AOC - General Information

[Flight]

The downtime announcement on the forums has changed :

Start time is now 13 30 instead of 16 00 GMT

It still says down time is two hours long.


Servers MAY be up in 90 minutes or so.

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by Tolanin

the biggest problem 1-10ish is that the soldier classes just flat out suck, you dont get any good armor, you dont have your good class combos, you are basically a rogue except you dont do very good damage. It picks up after 10 a bit and really gets going by 20, i very nearly quit my conq at lvl 8 because i was just getting raped over and over but now i am happy that i didnt. So if you are planning to be a soldier in final dont take the low lvl experience as being an indicator that you will always suck at leveling.

Huh? As Tempest of Set my heals were worthless, my highest dps was auto attack with weapon. Only good thing about my spells were that early on you did one-hit-kills. Soldiers have twice the hp, so they should do alot better than some casters early on.

[Tolanin]

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

Huh? As Tempest of Set my heals were worthless, my highest dps was auto attack with weapon. Only good thing about my spells were that early on you did one-hit-kills. Soldiers have twice the hp, so they should do alot better than some casters early on.

ya the healers suffer from the same problem.. but play a mage or rogue archetype and you will see what i mean... they do sick damage early on and give up almost nothing in terms of armor.

[matmanx2]

Made a Dark Templar and Herald of Xotil so far. This build looks ALOT better than the PVP weekend build, so that is pleasing. I'm enjoying myself but the long load times for new areas + the inevitable hitching as it caches all that stuff has to go. It's really my only complaint about the game at this point. I'm running on high settings with shadows turned down to characters only and I get 60+ fps pretty consistently with drops into the 40's with several characters on the screen. 2.4 Core 2 Duo, 8800GTS, 4GB Ram, pretty usual stuff.

Edit- LOVE the amount of quests in and around Tortage and the whole look and feel of the place. Funcom did a nice job on that.

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by CylusSoulreaver

He's not far off, at least from a lighting perspective.

Climbing screeny: Where's the light source? No shadows?
Lava screeny: Again, where's the shadows? Lava is, at the least, a light source, yet no shadows? Hell, there's no shadows anywhere?
Tomb/dunegon screeny: Same thing? No shadows or light cast from the brazier to the left of the character?

Am going to hazard a guess, or hope, that you have shadows off?

Next lava screeny: Shaders, combined with particles, can be made to prevent hard edges. Find a programmer that can make lava edges maybe less opaque but "cling" more and combine it with a particle, if need be. While it's not a final solution, it's better than that hard edge.
Player in water: no particles/ripples around the player? Even if idle, I'd hope that there's an idle swimming animation, which would disturb the water.
Player in water2: again, no particles/ripples on the player? Additionally, no particles/ripples around the stakes on the right?
Final SS: shadows?

Hopefully, all shadows are turned off in those shots?

Edit: upon futher glance, it looks like they have a water shader that avoids the hard edge so somebody there obviously has the skills to do it. While lava is opaque, there should be "trails"/remnants of it (ie, molten lava clinging to the ground) left behind rather than that hard edge.

Yeah thats about right all shadows off and everything around mid level or higher graphics wise. I can run it with everything maxed but hitching once in a while I avoid by lowering somethings.

SS can't show you the waving grass and flickering torches which add some great atmosphere. It is shaping up to be better then expected performance wise.

Gameplay however I am hoping changes as I get into the 20's. So far its pretty lame combat mechanic. I was hoping the "combos" would be skills that play off each other. Like smash then lifetap then enraging blow would lead to a fatality. Sadly I have done 4 fatalities in 10 levels. Maybe I don't understand how they work but it seems to be at random.

The Oar I knocked a dude down and plunged the pointy part into his heart.
The club with a hook from what I caught I plunged it into his face and ripped backwards.
The Sword with shield I have done twice wack with the edge of the shield and stab threw chest.

Sadly I just spam the normal attacks where their shields are not and click the combo attacks when sta allows. The AI shields is what keeps it interesting, I really hope I am just dumb and don't know how to use combos to get them to do cool stuff.

The buffs you get after a fatallity is awesome if I could chain those I could rape an entire dungeon. For now though I get 2 level 10 redhands everytime kill one the other kills me respawn kill him repeat. Maybe I should go for some day time and get a group.

[Tyen]

~!~~~

[Elerion]

Fatalities are random occurance when you kill something with the combohit (so not the 1-3 attacks leading up to it, just the final hit). If your goal is to maximize fatality buff uptime, you need to adjust the amount of damage you do so you always kill with a combo hit. Manipulating enemy shields helps in this. Try focusing on attack directions different from your biggest hitter combo to lure the shields away, then launch your big hit.


Are there any professional reviews yet after the Press NDA lift?

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

Sadly I just spam the normal attacks where their shields are not and click the combo attacks when sta allows. The AI shields is what keeps it interesting, I really hope I am just dumb and don't know how to use combos to get them to do cool stuff.

The buffs you get after a fatallity is awesome if I could chain those I could rape an entire dungeon. For now though I get 2 level 10 redhands everytime kill one the other kills me respawn kill him repeat. Maybe I should go for some day time and get a group.

Fatalities seem to be completely random (and lowish chance) to occur when you kill an enemy using a combo.

[spronk]

Fatalities generally will happen when you use a combo ability to kill something, rather than the 1-3 standard attack (not 100% of course). Due to the "delay" between actually executing a combo, and constantly 1-3 attacking, fatalities can be pretty rare. Some classes are also better at chain fatalities, the most I've hit is 4 fatalities in a row as a ranger in underhalls (killed about 12 mobs in a row pretty rapidly, but I was 3-5 levels higher), the buffs are pretty awesome especially the more chains you get (+xp, +dmg, +rest stam). Chopping off a head is my favorite so far.

It does heavily encourage group play after 20, its pretty much the only way to get chains going since the NPCs are much stronger and you won't be able to power through a ton at a time without other players. The fatality buffs though are not shared as far as I can tell unfortunately, hopefully thats something they change to encourage group play.

[Hatorade]

Good to know people. I was really hoping to "feel" the combat of this game but its a spam fest worse then EQ2. Just with less skills, still I am hoping the 20+ combat will be more substance. It like a mix of EQ2 spam with CoH cool downs. Getting flashes of Fury as well with the constant 123 1111 2233 213 1232 13131 23 13123 123 123 12 31 2313 3 123 1 231 23 123 1 231 23...fuck.

Still going to be there day one.

[TwiNCannoN]

I dunno, the combat for me feels more PSO-ish. You can't really spam the #s, otherwise shit just goes haywire. Also, if you haven't noticed, certain weapons swing in different ways, and some swings lend themselves to "mini-combos" due to animations chaining together. Most easily noticed is the Oar left-right-left-right, is much faster than left-left-left or middle-middle-middle (which makes sense because after swinging to the left, the 2h weapon is already there waiting to be swung to the right). 1h sword has a really swift left-right whereas 1h mace has a quick right-left (I may have mixed these up), and the speed also helps in combos.

As has been said, it's not super intricate, but for me the extra involvement is definitely nicer than autoattack.

[Lenaldo]

So far have enjoyed myself a lot.... combat feels fast, and a bit "spammy" right now but I think thats more because of inexperience than anything.

My only 2 complaints:

1) cant seem to bind anything to the mouse keys, can anyone confirm/deny. If i try to change strafe left/right to mouse 4/5 it wont let me.. pretty annoying :-/


2) Load-times are obnoxious....

[Repo]

So I managed to play last night up until level 5, I crashed once but was able to log back in with great performance and get some levels...Later in the night and this morning when I try to log either of my 2 characters in, the game starts loading, and goes not responding and crashes before the world loads. I am able to make a new character. and get in the world, but when I'm standing on the beach I get .3 fps for the most part, sometimes it will clear up and play long enough for me to get a few kills, then drop to .3 fps again, completely unplayable. I'm on a relatively new (Dec 07) laptop.


Specs :
Vista 32 bit
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2gig
3 gig ram
Nvidia Geforce 8600m GT w/ 1gig

Open for suggestions. Otherwise when i've been able to run around and kill stuff the game seems like a lot of fun. Hopefully can get my problem fixed at least... forgot to mention, graphics are all on min settings, low texture details etc.

[Heylel Teomim]

For anyone who hasn't tried one yet, this game more than any other MMO screams for a speedpad. Combat with an n52 is a thousand times more fun and less strain on your hand than trying to use the keyboard.

- c

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Lenaldo

1) cant seem to bind anything to the mouse keys, can anyone confirm/deny. If i try to change strafe left/right to mouse 4/5 it wont let me.. pretty annoying :-/

No option to do that atm. Players have made threads about it asking for them to include it.