Reel Expression

As you may have figured out, I play a lot of video games. While I do enjoy playing the wii (a lot) and psp, I’m not much of a console gamer. Yeah Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones is more than a little fun, especially while traveling.

The games that tie up most of my time are MMOs that have Player v Player. Yeah. I’m that kind of gamer. Just not the tea bagging, leet speak trash talking kind. PvE holds no interest for me and is repetitive. And those raids people like to talk about? Hours fighting an AI that doesn’t change? Doesn’t adapt? Bleh. I want an enemy that is constantly changing stratagy. I enjoy thinking on my toes and I’m pretty fucking good at it.

My first MMO was shadowbane. It was pretty simple and low graphics quality. However it was unbelievably fun. I was in a smallish guild and when they closed our server to merge a few, our city was the longest standing one. We’d fight 3 or more times larger armies and still not loose our city. I remember one battle when the GL ordered us to delete the walls to confuse the enemy, which worked like a charm. I remember being in the a separate group of stealthers in the battle where we’d sneak behind enemy lines and take out the healers.

In POTBS, we were the first nation who conqured the map on all servers - you had to take control of a number of enemy ports to flip the map. We were highly organized and very outnumbered and we crushed them. And I partisipated in just about every battle. During those battles, I’d be in “black group” - our sails would be black - which consisted of fast ships that would weave in and out picking off ships and causing a general disruption. We’d have nightly pvp open sea runs and I’d be what was called the tackler… the person who the group followed, would maneuver into a good wind position and attack.

I’m addicted and I highly enjoy playing MMOs, but I’ve gotten more then just a bit angry over the years of paying for shit games. Age of Conan was shit. I’d stopped playing that before I left on holiday. I’m so fucking tired of the fantasy genre and the fact that all games have the exact same issues and ideas. EQ was dull for me - I hate raiding. WoW was shit. LOTR was dull. Vangaurd had so many issues and ended up giving me wrist pain that still creeps up.

The new game of the moment is Warhammer and I’m jonzing for it like heroine junky. I had preodered it while I was away but when I tried to find out which mates were going to play it, they said not to bother so I cancelled it. But of course, when I get back I find out they are playing and loving it. Bugger. It wouldn’t be so bad if fucking EA didn’t make it so us Euros couldn’t play on US servers. I fucking hate that.

So I go to direct2drive, which has worked for me before, but on checkout even using a US credit card and address, it cancels the order stating “country restricted.” Jesus monkey fucker. That is 10 levels of wrong. I hate in this ever shrinking world that some companies force you to do what they want. I don’t ever have ping problems - which is most of the public “reasoning” behind it. I play during early US primetime, so don’t give me the bloody stupid “you want to play with others in MMOs” line.

Every fucking game does this now and it pisses me off to no end. Let me choose which servers I want to play on. Let me fucking choose which mates I want to game with.

Being away from “normal” life for 2 months gave me a different perspective on things. For one, I’d been creativly stunted all year. Partly from burn out but mostly from agnst about all the issues working in SL has. My 6 months of extreme insomnia. A shit load of RL personal issues. After wading through all that crap there was this moment of clarity within the first month. I was walking back to my parents house after getting my nails done for my mate’s wedding - that’s so not me - and I was watching Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on my ipt. Ok, not really all that safe but it’s walking through a residental part of Lincoln. It’s nothing like how I’d walk and read a book wandering through SF.

And somehow in that moment, everything was clear. I knew what I needed to do on all fronts. I knew exactly which projects I wanted to work on and how I wanted to do them. I decided right at that moment to leave London as soon as I could. I ran the rest of the way back, pulled up a new word document and started typing a list. Things I want to accomplish creativly in SL. Things I need to do for RL. Everything.

I had already gotten a few emails of “don’t buy WAR” from mates who were beta testing it so in my rush of excitement, I cancelled the preorder. I figured I’d spend the next 6 months - or until Stargate Worlds comes out - with my head burried in work. The list is that bloody long. When I got to London last week, I slept for about 4 hours and jumped right into SL. Since then, I’ve worked the majority of my waking time. And I haven’t really been sleeping all that much.

It has been great even if I’m not actually working on any of my projects yet. I’m too nice and currently helping out a mate. The problem is that there are some awkward things going on that is muddling my thoughts. Working that much is good in theory, but I really need the emotional release that MMOs and specifically PvP gives me. I need that hanging out with mates and being silly. I need the fun late night drinking games.

Yes I know I’m a geek. My creative hours aren’t currently conductive to seeing my RL friends. My most inspiring part of the day is during pub time for the rest of the country. My internal time clock is just off. So in order to hang out with someone, I have to not work much that day. It’s a bit of a mess really. Plus with my head in such an inspired place, being around mates who have no idea what I’m talking about is more then a bit frustrating.

I was voice chatting with Callie Cline this morning and she warned me of blogging rants. That I should always stay positive in public. The thing is is that I’m not a poitive person. I’m angsty. I can curse so much that it “makes sailors cry,” according to one of my mates. I may be nice and generous and what not to those who know me, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be angsty on many subjects. The idea of being positive to you all would plain wrong. If people buy products from someone based on personality then why should I pretend I’m something that I’m not?

At least my really nasty rants stay in the drafts folder :)

Cheers
Luth

I’m pretty jet lagged today so this may or may not make any sense. Well.. I’m not as bad as usual since I slept most of the flight and then on and off quite a bit while watching films. Of course, typical of me to be completly wide awake at 3am.

I bought Spore the moment I got back from SLCC. It was a good use of my getting over mass amounts of sleep dep and drinking. Because there wasn’t much else I could do. See next post for details.

I had some major issues getting it running on the Vista laptop that I was using. Had to dig through forums just to figure out that I had to dig through the folders to find a random .exe just to run it. No desktop shortcut and nothing was in the start menu. To make matter worse, the game would stall whenever a tool tip or cut screen happened and that was pretty often at the beginning. The only way I could continue playing was to ctrl+alt+del go to the task manager and then pop back in game.

With that said, I have been looking forward to the game for years. Yes I know its not technically an MMO, but I’m still putting it in that catagory because I rarely play single player games anymore. The game itself is pretty and runs really smooth on my gaming rig. It actually ran so well that I had SL in one monitor and Spore in the other. Ha.

I’ve only played the first 2 stages - cell and creature - so I have limited knowledge so far on the interest level of the rest of the game. So far… it’s easy. Bloody simple. Good for regular people to get into, but boring for me. Granted I’ve ony played twice, both times after at least a day of traveling and I had forgotton my saved game on the lappy I was using in the states. I should actually wait until I’ve played more of the game, but the problem is is that I get bored. Really bored.

I’m currently in the middle of creature mode and I have to run around to different creatures to make them like me in order to get DNA points. It’s the same point in time that I stopped playing last time. Not really a good sign for me.

The creature creator however is fantastic. The only problem I have is that you need to wait for a random drop to use the different parts. In my last game, I was able to get omnivore items very early but the game today I still haven’t been able to get one. Its bloody annoying.

I’ll update when/if I get onto another part of the content.

YAR!

This week they lifted the NDA for a game I’ve been watching for at least a few years now and also happily beta testing. I <3 betas. The following is some insider information. But I must warn you, its a complicated game with a larger learning curve than say WoW. It's my honest opinions and while it doesn't look so great with the amount of bad stuff, the good stuff outweighs all current games out there for me.

Be that as it may, it's definitely not a game for everyone. It's is not a EQ/WoW clone (which is a nice change) so people who like those types of games are generally frustrated with POTBS. It's in open beta right now and I highly suggest trying it out. For more information go to the website at burningsea.com

I already have my preorder box ready to jump start the economy on Jan 7th.

Player Driven Economy:
Good:
1. Everything you can buy from NPCs are absolute shit. Ships, cannon ammo, hull patches, ect. So that means 90% of the stuff you’ll need will be made from other players.

2. Gone are the days of carpal tunnel craft grinding only to find that no one will purchase your goods because better loot drops in 12 hour raids. Once you have enough money to build a structure and all the items needed, nothing else needs to be done.

3. A player that only logs in for 10min a day can produce the same amount of stuff as a powergamer online for 12 hours a day. Each item takes labour hours to use and those are based on real time hours. 24 hours real time = 24 hours of labour hours. What this means is that people who are not especially interested in the economy can still play a role and make extra cash by producing raw materials and/or first tier manufactured items extrem

4. That may not sound like enough for the power crafters out there, but a bigger point is trading. Go to a port that sells oak at 10db and sail it to another that people will buy it for 20db. Why doesn’t everyone do it? Because shipbuilders need a shit load of a lot of stuff and are too busy or lazy.

5. It’s bloody extensive. One of the main differences between POTBS and every other bloody game out there is that you can only make a few things. You are limited to 10 plots which is not enough to make everything you’d need to build a ship. The best way to be efficiant is to find one thing you want to make and deal with that.

6. If your products aren’t selling you can easily switch to something new or ride it out til other people give up and switch. Actually its just best to start off the game selling things like oak, iron or any building materials. They sell quickly and are easy to figure out. Then once you have a decent amount of DBs hanging around and understand what’s going on a bit better you can switch to ship building materials like sails, hulls and cannons.

7. Blind Auction house. You can read an indepth dev post about it here. Basically.. in most games you go to the AH and see a long list of of the different people selling the same items for different prices. One of the biggest issues with that is when you go to sell something, you’ll end up putting it up at just a bit lower. Then the next person does the same and it devolves into a pricewar. In POTBS, you’d have a problem with that mainly because of the mass amount of items for sale. On a typical day, I’d sell out all my granite which is around 200 or so units. That’d be a lot to sort through.

So when you go to the AH you’ll see different listings for the ports, how many are up for sale, and the going rate. If you are selling you can throw your’s up for less if there are many other sellers or more if there are few sellers. As a buyer you see the same thing then offer up a price: going rate, lower or higher depending on what you think other’s are selling it at.

There have been a lot of complaints on the beta forums since I started because most new people get frustrated and don’t see the point. They are usually pissed because it takes a bit longer to find the cheapest price and figure that since they do it everyone else does also. That is completly incorrect. I’d sell my granite at 5db lower then the the usual going price in Havana (Spanish main shipbuilding port). It took 52db to produce 10 blocks of granite and people would actually buy them for 100db per. Most of the time, people would pay the 100db anyways, which means I’d get the first sale and what they paid for it.

They also complain that it doesn’t stop pricing wars, which I find incorrect also. I bought a lot of goods in other ports with my freetrader toon and found that usually I couldn’t get a much better deal than that of the going rate. Once supply got more than the demand at that port, the price would go down. That is what’s supposed to happen!

8. Very little of production is level dependant. There are a few things that you need higher levels for and of course the ships get better with higher levels, but I never got my freetrader higher than lvl 16 in the entire time I was in beta. This is partly due to the fact that the FT class sucks at fighting which means its a pain in the ass to level (more on that later) and because I hate grinding missions. If you’ve got the cash, you can build most things and be level 5 - which is what you are after you finish the econ tutorial. I dig this because I can go slow with that class and lvl up my privateer alt for pvp. FTs shouldn’t be fighting in port contention if they want to be able to buy from other nations.

9. Everyone can see all the auction houses in the region but FreeTraders can take a skill for seeing all of them. This makes it super easy to buy low in one port and sell it high in another.

Bad:
1. Too easy to make many early mistakes. Making the first tier of manufactured goods is bloody easy but once you get into items that need more than 2 buildings it’s very difficult to sort out how many of which type to build. As I said before every item uses a different amount of labour hours so many times you need more of 1 building to be efficient. This is a large problem because no where in game does it tell you have many labour hours it takes to make something until you spend quite a bit of cash to build it. While it is easy to change around the buildings, it’s bloody expensive. In my first go at it I ran out of cash fast with absurd amounts of labour hours left in some buildings and not enough in others.

2. There needs to be a second intro (optional) tutorial then what they have now. A few weeks ago they had a stress test and then let them into closed beta when it was done. I ended up helping a lot of people who did the tutorial and jumped in feet first into ship building with no real idea how intensive it is. The optional part is for those of us who understand it well already and are needed to jump start the economy when the servers open. It should be a quest that starts you on the first line of materials: iron, oak, granite, leather, limestone, ect. You choose one of the items, it gives you the deeds and materials. This is because the econ tutorial starts you off with gravel and common wood which is bloody useless and worthless. Personally, I think this would be a good kickstart to the economy because those items are in very high demand.

While I like the freeform production process and don’t miss the carpal tunnel inducing craft grind of useless items, I really believe there needs to be some sort of middle ground. For instance, in my favourite crafting game - A Tale In the Desert - has the best middle ground I’ve ever seen. What happens is that you can make many different things but to get more advanced stuff you need to unlock it at the University. So the community takes a bunch of materials to the University and then they can learn how to make say.. a brick laying machine. In POTBS this system wouldn’t work because you need ships a lot earlier but there has to be something more than the current way to fully understand the economy.

3. The expansive scope can become an issue. For 1 it seems like everyone just wants to make the end product of ships. What that means is you end up with no way of obtaining the less cool items. Secondly, if a nation doesn’t have enough people or enough interested in producing that nation becomes nerfed in every other part of the game. Especially PvP. It’s a very delicate balance which was an issue with beta and could very well happen again. For example: When I first got into beta, the Brits were the powerhouse. This was due to a large population imbalance with very few people on the other sides. Then after a server wipe the Spanish side became heavy handed. Both times it was no contest who was going to win. In each case the economy was booming on the “good” side and nonexistant on the “bad” sides.

4. Guild production teams. It’s great for the guild itself but bad for the low end producers and people who are not in a large production line. Typically what happens is everyone is dedicated to making 1 or 2 types of items and sell to the other members at cost or a small markup. While this is quite typical in every game it’s not usually that big of an issue. What happens is that the people on the low end barely have any cash and the shipbuilders are swimming in it. A 20% profit of 10db (oak logs) is a lot less than a 20,000db ship. Granted you can make more of the cheaper ones and sell in bulk, but it’s still not a lot to get by on.

As apparant in the early stages of beta right after a wipe, guild production teams keep needed goods off the AH. They say this is because other nations can purchase it. But I think is way too over protective, let them come buy it so you have more money to buy or make stuff. But it sure is a big fucking nightmare being in a smaller guild or solo and trying to get a bloody ship other than the crap civis.

5. Pirates capture ships so they have a shit economy. I know it makes sense, but I really wanted to play a pirate! YAR!!

Combat:
Good:
1. Ship combat is bloody amazing. It takes skill and tactics. It makes it really fun in my opinion.

2. Levels don’t mean nearly as much as skill and type of ship.

Bad:

1. AvCom (avatar compat) sucks. I mean really sucks. They admitted it sucked before then they “fixed” it. Now it sucks and takes longer to kill people. Obviously they spent so much time making ship combat rock the socks off of everything else out there that they ran out of cool. Many times boarding the other ship is the best way to destroy your enemy. So you spend loads of time getting into the right postion, take out their sails so they are moving slow, and get close enough to grapple the ship. What happens after that? You do a sucky boarding combat. Really a let down.

PvP:
1. Woot! Finally a game with pvp for a bloody reason. I <3 Pvp. Yes I'm a dork. I'm really tired of "end game" being 12 hour raids (which I loathe even a 1 hour raid) and slapping pointless pvp on at the end. In PotBS you have port contention. Everyone starts with around the same number of ports and then work to take away others. What you do is kill the npc ships on the open sea who are sailing around the port. Once you gather enough points, the port goes into pirate pvp. That means pirates can come and attack any national player and vice versa. You continue to kill nps ships and then the port goes into full on pvp. The pvp area is marked in red on the map so you know where to go or where to aviod. You continue to gather points until to get the final battle which happens 24 hours later.

There are MANY reasons to take ports. Economic reasons - take the important ship building ports from your enemies to cripple their economy! Stratigic reasons - capture minor ports near the big ports to knock the area around the big port into pvp. Or capture those minor ports so your nations freetraders and stock up the AH with supplies.

2. You can flag yourself as pvp at all times. So sailing on the open sea is just a bit more dangerous :P

3. What fun would it be if one nation constantly held every port? Bloody boring I'd say. So once a nation captures enough ports the map will reset with everyone getting free stuff.

4. Port contention only lasts for a few days or so (usually) so if you aren't big into pvp you can aviod those ports until it's all over.

Classes:
Freetrader:
1. They can make expensive advanced structures which produce more than anyone else.

2. Can see all Auction houses

3. Can get a skill called tax evasion. To produce in other nations ports it’ll cost you tax each time you make something. This skill reduces that amount.

4. You start out on good standing with all nations so you can trade with all nations.

5. You get huge ass cargo ships to carry materials.

6. You suck at combat. I mean really suck. FTs have so many econ skills that you don’t have enough points to get combat skills. Plus the combat ones really suck compared to everyone else.

7. You can’t and shouldn’t pvp. Well you “can” but you suck in fighting. However, if you do engage in contention you’ll loose faction points. Not enough faction points in a nation means you can’t see the AH. You can gain it back, but you have to fight npc enemies of that nation which reduces faction from another nation. Plus you suck.

8. Needs better smuggling skills. Pirates and Privateers get great escape skills but FTs are pretty much sitting ducks. What I do is buy a super fast smaller ship, take speed skills and buy speed outfitting. Very few people can catch me. I also typically have a large hauler and a fighting ship for missions.

9. XP is mostly fighting. BLEH! You suck at fighting but it’s the only way to level up. OK.. you do have FT missions where you have to make/buy a crap ton of items, take them to a port then take them to another port. The money reward is only if you’d made them in a port your nation controls and the xp is far far far too small. You’d get more doing an early mission to destroy 4 ships.

10. Every class (I think) gets repair skills to use while in combat. FTs suck the most and they are the only ones who need sometimes expensive materials to use them.

11. You can have “experts.” You can buy these or “produce” (lol) them using a recuritment office. They cost a lot of materials but do help when needed.

Navy:
1. I’ve never played this class but they get the best ships of the game.

2. I hear they aren’t very good during low levels but higher levels they are better.

Privateer:
1. Think of yourself as a pirate but working for a nation. They are a lot like pirates skill wise but have the benifits of a good economy.

2. I have and will have a privateer for pvp fun :P But I haven’t had much time to play this one.

Pirates:
1. Little to no economy.

2. Can capture ships. This has a 2 hour cool down and the ship you get has only 1 durability. Meaning you loose a battle and you loose your ship. Hunting for the right ships is just too annoying for me.

General Game Play:
Good:
1. I get to say “Yar!”

2. Monkeys!

3. Ship battles are fun and even more so when friends are there.

Bad:
1. Like all MMOs, things aren’t finished. While it is in better shape right now then WoW was on release day, there are a few issues. The worst issue that has plauged all of beta (that I saw) wasn’t fixed the last time I played. Sometimes when you load into an area the avatars do not load. That’s npcs, group members, player avs, and even yourself. This is highly annoying when you are looking for/turning in quests and even worse when doing a swashbuckling mission. It seems to happen less if you wait to move until everyone has loaded but sometimes they just don’t. When that happens the only thing you can do is restart the game.

2. I hate loading screens. This sometimes is a game killer for me and I don’t know how long I’ll last with the game just because of this. You enter the tavern -> loading screen. You enter the shop -> loading screen. Start a mission -> all are instanced and you get a loading screen. BLEH!

3. You can’t jump. You can only run down specific paths. Highly annoying.

4. Last but not least, there is something just wrong with the game. I can’t put my finger on it exactally but it’s not connecting the way a game should. Some people say its because of the loading screens and immersion. Some say it is because the missions are too repetitive. I really can’t tell you what it is. Sometimes I really want to play, but no where near like I am when starting a game, and sometimes I just get bored. For a long time in beta all I did was log in to do some production and log out right afterwards. I thought it was because I was pretty much playing alone and it’s very possible that is still the case. While I did get some people in to beta, they didn’t play very much.

Name contest
Lots of ideas coming my way, thanks so much! Keep them coming :) You all have about 5 days left.

I thought maybe some more assistance from me of what sorts of things I’m looking for might be helpful. So, I guess I’ll do some bullet points :P

• One problem I have with my current shop name is that it boxes me in on the content. I’m working on branching out just a bit to spice things up. I’ve already started making some fun deco furniture pieces, couples poses, more cuddles, male poses, and some other bits and pieces that will be released in a big chunk when the full sim opens. A lot of the responses are coming in that pertain mostly to what I already do. While I really enjoy making poses, I’d like to include other stuff as well.

• I am a really humble person. Sometimes I might not sound like it when I run my mouth off, but you will never hear from me that I’m the best at anything. Yes, I have opinions but that is something completly different. I work hard at what I do, I enjoy it, and very happy that at least a few people like it. But I don’t like sounding full of myself. I thank all the people who have written to me saying I am the best, most naturalistic, ect but including that in an ad and especially in a name is something I can’t do. The reel part that I want to keep is because of my facination of all things photographic and film. I’d like to keep that because nothing says me more then that.

• A few people have asked me what image I’m trying to project or what is the reason or basis or direction for what I do. That, my friends, is a difficult thing to answer. My recent releases have been based on my photography background. Someone in the animations forum complained that the lack of facial expressions make us unable to show expression. Yes, it’d be much easier if we had complete control, but body language can say just about anything you want it to say. I look at ads in the new products forums all the time and really saw a lack of expression that RL ads do so well.
• A number of people have given the name “reel expression” that is the closest so far of what I think I might be attempting to accomplish. It uses the double meaning of reel in a way that doesn’t shout I’m the best. Added with the idea that an attempt to give ads something more then just looking at the outfit. And then finally, I am expressing my own style :) That’s not to say I’ve decided on anything. Alle and Ceres both hate that idea. They say it’s bleh. So, maybe using that as a getting warmer marker will help you guys to look in the direction I am.

Deco Sims Status:
The shops on Cappiello are almost complete. Yay!

Sometimes I am super quick at building, and other times it can seem to just drag on. With any of my creative work, I have to be in a place that the work flows. Editing film is the easiest for me to get into that special zone, animation next, and building at a dead last. So yeah, it’s taking a lot longer than I’d hope.

A week break:
Starting today, I’m taking a week off of SL. I could lie and say I have other work things to do, but it’s not true. I need to recharge. And not to mention, the Vanguard 3 day head start begins in about an hour. So, I’ll be around in theory but killing things in Vanguard for a week.

Looking toward the future:
When the sim gets closer to completion I will be having a massive sale. Then, in the new store some poses will be deleted and older stuff still in the “new” vendor will be moved to the “older” one. I’m a bit shit at doing that, sorry.

Like I said earlier there will be a LOT of new stuff for the opening. I’ve already started working on it and it’s still going to be a while yet. When it gets closer I’ll give you a bit of a taste.

Currently all the other shops have been there rent free. I’ll be adding quite a few more and starting to charge rent. This will be more to pay for advertising the sim and teir and not profit. So, it’ll be under the current market price. But it will be invite/application only. I know that seems a bit off or that I’m somehow important or something, but I’d rather have empty shops then a bunch of junk that I wouldn’t even buy.

It also brings me to the point of having others on the sim. First off, its not a mall. I get really cranky when people call it that. A mall has so many negative connotations in me that I’d really like to think of it as something different. Especially since the idea of it came from walking around shopping areas in London. I know in the states most cities have malls instead of shopping districts, but they do still exist. Anyways, what I am attempting to do with it is to get a bunch of different shops in there that work together. If you like one, you will probably like the rest. A mix of established and new designers.

I know that a lot of places like that seem they are just the friends of the owner and it’s not fair. And most likely that’s how it is. But on Lalique, it’s not true. Only one person thats currently there I had spoken to before they were given a shop, and that was Ceres. I actually don’t talk to many people anyways and stay on the fringes of that entire scene. So, if any of you designers out there want a shop in the new build, let me know. If you don’t get in it’s not just cause I don’t like your work, but there are some specific things I’m looking for that I am reserving the right not to explain.

Ok.. I’ve rambled on enough. See you guys in a week.
Cheers.
Luth

I am really angry right now and if you don’t want to read a lot of cursing or just plain ranting then I suggest you skip this post.

So yeah, I like to beta test. I’ve tested a lot of games over the years and sometimes they get better and other times they do not. Some got boring super fast while others did not. The problem is is that they all have just about the same things and do the same mistakes.

Personally I’m looking for that one great game to play for a while. Had DnL actually worked it might have been it. But, it was a pile of shit. Anyways… I’ve said in my last post that I’ve been testing Vanguard since Sept of last year. It’s not that great game that I’m looking for, but it’s enough to hold me until something better comes out. It’s got a cool few things that havent been done or have been done baddly. BUT the devs suck. I mean seriously suck.

Here’s the thing. I usually play a rogue. During my brief stint in EQ2 (bleh) I started to really hate the rogue class and fell for the healer/damage dealer type. I had played glass cannons (mage) before and they aren’t really what I’m looking for. And healers are so dependant on playing with other people at all times that it just gets annoying. But that mix between the two seemed to fit with me. I heal when its needed and I attack when thats needed. Imagine my glee when faced with the bloodmage class in Vanguard.

The class is designed to heal through damage. It makes it a very very tricky class. I heal myself and or others by stealing health from mobs and giving it out. I heal by taking health from myself and giving it to others. Now usually, healers wear good armor. If we die, the group dies. And we do get a LOT of shit for when that happens. Cept when I play with Eems :) We used to wear medium armor but they stripped that away and gave us fucking robes. Ok fine. We deal a bunch of damage fair enough.

But that wasn’t fucking enough for them. A few patches ago they reduced our damage by 30%. Ok yeah, we were pretty overpowering. Fine. It didn’t upset me. Then 2 nights ago, they sprung this HUGE revamp on us. I logged in and couldn’t kill one single thing by myself. Not one. 1/2 the spells were bugged and they took the other 1/2 and gave them to you at WAY high levels. Like this shield rune thing that soaks up damage for who you cast it on, move from lvl 14 to 48!!! What the fuck is that? This is out of a possible 50 levels that takes AGES to get to. I am lvl 16 now and get maybe 1/2 a lvl in a night. (recently rerolled on the pvp server)

To add insult to injury, a health stealing spell I mainly use the damage was reduced from 200-300 to 38!! Thats really how much it hits for now. What in the fucking hell is that fucking shit? I am so sick of MMO devs listening to people of other classes and bringing out the nerf stick. I’ve seen moron sorcs complain about our damage when they can stun me for 30 seconds, one shot kill Eem’s pally, then one shot me.

You’d think they’d stop there. Oh no. They lessen the damage and increase the energy cost. They increased the cost of everything. By a lot more then they should when the mobs are tough and come at you in groups.

But.. just because they are suck fuckwits, they upped the amount the heals do. Oh fucking great. They were good enough as it was. I kept Eems alive through most of anything. I’d heal him, he’d heal me (he’s a paladin) and everything worked just fine. Granted he is one of the best players I’ve ever been around, especially in pvp.

Had enough? I know I have.. but they didn’t even stop there! They give us buffs. Which used to be if I casted when I was near my group, I only had to cast it once. It’s not like they show me who has what buff on my screen. They changed it. They upped the cost to cast and made it single cast. I cant imagine what a 24 person pvp raid is going to be like.

They had another patch last night that fixed a few issues that I haven’t even talked about. That’s how bad it is. So yeah, I’ve tested quite a bit and watched revamps and such. But two things worry me. 1. The game is released in 2 weeks. 2. I have never witnessed a class go from being good to being absolutly worthless. From interesting to just not. They changed the entire point of the class.

The next day…
Ok.. so they patched again and I’ve calmed down a bit because they say a lot of this is going to be tweaked again. The bloodmage class is supposed to be the highest in dps of all the healers. As it stands right now, clerics and shamens heal and attack far better then us.

The actual numbers:
HP=Hit Points E=Energy/mana

• The give blood heal. Our single target “major” heal atleast by lvl 17:
• Pre nerf: Cost: HP = don’t remember exact number… E= 38
• Post nerf Cost: HP = Lesst than before… E=138
• Before it used health instead of energy they changed it to be a 1/4 of my total energy pool. I heal or dps, not a lot of both.
• The take HP from mob give to selected group member
• Pre nerf: Damage = 200-350 Heal = 100% of that
• Post nerf: Damage=100-115 Heal= 130% - 180% (depends on a factor I don’t feel like explaining.
• Group Heal: I don’t know they took it away from my “low” level
• Major damage spell
• Pre Nerf: Damage = 300-400hp
• Post nerf: Damage= 150-200hp

Now, these numbers don’t seem as bad as it is. The numbers I remember from post nerf are fighting against mobs that were 2-4 levels above me. On these same mobs I was hitting them for like 38hps. So, Eems and I went to a different area to help me catch up to him.

Oh well.. they said they are revamping us again tonight, we’ll see.