Runes of Magic: Friends and Visitors

Another weekend went by without me accomplishing much in Runes of Magic (ROM).  The weather here is turning early spring which brings people out of the house.  Family and friends paraded through off and on all weekend.  It was a nice change of pace even though I had other plans in mind like hitting a couple of levels and working on some short stories.  It wasn’t until Sunday evening that an opportunity to play ROM presented itself.  And the writing, well, that never happened at all.

Last week Shawn Schuster and I traded a few emails about ROM.  If you’re not familiar with the name, Shawn is now the Managing Editor for Massively.  I first became aware of Shawn from his GuildCast podcast and have been a fan ever since.  In email we discussed how much fun I was having with ROM after my story about my crafting workshop.  A couple of emails later he decided to re-roll on Artemis where I’m encouraging other casuals to come play, so we can form our own little casual community in Taborea.  When I logged on Sunday evening, I saw Shawn’s character was online and went to meet him in game.

I still get a kick out of meeting people I know from the blogosphere in game.  It’s only one step removed from meeting in person.  We spend time growing these characters and invest in them on some emotional level.  I’m pleased as punch to meet the bloggers I’ve been reading for years inside one of the games.  I’ve also had players come and visit my workshop since I posted that it’s finished.  Several players created alts on the server just to visit and were kind enough to send me in-game mail.

While I didn’t get much done in gaming this weekend, what little time I spent was all smiles.  Meeting Shawn and being greeted by friendly emails about my workshop was delightful.

Comments

[Ostt]

I must say that your house is very nice. I visited it last weekend, and just have not had the time to comment. I play pretty casually on Art myself, what level have you managed to get to? I think last I read you were in your mid 20's, fun times killing ents if thats still true. What do you think about the new patch this morning that buffed healing? I am using priest as my secondary and I think they went a little too far. My regen is only level 8 and was healing in the 190's as opposed to the 30's after yesterdays patch.

[Saylah]

Hi Ostt - Thanks. I love having the little house. I've recently found out from visitors that they can't use my stations. *Very sad face*

I'm level 26/26 with my slacker pacing. For the past week, I've been harvesting more than anything else. I'd been wondering if I should wait to see if they tweak the recipes which are too high for the quality of items but I'd like to get out of the previous two tiers. It's annoying to harvest backward in tiers you've leveled past.

I'm also finding that I get caught up in chatting and roaming around without getting much accomplished. :-) I want to hit level 30 before release.

I think the impact of the healing changes is dependent on your spec, gear and stats. People who are doing melee Priests use 1H and Shields which means our base healing has been severely nerfed. The new calc uses the magic damage from your main hand weapon and only 2H come with magical damage. People who had been stacking stats like Int and Wis are disappointed by this change. Lots of teeth gnashing on the forums.

As someone still more concerned about offensive capability, I will continue to stack STR, STA, WIS on my armor but will buff up a 2H for when I'm healing. I just got a nice 2H out of FA that I banked and haven't enhanced and now I know what I need to do with it.

[Chris]

I'm sure they'll have at least one more patch prior to the official release date of March 19. I'll spin the broken record refrain of "it IS a beta, after all." With three patches (1816 on 3/10 AM, 1817 at like 5pm PST, and 1818 on 3/11 AM) in the last 36 hours, clearly the devs are working on balancing stuff out. With priest/mage damage and healing being such a controversial change, I imagine the developers are doing the standard "change things too far to one extreme, then too far back, and finally find a good middle ground" that, say, WoW _continues_ to do after 4.5 years.

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

@Chris - I chuckled a bit reading the posts. This is so old news once you've played many MMOs. P/W is still a good offensive (battle healer) so I'm good. I gave them goblins what-for last night with my new rage generation and better DPS. I'm not changing my stat priorities just yet. Worse case at the higher levels is that I have to have some healing pcs. *shrug* Or I could say screw it and tank. *smile*

The only thing that would piss me off and the posts are starting, are nerfs to skills because of PVP. That whole players wanting a 1v1 balance in a game that has "some" PVP irks me.