[DAoC] Origins

[Sancti]

Originally Posted by Mist

Having finished my DAoC career at Rank 11L2 I can definitely tell you that realm ranks were >>>>>>>>>>> any gear differential.

Amen to that. As a damn high RR Nightshade I can attest to the mounds of hurt that Avoid Pain 3 lay down on other players. Paladins, Minstrels, Warriors, Reavers, overpowered Dragonfang Infs and broken LA SBs all cowered before the wrath of my timered RA's. Once AP3 was burned, I'd just go chill out in a keep somewhere then go back to the AMG once it was up.

It always pissed me off though that Nightshades never really got to be as overpowered as Shadowblades or Infiltrators. Once AP3 was taken away, unless you rerolled as a Bladeshade with tricked out gear, you had no shot in the stealther wars. Hell, melee rangers did your job significantly better AND they had a bow.

[Kuriin]

Originally Posted by Xequecal

People compare WoW Arena to CS all the time, I don't think the comparison is a stretch because it's the same situation as old-school DAoC, most people have the same gear.



One day? Did they change this after I quit? You had to grind ML experience for each master level, which by itself would preclude finishing in a day. If you didn't have a guild willing to level up your alt, ML10 was a nightmare. Think pugging ZA in WoW three or four times, only everyone is four times as retarded.

.

Yes. They changed it and made it VERY easy. I was PISSED OFF because of how difficult it was -- and it should've kept it at that difficulty to keep the newbs out.

Just to clarify, it took me (I was one of the very first ones -- let alone the first mids to hit ML10) from about late November to roughly late January / early February to have everything completed. This includes artifacts. Artifacts were starting to become known as people needed to find a way to get ML exp.

[Sancti]

Originally Posted by Kuriin

Yes. They changed it and made it VERY easy. I was PISSED OFF because of how difficult it was -- and it should've kept it at that difficulty to keep the newbs out.

Just to clarify, it took me (I was one of the very first ones -- let alone the first mids to hit ML10) from about late November to roughly late January / early February to have everything completed. This includes artifacts. Artifacts were starting to become known as people needed to find a way to get ML exp.

Yeah. I don't know what kind of experiences people had with MLs but I can sure as hell tell you it wasn't "easy" when it first came out. I was in the first group that went through MLs 1-5 and it took us forever due to all the bugs in place. How about that dude you needed to kill in like ML2 I believe...who was invisible and stuck in a wall or some shit. I was in IRC talking with people on a variety of servers trying to figure out how the hell to kill him for the better part of 24 hours.

[sticktastic]

Originally Posted by Sancti

Yeah. I don't know what kind of experiences people had with MLs but I can sure as hell tell you it wasn't "easy" when it first came out. I was in the first group that went through MLs 1-5 and it took us forever due to all the bugs in place. How about that dude you needed to kill in like ML2 I believe...who was invisible and stuck in a wall or some shit. I was in IRC talking with people on a variety of servers trying to figure out how the hell to kill him for the better part of 24 hours.

Fuck TOA.

They ruined their own game, it was so sad.....its like mythic never played their own product, and dont get me started on the fucking kick to the balls ML's were. Anyone remember the horrible "tactic" that bodyguard was? I know lets make it where you have to kill the friar, before you can even tough the paladin, and you can try to do this while he is fucking your face up, and getting heals from the untouchable pally weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[Mist]

Pallys couldn't even heal in DAoC except for a weak ass group chant, you probably never played the game.

[sticktastic]

Originally Posted by Mist

Pallys couldn't even heal in DAoC except for a weak ass group chant, you probably never played the game.

I didnt say they were uber heals, just said there was a heal. :P So touchy....

[goatface]

pre-font nerfs, pallies were pve tanking gods

[Bankok]

One of the funny things I remember is at the beginning Mythic not even knowing what stats affected what. Dex affected Stave damage for Friars, yet Dex wasnt one of the three stats that increased for Friars, Empathy did nothing for Bards, yet it was their secondary stat that raised. How this stuff was missed I havent a clue.

I remember arguing with either a class lead or dev on the private boards who insisted Charisma didnt change Skald spell damage even though every log i had showed it did.

[Mist]

The private board was fun times. And by fun I mean sad. I think what they did was gather feedback from the private testers, and then do the exact opposite of everything that was suggested.

[Ravensign]

I was on the closed boards for a while at release, and it was fun to feel like you were in this semi-secret club, but I got booted for the same thing, arguing about things that they were ignoring.

One of the things they didn't seem to do, that I noticed some Dev's do is to set targets for performance and then check them objectively. I know in CoH they would datamine how long each class spends on a level and try to make them balance out, or how in WoW they orginally designed sheild armor levels to make the reduced downtime match the loss in kill rate from going to a 1 hander. If they would have datamined Friar performance they would have seen something was wrong and pinned the dex thing sooner.

[Yussef]

Could FG the vast majority of trials with a solid group at TOA's launch (European anyway), but certain fights were a nightmare. 4.2 (Fortress of Storms) anyone? Artifacts were the pain for me, stupid exp requirements for some of them.

[Tenks]

Did they ever end up fixing the mechanic where a -haste debuff actually made the player do more burst damage via styles?

[Digits]

Originally Posted by Tenks

Did they ever end up fixing the mechanic where a -haste debuff actually made the player do more burst damage via styles?

I doubt it, considering that was a core mechanic to balance dps across the board. The slower your weapon, the greater your damage would be while still retaining the same dps. Fixing it would require going into archaic code that no probably programmer there fully understands, and would break epic amounts of shit in the game.

MLs were fun when they introduced novel and situational abilities, like the health font and to a lesser extent the power font. I view ToA the same I view Theurgists, Animists, Necromancer and Bonedancer and everything else. Fantastic ideas, incredibly different than anything else in an mmo and so terribly balanced that Mythic just let them be broken until everyone quit.

[Tenks]

I guess you're right. Its just silly they seem to only have a single variable for weapon speed which is a summation of haste/slow and it spits out a number that is used for calculation instead of every weapon having a base_speed variable to used for the calculations.

Oh well. I'm taking a very long break from MMORPG's anyways. That was just something that always bugged me. Probably since I was a Light Chanter for so long :P

[Kuriin]

Originally Posted by Sancti

Yeah. I don't know what kind of experiences people had with MLs but I can sure as hell tell you it wasn't "easy" when it first came out. I was in the first group that went through MLs 1-5 and it took us forever due to all the bugs in place. How about that dude you needed to kill in like ML2 I believe...who was invisible and stuck in a wall or some shit. I was in IRC talking with people on a variety of servers trying to figure out how the hell to kill him for the better part of 24 hours.

It was only "hard" (really) in the beginning because people didn't know exactly what gave ML exp. All we knew were named, that's it. My group -- after completing ML 1 -- farmed Jollnir or whatever, the middie epic dragon zone. Took us several hours to finally get to ML 2.

ML 2 took us about a week or so alone as the drop rate on some of the keys were really absurd. Then, Runihura was bugged (his spikes), so we had to figure out a way to kill him. Good ol' exploit.

ML 3 and 7 were probably the hardest and most stupidest. Seriously. Anyone who could kill the stingray boss without knowing what the fuck's going on: Kudos man. Ku fucking dos. Typhon was impossible because his HP would never go below 98% resulting us us having to take several trebs in there. ;P