AOC - General Information

[Zehn - Vhex]

Most of the encounter design these days revolves around positioning and re-acting to split second abilities. You could remove healing entirely from most WoW encounters and not change what makes them actually 'difficult.'

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Most of the encounter design these days revolves around positioning and re-acting to split second abilities. You could remove healing entirely from most WoW encounters and not change what makes them actually 'difficult.'

Arguable, and the reason most of this is true is due to fire and forget heals, aka chain heals and CoH, which is exactly what makes up AoC's healing. I didn't say I liked current healing in wow though, I think it evolved too much into this type of healing, while not completely taking the step. If you're a paladin, and I believe you play one, you're totally fucked, and if you play a druid you're half fucked, saved by battle rez and extreme mana efficiency.

In a way I liked early wow healing better, but matter of taste, I don't mind the healing on this game too much, I just wish mana wouldn't be so much of an issue when dpsing and healing, so you don't have to restrain yourself and just stand there doing nothing. Bear shaman and ToS look much better designed than PoM in that regard, even though PoM dps rape both of them in any AE situations. Just think it could have used a bit more mana regen while healing/dpsing synergy thing.

It just won't fit with everyone, I have an open mind while I still think Disciple healing on vanguard is the most fun I had(and a lot of it had to do with being a raki doing round house kicks for free heals), but not everyone will like it, especially EQer(at least from what I gather about EQ since I never played it)

[ajiatus]

Question: Does AoC have any scripted dungeons on par with WoW or LOTRO (i.e., feels like a scripted mini-movie)? Or is it more like EQ2?

[Tuco]

What would be great is if you had a boss that had small amounts of melee DPS but still required a healing rotation, and had an AE that allowed players to play outside of raids to gather materials to block his AE damage.

Then you could make him enrage after a while to add to the excitement. Raiders will really like the ability to contribute to their guild not only inside an instance, but outside as well.

I even have some character art for how this raid boss in AoC could be:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Tuco

What would be great is if you had a boss that had small amounts of melee DPS but still required a healing rotation, and had an AE that allowed players to play outside of raids to gather materials to block his AE damage.

Then you could make him enrage after a while to add to the excitement. Raiders will really like the ability to contribute to their guild not only inside an instance, but outside as well.

I even have some character art for how this raid boss in AoC could be:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

What's hilarious is that someone on the beta forums tried to justify the 48 man limit by saying people in large guilds could spend time gathering resources and making money to support the top 48 people when they enter a siege.

Fucking brilliant. Not only is it like WoW farming, it's farming so someone else could do the raid.

[Javvo]

What's everyone getting for download speed of the early access program? Mine says 2d 10h left at 70kbps wtf I just started it.

[Ashes Emberblade]

AoC healing is awesome because it's not whack a mole. You fire off a couple of HoTs then proceed to ae or nuke. It's fun, it's simple, and it doesn't gimp healers while still making them necessary.

Edit: Javvo, my ISP throttles bittorrent so I was getting 90kbps. It's taken me 2 days to get 93% complete. Thankfully early access is still 4 days away.

[Tuco]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

What's hilarious is that someone on the beta forums tried to justify the 48 man limit by saying people in large guilds could spend time gathering resources and making money to support the top 48 people when they enter a siege.

Fucking brilliant. Not only is it like WoW farming, it's farming so someone else could do the raid.

What's more likely is that organized guilds will have a siege defense team (Let's go Defense!) and have other teams assaulting enemy targets as well.

I've been a long, long proponent of having income be from owning land (mines etc) like in RTSs. If there are small targets that exist in the world, you can attack them while your enemies were busy attacking your keep.

One of the dirtiest things we did in Shadowbane was attack the enemy's home base when they assaulted us. It was usually pretty desolate, and once they respawned in their home city all peacemeal like and fucked up, we would kill them again. They would then spawn all over the world completely disorganized.

Hopefully there's enough depth in the PVP to this game that you can have people contributing to a war outside the siege PVP.

[Javvo]

Originally Posted by Arrr

That really doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in terms of encounter variety. I'm really hoping for some kind of healing revamp post-release. imo, that mechanic will hamstring any serious kind of raid game.

I think they'll balance raid design around high DPS low mob DPS output, lot's of adds (put those HoTs to use all over the place) and other shit. The possibilities are really numerous if they lower encounter DPS. Think outside the box, shit.

edit: Thanks for the info, Ashes. I hope I can get it all done and patched by the 17th.

Also! Another question off-topic-ish: Can I put the game on an external HD and put it on my laptop and patch/play it faster like that (like how WoW is) or will I have to DL it again?

[Axire]

Which are the classes with the strong aoe attacks, Barb/ToS/PoM/MOX?

[Gylen]

I would think there would be... I mean, guilds can also hold resource nodes. What's stopping people from attacking that guild's resource nodes if the battlekeep fight is full?

[Cinge]

All I keep seeing people say is 2 hots + the 1 heal that puts a debuff. Are we forgetting the cone heal? Does it have a debuff also? If not, cannot it not be used also?


My only concern is when you enter a "raid" will your hots effect raid wide? or just your grp again? Because I know from playing I cant even heal someone that helps me avoid a gank, or helps with a boss. You cant heal outside your grp, which is retarded IMO.

On the subject of download, took me about 6 hours, I had it running while i played some TF2/browsed the web, was running around 642kbs .

[Zalere]

Originally Posted by Javvo

What's everyone getting for download speed of the early access program? Mine says 2d 10h left at 70kbps wtf I just started it.

@ 300kb/s to 419kb/s. Sometimes drops into the 200s for a few minutes, but otherwise in that range.

I don't think the Upload throttle is working either. You can change it to Max Upload @ 25kb/s and I'm still pushing 80 - 120kb up.

Just start it up and let it run overnight. Unless your ISP is balls, it should pick up considerably soon enough. Mine started out in the double digits for the first hour or so.

[Ashes Emberblade]

Javvo, as far as I know the OB client didn't install any registry keys, and I was able to copy it over the network to another computer and just straight up play without any installation. I'm sure you can put it on an external hard drive, but one thing you'll want to keep in mind is that the game does a lot of hard drive loading so an external may not be fast enough to keep up.

[TwiNCannoN]

Originally Posted by Cinge

All I keep seeing people say is 2 hots + the 1 heal that puts a debuff. Are we forgetting the cone heal? Does it have a debuff also? If not, cannot it not be used also?

One of the HoT's is the cone heal. One is an area heal that only applies a HoT, and is weaker than the cone heal, the cone heal kinda does a semi-strong initial heal and then has an HoT afterwards. You can't spam it, though. You can (I think) remove the buff and then get healed for the big initial amount again but I don't know if it's worth doing that.