Game Director Letter - March

[barbaricwildcat2]

lol 50G x 6 chars = 300 duped golds. Not a single exploited gold (even a single tin) or item should come to Crom. Not. A. Single.
And yeah, will be fun seeing army of pvp 8-10 players exclusively done with "friendly" pvp events coming on other servers. This server was a rotten fruit since the beginning and you guys lobby'd so much in favor of keeping it alive during the golden days of dupe. It's always the same funny story with pvpers in AoC : they destroy their own server and cry to funcom afterwhile.

tissue never really was a rage server player, he has an alt nec there and thats it (his main is a necro).

[barbaricwildcat2]

Edit by Anzu: Trolling is bad.

[AgisVakarian]

I hope all that AA points which I gathered on my main character (around 700-800) I could change to that new AA points or something...

[Kurt2013]

There are problems with most of your suggestions there, i will just take the easiest one that is letting sins use swords, there are swords in the game intended for rangers that give damage of their dex. The T4 ranger sword has better stats on it than the assassin dagger and 37 more base dps, if the assassin can use that it will make it silly overpowered o the level that white hitting will do more damage than the current dual-dagger. And you cant solve that because the sword need to stay good for the ranger, and you cant buff the other sin-daggers to the same level. If you wanted to solve it you will need to change a number of feats and abilities of the sin to actively exclude their effect on swords, and that is way to much work and will need new systems to handle some of them.

You forget that the combo defines the damage too, maybe more than just stats and weapon damage. So plenty of tweaking and balancing options. There is really no problem except maybe unneccessary work and getting used to different looks.

[Boesch]

I think people are getting unnecessarily excited by this, but that's kind of traditional for what is left of the community - fans dying of thirst willing to believe in any oasis. There's now one less person working on AOC so the rate you saw things getting done over the last 12 months is absolutely not going to increase. And if people are worked up over the thought of Guardians say using a spear and shield or even more exotic combinations, remember that this may require a whole new set of animations where the damage would need to be applied at the same time and in the same amount as the old combos. So an Assassin wielding a chain? Probably not. If the past promises are any indication of the future...

[puckstop98]

First off - Thank you Joel for your efforts, you'll be missed by the AoC community and good luck with your new position.

I agree with Salorf - it would make sense to use some of the TSW animations and weapons, as applicable.

Assassin's having fist weapons? Yes please! Barb with a shield? Why not? Ranged combos for thrown weapons and non rangers? It could be fun.

Even leveraging some of the animations from other classes could be useful, if not fully utilized. I do agree that balancing everything will be critical. Giving a sin more DPS and more range with a sword could be damaging to the game. Making a trade of DPS for range with a sword makes it more interesting.

As a side node, I'd enjoy seeing a crossbow get the one hand shot gun pump to reload).

At the end of all of the day, if all it does is give people a little something new to play with or get some people to come back for a few months, it could be worth it.

[nico0815]

...use some of the TSW animations...

pls no!
animations in aoc are made by mocap (and looks fantastic), tws animation looks like ... no comment , do not want to be banned again ^^

i talk about player animation, the monster, specifically the boss animation looks great in tws.

[LunaticAsylumLA]

pls no!
animations in aoc are made by mocap (and looks fantastic), tws animation looks like ... no comment , do not want to be banned again ^^

i talk about player animation, the monster, specifically the boss animation looks great in tws.

Almost every idea from the action TSW brought into RPG Age of Conan is a bad thing, in my opinion. So I tend to agree with Nico.

[MisterClean]

I can't see where Salorf mentioned any animation from TSW -_-

The idea, which is simple and good imo, is to autoswap weapon to a new third weapon slot when you use your new combos that require the new type of weapon.

[Sarolf]

Hehe yeah i was not talking about using TSW animations for AoC! (but ill guess we get some of them anyway)

Just the automatic weaponswap by using a Combo for one of the "new/Extended" weapons was my Intension to implement for AoC, to avoid further manual weaponswaps.


Acutally we have 2 Weaponslots, some classes using weaponswap for debuffing etc. putting a third weapontype in this System which needs a non Auto-swap-mechanic can cripple the whole gameplay as Long as its not perfectly designed/balanced for each class.

Funcom spokes about Extended AA-Tree, maybe there´s a Chance to Level up different weapontypes within this tree plus the needed Combos and stuff, but in the end i cant believe that this stuff replaces the whole range of old weapon types Combos and stuff, they have to Balance so many skills for many classes for doing this which would bring the Game to Status quo in this Topic.

So it should be pretty clear, that the Extended weaponrange will be like it is, an Extended opportunity to build up your char/toon which goes the same direction that the khitai Combos did. Funcom´s main priority should be, to don´t cripple the actual combofloating (which means avoid any **** which kills aoc dynamic gameplay which can happen imo when they implement another manual weaponswap, 3 step Combos etc.)

some ideas are pretty cool about the classes weapons, i would go for this:

BS - 2H Staff (Melee)

Guard - Spear and Shield (Melee)
Conq - Polearm
DT - 1h/2h Flails - 2h Blunt

Ranger - Dual Wield Crossbows
Barbarian - Flails 1h/2h or Special Swords/ Axe´s in combination with some crazy shield
Sin - Claws - 1h Tanto with Ninja combos

HoX - some Crazy Chain-Weapon 2h/1h with Talisman - 1h sword with talisman

PoM, ToS, Necro, Demo - No Idea, maybe some mystical Weapons for givin them some more spells and spellpower i would never Change one of the acutal classes from real Melee to real ranged or real ranged to real melee caused of the Action that must be invest to make this perfectly working.