The aura is super handy to have if you end up playing past level 50, but no need to worry yet.
Thanks for all the info! I kind of suspected this was the case–basic questline just do whatever, real grind starts after–but it is good to know for sure. The game seems pretty fun to mess around with, even if it makes Path of Exile look simple (albeit its complexity is very different in nature).
YMMV but the thing that got me was how I’ve never experienced this kind of combat in an ARPG format before. ARPGs are always smashing cooldowns and blowing up screens of guys. There’s some of that in this game too, but stuff like Guardians? I’ve never seen an ARPG that was paced slow enough so that I needed to care about positioning on a boss or having abilities that can counter and even parry/riposte like my Gunlancer and Glavier. You won’t see a lot of this stuff until the main quest is done, but the combat in this is really special and feels more akin to something like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls in terms of having to understand the moveset of an enemy and knowing when and where your openings are.
In the endgame for traditional ARPGs, they all just kind of break down for me when combat starts to feel binary: you either blow up the entire screen/boss/whatever or you get popped. Path of Exile in particular is really really bad at that where you’re an immortal destroyer of worlds or you’re staring at your corpse with absolutely no idea what may have killed you. Pretty much every single death in Lost Ark I know exactly what killed me, or in the case of some boss mechanic I could figure it out.
Yeah from what tiny bit of combat I’ve seen this looks pretty good. I am a bit disconcerted by all the “guides” on Steam about how to cheat, but, eh, online gonna online I guess.
I haven’t had any issues with cheating in the several hundred hours I’ve racked up in the game. I don’t PVP though. They’re definitely not cheating on the PVE side, if they were I wouldn’t have to be carrying all these shitters through abyss dungeons and guardian raids, haha.
No, I think it’s all PvP. As usual.
I have done the bare minimum for pvp which is some quest you get to try it out. Like KevinC, I haven’t seen any obvious cheating in pve, but unlike him, I am probably the one being carried.
The game is infested with bot accounts though.
You’re able to form complete sentences as well as comprehend the words that others write so I assure you you’re not in the particular group I was referring to. :D
As I mentioned above with regard to 8-man stuff, I’ve never seen fights in an mmo like this has (let alone an aRPG). From what I’ve seen, as well as read about future content, these fights are much more about knowing the mechanics of the fight and doing those properly than they are about “moar dps”. Generally speaking, your first priority is (as you alluded to) not getting hit—unless, of course, gunlancer.
It is a very odd game to me, though my reaction overall so far is positive. The aesthetic is outside of my usual comfort zone. It’s a bit disconcerting to watch the anime-style female characters’ exaggerated butt-swagger, especially with the outfits in which the game seems to place most characters. OTOH, much of the environment and some of the higher level/higher end gear on characters is pretty sweet. The maps so far are extremely linear and small, making Diablo III or PoE maps seem vast by comparison. Voice acting is at another level of bad, but actual combat and combat sounds are very good. Such a bizarre mix, to a Western eye at least.
As an aside, and not limited to just Lost Ark, why do all these games use the Christian archetype of a priest-type character, complete with (generally utterly out of place and deracinated) cross iconography? I mean, they all look like refugees from Murder in the Cathedral or some period drama about the investiture crisis. It’s not like there aren’t a ton of other holy person/spiritual authority models to draw on from all sorts of different cultures. I guess designers all figure no Westerner will know that someone is a cleric unless they look like Father Murphy or whatever.
I don’t know, but the question I’ve been wondering is why the designers hate/fear chickens so much!
At least chickens are tasty! Weird pseudo-priests? Not so much.
Trust me on that one.
Oh man. The game conditions you to hunt rabbits for their meat and hide.
Then you get to the endgame, and suddenly you’re hunting cats. Cats with the same model as a housecat that you could befriend/dress up/catnap to your stronghold. Cats that explode in a shower of gore and viscera as you throw your hunting knife at it.
I’m fine with the chickens.
I really, really think the “pick up one thing, move it over here, and drop it off” quests that permeate the game are silly.
And usually you only have to go a few feet and it’s like, seriously you couldn’t do this yourself? Then you get one where you have to go 50-100 feet and it’s bloody annoying, lol.
There’s one particular spot in Rohendel where I swear there are 6+ quest steps that are just talk to NPC A, pick up item at their feet, talk to NPC A, talk to NPC B (standing right next to them), pick something up off the ground again, etc. It’s really bizarre. Black Desert Online had quests like that too so I just chalk it up with weird Korean MMO bullshit at this point.
At the same time, even though the vast majority of quests are thoroughly uninteresting, at least they are usually super fast and take you where you needed to go anyway.
I agree! I don’t enjoy the quest spam that every MMO has done since WoW since they’re mostly so low-effort about it. If they need to have them (I don’t understand why they feel they need to, but they do!) I’d rather them be quick and easy to get out of the way. So even if it’s weird NPC B is standing right next to NPC A, that’s better than them being across the map, that’s for sure! :)
The good part about the leveling process is that after you level your first character to 50 you eventually unlock Knowledge Transfers in your Stronghold, so you don’t ever have to level another toon to 50 again. You just pay 600 gold and let them bake for 8 hours (that sounds like a lot of gold but after a while at endgame you will easily be able to afford it).
Especially since that means never ever having to slog through Arthetine again. I think you can only do a particular knowledge transfer 9 times, but there are also passes and such.