AoC;better then EQ2?? - Page 3

Cuz · 06-10-2008, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cheddar

Personally I am bored with EQ2 but I know for sure that if I hadnt been playing the game for 4years and I picked up both AOC and EQ2, that i'd enjoy EQ2 way more than AOC.

Agreed. However I have no faith in the EQ2 team to innovate and make me want to come back to the same old same old.

Chix · 06-10-2008, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cheddar

Here's a 60 page thread about how stats mean nothing, enjoy reading it.

Strength, dexterity, wisdom, etc? Don't matter? - Age of Conan Forums

My personal experience along with what seems to be a hell of a lot of others is that gear is pretty much pointless. At least in EQ2 I could see base damage on CA's, how str effected your attack, how spell quality raised damage etc. All of this is missing from AOC, its bizzare.

Did you even play EQ2 from launch? If you did, you probably remember how damage numbers were missing from spell/CA examination there as well, or how gear meant just as little to certain classes. Lots of horrible imbalances, exploits and bugs. EXTREMELY linear starter content, as you had to do the exact same starter isle for every toon, the exact same citizenship quests, exact same class quests / armor quests. Then you only had the option of grinding in groups for XP, as there was little to none solocontent. NOTHING was as polished and smooth as it is today. Thats just how the industry works.

Anyone with just a little bit of MMO experience and sense of history should have no problem realising what a great start AoC is off to.

redsnapper · 06-10-2008, 12:32 PM

AoC is the new WoW.. Like it's been said, the graphics are great but the rest of the game is kind of shithouse.

One thing that really pisses me off is the death penalty, or lack thereof. You think we have it easy here? Wow. There's nothing there.. Just a free mode of transportation.

EQ2 in my opinion was better at launch. But then, I liked the challenge and not this easy mode bullshit that every new MMO gives us.

Cuz · 06-10-2008, 12:41 PM

Heh challange in MMOs.

redsnapper · 06-10-2008, 12:47 PM

Not anymore. That's the point.

Cuz · 06-10-2008, 01:08 PM

The icons weren't any harder to click back then...

icKx · 06-10-2008, 01:09 PM

I don't understand the people who keep pointing out that Eq2 was incomplete at launch as a defense for AoC.

Isn't the whole point of playing AoC to play a better game where some things aren't horribly broken?
So wait 6 months, or a year and AoC will be all fixed up and awesome?
PCGamer said these things a month ago: "We're concerned by the game's lack of polish when it's so close to launch" and the, "general lack of loot variation".
Why the should I trade one broken game for another?

And no I don't think that is "just how the industry works". Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention but I remember nothing but 'Editors Choice' and 'Game of the Year' accolades when WoW was released at the end of 04'.

xeshaka · 06-10-2008, 03:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by icKx

And no I don't think that is "just how the industry works". Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention but I remember nothing but 'Editors Choice' and 'Game of the Year' accolades when WoW was released at the end of 04'.

Pay ppl enough $$ they will say anything...

Illuminator · 06-10-2008, 04:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cuz

Agreed. However I have no faith in the EQ2 team to innovate and make me want to come back to the same old same old.

It takes pressure but things do get done lately, especially with the pressure from external competition. I don't see devs leaving as a bad trend the way I might have in the past, if they get replaced with fresh blood that doesn't sit there and resist every clamored-for improvement like an immobile boulder.

Lockeye ran off to do god-knows-what and look what I finally gained in his absence:

- Surging Tempest line fixed
- Coercer dps fixed
- VM doesn't require sprint
- Ranged pet control
- etc

Sure I hate the new Possession and I think the increased spell resist rate is a horrible idea, but I feel hopeful for the shadowknight subclass and others like I haven't before.

Vhalen ran off and now we hopefully don't have to deal with amazing questlines whose major plot includes fetching 50 statues from "somewhere" (what could it have been next, 100 or 200??).

Domino took over from the last retard and the crafting opportunities exploded, not to mention the holy UI change with the spam buttons taken off the crowded hotbars and put right onto the crafting window.

Grimwell is the new community so-and-so but who needs him when we have eq2flames?

The programmer devs are also stepping up to bat to be more responsive about the performance of their code.

I'm sure there are more. Warhammer seems like the revolutionary heir-in-waiting but I can stay occupied with evolutionary improvements vs. revolutionary until then. Just keep the pressure on, and bitch fearlessly when it is time to bitch, that is all. Healthy fear works wonders.

Longfangz · 06-11-2008, 12:46 AM

My wife and I have played EQ2 for several years now, and we both pretty much came to the same conclusion... and came back to EQ2.

First off, we have both played MMO's for many years starting with EQ1, then WoW for about 6-8 months when it first came out(ugh) and then came to EQ2. I can definately say from our point of view, while AoC has 'some' perks, it wasn't good enough for us to switch over to. We played for almost 2 weeks in which time just casual play got us well into the 40's... leveling is not hard at all. It's all quest based leveling, though the quests are monotonous and constantly make you run around talking to people and traveling back to the same zones over and over you just came back from. However, the quest journal is so cumbersome that we pretty much just resorted to using quest markers on the map that were at the zone lines to determine where we had quests to complete/turn in.
Oh yeah, btw there is no need for a map add-on as each zone has a map, and it even points out where you should kill/search etc to finish which quests... no effort involved to figure out how to finish quests and level. Which leads into the next issue...
Most people will most likely not even bother to group until they hit their late 50's-60's, so everyone solos and is totally clueless about HOW to play their class in a group. I played a guardian and my wife played a priest of mitra. While we could solo just about anything within 5 levels of us epic or solo, we quickly realized grouping was simply a pain. DPS classes have no knowledge of aggro control, which made it even harder when it came to grouping with the craptastic collision system the game uses. Everything... and I mean EVERYTHING has a space that it occupies that you cannot go through... you simply stop. A rock, a uneven spot in the paving, a mob, a person, a pet... So, considering that as a tanky type you have no reactive aggro, and in order to hold aggro you have to actually hit all the mobs to keep them on you. While this may not seem bad, you need to understand that melee attacks are all pushbutton(no autoattack) and the swings are in arcs in the direction you are facing and swinging... however if you are using sword and board, you can only hit 2-3 mobs in front(since one handed weapons have a short range) of you unless you constantly turn around to try and keep all the mobs on you, and the mobs will not stay in front of you because they cannot go through each other either(collision system). Instead, you get boxed in and can't move aside from turn... you lose aggro to one mob to an AEing caster... guess what, you can't do anything because you are still stuck and the caster dies, the mob chews on the healer, who is also out of range of you, and kills the healer... etc. Meanwhile as the tank you slowly get beat down after your group dies without any heals not being able to do a thing about it all because one mob got loose or simply couldn't get to you past the other mobs. Or, you get stuck behind one of your groupmates and surrounded by the others and can only reach a couple of the mobs around you... etc etc. Or even worse yet, necromancers in AoC get the ability to have multiple pets, 4 constant and a temporary, though humongous, 5th pet which, btw, also has it's own area, so you pull a group of mobs, the necro sends his pets, and suddenly they are all in yoru way getting chewed to shreds and you can't even get to the mob(s). Sadly, I can't imagine a raid in AoC because unless the raid mobs have ginormous hit boxes only about 6 people could actually hit the mob of the entire raid.
The default UI is a joke, your groupmate UI makes each of their health bars about 1 inch long on a 20+ inch screen, no mana bars, and if they even get 20 feet from you it will no longer show their health bar as gray and you cannot see them on the map. I would run woth a group and actually watch their group info dissappear and reappear as they ran behind me. Even with a custum UI this happens all the time. Their is a "target's target" window(though it is about half the size of the target window), but you cannot attack the mob through it, you have to actually target each mob and hope you are on the same one as the tank(as initially they will all target the tank if he is the one pulling) making it easy to accidently steal aggro. Targetting is a pain as well as most humanoid mobs look very similar to pc's you end up targetting other players more than the mobs due to mob's/pc's actually taking up more space than they do visually, unless you have autotarget on, which opens a whole new can of worms.
Chat is bland, no channels, only ooc/shout/tell/group, but it is very difficult to tell between the different chat groups as the colors are bland, text is very narrow and does not show the few colors well at all. Targets and target's target, as well as your health/mana/stamina windows are affixed and unable to be moved from the hotbars which cannot be moved from the bottom of the screen.
Overall, the game is very frustrating from many different aspects, and very WoWish regarding leveling ease and quest paths, as on PVE servers at least, eveyone starts in the same zone and is not KoS in other cities(once you get to 20ish in the same newbie zone area). All pc's are humans, very little is noticeable aside from certain cultures can't be mages or soldiers.
Also, I have a pretty good system that will run any and all games including EQ2 with minimal to no lag regardless of how many people/buildings/pc's are in them, but in most of AoC I was lucky to see 25fps. Enter a crowded area or get a half dozen or so NPC's runnign at you and my system would drop to 5-10 fps making some parts unbearable. This I can only assume has to do with the game being reverse engineered to be DX9 instead of the DX10 platform they initially intended and programmed the game to be played on, but simply ran out of money and time waiting for it to be released. Some of the scenery is pretty, shadows kinda cool, but unless you have most current and super uber system, you can count on turning all of it off to be able to play at all.
Overall, we were totally unimpressed. It's another WoW(especially since 90 percent of the players in it came from WoW) with a plethora of bugged quests, horrid UI issues and crappy loot where really.. stats don't matter much and upgrades are a joke. Gear quality means nothing as a blue peice of gear the same level or even one level lower may have worse stats than a white or green item (kinda like comapring a legendary of fabled item of the same level to a treasured or MC'd item)
Maybe the game will get better in 6 months to a year, but seeing how long they worked on it to get it this far, I'm not about to try and wait it out to see if it gets good enough to keep playing.