Changed the blog’s title to make it a bit more accurate. If I ever stop my perfectionist habits and get some story material I want to publish on here, I’ll just start another page and do it.
On to the gaming! With my true venture into F2P MMO’s I’ve come to look all over for some quality titles. Requiem: Bloodymare is close to being that, and an MMO I’ve come to really enjoy — despite some of it’s flaws.
Requiem is a pretty standard Asian F2P MMO port to a western audience. It’s cash shop supported, has a lot of grinding, and some damn good art. The style is a sort of post-apocalyptic horror fantasy, where technology too great for the humanoid races to fully understand backfired and triggered massive destruction and the mutation of different natural species — turning them into horrifying abominations that love to feast on humanoid flesh. With this dark style comes lots of bloody fighting, something that feels especially nice having gone through dozens of cartoonish, blood free MMOs. (I never tried Age of Conan, so I can’t say much about their bloody combat) It’s not just blood, however, as death animations incorporate decapitations and dismemberment — yummy!
Requiem currently has four playable races, each with a generic starter class. At level 10 players can choose their first job/class with each race having two choices unique to their race. (though the archtypes portrayed are generally one melee and one caster, with the exception of the Xenoa who have a Hunter class and Battlemagician, both ranged — one with a gun the other with magic) At higher levels comes the second job which is a further choice between two classes that are based on the first job. The classes and races are diverse enough to allow for alt creation, though only two starting zones exist so repeating content may get boring after the third or fourth alt. (that’s likely plenty for the average gamer) The two classes that I’ve been playing so far the most (keep in mind, as of this posting it has only been roughly a week of casual play) are the Kruxena Soul Hunter and the Xenoa Hunter. The SH is a pretty typical caster class, it has curses and DoTs with some good, quick damage abilities too (AoEs are great). The combat is pretty fast, many of the abilities that I have are on short casts or instant and can be used while running. (with a few exceptions, some of the more useful/powerful abilities like Vampiric Touch, a life tap) Armor is not a strong point with the SH, it does get some buffs but it’s extremely squishy, kiting has so far been the most effective way to kill mobs but I think that will change as I get more AoEs. The hunter is a sort of ranged/close combat hybrid. It uses launchers which are a sort of portable canon and knuckles. (think brass knuckles) Using leather armor they have more close combat effectivness than the SH, it was quite noticeable too.
Rogue fighting Ziebalt
Since this post has taken me a few days to write up, I’ve since started and tried the rogue class — the other first job class Kruxena get at level 10. It has leather armor so it can sustain far better close combat damage than the SH, which is fortunate since melee is its primary form of attack. It’s fairly standard rogue class combat: dual wielding, fast attacks, high damage.
I still have not tried any PvP out, will be looking into it soon since my rogue is on Hammerdine — Requiem’s PvP server. The server vs server PvP has also been added, so I’ll check that out some.
