Level ~50 impressions update:
CombatOverall still fun and great to look at. Usually after playing an MMO to these levels/this much time I would already sense if the combat is boring or not and this one isn't. Even now I'm discovering new depths. Your character basically has 6 bars:
- Health, determines when you die
- 'Flying'(stamina) bar, determines how much you can sprint, dodge roll, jump around and dash through the sky
- Block/stability meter, works kinda like a shield before you start taking real damage
- 'Ultimate' meter, determines when you can use certain powerful abilities
- The red and blue meters (no idea what they're called), when those fill up to 100%, some abilities that are marked with either the blue or red icon become stronger and the animation changes, usually adds one more 'step' to the move. For example Beggars move 'grab and throw on the floor' becomes 'grab, throw on the floor and then body slam enemy while they're lying'.
A lot of abilities, at least with Beggar, who's a close combat fighter (and thus susceptible to kiting), have some sort of a lock. That means you're holding your enemy in a lock/combo, if they're block meter is drained, otherwise they can dodge out of it. There's also a special skill to break out of these locks, so you don't just sit and watch yourself get pounded. Then you have skills that are based around dealing damage to enemies block meter, but deal less damage to raw hp. So basically what you need to do is break the enemies block then use combo skills on them before it recharges, otherwise combo/lock skills do not do as much damage.
There's also a skill with every class that works like an 'execute' ability when you use it on a low HP enemy. This instakills an enemy and returns some health to you. Great for PvE. For example my class' execute ability is my guy jumping on enemy, grabbing his head, spinning around him breaking his neck while also hitting all the enemies around him with the spin.
All skills have fairly low cooldowns so it's pretty fast paced.
I actually did some duels with chinese players and the lag wasn't that hindering.
GeneralMost of your progress until level 35 is by doing the main quest. You can also do side quests and NPC dueling, but it's not necessary, as main quest gives plenty of XP. After level 35-36, the main story ends and then continues at level 40, 50 and 60 (max level is 70). So what do you do if you're out of main story? There's several things you can do to level up. Note that you can do only so much of each of these per day, as the XP is capped. The XP cap stacks for 3 days, so you can wait and then do everything the third day.
So how do you fill up these daily xp caps?
- Meditating at your school master. Basically all you need to do is go back to your school (school=class) area and meditate for a few minutes and you will get xp.
- Job/profession daily quests. There's 4 types of those and they require a party of 5:
- Finding Treasure - you search a smaller area for these artifacts, you need to find 5 of them and each party member needs to stand on the spot where they found it until all do
- Escorting Cart - you and your team drive a cart to a location and halfway through it is attacked by NPCs
- Finding Criminals - you go to 5 different places on the map and beat on mobs
- Attacking a Cart - never done this one
- Grinding instance - you get into a huge party/raid with other people, get transported to a location where you fight huge amounts of mobs for up to 15 minutes.
- Other side stuff mentioned below
These daily XP caps can be completed quite fast, so it never felt grindy to me so far. It also puts some breaks on the nolifers
Side stuff you can do:
- Instances/dungeons - you go through trash mobs and bosses, get loot. Standard fare. One dungeon was especially interesting, as it was a stealth mission, where you go around and backstab guards without being spotted (you can kill the boss by backstabbing him as well). Bosses can be pretty hard, as they're not just tank and spank. They have attacks that can one shot you and you need to know the tactics on how each boss works. For example one boss spawns with 3 adds that all need to die within a few seconds of each other, but cannot be too close to each other, so you need to separate them. In addition to that, the boss does huge arrow rain AoE that kills you very fast unless you stand in the marked safezone, so you need to pay attention. There's a dungeon party finder feature, so there's not a lot of problems finding a party to do these. Dungeon bosses drop good items as well as cosmetic items, which I think is nice.
- Meditating at certain spots in the world to receive meridian points (take meridian as some sort of alternate/additional progress)
- Attack or escort caravans (different from daily missions mentioned before!) - you will receive money depending on how stacked the cart was (determined randomly at start)
- Professions (different from daily missions!) - you have several professions that you can do to get some extra items/money. I opted for treasure hunter, basically what you do is use an item until and it gives you direction (east, west, etc) of where the treasure could be, you locate it, dig at the site and get some loot
- Crafting
- Side quests and NPC dueling - each of these rewards you with either meridian points or permanent stat boosts pills, so you can imagine it's quite important to do them sooner or later
- Open world bosses - require more people, never done them
- pvp, dueling, guild, faction war, etc - have not experienced any of these besides normal dueling
