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Lost Pages of Taborea: Comparing RIFT's looting and multi-class systems to Runes of Magic's
Sometimes I feel like I'm playing the best MMO that no one's ever heard of. Lately, all I see are new games on the horizon that promise new flexible class systems, better functionality in old standard mechanics, improved pet systems, and so on. Every time I read these press releases, announcements, or blogs, I lean back, tilt my head a bit and say, "Interesting. But Runes of Magic already does that." It's why I have a lot of faith -- even if I disagree from time to time -- in Runewaker. The company has made all these great systems that are exactly what newer games are promising, and players are stoked about it. It really has me wanting to embark on a series comparing systems between RoM and other MMOs. RIFT has bulk-looting and class combining that I want to compare with similar features in RoM for this week's Lost Pages of Taborea. I'm tired of feeling like I'm playing an MMO no one's heard of, even if it isn't true -- RoM is very popular and it keeps growing at a fast pace. But dagnabbit, sometimes I want to tell everyone RoM did it before the other guy gets all the credit. Let's look at RoM's dual-class and pet systems to compare looting and multi-classes between these two games.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Tinkering with standard classes and my Priest/Rogue
Aside from some ancillary problems, one of the things I love so much about Runes of Magic is that it gives me ability to augment weapons and equipment via the arcane transmutor. When that is coupled with a dual-class system, players are given a lot of room to bend traditional classes to their wills. I've been running a Priest/Rogue for a while now and loving it. The selection of offensive spells, the Rogue's skills, and the weapons I can wield have me wanting to push the boundaries of typical class specifications. I'm building a hammer-wielding Priest that's specced much like I'd spec a Mage, but the class can also pump out adequate melee damage. In this week's Lost Pages of Taborea, I want to give you a run-down of the gear, weapons, and stats I'm choosing. It should serve as a good guide to some unique possibilities for classes in RoM.
RIFT's Spoils of War update deploys
It's a heady day for RIFTers as Trion Worlds has released the game's second major update. Titled Spoils of War, patch 1.2 includes several exciting additions to the game, most notably a Looking for Group tool, a cosmetic appearance system, and 10-man raid Slivers. The LFG interface will also offer daily dungeon quests with increased rewards as incentives to boost instance runs. The full patch notes are up over on the RIFT forums, and they're a doozy to read (but one has to have some way to pass the time while the game updates, right?). In addition to the headlining features, there is a metric ton of changes, tweaks and sparkling gems to absorb. Spoils of War will make the game's expert dungeons more attractive to run, and players who love tinkering with RIFT's soul system should rejoice at the addition of a fifth role. Trion's also added a lot more love for social media with increased integration between the game and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr. There's really too much to cover in a few brief paragraphs, so after you read the patch notes, make sure to check out our larger coverage of this impressive update from a couple of weeks ago! If you haven't had a chance to get your hands on RIFT, Trion's also launched its seven-day free trial and Ascend-a-Friend programs for one and all.
An exclusive look at RIFT's Update 1.2 and beyond with Scott Hartsman [Updated]
With almost two months on the post-launch clock at Trion Worlds, RIFT appears to be holding its own in the wild and woolly field of MMORPGs. With a major update and the first world event under its belt, RIFT is sailing into the future with the wind at its back and a hull full of subscribers below. We got Trion's Scott Hartsman on the phone to discuss RIFT's second big patch, Update 1.2, as well as to see how the game's progressed thus far and where the team is trying to take it into the future. And of course we couldn't let this opportunity pass by without a candid dissection of the uneven world event and how Trion plans to learn from its mistakes. So hit the jump and witness Scott Hartsman giving us a Care Bear Stare full of info and exclusive tidbits about the inner workings of RIFT!
Trion unveils new RIFT Rogue trailer
It's been a while since we've seen a class video from Trion, but today the drought is over thanks to the spiffy new RIFT Rogue trailer. The two-minute clip mixes in-game footage with title screens showing the various permutations of the Rogue's soul system, giving would-be rascals a cursory glance at RIFT's take on one of the fantasy genre's most beloved archetypes. Because of RIFT's build-your-own-class mechanics, Rogues in the world of Telara stand out from their contemporaries due to a good bit of versatility. The trailer shows us three incarnations of the class: a death-dealer, a sniper, and a support specialist. In addition to those roles, you may even see a RIFT Rogue playing a lute, teleporting, or possibly tanking a mob. Check out the clip after the cut for more details.
Hyperspace Beacon: Your eyes can deceive you
I don't know about you, but this Friday's update surprised me. After the freighter-full of information we have been receiving, I was kind of expecting a meager morsel of facts from Star Wars: The Old Republic in this most recent update. However, just knowing that the update was written by Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller, I was excited about it. Zoeller is surely the most active developer on the SWTOR forums, and he always has some incredible nuggets of information to share with the community. This week, I want to talk about combat roles. Although BioWare mentioned that it supports the standard trinity, it was refreshing to read that the team is mixing things up a bit based on advanced classes. For instance, your Bounty Hunter easily slips into the DPS or the tank role, but developers have thrown healing into the equation, too. This week, I want to talk about another role I did not expect to see: the Stealth Tank.
Enter at Your Own Rift: 'Role' play
In retrospect, it was all my fault. I had gotten too used to just throwing RIFT dungeon groups together and assuming that with the flexible soul system we'd be able to provide everything necessary no matter what archetype mixup we had. I suppose it's a testament to Trion Worlds' design that an exact group composition wasn't a top concern -- the goal is just getting five willing players together for a fun run. We were running Darkening Deeps, and I decided to start a group so that I could show off the dungeon to Rubi. We had two Rogues, two Mages and a Warrior, and I felt pretty confident going in that we would prevail. And while the Warrior stepped up and said he would tank -- taking the burden off of my Riftstalker build -- everyone else was curiously quiet when I asked if there was another healer who could back up my Bard heals for boss fights. Nothing. Not a peep. The other Rogue didn't have a Bard spec, and the Mages were whistling innocently when I asked if they happened to have a Chloromancer role tucked in their back pocket. Oh crud. This was going to hurt. Six trash pulls into the dungeon later, I called it and said that we simply didn't have enough healing power to make it through the bosses. My bad, I said, thanks for playing!
Alter-Ego: An overview of the trinity in DC Universe Online
In DC Universe Online, all of the different powersets can pump out DPS -- however, the trinity is alive and well even in this superhero game. Thankfully, due to the way the powers are designed, our ability to stack effects, and the heavy utilization of combos, grouping or raiding in DC Universe Online doesn't generally feel like you're stuck simply mashing buttons. If you get in with a regular group, you'll learn the ways you can play your powers off each other using synergy, thereby adding an entirely new level of awareness to encounters. Unfortunately, endgame isn't just about going into an instance and unleashing everyone's max damage to tear through the place. While all characters can do damage in DC Universe Online, roles are still vitally important for group PvE and endgame content. As a preamble to a series that will look at builds for each role in the game and what they can bring to the table, I thought it would be a good idea to take this first week to look at which powersets go with the roles players use in endgame. Join me behind the break as I break it all down for those who are new to the game or perhaps are looking for a refresher.
Behind the Mask: Eight ways for free-to-play
A little while ago, a full list of Champions Online's first eight archetypes was given to the public. Originally I wasn't going to talk about them much, but a couple people came up and asked me, "Are you going to write about archetypes this week?" I told them I probably wasn't, but after reflecting on it, it seemed a hot topic that I should probably talk about. Cryptic has a habit of releasing ideas and content that are ridiculously bad in their first iterations. Over time, these ideas tend to get more and more polished, until we get something ranging from playable (melee) to almost exactly right (pets). The first pass at archetypes really isn't any different. The archetypes are bad. I am pretty sure the team will tweak the little problems, so talking about them seems sort of like jumping the gun. But hey, you guys asked for it.
Storyboard: Archetype discussion -- the Soldier
Welcome to this week's installment of Storyboard, in which I'm starting off what I am tentatively hoping to keep as a semi-regular series. For all the previous discussion of characters that don't work, we haven't touched upon any that do work. And considering we've all sat there trying to think of any sort of hook for our characters, it's useful to have some stock types to draw from. I'm going to take a look at some of the more common stock types, how and why they work in a variety of settings, and what sort of touches you can add to make a character stand out. Of course, the first archetype we're looking at doesn't stand out. In fact, he excels at being a part of something larger, a cog in a machine whose only purpose is death. He's fighting for Stormwind, he's fighting for Bastok, he's fighting for the UFP -- he's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. So why not cue up some appropriate background music, and take a look at the soldier as an archetype.
Champions Online unveils the eight free-to-play archetypes for launch
It's an interesting road ahead for Champions Online as it prepares to go free-to-play. To facilitate the change and give subscribers a reason to keep paying regularly, the game is rolling out rigidly enforced archetypes that take away power selection but still allow for some personal customization. We've seen the initial description of how the archetypes will work, and the team at Cryptic Studios has just unveiled the eight archetypes that will be available to both free players and paying players when the conversion goes live. Each archetype has a strictly defined role, along with several powers meant to enforce that role. Tanking, DPS, and healing are all represented by the available choices, meaning that even players who haven't spent anything will be able to take on whatever role best suits them in the game. Players should take a look at the official listing to see exactly what powers will be available and at the lore description for an idea of where each archetypical concept fits within the Champions Online framework.
The Mog Log: Saturday afternoon's all right for (discussing) fighting
Here's the hangup I have with writing guides: I like writing them so long as I'm fairly confident in my understanding of the game. Unfortunately, unlike many others who are reasonably sane, I have a definition of "understanding" that goes into theorycrafting and design space issues. I don't feel that I understand Dragoons just through knowing their abilities; I need to understand why they have those abilities instead of others, how those abilities work in concert with other parts of the game, and so on and so forth. That's the reason I haven't talked a whole lot about guides for Final Fantasy XIV, because I'm still figuring a good chunk of this out. That having been said, there was no shortage of positive response (mixed with the usual omnidirectional vitriol) to the first guide-ish piece that I ran. So we're dipping back into that well with a look at the violence inherent in the system. It's time to get down and dirty with combat, and this time around we're going to look at the system as a whole, at tricks you can use that you might not be aware of, and at some useful low-level abilities to consider before you start picking "main" disciplines.
The Daily Grind: When have you felt superfluous?
Being a low-level Mesmer in Guild Wars is not often fun times. You know that later on the class becomes the absolute master of interrupts and lockdowns, nearly vital in a good party. But when you're still early in the game with few useful skills and few caster enemies to worry about, more often than not you find yourself standing in the back of parties casting a hex or two and waiting for the fight to be over. It makes it a lot harder to take claims of "great group" seriously when you didn't really do anything. Nobody likes the feeling of being carried in a game, but it's inevitable that once or twice the weak link is going to be you. Sometimes it's inexperience, sometimes it's being at a low level, and sometimes it's just the stars lining up perfectly to make your life miserable. So when have you felt like you were a complete third wheel? Was it during your learning phase for endgame content, or in the midst of a mid-game run where you weren't really necessary? Or was it just a matter of teaming with people who all knew one another with you as the stranger? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Final Fantasy XIV moves forward with exploit patches and companies
The general release of Final Fantasy XIV is three days away, but the collector's edition has been out for nearly a week. As a result, early players have had the chance to start taking part in that most celebrated of ceremonies -- finding whatever exploits the programmers didn't catch and using them. The most recent exploits are at least team-oriented, as they seem to involve casting beneficial spells during a guildleve; regardless, the issues are being fixed as fast as they arrive. FFXIVCore has also translated a recent interview with Hiromichi Tanaka in which the game's producer discusses both his role in the history of the series as well as what prior lessons impacted the armoury system in Final Fantasy XIV. As he put it, one of the reasons for the flexibility was to allow players to choose their ability loadouts based on the situation, unlike the fairly fixed roles within Final Fantasy XI. The full interview also drops some hints about the as-yet-unseen company system, something which will be implemented in a patch after the full retail launch on Thursday.
Breakfast Topic: What roles do you play?
An interesting thread popped up on the forums a few days ago that I wanted to ask our readers about here at WoW.com -- what roles have you tried in the game, and has experimentation with other roles changed how you play overall? Right now my main spends her time tanking and healing at an even 50/50 split. Healing's made me a more observant tank; I have a better appreciation of what a heal team goes through to keep my furry rump alive. Tanking hasn't exactly made me a better healer -- the two roles are so different that I even wind up redoing a portion of my UI while jumping between them -- but it's made me more forgiving of tank mistakes, and also left me in a better position to gauge whether a problem is the result of the tank or another group member. Damage-wise? Oddly enough, playing as a tank/healer for so long has made me into a hesitant DPS at best. I hate losing aggro to anyone as a tank, and hate healing oblivious DPS who pull it, and that's made me incredibly paranoid about my threat as a DPS. I watch Omen way more than I worry about my rotation. So what role do you normally play in the game? If you change roles at all, do you notice experience from one role having an effect on how you play others?
The Queue: Why are warriors so awesome?
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today. Today has to have some special significance. If you take the month and the year and add them together and subtract 2000 you get the day. The day. It's like, the world is going to end or something, and it isn't even 2012! Oh well, here are the last questions I'll ever answer in The Queue, because it's the end of the world as we know it (which happens to be today's reading music). Rhornez asked... "Why are warriors so awesome?"
Dungeon Finder reactions from players
The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let's jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit -- tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we've heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn't seem bad at all. While of course the initial flood of people brought instance servers down (I'd expect to see the same thing happen during peak time this weekend), everything seems to be working well since then: disenchanters are correctly dropping items out, loot is getting distributed correctly, and groups are doing what they were always supposed to do: rake in the badges and rewards for players. Hots and Dots actually has a long take on the Dungeon Finder, including "15 Things You Should Know," like that tanks and healers are still as important as ever (if you sign up for DPS and another role, you likely won't be doing DPS), and that we're finding out very quickly just how skilled or knowledgeable people really are ("the Party Leader will be forced to confess midway [through] that they actually know nothing about the instance").
A new blogger survey, this time for DPS
Last weekend we spotlighted the big healer survey that went around the blogosphere a little while back -- it was chock full of information straight from healers about their classes and abilities and what they thought of them. Now, Death Goddess is aiming to do the same thing for DPS classes. She's only got a few blogs who've answered so far, but they run a good range, from hunter to warlock to mage, and maybe getting the word out like this will encourage a few more DPS-style bloggers to put their answers in the pot. As long as we're going to keep encouraging this meme (or non-meme, as they may be saying), I'd love to see some of this stuff quantified a little bit more. It'd be interesting to put into numbers which kinds of classes like their roles best, or which situations each role likes to play more (do healers prefer raiding over 5-mans, or do DPS prefer to play solo rather than PvP?). The healer survey was a treasure trove of raw anecdotal information, but it'd be good to see this put into a spreadsheet or graph, and maybe give us a more quantified look at what people think of their class. We'll keep an eye on the DPS data and maybe try hashing it out once the list of those surveyed becomes pretty substantial.
Ghostcrawler and the "hybrid tax"
Ghostcrawler has put a significant sticky up on the forums about what he calls the "hybrid tax" in terms of PvE play -- there's been some back and forth lately on the forums about hybrid classes and what they should and shouldn't be able to do, and GC wants to put any confusion about what Blizzard intends "hybrids" to be to rest. Very basically, he says that there are three roles in the game (tanking, healing, and DPS), and if a class can respec to perform a different role, it's considered a hybrid class. Otherwise, it's a "pure" class. This means a few things: pure classes, he says, should have slightly higher DPS ("all things being equal," and when does that ever happen?), because they don't have the option to switch out. There's no rule as to how much better that is, but as a tradeoff of rerolling being the only way for "pures" to switch, they get to be a little better. That's the "hybrid tax," and mages, hunters, rogues, and warlocks don't have to pay it. Hybrids, however, do, and that means that paladins, druids, priests, shamans, and to a certain extent, warriors and death knights, will in Blizzard's view never be able to equal "pure" classes in terms of DPS output, with everything else being equal. You may love your ret pally, and he may be in uber gear, but he should never be able to pour out as much damage as an equally specced and geared hunter, because you can switch to healing, and the hunter can't.
Anti-Aliased: Socially awkward
So, ok, we've been talking about Champions Online recently here in the column. Been talking about it a lot, as a matter of fact. I don't feel like risking having this column turn into a Champions love fest (as much fun as I'm having with the game), so we're going to change gears significantly this time and get onto a completely new train of thought.This week's topic: social gameplay. No, I don't mean those games you play obsessively/compulsively on Facebook or your social network of choice. I'm talking about how some aspects of gameplay completely rely on human interaction, for better or for worse. It's present in all of our games, but are we really taking advantage of it? We're going to take a look at some games that do take advantage of human-powered conflict, and why, perhaps, it might be a wave of the future for online games.
