This changes a bit as you get higher up in level. Certain high end/end-game quests and instances have a lot less give in group composition. There is some over lap in class roles, so you don’t have to have a predetermined group, but your ability to do certain instances without a healer or a tank is severely limited.
I do agree with your point about the Minstrel class, Gordon. I hated it when I first started, this was before it received its update and it wasn’t until I started unlocking class traits that I was able to make it a playable class. Despite it being the class of my main, it’s not my favorite class.
I think Captain probably is my favorite as they are the most flexible. Although I could do without the pet. I absolutely hate pets in MMO’s. Don’t even get me started on AoC with its 10 necromancer pets.
How can you hate pets? I love games where I can just make my minions work for me. Too bad I’m not competent or rich enough to pull that off in real life.
Y’know, I really wish that instead of a necromancer class with a horde of undead you could just play a conquerer with a squad of regular soldiers. Seeing the undead bustling through the streets of well-heeled, Mitra fearing, Tarantia with nobody raising an eyebrow is just one of those really odd things that doesn’t help immersion.
That said, I do love pets. My favorite class in CoV was definitely my mastermind and his unit of commandos. If there was a captain class with footsoldier NPCs in AoC I’d definitely be all over that.
Yeah, my MM was zombies. I loved that you could script emotes for them. :) I wish they had clowns (or circus) and pirate masterminds. I almost considered resubbing for a month with the new issue, but I don’t think I can play the new area as a villain. I’m not sure.
This is part of my problem with AoC. I just don’t understand the dynamics of the world. Who are the bad guys? Why are undead necromancers and demon spawn lining the streets? Wasn’t there some big to do in Tortage about the undead? I hoped for some sort of explaination in the intro, but I washed up on a beach in quite the state of undress without a word of exposition. I get the amnesia angle for your personal character, but what about the game world? It seems Conan is too obscure to assume people understand the lore. A game like LOTRO or SWG can get away with it as it’s extremely mainstream.
My favorite aspect of the Gods and Heroes:Rome Rising beta was the squad based party system. I loved tooling around with my squad in tow, and the fact that I could swap out squad members for other roles should the need arise. Grouping with other people and their squads was cool too, and eventually they had planned to support mass “raids” with groups of groups (with squads) for battles supporting 100+ combatants, only a small proportion of which were actual PCs. That game had a lot of promise, I was sad to see it shelved.
Only partially. Exactly the wrong lessons were learned from UO, developers blaming the players for their own broken implementation of PvP and concluding “PvP is a niche”. The reality was that the world was waiting not for a MMORPG that would bring in the casual gamer, but the sensible implementation of PvP in a non-broken MMORPG. That is what made WoW the game changer it was. Similarly PvP is why AoC is doing better than it has any right to while LOTRO trails far behind while being a better “game”.
I think I’m done with MMOs. AoC had the shortest lifespan on my PC of the latest crop, despite being one of the most fun. It seems I just don’t have the time and my backlog grows and grows…
I am too, for now. I tend to go through phases. I’ll latch onto an MMO and play it to the exclusion of most everything else for 6 months to a year. Then I get tired of them–I hate drama, and I’ve never found a drama-free guild; I hate having to rely on undependable others to do end game content; I start thinking about all the great single player games I’m missing; etc.
At that point, I quit, and don’t touch MMO’s for a year or so until another one sucks me in and the cycle repeats.
Did you actually pay any attention at all to the Tortage Night quests? Without spoiling here, your Tortage Night quests explain everything about why you were on that beach, who’s responsible for your condition, who the bad guys are, and what had happened to you. You learn more and more about your past all the way up until level 80, where you complete your final Destiny quest. If you skipped over or ignored the text and explanations from the NPC’s, it’s not surprising that you’re so confused about the world and your place in it.
OMG, you’re kidding, female and males have different attack animation speeds?
That is not only an elementary mistake, it’s one that has affected other games in the past, so you’d think someone would have sat down with the art director and explained the requirements…
Oh well, I suppose it’s reasonably easy to fix if the animators haven’t already moved on to other jobs.
Well, it can be confusing at least in this respect - Thoth Amon is a Stygian, Stygians seem to be pretty “evil” in conventional terms - what with being demonologists and necromancers and Set worshippers. Stygians are asked to fight a greater evil in defense of Conan’s realm and treated, regardless however ghoulish and horrific their personal proclivities and associations might be, just like the average citizen whether in Cimmeria or Aquilonia.
That said, the introductory story does explain there are Stygians opposed to Thoth Amon’s rise and a few of them play key roles in Tortage.
