I finally got around to customizing my Runes of Magic UI this past weekend. Curse.com has a section for it and already the addons are flowing in. Anyone who has used them in WoW or other MMOs will recognize many of the features the addons give and tweak.

Apart from UI modifications, I also got my character into the mid-20′s, joined a guild and did a bit of grouping. One thing that is excellent about the game is the community, higher level players are often around in the lowbie zones to assist in difficult quests or to answer questions. Grouping is generally easy to do, though the group content tends to be deadly difficult. (very, very deadly) Given the dual-class system you can typically find players of any type in abundance, this leads to a general ‘bring whoever wants to come’ kind of grouping. I like the style so far, will have to see how it changes later in game.

The guilds in RoM have levels, the levels determine the number of members allowed and some guild content. From what I’ve seen I think most of the guild content is still in the works, they’ve got a level cap set at 5 currently. Leveling a guild is accomplished through the members donating different types of resources — gold, ore, wood, herbs — to fill a type of quota needed to move up. There seems to be an option for guild versus guild PvP — not sure if it’s actually enabled yet, I havn’t seen or heard of any wars going on. Guild halls will also be available at some point. (the npc is in-game for the GH, it’s either the level cap or lack of GH content right now) I’m waiting to see more on guilds in the future — it has the potential to be a very fun part of the game.

Lastly, I’ve done a lot of crafting too. Crafting is quite the grind in RoM, harvesting especially. The items you can make, apart from the rares, are generally not as good as the dropped loot — so I don’t see it being highly profitable. Arcane Transmutation is a — I’d consider it crafting, at least — very fun feature, allowing some really nice customization and buffing to equipment. Using charges that can be bought with in-game tokens — farmed from dailies — or bought off the cash shop, the AT takes runes, jewels and other items and allows the player to remove stats from some pieces and mix them with others. (that was a pretty simple and generalised explanation, you can use fusion stones with pieces of equipment to turn them into mana stones, and mana stones can be combined with another piece of equipment to give it extra stats — to a total of 6 different stats) While costly, I suspect I’ll be doing a lot of transmuting in the future, especially for equipment I can give to alts.

I spent all of yesterday evening and night playing RoM, though I wanted to play a bit of all three I just couldn’t pull myself away. I’m still pretty low level, 13/11  S/P, and I’ve just begun to figure out what I like about my setup and how to play it.

The great thing about RoM is the customization that you can have in your playstyle, even with the limited number of single classes.  I started as a Priest, leveled it to 10 for the second class, and was certain it’d remain my main. The secondary class I had some idea on — the Scout class had appeal to me, I wanted another class that did not use mana and had some usefulness. The Scout is a ranged DPS class with some debuffs and uses a powerpool called ‘concentration’. The Priest class is primarily healing, with some ranged magic damage — the switch between the two was pretty natural since my playstyle didn’t change much, DoT Nuke Nuke Nuke Loot. The options it gave, though, were much better — I no longer had to use mana to kill things, so I could reserve that power for heals. I made the switch from a Priest primary to the Scout because I simply enjoyed the skills on the Scout more, and I still had plenty of healing effectivness on the shared Priest powers — at least for my solo play. I’ll need to explore the other classes more to see what they offer, and refine the type of class I want to play further — currently thinking a K/S (Knight/Scout) for a sort of Ranger-ish build. (I think the Druid class is coming at some point, I guess that’d be a true ‘Ranger’)

The other element of RoM I’ve yet to explore is grouping and guilds. I have yet needed a group, the leveling is fast so far and I’ve only really seen one group quest — which is now too low level to really matter. While this ease of play is great for the casual or solo gamer, I just wonder what impact it could have on the community. Harder games, while less fun and casual  overall, do encourage community building efforts and tend to have the best communities. Community is important to me and could easily kill an otherwise fun game. I’ve stuck with Eve Online for years now, hardly ‘playing’ the game, just because of the community. As far as guilds go, I’ve seen a few recruiting, but I tend to take the choice seriously, wanting to look into their member counts, active members, maturity, hardcore/casual standings, plans for the present and future… This tends to bog me down, but whenever I do get through the muck the results have always been good — even great — finding guilds that can last years through several different games. So, I’m now sorting through the guilds available, on my server at least (it should be Osha) and will likely give the other servers a good looking over.

Some things I’ve found to be pretty cool with RoM: the quest help, you can view the NPC givers or requirments on the world map, and even get a handy colored arrow to guide you to them. (up to three at once) This helps tremendously with the sometimes poor wording in the quests, or the larger cities with little to define locations.

There’s a lottery game that you can purchase tickets for, it works like real life ones — pick/random 5 different numbers, if you’re lucky they’ll be rolled at some point.

The AH works much like WoW’s, with a history button (don’t know if WoW added that, I think I remember an addon I had that did something similar) to see how an item’s price history has been — makes plopping things down on it a breeze.

Instant transportation between cities and within major cities is excellent, it helps those who are too low level to get a horse, or don’t want to buy one with cash. (I’ll be giving the game some time before deciding on dropping 10 bucks or so on a horse) 

Upon reaching level 13 (or was it 12? think it was 13) you get a special talisman that stores TP (Training Points, to increase the ranks of your skills) and after reaching so many you can form a item that allows you to transfer those points over to your other class. (you level your classes seperatly, and can only rank up when on the current class)

I’ll be exploring the addons this weekend. In other MMOs I’ve used them in varying degrees, from heavy raid use to light casual soloing, will be interesting to see what is out there currently.