WoW is faster than NWN for sure, but it's still slow compared to newer games. The genre seems to have shifted towards more twitch-action combat with features like dodging, aiming, lack of a GCD and more streamlined skill palettes.
I played a few battlegrounds on I think WotLK with a friend as a Frost DK over 2 days - casually mind you, but 2-4 hours of casual play should be enough for a reasonable assessment of whether to commit for the long run or not. The things I was used to - rapid firing of skills, being able to double tap a movement key to dodge/dash out of the way with invulnerability, being able to hold and release a cast time skill early at the price of lower damage ('course DK doesn't have cast time skills, but still) and a bunch of other things, were just not there, so that contributed to the slower pace of combat.
Back on topic, I've tried Av3 and it's at least above average. I definitely see more attention to detail than usual with the spell changes, notably quality-of-life improvements to weapon buffs so that they hit both weapons on a dual wielder. There's definitely a sense of progression - new mobs are introduced at just about the right timing and challenge level. Getting 15 levels in a single map seems a little extreme, but it's a big map and I figure it's to let new players experience the touted post-40 system more quickly.
The admin also seems savvy with NWN developments, and I see the use of systems like prebuffed spawns, NWNX-based stat modification and it looks like it uses the same epic spell framework as The Awakening, because the Silence spell has the exact same bug - when you cast it, the white ring appears and follows the target around, but the actual silence zone stays at the location it was cast. It has its own customizations of course.
Typical of an extreme high magic/high mods setup, the power creep is evident. Spell scaling is clearly geared towards the high end of the level spectrum. Which means spells that inherently don't scale well, like summons, simply get a static buff. This leads to what I call WSI syndrome, where a mid-level mage outperforms an epic-level melee character because their summon by itself has better stats than a geared epic character.
Buffs like basic elemental protections and damage reduction spells also tend to last many times the caster's actual HP pool. and it looks like the size of the mod has caused some maintenance issues, because mobs in old, low-level content are using spells modded for performance in high-level content.
For a post-40 oriented server, I consider these minor issues, so overall Av3 checks a lot of the basic checkboxes that need to be checked. It has potential to be good or great, but I can't pass that judgement until I see the post-40 content.
Modifié par Aelis Eine, 09 novembre 2012 - 04:35 .
