Anyway, I really don't have much time left for blogging today so I'll keep this short. It's just going to be one of those "What I've Been Playing" posts and since all I have been playing is New World and EverQuest II, that's not going to take long.
When I say I've been playing EQII, that's not strictly true. I did manage to get in one good session while the huge Extra Life xp buff was running. I decided not to bother grinding through the last five levels on anyone, on the very valid grounds that it wouldn't be much of a laugh. Instead I logged in Mitsi, my Level 67 Swashbuckler on a different server, and spent a very happy couple of hours taking her to 80 in Kylong Plains.
She drank a two-hour 100% xp potion and with the server bonus she was getting +375%. If they hadn't somehow borked the bonus for having multiple max level characters that would have been 425% but it was plenty anyway. By the time I finished, most things in the first part of the zone had gone green. (They were orange when she got there.)
I did plan to move her to a more suitable area and carry on but the opportunity never arose and now the bonus is gone so that's the end of that. Fun while it lasted, though.
The other very satisfying thing I did was copy all of my character files across from the old PC. I looked up what was needed but in the end I just copied every .txt and .ini file and let the game sort it all out, which it did perfectly. When I logged in, all my hotbars were back and correctly populated and all the weird tweaks to the UI I've made over the years were in force again. Everything just as it should be!
As for Overseer, which is mostly all I do at the moment, I'm a level and a half from dinging into the current tier, which I believe must be Tier 7. I might just about get there by the time the expansion arrives, at which point I'll need to do another ten levels to get to the new current tier. It never fricken ends!
Assuming there is another tier, that is. I don't see Overseer mentioned in the promotional material for Rage of Churath. Maybe it's going to become a legacy feature. I'm not sure if I'd be sad or happy about that...
Other than that, most of my gaming time - no, all of my gaming time - has been spent playing New World. Or New World : Aeternum if you prefer. Not sure anyone does.
And again, I'm not sure "playing" really describes what I've been doing there. I've been doing time trials. Pretty much just those.
I mentioned before that I'd finished the basic mount quest and acquired a horse. And that I'd done the first five races. They call them "races" but in my book a race requires someone to race against. Racing against the clock is a time trial so that's what I'm calling them.
The NPC who gives the first set claims they're difficult but they really aren't. I'm playing on the U.S. East Coast server, which is suffering some very bad lag, so I've been stopping dead and even rubber-banding backwards a fair bit and yet I've only failed one trial so far and that was in the second lot, which are supposedly even harder. The timers seem to be pretty generous.
I've done three of those now and honestly I could keep doing these time trials for ages. I always enjoy races in MMORPGs although usually I'm racing against someone, which I always thought was kind of the point. I like time trials too, though, so this suits me just as well.
One thing I've noticed is that I seem to have a huge number of talent points or whatever the game calls them left to spend. Like almost 250. And another 60 or so of some other kind of points. I'm guessing there must have been a reset at some stage while I was away.
None of it seems relevant to the content I'm doing, i.e. riding along roads on a horse and avoiding anything that looks like it might give me a fight, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I suppose I'll have to at some point but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.
New World is certainly holding my attention for now, anyway. It also runs extremely smoothly on the new machine, the only issues being the terrible ping to the servers. I initially blamed that on our ISP, Virgin Media, always a likely source of any problems of that kind, but apparently it's due to some wider issues at the server end. I certainly never used to have such a poor connection to the East Coast last time I played so I hope they fix it soon.
It doesn't make the game unplayable, though, or even particularly annoying. I've played through far, far worse.
I plan on re-installing Once Human on the new PC soon and I already have Blue Protocol on an external drive but until I have time for one or both of them I'll just carry on with the riding lessons.
And when those come to an end, I think I'll go take a look at Nighthaven. I'll be way under level for it but when has that ever stopped me before?
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I did always like the time trials for mount leveling. For all that it can be quite challenging at points, New World is also very good at offering a lot of options for super chill play. I've spent most of my gaming time the last few days just riding around and picking up lore notes.
ReplyDeleteThe 250 is probably your attribute points. Gear no longer has attributes as of the Nighthaven patch, so spending those before you get into any combat is VERY important. Just figure out what the main stat is for your main weapon and put most of the points in that, spending the remaining ~25% on constitution.
The 60 points I'm less sure about. Weapon skill points cap out at 20 per tree, so it's probably not that. Possibly territory standing? That's a reputation system that gives you minor perks while you're in the corresponding zone. Nice to have, but generally not combat related. Never get the one that gives you increased XP; leveling in this game is plenty fast without it.
If i hadn't been too lazy I'd have logged in to get the actual names of the points. And the correct amounts. I'm in game now and I can confirm that a) it's Attribute and Mastery and b) I exaggerated a bit. I actually have 221 Attribute points to spend and 39 Mastery. Also 1 Territory but we can forget about that.
DeleteSo far, the races haven't taken me through any areas with mobs higher than 40. As a level 60, I've been fine killing any that got in my way, even without spending the points. I just finished the second set, though, and the next lot, where I go to talk to someone who's going to teach me to ride wolves, takes me into Great Cleave. I'd probably better spend the points before I go much further.