We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

I stumbled across news about a new MMO coming out at some point (probably still got years left in development) and it peaked my interest. Apparently it’s a Diablo-esque style MMO made by the same guys who were originally Blizzard North and are now called Runic Games. Unfortunately going to their website gives absolutely no information about the game.

Torchlight Screenshot

The guys behind the game are Max and Erich Schaefer (nope, I’d never heard of them either but apparently it means something to some people) who also did Hellgate London. Which was a flop. OK, let’s ignore that cause I’m still hyped. I mean c’mon it’s Diablo but an MMO, man!

Torchlight Screenshot

To distribute it, Runic Games are teaming up with a Chinese publisher called Perfect World. And uh gee that’s about all of the info I can steal from other websites. Anyway, looks sweet.

Queue the 24 theme tune. I’ve got 10 minutes to write this post. Why? That’s because it takes almost exactly 10 minutes to fly from Booty Bay in Stranglethorn Vale to Aerie Peak in the Hinterlands. 10. Freaking. Minutes. That’s 10 minutes less in my evening that I actually get to play and have fun. And no, I don’t consider riding a griffon to be fun. Unless ‘griffon’ is a girl’s name. And ‘riding’ is a long romantic walk in the moonlight along a beach.

Tobold had a good article about travel in MMOs as did Keen and Graev although it was a by-product of his Darkfall recap. I’d suggest you check them out the next time your griffon ride takes 10 minutes. Wink.

So Patch 3.1 finally hit the live servers last Wednesday. Glorious! As any reader would know, I’ve been highly anticipating it for months as it brings a feature I was incredibly looking forward to – dual specs.

I’m playing three characters now – my Warrior, my Priest and a Mage – and I was most excited about dual speccing my Priest as I really wanted to be able to heal in groups without sacrificing my ability to solo. So, after months of hard grinding and saving with my Warrior, on Wednesday I dropped a dime (that’s Sopranos talk for 1,000g) and dual specced to Shadow and Holy. Then I got a group.

It was your usual PUG in Zul’Farrak and I should’ve known it wasn’t going to end well when it took us 45mins to get to the zone and by that time we had lost one of our DPS players leaving just four of us. Still, we were brimming with optimism and went in… only to wipe on the second pull. At which point someone decided to blame my poor healing skills (even though they had let a runner get away and pull a bunch of mobs which then killed me first) and they all disbanded. Ah, another wondering grouping experience in WoW. 1 hour to get a group together, 5 mins to completely disband it. Just why is it so hard to get a decent group?

Anyway, I was pretty disappointed after that experience and spent the next day just soloing as Shadow, wondering if the whole dual spec thing had just been a waste of time. Yesterday, however, I decided to try a battleground as Holy (I love the new feature to join BGs from anywhere) and it was actually a lot of fun. I did a bit of research though and discovered Discipline is a better spec for BGs and so swapped my Holy spec for a Disc one. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet but I’m looking forward to trying it out as it seems more conducive to my play style. Plus it means I can still heal for PVE groups which is what I wanted.

Overall I’m happy with the dual spec system and I’m excited about trying it out more. I’m still contemplating getting the cash together to dual spec my Warrior as Fury/Prot but I’m in no rush for that. As for my Mage… well, I have no idea why I’d dual spec him when Frost covers everything. Shame.

I’m sure most of you guys have seen these before but I’ve just discovered them – WoW music video. Seems to be tons on YouTube and the most famous are by a player called Nyhm. He’s not going to be the next Eminem but he’s decent enough and I’ve got to admire the huge amount time and effort taken to put these together. Here’s some of my favourite videos.

The above are all by Nyhm but below is a random one I found. Watch it then search for ‘Tunak Tunak Tun on YouTube for the connect

So I started a Mage. I’m holding off on going back to my Warrior and/or Priest until the dual talent spec system comes out – I’m looking forward to playing them as the tank and healer they deserve to be. My Mage is now level 20 and he’s pretty good fun, like a more potent version of my Shadow Priest I’m not sure I’m going to go back to my Shaman alt… maybe one day but I just found all of those totems too damn annoying.

Having played a spread of classes now, one thing I’ve found that creates a huge impact on ease of gameplay is melee vs magic and the rank of your spells. For instance, my Mage is Frost spec and just got a new Frostbolt upgrade at level 20. Fantastic. Improved damage and things die so much faster now buuuut I don’t get another upgrade until level 26. That’s 6 levels of using the exact same spell as I’m using now, doing the exact same damage followed by a huge jump upwards again. This puts me at a huge disadvantage compared to a melee class whoes abilities do damange based on weapon damage because they can continually upgrade their weapons. Plus melee classes rely a lot more on just hitting their opponent and can continually increase their strength and weapons to increase this damage. Sure, my Mage can increase his intelligence or buy a new staff but the real source of my damage comes from spells and they only upgrade every 6 or so levels.

So what am I saying? Well, I reckon the life of a caster is far harder than the life of a melee class and I think it’s got a lot to do with the whole spell rank system. EQ2 had a similar issue because spells/abilities got upgraded every 14 levels (although they had the whole Adept III/Master I twink system which made things easier). I wonder if WoW would benefit by adding more spell ranks spaced less far apart to make up for this deficit, especially at lower levels when mob’s hit points increase dramatically every level. Or maybe WoW should restructure their spells to be like Warhammer Online by removing the whole ranking system and have them scale as you level.