Back after the holidays and playing more Allods!

Well, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a good New Years!  For me, I am glad it is over.  Working in retail makes the holidays real stressful.  That said, I enjoyed my time with my family and I hope you folks did as well.

So, what have I been doing gaming-wise?  Pretty much the same thing I was doing before the holidays.  Splitting my time between Darkfall and Allods Online.  Two totally different games that I enjoy for very different reasons.

As far as Allods is concerned, I have leveled five characters to level 10 or above.  I am not leveling too high on any of them, simply because I do not want to get burned out and I would like the leveling experience 15 and up to be as fresh as possible after release.  I already know I am going to play a lot of the game after release, so there is no reason to level a character and then watch in dismay as all my hard work is deleted by a server purge.

So far, I believe I enjoy my Paladin the most.  He starts off slow as far as damage is concerned but once I got a two-hander at level ten, the time to kill decreases substantially.  In addition, he can take a ton of damage.

Guderian, Orc Paladin

One thing about Allods that I really like is how much talent specs mean to your character.  Like WoW, a different talent spec can totally change how you play and even the purpose of your class.  This is a nice change from WAR and Aion, where I felt that spec meant very little, as least compared to WoW.  A mêlée DPS paladin plays a lot different from a tank paladin, which plays very different from a magic DPS paladin.  Your stat allocation will also radically change the effectiveness of your class.  All this put together means that two paladins are rarely alike, a welcome change from Aion and WAR.

After leaving the starting city the game opens up tremendously.  The zone outside the capital city is huge and gives reminiscence to the zones surrounding Ironforge and Stormwind.  It certainly increases immersion and there is awe while approaching the city, to see how large and all-encompassing it is.  Again, a stark contrast to WAR and Aion, where the capital cities are their own zones.  The area around the Empire capital reminds me of Arathi Highlands in WoW, rolling hills, bordered by mountain ranges.  The are seems at least as big as Arathi and there are tons of quest hubs located across the map.

Questing is another thing done right.  There is a good mix of solo and group quests and enough diversity in the type of quests to satisfy. There is no “ground-breaking” innovation in quests, as they are all the standard kill quests, collection quests and Fed-ex quests, but they are interspersed well and all are well written and interesting.

Quest awards are well thought out and seem to have a good loot table.  This is a nice contrast to WAR and Aion, which seemed to have useless quest rewards in many cases, or quest rewards that were poorly itemized.

The gear also looks very nice, keeping to the Soviet style of the Empire. Military style hats and helms abound and the game has really integrated the World War II Soviet/Nazi style with the standard fantasy MMO style.  Really the game abounds with style and character.  It is just an interesting world.  There is “personality” here that has been missing in a lot of MMOs since WoW.  Warhammer had a lot, especially on the dwarf/greenskin side but Aion had none, though to be fair, it may have had personality that I could not quite grasp being American and it from a Korean publisher.

A Soviet Orc General

A Human Soviet General

Okay, this is too cool, an Undead Soviet General?

As you can tell I am enjoying Allods more and more every day.  This is going to be a pretty big hit and, most likely, the biggest F2P MMO around.

Two more Allods Online videos

This will probably be my last Allods post for a while as the beta is now down until the 29th of the month.  I am still unbelieving that I am liking the game, especially as much as I do.  I am actually going to miss it until the next phase!

I shot about 40GBs of video while in-game over the last phase, most of it inside the starting area.  I am a total noob when it comes to video editing so I have pieced it together and learned as I go.  This next video is a pretty simple one, it is the Empire starting tutorial, which takes place on board an Astral ship.  I did no real editing to this and kept the in-game audio, all I really added to it was annotations through You Tube, but you can really see the attention to detail and the production values in the game.  This one is in HD so you can get a better idea of the graphical detail.

Notice the quality of the voice acting, the fire on board the ship, the animations and the small details.  The game screams high production values throughout.  This is truly a triple-A MMO.

The next video was actually not filmed by myself.  I downloaded it from the Russian forums and posted it on You Tube because there were few examples of Allods PvP on You Tube.  All credit for the video goes to RazGib on the Russian servers for this excellent video.

This video reminds me so much of the early WoW days.  The combat is fluid, the animations are excellent and the fights are just plain fun to watch.  The paladin is also very, very good.  I thought that maybe Paladins were just over-powered until I saw the second fight, where he fights another paladin.  He absolutely obliterates the guy.  He is just good….damn good.

Hope you enjoy the videos!  Let me know what ya think!

End of Allods Online Closed Beta 2. Nooooooo!!!!

This weekend has been busy for me.  I work retail so the Christmas holiday is hell.  Long hours, on my feet all day, customer stress, it all adds up to a very, very tired blogger.

Even with being dead tired, however, I could not resist logging many hours in on Allods Online.  I knew that Monday was the close of this beta phase and I really wanted to see more of the game, plus the game is just good.  Really good.  And getting better.

The weekend started with getting my summoner up to level 10 and finding a group for Xaes, which is the first instance in the game for the Empire side.  I really wanted to see if Allod’s engaging game play would continue to shine in instanced content.  I was not disappointed.

Xaes takes place inside the Empire capitol city of Nezebgrad.  Keeping with the Empire’s industrial/magical feel, the instance is inside and around a factory/sewer area of some sort.  There are a number of quests that can be picked up, both outside and inside the instance and completed within.  The instance requires a group of six on-level participants and is highly challenging.

I have been let down by instanced content many times after WoW.  Every MMO since WoW has dropped the ball in some way as far as instanced dungeons are concerned.  WAR’s instances were horrible.  The mobs were buggy and had pathing issues, the bosses were buggy and had abilities that, many times, did not work.  LotRO had decent instances but the loot tables for the bosses were horrible, though that may have been fixed since last I played.  No MMO has had instances that felt as “smooth” as WoW’s.  Something always let me down.

Allods Online’s first instance was like WoW.  That is a compliment and, for me, a pretty big one.  We went in with a group of level tens, a paladin tank, 2 summoners, 2 mages and a priest.  The mobs had no pathing issues or bugs that I could see, the instance was well laid out and the bosses were challenging without being infuriating.  They also dropped good, useable loot.

The bosses, of which there were three, were mostly of the “tank and spank” variety, which one should expect from a level 10 instance but they did have a few special abilities and adds that caused us problems.  The trash was also challenging and there was enough of them to keep the instance engaging but not boring.

We advanced through the instance in about an hour or so and did not have a wipe, though we did come close a couple of times.  We found it necessary for the summoners to aid in healing during the boss fights, in addition to DPS’ing as the Priest had trouble keeping the Paladin alive at times.  There were many places that we had to use the Mages crowd control abilities to hold one mob while we concentrated on another and we had to plan out a few of the pulls, especially near the last boss.

Xaes is a very good instance, especially for a low level one.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and would do it multiple times.  I would put it up there with Shadowfang Keep as far as low level instances are concerned.

I ended up going through the instance a second time last night, though this time we had a level 20 paladin tanking.  Of course, that allowed us to run through in just a few minutes.  I recorded some video and am currently uploading it to youtube to post on the site, expect that later today.

In addition to leveling my summoner, I created a paladin and began leveling him.  He is now level eight and I think I may just like him better than the summoner.  There are some unique mechanics involved that make the paladin different than any other tank I have played in a MMO.  Let me tell you a bit about the paladin mechanics.

Offensively he plays pretty straight forward.  Many of the paladins abilities place a “seal” on the opponent.  Once you stack enough seals, you then use another ability that “detonates” the seals.  This does direct damage, places a DoT on the target and slows the target.  The amount of damage, the size of the DoT and the amount the target is slowed is dependent on the number of seals on the target at the time.  Seals can be stacked up to three.

In addition, the Paladin has very limited healing.  However, this works totally different than a WoW paladin.  Unlike the WoW paladin, main healing is not an option.  Instead, a paladin’s healing is mainly used as occasional heals to top himself or a group mate off.  Heals require “Canons”, which are obtained through prayer that can not be done during combat.  The prayer is about a five second cast and generates ten “Canons”  The first heal a paladin gets is a small HoT placed on the group member with the lowest health.  This is an instant cast which consumes two “Canons”.

Defensively is where the Paladin really differentiates itself from any other tank I have played.  The paladin has a mechanic called Barriers which absorb damage and stores it for ten seconds.  At the end of the ten seconds all damage is then done to the paladin at one time.  This sounds bad but the paladin has abilities that can absorb the damage, reflect it back at the target or spread the damage out over a longer period.

In short, the paladin has some control over when he takes damage and how he takes it.  This allows him to communicate with his healers and prepare them for damage, making healing spike damage easier.  One result of this is that I believe that there will really be a big gap between truly good paladins and mediocre or bad ones.   A good paladin will make boss tanking easier on the healer but a bad one could truly be a nightmare.

I am still not fully knowledgeable on how this mechanic works but I look forward to mastering it.  As of now, it looks like my main will be a paladin, so I will get much more time with him to master the mechanic.  I really do not want to be one of those bad paladins!

Stay tuned for the video coming later tonight!  Right now I am going to bed!