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Aion Beta II

August 17, 2009August 17, 2009 Laura Highcove

From the future (ie 2018) the image links on this post no longer work. I must have deleted them in a cleaning since it’s an old post and it’s not worth it to me to try and find them again. Sorry.

Okay, so more Aion beta action time. Got some advice from Sil wherein I now know how to auto run. Man that feels better, but I’m not surprised I missed the keybind. It was called like “Automatic Forwarding” or something equally long and ambiguous. I got confused by the keybinding that was called “Run”. Silly me.

Secondly, for mana regen we were told of “resting” wherein you sit and regain health and mana kinda like drinking in WoW only without food and MUCH more slow. Way too much downtime to be worthwhile, since the amount regenned seems to be set instead of a percentage.

Mages ARE given two abilities to get back some mana. One gives like 200 mana on a minute cooldown. The other gives just under 200 mana on a 12 sec cooldown but it takes reagents. Sounds good right? Not when I have 2.5k mana. I’m really hoping we get something better, but looking at Mana Ability II that we get at level 22, it actually gives us LESS mana. I don’t know how that’s possible. I’m hoping it’s a beta mistake.

Sill huge problems with the spirits not being able to fly. Every time I wanted to fly over a few mobs (Not to mention flying up to the actual quest hub.) in the new quest area that allows flying, I had to resummon my spirit. (Don’t get me started on the fact that this new hub has no flight path.)

Also HUGE problem with a campaign quest line that threw me into an area where I got two shot. Only after running back did I find out that one needs a group (quest doesn’t say it) to complete it. I (On my spiritmaster) went in with a cleric and two rangers. We died a half dozen times while kiting each mob for at least a minute to kill it. We got the first campaign quest done; only to find out the second part was killing a named that was wandering around who two shot one of the hunters. We had to give up on it for lack of a tank. (btw, these mobs that were chewing us up and spitting us out were Mau. I repeat my previous comment about them being op.) It rubs me the wrong way that REQUIRED quests REQUIRE a full, balanced, 6-person party to complete.

I also spent much of this beta getting my templar to level 16. I am pretty irate about the fact that there are nowhere near enough quests to level. I actually had to grind three-quarters of level 16 because there just were no more quests. That makes me feel that the zones were just poorly planned. I feel like I saw more gray quest arrows than colored each time I moved to the next quest hub.

Despite that, I loved my templar. It was a little slow killing mobs, but I had absolutely no downtime, and it got even better at level 16 with more damage dealing abilities.

So I wanted to try out the dyes in this beta for fun. So here is the original, a cool looking green outfit on my templar. When I looked at it, I guessed that the part that would be recolored would be the green. Makes sense right? Apparently not. Some idiot decided that the silvered plate should be recolored instead of the actual colored part of the armor. /slaps forehead So I dyed each piece different in protest.

Lastly was my complaint from two weeks ago about the inventory space. So I decided to take screenshots of what my inventory space looks like just to prove a point. Everything you see in the warehouse is a crafting material that you either gather or get as a drop (sans the patterns which, as you can see, I can’t learn yet.)

My inventory space is currently cleared of any gatherables. Right now is just potions, a few pieces of gear and quest items. I started just not picking up manastones I don’t use, but in live, that would be throwing away a lot of money, so it’s not really an option. So add about 8-9 manastones and 7-8 gatherables that will be in my bags while I’m questing and really… just not a lot of space. And looking at the price for upgrade, that’s for the warehouse, upgrading my actual bag is 61k, still a lot.

I’m hoping that when we go to live, I’ll be able to make more money such that I can more quickly update my space, but again it seems like poor planning to rely on a non-set monetary source in order to have enough space to actually play the game.

Also, I got my DP to 4,000 in order to morph some aether powder, and took a picture of the shine around me.

And yet despite all these problems, I still plan on playing it when it comes out, just not dropping WoW for it.

Untitled

April 4, 2008April 4, 2008 Laura Highcove

Anime I’m downloading:

Spice and Wolf
Clannad
Shugo Chara!
Rental Magica
Shion no Ou
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Shakugan no Shana II
Gundam 00

Spice and Wolf is the tale of a traveling merchant, Lawrence, who makes a promise with a harvest god, a wolf named Horo (or Holo, those silly Japanese) to take her North, and their resulting journey.

Impression: Actually, this is one of my favorite series to date, and that took me totally by surprise. So much so that I was thinking of putting together a Horo costume for the upcoming con. Horo’s character is just amazingly well done. The chemistry between the two main characters is just perfect. All storylines revolve around being a merchant and buying and selling goods, but it never gets boring. My only regret is that it’s only 13 episodes long.

Clannad is the story of a high school delinquent, Tomoya, who in his free time starts helping out a lost looking girl, Nagisa, who wants to restart the school’s drama club but lacks the confidence to do so.

Impression: After Air, and attempting to watch a few other dating sim games, I was sort of turned off by the general classification. But I saw Dom’s review of Clannad on Megatokyo.com, and I decided to give it a shot. I’m very glad I did. Once again watching the relationship between the two main characters evolve is a joy, and the supporting characters are lively, friendly, and in general everyone just wants to help everyone else. Just stay away from the movie. Usually I like movies like this because they kind of take the plot and condense it, and you get a nice quick trip with the characters from the series, however, this movie sapped the life out of Nagisa. She didn’t feel like Nagisa at all, and I just hated it. Plus it puts the supporting characters into nothing more than brief cameo roles, which isn’t fair to them.

Shugo Chara! follows a girl, Amu, who is seen as ‘cool’ by everyone at her school, but who really just wants to fit in. She then finds a trio of guardian eggs that tell her she can be anything she wants to be.

Impression: Just a fun magical girl show with everything you’d expect from the love interest, the rival, the friends, the enemies who aren’t really so bad, and of course the magic.

Rental Magica is the story of a boy who inherits his father’s mage renting company, even though he knows nothing about being a mage himself. It follows the small company and its employees, as well as the young leader of an impressively powerful mage renting company who befriends them.

Impression: Having a lot of fun watching this series. It’s nothing that I would end up watching more than once, but it’s entertaining the first time through. Hm, I make it sound more underwhelming than it is, but I can’t go into much detail without spoilers.

Shion no Ou is about a young girl, Shion, who is unable to speak since seeing her parents murdered in front of her when she was a child. She grew up raised by her next door neighbors, while learning to play Sougi.

Impression: I figured it would try and be some sort of Hikaru no Go rip off, but the murder is front and center in the plot of the series. It also goes into a lot of detail about the differences between men and woman’s shogi. (I’m almost positive there was no such distinction in Hikaru no Go.) Shion is adorable, and she acts like a perfectly normal girl except for having to write things down to communicate. Plus she’s falling for a bishie, and we all know how much I like those.

Shakugan no Shana II is more of the same as the first season. Still good, but you’ll be lost without the first season. Gundam 00 is extremely underwhelming right now. I think I got through about seven episodes. I’m still downloading it, but saving it for when there’s nothing else to watch.

CLAMP

March 5, 2008March 5, 2008 Laura Highcove

I have been a fan of CLAMP since before I even knew what they were. My first introduction to them was a manga volume my friend Anne brought to school. I read it with no idea what manga was, or anything about the story, and simply marveled over the drawings, and what I could get of the plot. It was not until much much later (ie years) that I now know what I read was the second volume of Magic Knight Rayearth, which incidentally became the first of CLAMPs works that I read in full. Avoiding spoilers, (well immediately) the ending to MKR was one of the most interesting things I had ever come across.

The second of CLAMPs works that I really got into was Cardcaptor Sakura. I watched the anime first, and it wasn’t until later that I was able to read all of the manga, but it became another of my favorite series.

I continued along in my otakudom, reading other CLAMP works Angelic Layer, X, RG Veda, Clover, Chobits, CLAMP Campus Detectives, and I enjoyed all of them (except Chobits). Magic Knight Rayearth, Angelic Layer, and Cardcaptor Sakura were by far my favorites.

So one day I was in the Waldenbooks down in Blacksburg for one of SD and my’s trips to town, and I spotted a manga on a display. It caught my eye because at a glance it looked like Sakura and Syaoran. Well suffice to say I was shocked when I read the back to find out it *was* Sakura and Syaoran. It was a new series Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles. I was thrilled. Two of my favorite characters of all time were back, and whats better, the world they were going to were going to be filled with tons of CLAMP characters.

So I read it, and it was pretty good. I eventually got the XXXholic which is seperate, but runs alongside Tsubasa’s story. Eventually the anime was announced, and I was even more thrilled, but eventually…I dunno it became monotonous? I stopped getting the anime episodes the day they came out, and I actually looked forward to new XXXholic manga and anime releases than Tsubasa, and basically it dropped into the background. I still read it, it was still good, but it wasn’t great, and I wasn’t sure why.

Well I was surfing the Internet, and stumbled across someone’s blog that pretty much summed up the problem I was having with it. Syaoran was a horrible one-dimensional character. At the beginning he was the endearing Syaoran that we all knew and loved from Cardcaptor Sakura. Blushing glances thrown at Sakura, stumbling over words between them and such. When she was in trouble he did not hesitate for a second to help her…but that was just it. He started out on his quest with her, Fai, Kurogane, and Makona and all he cared about was the feathers and we were like ‘Awww, he’s giving up everything for her.’ but he never stumbled, never faltered. His one and only focus was getting her feathers, and while there were the occasional blushing glances, there was nothing else going on. That was why I drifted away. I felt like nothing was happening, and that there was no room for anything to happen.

Below here are spoilers. So don’t click unless you’ve been keeping up with TRC, or don’t particularly care about spoilers.