The queues for Alliance right now are bad, anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes for a random bg, to a solid hour for Ashran, sometimes up to 2 hours or so.  I waited an hour and a half last night for it.

Anyway people are asking that we do random faction bgs to make it better.  Alliance vs Alliance and such.  They do that already for RBGs and arena.  I don’t want to see that personally.

For one thing Horde queues were terrible last expansion (15 mins usually!) and it was just one of those things.  I play what I like, I don’t care about racials but not everyone feels that way.  And I love faction vs faction, I adore faction RP with my “get out of my town you filthy orc” and whatnot.   The Hydra group is like that too.

Someone in the bg forums suggested we should have more factions.  I don’t see how that would help, wouldn’t there still be one dominant race and therefore faction?

It makes me think back to Lineage 2, which technically had lore that set up wars between the races, but nothing was enforced and even had a ridiculous requirement that Dark Elves and Light Elves (who hate each other) had to do their dances and songs in a specific order or destroy their mana pools.  That made no sense.

If each one WAS a separate faction (excluding Kamael and Etheria) how would that pan out? I was thinking about it now and again.  This assumes the races couldn’t trade or party together AT ALL.  I’m basing this off somewhat original class skills, prior to the healers getting all the same heals as well (pre Interlude, I believe).

Dwarves

Cons:  No healers, no ranged, no summoners, no tanks, no mages. Only melee though I guess technically they could use bows.

Pros:  The only crafters of high level armor, weapons, jewelry, and soul/spiritshots. The only spoilers (scavengers) for extra materials and rare pieces.

(Trust me when I say dwarves will scare the living daylights out of a healer or other clothie if your gear isn’t good. I did that on the L2 Azure servers, seeing a dwarf meant you were going to die. )

Humans

Cons: No crafting, would be limited to armor upgrades past shop gear at B grade.

Pros: The best healer, the only mass rez, the only pure buffer.  Has two summoners, dagger, archer, nuker, and arguably the best tank.

Dark Elves

Cons: No crafters, no mass rez, hybrid buffer, healer heals are part heal, part HoT. No greater battle heal.

Pros: Healer is basically jack of all trades with Empower and Recharge for mages, Vampiric Rage and Focus for melee. Has archer, dagger class, one summoner, tank.

Light Elves

Cons: No pure buffer, no crafters, least desirable buffs.

Pros: The only personal and party recall, fastest healer, fastest archer, fastest mage,  and dagger class, tank, summoner.

Orcs

Cons: No single target buffer, no strong bfufs,  DoT based nuker, no tank, no summoner, no crafter, no strong healer, no archer, no dagger. No crafter.

Pros:  The only healer who could restore CP.

Um.  I think orcs would be sunk.

If I had to pick, I would think humans would come out on top even with the gear situation.  They would be in the best spot to kill raid bosses, and dwarves lacking a tank and a healer would be very limited, even if they managed to get the best gear.  That’s my vote!

Ran a Kama today, didn’t win any loot again, hit 33. It’s just bad design to watch the other casters stand around manaless at these levels during this with nothing to do. Especially since my pony died twice and now I can’t revive it for however long, since we had no one maintaining aggro.

I followed the chain of quests to Gludio and got up to 24 doing nearly nothing. There are still inaccuracies in the quest text that bugs me though.

I joined a kama for level 26 with some people and it’s the same old same old it appears. A mage class such as myself, even with a servitor out, even with Bsps, with beast shots, and using the pet recharge constantly, will go OOM before the end of the fight without any way to recover. I hit level 26 when it died but it also seems the loot rules are exactly the same; this time it was one drop of 6 enchant armor D’s that no one else got a share of. There is also no “rolling” for loot like in WoW, however the group was set up at the time gets it, be it “by turn” or whatever the settings are, can’t remember exactly.

It also still suffers from the problem of being able to use SS and cast a spell when a mob is dead, and hit a dead body, wasting SS and mp. Some of the monsters got upgraded textures though.

One major thing to note is adena is no longer an issue. I am getting sometimes up to 90k at a time from one quest, and from my prior noob tests, I was lucky to have 90k at the end of level 20. In fact at level 26 I have nearly 900k.

I got up to 32 before I got bored, since I can’t do any more kamas today. I see there are still a lot of useless skills like boost mana for a whole 30 pm, and skills that were rarely used like weakness and such. Ended up logging out after making 10 levels for the day.”

It just feels wrong to see all these NPCs that use to have lore, in the correct location, in an “office building” now.  It would be like Blizzard putting the warrior king of Stormwind in a cubicle.    The dialog all so far feels like it came from the same person with no variance in what race or class the people are.

There’s also confusing text “lore” wise, like Celin in the ruins says that Amadeo Cadmus may be young, but he’s charming, has looks and power, long blonde hair and a beautiful face. Uh, well Amadeo Cadmus was the King of Aden, and did not look young, or have blonde hair.

http://wiki.ocyla.com/index.php?title=Amadeo_Cadmus

I did a quest where you had to show your sorrow by crying over corpses on the ground.

It warned you not to laugh or dance, and I took that as a dare so I did, and that just spawns 2 mobs to kill you, even though I was able to fight them off.  There’s also one where a dog escorts you around the ruins. First escort quest I’ve seen in the game, ever.

I plan on getting to at least 40 but so far there’s been 2 clear points where if I was really new I would have quit.  First would have been the confusion with the quest that went nowhere, and secondly, being repeatedly PK’d even with protection on early in the game.

When I hit 19 I started looking around to class change, and I went from the ruins back to town from the direction of the npc there.  They told me to talk to Rivian who gives this confusing bit of dialog.

I don’t remember getting a newbie travel token.  It says to see Rosella in Elven village, only no npcs are in elven village any more.  Then it says to SEE Rosella who will send you to the village, but prior to that it says Rosella is IN elven village. Ok?

Then it says to go to Gludio to High Priest Raymond. Elven Vilalge is clearly deserted so I go to Gludio who also says to see Rosella in Elven village. Sigh.

I feel like this will be a lot of “this is so easy it took me 30 mins to hit 20 wtf” but being new to the area and going by quest and npc text only, I’m having a hell of a time.

Recently when I logged in, it made me enter a pin. It’s the same one all the time unlike the WoW authenticator.

I picked up another quest which took me to Flame Lord Kakai, who looks completely out of place in the “administration office”.  He’s an ORC, a FLAME lord.  At an office building?  Seems weird.  Where’s his stone village lit by fire? Sad. He also said something about building a new home “here on the Immortal Plateau” but um, Orc Village was nowhere NEAR Talking Island, how can that be? I don’t know besides all that the dialog just seems written more hip, it’s odd to read after doing all the old style quests.  Kakai things like “killer headache”, “this stuff” and “nasty little” which makes him sound like he’s from California or something. That quest gave me 13,000 exp, the first serious batch I’ve gotten so far. After that point I got the little guide arrow that pointed seemingly off into the ocean.

it’s like uhhh hm. Doesn’t work well on hilly areas I think. The next quest marker shot straight into the side of a mountain for example. But after that I got leather armor rained on me, clearly inappropriate for my class, jewelry and before I knew it I was 3 levels higher for doing nothing.

On my way to the ruins I got killed by a red just looking around getting my bearings and again, the npcs just stand around doing nothing.  I’m not new to the PK scene but there should be severe protection for lower levels.

Buuut on the way back I ran into the guy again, killed him, and looted 806 D bsps and 5 soulshots, ha ha. Served him right. I was going to say mean things to him but it said that “characters level 20 and below cannot use regular chat functions except answering whispers”.  Is that because of the gold sellers? Irritating!  Anyway I got my PK protection before I went out again. The guy was back to the ruins before I could manage to get there, he killed a few more players then went back to the ruins to kill people again.  I could not even whisper him to say mean things 🙁 Then I was killed a second time by another player some how,  did this a few times trying to kill the other player before someone chased them off.  I don’t know how I killed the guy once but the next times he resisted all my spells.  Ah well, once those two scattered I grinded out to level 12 old school style, got bored and logged. With no one to talk to it gets boring quick.

It seems the quests are more interactive than all the old ones, in this one you picked up papers around the area, then thieves spawn to killed you.

It doesn’t sound like much but the most interactive NPCs ever got a few updates ago was spawning and just standing there, or with the 3rd class change, helping you attack.  Otherwise there was nothing like that.

I again run into reds AGAIN.

It gets tiring, I leave.