Cráb People

So anyone playing it? Can someone give a short description of the game/pve model? Are there pay2win elements?

I've been playing it.

It's a thing of beauty. The gameworld is epic, stunning. The art direction is the best I've ever seen in any video game.

The questing and exploration is amazing fun. Everything is so vast and so gorgeous and there's so much incentive to explore and complete everything. I'm absolutely loving it and I really don't feel like logging on to play WoW this evening...

There's a few typical release issues that I expected. The log in servers get hammered and go down periodically and there's a new patch released every few hours. It's still a good launch in my view.

The game actually gets better as I'm playing. I'm hitting mid-game levelling now, and it is still as good if not better than when I first started.

I just started the third zone myself (25-35)

The game is good, my only problem comes from the forced completionist that appears to be in the game.

Renowned hearts are fine and work basically like quests that you don't accept or hand in.
My problem appears to be finding events that are ongoing. This appears to be the meat of the xp needed. However finding them is hard, the only viable way is to wander around looking for them.

The alternative is to explore everywhere and get everything, this is pretty much what I've been doing.

Playing Thief, not sure why I picked thief. After you learn (painful lesson) that going toe to toe with enemies as a thief will get you killed, you begin to actually use abilities and the game becomes a lot more engaging. Constantly moving in and out of stealth as much as possible to avoid hits. While that seems like a good thing it can get tiresome after a while.

It is an odd transistion from wow to this, the out of combat health regen means you are essentially expected to drop to half health or so after every fight. While this is fine it does lead to some problems, for example the undead in the zone I just started, they usually spawn in packs. If you want to engage you have to make sure you'll only get hit by one at a time, engaging the whole pack at once and I'll just drop dead from their first hits. Major difference from elementalist where I could just run around in circles throwing aoe fireballs at everything and not get hit.

Then again I also do way more damage that I ever did as elementalist.


As for the cash shop, they have things like +50% xp earned from monsters, +100% xp earns for 30secs (duration extends everytime you kill something), +karma earned. However you can buy the gems for real money or ingame gold. There are other things, such as a res stone and repair canisters that help. But nothing you can't do without or give you any real advantage.

Not to mention you get the xp boost items from questing as well as rewards.

At my level events give around 1000xp for gold, mobs give around 22xp with a bonus based on how long the mob has been standing around.
The xp boosts are nice sure but hardly add up in the grand scheme.

I'm fairly intrested in it too, but I've noticed that no where has there really been any mention of whether or not it's a hotkey spam fest (like WoW) or if it's not. I watched an hour or so of it on a giantbomb quick look and noticed they where selecting the target with the mouse before spamming the first attack on the hotbar but in a seperate trailer I noticed what looked like attacks being launched without having a target suggesting that target/attacks are independant from one another.

So for anyone currently playing, how exactly does combat work?

(Side note, happened to check wow armory to see if any one I knew from other guilds was still playing and ended up selecting my character as it was still in my browser history, noticed the glyphs had changed and paniced wondering if my account was somehow compromised.. then realised I don't have a ranged weapon equipped anymore)

So it's a hybrid of sorts then, thats why it seemed inconsistant. Cheers for clearing it up.

Playing as thief, and the combat isn't anywhere near as spammy as WoW.

I've 11 abilities hotkeyed and one extra for weapon swapping.

The first is an autoattack, then four moves that use up points called "initiative" which regenerate over time. There's the healing spell, three other skills that are cooldown abilities, one elite spell that's on a longer cooldown. I've a special ability that allows me to teleport and steal a weapon from my opponent and the hotkey to swap weapon types.

The types of attacks available depends on your weapons.

The cooldown skills and the type of healing spell is customisable from a list of skills which you pay for by obtaining skill points through special challenges that are dotted around the world.

There's double tap evasive rolls I can make in any direction that use up energy.

As an addendum. I actually like the forced completionist aspect; makes the world feel a bit more relevant. It'll be interesting to see how the later zones pan out. I'm level 52 at the moment so haven't hit the later zones yet.

I'm using double daggers and double pistols.

I use evasive rolls and stealth-heal a lot. I think the key is to use all the tricks to avoid being hit rather than trying to tank anything.

Steal is an awesome ability and usually gives you something useful. I tried all the healing spells, but I think Hide In The Shadows has been the most effective for levelling, the ability to reset a fight, escape or heal and reopen seems much better than the others. I'm mostly just Death Blossom spamming packs of 3 or so mobs, and rolling around and stealthing a fair amount, and Stealing when I can.

You can kite elites or packs with Dancing Dagger.

For those mean boss fights that slaughter you in melee radius, I'll just stand back and blast away with pistols.

Obviously I'm still a noob, but it feels like it's getting easier. I think timing your evasive rolls and timing Death Blossom to evade frontal attacks is the key.

I also just picked up Dagger Storm, and it is fucking awesome.