04-15-2004, 09:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-15-2004, 09:25 PM by MongoJerry.)
Some initial impressions from my level 4 undead priest, while Blizzard conducts another shutdown of the server:
"Skill points" no longer seem to be given when you level up. Instead, they seem to be given more often than that. I'm not sure if it's tied to experience points levels or how well one has trained in one's skills. So far, I've been afraid to assign skill points to boost things like intelligence until I see how many skill points it costs to train in skills like herbalism.
You get talent points after every levelup, but as the push description says, those talent skills are disabled at the present time, so those talent points don't mean anything.
I've been running into some early frustrations in the undead starting area. The early undead quests are similar to the early quests given to humans -- go to a mine and kill monsters there, except it's spiders in this case instead of kobolds. The problem is that the mine is very small and the number of people competing for kills is large. There's a lot of competition for far too few monsters, so every time a monster spawns, there's a race to be the first one to hit and "tag" it so that you get the credit for its death.
Now, the mine isn't too bad, because at least people can party up temporarily and get credit for party kills. What's worse is the next quest -- gathering Scarlet armbands. Partying up doesn't make the quest go faster, and there's only one camp of Scarlet guards to attack so that there's huge competition to tag those guards so people can collect armbands. It's strange. In the human areas, Blizzard did a good job of giving people a choice of several areas where they can fulfill their quests or giving them large areas to work in so that people aren't running into each other too much. The undead starting area, though, is a major traffic jam. They need to make the spider mine much bigger and create at least three Scarlet camps. There's plenty of room to do this, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Also, I've run into some bugs with invincible spiders and bats. I think it's a problem with terrain -- like the game has trouble with bats flying over hills and stuff. Or it could be a lag problem. I haven't figured it out, yet, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
Despite these things, I've enjoyed the new push so far. There are just some issues that need to be worked out -- and that's why we're beta testing the game, right?
"Skill points" no longer seem to be given when you level up. Instead, they seem to be given more often than that. I'm not sure if it's tied to experience points levels or how well one has trained in one's skills. So far, I've been afraid to assign skill points to boost things like intelligence until I see how many skill points it costs to train in skills like herbalism.
You get talent points after every levelup, but as the push description says, those talent skills are disabled at the present time, so those talent points don't mean anything.
I've been running into some early frustrations in the undead starting area. The early undead quests are similar to the early quests given to humans -- go to a mine and kill monsters there, except it's spiders in this case instead of kobolds. The problem is that the mine is very small and the number of people competing for kills is large. There's a lot of competition for far too few monsters, so every time a monster spawns, there's a race to be the first one to hit and "tag" it so that you get the credit for its death.
Now, the mine isn't too bad, because at least people can party up temporarily and get credit for party kills. What's worse is the next quest -- gathering Scarlet armbands. Partying up doesn't make the quest go faster, and there's only one camp of Scarlet guards to attack so that there's huge competition to tag those guards so people can collect armbands. It's strange. In the human areas, Blizzard did a good job of giving people a choice of several areas where they can fulfill their quests or giving them large areas to work in so that people aren't running into each other too much. The undead starting area, though, is a major traffic jam. They need to make the spider mine much bigger and create at least three Scarlet camps. There's plenty of room to do this, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Also, I've run into some bugs with invincible spiders and bats. I think it's a problem with terrain -- like the game has trouble with bats flying over hills and stuff. Or it could be a lag problem. I haven't figured it out, yet, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
Despite these things, I've enjoyed the new push so far. There are just some issues that need to be worked out -- and that's why we're beta testing the game, right?