Thought I'd do a PSA and give a little review of AoC. Graphically it's allot like EQ2 on steroids, even on lowest settings the look is awesome. DirectX10 isn't up and running, so it'll be interesting to see it pumped to the maximum settings. Melee combat is very different from WOW, it's not a matter of auto-attacking with the random ability or spell thrown in. You have 3 attack buttons, left, center and right. These are the main melee attacks. There is no auto-attack, if you want to hit, you have to hit a key. Special attacks are keyed separately then triggered with one of the main attack keys. No more bathroom runs mid fight and still being high on damage meters. My experience with casters is low, but so far the main healer class, Priest of Mithra has devastating damage spells, 1 shotting almost everything equal levels, but they say that changes as you level up. Bear shamans have an AOE heal triggered by pounding on mobs that is cool, combines Enh and resto shammies in one. One nice thing they do is give you the choice of daytime PVE leveling, or going to an instanced night time area in the starting zone. I leveled to 14 at night without having to fight for mobs then found I'd passed over allot of quests in the regular daytime area. It's nice to have the choice.
Launch since all servers opened Tuesday is pretty smooth so far, but crafting, banks and mail options aren't working yet. The random blue screen of death can happen, once for me so far, and one zone will get you stuck if you enter. Frame rate has been 40-60 on low settings using a newer mid level gaming rig with a 6800 video card. Going to invest in a high level card once directX10 is running tho. The community seems to be more mature than others, but the M rating, and needing a newer gaming rig to even run the game may keep the kiddies away for now. The interface is ok but not as intuitive as WOW, that way change if modding works in game. I'm looking forward to getting to the main areas, the starting island is like the one in EQ2, only bigger but lacks any real exploration.
I'll post more when I hit the main areas and try grouping. I'm actually playing a tank class since I never could get one past 40 in WOW just to shake things up so my review in based on melee so far.

Thanks for the review Znak.
Zootinjones is my Herald of Xotli (battle mage).

I'm looking to get this game as well. As soon as I find a copy I'll be trying out some of the carnage. Are you all on pvp servers?

Quote by Melibourne

I'm looking to get this game as well. As soon as I find a copy I'll be trying out some of the carnage. Are you all on pvp servers?

We started toons on Wiccana a PvE server.

Hmm ok, I'll be trying out the pvp servers. I think we all know its where I belong.

By all means I will probably try pvp at some point. Just trying to see how the game behaves at the moment. It's only the beginning. Keep me posted on your pvp heroic moments, Meli.

PVP servers are rumored to be total gank fests. I'm not sure how they work without 2 factions, but the chaos could be cool

Quote by Znakharka

PVP servers are rumored to be total gank fests. I'm not sure how they work without 2 factions, but the chaos could be cool

Ya i heard about the ganking/corpse camping. Not appealing.
As for factions, they have a cultural PVP server based on the 3 races.

AoC week 2- OK, now that I've had some time with the game I have a better view of the game. The kick off went pretty well, no server crashes, but I had blue screen of death issues running vista in full screen mode. Pretty common, just switched to windowed and had only 1 crash so far. The banker/AH/mailbox feature went live yesterday and seems to work well. I started playing a bear shammy but hit a wall at lvl 10. It's the one class that has a hard time with multiple mobs and sucks till lvl 15, but really shines after 25. There's a chain quest in the starting zone to get off the island you do in an instance at night. Kinda cool that there's no one to interfere or help you, and all the mobs are adjusted to your level, but it makes shammies extremely hard till you get a CC ability. It may be the wall you hit keeping the number of bear shammies down, but it seems groups are always looking for them. I am playing a priest of Mithra leaning to damage on the feat scale. It can deal out amazing damage and still heal a group with no problems. In the mid 20's I can take on 2-3 same level mobs using CC if I pay attention. Priests can use a shield and can take a fair amount of melee abuse. So far it's the best balanced class I've played. The guardian is the main tanking class and can take massive amounts of damage as would be expected but can also do a fair amount in return. At low 20's it's an easy solo class to play specced for damage, so far I have no tanking experience to relay. So far, the game seems very quest oriented. If you want to group you can select epic level for zones, kinda like doing regular zones on heroic level. The regular zones can be instanced also if an area gets too full, like EQ2 did. The biggest change from WOW is the complete lack of any auto attack. It's constant input or die here, no afking your way through anything. That's all for now, post more when I get more game time.

AoC Week#2. French report.

After reaching 20 my Templar of Set - Worgenjones - went to Khopshef.
I did most of my leveling over there until level 27. I only died maybe 3-4 times. The ToS class is a mage/healer combo and has very good dps and survavibility. The Khopshef province is an Egyptian/Persian based region with some amazing sightseeings. Loved it.

In my late 20s, I joined Kornan the Guardian. I travelled to Old Tarantia (Roman style province) and then to Cimmeria. That's where I have been questing lately. My Thunder spec started to kick ass being AoE based until they nerfed the Idol of Set this week.

Around level 30, Stormstress joined us (Dil's ToS). We started a few group quests fighting elites. That gave us our first real experience of party fights. The Guardian can hold agro if we don't start nuking or don't use too much AoE. Social agro is very weird. Healing is great: you keep your HoTs up and dps at the same time.

Last night around level 31-32, we came back for more group quests in Cimmeria (fortress quests). A level 39 joined our party and showed us a neat trick. He made us his apprentices raising our levels to 38 (power leveling / works only in his group). You temporary gain levels but without the matching feats, skills, spells ; your experience is adjusted based on your temp level versus mob levels (so it drops). It allowed us to zerg through groups of elites, very wild/epic fights.

You guys on Wicanna? I added you to friends list but never see you on...

Yeah.. we are on wiccanna.. We have been playing mainly at night or after WoW raids so thats probably why you havent seen us. If you havent joined a guild you can join us.. right now we are in Nerfed2. Hopefully we can fix things and get it back to just Nerfed. right now it is..

Me = Stormstress ToS
Apo = Worgenjones ToS / Zootinjones HoX
Kor = Kornan Guardian / Kordark DT
Kit = Kitster PoM
Aroi = Aroi Bear Shaman

Man, I am debating trying this shit out. Sounds like a fun diversion if nothing else. Then again, I can also wait for a year til they give free trials out haha. Even with the free 30 days they give you, gotta pay that $50 which isn't fun for poor college budget.

Hmmm.

How is the class balance? Any classes yet to get nerfed? Any classes which need to get buffed?

So far they have done a great job with class balance or so it seems. We just did our first group instance tonight. Was Me Kor Apo Aroi and Znak. Had one tank 2 caster/healers 1 melee/healer and 1 hunter type. 5 men in a 6 man instance. It was cake.. One of us was actually 10 lvls lower than the instance but the game allows for a member of the group to "apprentice" such a person and boost them up to one lvl below the teacher. They get all their abilities boosted but lack the talents and new spells that that level would normally allow. It was pretty fun. All the classes seem to have great diversity in their talent trees. Kor still hates it when you pull aggro off him. lol. I'll post some pics and or a vid on this thread soon.

Quote by Dilusiun

So far they have done a great job with class balance or so it seems. We just did our first group instance tonight. Was Me Kor Apo Aroi and Znak. Had one tank 2 caster/healers 1 melee/healer and 1 hunter type. 5 men in a 6 man instance. It was cake.. One of us was actually 10 lvls lower than the instance but the game allows for a member of the group to "apprentice" such a person and boost them up to one lvl below the teacher. They get all their abilities boosted but lack the talents and new spells that that level would normally allow. It was pretty fun. All the classes seem to have great diversity in their talent trees. Kor still hates it when you pull aggro off him. lol. I'll post some pics and or a vid on this thread soon.

That sounds pretty awesome...

Damn my funds...Is this game worth going without food for a few days? lol

this is actually a preview video of the first instance. The one we did. This is all in-game graphics. Really nice.

The apprentice ability rocks, makes playing at different levels fun. My lvl 24 ranger got bumped up to 38 in the instance so I was able to
go. That helps a lot because I'm leveling 5 different classes and enjoying them all. The only class I'm having trouble with is the bear shammy, but I need to get over the lvl 15 hump to where the class starts to shine. Below 15 multiple mobs wipe the floor with me, so far that's the only class problem I hit. The quests seem pretty much standard MMO, kill this, go here, talk to that person leading to a boss fight but the amount of quests per zone is huge. I had over a dozen quests going at once in one zone going at the same time and got 3 levels when I turned them all in. At mid 20's it seems impossible to do all the quests around, just too many to get to before the xp cap is hit and they're useless. I've heard of complaints in lvl 40-60 range of not enough quests to do, but am not there yet. Oh yeah, after the instance was done, which rocked, I went outside while they turned in the quests( apprenticed toons can't get the higher lvl quests ) and being lvl 38 decided to go kill some lvl 30ish mobs. As soon as I engaged them I dropped back to lvl 24 and got destroyed, not sure if it's a bug or if you need to stay near the mentor to prevent exploiting.

In response to Tinil:

Funcom decided to implement a buggy game to justify the server/game downtimes. Thats their contribution to RL, allowing peeps to run to the grocery store and get some food...

Haha, damn, I heard they were doing great too.

they seem to be on the right track.. they are just doing a lot of patching to fix all the issues.. without downtime they cant fix these things