Done Trying To Be Korean, Balancing Melee: The Final Frontier

Done With "Trying To Be Korean"
Not permanently... yet, but the game (Aion) has taken its toll on many a gamer. Although I initially found it surprising that almost the entirety of Voodoo participated in a mass exodus from Aion with numerous account sales, I can pretty much see where they're coming from lately. Although there are some really fun aspects to the game (primarily cosmetic aspects), there are also numerous problems that keep the game from ever becoming anything resembling a "WoW killer," most notably the incessant amount of grinding involved. So you hit level 50, you're done with the hard part, right? Ha, no. The game is Korean through and through and if people learned anything from Lineage 2, you'd know that the grinding has just begun.

Want the best PvE gear? No problem, you just need to run Dark Poeta about 3 billion times, camp the quest spawn NPC's, and farm legendary bosses that can either drop 4 of the best items in the game at a time or also drop absolutely nothing as a curve ball to keep you coming back for more. Or on the other hand, you can do full instance runs that take a bare minimum of 4 hours to complete in order to have a shot at equally entertaining final bosses that also have an equal chance to drop 0 loot.

Desire the best PvP gear? Piece of cake, all you have to do is farm fortress guards for 8+ hours a day until higher officer ranks at which point you're stuck doing mind numbing repeat turn-in quests for a measly amount of Abyss Points, all because the risk:reward for dying at high ranks is extremely against your favor. An elysean general ranked Ranger from JP Aion said it best when he stated, "Never. Ever. Strike unless you feel that you ahve 100% chance of winning. 95% isn’t good enough. The risk isn’t worth it." So basically in order to advance to the most prestige ranks on the PvP ladder, you basically need to avoid PvP entirely and slay dragons... I mean fortress guards... in order to do so, brilliant!

I think quite possibly the worst example of how bad of a grind this game is comes when I first got my level 30 piece of Daevonian armor. You get 1 piece out of a 5-piece set and upon completing the set, you can then get your Daevonian weapon. Well, in true NCsoft fashion, the only way to get any more than 1 piece of the armor is to level another character on your account up to level 30 and mail the armor piece to your main after doing the quest. Then again 3 more times... for a level 30 set of gear. And people find this fun?

Aion hasn't been a huge let-down in terms of being a break from 6 years of WoW and a graphically appealing time sink, but it is far from your perfect MMO. I'm not cancelling my subscription just yet, but if NCsoft doesn't do some sweeping changes within the next 1-2 major content patches, you can expect to see my account on Player Auctions like the rest of Voodoo.





Melee Classes: The Final Frontier
I'm bringing up this pseudo-random topic because after playing Aion for the last couple months, if I had to pinpoint the one thing that bothered me the most, it would be melee classes and how powerful, yet worthless they can be at the same time. Not in just Aion, but seemingly every MMO to date has yet to balance melee classes in-line with casters adequately, handle client-server latency well, and at the same time do it in the absence of collision detection (which only EverQuest had).

In Aion, melee classes scale extremely well, far better than casters, with end-game gear, particularly because of attack speed bonuses. They will simply wreck casters because of their health and offensive power scaling when casters don't get the same return from magic boost scaling. That said, however, melee are also extraordinarily worthless in this game when it comes to aerial combat (95% of Abyss PvP). This is primarily because the client-server interaction in Aion is sketchy at best when it comes to determining melee range with your target. Ranged classes have it infinitely easier when fighting in the air and even with extendable weapons and flight speed items/scrolls, melee often find themselves repeatedly "out of range" of their target even when flying ahead of them on their screen. It's probably the absolutely most game-breaking problem I have with Aion right now.

In WoW, melee classes also scale very well, often far better than caster/healer counterparts, due to gear. The client-server interaction is also much better but only in the presence of snares. When 2 un-snared targets are fighting with 1 kiting the other, you'll begin seeing the same problem that Aion has (no melee classes in Aion have reliable snares). For WoW's sake, I think they did a good job of giving almost every melee class a consistent snare (FU ret paladins, you don't deserve one) for the sake of keeping the client-server latency issue to a minimum. What Blizzard really just has to do at this point is figure out a way to have casters benefit more from having top-end gear in the way that melee classes do. When are we going to see a good caster weapon with a chance on spell hit? The datamined melee weapons out of 25-man Icecrown are looking ridiculous meanwhile casters are only getting another 50 spell power to show for their hard efforts.

Finally, I just wanted to conclude by saying that Dark Age of Camelot had by far the best melee balance in any MMORPG that I've played thus far. Their client-server interaction was almost flawless, allowing melee whenever you were in range even in the absence of snares, and almost perfect balance with melee/caster in that game. I won't go into too much detail on this because I know very few Gameriot readers have even played DAoC, but I honestly feel DAoC was and still could be the best PvP game on the market if not for New Frontiers killing the game. If anyone reading this played DAoC for years before/after NF, please let me know if you agree or disagree with this statement.





In other news, I'll be reactivating WoW soon most likely, so if any rivals out there are looking to push for duelist while carrying a Deadly/Furious Gladiator Death Knight, PM me!