The current state of Age of Conan

So, I promised a big post. I did quite a bit of dueling on Saturday and Sunday and really must say, the strategy around 1v1 has changed *significantly.* We simply lack the killing power to really dominate 1v1 without being extremely cautious with our cooldowns. What do I mean by this?

Well... if you're fighting a ToS (for example, since I just so happened to fight one about 20 times last night...) there are a few major factors that come into play.

1) Did you open in stealth?
-In this case, the answer is no. The answer is no, because we were dueling... so it almost always began with FtD and eating a Charged Bolt which isn't necessarily fair, but neither is starting with SA.

2) Do you have Lotus Overload?
-My specs are a little outdated. Lotus Overload is an ABSOLUTE MUST if you want to fight any caster now. It makes their life difficult, and buys you breathing room to save those heals until after your opponent lands a crit.

3) Did you use your cooldowns correctly?
-Basically from what I've seen... going against melee, you want to use your cooldowns extremely aggressively. You want to get them behind early and use it to your advantage while you're going for the kill. The complete opposite is true against casters. You want to avoid using cooldowns until you can get them at ~50-60%. You want to then lock them to death... which would be the same old FtD->Death's Gaze->SS->Snap Kick->GC(or SS if you used SDS after step 1.) If you think that the fight is going to be decently long, you can blow Snap Kick early and it should be back up by the time you go in for the kill (depending on how much damage you're taking.)

-Take a look at these, and then think- how long is the fight going to last? Take an average of 10 or so fights and see how long they lasted... use that to figure out when you need to use those cooldowns. Things like Snap Kick, Lunge, FtD, etc... these are what effect your burst damage. You're not putting out 2k+ damage with FtD anymore. You have to plan ahead and plan to play perfectly.

Here's my new build. Lotus Overload is IMPORTANT.

These things seem simple but it took about an hour of dueling to even get back in the groove of landing combos and not whiffing like a fool (which I continue to do now and then, still in WoW-style syndrome.) This sort of leads in to my next section for this post:

Someone asked: Where have you been?
Real life: I started a new job in the past month or so. It's been relatively slow but quite time consuming at the same time because you always want to make a good impression. Still in NYC, no change there.

WoW: I played WoW mostly from when I stopped playing AoC until now. I was gladiator in season 3 on my druid... broke top 10 a couple of times in season 4 (shoulders and all) but ended up quitting a few weeks before season 4 end and not getting gladiator.

A new patch has been released for WoW... 3.x, which is absolutely insane. All of the new Wrath of the Lich King talents are in and everyone is silly overpowered. It's fun but at the same time it kind of makes you wonder where the game is going. My fall back has been doing a 5man instance or two to have a little fun or doing battlegrounds waiting for the Wrath release (which is November 13th.) I must say I'm getting that sort of giddy "new expansion" feeling from WoW right now but I'm hard pressed to believe it will last so I'm splitting my time between WoW and AoC. If anyone wants to look me up, I'm Viia or Hiies on Mannoroth now.. having left Hellscream, and then Staghelm.

War: I played War for about 3 weeks. I leveled a warrior priest to 30ish and was extremely disappointed as a whole. The game is very much like WoW, without the polish.. and AoC... without the amazing game mechanics. I just couldn't "get into" this... but it did take up a little chunk of time.

AoC: As I said I've been splitting my time between WoW and AoC the past couple of weeks. I'm primarily waiting on an AoC server merger and then hopefully a "real population" will exist again. I *really* wish AoC were a more popular game. It's phenomenal and completely revolutionary but some of the areas are just really not well balanced (instances and Raids come to mind... as being quit lackluster...) and with the way the game is designed it makes it hard to "keep people around." It's always been the case with MMOs- you want to be where the people are. I think they should have stuck to small scale instances as whole. 10 mans (sort of where WoW is going these days) seem to strike the balance between grouping and manageability. Smaller groups and instances are easier to handle, easier to test, and thus I assume easier to produce. I don't know how to get people back to AoC or how to keep them here, so I'm really at a loss. I'll continue to play the game part time and continue to absolutely love it, but the social aspect just isn't as strong as I would like it to be.

Return to AoC

Hi everyone.

I've recently returned to AoC after a long hiatus inspired by a new career, WoW, War, and a few other little distractions along the way.

My first impressions after returning are, in a broad-to-narrow view:

-There aren't a lot of people. The population is hurting a little, but the game is still just as exciting and fantastic as it was before. I think with the way combat was implemented (even post patch- referring mainly to AoE melee) was fantastic. The design as a whole was revolutionary and it brings with it a visceral feeling when you're in combat.

-Wow, the combat system has changed. If I had to pass judgment immediately I would say it's for the better.

-Assassins still feel pretty good. Combo priority has changed (a lot) and a lot of our broken abilities have been fixed. I haven't quite figured out "how" to PvP or PvE most efficiently yet (again) but I will, and when I do I'm sure you'll see a post here.

-I am missing a chunk of detail. I don't know which items are good, which tradeskills are good, where to farm for gear, where to raid for gear, who is raiding and who isn't, and so on. Keep that in mind regarding anything you read over the next few weeks.

Regards,
Evii

Updated Hybrid PvP Build

Since I'm respec'ing back to Hybrid from Full Lotus, I figured I would share the small changes to my previous build.

Evii's Hybrid Build

I've made two changes:

Old: 5/5 Cat's Paw
New: 2/5 Cat's Paw and 3/3 Accelerated

Impede Life was made useful with a -500 to natural regen, it basically eliminates non potion regeneration. Impede Life also happens to have a long 60s CD, Accelerated helps out with that. It also helps with Grim Corruption and Slow Death Strikes.

Old: 5/5 Unholy Armor
New: 5/5 Dread Weapons

I've more or less moved away from playing defensively with this hybrid build with the exception of Golden Lotus Extract. When you're deciding which of these talents (Unholy Armor or Dread Weapons) to pick you're looking at two different concepts of defensive... one being healing and the other being mitigation. Mitigation to me hasn't proven to be "that" useful... at least not for this build. So you're trading mitigation for offensive power as you have GLE to backup your leeches and make up for the ~10% invuln loss. For a full corruption build I would certainly recommend 5/5 Unholy Armor and the general feats to increase it even further because you lack GLE for burst healing.

Conclusion:

Obviously the state of these builds will change as bugs get fixed and skills are reevaluated but as of right now I see zero fat or questionable feats in this build. Everything looks very tight, with the exception of the 10 "necessary evil" lotus points required to get deeper into the tree. I stand by what I've said before that the hybrid spec is by far the most effective PvP spec out there for an assassin.

Assassin Resurrection

So, I'm back from my gladiator run. I'm playing my Assassin again and there are a few things I would like to cover.

Female Attack Speed:

Funcom has stated in no uncertain terms that the "white damage fix" is in, and that they've normalized it. The "combo damage fix" is significantly more complicated and will take awhile.

Okay, the way I understand it is they didn't adjust animations at all yet and they simply made white damage normalized (ie we swing slower as female characters, we hit for more damage...) The problem with this, especially when PvPing is that a lot of time is spent white swinging (ie slower swings) so you can build up combos, the combo time itself doesn't actually matter much (it still matters)- because when it lands, if you don't move... all of the hits land regardless of how fast the combo fires off.

So, this fix isn't really acceptable... not to mention the fact that if I press Q for LL attack, and then strafe and press Q for LL attack, the animation is still significantly faster resulting in 2-3 additional LL attack swings every 15s. Now, I'm still leaving this up in the air until we see the final fix but as of now I'm not impressed.

Full Lotus PvP:

I did some mild testing tonight with this spec:

Full Lotus Build

It's been quite an interesting experience. The build definitely doesn't have the one shot "oomph" that you get every 1 minute with full corruption/corruption hybrid but it certainly has its perks. The build for me has been mostly about DPS'ing someone (even healers) until their hots drop/they've used their big heal, throwing down curse of the lotus (so they don't re-hot themselves) and going in for the kill.

The DoT damage does add up if you have SDS IV/GC 4/GC 3/Lotus Weapons/Flesh Rot/Kidney Shots... I went primarily with spell invulns in the general tree due to the fact that I don't (and haven't really had) any problem with melee classes as it seems to come down to skill/knockdown resist cooldowns a lot of the time.

One PoM fight in particular went about two minutes where we were sparring back and forth... all of the sudden he didn't have HoTs on and his big heal/immunity was down. ~15s later he was dead on a Kidney Shots->GCIV/SDSIV/SSX.

Takeaways:
Female attack speed is still up in the air.

Everyone needs 5 points in Excellent Balance. I don't care WHAT spec you are, having 5 points in this talent is invaluable.

Escape Artist really is extremely useful, despite how much I've ignored it in the past. It's more useful I feel in a full Lotus build where you don't have From the Darkness to close the gap when the root wears off. In a full corruption/corruption hybrid I still see it as "fluff."

Curse of the Lotus is extremely fun/easy to use- the AOE fear/ranged fear catches most people off guard and it's a good way to make sure HoT's run their duration.

As expected, Swift Ending and and even moreso Assassination at 80 are extremely potent when combined with Flesh Rot/Lotus Weapons/Deft Blades. I knew this at 60 when I first tried them out, but wanted to reaffirm this position at 80.

Lotus Overdose is much how I originally predicted- more or less a stamina regen skill, which if you use correctly can also be used for burst. That being said, I've used it for mostly keeping ahead in stamina and chasing people down.

Chase Corporate Challenge

During my blog lockdown one of the activities I've participated in was the Chase Corporate Challenge. Check out the details here.

Chase Corporate Challenge

3.5 mile run through central park. A great time was had by all. I look forward to putting in quality assassin posts when I'm back on Tuesday!

Blog Lockdown

My blog is on hold for one week and will be back next Tuesday.

So in the place of a long, informative, detailed post... you get a good one liner:

If you Double Tap S and hold Active Block, you evade. A lot.

My PvP Feat Build - Broken and Abandoned

I've had a lot of people ask me in game what my feat build was, whether it was different than what I've posted, etc etc. So I'm posting my current feat build, spec'd into with consideration to bugs and other issues going around which cause some feats to be more(or less) useful. I'll point out differences from my previous builds worth noting as well as bugs that have plagued my PvP experience.

Evii's PvP Build

Lotus:

Light Footed does not seem good at all. I'm not sure whether it's broken, or doesn't include the "root" category in what it calls "movement slowing effects (+25% snare)" but this feat just has not been useful in the builds that I've included it in. This brings up the interesting problem with not having escape artist. With escape artist you can play hyper aggressive, if they root you- break it and charge on in. The problem with that type of situation is that if they rooted you, you've already lost your advantage and you really should be stabilizing before you re-engage. At any rate, this feat will be extremely useful if I can ever prove that it actually works against roots, but I've yet to... so until then, I've left it out.

Accelerated was mentioned in a previous build of mine but after some testing I've come to the conclusion that it's just not really necessary. With Grim Corruption IV, III, Impede Life, Slow Death Strikes, AND Swift Strikes- you always have *something* up that you can do.

Snap Kick if it were more than one point to obtain would be a waste. No one is quite sure how Snap Kick works (the silence portion) or how it is supposed to work (the knockdown portion), but that being said- it still has some uses. It's good in PvE and it's extremely good in Assassin mirror matches which almost always end when I FtD, GC, Snap Kick, GC- even if the FtD damage doesn't hit, you have to use it to stop them to land the Snap Kick.

Corruption:

Vile Corruption was a feat I really advocated against because I didn't feel it was necessary... after dueling a lot last night though- and noticing the lack of free Soul Fragments to pop corrupting strikes along with the importance of landing big combos while opponents are 'jousting' with you and the difficulty of landing combos in general I've changed my mind about this feat. If Corrupting Strikes lasted 20s or 30s and had a longer cooldown I would definitely go back to my previous line of thinking, but a Soul Fragment for 10s of +20% offhand when you'll be jousting and may land one combo in that 10s or may not land one at all, it's just not worth it.

Unholy Armor vs Dread Weapons was another major decision that was made in this build. I like both of these feats but with what seems like better evasion unholy armor adds a lot to our lasting power in melee fights and dread weapons doesn't do much to shorten those fights enough to justify -10% physical invulnerability's. I went with unholy armor for a more balanced build.

General:

Burden to Bear/Dread Weapons/Extra points vs Excellent Balance I could've easily put 4 points into Dread Weapons or Burden to Bear or Life Leech but instead I put them into Excellent Balance. Why? Well, in a melee v melee fight it's about damage up time- and if you get knocked down once you're in trouble, more than once and you probably lose... having 15s immunity with a 30s cd is pretty monumental versus 10s immunity with a 60s cd... you'll often use the skill multiple times in a melee v melee fight.

Conclusion:

So after the PVP from last night I really must say- the amount of bugs we're fighting against is simply infuriating. Despite being broken and abandoned compared to most, I do believe that this class can be successful. I still manage to win an amazing amount of PvP encounters DESPITE all of the bugs (and "non bug issues") working against us and I think that adapting and spec'ing to these strengths has helped a lot. Most of my fights turned from "FtD someone to death" to me playing more conventionally with SA/engage and see how fights play out and I have come to believe that Lotus can be a viable end game PvP spec. As the number of 'one shot' (overreach/fire lance were the latest to fall victim) are removed Lotus becomes more and more viable as we don't absolutely have to one shot someone to win. Though, if the bugs/issues were corrected or we at least knew what was considered a bug and what was working as intended we could plan a bit better.

Here is a short list of the things that I think need to be corrected in order for us to even fathom class balance or different specs:

Poison Stance:
What does .01% fizzle chance do? Is it .1% chance? Regardless, it's so insignificantly small that I would assume that it does absolutely nothing. With no guidance to prove otherwise, it's hard to argue. Corrupting Blades seems to work fine with -5% evade, why not a 5% fizzle chance from Poison Stance?

Light Footed:
Does this work? Do we even know what the devs consider "movement slowing" effects? Roots? or just Snares?

Snap Kick:
Is the silence supposed to work regardless of whether or not we knock our target down? Does the silence work at all? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Are we supposed to be able to knock everyone down? Barbarians and other classes 'knockdowns' effect everyone- why wouldn't Snap Kick? We're not sure what the intentions are behind this skill.

From the Darkness:
This skill needs to work properly. I hit about 50% of the time with this skill, the other 50% I charge stun someone and stare at them longingly. Even at 50/50, or 30/70, or 10/90 (on the damage portion) it would still be useful... but there shouldn't be any need for percentages here... and your milage WILL vary. If you're fighting people who move around, or if you're using it to open your success rate will be alarmingly higher than if you attempt to use it while fighting a moving target.

Death's Gaze:
This skill needs to work properly, or at all, this is by far the skill that I've had "fire off" the most without actually working. I would give this a 10-20% success rate, and that's being generous... I only ever really use the skill while a target is trying to combo or flee in PvP... so the success rate would vary widely if you were using it directly after FtD or on a Mob/random person standing still.

Phantom Skill usage:
The game simply shouldn't allow you to use a skill and eat up the shard/cooldown if it's not going to give your character the buff. I can't use excellent balance while stunned/knocked down, why can I use Golden Lotus Extract and essentially lose a match because the game hasn't updated yet and won't let me "cast" it? This effects a countless number of abilities and is a large problem.

Hitbox:
The hitbox for landing a combo while jousting even for a very skilled player against people like me who do not stand still, who hop around like a crazed maniac, and generally jump on anything they can find is extraordinarily difficult. Making the hitboxes larger and the melee weapon ranges larger would make fighting other players a lot more reasonable.... let's not even get into how lag plus the ity bitty hitbox is comical. I jousted with another rogue for something like 3 minutes last night where we were both sprinting and moving around so quickly that the server simply couldn't put us both in the same place at the same time to combo each other.

Female Attack Speed:
By far the worst bug I've seen in a release game that has stuck around since beta. This isn't an exploit, it's just disheartening. At one point I considered postponing my blog until this was corrected but I decided in the end that this wouldn't really help anyone and would hurt new assassins trying to find their way.

Hide:
Group Combat. Enough said.