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AA Engame Review 1.5 Weeks in
My opinion on AA endgame after being 50 for a week and taking part on several large scale guild events.
Crafting/Gathering - Not a personal area of interest since I find harvesting my farm every 12 hours and spending tons of time running around in circles hitting mining nodes to be extremely boring. I did get 15k mining.
It is a very deep system that is clearly better than any recent theme park game. It is a better way for people to get money than daily quests like most games do (Wildstar) and you are well rewarded for your grinding effots. Crafting anything decent however is long and difficult, dependent on RNG and generally requires guild support to get materials and money. Unless you are a guild designated crafter you probably won't get anywhere without massive grinding.
Hasla Weapon - This was pretty fun for a few days and has a very oldschool feeling of competing with other groups for mob camps, but it is still straight up mob grinding for many hours. Occasional pvp breaks up the monotony or makes the grind worse depending on your point of view, but generally people just want their tokens and to get the heck out as quickly as possible.
Grouping here can be frustrating since having multiple people looking for the same type of token is very inefficient farming. In fact the token system itself is poorly thought out since you will get loads of tokens for weapons you don't need. There really should just be one type of token that allows you to buy whatever weapon you want.
Greater Howling Abyss - A decently challenging dungeon that requires coordination to complete, but is very easy once you have the right group and knowledge.
Its is very unfriendly to PUGs so you are highly reliant on your guild or trusted friends in order to run it. In my case we have a lack of healers so it is hard to get many runs in and a lot of people end up getting left out which is frustrating since it is the only source of 50 gear outside of extremely expensive RNG crafting.
Also be warned that get get a 7 set of Heroics it will take dozens if not hundreds of runs. This is problematic because that is an extreme grind and you can only do it 5 times a day.
World PvP - Fun for a while, but a zerg fest and ultimately pointless. When someone dies he respawns 10 feet away with no real loss and continues on. Larger scale fights consist of the bigger zerg clearing out the area then spawncamping the other side (rez points are safe) until they get bored and leave and everything resumes as normal.
Naval PvP - I have taken part in a few naval raids where we had multiple galleons and clippers. Again it is fun at first, but the seas are fairly empty at this point. Aside from the people driving and using the radar the other 70+ people in the raid sat around doing nothing for long periods of time. We would occasionally hunt down a single clipper and get a pack here and there but it ultimately ended up being huge overkill. People can also despawn their boats if they see you early enough which completely negates any chance of loss/battle. With no opposition it was boring and would have been far more efficient and profitable for everyone in the raid to just go mine 10 nodes each.
I understand this will get better as more people get boats, but I still feel like there will be long downtime between battles and most people in a raid will be sitting around a lot. I can't help but feel like I would rather go play planetside 2 or battlefield for vehicle based combat since I know I will be guaranteed to have competition and little downtime.
Arena PvP - I am a big arena player in other games, and frankly arena in AA is a big disapointment.
5v5 is random vs random so you cannot queue with your guild. If you get matched with the opposing faction on your team, you can't talk to them which is really stupid. There is no level 50 requirement so lowbies will join in and ruin matches by feeding kills. The match also lasts 15 minutes, but gives poor rewards compared to 1v1.
1v1 is just plain bad since it is entirely dependent on gear, build and RNG. Blocks/parrys/crits have large impacts on matches and CC stacking is out of control on certain builds.
Generally the main people doing area's are those who have spent a lot of time farming gear in GHA and get enjoyment out of beating people who have a weaker spreadsheet.
Arena is also pretty much the only thing you can do once you are out of labor and can't find a GHA group or guild event, so its unfortunate that it is so gear dependent and unbalanced which are actually problems that occur throughout AA pvp, but is usually hidden by the zergs.
I could also mention world bosses, but all you really need to do is zerg them down.
Comments
Semantic much? His activities are what even people who LIKE Archeage refer to as "end-game" (PvP, crafting, the final dungeon, etc).
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Spot on a lot of point but missing to mention a lot of features that are meh anyway in the end...
World PVP : While respawning 10 feet away from your ennemies or next to an entire zerg sucks, you can also end up respawning across the map and even with the best glider you end up spending 5-10 minutes getting back where you ve got killed while grinding mobs or in an unfair 2...3....6....vs1. Just to do it all over again.
This game has an old feel to it, which is good and bad. In the end, things get very boring quickly and there is far too much BS by Trion.
Seeing how recent games got rated, i would say this game doesnt deserve anything above 8.5/10 and because of the way Trion handled the whole thing, i would say nothing above 7.0-7.5/10 top.
Endgame is an entirely subjective concept, but even so there is a point in AA where leveling ends and you are limited to certain activities.
Its up to each player to decide if those activities are worth their time and money and I believe that the people on this site in particular are interested in critical viewpoints in addition to people under lvl 30 posting about how wonderful the game is.
First Auroria is not even in and that will be a very big part of this game.
OP I am sorry that you ran yourself to 50 as fast as possible to have little to do. However that is your own fault. If you had played MMOs pre-WOW (like SWG, UO, EQ and so on) you would know that starting the game Day 1 is end game. There is NO need to rush to the highest level you can get as fast as you can because you miss so much of the content. For example if I was a 7x GM Bard and went right into the Shadow Wyrm room in UO I would see next to nothing of the entire game. These old games are MEANT to be a grind. They are MEANT for you to spend months and even years achieving a high level of success in the game. Because you played AA just like any Themepark game now you are bored out of your skull because most of the other people are leveling enjoying the path vs the destination.
Right now myself and my wife play AA we are both level 21 and 20 respectively. No one in our guild is over 40 right now. Everyone is taking their time, when asked to help in an instance players go. When asked to help with crafting runs people help. No one is rushing to get to 50 just so they can be ready to take over Auroia with a castle. If you do this it makes the game POINTLESS because there will be nothing in game for you.
Either take a LONG TERM view of the game and enjoy it over months to years or go back to Themepark games and bitch when in 3 weeks after a new raid launches your board because you spent so much time in 3 weeks for watered down content. In truth you are your own worst enemy.
Here is the problem, it sounds like you are burnt out on MMORPGs.
AA has one of the most diverse and intricate class systems of any modern day MMO. Learning the synergies of the various spells across the various classes is theory crafting at it's best.
The PvP in this game is not like 2 shot WoW type PvP, 1 v1 battles can go on for minutes and are actually exciting.
Crafting is crafting, I am not a big fan but I like the fact that you have to put time and labor to be able to craft good armor.
Your opinion is your opinion and I am not invalidating your opinion by any means. I would just like to know if this game is a letdown what MMO would you consider fun?
In short....YOU AREN'T PLAYING IT RIGHT!!! I can't believe MMO vets are coming out saying this farce of a statement
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Halcyona war in particular is very reminiscent of GW2 and is usually a zerg of hundreds steamrolling the other side at least on my server. Except unlike GW2 the map is just one big tunnel with a base on either end. TBH its a lot like Illum was in SWTOR expect the map ends.
Of course smaller scale pvp exists, but like I said its largely pointless. Death is only a minor set-back so the open world general pvp is just as meaningless here as it was in any other similar style game like Age of Conan pvp servers.
I have done open world with a raid of 60+ and all we did was clear out Hasla, spawn camp for a bit and then leave.
Yes I am in a big guild, AA is designed for big guilds and large scale pvp.
Sure I could play with a smaller guild of close knit friends, but that is true of any game and hardly unique to AA. If you want to take part in large scale pvp and naval warfare you need to be in a large guild or you will just be fodder.
Your review is your review based on your personal experience and opinion, so i cant say it is correct or not, i can agree or not but even that i cant because i dint reach there yet.
What i think is incorrect is your title. Like someone allready mentioned Auroria is not even open yet so the word "endgame" is a little premature atm, unless Auroria is not part of your engame objective.
But thanks for sharing your experience.
Trade runs introduce an interesting element to PvP where you can get some money when you kill those crafters
But then again I don't see how else would you do world PvP. Body looting is one way of giving rewards but it's a horrible horrible idea. Losing xp would just be frustrating. What's the point of people dying and losing xp.
Ultimately PvP should be fun. I played Diablo 2 for ages and 80% of my playtime was spent dueling. Do you know what I got from the whole dueling thing? Absolutely nothing. I have hundreds of hours spent pvp-ing in that game with 0 incentive/reward. It didn't feel pointless to me. As long as it is fun, it's cool.
It's like Dota 2, the other game which I have played for over a thousand hours. I spent so much time just killing people. Did I get any rewards? No. After every 30-60 my progress is wiped and it starts a new.
PvP doesn't need a point in my opinion.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
OP, maybe part of the problem is that the game is only a week and a half old and for a good portion of that week there were login issues between queues and DDOS. You are level 50 but at this point in the game most people are not. My guild has 200 + members and there are only like 8 - 10 level 50's. A lot of people have been working on setting up the guild farms, building ships, crafting etc.
You may find it more interesting when there are a lot more 50's and the PvP is less zergish. Also, keep in mind that they haven't even opened up the north are yet which is based around level 50 play.
Or like I said in my last post, you may just be burnt out on MMO mechanics (crafting, PvP, dungeons, grinding, etc).
I would argue that the point to small scale PVP is to change a static quest into something dynamic. That is the appeal of ArcheAge, they created a static, themepark game and added sand to it. Why go through the hassel of creating a ton of content for two separate factions and try to find ways to make it feel dynamic. Just create some content unique to each faction, then create shared content and throw in open-world pvp. All of a sudden you have static goals with dynamic options for completion based on what other players throw at you. Simple, yet brilliant.
I have played MMOs for 14+ years and never played WoW.
I can't comment on how fun Auroria is because its not in the present endgame.
I did rush to 50 and gear farming because 1) I dislike quest grinding and want to get it over with and 2) in a PvP game I want to be competitive and not farmed for months by people with a level and gear advantage.
Believe it or not this is a very common way to approach MMOs and they are specifically designed to attract these types of players. MMOs as a casual and quest grinding for months are not fun for me as I would rather find out sooner if I like the available endgame activities. You play your way, I play mine.
You know what is sad in all this, when new mmo go live people play without eating or sleeping until they hit the level cap (few of them dies along the way).
Then they do everything there is in game, crafting, raiding, pvp, ganking and what not.
Then they come to forum and post their BS about the game being good or bad....
I just described 5 days of gameplay for nowdays superultramegahardcore players......is your thing "DO OR DIE"?
Now i also am playing AA, not subbed yet as i want to see the game and so far i like it, i am level 8....see what i mean? And no i am not a casual player....
I couldn't disagree more with this. The elitism of "pre-wow" players just pisses me off to no end. WOW did not have a focus on endgame when it launched. A lot of people were exploring the world and enjoying the levelling experience. Cause you know what? The levelling experience in WoW was enjoyable unlike that horrible garbage called EQ which had the most mind-numbing levelling experience. Even Lineage 2 was better.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
The game was in alpha for months and people have had the optimal cookie cutter builds figured out for a while. There is actually very little theory crafting left to do until balance changes.
Its also currently difficult to level up alternate classes and get appropriate gear to experimentation is very hard to do in the real game. I am a tank and would like to try healer but have no way to quickly level up other trees or get healing gear without spending hundreds on sub-par crafted gear.
Currently the MMO that I feel has the most 'fun' large scale pvp is Planetside 2 but it has a terrible pay 2 win business model and obviously isn't an mmo in the traditional sense.
I agree with this 100%, as a veteran wow player myself i enjoyed the questing and world exploring and it was really fun, before even having any idea about end game......
But now it is all about RUSH>DO END GAME>CRY ON FORUM.
Listen, I have no issue with WoW. I played the game for 8 1/2 years and it will always have a special place in my gaming heart.
With that said, Vanilla WoW questing was fun? Really, needing 15 boar meat that has a 25% drop rate is fun? I played WoW the first 2 months it was out and hated the game because it was so grindy, I came back about a year later and it was a completely different experience. They increased drop rates, shortened the number of kills needed for quests. They also had introduced BGs, before that all PvP was basically open world zerg PvP. Let's not forget that you needed insane amounts of XP to level and crafting leveled extremely slow.
My point here is that while I too am guilty of slapping on the old nostalgia goggles, lets not forget vanilla wow was grindy and unrefined too.
I can't comment on the North because its not in the present endgame. Every MMO on the planet promises everything will be different after the next update - maybe it will maybe it won't.
I never said there is nothing to do at endgame, in fact there is plenty of stuff to do. The problem is that it is mostly very grindy and boring (Hasla, GHA, Naval PvP) or just plain broken and unbalanced (Arena PvP).
Several people basically try to respond by saying something along the lines of 'your playing the game wrong' but they never address any of my specific points directly.
If anything AA is directly aimed at large scale hardcore players since controlling the sea and open world will yield great rewards. If anything it is the casual carebear PVE players who are playing the game wrong since they don't understand how dominated they will be once they hit 50.
I hear this crap each time some new game is failing, and you know what? It doesnt work like that.
You cant fix bad game design by slower leveling, you can just delay the inevitable.