As you can see from my tiny body, plummeting to its death, this place is huge.
Last night I was able to “help” my guild in their Genetic Archives run. Since this was my second foray into this raid, I had no excuses for the number of bad things I stood in. What I did have was a lot more fun. Since I had seen almost all the fights we did before I was a lot less overwhelmed and could actually relax and enjoy myself a bit more.
I still love those loot explosions!
While large raid sizes are not really my favorite thing, there is something to be said for being able to blend in to the crowd and just shoot things. WildStar’s raiding seems ridiculously forgiving, at least at this level. I’m used to fights in FFXIV where one death out of 8 players can quickly spell disaster. It is startling and refreshing that even though a few of us died early on the Kuralak fight the rest of the group was fine to push through without us.
I still haven’t come to terms with why I like DPSing so much in WildStar compared to other games, but I’m glad I do. On nights like last night it is way easier for me to hop in and help shoot things than to play a critical role like tank or heals.
I have been Liebstered once more, this time by Tamrielo. I'm not going to try to come up with another 11 facts about myself; that was hard enough the first time. I will answer his questions however. Rumors that I am using this as free content because I can't think of anything better to write today are absolutely false and should be disregarded. The computer is your friend.
The computer desires answers
What is the best spell to cast?
Time Stop, no contest. Casting Time Stop gives you the opportunity to set up a cascade of fireballs, lightning bolts, and delayed blast fireballs all capped off by a prismatic sphere to utterly annihilate your foe. Not that I have any experience doing this, nope, not me.
What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any others? I'm extremely curious about that goblin cheese. If the Illuminati want it, it must be some impressive stuff.
You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose? Fairies in bottles. Infinite fairies in bottles mean you can brute force your way through any problem.
Cures what ails you
You have to choose a race and class that you’ve never played seriously before. What do you pick? Bugbear warrior. Bugbears are clearly the chosen race, and are particularly good at beating people up. What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?
Team Fortress 2. I got it in the Orange Box because Half-Life 2 and Portal. Turned out to actually be a whole lot of fun.
What game did you think you would love but actually hated?
Ultima VIII. I was a huge fan of Ultima, and the idea of taking the fight to the Guardian's world was really interesting. The game was... not good. Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?
Hrm, maybe pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan? I always liked it, and it's a reasonably pleasant terrain and climate. Good fishing too.
You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why? Warrior. Replace with something more interesting than 'guy who hits people with sharp objects'
What’s your favorite story? The Wizard of Oz
What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?
I'm a (very) amateur birder. I'm not going for a Big Year anytime soon or going way out of my way to hunt down rare birds, but I do actively keep an eye out for birds when going about my life, and keep record of new or interesting ones I see.
What is your favorite secret shame? >:D I enjoy bubblegum pop music way too much.
Not too long ago, Tam wrote a post (and a follow-up) about why we should get rid of levels. SAO contains hints of this, mentioning how a level-based system isn’t really fair in PVP contexts, with a subtler hint at the same idea explaining why the second arc doesn’t have levels. In general, I don’t disagree with the arguments presented, but I still think levels are worth keeping.
Progression
It’s possible to have progression without using levels, but I feel that having a level as a symbol of how far you’ve come is more important than any actual increases you get from it. Diablo 3 is a good example of this, as each paragon level doesn’t get you much, but it still feels good to get the level up animation and sound. Skyrim likewise gives you a small power boost as you level, but a large part of your power is based on your skill levels, which might be somewhat far removed from your actual level. (A system was introduced after Dragonborn came out that even lets you reset your skill levels and level indefinitely.) I haven’t played a lot of SAO: Hollow Fragment yet, but it seems to work similarly. (It also has the somewhat ridiculous level cap of 250, and Kirito starts at level 100. These numbers are kind of just there.) Tam kind of dismisses this point, but I feel like it’s relatively important. Even at max level in games with vertical gear progression, you tend to make a different number go up (since both WoW and FF14 tell you your average item level). Admittedly, there’s no “ding” noise for hitting ilevel 170.
Yes, I hit 70 on my first character from desecrating a fire.
Baby + Bathwater
I think more than that, my problem is that most level-less systems that I’ve seen so far either aren’t (TSW) or are 100 times worse (Destiny), with a few exceptions. EVE seems to have figured this out, but it has the problem of being EVE. TSW claims not to have levels, but that’s a big fat lie, as your power is 90% based on your talisman levels. If the big skill wheel was all there was, that game could still be compelling, but they felt the need to add a power gating mechanism on top of it. Contrast this with Guild Wars (the first one), which had actual levels, but intended you to hit the level cap (20) about a third of the way through the campaign. The bulk of your time is spent acquiring additional options, especially Elite Skills, which had to be acquired from bosses out in the world. It’s not a level-less system, but it acts like one, and I find it one of the better examples of such.
There are… other problems with this wheel.
Destiny tried to be like Guild Wars, but is structured more like WoW or FF14. The story is enough to take you to about level 20, and you have “light levels” after that. Most options for getting additional light relied on random drops, and your light level still restricted what you could do, so this ended up being worse in almost all cases than having normal levels. Bungie seems to agree, and is going to normal levels with their first real expansion. Most systems I’ve seen so far that attempt to gate power in a way that isn’t related to level don’t actually fix any of the problems Tam outlined. As a consumer of games and not a designer, levels are easy to understand and mostly work, so I think I’ll stick with them. Changes have to do better than “mostly work”, and so far I can’t think of any that have.
Last night, our Monday raid beat up Bismarck (Extreme). It helped a lot to have Belghast, who cleared it with the Wednesday group last week, but it was still the first kill for 5 of us. Bismarck is one long DPS check, but more than that it’s the kind of “controlled chaos” fight that the Monday group excels at with AOEs flying everywhere and weather changes that have to be reacted to appropriately. Clearing this fight opens up our way to Thok ast Thok (Extreme) and the hardest current encounter in the game outside of Alexander (Savage).
1-2-3
As suits his music, Ravana asks you to dance. It’s the kind of intensely structured encounter where you need to know what’s coming, as reacting to it is generally not going to be fast enough; it’s kind of like Titan in this sense. In addition to his normal abilities, Ravana has a series of attacks called “Liberations” (Prelude to Liberation, Liberation, Swift Liberation, and Final Liberation). Each of these is a 15 second cast (he takes bonus damage while using these) that ends with a very choreographed attack pattern. These vary in difficulty from “You remember Ifrit EX, right?” to “What madman came up with this nonsense?”.
Fortunately, all is not lost, and Someone came up with these simpleanimations to show one way of dealing with what’s going on. I love it when players do awesome things like this, because trying to explain Final Liberation in just text requires a lot longer than the 54 seconds of this video. Understanding how and why it works that way isn’t really something you can get from the video, so there are some drawbacks there too.
