Freebies Cont… (Runes of Magic)
Posted by nefchast on February 19, 2009
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.
