What do you get when you take the most vanilla aspects of World of Warcraft, EverQuest II and Lord of the Rings Online, and roll them into a free-to-play MMO? You get Runes of Magic. And God help us, they’ve implemented damned daily quests. Will the influences of WOW please just die already! Okay, okay, I’m being melodramatic but it just floors me to see dailies in another MMO. Dailies just scream, “Grind you fool,” whenever I see them. But it’s not all bad or doom and gloom, if you’re a more forgiving player and looking for a new fantasy free-to-play (F2P) MMO.
I took a look at Runes of Magic (ROM) for two reasons. First, I was intrigued by the dual class system. The last MMO I played with dual specs was Asheron’s Call 2. GuildWars has dual specs but I have a hard time bundling that with MMOs. Secondly, was crafting combined with immediate access to player housing. I’ve only had that in EverQuest II (EQ2). Those two alone are powerful inducements for me to give a game a look. ROM is currently in an Open BETA that’s more like a “we’ve launched incomplete but are calling it BETA”. I say this because characters created at this point and forward will persist through release. There are no more character wipes planned. The game is still being balanced, content completed and whole classes being added but you can play now and keep your levels. I’m not sure about your gear and wealth.
The graphics are decent. On high things look pleasing without buckling your rig to its knees. The style is somewhere between WOW and EQ2, leaning closer to WOW. During character creation you have more control than in most games. It’s along the lines of Age of Conan where you can control your height, weight and breast size, along with the normal, pick through these stock faces. I came out of the creator looking pretty good. They’ve learned what Blizzard knew but AOC and LOTRO didn’t initially, players don’t like looking like mixed-matched shit even as a noob. You actually look a cut above a WOW character coming out of the starting blocks, if that’s important to ya.
The first thing you need to decide, a total mind-bender for me, is your classes. There is no resetting the class selections. If you create a combination that you don’t like, you will suck it up or re-roll. This is a tough decision because the choice of combination is WIDE OPEN. You can combine anything but certain combinations won’t be beneficial at all and prove very counter productive to progressing through the content. The way classes work in ROM is probably worth the free look. You can pick any two classes and play those classes separately – wholly independent of each other. And you can play with one as your primary and the other as your secondary together, but you only can access the elite skills of the primary class.
For example, I went in with the idea of being a Mage. That’s pretty straight forward. Choosing a secondary from among Warrior, Scout, Rogue, Priest and Knight was not so simple. Playing the combo a Mage/Priest is an obvious choice. Your an Elementalist that can heal herself while questing, play pure DPS in a group or pure healer in a group. It would be easy to manage gear and stats since they are both cloth wearers and dependent on Intellect and Wisdom for mana. There is no +healing stat so they could wear the same exact armor and use the same weapons.
On the other hand, they are suited for ranged damage and suffer from the same disadvantages when something closes the distance to in-your-face-combat. They’re squishy, mana dependent for damage and easily interrupted with long spell casts. Whereas Mage/Rogue adds versatility by adding melee combat abilities, DOTs and snares. However, their primary stats are different – one uses mana and the other uses energy. One wears cloth and the other can wear leather, so you’ll have to manage gear and weapons. For each class combination you can think of, you have to weigh the advantages, disadvantages and compare them against your play-style and content goals. The choices you’d make if you plan to solo are different than if you want to group vs. if you going to end-game raid or do PVP.
Thinking of what I might want to do and reading the feedback on forums, it took me about three days to even decide on what to try. This was fine because completing the download and patch took me about that long after several false starts. *Grumble* My understanding of the way this works is you have to level the classes separately – or up to the level of skills you want for your secondary class at a minimum. If the skills you want from the Rogue as secondary stop at level 15, then that’s as far as you level the Rogue while continuing to level the Mage half of you. You might see people running around as Mage/Rogue (30/15), where the Mage is level 30 but they stopped leveling the Rogue at 15. *Shrug* A quick trip to your house allows you to switch between Mage, Rogue and Mage/Rogue.
Tangent – they borrowed the doing inventory, sales management and stuff from inside your house like EQ2. But they replaced the bulletin board with a housekeeper in a short French maid outfit. This is such a “some guy thought this up” I could vomit. An interactive desk would have sufficed or a ledger on a bookcase. Being a poor schmoe player walking into my room and being greeted by the sex-kitten housekeeper so doesn’t work. Every time I go in my room I think, “Why are you in here and is there any way for me to kick your ass out!?!” Oh did I mention that you can put crafting stations in your room? No, well you can and if I’m around long enough I will love that. But I’m NOT going to love having the short-skirt chick tailing me around. The game is open for modding. I hope someone makes a re-skin so I can turn her into a desk, cat or picture on a wall. *Giggle* Anywho…
After playing AOC and WAR, I knew that I was going to trial run the classes I thought I might want to play. In both of those games my usual stock choices were nothing like what I expected, didn’t like them and had to pick something else. As it happens, I’m now 3-for-3 in the new fantasy game for my old standards not being very standard anymore. AOC, WAR and now ROM, I’ve had to step outside the box and make due with something else. I’ve found nice alternatives. The awesome AOC Bear Shaman. The spunky Bright Wizard and really fun Warrior Priest in WAR. In ROM, I’m really taking a leap and doing a combination being called a Battle Monk.
Lord help me, I’ve never ever played or wanted to play, a Warrior. However the forums have convinced me to give this combo a try. Of all the classes I tested, the Knight and the Priest were the only contenders. I would have preferred the Knight/Priest but the Knight is a bit borked right now. He consumes more mana than any caster EVAR and only does moderate damage. The WOW Paladin and seal mechanic is completely ripped but not tuned as well. Even knowing how to use seals from having rolled a WOW Pally to keep your health and mana up it doesn’t work in ROM. You have to stack the seals a certain number of times and the mob is either dead or the seals gone before you stack enough seals to activate them. Consequently, you’re always running out of Mana. This was on the scale of slower than doing a Holy Priest - sit down and drink deal. Sure you could gobble potions or just wait to regenerate mana after each fight but that’s too tedious. I remember the early days of Paladin leveling in WOW was like watching paint dry, well this is far worse. As much as the combination intrigued me and I looked hella hot with a 2H bigger than my scantily clad body, I’m not in the mood for the pain train leveling, not even when it’s free.
Not being impressed by the Mage or Scout and walking way from the Knight, left only the Priest. Now what on earth is a solo player going to do with a Priest?!? Play a Battle Monk of course. There are a few players giving this a whirl. A special stance has been added for Priests doing a Priest/Warrior combo. There are a few really good threads on strategy and people are saying that it's fun, if not the easiest combination. This is a game and I'm all about "the fun" so I'm going it a whirl.
Having taken that much time to pick and discuss my selection of classes, it must mean that this pudding rip-off of WOW/EQ2/LOTRO isn’t completely without merit. Yes, it does have some aspects I like “okay” enough to keep poking around. Oh and did I mention it’s free? See that’s the sticking point. I’m no cheap-skate. I’ll lay out money for good games. Goodness knows my bookshelves are lined with them. But with the feature-sets, appearances and mechanics bleeding all over each other, why pay for one of the copycats that will piss me off in a few months, when I get the same result for free?
What I’m still looking for that Wizard101 can’t provide is more exploration, more roaming around as a character in a bustling fantasy world, player housing which I adore and CRAFTING. Crafting is just something I enjoy doing. Producing items my character can use is fun. Producing things worth selling to others is a treat. Participating, however casually, in the game’s economy is icing on the cake of my MMO experience. It’s just part of how I game. I’m not very far in ROM, having rolled 4 characters to 10 as a trial but what I’ve seen is good enough to want to see more. ROM has end-game raiding and PVP. Your effectiveness is gear dependent. My sense is that leveling is going to be a bit of a grind. Some of the things that keep me from going back to EQ2 and flat out abandoning WOW.
The difference in those things existing in ROM is that I can tinker around with crafting, my house and economy, while leveling when I feel like it. That means if I can only stand leveling one day a month who cares, it’s free. I can come and go, or never log in again and I’ve lost nothing at all. My point is that subscription MMOs are going to have to change – reduce the grind and gear dependency. Stop with the fuking dailies and having players do dungeons for the umpteenth time praying for that random drop. You’re not the only kid on the block anymore offering that kind of experience.
ROM looks pretty darn good. It’s says it’s BETA but I didn’t encounter a single bug. The players were actually polite in chat and answered lots of questions. People stopped to help me when I looked like I might die. Someone gave me a sweet sword on my Knight. I can do the Kill X quests, dailies or grind. I can craft – making 500 pieces of crap until I get to the ones that are worth it. I can have player housing. I can raid. I can PVP. I can do all of these things in a game that’s decent FOR FREE.
Why am I going to pay you for the same? For the polish? Screw that, I’m not impressed by it the 10th time in a dungeon. For inventive but so overly dispersed content that it’s an empty wasteland which turns into one of the most boring grinds ever? Or large scale PVP that’s not really PVP, only disguised PVE and well, not actually so large scale because there’s hella lag? Or gear that looked the same from level 1 to level 30 and game completion that was a complete façade after level 20? I think you’re all in for a VERY RUDE awakening. F2P games are rapidly maturing and if I can get something close to what you’re dishing out minus the box fee and subscription, why the hell am I going to pay you? Answer is, I’m not.
If FreeRealms comes on strong and is as much fun as I'm having in the limited but rewarding experience of Wizard101, yet has considerably more content and options, I predict many games are going to get a huge kick in the fuking teeth. Sony is going to put some lights out with FreeRealms. Grind heavy slow content releasing subscription based games better wake up.
More thoughts on ROM in the next few days…
Here's a nice little starter guide
Two posts on the Battle Monk | Thoughts on Battle Monk
