Lets take a brief look at all the features that FunCom has released since August.
PvP Experience
Quite a simple bolt-on system for PvP Experience. They give us a new PvP Exp bar and we get PvP Exp for killing another player in PvP. Lower level characters get PvE Exp as well, for PvP. Equal leveled characters give you 100 PvP Exp for the first time you kill them that day (24hrs), this number is diminished each time you kill them, 80, 60, 40, 20 and finally 1 PvP Exp. Just as a reference, you need 7000 PvP Exp to get to PvP Level 1, and 28,000 to get to PvP Level 2. Apparently you start to lose PvP Exp if you die in PvP after PvP Level 5.
While diminishing returns is good to reduce PvP Exp farming, it also meant that characters get a lot less PvP Exp if they are in a group versus group situation, where other player’s kills are counted towards their own diminishing returns. It is better to hunt in packs, but not grouped up.
The most common complain about the system is the diminishing returns, because it applies to mini-games as well as open world PvP. For players on PvE servers, mini-games are the only places where they can get PvP Exp. Another complaint is that big guilds are farming each other for PvP Exp, this is an expected situation, particularly when the server population is dropping.
PvP Exp is divided by relative damage done by multiple groups, and then divided equally within a group. For example if two groups A and B attacked character X, and group A did 60% of the damage, the members of group A equally share 60% of the PvP Exp.
PvP Gear
The reason to gain PvP Exp is to wear have access to PvP Gear. The PvP Gear are sold at vendors in the major cities, each piece of gear is about 1 gold 50 silver, or so. At PvP Level 1, you can buy a necklace and rings. These give you decent PvP Invulnerabilites and some damage bonus. PvP level 2 through 5 allows you to get class specific gear that gives you the usual class related bonuses such as +hp, +mana, etc. It also gives quite a solid amount of PvP Invulnerabilites and +damage. The pieces of gear you can wear are staggered through the levels. You can get belts, shoulders and wrists at PvP Level 2, if I am not wrong.
PvP Consequences
This is probably the most highly contentious inclusion into the game recently. Basically, you get Murder Points if you kill characters who are 7 levels below you. This flags you as a Criminal, and if you accumulate 100 Murder Points, you are flagged as a Murderer. Each time you kill a character 7 levels below you or more, you get 35 Murder Points, so 3 strikes. Murderers will be attacked on sight by Guards, so they cannot access the normal vendors, resurrection and travel points.
FunCom was quite inspired to include Shady Camps in each game zone for Murderers. This is where their resurrection pad is, and here they can buy provisions at double the cost, and they can get Smuggled to another zone at a price. Each camp has a Redeemer who gives out repeatable quests for Murderers and Criminals to remove their Murder Points. I had to collect the heads of 13 PvE mobs to remove 12 points. So a Murderer needs to do 10 of these quests. This adds a little new element of gameplay for people who chose to be Murderers.
Guards and Resurrection Pad changes
With the implementation of PvP Consequences, FunCom has beefed up the Guards, and now they are able to kill level 80 players with two hits. The Guards will attack anyone PvPing within a certain range to them. They are also armed with throwing weapons in case characters decide to exploit their limited pathing AI and go somewhere they cannot access.
There is much complaints about this as players who believe in Free For All PvP feels that the guards are stunting PvP too much. FunCom might not have much of a choice because there are more players who are bothered by being ganked while talking to quest givers and vendors.
Another issue with the Guards is that auto attacking PBAoE spells like Storm Field and Storm Crown for the Tempest of Set will attack the Guards if the character is walking past them. Certain lingering reactive damage will also hit the Guards if the players have them on. Small issue but irritating if your built relies on them.
Another major change that drew a lot of critism is that instead of being able to choose where to resurrect, the player is left with no choice but to resurrect at the nearest pad. There are occasions where it can be irritation, and some very annoying like the Aztel’s Fortress resurrection pad that is totally surrounded by high level mobs. It also makes rezcamping easier in PvP. I understand that FunCom wants to remove deathtaxi, which players used to travel across the zone by killing themselves. Allowing players to choose from the two nearest rez pads would solve almost all the issues players have with the current implementation.
Combo and other combat changes
The changes to the combos got me quite worked up. Everyone was at a point where they felt that PvP was quite balanced, and only Bear Shamans and Herald of Xotli need a bit of a nerf, and the Dark Templar a bit of a buff to their damage to get them on par with the rest of the classes. No one was asking for an almost complete revamp of the combo system, but thats what we got.
All the debuff combos got changed to two swings, while damage combos are capped at four swings. Damage was reduced to match and the overall result was less burst damage, a slightly lower DPS, and higher stamina cost in the long run. The end result is that casters are suddenly doing a hell lot more damage than melee characters, considering that they have the range, as well as a simplier combat interface, I find it quite unbalanced.
Another changes to combat is a nerf to the double-tap-back evade. It went from a +50% evade chance to a +25% evade chance once every 6 seconds. Casters were abusing the double-tap-back evade because they do not use their stamina for anything else but running away. However, that evade is an important part of PvE tanking, so tanks got nerfed as a result of caster PvP abuse.
The last big one is that Soldier stances cannot be changed while they are Crowd Controlled. This means that Soldiers must really be careful when they get into Frenzy stance. This has curtailed the already nerfed Soldier damage making Soldiers a joke in 1 on 1 PvP. Crowd Controls have also been nerfed that if you do 20% damage to the target, the CC will break. This is a necessary change as CC was dominating PvP.
The main problem I see with FunCom’s approach to balancing is that they change multiple inter-related mechanics at the same time. This means that even if they get their desired results, they cannot finger print their process well, and cannot repeat the change in the future. At worse, the result is not as they intended, then they will not know what part of it went wrong. They need to take a leaf out of ArenaNet’s book, where they tweak Guild Wars balancing one skill at a time, and let to pan out and see how the community responses.
Nerfs and its consequence in PvE
One problem raised about FunCom is how they tend to nerf classes and skills when there are imbalances in PvP, as opposed to buffing classes to match the leaders. Their method might lead to some semblence of PvP balance but the result is that players are finding PvE content harder and harder. This may or may not be their intention. One theory is that FunCom is making raiding extremely difficult on purpose to create the illusion of having something to do at end game, because they have not got their Tier 3 content created yet.
Currently the Yahkmar’s Tier 1 raid encounter is harder than several Tier 2 raid encounters. Kylikki’s Tier 1 raid encounter is also extremely difficult for ungeared raiders. These are Tier 1 raids that are the introduction to raiding in this game, and they are quite undoable by all but the most organised raiders. This is a major put-off for casual players, who make up the bulk of the player base. To quote a fellow guild member, “I hate to say this but it makes me miss World of Warcraft raiding.” That says it all, really.
The problem may lie in the fact that there is not enough testing of raid encounters. On the Testlive server, there is a haphazard raid test guild that more often than not, wipes at the raids despite having free raid gear. The encounters are not properly accessed. FunCom needs to pay attention to end game raiding, the fact that they have had major QA layoffs may or may not be a good thing.
City and Culture Recipes and other crafting changes
Finally crafting is no longer the underdeveloped aspect of the game, FunCom has introduced unique and interesting City and Cultural recipes that drop from monsters around the world that require base material recipes, also dropped from monsters. There’s a new buzz in the Crafting forums, and people are out there farming for recipes and ingredients.
The crafted equipment are quite good, in some ways better than Tier 0 and the Dungeon armour. For example the Juggernaut Chestguard which is a crafted level 75 armour has 500+ hp bonus, as opposed to 400+ hp bonus on my Tier 1 level 80 chest. The unique new looks of the armours and weapons are also getting people excited.
They have also streamlined the Alchemy materials, and have pretty much removed 2/3 of the clutter. Alchemist Caches are now seperated into four types, and drop appropriate materials for the various levels of crafted goods. About time for this change, its not very major, but it makes the system a lot less clunky.
Perhaps as part of this change, Dark Templar raid sets got a total change to its look. It is now some kind of green lizard skin armour, but the whole look is spoiled by some bright green tassels on the pants. While Dark Templars were pissed to be sharing the same armour skins as the Conqueror (and for a while the same stats), many are pissed that they now look like Peter Pan or Robin Hood. It is a case of poor implementation as the concept art was not quite so dandy. Another nail to the coffin of the Dark Templar is for them to find out that their PvP armour looks the same as the Guardin Cultural armour. The red headed stepchild gets only hand-me-downs.
Ymir’s Pass
The first zone to be released since launch proves to be quite encouraging. Ymir’s Pass is a level 55 to 63 zone chocked full of quests. I did a brief run through and picked up 15 new quests and counting. I think they are on the challenging side as many mobs are cluttered quite closely in camps, so players need to group up.
A few more interesting quests like trapping a big rabbit for its lucky foot (its not so lucky if it got caught). And environmental effects like earthquakes. A quest you can only get if you die, and a quest chain and leads one to the dungeon for this zone, Amphitheatre of Karutonia. These all show that FunCom still has competent staff writing quests and dungeons.
Amphitheatre of Karutonia is quite a large dungeon with multiple bosses, it is fun like most of the lower level dungeons, and in the finale you help free the son of a god and defeat a demon. Quite epic.
New Mammoths
The latest patch brings out mammoths that we can buy with game gold. They cost 100 gold, and look different from the armoured War Mammoth that players get from their collector edition sets. These are white Snow Mammoths and they have different colour war paint on them. But at 100 gold, they are just bragging rights although changed to Sieges can make them useful.
Age of Conan is launch ready
At the start of the game, everyone was complaining about the state of the game, the client and the content and saying FunCom should have waited six months before launching the game. Guess what, they were right. In the six months since launch, Age of Conan has finally got to a level of polish and content that is worthy of a pretty damn good MMO. It is launch ready.
But is it too late? FunCom would be hard pressed winning back all the people it pissed off in these six months. And those were their easiest sells, the people attracted to the style of the franchise but got let down by the substance of FunCom. Once again, they missed the opportunity of a great game launch and proved that they can create the hype and a decent product at launch but they do not know how to run an MMO as a service. Maybe they should stick to single player games.
Server Mergers
The only thing the meagre few players still in the game are waiting for are the server mergers, players doubt even relatively concrete announcements by the developers because they have been lied to too many times. A server merge with healthy server populations can help salvage this game to a certain extent. I believe that most people who have left the game in the last three months left because of a lack of players, as opposed to dislikes for certain game features. High server populations and marketing relaunch, and extending some free playtime to players who have cancelled their subscription might just turn this game around from dying to stable. Lots of people have said this, the only people letting FunCom down are themselves.
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