Playing a Summoner rocks!

I’m having a blast in Path of Exile. The game has expanded so much over the years, it’s actually mindboggling how many systems and mechanics there are. It even has customizable player housing that puts many an MMO’s take on the feature to shame.

The most important aspect of an ARPG, or any RPG really, is of course how fun the characters are to play and evolve though. And I have to say, I’ve never had so much fun just running around and killing stuff in any game of any genre than with my Summoner in PoE.

The game provides nearly infinite possibilities to build your characters to your liking, and while I used a build guide I found in the official forums as a starting point for this Witch she has over time become my very own flavor of the Summoner playstyle. It is not the most effective or powerful character possible, not even close, but this is exactly how I wanted to play an ‘Armymancer’ since Diablo II introduced me to the concept.

Many Summoner builds are highly specialized, using only one type of minion as their main source of damage. Other minions are mostly there as meatshields, or not used at all. In contrast, my goal was to not only have as many minions as possible, I also wanted them to be relatively equal in damage output and general usefulness, maybe just with a different focus (like single target or AoE). Just like an oldschool real world army with infantry, cavalry and artillery, so to speak.

The tried and true backbone of most Summoner builds in PoE are Zombies. They are summoned from the corpses of dead monsters, are pretty tanky and have a single target as well as an AoE melee attack. They don’t have a limited duration, so they only need to be resummoned if they die. I use them in a helmet I crafted with +2 to minion gem levels, three damage enhancing support gems and two unique passive tree jewels to further boost them. They are very good meatshields, but also deal a lot of damage. I can have up to twelve of them.

Mine look like Mummies, because Mummies are just way cooler than stinking Zombies.

Next up are Spectres, which are reanimated monsters. These are obviously the most flexible and potentially also the most powerful minions, since almost any normal monster can be revived, and all of its attacks, spells or special properties stay intact. Not only that, they can be enhanced with support skills just like every normal player skill can. This means that a monster that normally shoots a single projectile can for example be supported by Greater Multiple Projectiles to shoot five instead. Which makes monsters like Frost Sentinels great Spectres for clearing whole screens of baddies in an instant.

Which is exactly what I use them for.

Since they are so powerful a character can only have one Spectre by default, but pretty much all such restrictions in PoE can be loosened by special properties of unique items and/or the passive tree. I can use four Spectres at the moment. I could bring that up to five, but I’d have to give up much survivability for that, and I’m pretty squishy as is. In contrast to Diablo II they thankfully don’t have a limited duration here and even persist after logging out.

I also use Raging Spirits. These are fiery floating skulls that, once summoned, fly to their nearest target to continuously attack and kill it, then fly to the next, until their by default pretty short duration has expired. Up to twenty can be summoned at a time, and to achieve that manually one would have to cast them pretty much non stop. Hence I decided to use a unique chest armor which has a built-in Spell Totem support. This means that every spell gem I socket into it isn’t cast directly anymore. Instead a totem is placed at the position of my mouse cursor, which then continuously casts the spell for me. Since the chest piece also raises the maximum amount of totems by one I can now place up to three, which combined spit out Raging Spirits very quickly. They are pretty effective boss killers, but also clear packs well.

Always eagerly chasing after their next prey.

It goes without saying that no undead army would be complete without Skeletons. In PoE these don’t need a corpse to be summoned, but have a limited duration. Basically I cast these whenever I have nothing more important to do. I have supported them with additional speed and damage and can have up to ten. The setup also contains a Vaal Summon Skeleton skill gem. Vaal skills are more powerful versions of normal skills that have to be fed a certain amount of souls by killing monsters before they can be used once. I mainly use this for bosses, as it summons a whopping 36 skeletons, a mix of warriors, archers, mages and a General.

Go get them, Bones!

Lastly I use a Stone Golem, which doesn’t do a lot of damage but gives myself a nice bonus to life regeneration.

To sum it up, when I have all minions except the Vaal Skeletons up and running I have 12 Zombies, 4 Spectres, 10 Skeletons, 1 Golem and three totems casting up to 20 Raging Spirits.

There’s always a team meeting before battle.

Of course a good General doesn’t just twiddle his thumbs while his army does all the work. I have a range of skills that I use to support as well as direct the minions.

I curse monsters with Vulnerability, making them take more physical damage (which all my minions deal at least in part except for the Frost Sentinels). It also serves handily to guide the minions’ attention towards the cursed area.

I use the Hatred aura to give all minions inside its radius a percentage of their physical damage as bonus cold damage. A Generosity support gem makes the aura no longer affect myself, but increases its effect and radius, making it even stronger for the minions.

With Convocation I can teleport all Zombies, Spectres and the Golem to my position (a skill Diablo II’s Necromancer would have desperately needed) and give them a small Heal over Time.

Offering skills blow up monster corpses to give my minions certain buffs for a period of time. I mostly use Flesh Offering, which increases attack, cast and move speed. When the minions take too much damage I use Bone Offering instead, giving them block chance and additional life regeneration when they block.

Desecrate lets me summon monster corpses whenever I need any but don’t have enough at my disposal (think boss fight without any adds).

Lastly I use a life flask that applies its healing effect not only to myself, but in part also to all minions.

Playing this character feels incredibly satisfying and never becomes a chore. Sometimes there’s so much mayhem going on that I can hardly see anything, but that’s a price I gladly pay for finally being able to play my perfect version of an Armymancer.

When all hell breaks loose…

Now all GGG have to do is find a fix for those freezes and ‘unexpected disconnections’ that happen to me regularly as of late. Seriously, what’s up with that?

Revisiting Path of Exile (again)

During the first half of April we went on vacation. When we returned home I was looking forward to diving into gaming again, but, as is often the case after such a ‘forced break’, once I sat down at my computer I wasn’t quite feeling it. To not log in and play your MMO of choice for a couple hours a day every day for a while sometimes changes your perspective on things, it seems.

I still log into Black Desert every day to get my login goodies and Boss scrolls, but that’s pretty much it at the moment. I don’t intend to quit, but I don’t want to invest the time and energy it takes to do something substantial either. For now.

Whenever I don’t devote most of my playtime to an MMO (or several) and just want to dabble for a bit every now and then my genre of choice is the Action RPG. I fell in love with the playstyle these games offer at the start of 1997 when I sunk ungodly amounts of time into the first Diablo. Since about four years ago my favourite ARPG is Path of Exile.

I started playing after I had watched a trailer for its first expansion, Sacrifice of the Vaal, which I quite liked. That many people dubbed PoE the ‘true’ successor to Diablo II, which I loved and still love, sealed the deal for me.

It’s indeed very obvious right from the start that the folks at Grinding Gear Games are big fans of Diablo II. Even the first thing you do after creating an account and logging in, namely choosing a class for your first character, looks and feels exactly the same.

It’s not a simple carbon copy though, far from it. What they managed to do is to take almost everything that was great about Diablo II and make it even better, perfect it and expand on it, while leaving out its (precious few) weak points.

For example, my most played and highest level character in Diablo II was a Frozen Orb/Fireball/Meteor Sorceress, but my most beloved character was a Necromancer with his army of skeletons, revived monsters and a golem. The playstyle of managing an army, supporting it with curses and other spells while focusing on staying out of harm’s way myself feels incredibly satisfying to me.

The Necro’s design wasn’t perfect though, especially concerning the minions. In PoE I can play an ‘Armymancer’ exactly the way I like, because the most glaring weaknesses the DII-Necro had are gone. When I revive monsters to fight for me they don’t vanish after a couple of minutes, so it’s actually worth it to take the time and hunt for the best possible monsters at the highest level for this. They even persist after logging out of the game nowadays! There are other minions which do have a limited lifespan, but I can do neat things with those too. I can for example place totems which then continuously spit out these minions, so I don’t have to cast them myself and can concentrate on other things.

My Summoner-Witch in her element (sans minions, else you wouldn’t be able to see her).

PoE’s most talked about feature is the passive ability tree. Just one look at it perfectly illustrates why.

My Summoner-build at level 88 with all available points spent.

It seems overwhelming at first, but you get used to and comfortable with it pretty quickly.

What it indeed does is give you a lot of flexibility to build your character of choice. In a lot of games such perceived flexibility often turns out to be pretty fake in reality because there’s just one or two ‘optimal’ paths. By not choosing one of those you’d gimp yourself, and who would want that?

With this passive tree you can fully play to your build’s strenghts, iron out weaknesses and/or let it do things that it otherwise could not. Above all it makes the character your very own. I’m pretty sure there exists no other Witch with this exact same passive tree, the same items and the same skill gems. As long as you don’t copy a character from the forums or reddit to a T it will be unique, and can still be strong at the highest levels.

Graphics, sound and moment-to-moment gameplay all feel very familiar to Diablo II veterans. The 3D-engine doesn’t quite match the level of detail Blizzard managed to cram into their 2D 640×480 pixels (800×600 with the Lord of Destruction expansion), and in terms of great, spooky atmosphere nothing beats DII’s Act 2 and 3. In my opinion these two aspects are the only ones where PoE doesn’t match or surpass its unofficial predecessor though.

To be fair, PoE has some pretty creepy monster design. Fortunately these guys follow MY lead now!

Now, what about the payment model?

It’s free to play and has arguably the best (while not the cheapest) item shop of them all. Not a single item in that shop has any impact on gameplay whatsoever. GGG sell exactly two categories of items there: stash tabs and eye candy.

It’s true that you will definitely want some additional stash tabs once you play the game for longer than a couple of days, but if you wait for a sale on those you can easily nab a lot of storage space for the price of a normal game – and PoE is at least worth as much, let me tell you.

The eye candy is, as always, a matter of taste and completely optional. There are a lot of really nice armor sets, weapon effects etc. on offer, but also some rather hideous ones. Since most armor and weapons found in game aren’t exactly lookers and I wanted to support GGG anyway I’ve decked my other characters out quite a bit too.

From top left clockwise: Marauder, Scion, another Witch and Shadow.

If you like ARPGs and haven’t tried out PoE yet (unlikely but possible) I strongly recommend giving it a go.

Taking crafting in BDO to the next level

Until recently my experience with crafting in Black Desert Online had been limited to cooking, alchemy and processing as described here. Processing is as simple as it gets, and while considerable preparation can be necessary for cooking and alchemy the crafting process itself is also very straightforward.

Crafting more complex products like tools, weapons, armor, merchant wagons or boats is quite a different beast. Those things aren’t actually crafted by players themselves. The correct type of workshop has to be rented with contribution points and a worker has to manufacture the item.

Every village and town has lots of properties that can be rented for a range of purposes. Almost every one can be rented as a residence (the actual ‘housing’), more storage space or worker lodging (so you can hire more workers). Only some can be used as a workshop, and not all workshops are available in every town.

I’ve already rented the white ones, the blues I could rent next. For the grey ones I’m missing one or more prerequisite properties.

Since I started doing gathering dailies in Olvia regularly I wear out a lot of gathering tools, so I figured making my own would be a good start. There are six types of gathering tools, which are all produced in a (surprise) Tool Workshop and need mostly the same resources. Because it’s very slow to gather with level 1 tools I aimed for level 2 tools from the start.

The main materials for all of those are Steel and Black Stone Powder. The former is made out of Coal and Melted Iron Shards in a workshop called Mineral Workbech, the latter needs Rough Stone and is crafted in a Refinery. Some tools also need Maple Timber, and the butchering and tanning knives need Hard Hide on top of that.

Luckily I have followed this video guide from Morrolan about lucrative worker nodes for quite a while now, so I already had a lot of resources lying around.

This is just my warehouse in Velia. Almost 8k Iron Ore came in handy now, but I could also serve lots of chicken wings on scrambled eggs should the need arise…

Melted Iron Shards are an intermediate material made by processing Iron Ore.

Melting iron while Spike, my cat, seems to have scented a mouse or something.

I also had a lot of Coal and Maple Timber already in stock. After gathering Rough Stone by hand for about an hour I was all set for the other intermediate products.

I rented a Mineral Workbench and a Refinery and set two workers on making Steel and Black Stone Powder respectively.

Now I had to wait for a while. Had I logged off all workers would have finished their current task once and then stopped, so I stayed ingame and spent some time aquiring the last needed resource, Hard Hide. This is made by drying hides from lizards and such, so I rode into the wild and decimated the population of triangle head lizards by probably dangerous amounts.

When I returned with over a hundred Hard Hides in my backpack (it’s a large backpack!) the first batches of Steel and Powder were finished. I rented a Tool Workshop, upgraded it to level 2 and sent a worker to make my very first gathering tool.

I went for tanning knives and fluid collectors first because those were the ones I’d need replacements for soon.

I didn’t want just any knife or collector though. When crafting a gathering tool there’s a chance to get a ‘lucky’ version of it. These have a pretty important bonus which increases the chance for rare drops. Hence I don’t actually intend to use every tool I make. I’ll only keep the lucky versions and sell the others on the market.

The first ones, which took about 20 minutes each to manufacture, turned out to be normal ones however. With the fourth or fifth try I got lucky.

No pun intended.

The normal versions sell pretty quickly on the marketplace, so there’s obviously a demand for them. Hence I’ll keep manufacturing as quickly as I can procure the resources, keep all lucky ones and sell the rest.

I’d actually earn more silver by selling the resources or the intermediate products, but by exclusively gathering with lucky tools the additional rare drops should more than make up for that. Besides, I’m having fun crafting them, which is always more important to me than my bottom line.

I’ve simultaneously started to let some workers gather materials for the various life skill costumes, which give speed and XP bonuses for their respective activity. Crafting these will be my next project. Although I might upgrade my gathering tool empire to level 3 first, if the needed resources aren’t too hard to come by.

Maybe I should start thinking about a brand name.

On non-consensual PvP in MMOs

The other day I was ganked for the first time in Black Desert Online.

The main quests had led me to Sausan Garrison, a popular grinding spot for leveling I had already read about.

More like Sausan Ruins I’d say…

I intended to kill just enough mobs for the quests I had and then be on my way again. Suddenly I took a whole lot of damage in a flurry of movement and effects, and before I had realized what was happening I lay dead on the ground.

Another player had obviously decided that I was contesting ‘his’ grinding spot and that losing a bunch of Karma was worth having it to himself again.

I respawned and, because I wanted to at least finish my quests in peace, switched to another channel (BDO has one huge server for each region, each with lots of seperate instances of the game world), which worked out just fine.

Was it a pleasant experience? Not exactly. But is the game worse for this even being possible? In my opinion, absolutely not!

I’ve talked about what my idea of a virtual world looks like. The more interaction between players and the environment as well as between players and other players a game allows the more alive and real the world feels to me. It also makes surprising and exciting things to happen more likely.

An example. When Lakisa, a friend of ours and I were about level 30 in ArcheAge our quests sent us to Cinderstone Moore, an area where PvP is allowed most of the time. The three of us as well as some other players in our level range were busy questing when a level 50 player ambushed and killed us all one by one. When we respawned and continued questing he did it again. Instead of giving up and leaving we teamed up with the other players and tried to take him down together. We didn’t actually manage to do so until another level 50 came in and helped us, but it was a really exciting game of one cat versus a bunch of very angry mice, and I had much more fun than mindlessly ticking off one quest after another would have brought me.

I have no screenshots of it, so here’s one of Lakisa and me chilling on my balcony.

Now, of course there have to be restrictions to and/or severe consequences for doing nothing but killing other players all day long, else a handful of sociopaths can and will ruin a game for everybody else. If these mechanics hit the sweet spot between leeway and punishment, between allowing to gank freely and prohibiting it outright, then, and only then, this can not only work, but be actually great.

In BDO Karma builds up slowly by killing mobs and falls rapidly by killing players outside of Guild PvP or Node Wars. Having negative Karma means everyone can attack you anywhere without losing Karma themselves (I think), and if you die not only normal PvE-death penalties apply, there’s also a chance that a piece of gear loses an enchantment level (which can be outrageously expensive to regain). As long as you have positive Karma you suffer no penalties whatsoever when killed in PvP.

The fact that I got to level 57 before being attacked by someone for the first time shows that ganking is discouraged enough to not be a common occurrence while not being completely ruled out. Seems like working as intended to me.

Maximum Karma. Took me quite a while to get there. I hear you lose about 60k for one kill.

In ArcheAge a track record of your misconducts is kept, and once you’re past a certain threshold your next death teleports you straight to court where five more or less randomly chosen players put you to trial.

My first time in the jury (second from left). I never stood in the dock myself.

The culprit’s criminal record is presented to the jury members who then get to choose a sentence, the minimum charge being Not Guilty, the maximum a certain duration of (online) jail time depending on the amount of transgressions.

My first trial was against a well known PK (player killer) named Kuroda. When there are ten pages of attacked and killed players to flip through you know someone’s been really naughty.

240 minutes of jail time seemed like a quite appropriate punishment to me.

Because he was a repeat offender the other four jury members were obviously in favour of the maximum sentence though…

Ouch! The highest sentence I ever saw.

The ‘RIP Kuroda’ chants in trial chat went on for quite some time, while he already lingered in the prison’s courtyard unable to harm anyone.

In EVE Online there’s the distinction between high security space (abbreviated ‘high sec’), low sec and null sec, each with it’s own rules and punishments (or in case of null sec, no punishments) for PvP engagements.

My punishment for having shot at a lot of people in low sec is that I can’t enter any high sec system anymore without being attacked by police NPCs, and other players can shoot me without any penalties whatsoever even in high sec. Which restricts me pretty severely in moving around, getting lost ships replaced etc. I can work around much of that with the help of alt characters of course, but it’s still enough deterrent for many players to not choose this path. It took more than ten years until I dared trying it myself.

Once I did I tried pretty hard though.

I think these three games handle non-consensual PvP in ways that, while still not perfect, work quite well, and for my taste they would be much less worth playing if they didn’t allow it at all.

Miscellaneous milestones and more

Since my last entry I unsurprisingly played a lot of Black Desert and EVE Online again. My resolutions for 2018 notwithstanding I have some goals I’d like to achieve in both games besides just having fun. I’m not super serious about it though, so all is still good and relaxed.

My main character’s security status in EVE has tanked mightily since we joined Holy Cookie. When pretty much all you do is shoot people in low sec it’s inevitable. I have long passed the threshold beyond which anybody can attack me anywhere with impunity, and NPC Police forces attack me in every high sec system on sight.

Once you’ve gone that far you might as well wear your sec status like a badge of honor, which is what most pirates in EVE do. For that just any figure below -5 doesn’t cut it though. You want to get to -10, the worst sec status you can have. It isn’t easy, as the lower you get the more bad deeds are necessary to go any further. I was stuck at -9.99 for about three weeks. Then, finally…

Of course a Pod kill got me there. Normal ship kills hardly ever make a dent once you’re past -9 or so.

So I’m officially a really bad egg now. I have to be very serious about not shooting even a single NPC ever again though, which would bump up my sec status by a good bit in an instant.

In other news, our new monday night doctrine’s DPS ship happens to have a spare high slot, so we now bring a bunch of firework launchers to every fight.

Surely causing some WTF?-moments for our targets.

In Black Desert I ignored gear upgrading for a while. I just wasn’t willing to tackle what lay ahead of me: enhancing my weapons to TRI, possibly (probably) having them fall from DUO to PRI in the process. The increase in power from DUO to TRI is pretty big though, so I knew that sooner or later I’d have to do it.

One evening a couple days ago I was about to log out and call it a night. I wasn’t all that sleepy though and decided that I’d play another half hour. I felt pretty relaxed and thought, what the hell, I’ll just go for it. Maybe I was sleepy after all.

I built enough failstacks for a shot at TRI, crossed my fingers and went for it on my Liverto gauntlet. It failed and fell to PRI, of course. So I built a lower amount of failstacks on another character and tried to bring it back to DUO. No luck after four tries! Now that character had also enough failstacks for a TRI-attempt, so I switched to yet another char and built some more failstacks. After a total of six tries the gauntlet finally went DUO again. I switched back to my main for a second attempt at TRI.

Long story short, this process would repeat itself another two times. On the fourth attempt starting at DUO I was “lucky”.

Fricking finally!

This would have been my last attempt in any case too, since I would’ve had to use up my last weapon upgrade stones for getting to DUO yet another time. I have more than enough silver to buy some more stones of course, but I wouldn’t have bothered in that situation.

I have no idea how much the whole process has cost me, but it sure ain’t pretty. I do realize that four attempts should be about average for TRI though, so I wasn’t particularly unlucky. Which verifies what I had already known going in: I don’t like systems like this. I would’ve happily invested the same amount of resources if it were a fixed price, sparing me the disappointment of failing three times and the aggravation of having to work and spend more just to get to where I had already been before.

Anyway, I’m glad that this upgrade gave me a quite noticable bump in killing power, so it was worth it in the end. If I’ll have it in me to stomach more of this I’m not sure though. Maybe I’ll follow the advice forums and guides give to anybody who hates RNG-upgrading and try to earn enough silver and buy already upgraded items from other players.

I also explored some more of the game world. East of Mediah lies the very dry region of Valencia. It’s center is a large desert. Here monsters aren’t the only dangers that await. By day you need an ample supply of clean water to avoid sun stroke, by night you need star anise tea to combat hypothermia. Both conditions make you lose health regularly and rapidly. I almost died while fighting some mobs for a while and not realizing that I was losing health not just due to damage from them. I saved myself by riding back to Altinova as fast as I could while using health potions regularly. Now I always have water and tea with me.

I’ve traveled so far and still haven’t seen everything.

Another time I visited Calpheon right before dusk, which gave me the opportunity for some beautiful screenshots.

I still love the game despite it’s less than ideal upgrade system. There’s nothing quite like it out there.

My next ventures are going to be the production of gathering tools and life skill clothing. I’m anxious to see how that goes.

Gearing up in Black Desert

As I’ve said before I’m not a big fan of chance-based crafting or gear upgrading in MMOs in general. I don’t get a rush by pressing that button and hoping for the desired outcome, at least not a positive one. It agitates me more than anything.

Many players argue that “it’s just mathematics, man” and that I only need to calculate how much upgrading all my gear will cost on average. That’s not quite accurate though, is it? After all I won’t upgrade hundreds or thousands of items, so chances of it all evening out over time are pretty slim. I’d rather have higher but fixed costs for each step, so I’d always know that investing X will get me Y.

That being said, BDO’s system (called ‘enchanting’) isn’t nearly as punishing as for example ArcheAge’s, at least in terms of upgrading weapons and armor. These items can’t be destroyed by failing an upgrade, and falling back a tier can only occur from trying to hit enchantment level 18 (of 20) onward.

The game is also very generous with login-rewards, limited time events and such. Even if I hadn’t done anything other than logging in once per day and maybe doing a quick quest or two for the last couple of months I’d have quite a stash of silver and upgrade materials by now.

Goodies galore.

This all combined with the fact that I really want to experience everything this wonderful game has to offer meant that I couldn’t (and didn’t need to) ignore this part of it for too long.

To prevent making costly mistakes I tried to learn as much as I could beforehand. This video is the most sensible and comprehensible guide I’ve found, it helped me a ton. The author has made some more guides about other aspects of BDO which are equally good. Thanks man!

Since I weren’t keen on having to start over a couple of times I wanted to pick the ‘best’ items to enchant right away. Based on Morrolan’s and some other guides I decided that I’d go for a Liverto Gauntlet, a Leather Vambrace and three pieces of the Heve armor set plus the gloves I was already wearing. I would enchant and wear all of these until I got pieces of boss gear (which are all Best in Slot, but rare and expensive).

I didn’t actually have to wait until I got lucky and looted the pieces I wanted off mobs. Not only is most gear in BDO tradable, it’s auction house works with a fixed-price system. Every item has a minimum and a maximum price. They fluctuate a bit, but not by orders of magnitude. So even if an item is sought after and the supply can’t meet the demand sellers can’t charge ridiculous amounts of silver for it. Hence I could just buy the items I didn’t have yet off the market, and it didn’t cost me a fortune. Not the most satisfying way to get one’s gear, but at least I know someone else pried them from the cold dead hands of some monster.

Then I was finally ready to start enchanting. Here’s the datamined and considered-to-be-accurate chart of success chances:

This is for weapons, the one for armor isn’t much different.

A failstack is generated when an attempt to enchant an item fails. As you can see, those stacks are an immensely important part of the process if you don’t want to fail too often. The chances for success go up again from +15 to +16 (called PRI ingame) because from then on you need more expensive upgrade materials, the item loses more maximum durability with each failure (which has to be repaired by either consuming copies of the same item or using a considerable amount of a relatively expensive special item), and above DUO you fall back one tier when you fail.

What this means is that you have to do a delicate dance of building failstacks on cheaper items and only working on expensive ones when you are relatively close to the maximum number of effective stacks for the level you’re trying to reach. A successful attempt consumes all failstacks of course.

Getting items to about +11 is easy enough, after that you start to feel the chance of success dropping off considerably. I kept at it though, and before long I had reached +14 on my gauntlet, the most important but also most expensive piece of my ensemble.

I decided to build 20 failstacks before trying to hit +15. This would give me a measly 12,5% chance of success to begin with, but it’s generally not recommended to start at the effective maximum because the additional failstacks from failing a couple of times would be kind of wasted. The first five failures would give me another failstack (and thus 0,5% more success chance) each, then I’d give it another 3-5 tries at max effective stacks (while still building more total stacks). Barring success I’d then save that high amount of stacks for a later try at higher levels and switch to another character.

This was the plan. On the very first attempt though…

RNG favouring me? A cold day in hell indeed.

This, of course, is why many people seem to like these chance-based systems. It sure feels nice to hit the jackpot once in a while. I know that by hitting +15 right away my gauntlet’s value has increased by much more than it has cost me to get there.

Thusly motivated I continued to enchant my other pieces as well and even dared going for PRI and DUO on gauntlet and vambrace after a while. I had mixed results, but got there. Some levels needed numbers of attempts above average, some below. Overall I believe I’ve been neither especially lucky nor unlucky.

Then some unforseen things happened. A couple patches ago the set bonuses for the also very popular Grunil armor set were changed, making using two of those instead of Heve the superior choice for me. I didn’t fancy having to start over enchanting though, so I bought Grunil helmet and gloves already at +15, and sold my corresponding Heve pieces at +14. Because of the fixed prices it wasn’t much of a loss in terms of silver, if at all. I also got a pretty good chest piece by questing, so I also sold my +15 Heve chest, having lost the set bonus anyway.

My gear as of now. Pretty satisfactory overall.

The accessories I’m wearing are a different story. Those are looted off mobs (except for the belt, which is quested like the chest) and neither tradable nor enchantable. For where I’m at in the game right now they’re pretty solid, I’ll use those for a while I guess. Farming them was actually quite fun, killing mobs until they dropped just like in the old days.

At the moment I’m quite content with the whole system. I’ll continue upgrading by getting the other armor pieces to DUO next. When (or if) I can muster the courage to do an attempt for TRI though…we’ll see.

Doing a bit of everything and loving it

I’m still playing the heck out of Black Desert Online. I’m very happy to have found a game that lets me play it just the way I want – even when I want to play it completely differently from one day to the next. It really feels more like a virtual world to me than any other game I’ve played, which makes it so much more than the sum of its parts (of which there are many to boot).

Some play sessions I dedicated to following the main quest lines with the Striker. At first I had to do some backtracking because the quests led me to areas I had already visited while leveling. This wasn’t bad though, since there was still much to discover.

Like this village of treehouses in the southern Calpheon area. Great view and thankfully no Ewoks.

A village called Trent, which I had visited before, all but drowned due to the most pouring and realistic looking rain I have ever seen in a game.

A still doesn’t do it justice really. I had to crank up the brightness a good bit too, it was much darker than this.

Of course I had to kill hundreds of mobs for the various quests, so I snatched quite a bit of loot. I replaced all my accessories during the last couple of weeks and even got some pretty good armor pieces. The Striker doesn’t need the latter anymore, but any future alts I might play will start pretty well equipped (no level requirements for any kind of gear in this game and no bind-on-pickup or bind-on-equip either).

I even looted some boss scrolls. I guess I was quite lucky since I got three in the course of just two days. From what I’ve heard they are pretty rare. Two were for the goblin boss Giath, whom I hadn’t fought before.

The bigger they are…

The helmet he’s wearing is actually the piece of boss loot he can drop, imaginatively called Giath’s Helmet. No luck with that though.

I also got to explore a completely new region, Mediah. I think it’s supposed to look and feel mediterranean, and it kind of does I guess.

It actually reminds me a lot of some parts of California or Arizona.

In any case, I quite like it.

The largest town of the area is Altinova.

Admittedly I haven’t seen something like this in California…

It’s nice, I won’t set up shop there though. I feel more at home in the medieval ambience of Heidel or Calpheon.

A couple days ago I hit level 56, which means that I gained access to the ‘awakening’ of the character. I did the requisite quest chain and now have a second mainhand-weapon, a monstrosity called ‘Gardbrace’.

Fisto’s got nothing on me!

A whole bunch of new skills are also available to me now, though I haven’t taken a closer look at them yet.

Of course I also wanted to continue with crafting, gathering and farming, so I didn’t only play the Striker. I’d estimate the Witch got about a third of my total playtime.

In addition to the mainstays beer brewing, carrot farming and meat acquisition I explored some new ventures here too. I had read that Olvia is a great place for Alchemy, so I went back there after quite a while of absence. Indeed there are a lot of Alchemy quests on offer, but there’s more. I also found some quick and easy cooking dailies, and most importantly lots and lots of gathering quests. Those are really great because not only do they give a good chunk of extra gathering XP, when finished I get to keep everything that I had to gather for them, incidentally supplying some of the materials for the cooking and Alchemy quests.

Oh, and I learned how to milk cows. I kid you not.

Even the Striker had to try it. I hope he remembered to take off that Gardbrace first…

I also researched a bit more about workers. I had already noticed that they come in different tiers of quality. What I didn’t know was that lower tier workers can take a promotion test every ten levels (level 30 is the maximum, so no more than three tries per tier). If he passes the test he gets promoted by one tier and resets to level one. Since levels 20 to 30 take considerably longer it is recommended to level workers to 20, then have them try the promotion test twice, and fire them if they fail both. Only one worker can take the test at a time, and it takes 24 real time hours whether logged in or not.

Another way to progress which I quite like. It’s somewhat comparable to collecting trading cards, and just as addictive.

I’m really happy about how progression is handled in this game. There are countless ways to progress, so many XP bars to fill and stuff to level and/or tier up. What’s great about it: the ceiling for most things is so high that even hardcore players won’t reach it anytime soon, yet nothing is useless or worthless even at the lowest levels. There are so many MMOs where, once a couple of weeks have passed after the game’s release, you have to grind your way to the top before you can do anything substantial, anything of value. It’s so much more satisfying to be able to do useful stuff from the beginning while knowing that you will get continually better and better for a very long time.

Lastly I finally managed to tame a tier 5 female horse, which means that I now have horses of both genders at the highest tier to be found in the wild. I will train them to at least level 25 each and then do a breeding attempt. A breeding calculator I found claims that there will be a chance, albeit small, for a tier 8 horse, which is the maximum tier as of now. Fingers crossed!

It’s already a big upgrade as it is though, because the female has learned the skill Sprint while leveling, which my other horses didn’t. As the name implies it makes a horse run faster. A LOT faster. It’s level 10 now and runs much faster than my level 23 male without Sprint. Imagining a tier 8 horse with this skill…hell yeah!

I’m sure I forgot some odds and ends, but these were my last couple of weeks in BDO in a nutshell. I’m lovin’ it!

More jump field shenanigans

Last Monday’s public fleet was the last hurrah for our Wolf doctrine, at least for now. CCP has reworked Assault Frigates and we will do some testing with different boats during the next couple of weeks.

Hence Captain Cean was more than willing to take us into a big fight should the opportunity arise. Why let all those Wolves gather dust in our hangars when they could die in a blaze of glory instead.

After our Scouts caught a lone Arbitrator and an Algos for our first kills of the evening it looked like our wish would be granted. We spotted a mixed gang of Cruisers, Battlecruisers and even an Armageddon supported by two Guardians near Nennamaila. Unfortunately I didn’t save the D-Scan, but I think they were about 20 pilots. We were pretty sure that they’d be willing to fight us.

Alas, for some reason they were not. Before we could catch them at the gate through which they arrived in our system they warped off to the NPC station and docked up. What the hell? We weren’t willing to give up just yet though. We positioned ourselves right at the station’s exit and waited for anyone to undock and hopefully break their invulnerability before docking up again.

Everyone orbiting Cean and waiting to be booshed off together with our prey.

When someone undocks they are invulnerable as long as they don’t do anything (like lock someone, stop their ship or change direction for example). If they don’t stop they keep flying in a straight line though, until they eventually leave docking range. Which means that they have only so much time to decide what to do. Checking if someone’s still invulnerable is as easy as trying to lock them. If you can lock them, they’re fair game.

Some of their pilots would poke out their head for a moment to check the situation every now and then, but they were smart enough to dock up again while still invulnerable.

That is, until a Cerberus undocked that we hadn’t seen before. He seemingly wasn’t part of that fleet and had no idea that we were there. He obviously didn’t know what to think or expect of our presence, or he just panicked, either way he became lockable. Cean fired his jump field generator right away. Whatever the pilot had done to break his invulnerability couldn’t save him, and he found himself 100km off station surrounded by an angry swarm of frigates and destroyers. As sadly is often the case the loot fairy said no, but a nice kill anyway.

Meanwhile though some pilots of the other fleet seized the opportunity to undock and warp off. In the course of the next 45 minutes we chased them around the neighborhood. We were going to get our fights, whether they wanted or not.

First we caught a Myrmidon and his pretty expensive pod, a Caracal was next, then a Gila and an Oracle. During these events we used our jump fields in ways we hadn’t used them before (at least I hadn’t), sometimes to great effect. Whenever we chase someone who manages to warp away just in time we try to see where he went and warp after him. But did he warp to zero? Or to 100km or something in between? Normally we all warp at different ranges so that hopefully at least some of us land within tackling distance. This time around we all warped to 100km a couple of times, and when we saw that our target had warped to zero we used a jump field to jump us right on top within seconds. Pretty effective.

The Caracal kill was especially cool. When we arrived at the combat site he was in he had already pulled about 150km range from the beacon and still kept burning out full speed ahead. Cean and I aligned to him and fired our jump fields in relay, as we have done numerous times before. Between aligning and spooling up both jump drives this took about 10 seconds total. Which meant that by the time our second jump was finished he had burned another 40 or so kilometers and more or less bumped right into us when we landed. Even he had to laugh about that.

By now we had a good bit of loot in our cargo holds and it was time for a bio break anyway, so we docked up in a freeport Astrahus in Hikkoken.

Astrahus sitting above a pretty but rather inhospitable planet.

We weren’t satisfied yet though. Next up we caught a VNI, then a Devoter, a Brutix and one of the Guardians (loot fairy still didn’t like us).

Then an EVE University fleet of Catalysts and Griffins crossed our path. I guess we were in total-carnage-mode by then because we didn’t even think twice about taking prisoners. Three Catalysts, two Griffins and a couple pods fell quickly. Sorry guys!

Things quieted down a bit after that, until Spike reported a Daredevil that he might be able to tackle. He was two jumps out from us, but Cean told him to go for it and we gave chase. Our second scout, Waleri, was in between and would arrive ahead of us.

Indeed Spike got him and managed to stay out of webbing range at first. His task was to not let the guy escape until we arrived while staying alive himself. A Stiletto is no match for a Daredevil in a one versus one fight. The Daredevil pilot knew his stuff though, and maneuvered himself into web range after a few moments. Bad news. As feared he killed Spike shortly after, but by then Waleri was almost there, and the rest of us close behind.

He managed to warp off, but made the mistake to warp to a medium site where we could all follow. Finally Waleri hard tackled him and our fleet caught up. With several logis on the field there was no way he could be a threat to us anymore, so we just held him down. We wanted Spike to reship, return to us and get in on the kill. Suitable vengeance.

Daredevil warp scrambled, webbed, target painted…doomed.

The guy didn’t want to wait that long and initiated self destruction though. Unsportsmanlike conduct, 15 yards penalty! Ahem. Spike didn’t make it back within two minutes. Fortunately he’s still on the kill mail since the Daredevil didn’t leave system after their encounter, so all is good. Finally the loot fairy decided to be on our side for once too, probably to reward our great camaraderie. Almost a hundred million ISK dropped, more than twice the cost of our lost Stiletto.

The evening still wasn’t over. We killed some more small stuff, and, our last kill of the evening, another Brutix. Spike tackled him sitting right at a gate. He hadn’t seen the rest of our fleet, yet decided not to jump to (assumed) safety after Spike aggressed him. Instead he started shooting back. Of course we all jumped through and killed him. A few minutes later a friend of his convoed one of us. He stated that the Brutix had been quite expensive and he deemed it unfair that a bunch of “unskill people” in “crap rifters” killed him. And that we should “repay his ship”.

I’ll leave you with the sound of our reaction to that and a closeup of my Magus and a couple fleet members.

 

Player-made music in MMOs

Music is very important to me. I love music since I was little. I became a musician myself relatively late though, I started playing the guitar when I was sixteen. A couple years later the drums became my main instrument.

Although I’m not the most creative person when it comes to composing music, expressing myself through music has been a part of my life for a very long time.

So you can imagine my excitement when Star Wars Galaxies came along in 2003 with a pretty sophisticated system for player-made music.

It didn’t actually allow players to compose music themselves though. Instead it had eight (I think) songs to choose from at launch, and five instruments to play them. Among those songs was the Mos Eisley cantina song of course, but also a couple of new compositions. Each instrument had up to eight musical variations, called Flourishes, for each song. For every bar of music one of those could be chosen while playing. Additionally some lightshow effects could be triggered every now and then.

This was already pretty nice when playing alone, but it was obvious that the system had the potential for greatness when played as a group.

Hence I didn’t hesitate for long to start looking for a band. I found two guys looking to start a new band on my server, Gorath, on one of the german SWG forums. We met ingame and talked about our ideas and visions and decided we were a good match.

We started meeting regularly to practice. We experimented with different combinations of instruments for the various songs, and which Flourishes sounded good together. We even practiced solos for single instruments, which meant all other musicians had to use one or more ‘Pause’-commands at the right time. Since this was before voice chat had become a common thing we had to coordinate our efforts via ingame-chat, which was trickier than it probably sounds.

Practicing a vocal composition in the sunshine of Corellia.

When we felt that we were good enough to play in front of an audience we started looking for opportunities. Since Gorath had a pretty large and lively roleplaying community that didn’t take long. Soon we were booked for our first gig, at a player wedding no less.

Playing the song ‘Ceremonial’ as a substitute for the Wedding March while Groom and guests wait for the Bride.

It was great. I have to admit that the roleplaying stuff was a bit over the top for me, I’m just not into these things. But being there and playing for an audience of real players, being cheered at and asked for encores was a gaming experience I’ll never forget.

Rocking the wedding party in a guild hall…

…and on the beach at night followed by fireworks.

We were joined by additional musicians and a couple of dancers over time, rehearsed even more sophisticated shows and wore more elaborate stage outfits. I wouldn’t say that we were the best or most famous band on Gorath, but we were definitely playing in the top league. It was a fantastic time.

Entertaining the crowd at a local crimelord’s palace. We were very glad that he liked it…

After I quit SWG I had to wait for about six years until I played a game with player-made music again. This game was All Points Bulletin (the reboot, APB Reloaded, that went live some time after the original game tanked is still running and I play it from time to time). A MIDI-like editor can be used here to compose 5-second long themes or whole songs.

Recreating Marilyn Manson’s title theme from the first Resident Evil movie.

I never saw a reason to do whole songs because the game supports using one’s own music library to be played by car stereos ingame anyway. Also the available sound libraries aren’t really that great.

The themes are where it’s at though! Every character can equip such a theme, and whenever you kill someone it gets played to your victim. If the game bestows the MVP title upon you at the end of a match it’s even played once to all players on both sides.

Because people are people I don’t really have to point out that there are lots of folks who use a theme that’s basically just noise and as annoying as (in)humanly possible. Fortunately blocking a player is but a few klicks away, and then you don’t hear that player’s themes anymore.

However there are also many players who want to have a nice, high quality theme that suits their style or taste, so a talented theme-maker has not only lots of potential customers but can also earn quite a sum with his craft. I made millions of ingame Dollars selling the themes I made, I even did a couple on request.

It feels really great to receive a whisper after killing someone and not be called a cheater/dickhead/whatever for a change, instead getting: ‘WOW what an awesome theme, did you make it yourself?’.

The third and until now last game with player-made music I played was ArcheAge. Here a somewhat peculiar notation system is used to compose songs. It takes some time and effort getting used to. Apparently it’s taken from an earlier game, Mabinogi, which I never played.

Composed music is written down on special paper that has to be crafted first, and these song sheets are then used to play the song with an equipped instrument. They can also be traded or sold. The amount of notes that fit on one sheet are determined by your Artistry skill. Songs can have up to three voices, which is kinda cool because you can make even wind instruments play three notes at the same time this way.

Playing a pretty cool looking and sounding lute on my balcony.

The important thing that’s missing though, at least in the EU/NA version of the game, is band support. Playing all alone is quite nice when you have some good sheets and a couple of instruments on hand, but playing with a band would be a world of difference (see SWG above).

Lord of the Rings Online seems to have a very good system with bands and everything. There are even big festivals, like this one just a couple weeks ago. I’ve never played LotRO though, so I can’t speak from my own experience about it.

Now, I fully realize that there are without a doubt many players who couldn’t care less about player-made music in their MMOs. So every developer team has to weigh the cost-benefit ratio when deciding if their game needs something like that. There are also games where it just wouldn’t fit thematically of course.

Generally speaking though, if you want to make a game that’s more than just a treadmill of quests, gear and combat, instead offering a rich and varied virtual world to explore and experience, a good system for player-made music can be a massive enrichment and a real asset to your game.

Spontaneous cooperation for the win!

The formup for Monday’s public fleet looked promising. Not only did we have quite a lot of Wolves, our mainline DPS ship of the day, and enough Deacons for reps, we also had three Command Destroyers, two Hyenas and a Keres for support. I joked that when our fleet looks this good we probably won’t find any targets to kill at all.

Indeed our roam started pretty underwhelming. Within the first hour we only caught one lone Stabber.

Desperate for a fight our FC, Captain Cean, contacted our friends at EVE University. When I say friends I mean that we like and respect what they do, and when we meet one of their fleets by chance we normally only engage them when we feel that they have at least a fighting chance. We are pirates, but we are also fully aware that EVE’s biggest problems with player retention are it’s steep learning curve and it’s sometimes pretty hostile environment. Chasing newbros away from the game by mercilessly slaughtering them time and again doesn’t help anyone.

From time to time we arrange scrimmages so that they can have a fleet fight at more or less even odds. It’s good training for them and additional content for us.

This time they had a Caracal fleet already going and were willing to meet and fight us. We turned around and headed for the rendezvous system, eagerly anticipating the fight.

After a couple jumps our scout suddenly reported a neutral gang just one system ahead of us. They had a fleet composition very similar to ours. Since some Caldari Militia pilots were among them we suspected this might be our arch enemy Chichou again. Cean didn’t hesitate for even a second, we gave chase full speed ahead.

We caught up with them at the Oicx gate in Vlillirier. Some had jumped already, about ten still sat at the gate. Cean fired his Jump Field Generator as soon as we landed in hopes of booshing at least some of them off the gate with us.

We caught eight of them and the fight was on!

Then shit got real.

What looked like some easy kills at first turned into a serious slugfest as the overview filled with more and more hostiles quickly. Their fleet was much bigger than what we had seen, and our position 100km off the gate didn’t slow their reinforcements down much. They probably used their own Command Destroyers to jump right on top of us, I honestly wasn’t able to pay attention to everything that was going on. Chichou was indeed among them.

Setting drones on the primary target and keeping Chichou tackled while taking damage myself.

Despite our early kills the tide began to turn. They outnumbered us a good bit and still had six of their seven logis left on the field. We switched targets often but had a hard time breaking our primaries, each kill took quite a while. Meanwhile we lost four Wolves, one Hyena and the Keres in the course of less than three minutes.

When we also lost one of our Deacons it sure looked like we were going to get wiped out.

Suddenly another group of neutrals appeared on grid. More reinforcements for Chichou or a third party looking for easy kills?

EVE Uni to the rescue. Never been happier to see these guys.

As it turned out Cean had kept Uni’s FC in the loop. And why wouldn’t he? After all they were waiting for us to come and fight them, and were about to get robbed of that opportunity. So they decided to give us a helping hand. Cheers guys!

With their help we gained the upper hand again and made short work of the remaining enemy forces. Some managed to get away, but we made very sure their General wouldn’t be able to.

Chichou awaiting his demise.

We saved him for last. Unfortunately his pod escaped, but it felt really good anyway. Cean and I were especially pleased, because he got top damage and I got the final blow.

Lakisa got her whoring-drone on him in time too.

As expected we didn’t have to go without a hefty dose of salt from him either. While we looted the field he ranted in local about us having set a trap for him and bringing the perfect counter for his doctrine. Yeah, right. Never mind the fact that we did nothing of the sort, or that he started using ‘his’ Wolf doctrine only after seeing us use it effectively, accusations like that are really grand when they come from someone who never takes a fight if he doesn’t have the clear advantage.

Besides, the Battle Report shows that even with EVE Uni’s and our fleets combined we didn’t quite match the numbers he had. Again.

Which makes us the clear winners of a relatively even fight. Thank you EVE Uni for being the cool guys you are! Thank you Chichou for…not running away quickly enough this time, I guess. Be sure we’ll hunt you down whenever we get the opportunity.

Wrapping things up here’s a screenshot of the fight with the UI turned off and zoomed in a good bit. Unfortunately it’s still hard to make out any details, but at least it looks pretty.