The 'Ask a Tester' threadFollow

Has Blizzard released the new push yet? If so, do you know where it caps out?

How important is cash flow going to be in this game? Am I going to be buying or questing the "good stuff"?

Hopefully you'll be questing. You can play adequately without farming items, as you will get items along the way, and enough money to do the basic things you need to. If you have ample extra money, yes you can turn to the auction channels, but I absolutely hate scrolling through the WTB/WTS spam, and have barely ever bought a thing besides tradeskill supplies and spell training.

It's a lot better. Check out this page for in depth information on fishing. It's interactive, and not just a "sit there and wait for system message" skill.

Right now skillups slow down quite a bit as you get higher, but this is still subject to tweaking. I'll see if anything changes next push. And yes, you can fish up locked boxes with delightful items inside.

I have a question for a tester. How many players can you have per account? Like there's gonna be a monthly fee for each account i guess. I thought i read somewhere you could have 8 players an account, but then i seen somebody saying only 2-3. Please if anybody knows let me know.

AWESOME!!!

Combat is fast-paced (as far as an RPG is concerned) and involves non-twitch decisions. There is no more bland "press A and watch" syndrome. While there's always going to be some of that, rogues are constantly using abilities as far as their stamina permits, warriors are using different combat skills within their stance or possibly even changing stances, warlocks and shamans are prone to pulling out all manners of spells. In fairness, I usually do the same 4 or 5 things over and over, but I do have options, and sometimes I find it necessary to fall back on them. This isn't EQ where casters are limited to 8 spells and melee don't have anything except a once-per-hour discipline. Fights are usually about a minute solo, far less grouped, and it is not uncommon to have multiple live mobs at once.

In short, it's a lot more exciting, and a lot less brain-dead.

Sun beating down on you, exerting physical effort, I'm getting depressed again already.

Shoot, now I have to write something.

The aggro system: When you hit a monster with a melee attack, you get aggro. The more damage you do, the more mob hate you gain. Same goes with spell damage. Healing someone who the mob has mob hate with also increases mob hate towards you. The warrior does indeed have a taunt skill that increases mob hate for him.

The warrior and the rogue have their own special fighting systems. The warrior has a rage bar instead of a mana pool. The basic principle is still the same, this is the pool you draw from to use your abilities. However, when a Warrior is at rest, the rage bar is empty. Rage is generated during combat by damage you cause, receive or block and there are also abilities that can raise your rage instantly, should you find yourself low on rage.

Once rage is generated, you can then use this rage to activate your abilities just as you would use mana. After combat, rage will slowly fade to 0 and you'll have to build it back up again to continue using skills. Rage is instantly reset to 0 when switching stances, as well. There are three different stances, each with their own set of moves (which you can browse at Allakhazam's fabulous Warrior skill list)

Rogues, instead of mana or rage, have energy. All combat related moves take energy. They have opening moves (like Sinister Strike or Gouge) which build up combo points. Some moves (like Garrote or Cheap Shot) can only be done while stealthed, but have better than usual properties, like large damage or a lengthy stun. Once you have accumulated 1 to 5 combo points (the maximum) you can use a finishing move.

Finishing moves (like Eviscerate or Rupture) do scalable damage/buffs/debuffs. The more combo points you have when you use the finishing move, the more powerful or longer lasting it is. All combo points are generic and any opening move can be used to provide combo points for any finisher.

All other classes (exluding hunter, nothing is known about how they work at this time) use mana for their attacks. Yes, their is an auto attack that just has you attack normally with your weapon.

You certainly don't have to do quests to level, and you can gain quite ample experience just wandering around killing monsters, but if you don't do quests you're losing out on giant chunks of experience, money, and items. The game basically revolves around the questing system, but you're never forced to do them. If you wanted you could wander in the wilderness for five minutes, kill some monsters, gain some exp, and log off.

The ability system is most certainly not like Diablo. When you level, you go to a class trainer (located in villages or cities around the world) and pay the trainer money to learn abilities if you are of the appropriate level to learn said abilites. You are not limited on the amount of abilities you can learn. To get Rank 2 of a spell or ability, you must have Rank 1. You'll likely learn all possible abilities at level up anyway, since nearly all of them are quite quite useful.

Priests are probably the easiest class to get a group with, but no classes have trouble finding groups. There is no Shadowknight in WoW ;)

I know I posted what classes are good at what somewhere, but now I can't find it, blechem! I'll just say there's much more of a blending of roles in WoW, it's not cut and dry like EQ.

Being a different race gives you a minor statistical variance. There is no gimped class/race combo. [Edit: Oh, there will also be different racial traits (innate racial bonuses) and perhaps race-specific talents, so there will be a difference, but nothing crippling, and they're not in yet so I can't comment on them at this time.] A warrior with a weapon *will* do more damage over time than a mage with the same weapon.

There we go.. all done.

Edited, Tue Jun 15 15:16:17 2004 by JAEFo

All right, this may have already been answered in a different thread, however... I did notice that you said that there is no shadowknight in this game... Is that meaning to say that there will be no Death Knight possibility for the undead?

Edit* Just curious, have they begun the new push?

Edited, Tue Jun 15 17:11:47 2004 by Valhallan

I would actually be surprised if I didn't see Death Knight as a hero class somewhere along the line.

The Shadowknight (SK) comment was referring to the fact that SKs in EQ were largely worthless. The ***** class of EQ. They got buffed up with a few better weapons or soemthing in one of the newer expansions (can't remember if it was expansion 36 or expansion 54) but for the longest time they were basically a worthless class that was entirely unecessary.

If you concentrate on one tradeskill, you can make useful items for yourself (if you have the right tradeskill) starting right from skill point 1. If you spread yourself thin and try doing many of them, you'll end up only being able to make stuff a few levels below you. But as the skill gets higher the item quality jumps up (for leatherworking, say) so it's useful all around. Now no time for talk, must play new push.. go go install..

Edit: Oh, and it doesn't cost crumloads of money to tradeskill. It's all very fluid, best tradeskill system I've ever seen really.

Edited, Tue Jun 15 21:52:00 2004 by JAEFo

But Shadowknights were the most glaring example of class worthlessness.