some statements of the leaker forum - do you agree?

[Anonymous]

Hey Guys - I've been reading alot in the leaker forum.

And one of the last statements leaked of the beta forum really suprised me... its out of this http://s1.zetaboards.com/betaleaks/topic/1205757/1/ thread - with much more suprising stuff in it.

I would like to hear the impressions of our FA guys who are in the beta especially regarding this topic... Thanks!

Ok I Give UP, What's the Deal with Spell Casting? Devs Please Read This



You start the game out with heal self and mana missile.

You quickly learn that heal self is worthless im combat since it has a casting time and heals less than 1 hit from a person or mob. It is only to lessen downtime or to use when running.

Then you realize that mana missile hits for less that starting weapons or a starting bow, fizzles 3 out of 5 casts, and has the built in disadvantage of being highly dodgeable.

So you think its no big deal they are the starting spells and are at lvl 1. They will get better as their skill level increases and later spells that use reagents will also of course be better.

So since the starting spells arent worthwhile using in combat you fire them off at the sky or a wall constantly for a few days. Eventually they reach lvl 25, but there is no improvement. You buy durable lesser spells. You buy the spell elderich sphere but realize its damage is the same as mana missile, it doesn't have the aoe that mana missile does, and it costs a reagent (worthless).

You continue shooting the walls and the sky for a few more days until lesser magic and mana missile/self heal are all at 50. There is a slight improvement to mana missile aoe size but no damage increase and no or extremely little improvement to self heal. Starting weapons or a bow still do more damage. Lesser magic durable spells has leveled up but still appears to have no effect.

You buy lesser magic mana reduction.

You buy greater magic. You buy greater magic spells rend and beacon. Beacon marks a target and that's it, and costs 2 reagents....one of which being ash which is very hard to come by (useless). Rend costs the same mana as mana missile, does the same damage or less, uses a reagent 1 bone, and doesn't have an aoe like mana missile. Ok so rend is useless in combat but you are left with it being the ONLY spell to level greater magic to 25. You spend several more days grinding and buying well over 1500 bone and firing rend into the sky or a wall to reach 25 greater magic.

At 25 greater magic you buy frailty which is supposed to debuff their damage resistance, and heal other. Frailty makes no noticeable improvement to either your spell or melee damage and costs 2-3 reagents. Heal other is no better that the lesser magic heal other.

You buy greater magic durable spells.

You buy witchcraft. You buy needles and sluggish. Needles does less damage than mana missile and rend, doesn't have the aoe that mana missile does and costs 4 reagents. Sluggish debuffs quickness but has no noticeable effect to their run speed, attack speed, or ranged speed. So both witch craft spells are useless in combat and given how the others have progressed there is no reason to believe that will change.

So I have spent a solid two weeks grinding over 5000 reagents and over 10,000 gold, and spent day after day firing combat worthless spells into the sky hoping once I reach that next benchmark something will change.

Now im in the position of needing to grind lesser magic to 75 so I can buy leap which is an actual useful spell. Grind greater magic to 50 with rend or another combat useless spell for probably another 5000 reagents only to have rend and frailty remain useless despite level and then finally obtain new and useless greater magic spells. Grind witchcraft to 25 for about some additional thousands of reagents, firing at the sky because needles and sluggish are once again combat worthless spells. Then get new useless witchcraft spells and so on and so on.

Seriously how can these spells and this system have made it into the game, even into beta. It is clearly broken from the very beginning. Spells do not improve from 0,25,50,75,100 except so minorly it is barely noticeable. When you finally reach a new level and new spells open up they are worse than the spells you already have and don't ever get any better., and because they are worthless on combat you are forced to spend weeks grinding thousands upon thousands of reagents and firing them into the sky.

When you look at the spells as a whole in all the spell schools it seems as if this trend continues. Every school is very similar, worthless highly specific debuff, worthless highly specific buff, a few direct damage missiles spells that are undoubtedly worse than spells you already had, a few direct damage aoe spells that are undoubtedly worse than spells you already had, and a few unique and possibly good spells. There is very little diversity. The only difference between many of them is the name and probably the graphic.

I find myself for the first time really doubting darkfall. I mean combat is 100% all about stamina, running/chasing, hack and slash, and spamming consumables....and now we find out magic is completely fucked as well.

Where are the 500 spells we were promised. When exactly will you ever get a new spell that is better than your old ones or even better than mana missile? Where are the crowd control spells we were assured existed in the game from quotes like:


Quote, "Styles/stances work the same way in Darkfall as they do in martial arts – some are more defensive, others are more offensive.....Crippling Blow with a sword can slow an opponent.....Other disabling spell effects include stuns, paralyze, slow, blind, mute, etc".


I would say 40-60% are mmorpg players prefer to play casters but this system will be summarily rejected by the masses, as will melee. So if DFO releases feature incomplete as we all know it currently is, with borked melee, spellcasting, sub par user interface, and bad chat system there is no way a beautiful world and full loot will save it.

I realize that different level staffs are in game but there is no difference in their effects. This needs to be added immediately for proper testing, but since they will likely raise the power of all spells it will not change new spells being worse than old ones.

Darkfall has huge potential and the last thing I want to see is it go the way of AoC. If additional time is needed to revamp the combat and spell casting system I suggest that is the only option.






The whole darkfall system have more grind then any game we play. They claim to be a revolutionary sandbox game and also good for casual gamers, but its not. I tought economy would do all the job in darkfall, but not grinding on skills like it had been implemented. I tought i could raise one of my skill to 50 before a week and an other 50 before 2 weeks, but i think masterd 1 skill at 100 would cost you more then 3 month, thats mean, more time spending then wow to be level 80. Come one. They claim that they have no levels, but skills improvement is the same improvement that we fear in other mmorpg's like wow and it make me sick. WTF with the failed pourcentage rate? Devs said that we would have no chance like other mmorpg's, but gianna said taht we also have critical hit.

This game need a hell lot of improvement. Shame on your devs, (real comment.) You can still fix your game by removing 50% of the grind maybe. I hope release is not at the 25 because i wont pay unteal the game had been fully improve.





Once people finish their builds, we can truly test the PvP, and the devs will definitely tweak damage (as they have already done with air magic).

Right now, magic is useful more for its utility. My buddy uses mana to stamina religiously. I'm sure a lot of the AoE's will be the bread and butter of magi later.

At the moment, archery is definitely better than magic in terms of dealing damage at range quickly, and I think it's meant to be that way or else archery would be pretty useless.

As for the melee system, they need to let you hold attacks (like you can spells), and let you "charge" up the damage.

So if some one's just spamming melee while running in circles, you can hold your attacks and make them count.





I realize i will get flamed, ill be called a troll, a whiner, and who knows what else but every word i have spoken is 100% truth.

The spell casting system is completely ridiculous, so bad its hard to believe it even exists in this state. The worst i have ever seen in a mainstream mmorpg.




I never played any beta excluding df, but for release a bad game so soon when its not complete at all, i think the game will die at launch.

Im mad because df was my only hope to go back to mmorpg. Like i said, they can fix they problem and all almost all their promise system that they said they will implement.

[Lithium]

I read this post. And I read all the people who flamed the guy after he posted it.

Don't read into things. You'll end up disliking the game before you get to form your own opinion.

[Anonymous]

I read this post. And I read all the people who flamed the guy after he posted it.

Don't read into things. You'll end up disliking the game before you get to form your own opinion.

I am not disliking or liking because of random ppl - but I care for the FA opinion, so I'd like to hear em

[Runjun]

Sounds like he might be right.  All the videos I see are people using mana missile.

[Tbone]

It's hard to say. I haven't used magic at all. I will say that I've encountered three types of attack so far: melee slash, arrows, and mana missle. I haven't run across anything else.

Now I've been focusing on arrows. I've noticed that instead of spending my time looking to see if there are any additional bow skills to pick up, I've been trying to get the crafting skills necessary to make arrows.

I will say that almost every time I run into PvP, someone is throwing mana missles at me. Magic is definitely not too weak. The splash damage actually makes them incredibly hard to dodge, especially considering their size.

To be honest, we've really been focusing on other things. Grinding your character is a hard thing to set out to do in this game, as each skill is seperate from each other. We've been setting other tasks like exploration, clan building, quest accomplishing, etc. and letting our characters kind of evolve naturally. Since we're the first in, we're kinda looking at the bigger picture rather than focusing on the nuances of our individual characters. That will change when more of us get in or we get some of the bigger goals cleared, but until then I just don't think we have enough information for you regarding this. Broin might be able to speak a little more about it.

It still feels like a lot of features are not turned on. Some of it is because we're still newbs and haven't figured it out, but I think some things just haven't been activated yet. We've run into a lot of "NPC" towns that are completely void of NPCs. The mob count seems very low if massive amounts of people are going to play, which could be a choice until they get those people in. The mobs are very intelligent and difficult, so if they had the regular amount of spawn, the few that are in right now probably wouldn't be able to explore much without being overwhelmed by the aggro.

It's still beta and a lot of these things will continue to be tweaked, I'm sure. Right now the game feels like it's more designed to be a player-interaction sort of game. The excitement doesn't come from slowly grinding your spells and skills, but learning how to survive against other players by sneaking up or sneaking around or managing stamina or not biting off more than you can chew. A part of me things that they are just showing us the skeleton structure to test out the core elements of the game and then will add this whole new layer out of nowhere when it gets close to release.

Oh, and I think being able to level a skill by shooting it into the wall is stupid. They need to change that.

[Tbone]

As an addendum, I just checked the patch notes for the most recent patch. They have made a lot of changes to a lot of spells:

Changes to damage, consumption of reagents and more has occured in these spells:
Blast in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Eldritch Sphere in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Heal Self in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Health to Mana in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Lay On Hands in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Mana Missile in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Mana to Stamina in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Stamina to Health in Lesser Magic has been tweaked
Flesh Curse in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Frailty in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Heal Other in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Infliction Shield in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Infliction Ward in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Missile Fury in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Rend in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Shrapnel in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Venom in Greater Magic has been tweaked
Firebolt in Fire Magic has been tweaked
Dragon Breath in Fire Magic has been tweaked
Fireball in Fire Magic has been tweaked
Inferno in Fire Magic has been tweaked
Ball Lightning in Air Magic has been tweaked
Acid Arrow in Earth Magic has been tweaked
Icicle in Water Magic has been tweaked
Disease in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Exhaust in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Insect Swarm in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Palsy in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Pestilence in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Sluggish in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Stupidity in Witchcraft Magic has been tweaked
Some magic schools has had their charging effect tweaked.

[Jarimus]

Man, it is really disheartening to see an official release (here, the Build 119 Patch Notes) from a company have VERY blatant, elementary mistakes in grammar usage.

I know this is a new company and a new business venture, but this game is so mom-and-pop it's ridiculous.

I am still optimistic for the game and all, but it just questions their level of professionalism as an organization, and brings me worry about customer service and account management.

I own a house, and my credit is VERY important to me. I don't know how comfortable I am giving my credit card information to an organization that doesn't have a handle on the English language.



EDIT: Sorry for the doom and gloom, just getting very frustrated with the game and Aventurine.

[Tbone]

The grammar seems fine in the game. The game doesn't feel like one of those Korean imports with broken English or anything crazy like that. It's a solid game. There's enough information out there on the company that you can rest assured that they'd never be able to get away with any kind of fraud.

Patience, young grasshopper. We need you!

[Phienyx]

I also think that alot of players, including the one who posted that, are used to other MMOs where the casters can just sit back at a safe distance and do major damage while being mostly out of harm's way.  Also they're used to targeted grinding to become uber in a certain skill area within 2 weeks.

This isn't DAoC, Evercrack or WOW and casters shouldn't rule the battle field except with much experience that takes alot of time to accumulate.  

Put all thoughts, ideas and comparisons of other MMOs out of your heads and open your minds to Darkfall.  I'm sure it needs alot of tweaks and improvements, but it is its own game, not a clone of any other.

[Anonymous]

Man, it is really disheartening to see an official release (here, the Build 119 Patch Notes) from a company have VERY blatant, elementary mistakes in grammar usage.....

.....n that doesn't have a handle on the English language.



EDIT: Sorry for the doom and gloom, just getting very frustrated with the game and Aventurine.

I am sorry, but pull your head in. I bet many Europeans feel the same way about translations into German, French and other European languages when games developed in the US are sold overseas. WoW comes to mind.

I have good friends in a software company called Sunflowers in Germany and they take allot of time to get accurate translations at huge expense and yet some of the story is always lost in translation.

Also lets not forget US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are all a bastard mix of watered down euro-culture and our grammar is no where near perfect Queens English. Let us all exercise some tolerance or else I'll go over there and put the letter u back in all the words you lot removed it from!

;-) TiC tone ;-)

[Tbone]

"America! Fuck yeah!"

=P

[Lithium]

...Coming again to save the mother-fucking day, yeah!

[Ash]

All of your base are belong to us

[Anonymous]

Sheesh, Im still jealous I get no pre game play time.... All I can do is wait... I dont know if what you guys say sho0uld worry me or not I hear mixed emotions about this game everywhere...
We shall wait & see

[Jarimus]

My bad. Just getting really frustrated and being "that guy" venting those frustrations.

I'm not frustrated that I'm not in beta (yeah, it's beat, but I joined the forums late). I am more frustrated about NOT KNOWING game and release details, and the lack of communication from the staff. It was cool for a while, and a good communication tactic to use players to viral market the game without spending a dime, but now it is getting ridiculous. They've talked about a new website, and all these things, and there is no info with the (doubly pushed-back) release 2 weeks away.

No matter WHAT they say, there IS enough time to update the community. Honesty is ALWAYS the best policy in PR and all mass communication (especially crisis communication - A-Rod u fail). And, hiring a full-service communication agency that does advertising/marketing/PR is not that expensive. My agency has done some great, effective work for businesses for only a few thousand dollars or LESS.

This could become a university case study in how NOT to develop and market a game as it pertains to the community. I feel like they are assuming we are all 18 years old and blindly going to buy the game and try it for 1-3 months no matter what. But I would say there is a LARGE population that are 20 somethings and older (basically all of FA) that at least want to research the game ahead of buying it to see if it is worth spending the money. Yes, most of you and I too will buy the game no matter what, but I think we would rather have the freedom to get some more info on the game ahead of release to make an informed decision ourselves because we are all educated people. And this lack of info will be what, I think, drives a lot of people to go ahead and buy the game, but quit within the first 1-3 months.

Not that this is me, I'm just sayin' it's frustrating when I spend all day counseling organizations on how to effectively communicate and market their services, billing them like $100/hour, and at home there's this AMAZING game with all this potential up on a pedestal with some D-Bags ruining it's brand.