Yet another first impression postFollow

I started off as Night elf druid.
The first thing I noticed is just about everything in the zone is a shade of purple was cool at first but got old fast. Overall the grafics are pritty good, not outstanding but nice.

I'm only lvl 12 after about 12 hours. So far the lvling speed has been on par with other mmorpgs. The exp system so far has been realy screwy sometimes I'll kill a lvl 12 mob and get 80exp others 100, if I kill a lvl 15 mob the most ive got is 105. The exp/work you get from quests needs major adjustment, for example a quest that just had me clicking a few plants got me 600 exp, while another that had me get 10 somewhat rare drops (killed about 50 mobs to get the 10) only gave me 250 exp.

Some of the things I realy liked was that you can cast instant cast spells while running so none of that trying to get claim faster then someone with voke that was all to comon in ffxi. The very very fast regen rate of hp/mp is also very nice very seldom have to stop and wait for mp. The fact that you can tell exactly what lvl a mob is as well if it aggros by just hovering the mouse over it is very nice change over the dc-em-t-vt-it or green-blue-white-yellow-red crap of ffxi/eq

SO far my attempts at grouping has been realy bad, getting half the exp then I would of got soloing. as well as not getting the drops needed for quest from the basic free for all drop system in parties (basicly everytime the group killed something everyone would would run to loot the drop first) Not to mention the people bailing once they got the drops they needed or the #of kills. Hopefully that will change once people are used to the game.

The claim system in the game is kinda.. interesting in that the first person to hit the mob get the exp and loot. If person A and person B fire a spell on the mob at the same time A may get the claim but B the hate, B will end up killing it off but A gets the exp and loot from it. It a nice system for the most part as people can help someone out without woring about ******** up thier exp but it can be a pain sometimes if you dont see someone else hit it first.

The game does seem to be made for people who only play a few hours a day, You dont get that "I have to stay on another 3-4 hours to get XXXXXX done" fealing as you do in other games. As well as being able to logoff at anytime, as you do most things solo. If I powered my way thrue a lvl it gave me a grinding fealing from the non stop no downtime setup of the game

From what ive seen its very very hard to pull in this game as mobs will only chase you 20 yards or so before turning around and runing back to its spawn point. While this meens no trains it also meens the tradional party setup with a puller bring it to camp doesnt work well, insted the whole party has to run around to get to the mobs and fight off multiple links and adds. Fun but deadly to the healer, Ive had to chose many times to keep the party or myself alive resulting in my death and a long run as a ghost to my body, at least you dont lose exp when you die if you get your body.

Overall its a fun game. It needs some major tweaking as far as exp vrs work, hard quests should give more exp the easy ones. from what ive seen easy ones seem to net more exp then the hard ones. The quest story lines are typicly better then other games even if its the same style "go collect 5 items" but insted of getting them so some guy can make dinner its to help him reseach a curse or something.

If the potrait of the monster is grayed out, it is tapped by someone else.

It seems the monster AI in regards to pulling is done for a reason. It seems to be set up to limit the large party camping spots for experience.

It's so the exp parties won't get in the way of the people killing those mobs for quest items.




As for the exp in questing being different.

In the gathering quests, the only exp you're getting (aside from the random mob come across in your gathering) is the reward exp.

In the killing quests, the exp you get is from both the mobs and the reward.

I'm sure if you add up the total experience of the killing quests (reward and mob exp) it would come out roughly the same as the exp reward of the gathering quests.