Rift: Currently on Rift

I’m currently playing as “Tata” in the “Dayblind” PVP server. I am currently level 35 Mage with Chloromancer, Pyromancer, and Necromancer roles. Because of these roles, I can easily change depending on situation and what we’re doing. I am Expert+ in Runecrafter, Outfitter, and Butchering. We made a guild called <Chibi>. It is currently a level 2 guild, and it is a friend’s oriented guild. There are only 4 of us that are here and are looking for people to join. We’re semi-casual and just currently leveling and doing dungeons. We did our three guild quests, but unable to finish the last one before they got resetted so we missed out on the next three; pity =(.

We just cleared out the quests in Scarwood Reach, and now deciding to head to Moonshade Highlands area for quests because we did all of Droughtlands in Open Beta already. And now to open up my boxed Collector’s Edition of Rift! See you in Telara, or until next post.

If you want to join our Guild contact Tata, Bonnie, Rukuso, or Sharwyn for invite. Our concept is to invite friends, and friends’ of friends. If you’re looking for a friendly guild, hit us up and let us know. We usually play anywhere between 3PM EST to 5AM EST.

 

Rift: Open Beta 7

Beta 7 was fun. Bonnie, Rukuso, and I manage to get to level 42 and have done all of the dungeon instances available. The Fall of Lantern’s Hook was pretty fun as well. When we first did it with some other people, we kept wiping and wiping and wiping from the guy that goes up the ramp and keep popping two dogs over. The Rogue probably sucked at pulling and constantly pulls links after links. The next time we did it, Rukuso pulls and it was fine. The boss there seems to throw cats at you. That’s what they said, but I didn’t actually look at it and see it ;( Maybe in launch I will do it when I get my levels up. Like with every other zone, we cleared all the zones completely. There was this one quest that was blocked off by the invisible barrier, but with clever jumping we manage to get to it and finish that one.

I’ll make this one short because it’s been awhile and I haven’t had time to actually write a thorough Beta 7 post because RIFT is here and more RIFTing and less of anything else!

Rift: Beta 6

Rift 6 came and even more improvements over the previous ones. There are less sparkles and graphic animations all around the world. There are huge changes to the class abilities as well as the racial abilities. My Bahmi can now take a leap and I am able to access areas where normal jump are not accessible. It is fun, hehe. This time, I completely abandoned my Warrior tank since we’re making Rukuso tank instead. I just focused on my Chloromancer because it’s fun and I can aid as a half DPS and support.

I didn’t abandon my Warrior until later on when I did the long series of quest in Titan’s Well. In this beta, I switch back and forth between my Paladin and my Chloromancer a lot. In order to level my Chloromancer up, I grind through the quest in Stonefield all the way to Granite Falls. Our group (Rukuso, Bonnie, and I) continue to do Deepstrike Mines. This time, it’s easier since we learn from our previous encounter. We got some more members to join and when we finally reached Gatekeeper Kaleida, we were able to kill it because we have enough DPS focusing on the Earth Crystal. Everything else is just Tank and Spank. After the instance, we were excited and so I told everyone, “Let’s go do Foul Cascade!”, and they agreed. Note that Bonnie and I are level 26 at this point, Rukuso is at 27 or 28, the other member (a Mage and another Rogue) are at 30. This is a group looking for disaster, as we kept doing instance at the worst levels possible.

Before we did Deepstrike Mines, I manage to find two things. One of them is the Telescope puzzle, the other is a cairn filled with random magical+ goodies for our level. I told Bonnie and Rukuso to come up towards me to get the free goodies and do the puzzle. It was fun! I only later found out that there are dancing squirrels in the vicinity and that is where we’re supposed to get the “Dancing with Squirrels” achievement. 😦

On our way to Scarlet Gorge

Not far from Granite Falls, we hopped our way towards Scarlet Gorge and on our way to the Foul Cascade (FC). Only to realize how far the instance really is from where we are. We have to reach all the way to the end of Scarlet Gorge in order to get to the Foul Cascade. We grab the Porticulum in Scarlet Gorge, and we all split apart to find the road and entrance to the instance. Aside from being a shared zone, these monsters can be higher level than us and various invasion and nasty treacherous danger can come at any moment. And I was right. I stepped into a Guardian area and the guards instantaneously 1-shotted me. It was hiding behind a wall and when I head towards a doorway, thud! After that I just soul walked and kept on going. Near the end, everyone was confused in how you enter. I started from the bottom of the gorge, and walk my way inside climbing the long passageway only to find out it’s not all the way to the top. I then head around and find the green dot and manage to portal in.

The zone greets us with two quests, we quickly accepted. The beginning was rather sloppy. Mobs would be roaming all around and aggroing us when we were fighting the Gnar Residue. First wipe happens, and it wasn’t the last. After we clear the trash mobs and the Gnar Residue, we head towards Matron Verosa. Bad Idea. The fight itself is pretty easy, but when Lesch starts to face rape random people (namely either Bonnie or I) things gets ugly. We wipe to it many times, trying various strategies with no progress. We were fed up being 1-shotted, and almost call it quits entirely. I then told everyone to do the other bosses before coming back to this one. We head on to Krasimir Barionov and clear any Gnar Residue we come into as well as trash mobs. Those bigass trash mob hurts, but we had no problem with a Cleric and Chloro healer.

Krasimir is relatively easy. The fight is about 4 waves. The first wave he will summon 5 Animate Corpses. The second wave he will summon 3 Reconstructed Corpses. The third wave he will summon 2 Reconstructed Abominations. These Abominations will periodically be buffed by Krasimir and will gain in size, take it down first. The final wave is Krasimir himself. He can cast Dark Touch that can have AoE DoT effect on the targeted person. They can be dispelled and pose no problem if the healer can keep up on the cure. He also cast Void Bolt and does an ability called Shout of Rage. Shout of Rage is a point blank AoE knockback ability. We killed it easily and were looking at the loot. Someone *cough* Bk, the Rogue, decided to touch the altar and a mob spawned killing him while we were enjoying rolling on the item. LoL. We head on to the next boss, Surin Skenobar.

As we head towards Surin, the trash mobs killed us when more adds aggro us. We soulwalked and resurrected and cleared them. Surin is pretty easy, just keep the heals up as she cycles her abilities. Her abilities are Shrapnel Blast (instant cast DD spell), Void Charge (longer casting spell which can be interrupted), and Hail of Bullets (teleports 5 times to random party member and attack them).

When these two bosses are killed we turn in our quest and head on to Verosa again. This time it was progressing smoother than before. We don’t know why though! We manage to get to Gurze, but then wiped afterwards. Once again stacking close doesn’t do jack since Lesch was able to 1-shot Bonnie or me with or without the Staggering Blitz move. We were in close range too, and it still did that. After many wipes and two soul mending, we manage to defeat her. Yes, the whole instance was like 2-3 hours and we all had to recall and heal our souls two times.  On the time we finally defeated Verosa, I actually died on Lesch phase as I got 1-shotted. I quickly resurrected and ran my ass back to the fight. Note that I didn’t walk all the way from the bottom to the ramp to the fight, because of my racial ability I was able to jump over a ledge to get to Verosa. We cleared the fight confidently as we are able to keep everyone healed up and with Lesch being dead. Verosa phase was semi difficult as she sent Death storm towards us. With Flourish and my AoE heal, and Bonnie curing, we were able to top everyone off rather quickly.

After the instance, it was a bit late in my time. We decided to do another instance of Deepstrike Mines, but Bk had to go. We replaced him with a DPS Warrior, and cleared the whole area rather quickly. Kaleida went down even faster than before.

This was the most memorable time during Beta 6. Like all other Beta I’ve played, I also submitted bugs and feedbacks. I didn’t really get to play much due to three things: My brother coming home, Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year), and the Super Bowl. Hopefully I will play more during Beta 7 since I keep missing out the new content for each Beta. I’ll need to catch up and learn more before I play pre-release!

Rift: Beta 5

So…Beta 5 came and between Beta 4 and 5 I manage to drag a few friends over to play with me. Since they are all new, I made a new character as well to play with them. I decided to be a Warrior tank since one is going to be a Cleric, and another is going for Rogue. In the end of Beta 4, I played a Warrior tank as well until level 13. I didn’t know which soul is good for Paladin so I chose the default compatibility. The best thing about playing games is the ongoing learning process. You improve over your previous experience. Unlike in Beta 4 where I played a lot, I played a lot less in Beta 5.

We all woke up early and wait for the servers to go live. We had no problem because we got in earlier than most people. I was a Warrior, Bonnie was the Cleric, Rukuso and Castellano are Rogues. During this time, the server went crazy. Many people are having problems logging in or even get to the server list. Luckily for us, we manage to stay in the server without interruption. However, Rukuso got unlucky and he was stuck on the 49% – 89% thing. After a while, they patch up the issue and people no longer have problems.

When we’re high enough level we decided to trio Iron Tombs (IT). Caor Ashstone pretty much wiped us when I got stacks of Jagged Wounds and Curses on me. It wasn’t until later when we’re higher level that we were able to do this. I told them that Caor Ashstone drops a 10-slot Bag. It didn’t drop the first time we did it and Rukuso was like Liiiiiiiar! After the Three Kings, we were playing Ghostbuster and capturing the Spectral Screamers. Bonnie had to go to work so we didn’t have a chance to fight the final boss.

The next time we did the instance, we finally had more members! I was doing quests with a random person I encounter in Stonefield. When Bonnie logged on, we decided to go do IT for real this time. We grabbed another player and we went in. Everything went smooth; we split into 3 people tanking the three kings. Why? Because we can lol. I took on Derribec with my Void Knight sub soul abilities, Rukuso took on Laric, and the random took on Humbart. We all took them down about the same time. We did the Ghostbuster quest again because some of them didn’t do the quest before. Now, the fun part is the Orb room. I told them to hop from orb to orb! And we all wipe because there was so many shades. I laughed my ass off so hard. We took on the shades later after we resurrected by moving little by little until they don’t spawn much anymore. On the last boss, I told them I’ll be moving towards the light when Eliam’s Ghost popped up, but I never told them to get into the light as well. Well, we know what happens. LOL, a lot of people died when it did the AoE. We wiped or ran away to lose aggro. We cleared the instance after that of course and that concludes Day 1. It was very late and the sun was rising.

The next time, we did Deepstrike Mines. Once again we did the instance at lower than the expected level. Especially for Bonnie, she was our healer and she was about few levels lower than us, which was fine. The instance itself was pretty easy, except for the final boss. I was fooling around too much and I keep falling down and getting myself killed. Deepstrike Mines is pretty basic; kill trash, tank and spank, repeat. The first boss is the Overseer Markus. On the distance you see him whipping 4 Rotted Dredgers. When you engage him, they all come into you. Don’t get behind the red line since that will reset the fight. The first thing is to clear out the 4 trash mob then focus on Markus. At about 50% HP, he’ll split into 3 Shades of Markus, you then have to kill them all before he returns to battle. He’ll come back at the same amount of HP he left off with. Kill him and head on towards the next boss.

The next boss is Gregori Krezlav. He is a mage mob that doesn’t move. He just cast spells on the tank and summons Baneful Delver from time to time. At some point, three channelers will spawn and put a buff on Gregori to prevent any damage being done to him. I, being the tank, then switched target to kill the annoying Baneful Delver while the other DPS focused on the channelers. After the three channelers are dead, we then focus on Gregori. It was a pretty easy fight.

The next boss we encounter is Bonehew the Thunderer. He’s such a big boss. While not engaged, he likes to play with fire and blast that thing in the middle of the platform. He’s also an easy boss; just have to avoid his Seismic Smash which causes a huge frontal damage knockback move. Bonnie being the lower level actually got hurt more than the rest of us. When we finished killing him we head on down to the lower level to do the Eth Device quest. The mobs are annoying since they keep knocking you away from the device. It was funny being pushed away, and even funnier with those funny sound effects.

After we’re done with the quest, we face the Gatekeeper Kaleida. Well at first we didn’t know about it until we mess around. We were hopping all around the side and see if we can jump over the platform in between the gate. Rukuso took a leap and ended up engaging Kelaida. Now this is one of the hardest bosses we’ve ever encounter because of the Earth Crystal. Every time we took it down, it would just heal back up to 100%. We wiped a couple times, and then finally decided to quit when we didn’t have enough DPS to take it down. This was the last instance we’ve ever done and Beta 5 is concluding. In Beta 6, I no longer played Warrior and switch back to my Chloromancer because it was actually more fun.

In Beta 5, Rukuso and I did a lot of Black Gardens. We would pass the Fang around whenever we died to it just so we could win. I believe we did about 5-6 in a row, and only lost once or twice. I don’t know why, but every time I played it people don’t really know what to do. They would just constantly try to kill people and ignoring the fact that the Guardian has the Fang or even bother to grab the fang and go to a better defensive area. The strategy is to grab the fang and move it back towards your faction area and defend it. It may be a pussy move, and some wants to actually engage in fight, but that’s the goal. There are the attackers and defenders. Once the defender grabbed the Fang, the attackers can just engage the enemies that are coming. Here are some screenshots in the Black Gardens in Beta 5.

Rift: Planes of Telara Beta 4

When I first heard about this game, it was in Beta 3. It was during a short session when a Justin.tv (JTV) broadcaster casted one evening. It got me interested in the game as I search for more information about the game. Little did I know that it was in beta phase, and sign-up are available. I quickly signed up and search all over the web for these beta-keys to guarantee that I would make into the next beta. As an avid MMO gamer, I must try this game I said to myself. And I did as I got into Beta 4.

The first time installation got me a bit frustrated since I had problems with the installation. It was about 7 GB download, but it was fine since I’m downloading at my maximum speed. After the download complete and it installs, there was an error. Some file got corrupted or something and it wouldn’t continue. Perhaps it was because I install to another drive or perhaps a packet of download didn’t download correctly. I had to recover/download the whole thing again. Once again, it failed causing me to download gain. The final one works at least, and I am on the way to play the game on Beta 4 day.

I didn’t wake up early in time for the server to start up; I was about 2 hours late. One of my JTV friends also got into the beta as well. We were both excited the day before the test day. My friend Momo chose the Wolfsbane server, so I went with her. We chose Defiant. When I woke up, Momo was already out of the starting zone. I hurried my way as I do my starting zone quests. Of course, I also took the time to read the text and find out my way around. This is easy because the whole interface is familiar to me. It is about the same as World of Warcraft that I have played before, so it wasn’t hard to learn the system. Prior to the game, I did some research on what seems like a class, or Soul, I would like to play. I know I was going to be a Mage, and since the Stormcaller interested me I chose that as my main one I will spend more points on. The final battle was so interesting in the final starting area, it’s RIFTTTTT. Once I got out of there, I arrived at Freemarch. I followed my way towards the quest waypoint and all of the sudden this NPC just fall down, shocked by my presence as an Ascended. Lots of LOL ensues.

We grouped up and formed a mini two-man party. Various Rifts appears all over the place and we tried them out. It was nice to learn about these rifts and work together with others in sealing them up. When we’re at Kelari Refuge, I began choosing a profession (crafting). I chose Butchering, Runecraft, and Outfitter. It is nice making things we can actually use while we level up. We finished quests after quests and head on towards Meridian. After many, many hours, we obtained all of our souls. All of the sudden, the sky turns dark. This was our first zone wide major invasion. We took on the final boss and are awarded various goods like the Orb of Heroism, and 2 gold O.o. When we are finally high enough level, we went to try our first instance, the Iron Tombs (IT). This is where I learned about the Chloromancer, a healing mage that heals based on the damage they dealt. I bought a second role and chose Chloromancer main. It was fun, and we couldn’t have survived the first boss without it. Momo was a Ranger, Bard, and another soul I forgot. I was Archon, Chloromancer, Warlock. Those are very poor soul choices until I figure out how to actually play it later on. We did IT with her pet tanking, while her bard abilities and my Chloromancer abilities heal the pet. Now, here’s something bad, I never used Lifegiving Veil! Yes, being a noob is bad. I didn’t know how to use the ability until later on. Not only that, I never put any points into reducing the cast time on Bloom and Flourish. My only way to heal the pet tank was the long casting of Bloom and Flourish. We never cleared IT though, but it was fun either way. We finished every quest in Freemarch and have nothing to do except to head to Stonefield, but we never did. As the time draws closer to the end of the beta, we decided to play on the Guardian side and see that part of the story as a new calling.

It was nice being able to choose the Guardian as well on the same Server (Shard). I chose to be a Paladin tank and she chose to be a Cleric. The Rifts here on this side was very different. There are Fire Rifts and it was fun. We did the starting zone, and came out. We took on the Fire Rifts and finally ended the journey at the academy. Torturing students was fun, esp. being Defiant at heart.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Upon out of nowhere, I stumbled upon RIFT. Being a semi-huge MMO (RPG mostly) fan, I like to test around and try out new MMO out there. Let me talk about myself first about my gaming experience in the MMORPG category. It all started with Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds back when I was in high school. I started playing around the summer of 1999 I believe. The game still exists now, but I haven’t register for my account for a while. I usually re-register at least once every year for their anniversary event. I have also played other f2p MMO games, but not really fond of many of them. They got boring really quickly as well as hacks and bots all around. This is not to say p2p games don’t have such thing, but when someone pays for subscription they mostly will think twice before using such hacks since using them will cause their long effort in developing their characters into getting banned. I also played Final Fantasy XI Online since October 29^th, 2003. You can say that this is actually my birthday gift since the game went live on October 28^th, 2003 (which was my birthday). I preordered the game, but it didn’t arrive in my mailbox in college until a day afterwards. I am currently still subscribed to FFXI and enjoy the time with my Linkshell as well as many of the new expansion and add-on available. I also enjoy foreign MMO games as well. One game I played was Yogurting JP which is no longer in service. It was a school themed 3D MMORPG where you have to clear different classroom or stages in order to rank up and to go up a grade. However, due to lack of communication I didn’t play it for long. The last time I played it was when they introduce a new patch with the egg capsule machine. They’re quite fun since some of them dispense these card that makes you dance.

During the time in NexusTK, I made many friends and tried out many new online games. Some of them that came to mind were QuizQuiz and Ragnarok Online (RO). QuizQuiz was a short lived game that never actually went commercial. It just kinda stayed in Beta phase and then died off due to the lack of players. In QuizQuiz, you can configure your avatar as much as you want with items you buy. The main thing I remember about my avatar is that he has a big green bandana and is sucking on a lollipop. The main quiz game I play in there was actually Olla Olla, a typing game where you have to be very quick in typing the sentence displayed after every round. If you are the first to type the sentence, then your bucket goes up. If you fail to type the sentence or fail to type it in time, your bucket goes down. After certain amount of rounds you either earn IQ or you lose them by failing. There’s also a game called Survival OX, this is a True or False game where 32 players are pitted against each other. This is a battle of elimination where you choose if it’s true (O), or false (X). The goal is to be the last man standing by moving to the O or the X side. You can trick your opponents by going to the incorrect side, then at the last minute switch side. Another game was a game show type trivia game about computer and video games genre. Unfortunately all of the game except the Korean version died off, the Korean version got renamed to Q-Play. You can find the similar sprites in the Nintendo DS game called Ping Pals.

I’ve never really got too interested into RO. I did play in the Alpha and early beta, but didn’t get too interested into it until emulation of the server came about. RO was a grind fest…a huge grind fest. After certain amount of levels, it just got too boring to continue. I remember cheating in RO too. Yeah, I know I’m a cheater blah blah blah. In the early RO beta phase before you have to pay for the game, there are bots. APE (or monkey?) bot being the most popular one is one advance bot. It has a map of your location, and it set to auto walk around and kills things and pick up items while you are away. This is mainly due to packets being sniffed out and due to lack of security in the game. That experiment was rather short lived. The game didn’t really get too hooked; this is probably because of the lack of people I know that plays the game. I’ve always been a loner in the game and not many people to play it with. When emulation started for RO, I kinda jumped in and played with it as well. There was the AEGIS (real server that RO uses) and then there was the YARE. AEGIS was stolen and YARE was developed by a person. Early days of emulation of RO was buggy for YARE. AEGIS was also complex to set up since you have to have a dedicated system just for it and set up MySQL and whatnot. Took a long time to get AEGIS up and running, but it was worth if, for the short amount of time of messing around. In YARE, I was also an early tester of it and played a tiny part of bug editing but I was never a coder for it. I had zero programming skills. The only code I played with was the walking code. Back then in early YARE, there was this huge bug with walking around. You would always end up jumping back and forth or running slow. I only slightly fixed my compiled server by changing a line of code. I don’t remember what it was though. Being a GM is always fun, you get to summon a whole load of monster and turn on PvP…but wtf everyone tries to kill you as soon as you turn PvP on lol. Even though I was a GM, I am also vulnerable to attack, except later on, I edited a card that gives me 100% avoid so every hit always misses me. And then I stopped playing altogether.

Yet another game I play was Maple Story…except I never played the US version of it. That only lasted 1-2 days, the emote is kinda cute though which I had posted long time ago in my Xanga blog. I also played Gunbound as well. To those that have never played Gunbound, it is turn-based tank game. My first “tank” style game is Gorilla in the Q-Basic format. BASIC is an old computer language. Being a kid, I have absolutely no knowledge in computer when my father first bought a 486 computer. Since I have the freedom to mess around with computers, I learn computers through trials and error. One of the games included was QBasic Gorilla and Nibbles that my brother and I loved. We somehow stumbled into it and had fun playing them. Gorilla is a tank game, although not a tank, where you go against a second player. The goal of the game is to throw a banana into your opponent and kill them. You input the angle and the velocity and watch your gorilla throw the banana towards your opponent (or away…). The other game that is similar to it is Worms. Although I had the game long ago in this 1000 games collection that I had, I didn’t know about it until my friend Billy told me about it. I was hooked at first as well as Worms 2 that came later on. Worms was fun whether you play it against computer or players. In Worms, you move your worm and try to kill all of the opponent’s team worms. You have various types of weapons at your disposal and you’re supposed to knock down the health of each worm to 0. When they die, they also suicide and explode themselves so neighboring worms will get hurt as well. As for Gunbound, you have various tank available to you, and each tank have different supers and attack type. If the room owner also allows item usage, players can also use items when it is their turn to power up, heal themselves, or enhance their attack. Players can have multiple lives or team lives, and the player or team last standing wins the game. You also gain points to spend to freely customize your avatar.

Although I should test many new MMO games, not many really interest me. If a game really gets me hyped, I would actually go and play/subscribe to it. However, that is rather hard to get me hooked because I’m more into what things are there available to do, how often, and things like the maturity of the players. What is a turn down for me are the players in that particular game. If most of the people are being an ass, the game won’t be enjoyable and the game gets uninstalled. The community in the game is more important to me than the graphics and gameplay. It’s not to say that graphic and gameplay is not as important, there is just so much in consideration when playing an online game. As for now, I will slowly talk about games I have played, am playing right now, and future games that I may play.

Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds Pt.1

The Kingdom of the Winds (NexusTK)

The game itself and the MMORPG category were still fairly new at the time. The game was first develop in Korea back in 1994 by Nexon, and uses a 2D tile system and wasn’t released until 1996 in Korea. Many of you may know the name Nexon because of such games as: Maple Story, Mabinogi, Audition, and Dungeon Fighter Online. The game later came to America one year later in beta phase and then fully went commercialize in 1998. The client itself is 2D and to many people who values graphics over the gameplay and online interaction, this game is definitely not for you. The game thrives in the community, albeit a very small community, where everybody may know you. It’s a close community of about 400 simultaneously logged in characters. The peak one time I saw was about 2000+ in the single world that they have in US. I said world instead of server because they have multiple server dedicated to one particular zone in the game. According to Wikipedia, in Korea their record was over 12,000 in 1999 which was three years after they went commercial. Nowadays, that’s relatively low comparing to massive giants like World of Warcraft. NexusTK later changed owner to Kru Interactive.

Gameplay

(Since I won’t be using screenshots and graphics in this first post, I’ll try to be as descriptive as possible)

The game uses 2D tile based system. You may only attack Up, Down, Left, and Right of you. It uses the arrow keys to move your character around the world. Besides the four physical attack positions, you may have spells to be used at your disposal. There are few chat systems in the game. They are regular chat, clan chat, yell, whisper, wisdom, and path. We will go more into each one of them. Speech bubbles appear above you and other characters if you are in range. To talk publically, press the apostrophe (‘) key and then your message. The chat log appears on the bottom/bottom left of client. The chat log has all the chat system available to your character and you can scroll up to read them back.

You can also join a clan or a guild as well. These clans, however, wasn’t as freely made as it is now. Back then, clans are not easily created and in order to start a clan, you have to be a hardcore roleplayer. You also have to be rich and have many dedicated followers. In order to be a clan leader, you mostly have to give up your time in hunting to dedicate yourself in the clan. It’s not easy being the leader, but you do have clan officer to help you with other things as well. To make a clan, you also have to enter in what is called a Tribunal. In tribunal, other clan in the city will either have to vote you in or decline you completely. This is a lengthy process with both in-game GM (called an Archon) and as well as other clan leader in the current city. Nowadays, you can just create a mini clan called a tribe. It is a lot easier but they are unofficial unless you want your tribe to become a clan, it is one way to start off.

Back to the chat system, the regular chat system only display to those that are around what you can see. The game only shows about 20 tiles by 20 tiles, I’m not sure on the exact dimension anymore, which is pretty small. You will have to get near the character you want to chat to if you want a public chat. There is also the yell feature, which will highlight your text to those that are beyond your visual range, but not to the whole zone. You can yell by pushing shift + 1 or the “!”. I believe it’s up to around 50 tiles away, again don’t quote me on this as I don’t remember the exact numbers. You gain this ability at level 6, or the exact roleplay word for level is “insight”. There is also a way to contact one another in privacy; it is the whisper chat system. To whisper someone, simply push shift + ‘, which is the quotation mark (“), and type in the person’s name then push enter and the message to send a whisper. The wisdom chat system is a server/zone wide system dedicated to relay your message to the entire server. Like I said, each server is different and dedicated to only one particular area. To make it a bit less confusing, the area are: Koguryo, Buya, Nagnang, Wilderness, Event, House, Carnage, and Games Server. To post a wisdom message, they only appear in either one of those particular server that you currently at. There’s also a mass wisdom which appears on every server, but only dedicated to certain message such as giveaways, trivia, and particular event. The wisdom chat cannot be used until you are level 90, and even that, it cost 100,000 coins just to get the spell. You can also lose it if you are jailed for a crime, which I will go more into later. The final chat system is the path chat. This chat is dedicated to those that are in your current path. A path is basically the class system of NexusTK (Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds). To chat with your fellow path, just send a whisper to @ and it’ll relay all your message to those in the same path as yours.

The Path System

The path system is basically the classes available for NexusTK. There are four of them, and they are the Warrior, Rogue, Poet, and Mage. Each one of them is very special and one can easily determine in relation to what their job is. Every path has a HP bar and MP bar. Yes, even Warriors and Rogues use magic. Before I talk about each individual path, let me tell you this: There is literally no downtime at all in this game besides the part where you find people to hunt with or area availability. Besides the four original paths, there is also the 12 Subpaths system and the 4 totem path. The Subpath is a roleplaying path dedicating 3 different choices to each of the 4 paths. You may also join a totem path which is a NPC path if you don’t want to join a roleplaying path. Joining a roleplaying path means you cannot use words like lol, wtf, lmao, or real world objects and the like unless you’re in carnages or non-public places. However, you can just join a NPC path dedicated to a particular totem. Joining these paths gives the options to more spell availability as well as different titles and markings in your legend.

The Warrior subpaths available are: The Do (martial master), the Chongun (sworn protector and follows the code of honor), and the Barbarian (strong sense of family and expert in outdoor survival).

The Rogue subpaths are: the Merchant (experience trader and master of economy), the Ranger (protector of nature and is using it as their ally), and the Spy (expert of sabotage, deception, and intelligence).

The Mage subpaths are: the Diviner (seers who envision the future), the Geomancer (follower of the Tao), and the Shaman (spirit speakers and communicator).

The Poet subpaths are: the Druid (one with nature who respects the natural cycle of life), the Monk (followers of Buddhism), and the Muse (dedicated to the arts of music, poetry, and storytelling).

The NPC subpaths are the following for warrior, rogues, mage, and poet: Chung Ryong (the mythical blue dragon), Baekho (the mythical white tiger), Ju Jak (the mythical phoenix), and the Hyun Moo (the mythical turtle).

Before I can talk about the class system, I have to talk about the end-game. You first start off in a newbie starting area and you learn your way around the kingdom s you gain level up through quests and hunts. Upon reaching level 99 which is the final level you can obtain, you can sell off your experiences for more stats. To make things slightly complicated, when a player ask what is your stats they typically mean what is your HP/MP in terms of thousands. However, the real category for stats are the three statistic points in Might (more power), Will (magical power and accuracy), and Grace (able to dodge things). There is also HIT and DAM which is also important for physical attack. The HIT stats which are mainly gain through spells and equipment, gives the player more chance to hit a target. Keeping it higher gives you more chance on swing to hit a particular target. This becomes important when things are surrounding around you and you want to hit all four at once. The DAM stats are damage which increases the power you hit at a time. I apologize for going all over the place since this game is pretty complex and explaining one thing will lead me to explaining another. Back to experience selling. After 99, this may become dangerous. You may sell the experiences you have, which is about 4 billion experience points (not a large number anymore nowadays). You may also lose half of everything every time you die, which can be sad when you obtain all those experience points in the hours of hunting you did. These experience points may be traded off for the stats, HP, and MP. Most hunting area progress into different tiers of level as you gains more HP and/or MP. The absolute max experience points you can carry at a time is unsigned int which is 4,294,967,295.

The Warrior is a path dedicated mainly in unleashing their power through their hit points. Their main power relies in obtaining more HP. They mainly uses a power-up spell which lets them to attack all sides for physical swing, but they also have some major attack spells like Slash, Berserk, and the Whirlwind. The Slash is a very weak attack but with very low aethers (cool down timer), the Berserk takes about half of your HP to do a larger damage attack to the one in front of you. The major damage is the Whirlwind which leaves you with 10% HP, but do an enormous amount of damage to the target in front of you. All of these attack spells are based off of your HP, so buying more HP makes your attack even more damaging. The Warrior also has a rage spell which increases their physical damage multiplier by a certain amount. These last about 938 seconds, but are stackable up to 6 times. With each cast, it will cost more MP so getting some MP in according to the tier is important. However, the more you cast the more damage you will receive when struck by an opponent because it increases your AC. In the game, the armor is called AC (armor class), but getting less AC is actually better. At Rage 5, you do about 81x more damage and when you combine with other spells that buff your weapon and hitting all 4 sides, it can be deadly. At the end of this spell, you also leave you with 10% of max HP.

The Rogue is a path dedicated in swiftness. Your attacks are not as strong as the warriors, but you can use your lethal attacks a lot quicker. The Rogue’s main attack comes from both Desperate Attack (DA) and Lethal Strike (LS). Unlike a Warrior’s spell, desperate attack leaves you with absolutely 0 MP. To cycle a rogue or the rotation of these spells mainly follows like this: LS DA DA. Since each spell has some aethers in them, by the time you can do another LS, you can do 2 DA. In order to maximize the Rogue’s potential they will have to balance both HP and MP. A larger MP pool poet will also have to come into play as well. Since Poets can actually give their MP to a target player, the poet should have slightly more MP than the Rogue for maximum output. The Rogue also plays fairly well in PvP Arenas since they can hide themselves anytime they want and can instantly kill a player without them realizing it. Like the Warrior’s rage, the Rogue gets a Cunning spell that improves their damage and ability to attack multiple targets upon stacking it. However, they can only stack until 5 times, with the last being a superior defensive ability.

The Poet is a path dedicated to healing and debuffing. Although they can’t really fare too well in combat, they can however charm some monsters and make them attack others. They also have an ability called Harden Body that prevents all damage done to you for a specific amount of time. Poets mainly spam this spell along with heals and some type of vexing spell. Poet in general is slightly harder to play since it requires more spamming of spells than other paths. The Poet has to vex (spell that debuff the enemy’s armor), heal, and prevent themselves from dying. Before, I mentioned about zero downtime. This is due to the face that every 30 seconds or so, you can actually get back all your mana at the cost of some HP; the spell is called Invoke. On another note, I’m not supposed to say HP and MP. The game’s term is vita and mana. With Invoke, you can easily cycle a Warrior or Rogue at will. The general game play is to Restore (a spell that uses 1/3 mana to heal 1.5x your mana) someone that used a large attack, and then use your highest curing spell to top them off. Repeat until you can recast invoke, but before that Inspire all your leftover mana available to your fighter, drink some wine (Invoke cost about 30 mana to cast), and Invoke. Repeat afterwards. Because of this system, there is no downtime since you have almost limitless mana (you can also steal mana from those in your group). The monster also may not attack players as well because of the Mage.

The Mage is a path dedicated in multifunctional spells as well as big burst of damage. Before hitting 99, a Mage rely on casting single target damage spell known as zapping. They are generally not as productive and can get boring really fast, but Mages also have Paralyze and Blind at their disposal. Blind stops an enemy where they are, but if you go next to them they can attack you. Paralyze does the same, except it completely freezes the enemy preventing it from attacking. These spells only works on non-player characters and not for PvP. A Mage also have spells that attack their surrounding area. These spells usually do more damage at their level than their zapping spells, but are not mana efficient and almost never comes into play. A player may only have up to 52 spells available to them at all times, and there is actually not enough room to get everything from level 1 to 99+. Some spells can be forgotten as they are too weak. For advanced Mages, they also have to learn to properly “set” mobs. This new system came into play when they introduced polearm. This sets a new limit to the amount of mobs you can attack at once from 4 surrounding to 8. It gives you one more tile further range if you attack all sides (think about a diamond in tile form, now think a larger diamond). There’s a lot of work involves in setting since you have to immediately stop them and mob control to pull them from one area to the next. The crowd control is very easy in this game. Whoever zaps an enemy gets the hate. It could be anyone and anytime, but eventually the mob may change target if left alone.

On another post, I will talk about 99+ content as well as other gameplay system, like targeting, I haven’t mentioned yet.