?

I agree, SI was the best of days though I was even unsure about that expansion to begin with.
Those fights we had back in the SI days on Excalibur Road are still my favourite and most memorable.

We still had good drops to aim for with the epic dungeons, caer sidi and so on, spellcrafting gave us great builds to aim for but with still solid caps to stop things going over the top and there was no /use timers to or at least very few to greatly unbalance things.
The only timer dumping you had to worry about was standard class RA's and even those had much longer re-use timers.

I doubt i'd bother with this origins unless it's old frontiers with the old styles and abilities ect, not of this cap-increase shit.

[Kagato]

Ok just actually bothered to read the links and I see it actually IS old frontiers with 'extras'.

After reading the bits and pieces I do actually like the sound of it in principle, but I have some very heavy reservations:

Valkyrie? seriously? It's a hideously over powered class to begin with in modern RvR (or was a year ago when I last played). Putting that class in old frontiers with old classes, even if tweaked a bit and if they nerfed it a little it's still going to be way over powered.

Styles - I havent seen anything regarding which styles they'll be using wether it's old frontiers or new, and given what a big fuck up they have made in this area I frankly wouldn't want to start out again unless they did a proper over-haul of styles or set them back to how they were in old frontiers.

Part of me is hoping this could be the balanced dream we always wanted but another part is telling me not to go back down this road again !

[Raven]

I don't understand why they don't just make it like it sounds, old style DAOC post savage fix SI. No TOA, no LOTM no retard classes (aside from fixed savages)

Sure keep the epic quests and in and maybe boost the SI top tier dungeon loost drop rate or something but very little else is needed.