The past two weeks have been extremely busy with finals, work, raiding, guild leadership, real life issues, my Lost addiction, and other things I’m not at leisure to discuss. I’d also been conducting an experiment with DAoC, basically evaluating its current situation to solidify or change any points made in my earlier contrasting juxtaposition of WoW and DAoC. But with finals, some indulgence in leisure, and the DAoC experience having ended, I’m back to full-time blogging.

The DAoC Experiment Is Over

At first, I tried to play my old characters again: a level 50 spiritmaster and a level 49 shaman. Something I found amusing was that I was still in my old guild from four years ago. However, it was not the same guild I remember. The helpful members from back in the day were no longer around. Instead, there was only a handful of players ever online, and they were all elitist. If you asked them a question, they didn’t respond. And they’d kick you from a group for one of the “better” members of the guild. “Better” meaning older and elitist, because they weren’t actually deserving of their pride considering the terrible play. Yeah, let’s go troll for kills around an enemy keep with an eight-person group, instead of intercepting roaming offenses and wiping them with stun-PBAoE tactics. That’s sarcasm, for non-DAoC players, because sitting around a keep in a small group with only one mediocre healer is a death wish. You should only do so if it seems vacant and you’re trying to actually take the keep. Otherwise, keep your distance and try to catch people that actually leave the keep.

I also rediscovered my hatred for the ML abilities you can get in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. Pardon me for thinking it’s stupid that an offensive raid never has to worry about AoE DoT’s because their low realm-ranked healers can just stand out of LOS next to a power font and spam the fuck out of their group heal without having to worry about their power (mana). And pardon me if I think it’s stupid that the people hit with the AoE DoT can just stand next to a heal font out of LoS while their healer is spamming heals on them without having to be in LOS of the people they’re healing. It makes using siege weapons like trebuchets unnecessary in many situations, because damage output by defenders is not an issue. The only issue, really, is if you can break down the door with a ram without dying to boiling oil, or if those defenders can charge outside the keep, take out your healers and CC classes and wipe you entirely.

So, with all of the things I disliked about normal servers, I ended up re-rolling on a classic realm, where ML abilities don’t exist. But this brought back memories of how terrible the leveling system really is, though some improvements had been made in my absence. The tutorial zone was perfect. On your minimap, yellow dots were implemented to indicate a quest giver, and red dots to indicate an NPC or place you need to go to in order to complete quest objectives. Furthermore, the quests were interesting and offered ample rewards for the required effort. However, this system only partially existed outside of the tutorial zone, and the rewards became inadequate shortly after leaving this zone. By level 12, it was much more efficient for me to enter a battleground and kill mobs there for the bonus experience, while farming aurulite from the Catacombs instances to buy gear, all of which is soloable. But this meant I could only grind mobs or PvP for decent experience. The only quests I bothered to do were parts of my epic armor quest, so I could potentially use my level 50 epic armor once capped. But the quests themselves give little experience for doing them and take forever to complete (and the higher level ones are impossible to solo).

So it was a rather frustrating experience to discover very little had improved in the four years of DAoC’s existence since my departure. The only positive was the fact that you can level easily in battlegrounds provided there’s enough people there to kill and help you kill people. Being there to take the central keep of a battleground is worth between 10 and 50 percent of a level, depending on your level relative to the BG’s level range (each of which is split into tiers of five levels: 40-44, 35-39, etc.). But that requires there to actually be enough members of your realm on to counter enemy forces. It also requires there to actually be enemy forces, and for them not to get discouraged when they wipe. It also requires the BG to be popular, and the mid-level BG’s are anything but that. Between level 25 and 35, there’s almost no one interested in participating in the BG’s. So you’re stuck grinding out your levels, and I just couldn’t stomach that enough to satisfy my curiosity over Labyrinth of the Minotaur’s content.

So I ended my DAoC experiment prematurely. The idea was to gather a good amount of RvR data to compare and contrast with WoW. But my frustration was too high for me to bother continuing. I didn’t want to finish leveling to 50, whereas in WoW I have no problems at all leveling alts. I actually enjoy it. But I do like the fact that I could level while PvPing. However, for WoW, that would potentially ruin the twink community. I’d elaborate more, but it would be nothing other than what I have already said in some of my previous entries.