Into the Abyss in Path of Exile

In early December, Path of Exile launched version 3.1.0 of the game, titled War For The Atlas. This comes with a new set of challenge leagues, as per usual. I've been spending a lot of my gaming time there for the last month.

This time around, the new challenge league feature is Abysses, which spawn randomly in nearly every area of the game. When you find one and run over it, cracks open in the landscape and a whole lot of monsters pour out. At the end of the crack line is a big sinkhole with tougher monsters, generally 1-3 rares. The abyss might end after one sinkhole, or it might continue on for more...the most I've seen is 4. You move along, defeating the monsters and following the cracks, and if you move fast enough and survive then you're rewarded at the last sinkhole with a loot chest called an Abyssal Trove.

Occasionally, you'll get a entrance to a new zone called the Abyssal Depths instead of a trove. It's populated by a whole lot of abyss monsters and eventually a boss area. Mostly the boss is a type of totem that spawns tons of monsters until you've broken it, but in higher level Depths you might see a unique boss. I've fought two of those, and they're certainly a challenge. Tons of abyss monster adds, several of the totems to defeat, and of course the boss itself.

I really like the abyss feature. It's difficult, especially in the very low and very high levels. At the low end, your character might not be capable of handling a big swarm of enemies. At the high end, the sheer damage output of the rare and unique abyss monsters can be overwhelming. But that risk is accompanied by some great rewards. The troves have decent items, there's a lot of rare monsters that can drop good stuff, and there's a whole new class of abyss items that have mods not seen anywhere else.

As the War For The Atlas title indicates, there's also some significant changes to the end-game mapping system. There's been quite a bit of rebalancing, with a number of new maps and quite a few modifications. The Atlas of Worlds now has two factions fighting over it: Elder and Shaper. On the atlas, you'll see background effects indicating where the factions have influence, and if you run a map in an influenced area then there are additional faction specific hazards and item drops.

I'm just getting around to the middle of the atlas. I progress pretty slowly in Path of Exile terms, largely because I play almost entirely solo self-found (no teaming, no trading with other players). But I'm starting to see those atlas factions, and they certainly seem interesting. A few maps have had demon portals spawning tons of extra monsters, I've seen enhanced boss fights, and I've collected a few items with mods I've not seen before. Looking forward to seeing what else is in store as I move along.

As far as characters go, I'm mostly playing two. A Sunder Duelist Gladiator and my usual summoner Witch Necromancer. The gladiator is insanely powerful, as long as you avoid certain specific situations (physical damage reflection and lightning thorns, for instance). Sunder is so good that I'm not sure why anyone would bother with any other melee skill. As for the summoner, there have been some quality of life improvements in this version that are really nice. Most notably, you don't have to resummon your spectres every time you log in! In both cases I had one death and had to start a second version of the character, but both of those are running strong into the 80 levels.

The Path of Exile designers and developers continue to work their magic every few months, adding new and interesting features to what is already the best ARPG on the market. (In my opinion, at least.) I'm not sure how long they can keep it up, but as long as they do, I'll keep coming back for more.

Marvel Heroes 2.0

The Marvel Heroes folks sent me an email a while back announcing the launch of their "Biggest Update Ever." It had been several months since I played the game, so this seemed like a good time to see what had changed.

It turns out that what changed is darn near everything about how you build out each character. The action-RPG gameplay is more or less the same, and you still have pretty much the same story content and challenge modes. The level of difficulty has been reset in that content, though, so that higher difficulty modes are more of a challenge than they used to be.

Under the old system, a large part of character planning involved trying to get as many levels as possible in your key powers. The new system eliminates power levels entirely, and adds the concept of talents that can change how powers work depending on which talents you select. If that sounds familiar, that's probably because it's pretty much the same change we saw from Diablo II to Diablo III. In general I like it, especially since it means you see all of a character's powers (except the ultimate) by level 30.

The change to eliminate power levels had a big impact on items as well, since adding power levels was a big part of gearing character in the old system. Almost every item got a revamp, and for the most part you can do pretty well just by getting the unique items specific to your character plus a few artifacts. When I logged in some of my old characters, I was mostly able to jump right in without worrying too much about changing out their old gear, even though the stats on that gear had changed. I'm sure there's new ways to min-max stats, but the old stuff is mostly still usable.

Another major change is the simplification of the end-game character improvement system. The old OMEGA point system was extremely complex, so a key feature of the new Infinity system is simplicity. There are only 6 groups of 5 options for Infinity point placement, much fewer than the number of OMEGA nodes. I found it to be fairly easy to understand, and it certainly seems to have plenty of room to grow in the future if the developers decide to go that route.

I was less enthusiastic about the ramping up of difficulty. The "green" lowest level is still pretty much the same, but "red" and "cosmic" levels seem significantly harder than I remember. I suspect that the designers realized that power creep was becoming a problem - high-end characters with the best gear were just too powerful - so decided on an across-the-board difficulty increase during this major update. I'd rather that they'd paid more attention to the power creep to begin with. Still, at least this addresses the situation to some extent, and hopefully they've learned a lesson and won't make the same mistake going forward.

After spending a few days going back to some of my old characters, I felt fairly comfortable with the changes. It's a credit to the design and development teams that they were able to make these big changes in such a way that it was pretty easy for players to make the transition.

PoE: Self-Found Solo Summoning HOWTO [2.3]

Since I've posted about my summoner (through Normal, Cruel, and Merciless difficulty levels) in Path of Exile (PoE), I've had a couple of requests to go into some more detail on her build and how I've been playing her. This is current as of PoE version 2.3.

The first thing you have to choose when making a character in PoE is whether to play hardcore (first death kicks you out of the league) or softcore (dying may cost you some XP, but you stay in the league). A summoner is viable in either mode, but I highly recommend softcore for most people. It's much more forgiving until the very high levels, when the XP penalty gets harsh enough that dying really slows progress. It only takes one moment of inattention (or bad lag) when you've just stumbled upon some really nasty boss or monster pack to bite the dust, and in hardcore leagues you only get the one chance. Having said that, if you really want to play hardcore, a summoner is one of the safer options. Just err on the side of more defenses whenever possible, and be prepared to grind a few extra levels before taking on particularly nasty areas.

I chose to play a Witch, but a Scion is also viable. The Witch isn't able to buy some useful skill gems from vendors, but she's got easier access to most of the minion nodes as well as the full necromancy ascendancy class. Playing as Witch is definitely the simpler route, even with the limits on available gems. The Scion version has advantages at high levels and with certain gear, so it's better for experienced players, and generally you don't want to be playing self-found. For the rest of this guide, I'll assume playing as a Witch.

In the early levels, I recommend going up the passive tree to get Minion Instability, which causes explosions when your minions die. (Example) It's not a good long-term tactic, but in the early levels your minions are going to die a lot anyway. Might as well get some use out of their demise! Once you've defeated Brutus in the Act 1 Jail, you can get Summon Skeletons + Spell Totem Support from the quest reward or purchase from the vendor, which works wonderfully with Minion Instability. While clearing normal monsters, drop the totem out in front of you so the enemies focus on it, and all your minions will jump into the fight once they're engaged. In boss fights, you can drop the totem, let the skeletons make suicide runs at the boss, and focus on keeping yourself alive and/or summoning raging spirits until the fight is over. This works pretty well up until the tail end of Act 4 Normal.

Somewhere around level 40, you'll want to use a respec point to get rid of Minion Instability and pick up Elemental Equilibrium instead. (Example) Change your totem link to use Arc instead of Summon Skeletons. You can still use the totem the same way as before, but now instead of summoning skeletons it will do a little lightning damage and trigger Elemental Equilibrium, making every enemy it hits vulnerable to cold and fire. With Hatred and/or Anger running as an aura, and the natural fire damage from your raging spirits, your minions do a lot of fire and/or cold damage. Just be careful that none of your gear adds fire or cold damage to spells - you don't want Arc to be doing anything other than lightning damage! 

From that point on, you've got choices on how you'd like to focus your build. I like to grab the Sovereignty node cluster to improve my auras, and all the extra zombie nodes. You can skip those zombie nodes if you're focused more on raging spirits, but in either case you'll want the nodes that increase minion damage. Most people will use a life-based build with some armor and energy shield defense, but it's possible to get Chaos Inoculation and focus entirely on energy shield. Here's a sample 100-point passive tree for a life-based build, and here's another using CI.

Once you're able to open up the Necromancer Ascendancy nodes, I recommend getting Commander of Darkness first, for the extra resistances and damage for all allies affected by your auras (which includes your minions). Pick up Mistress of Sacrifice next, which really boosts the benefits of Flesh Offering. I took Spirit Eater for my third node since it works so nicely with Flesh Offering, although Flesh Binder would also work if you'd like some added defense.

When playing a self-found character, you'll mostly you'll be using whatever gear drops with a good amount of resistances, some life and/or energy shield, and the appropriate links. Try to get a helm that has +1/2 to minion skills if possible, and fill it with your Raise Zombie gem plus supports. It's worthwhile to prioritize movement speed on your boots, as with almost every PoE character, since running away fast may keep you alive in a tight corner. I highly recommend using a shield instead of a 2-handed weapon or dual-wielding setup, since it's much easier to get resistances and other defensive stats that way. Plus a bit of block chance never hurts.

Here are the skill gems that I use, and how they're linked:

Summon Raging Spirit + Spell Echo + Melee Splash + Minion Damage + Item Rarity: My spirits are my main damage-dealer, so they get to use the 5-link in my chest armor. (When playing self-found, you're unlikely to see a usable 6-link item until very high levels, if at all.) Spell Echo is by far the most important support here, but it takes a while before it's available - until then, you can use a Faster Casting if you have the right links. You could do Multistrike instead of Melee Splash, which is better DPS for single targets, but I've found that there's very little in the game that is truly single target. Most of the bosses spawn enough adds that you really want some damage splashing to kill them off quickly, so the horde doesn't get distracted.

Raise Zombie + Multistrike + Fortify + Minion Damage: I really like Fortify for my zombies, which improves their survival greatly against stuff with big AoE attacks. (I got lucky with a drop - witches don't get Fortify from quests/vendors. Melee Physical Damage is an alternative support gem, if you don't find a Fortify.) In this case, I prefer Multistrike to Melee Splash, since the spirits already have that AoE damage covered. Minion Damage is never a bad idea for a support gem, or you could also use Faster Attacks in that slot if you have one available.

Raise Spectre + Summon Chaos Golem + Minion Damage + Lesser Multiple Projectiles: This is my "secondary summons" link. The LMP is great when you revive things with projectile attacks, such as my usual crew of Tentacle Miscreations. As you level, you can find something with decent ranged attacks almost everywhere in the game (though Act 1 is pretty sparse). I don't think the golem is getting any benefit from LMP, but I needed somewhere to put the gem, and certainly he gets the Minion Damage.

Animate Guardian: I have this guy in a Unset Ring slot, no links. Mostly just for the sake of saying that I have an extra minion, rather than any real utility. Hey, an extra body never hurts. Once you get all the passive minion nodes, he almost never dies, so I rarely have to worry about finding items to equip him with.

Discipline: If you're going with Chaos Inoculation, this aura is a requirement. Even in a life-based build, though, it's useful to boost survival. My own, and the minions as well...as you're leveling, that bit of ES can really help keep your zombies upright. You may have to wait until you've gotten some of the mana-reservation-reduction passive nodes if you want to run two auras. Certainly this is the case if you'd like to go with more damage and run both Hatred and Anger. I chose more survival with Discipline rather than the second damage aura, so the mana reservation isn't quite as much.

Hatred + Generosity: Lots of extra cold damage for all the minions. You could run Anger instead if you prefer, or try to do both if you're willing to do without the extra energy shield from Discipline. Don't run Wrath since it doesn't work with the Elemental Equilibrium setup, of course.

Arc + Spell Totem + Chain: Used to trigger Elemental Equilibrium. Make sure it's only doing lightning damage - don't accidentally equip some piece of gear that adds fire and/or cold damage to your spells. The extra Chain isn't really necessary, I suppose, but I find that it helps to maximize the number of targets hit, especially on maps with increased pack sizes.

Flesh Offering: Amazing buff for your minions early on, and for you too once you get the Mistress of Sacrifice ascendancy node. Link it to Increased Duration if you can find one, but you may have to do without since Witches can't buy that from vendors.

Convocation: There will be times when the minions get lost and your horde is spread out across several rooms, or stuck behind a wall, etc. You really want this skill to get them all back together, especially if you've just wandered into a small room with lots of enemies going after your personal self. I use Convocation most when opening strongboxes - hit a Quartz flask so you don't get stuck, hit the box, run through the spawn, then Convocation. That puts all your minions in a perfect position to focus fire and wipe out the whole spawn quickly, rather than being spread out and possibly losing some minions (or worse, your personal self).

Enfeeble: I'm only running one curse, and I mostly only use it against bosses or particularly nasty magic packs. I picked Enfeeble because the minions are doing plenty of damage as long as they stay upright, so it's more important to make sure they stay that way than to try to increase the damage output. Temporal Chains would be a good alternate option, if you can find one. If you have the slots and gems, an Enfeeble (or Temporal Chains) + Flesh Offering + Increased Duration link would be good.

Desecrate: Every time you log in, you'll need to summon zombies and spectres. I like to go to the Lunaris Temple waypoint, drop into level 2, then use Desecrate to make corpses until I get two Tentacle Miscreations to revive, and enough other corpses to zombify. Occasionally it's also useful to use Desecrate to drop a set of corpses to power your Flesh Offering, when normal monster destruction isn't generating enough. You can do without this, or put it on weapon switch to use only in that initial summoning stage, if you're short on slots.

Lightning Warp: Got to have a movement skill to jump over those broken bridges and other map annoyances! Link it to Reduced Duration if you have the gem available and an extra link someplace.

There are plenty of other summoning guides if you'd like to learn more about optimizing the build, mostly in the Witch section at the official PoE forums. Looking at those other guide is particularly useful if you're not playing self-found and are willing to trade for some better gear. Happy summoning!

PoE: Merciless Necromancy

I've been revisiting Path of Exile (PoE) with the latest expansion, Prophecy. My necromancer witch is into Merciless difficulty, after completing Normal and Cruel.

Moving into Merciless difficulty comes with another hit to your damage resistances, down a total of 60%. Thanks largely to the Commander of Darkness node in the Necromancer Ascendancy class, which adds resistances when I'm using an aura, the 20% Cruel resistance hit didn't cause me too much trouble. But the extra 40% in Merciless is another matter. Fortunately, gear starts to drop with higher resistance values as the levels increase. I haven't quite got the right combinations to max out all of my elemental resistances, but it's close.

One reason I'm still looking for that perfect gear is that I'm playing this character with only the items she buys from vendors or finds during play (this is known as self-found). There's a large trading community in PoE, and if I wanted to shop around I'm sure I could find the perfect items. I like the challenge of the self-found character, though, at least for builds that don't require specific unique items. Whenever I decide to play some other characters, I'll likely look into the trade market.

When I completed the Labyrinth back in Cruel difficulty, I chose to add the Mistress of Sacrifice node from my Necromancer Ascendancy class. It increases my skills' duration, and allows my Flesh Offering skill (added movement/attack/cast speed) to affect me in addition to my minions. That really makes a difference in how powerful my witch feels! My Raging Spirits last longer and do more damage, my Zombies and Spectres are running around at light-speed, and the added movement speed helps me keep out of the way of whatever nasty stuff is trying to kill me. Most enemies just melt away under the onslaught instantly, with bigger rares taking just a bit longer. Unique monsters still survive for a while, but I've not had much trouble for the most part. I've yet to face Malachai at the end of Act 4 or Izaro in the Labyrinth at the Merciless difficulty level, and haven't even considered end-game content like Atziri. But everything in the normal zones and early map areas has been fairly straightforward to finish off.

Another build change that I decided to make was using Chaos Inoculation. This keystone makes you immune to all chaos damage, which is a pretty useful thing in a lot of end-game areas. The downside is that you are left with only one life point, so you have to protect that one point with your energy shield at all costs. I've managed to get around 5500 energy shield, and a few thousand more should be possible as I find better gear. One reason I did this was that I'd already found a Geofri's Sanctuary unique armor, which has decent energy shield plus Zealot's Oath for extra shield regeneration. Thanks to a fortunate prophecy, I was able to get five linked sockets in that armor, so I'll be using it for quite a while.

Once I made it through Act 3 in Merciless, the Eternal Laboratory opened up. This is the endgame system for PoE, where players use maps (dropped like any other item) to open new areas to explore. (And by explore, I mean slaughter everything that moves, of course.) Maps can have modifiers like any other item, which generally make things more difficult on the player by buffing monsters or limiting player abilities. Maps use the same currency items to set those modifiers as you'd use on your gear, so you have the opportunity to set the map modifiers to something you can handle. I really like the system, at least initially. Once you've leveled a character into the mid-80s, it becomes pretty difficult to find maps of the appropriate level, and that's not a lot of fun. But I'm usually tired of playing a character by then anyway.

There's a whole set of prophecies that apply only to maps, plus many of the familiar prophecies can also be found there. On top of that, there are map-specific Ascendancy Trial areas. Plenty of things that are new to me, even though I've completed the story mode through Merciless. (Except for that final Malachai fight.) I died a few times while figuring out those new trial areas, which are quite a bit tougher than the trials you find in the regular zones. Once you know what's coming, you can certainly make it through, but learning can be a rough process!

As for the main map areas, I've only done the lowest-level maps thus far. To this point, almost everything has been fairly easy, even with the monsters getting buffs from the map modifiers. Here's a quick example of the horde eating the Blacksmith boss, for example. I did have some trouble in the Pit Map, which has a difficult final boss area with hordes of extra monster spawning. That's bad for a necromancer since all of my minions get distracted by the extra spawns, rather than killing the boss quickly. That's the only real trouble I've seen so far, though.

I'll probably keep playing this witch for another few levels, at least into the next few tiers of maps. I may start thinking about a different character, too. I've got quite a few interesting unique items and skill gems in my stash that are begging for use!

PoE: Cruel Summoning

I've been revisiting Path of Exile (PoE) with the latest expansion, Prophecy. My undead-summoning necromancer witch has now made her way through Cruel difficulty, after finishing Normal a few days earlier.

In my experience, Cruel difficulty is well-named. It's the second of three difficulty levels, covering approximately levels 40 to 55. This is where you learn whether the build idea that you were so excited about back at level 1 is going to actually function the way you'd hoped. All the skill gems are available, you've got enough passive skill points to get the most important nodes on the passive tree, and a good selection of gear is available. With the exception of some specialized builds that use high-level unique items, everything is in place. Now the difficulty is cranked up and you hope it all comes together. If not...well, there's a reason they call it Cruel.

When you start over in the first act after finishing the previous difficulty, everything seems pretty easy. Those early monsters don't have the powerful skills that you see in the later acts. That's a good thing, because you may need time to get used to the reduced damage resistance that affects your character with each difficulty level. If you don't deal with that, the tougher monsters (especially act bosses) can be a very nasty surprise. Around act three or so, even the normal monsters are hitting hard enough to hurt pretty badly if your defenses aren't up to par.

Thanks in large part to my prior experience with the game, I didn't have too much trouble with anything in the Cruel story quests. Knowing exactly where you need to go, how the bosses act, and the most useful rewards to take all helps. I was actually a bit surprised at how easy the act three and four boss fights were, compared to the last time I played PoE. The added character power from the ascendancy classes and prophecy rewards makes a noticeable difference.

Going through the Cruel Labyrinth was not so easy. I died once when I got stuck in some traps. On Normal those traps did some damage, but nothing a health flask couldn't fix. On Cruel, they were a lot more dangerous. Partly that's because my witch wasn't focused on defense as much as some builds are, but my lack of familiarity with the area didn't help either. Whatever the reason, that experience taught me to be a lot more careful moving through the trap areas. I also died once to the boss, who throws a very powerful ranged attack that isn't easy to avoid, particularly in the final room where a bunch of traps are also present. I eventually made it all the way through, but I'd definitely say going through the Labyrinth is much tougher than any of the story quests, including end-of-act boss fights.

I tried something with my character's build that I'd not done before with a necromancer: I picked up Elemental Equilibrium. The idea of that keystone node is that hitting a monster with one elemental damage type (fire, cold, lightning) makes them vulnerable to the other types. Usually that means you want to alternate hits: use fire to make them vulnerable to cold, then use cold for extra damage and make them vulnerable to fire, repeat. But with a necromancer, your minions' hits don't cause the vulnerability effect. So if I hit the monsters with lightning (making them vulnerable to fire and cold), then my minions can use fire and cold for extra damage all day long, without having to worry about alternating the damage types. It's been working incredibly well, particularly against the high-health unique boss monsters.

When I started Cruel difficulty, I had a few prophecies left over that could only be completed in Normal. So I had to use the seal option to remove those, and stored them in the stash for future characters. I suppose I could have gone back and completed them instead, but that kind of back-tracking didn't appeal to me. That's a bit annoying, but since it only happens once at the end of each difficulty level, it's not a major problem.

I've come across a few prophecies that have some pretty interesting effects. For example, there's the Undead Uprising, which resets all the monsters in the act two zone Old Fields to skeletons, and spawns a unique boss in that zone. Or the Wealthy Exile, which makes the next rogue exile you encounter drop all rare items. I'll admit that I'm already a bit tired of seeing some of the more common prophecies, but it's fun when you get one of the more interesting (and rare) ones. There are also some prophecy chains, sort of a mini-story told through a series of individual prophecies.

Next up for my necromancer is Merciless difficulty and end-game maps. I'm looking forward to seeing how well her build holds up there.

PoE: Prophecy Initial Impressions

I've recently re-installed Path of Exile (PoE) to play around with the new Prophecy expansion. After a few hours of play, I've gotten my first character through Normal difficulty.

Getting a character through the Normal difficulty is only a small part of the full PoE experience. It means you've gone through all the regular story zones, done the quests, and leveled to somewhere around 40. There's two more trips through the story to go, plus all sorts of end-game content. But the initial trip through Normal is enough to get a feel for the game.

For me, there are actually two new sets of features, since I haven't played for several months. The prior expansion was called Ascendancy, all of which was new to me in addition to the Prophecy release. I decided to play a familiar character while I got used to the new stuff, so I chose to make a summoner witch. She raises zombies and skeletons and such, generally overwhelming the bad guys with superior numbers rather than directly doing damage herself.

The Prophecy additions show up almost immediately. In each town area is a new NPC who takes special Silver Coin items in exchange for granting you a prophecy. Each prophecy gives you some kind of extra effect to normal gameplay, such as extra monsters showing up in a zone or better effects when you modify an item. The coins show up fairly regularly, so I usually had enough to keep several prophecies active at once.

I found some of the prophecies to be pretty useful in the early going, such as adding extra mods to an item. Always handy to get slightly better items than you'd normally see early on. Others were less impressive, such as one that wanted me to defeat a boss while wearing a certain item. I didn't have that item, so that's pretty much useless. Fortunately you can deal with that scenario by "sealing" the prophecy - for a few coins, the prophecy can be turned into an item that you can store away (or destroy, or trade) like anything else.

Outside of the prophecies, I didn't notice much of a change to the overall gameplay experience through Normal difficulty. Progress felt perhaps slightly faster than I remember, possibly due to extra monsters from prophecies, but not significantly so. I wish it was a bit faster, honestly, because a lot of the most interesting parts of PoE are at the higher levels, both in terms of your character's build and gameplay challenge. There were a few monsters that looked new, but not many, and all the zones and story quests were familiar except for one thing: the Trials of Ascendancy.

The Trials are a set of trap-filled side areas, leading up to a major new zone called the Labyrinth. I stumbled across the first one in the second act, without knowing what it was, but it was fairly easy to figure out. Completing all six of the Trials lets you access the Labyrinth in the third act. I actually waited until I'd gone through the fourth act before coming back to the Labyrinth, which seemed to be a good move since the Labyrinth boss was a big pain even with the advantage of the extra levels I'd gotten in act four.

Completing the Labyrinth gives you access to an Ascendancy class, which is a way to specialize your character. For my witch, I chose the Necromancer, which has benefits for my summoned minions. The Ascendancy classes have some pretty powerful effects, which is all to the good as far as I'm concerned. My prior experience in PoE tells me that things get very difficult in a hurry as you move up through the higher difficulty levels. Some games have a problem with overpowered characters making the content too easy, but PoE has a long way to go before that will be an issue.

The trip through Normal difficulty is the simplest part of the PoE experience, and it went pretty smoothly for me as a returning player. Moving on through the Cruel and Merciless difficulty levels is likely to be tougher, though.

Path of Exile (PoE)

There are times when a gamer just wants to kill all the things. There are times when you want shiny loot, and times when you want lots of ways to customize your character. When you want an action role-playing game (ARPG) that does them all, you can't go far wrong with Path of Exile (PoE).

I first played PoE back in 2013, when it was in open beta. My first impression was that this was a spiritual successor to Diablo II. The similarities are legion: top-down isometric viewpoint, grim-dark world setting, similar character classes, slaughtering hordes of monstrous enemies, tons of loot items used to customize your character, linear storyline replayed at different difficulty levels, big boss monsters. PoE does indeed belong to the same genre as the Diablo franchise, but it's unique enough to stand on its own. Two unique things about PoE jump out almost immediately: the passive tree and skill gems.

To gain skills to use in the never-ending monster-slaughter, your character has to find gems and slot them into equipment. There are dozens of different skill gems, for all sorts of fighting styles: melee, ranged, magic, physical. In addition to the basic skills, some gems provide modifications to the skill's effect. For instance, you might have an archer character using Burning Arrow to set individual monsters on fire, but you'd like it to work as an area effect. Add a Lesser Multiple Projectiles support gem, and now the skills sends out three fire arrows at a time instead of one. That's a very simple example, but the combinations can get very complex as you approach the end game.

As your character levels, you gain points to spend on the passive skill tree. The tree is massive and a little daunting to the new player, but after playing a while things start to make sense. You use points to move along the tree, picking up nodes which provide bonuses to various stats. Usually the goal is to reach one or more keystone nodes that provide major bonuses and/or changes to how the game plays. There are a ridiculous number of choices on the passive tree, making possible all sorts of different builds.

Another unique feature of PoE is the economy - there's no money. Almost every game has "credits" or "gold" or "dollars," but not PoE. Instead, you get "currency" items as loot drops and in exchange for selling items to vendors (or other players), each of which is usable. The currency item effects range from mundane scrolls that can identify magical items to orbs that modify gem sockets to a mirror that can copy an item.

There are two major weaknesses in PoE, as far as I'm concerned. One is a lack of direction for the inexperienced player. In addition to the aforementioned overwhelming complexity, simple things are difficult to find - for instance, if you want to buy gems from a vendor, you have to click on a small numbered tab in the correct vendor's inventory. It's not intuitive at all, and easy to overlook. As you complete quests, more gems may be available there, but nothing tells the player about the new options unless you happen to look. Searching the PoE wiki can get around a lot of the confusion, if the player knows about it...which new people may not. Obviously this problem goes away over time as the new person learns, but I suspect a good number of potential players never got that far. Secondly, the game requires a huge time investment. Changing a character's passive tree build in any significant way is nigh impossible, so trying something different usually means investing hours into a new character. Many skills and important passive tree nodes aren't available until high levels, so you may not even know if your idea will work until you've invested many hours. Once you do get up into the highest levels, keeping your character supplied with maps to clear is another major time sink. The time investment requirements are a major reason that I don't play PoE more.

PoE is a free-to-play game, and as far as I'm concerned they've nailed the right way to run that model. You can buy all kinds of cosmetic items to change your character's appearance. Nothing in the store affects how you play the game, though, outside of additional storage space. Unlocking all the content and playing to the very highest level is possible without spending any money, although I suspect most people do buy some things. I certainly have - primarily that extra storage space.

Every few months, the developers come out with a content update that adds new features to the base game. Those new features are first introduced into challenge leagues, where players must create new characters and use items found only within the league. Those challenge leagues usually run for a few months until the next content update. It's a system that encourages trying new and different things rather than building up one character to use constantly. The newest PoE content update is called Prophecy and was released earlier this month.

I find myself coming back to PoE for a short time on a regular basis, usually to see what's new after a content update. It's such a time-intensive game that I tend to burn out after a while, though. I'll try out Prophecy and see how long I want to keep with it this time around.

Marvel Heroes: Ant Man and Vision

The Marvel Heroes Civil War event has been going for a few weeks now. I've taken the opportunity to play some characters that are new to me.

Twice during the event, free hero tokens have been given out. The first one I got was Ant Man, who I hadn't yet unlocked. My second was a duplicate. I decided also to unlock Vision using the in-game currency. I have plenty of that, since I log in almost every day for the daily rewards, even when I'm not playing the game regularly.

With the extra bonus XP given to characters from the movie, plus all the other bonuses to experience gain that I have on my account, it took very little time to level Ant-Man and Vision to 60. So little, in fact, that I did it twice on each. That puts them both at green prestige level.

I also had a whole bunch of reward boxes that I'd collected from daily rewards. So once each character was at 60, I opened a bunch of those for gear. Nice to get a set of unique items with basically no effort. It's not optimal gearing, of course, but plenty for most anything short of high-end raiding.

Ant-Man has two major themes in his power sets: size change and ants. He has quite a few shrinking skills, which mostly do melee damage, and his signature power is to grow to giant size and stomp. The ant powers damage and debuff enemies with swarms of ants. I wasn't too impressed with most of the ant powers, but the size change stuff is pretty neat. The signature power in particular looks awfully cool. From a functional perspective, there are powers that fit all the key requirements (vulnerability debuff, area damage, single target damage) that are spaced out nicely as you level. Ant-Man feels a little less powerful than several of my other characters, but a bit more work to optimize the build and gear would probably fix that.

Vision's power themes are density shifting and solar powers. His Density Shift power toggles between low-density for phasing and ultra-dense for solidity. The other density shifting powers change based on the Density Shift setting, either phasing through things or hitting them hard. The solar powers do energy damage by using up solar energy, which is used up fast but also regenerates quickly. He can also take control a mechanical enemy and use it as a pet, though I didn't use that ability much. I liked a mixture of density and solar powers, mostly doing area damage with the solar powers and single-target damage with the density powers. I wish his vulnerability power unlocked earlier than level 47, but that's not a problem once you get to level 60. Vision seems to be about average power level, not noticeably better or worse than other characters that I'm used to playing.

The Marvel Heroes team has done a pretty good job with both these characters in terms of theme and style. It's a bit difficult to do size-change and phasing correctly, since the player needs to accept some limitations: you can't have Ant-Man just stomping on the biggest bosses, or Vision phasing through every wall. They're pretty good at implementing super-powers by now, though, after practicing on the other 50-ish characters in the game. In both cases, I felt like the gameplay captured the character's themes nicely.

World of Warcraft: Some Time at Level 90

I was recently sent an offer by Blizzard for seven free days of World of Warcraft play time, including creation of a character boosted to level 90. Free is a good price, so I tried it out.

I'm not sure if the timing is coincidence, or if the fact that I played the "starter edition" a few weeks ago triggered this offer. I wouldn't be surprised if their marketing department sends this offer to most folks that try out the free-to-play option. At least, those that stop playing once they hit the level 20 cap. Seems like a smart way to try to draw in those who are on the fence about subscribing.

The introduction experience this time was much better than the starter edition. Same character creation process, but with the level 90 boost you are dropped into a story area immediately (as opposed to the race-specific starter areas for level 1 characters). I chose a Tauren Druid, so that put me in the battle to close a dark portal opened by the Iron Horde. After that immediate threat was dealt with, I joined the rest of my allies' forces in a hasty retreat to safer territory. There were a few cutscenes along to way with big fights and explosions to spice things up. As far as MMO story-telling goes, this was done nicely.

I didn't notice any bugged quests through this process, and never had to wait on a respawn to fulfill a quest objective. I didn't have to make long trips through big empty areas to talk to quest givers or chase down objectives. Plus I was given a mount to use if I wanted, though I didn't find it necessary in the early going. As the story moved along, I was gradually granted all the character abilities that I'd have normally earned in the leveling process. All of this is a sharp contrast to the starter edition introduction process, which was slow, had bugs, and generally felt boring. It's pretty clear where the developers have been focusing their effort.

At the end of the introduction quest chain, you're given an outpost of your own to run. I enjoyed the introductory quests that involved directing peons to cut down trees and setting up new buildings...reminded me of the old Warcraft days. There's clearly quite a bit of upgrading available, which I assume would require a good amount of time spent gathering resources to fully realize. And you get your own minions to boss around and send out on missions, which is always fun. Most modern MMOs have some version of player bases, so it's not a surprise that World of Warcraft joined the crowd.

Personally, I'm still not interested in subscribing. Largely that's because there are so many other games that provide basically the same thing, without requiring a monthly payment. I can play a game like Guild Wars 2 with a single purchase rather than an ongoing fee. The only unique things that World of Warcraft really offers are their background story and player base. Neither really means much to me.

Having said that, I can certainly see how someone might be tempted to pony up the subscription fee after playing this trial week. The level 90+ experience feels much more modern than the lower levels, and I expect it's especially attractive if you already have friends playing the end-game. If Blizzard really wants to attract new subscribers, this level 90-boost trial is a much better way to go about it than the free-to-play starter edition.

Marvel Heroes' Civil War Event

Marvel Heroes has promotions and events of various kinds running almost constantly. So it's no surprise that they did not miss the chance to put something together specially for the release of Captain America: Civil War.

There was no time wasted by the marketing department: I got an email even before the event actually started. Presumably the idea was to catch the eye of fans who were going to the midnight showing of the movie, since it came in at 11:15 PM. Here's the event details, as listed on the game's website.

This promotion should appeal especially to new players, since it includes a free unlock of either Captain America or Iron Man. It's still useful for existing players who already have both, too, since you get a hero token to improve their Ultimate power. I picked Iron Man. There's also new costumes for many of the characters in the movie, for purchase in the store.

The event itself has two parts. This week, a short new zone where you can chase down the villain Crossbones (similar to the movie's opening action scene) has been introduced. Crossbones also shows up in the various patrol zones. Next week, there will be events to gain influence with either the Iron Man or Captain America side of the civil war. Through the whole thing, characters that appeared in the movie will get bonus experience.

I went through the new zone a couple of times, first with a level 60 character and then a level 40. At level 60, it was very easy, so I'm glad there's also a cosmic version of the zone to provide a bit more challenge. At level 40 there was a bit more difficulty, but still not too bad. All but the least experienced players should have no trouble, and it won't take even brand-new players very long to get to the point where they can make it through.

Clearly the idea with this promotion is to attract new players, with all the movie-related giveaways and content. A free hero unlock is always good for new players, and the bonus experience is nice to give them a quick start. I think the developers did a good job with the new zone as well, making the movie-related content easy to access for new players attracted by the movie tie-in.

I haven't been playing Marvel Heroes on a regular basis for a while, but I still log in occasionally and I'm glad to see the game continuing to grow. Hopefully some of the excitement from the movie will transfer over to some new players in the game.

World of Warcraft: A Brief Return

Way back in 2006, I played World of Warcraft (WoW) for a few months. Did the same again a few years later, around 2010, and haven't touched it since. Recently, I installed it again and played a character up to level 20 (the "starter edition" free-to-play cap, at least for now).

The impetus for this little adventure was the Hearthstone promotion to unlock the Lady Liadrin alternate Paladin hero. Play a WoW character to level 20, get the Hearthstone unlock for your account. I likely still wouldn't have bothered for that alone, but it also gave me an excuse to take a quick peek back into WoW after being away for years. Curiosity combined with the Hearthstone freebie was enough to push me into actually re-installing.

I didn't have the option to do anything with my old characters, because you have to subscribe for that. There's a good amount of stuff locked behind subscription: using the mail, auction house, guilds, etc. (Full list here.) Since I just wanted to poke around a little, that was fine with me. Apparently Blizzard is in the process of realizing that people don't want to pay monthly subscription fees any more, as they've created a system where you can buy play time in-game. Maybe they'll eventually be pushed to a buy-to-play model (meaning that you buy it once, then play with no recurring fee), but not yet.

In the process of creating a new Troll Druid and leveling her to 20, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to encounter:

• Bugs in the opening quest area. Specifically, there's a quest to chase down a unique raptor and rope it, then take it to a holding area. I took the quest, but no raptor spawned. Had to drop and re-accept the quest, then it spawned. Bugs happen, but this game has been around for more than a decade! Can't they at least make the new player experience run smoothly? There were a couple of other similar quest issues as I moved into other areas.
• Huge areas with no quick travel. My starting area was a pretty huge island, and I had to run around it to quite a few different locations to complete the initial quest chain. Watching your character run for 20-30 seconds between quest locations is not a good initial experience. I understand that mounts are available later on, and you do get access to some forms of quick travel between town areas soon after the starting area. But in the early game, it still takes forever to run around big areas like cities, or the huge open spaces between quest objectives.
• Terrible respawn rates. The very first quest I got after leaving my starting area sent me to hunt down some sort of crab things, and when I arrived in the quest area, some other guy had just killed them all. I had to wait several minutes for more crabs to show up, so I could complete my quest. Same sort of thing happened several times in different quest areas.
• Slow NPC Interactions. Several times, I had to sit and wait while NPCs spouted several lines of text, with long pauses in between, before I could do whatever was next for my quest. I can read quite quickly, thank you, and don't need to sit around waiting for the next line to appear.

Now, I realize WoW is an old design. Some of this stuff didn't seem nearly as bad 10 years ago, because we hadn't seen those same problems repeated again and again in other MMOs. But it confirms what I'd expected - WoW hasn't made much of an effort to change, at least not in the early going. If they want to get new blood into the game, that new player experience is a key component.

It's not all bad, of course. The graphics are fine, running well on my 1600x1200 screen. The cartoon-ish art style helps there, as you don't really expect amazing visuals. I didn't have any technical issues at all, really, which for a decade-plus-old game is a pretty significant feat. Quests were plentiful and led me to new areas, so I wasn't ever lost and wondering where I should go next. And leveling progress from 1-20 was fairly quick, requiring just that I follow the quest lines with no additional grinding.

It's certainly possible that there are some new and interesting things in WoW, at the higher levels and in newer areas. But this little experience in the new player/free-to-play area gives me no incentive to pony up a fee to find out. I expect most new players using the free "starter edition" trial will feel the same way.

Black Desert Online: Witchery

As I've been playing Black Desert Online (BDO), I've tried a few different character classes. Hunter, Fighter, Valkyrie, and Witch. Thus far the Witch has been my favorite. She's up to level 31 as I write this (the soft level cap is 50).

As I've mentioned before, you can do a whole lot of non-combat stuff in BDO. For those things, it really makes no difference what class you've chosen. Everyone can equally become a cook, or gather resources, or fish. But combat can be a very different proposition for each class.

Fireball explosion

The Witch is mostly a ranged attacker. The first skill she gets is a fireball, and that is augmented a few levels later with an explosion option. Against average enemies, my standard approach is to run around to gather a small group, then throw a fireball at them and make it explode. Kills many weaker enemies outright, and knocks down most of the others. She also gets a lightning attack which is similar in that you can cast it, then expand it to fry a large area. And there's a giant meteor storm you can cast for massive damage over a wide area, though it takes a while to charge up.

With all that area damage, you'd expect that a Witch uses up mana like crazy, and this is true. She gets a single-target attack to steal mana from an enemy, which is very helpful. Especially when there's just one guy left standing after a big explosion that ate up my mana bar. She's also got an ability to both heal and restore mana, albeit small amounts, which can affect any party members as well as the Witch herself.

Lightning Storm...

There are other utility powers as well. A freezing bolt can put a single enemy in an ice block, handy if you need a respite to recover from something particularly big. There are a couple of area slow effects, too. And bigger party heals, though I haven't done enough group play to really make much use of those.

Many of these combat effects look amazing, as is the case with many of the visuals in BDO. I've been known to stop and just watch the effects while electrocuting a bunch of Orcs with a lightning storm, or freezing a particularly aggressive bear. Admiring the effects isn't great for XP gain rate, but it sure does look pretty.

...and the corpses left afterward.

The biggest weakness thus far that I've run into is enemies that move and attack quickly. The Witch wants to stay out of melee, but she has to stand still to cast her spells. Against slower enemies, that's no problem, since you can just run a little ways away and cast your fireball while they're trying to catch up. If the enemies move quickly, though, you'll get hit while that spell is charging. Enough of that leads to a downed Witch soon enough. I'm still working on proper use of the slow effects and other support abilities to enhance her survival.

Gear is important as well, as with most MMORPGs. My Witch is currently using the Agerian set, which gives her extra casting speed. It's also fairly light in weight, so she can move a bit quicker than someone in heavy armor. Of course, that comes with the trade-off of lower defense, so getting hit can really hurt. Dodging, slowing enemies, and knocking them down is essential against anything dangerous.

On the whole, I'm fairly happy with my Witch's combat abilities. The big area-damage effects are a lot of fun, and the class abilities are well designed to allow you to use them without much downtime. She dies a bit more than I'd like, but that's likely my fault as a mediocre combat pilot, more than anything in the class design.

Black Desert Online: Annoyances

I've said a lot of nice things about Black Desert Online (BDO) recently. Which is all well and good, but we all know nothing is perfect, and MMOs even less so than most things. So here's the things that have most annoyed me thus far.

Crowded dock...all AFK fishing.

There's a lot of downtime while waiting on things to happen. You can try to minimize this by doing multiple things at once - go out gathering wood while waiting for crops to grow, that sort of thing. That only goes so far, though. Gathering materials in particular takes forever, as you move between nodes, spending 10-20 seconds at each one to mine/chop/etc. Using workers can help, but there are some materials workers just can't gather for you.

The game has no teleport-style quick travel, so location-specific tasks (such as turning in completed quests) can be painful. You can use automatic navigation to send your character riding/running to the proper location, but it still takes a while for them to get there. (And occasionally it doesn't work - been stuck a few times on weird terrain.) Travel between towns for trading is particularly slow, at least until you build up your resources to have a decent trade wagon. You have to pay attention to those trade trips, too, or bandits are likely to get you. So the auto-navigate is less useful in the trading sub-game, meaning it's just tedious to get where you're headed.

There's a whole lot of tiny things to micromanage. Tools break, for instance, so you may be well out into the woods and realize you have to run all the way back to town for a new axe. Gathering any significant quantity of materials on your own is painfully slow at first, though that does get better as you improve your skills. Working to increase NPC amity takes forever, and the little mini-game gets old after the first several dozen iterations. Inventory management is just as much of a challenge as in any MMO, and complicated by the fact that each major town has its own separate storage.

The game's Korean roots show through with some poor translations in some places. Whoever wrote the English translation of NPC dialogue could definitely use some more practice. There's also the usual minor new-launch bugs in quest descriptions and the like. More than once I've had to do a web search to find out what exactly I'm supposed to be doing for a quest or craft skill, only to find that the info in-game is simply wrong. Go use your mining skill in that cave to get a special crystal? Oh, nope, we really meant go kill the goblins in the cave, who will drop the crystal. Turn in two widgets for a reward? Sorry, it's actually five. The errors aren't particularly common, but even one quest in a hundred with wrong information sticks out.

My least favorite annoyance this is the way the game encourages you to leave it running while you go do something else. Energy recovers at a very slow rate when you log out, to the point where it may take days to max it out. Thus, it's fastest to just leave your guy sitting around to recover, while you minimize the game and walk away. Or better, set him up to do some fishing, which can be done with zero player interaction for hours on end. Come back in a few hours and see an inventory full of fish, and a full energy bar. It just doesn't feel right to me, purposely going AFK while my character just sits there. I still do it, though, because that AFK fishing is a huge money-maker in the early going, making your life much easier when pursuing everything else.

I realize all these things could be a lot worse, which is why I'm terming this post "Annoyances" rather than something like "Reasons to never play BDO." I'm still playing despite these issues, and will for a while yet. But when I do decide to give it up, the things mentioned here are likely a major reason why.

Black Desert Online: Not Fighting

After getting to around level 14 in Black Desert Online (BDO) with my first character, I spent a few days playing with almost no progression toward the next character level. For most MMOs, that would be a terrible experience, but in BDO it just means I was busy exploring everything else.

After those first few hours of play, I reached the major hub town of Velia. There's plenty of options for fighting nearby, mostly goblins, but I got distracted by all the other things you can do. Character level in BDO is important in terms of which areas you can safely visit and which monsters to fight, but it doesn't seem to be important for the various gathering and crafting choices. Much more important is how much energy you have, which is a resource used by almost all non-combat actions. It regenerates on its own, but it's fairly slow (especially when logged out). Doing quests can add energy, providing an incentive to keep moving on available quests.

In most MMOs, the most important thing is how well you fight. Anything else you do (like crafting) is clearly secondary and really doesn't matter much if it doesn't improve your battle-readiness. BDO is much more balanced. If you'd like to focus on trading, or gathering raw materials, or one of the crafting skills, there's enough depth to focus almost entirely on those aspects.

The non-player characters in BDO have more depth than I'm used to. Each one has a certain set of interests, usually other NPCs in the area but occasionally monster knowledge or other subjects, and you have the option to increase your "amity" (friendliness, basically) by discussing those interests. Of course, you have to know what you're talking about, so you have to first go meet the other NPCs or defeat the monsters or whatever else the person is interested in. Then you can play a small mini-game to increase amity, and at certain thresholds you'll get new quests, or knowledge, or other bonuses. It's not easy to increase amity by large amounts, and it eats up your energy, so you have to work at getting friendly with each NPC.

The amity system adds depth to each area. Instead of just talking to everyone in an area when I first pass through, then coming back once to turn in quests, I've got incentive to re-visit several times. I can choose where to focus my efforts, rather than just talking to everyone with a quest sign over their heads. For example, if I'm playing a character with interest in cooking, I can spend time to chat up the local NPC cooks, gaining bonuses and cooking info and quest options.

A common problem in MMO crafting is that the gathering of materials becomes extremely repetitive. There's only so many wolves you can skin for furs, or trees to cut down, or rocks to mine, before the player gets tired and looks for something else to do. BDO has all those things, but also provides a way to hire NPC workers to do the grunt work. You can invest "contribution points" in map nodes to gain several benefits, one of which is the ability to assign a worker to harvest resources in that area. Those might be crops or animals on a farm, trees in the woods, ore near a mine, etc. So if you're tired of grubbing your own potatoes to make soup, hire someone to do it for you!

Of course, hiring workers comes with its own set of support tasks, many of which require money and/or contribution points to set up. You have to feed them to keep up stamina (although they seem to do fine on just beer), provide lodging, and make sure they're assigned to tasks. If you want them to do something more than simple gathering, such as making goods from raw materials, you can also provide them with workshop space. Managing your work force can be a whole game in itself, if you choose to pursue it.

The aforementioned contribution points are also used to make trade connections, by investing in connected map nodes. Once you've connected two nodes, you can make trips between them with trade goods, usually turning a fairly decent profit. It's pretty slow at first, as you have to walk from one city to the other carrying all your inventory in a backpack. Before long, though, you can afford to get a donkey for heavy lifting, then a horse, then a horse-drawn cart, and so on. Just look out for bandits on the road! The trading system can also be a whole game in itself.

Yet another use of contribution points is to expand your storage space. Each town has its own storage, but it's pretty limited at first. You can add to it by choosing to use various spaces around town (and in the surrounding farms) as storage space. Those are the same spaces that are used to set up workshops and other processing facilities, so you have to be careful which ones you use. It's nice to see a game where the expansion of storage facilities is integrated into the game world, not some add-on purchase option.

BDO encourages the use of multiple characters by sharing contribution point investments and storage space. Each character has their own energy level and skills, so you can specialize. As an example - I created a second character and parked him in Velia to serve as coordinator for my workers. He cooks up their food (that is, beer) and gathers up the inventory, to sell on the marketplace or ship off to other cities. If my main character out of energy or otherwise not available, I can take a few minutes to switch over to him to feed the hungry workers or otherwise manage the work force.

Between hiring a work force, learning crafting skills, doing some trading travel, and talking to NPCs, I spent most of a couple of days in BDO without making any appreciable progress along the main quest line or gaining character levels. And it was still plenty of fun, despite there being some annoyances along the way (more on that later). That's a well-designed sandbox-style game.

Black Desert Online: First Impressions

Black Desert Online (BDO) has just recently gone live with their North America/Europe release. Being the MMO addict that I am, I decided to give it a try.

BDO is a buy-to-play game, meaning that you buy it once, then play with no recurring fee. That doesn't mean you never spend any more money, of course - such games usually have extras available through in-game stores and expansions. But at least you're not paying a set fee every month. I like this model, because 1) it means I don't feel like I'm wasting my money if I decide to take a break from the game for a while, and 2) the spend-some-money-now nagging is much less noticeable than in free-to-play games.

When creating a new character, you have to choose a server, which is locked in for that character. When you log in, you choose a channel within that server. Which means you can play together with friends on the same server, and you shouldn't have to worry about it being overcrowded - both of you can just switch to a different channel if needed. Unfortunately, I have friends playing on two different servers (L is playing, and so are the New Outriders folks). I wish MMOs would figure out the scaling necessary to develop a single-server system, or free movement for characters between servers. The closest I've seen is the megaserver system of Guild Wars 2, but even that has limitations. Anyway, I'll probably end up playing mostly with L on his server.

BDO doesn't go out of its way to help you manage your social contacts. There's a friends list, but it took me several tries to add L despite knowing both his family and character names. I'm never sure if he's actually online or not, since the list doesn't seem to update properly. You can talk directly in a one-on-one chat window, but it doesn't have keyboard shortcuts and often scrolls the text up out of view. We ended up creating a clan (the no-cost version of a guild) just so that we'd have a usable chat channel to communicate with.

Unlike most MMORPGs, BDO allows you to choose a class, but not a race. All Hunters are female Elves, all Wizards are male Humans, etc. It's a bit of an odd limitation, but it does make things a bit simpler. There are a lot of options for customizing your character's face and body, so not everyone in a class looks exactly the same. Just about all the new characters look very similar in the early going, though, since your clothes depend on your equipped items (as opposed to costume choices), and starter gear is the same for everyone.

Plenty of effort went into making BDO look good. The graphics are top-notch and the environments look great. My NVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost graphics card is a few years old, but it still manages to run the game pretty well on Medium settings. I imagine those with top-of-the-line graphics hardware are getting some really impressive visuals.

The first 2-3 hours spent in BDO are pretty standard tutorial/introduction MMO play. There's not a lot of emphasis on story, beyond some vague talk about some "Black Energy" causing problems in the world. Your character carries some of that black energy, and there's a black shadow-creature that appears only to you. There's the usual assortment of "go beat up harmless woodland creatures" quests to start out, eventually moving on to imps and goblins. You meet some NPCs with various interests of their own, but it all seems fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Quite a difference from many RPGs (MMO and single player) that toss your character directly into some kind of huge conflict right away.

Your personal shadow fuzzball points you along the main quest path, while at the same time encouraging you to be selfish and power-hungry. Presumably later on it will want you to do some awful things, setting up some story choices. Early on, though, it's just a matter of learning the basics of movement and combat.

Combat is action-based, meaning you need to aim your attacks and be prepared to move around to avoid incoming damage. I freely admit that I'm not very good at such things, but at least in the early going I've been able to keep up with what BDO demands. Combo attacks are reasonably simple to put together, and dodging mostly works well. My only problem so far is judging where big enemy attacks are going to land, since there's no "effect shadow" on telegraphed attacks showing where the damage is going. Several times I've dodged to what I thought was a safe spot, only to get hammered because the safe zone was a little farther away than I expected.

Even in these first few hours of learning the game, it's clear that there's a lot more to do than the usual "go kill X whatevers for NPC Y." Crafting, gathering, trading, running your own worker empire...all that comes later. More on that as I work through it.

Blade and Soul: The Botpocalypse

My friend L and I played our duo characters in Blade and Soul up to the level cap (currently 45 on the NA/EU servers) and finished out the story missions. And that's as far as we're likely to go. There are several reasons, not least of which is the amazing amount of time needed to make any progress, but the last straw for me was the bot hordes that choke some of the endgame areas.

We finished out the currently available story missions just before reaching the level cap, and I have to say I wasn't impressed. There's no actual ending from a story perspective, because the evil lady who killed your master gets away (yet again, seems she does that in every story chapter) and nothing you've tried against her seems to work. I realize there is more to the story yet to be released, but it's still a letdown to get to the end and find very little in the way of resolution. You'd think they could have found a way to release the game with a complete, coherent story arc instead of just part of one.

Worse, the last bit of the story forces your character into a complete 180-degree-turn in terms of motivation. No longer is everyone telling you to "remember what Master Hong would want you to do" and begging you not to give in to revenge. The teaser for the next bit of the story is basically "come to the dark side." Stuff like that can be interesting in books and movies, but when you're supposedly playing a game where you have some level of control, it's a real downer.

Despite that, L and I were still willing to look into the endgame content. We tried Mushin's Tower, which is a series of solo instances, and each of us got completely destroyed. No problem with the toughest part of the story content or the lower level dungeons, but the difficulty in the tower spiked way up. Neither of us could make it past the first couple of levels, much less get all the way to the top. Which means we needed more and better gear, since it was unlikely after 45 levels that our combat reaction skills would improve much more.

Some gear upgrades drop from various world boss monsters, and it's here that the bots first became a real problem. You'd see dozens of players just standing around the boss spawn point, doing nothing. Then the boss spawns, and they all instantly jump at it and do some big attack. Once it's down, they go back to standing around. You might see a few actual players doing the same thing, but most of them are clearly just farmer bots. We missed a couple of boss spawns and had to wait around for the next one, because the bots killed it so fast.

You also need big chunk of in-game money to upgrade. Here the main way to progress is to do daily missions in big 24-man instances. The bosses you need to kill are difficult enough to require a full team of six, and in some cases more. There weren't many bots here because the zone is large and complex, but finding a decent team is no fun. Most people you pick up through the group finder just run around following whatever their own mission log says, and if you miss one objective, tough...they're not coming back to help you finish. Worse, the spawn rates for some of the objectives are very long, so you see a lot of players camping a particular spawn, and if you happen to be a little late getting there you've got a long wait for the next one.

Then there are the daily 6-man dungeon missions, and the bots are back there with a vengeance. It's easy to use the cross-server group finder to get a group. Too easy, because almost every time you'll find that 1-2 of the people who joined are bots. They walk into the dungeon and just stand at the entrance. The game doesn't check participation, so if the rest of the group manages to make it through, the bot gets the quest rewards for free. The obvious solution would be to kick the bot from the team, but there's no such option in Blade and Soul. So you end up either taking forever to get through a dungeon with less than a full group, or going back to the group finder over and over until you manage to get a bot-free group.

Between the story disappointments, major difficulty spike in areas like Mushin's Tower, the amount of time and effort needed to grind for money and items, and the bots making it all harder, I've had it with Blade and Soul. If the developers make an effort to fix the bot problem, if they smooth out the end-game grind, and if the story is extended to some reasonable conclusion, then I might consider trying it again. Until then, I recommend staying away.

Blade and Soul: Time Sink

Every MMO is a time sink to some extent. Daily quests, repeat boss and dungeon runs for specific loot drops, crafting, multiple characters, etc, etc. I've played a bunch of MMOs, and come to expect it. Even so, I think Blade and Soul is a pretty extreme example when it comes to how much time the game expects the player to spend.

Let's start with multiple characters. Every character you make has to go through the tutorial and the whole main story-line quest. No way to skip any of it (apart from skipping cutscenes) that I noticed. No alternate way to unlock travel powers, or get the important quest rewards. And as I mentioned before, the story is all very generic. Doing it once is mildly amusing. Doing it again gets old fast.

The most obvious time sink is crafting. The way you get raw materials is to put in an order with a gathering guild. The lowest level orders take 30 minutes to fill, and the time goes up from there. Then you turn over those materials and some other rare items to a crafting guild, who spend more hours making an item for you. The good news is that those countdowns continue while you're offline, but the bad news is that you have to log in to set up new orders as the old ones are completed. Lots of MMOs use this approach, but very few have this kind of length. (For comparison, Star Wars: The Old Republic gathering missions mostly take 3 minutes at low levels.)

Then there's that "other rare items" that I mentioned. All but the most basic crafting requires special items that come from random drops in boss fights and daily quests. Many of these aren't tradeable, so the only way to get them is to go do the quests...another time sink. Daily quests aren't anything new in the MMO world, but again, Blade and Soul stands out for the sheer amount that it expects you to do in order to progress.

Even daily awards require more time than I usually see in these kind of games. Blade and Soul has a "Daily Dash" where you spin a wheel to get a number, then move a token that number of spaces along a game board, and get whatever item you land on. You get multiple spins, but you can only use one per hour. So in order to even get the full daily log-in reward, you have to play the game for multiple hours.

Finally, there's item upgrades - probably my least favorite example of how Blade and Soul eats up your time. At several points, the only way to continue to upgrade your weapon (at least, as far as I can tell) is to defeat a world boss, take reward tokens that he drops, and spend those tokens on a "wheel spin" where an NPC gives you a random item. You'll eventually get a weapon box, which you then have to open and hope to get something usable by your class. It's not tradeable, so you can't buy one or sell your extras. It can take dozens of attempts to get what you need, which means a ton of boss fights, which means sitting around with a lot of other people looking at the ground until the boss spawns and everyone jumps in hoping to get a few hits in so they get a reward. It's a terrible player experience, combining the worst of boredom (waiting on the boss spawn) and frustration (getting useless crap from the random wheel spins).

Blade and Soul has some good aspects, certainly. There's some really good art and animation, and some interesting combat moves (even if it's not really my favorite style). It's fun to play as a duo, at least as long as you stay away from the 6-player dungeons. But the sheer amount of time needed to progress means I'm unlikely to stick with it after I've made it through once.

Blade and Soul

My friend L recently decided to start playing Blade and Soul, a Korean MMORPG which just recently released an English version. He convinced me to give it a try.

The first thing that struck me about Blade and Soul is that it's very pretty. There are lots of big open landscapes which are nicely realized, and the interiors of caves and the like look appropriately gritty. The art style is very much in the tradition of martial arts fighting games and anime. The characters are overly cute, but since they spend a lot of their time kicking monsters in the face, it sort of balances out between cute and dangerous. A dozen or so levels in, you'll start encountering Dragon Soul travel points, each of which has a pretty incredible travel animation. The game has plenty of eye candy.

I was pretty impressed by the character appearance creation options. As I said, all the characters are anime-style cute, but you have a ton of choices of exactly how that plays out. Everything from slight facial changes to body style to coloration is customizable. Unfortunately that doesn't extend to clothing - everyone has the same starting uniform once you get into the game. You can find others as you play, but it takes a while.

There are a bunch of different class and race options, as you'd expect. It's all based around magic and martial arts - options like the Blade Master or Assassin on the martial arts side, or Summoner on the magic side. It all bleeds together, of course; for instance, your Blade Master might use a magical Lightning Sword attack.

Combat is very interactive, requiring the player to move around a lot, execute attack combos, and keep the target lined up. I've only played the lower levels thus far, and not run into anything too difficult, but I can see the direction things are going. There's going to be a lot of twitch-reaction coordination needed, which sadly means I'll probably be awful at it. I'm sure the basic story content will be workable, especially in a duo. But higher level dungeons and such will be a challenge.

Speaking of story, Blade and Soul does have one, but it's very limited. Nothing that I've seen thus far is specific to class or race - everyone gets exactly the same quests and meets the same people. It's all very generic for the genre: you're a martial arts student, some bad guy comes after your master and fellow students, you must avenge them. Heard that one before! Some of the quest bits are entertaining, but none of it is a surprise.

Having said that, the writers sure seemed to have a good time putting quests together. You'll run across plenty of amusing little stories, like the hopelessly-in-love guy sending mushrooms to the object of his desire (who hates mushrooms), or the old man that sends you after his apprentice because the kid stole all the beer. They use a fun little system where you can see thought bubbles from the character you're talking to, so you know when they're trying to deceive you, or just asking you to do something dangerous because they're too scared to do it themselves. It's entertaining to go through once; too bad there's not anything new if you want to play another character.

And then there is loot. You get a lot of it, mostly from defeating the occasional boss monster and from doing quests (many of which can be repeated daily). And you can't use much of it at all without removing "seals", or in some cases unlocking treasure boxes. Even once unlocked, most of the items will be class-specific, which makes the vast majority unusable. You get a decent amount of the keys and seal breakers, but there are special key versions that give you better results if you use them. (Which are purchasable in the real-money store, of course.) And you'll need those better versions to get items specific to your class, or else be prepared to grind for the same drops over and over while hoping the random drop is something you can use.

I'm enjoying Blade and Soul as a change of pace. It's not the style that I normally play, and the duo experience with L has helped to smooth out some of the more difficult points. The combat isn't my favorite style, and the loot system seems unnecessarily focused on repeat grinding. I'll give it some time, though; maybe it'll grow on me.