Fana
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2003
- Messages
- 2,181
Ok, so servers aer going up and i log on.
First thing i do is fiddle alittle with the character visual customization on existing characters. Fun trying to get them as close to the picture i had of them as possible, although truth be told the options arent that many (6 faces, and 4 hairstyles only f.ex). It does look very good though and i seem to recall mythic saying they will add more (or have already in a patch we dont have yet). Easy to work with anyway.
Then i log on my main, my healer, and get invited to a small rvr grp almost instantly in svasud. I sort my qbars as quick as i can and me and 2 kobold runies go out for some rvr. Since i havent played for over a month we get owned badly - i also had wrong setup and no advanced UI installed yet. And i ran with dynamic shadows enabled for some reason, slowing the fps considerably. After removing shadows it ran as good as a ToA client does more or less, altho the "inclag" was more noticeable (more advanced textures to load into memory etc). I excused myself after a couple runs, realizing that skilled rvr wasnt on the cards this evening for me
Instead i created my Valkyrie. Now, i had decided to try Cata without a bb, so have only activated my main account. I also decided initially to try to be really oldschool and dont twink down any equipment/gold from my loaded mains. Instead i started with nothing, in Mularn outside Jordheim and decided to see what exactly a newbie would face when entering the game. Must say i was impressed by the upgrade the game has done in newbiefriendliness - there are now "learn-the-game-quests" that start right away, and you quest your way through the first 5 levels, gaining usefull equipment and valuable knowledge about how the game works - you learn about /use, horseroutes, other / commands, the local areas, and even about rvr since one quest sends you to the proving grounds (level 1-5bg).
There are plenty of popups telling you what to do and where to do it, and good descriptions of how to proceed with the quests, the journal updates often and you dont have to guess alot like in the old times. You even get a guide that follows you around and can teleport you etc when you visit Jorheim in a quest. All very streamlined and i expect a newbie would feel pretty confident about the game mechanics when she was done with level 5.
All this was a nice nostalgic moment for me ^^
You now also get onscreen text telling you what area you enter, when you complete an objective and such.
At level 5 i went and signed up as a valkyrie in Jordheim and then went to the Cata entrance. You can go there right away, since the first quests and mobs inside are designed for 1-5. I proceeded alittle further down the halls and started picking up quests, of which there are alot. The questmarker, a yellow circle at the feet of a npc, is great. All i did were pretty easy to understand (no need for guides etc), gave decent rewards and about 0.5+ bub exp per quest (taking from 5-20 min to complete). The queststories were also good quality. There are also killtasks, which is probably the fastest way to level since the mobs are usually very near the guard giving the task - i didnt do many since i wanted to see what the quests were like but i can see myself doing more of those when ive done some more exploring and try for some more concentrated leveling.
Quests took me to Kobold Undercity, which is *really* good looking (rest of the areas i saw are also mostly very well rendered, has all the facilities you could want, and a portal system to obelisks around Cata which you can port to and from once you have found them, making travel pretty fast, similar to ToA djinns.
Performance of the Valkyrie - well, i only got to level 7 before we had a CTA in mid and i had to log main and go defend So, dont have all the different sort of abilities yet. Seems like a decent soloer tho, and reminds me of the Thane for obvious reasons, altho Valk is alot less distance capable (no castable dd etc, only a 30 sec delay insta dd). She is more like a Thane/Savage mix - she has spells but she wants to get stuck in melee to use them. Good thing is that her cone spells dont break when she fights in melee, they keep pulsing, making her capable of killing 2-3 lower cons at once without buffs - have to be very carefull that no adds wander into the cone tho I can see this ability beeing great for interupting casters as she can just sweep over them when the pulse ticks and interupt lots at once etc, and otherwise join in an assisttrain. Will be invaluable for breaking roomcamping. Does burn power very fast when using magic as the cone effect draws a % of full power each tick.
Cata client in zergs - Works, but is definetly more slugish than ToA, although it is fully playable with a of gig of ram and a decent gfx. Was not a large zerg tho so further testing might be required.
All in all, im very impressed by Cata, and if we only (please please) can get more people into the game and into Cata i can see this game getting a second spring. Catacombs does exactly what its supposed to do - it makes the game accessible for newcomers, shakes things up alil in rvr (nothing too much tho), and generally gives disillusioned players some new and rather different stuff. This combined with the easing of ToA that is happening atm marks some really good changes in a game that was going downhill fast. All i can wish for really now is a nerf to maximum castspeeds, some more downtime lessening stuff like food, better alchemy, and more players, and i would not hesitate to say that DAoC is the best mmorpg you can play right now.
Looking forward to playing more cata over the coming days.
First thing i do is fiddle alittle with the character visual customization on existing characters. Fun trying to get them as close to the picture i had of them as possible, although truth be told the options arent that many (6 faces, and 4 hairstyles only f.ex). It does look very good though and i seem to recall mythic saying they will add more (or have already in a patch we dont have yet). Easy to work with anyway.
Then i log on my main, my healer, and get invited to a small rvr grp almost instantly in svasud. I sort my qbars as quick as i can and me and 2 kobold runies go out for some rvr. Since i havent played for over a month we get owned badly - i also had wrong setup and no advanced UI installed yet. And i ran with dynamic shadows enabled for some reason, slowing the fps considerably. After removing shadows it ran as good as a ToA client does more or less, altho the "inclag" was more noticeable (more advanced textures to load into memory etc). I excused myself after a couple runs, realizing that skilled rvr wasnt on the cards this evening for me
Instead i created my Valkyrie. Now, i had decided to try Cata without a bb, so have only activated my main account. I also decided initially to try to be really oldschool and dont twink down any equipment/gold from my loaded mains. Instead i started with nothing, in Mularn outside Jordheim and decided to see what exactly a newbie would face when entering the game. Must say i was impressed by the upgrade the game has done in newbiefriendliness - there are now "learn-the-game-quests" that start right away, and you quest your way through the first 5 levels, gaining usefull equipment and valuable knowledge about how the game works - you learn about /use, horseroutes, other / commands, the local areas, and even about rvr since one quest sends you to the proving grounds (level 1-5bg).
There are plenty of popups telling you what to do and where to do it, and good descriptions of how to proceed with the quests, the journal updates often and you dont have to guess alot like in the old times. You even get a guide that follows you around and can teleport you etc when you visit Jorheim in a quest. All very streamlined and i expect a newbie would feel pretty confident about the game mechanics when she was done with level 5.
All this was a nice nostalgic moment for me ^^
You now also get onscreen text telling you what area you enter, when you complete an objective and such.
At level 5 i went and signed up as a valkyrie in Jordheim and then went to the Cata entrance. You can go there right away, since the first quests and mobs inside are designed for 1-5. I proceeded alittle further down the halls and started picking up quests, of which there are alot. The questmarker, a yellow circle at the feet of a npc, is great. All i did were pretty easy to understand (no need for guides etc), gave decent rewards and about 0.5+ bub exp per quest (taking from 5-20 min to complete). The queststories were also good quality. There are also killtasks, which is probably the fastest way to level since the mobs are usually very near the guard giving the task - i didnt do many since i wanted to see what the quests were like but i can see myself doing more of those when ive done some more exploring and try for some more concentrated leveling.
Quests took me to Kobold Undercity, which is *really* good looking (rest of the areas i saw are also mostly very well rendered, has all the facilities you could want, and a portal system to obelisks around Cata which you can port to and from once you have found them, making travel pretty fast, similar to ToA djinns.
Performance of the Valkyrie - well, i only got to level 7 before we had a CTA in mid and i had to log main and go defend
So, dont have all the different sort of abilities yet. Seems like a decent soloer tho, and reminds me of the Thane for obvious reasons, altho Valk is alot less distance capable (no castable dd etc, only a 30 sec delay insta dd). She is more like a Thane/Savage mix - she has spells but she wants to get stuck in melee to use them. Good thing is that her cone spells dont break when she fights in melee, they keep pulsing, making her capable of killing 2-3 lower cons at once without buffs - have to be very carefull that no adds wander into the cone tho I can see this ability beeing great for interupting casters as she can just sweep over them when the pulse ticks and interupt lots at once etc, and otherwise join in an assisttrain. Will be invaluable for breaking roomcamping. Does burn power very fast when using magic as the cone effect draws a % of full power each tick.Cata client in zergs - Works, but is definetly more slugish than ToA, although it is fully playable with a of gig of ram and a decent gfx. Was not a large zerg tho so further testing might be required.
All in all, im very impressed by Cata, and if we only (please please) can get more people into the game and into Cata i can see this game getting a second spring. Catacombs does exactly what its supposed to do - it makes the game accessible for newcomers, shakes things up alil in rvr (nothing too much tho), and generally gives disillusioned players some new and rather different stuff. This combined with the easing of ToA that is happening atm marks some really good changes in a game that was going downhill fast. All i can wish for really now is a nerf to maximum castspeeds, some more downtime lessening stuff like food, better alchemy, and more players, and i would not hesitate to say that DAoC is the best mmorpg you can play right now.
Looking forward to playing more cata over the coming days.
