Posts by Insomnya

When your game got several years of testing and development, you shouldnt have to rebalance everyclass and wait the 30 days after an official launch to get something that's working fine. It should work before the release in case you guys forgot this point.

Reserved

Reserved

-- PART 2 --

Few hours later, Neowiz updated a patch that reduced every class damage by around 90 %. From 10 000 crits on my guardian to 1185 at max. They said people complained about the game being too easy and expect people to use full chains of combos to get a kill and no just a few hits.

Well, it makes sense. I’m not saying 2-shotting thing is great. But I’m not sure the 90 % reduction damage is the right answer. What’s happening in PvE ? People used to solo the 13/22 dungeons which were designed (I hope) to be soloed. Now they can’t do the 22 one.

They fixed mana issues for paladin, like now we don’t even need to use one of our 2 regen spells ever. Like ever. Mana never goes down.

What about Mages ? Manabar is fully depleated for killing a single mob in PvE. You can’t even enjoy mage anymore if you don’t specc in Mana regen Blink. Unless you really like to kill a mob every 30secs.

What about Guardians ? In PvE –Ok, for those who never played a guardian before all look just fine. Mobs are dying in a few combos which arent too hard to get out. For PvP ? Guardians are still relying on Charge to gap close any target. And now if a target wants to escape, she just have to time her dodge spell at the right time and run forever until she meets either a guard, a member of it’s faction or the ennemy faction. Nice game.

What about Berserkers ? From someone who never played a berseker before, again, it doesnt look so screwed. Berserkers are still the most wanted things in PvE, they still output loads of damage. What was the main problem of the berserker before in PvP ? They couldn’t reach any target with their spells. Good job trying to hit a mage now that people have 2times more dodge spells than before !

What about Rangers ? If you used to play ranger before the patch you would simply just run from point A to point B while killing things. Just perfect farming class. Smooth, fun, loads of damage, and could be in struggle if being charged by ennemys. Now ? You can still run from point A to B thanks god they didn’t remove autorun yet. Don’t expect to kill things on the way or just a few since your concentration will be depleated after a couple kills while you’ve been used to one shot things.

Also now if you get rushed by a guardian, does’nt really matter if you dodge or not cause you won’t have enough damage to kill him before he kills you and unlike you, he can spams how many times he want if he catches you.

What about paladin then ? Well with all the damage reduction paladins are now godmode. I’ve been used to get 2shotted from a few seconds of inattention before. Yesterday I just went afk after farming some minerals, when I came back I was being hit by a ranger, I swapped to my healing stance and launched a 5500 heal wich is half of my Hp bar. From this point I just swapped to my interrupt stance and perma root him while maintaining some DPS without losing any mana in the run. Took me around 30seconds to kill him but what could he do ? Not enough damage to kill me, not enough escapes to dodge roots. God helps him.

-- PART 3 --

Beside all of this « in game » review, I just have to say a few words on servers stability. If game is being tested for several years now and in game mechanics issues CAN NOT be forgiven, every EA launch comes with it’s own servers issues.

I’m a network admin myself and I now the feelings when you get to manage these sort of things. Neowiz surely underestimated the number of players that would buy the game by A LOT. That’s why their first answers were to add more servers to play.

Coming from that, lot’s of people had friends that could’nt log in Physis because server was either full or restricted. Some of them even bought the game with an early access pack and could’nt play.

Neowiz did some apologize on twitter and gave every EA users 2450 lumena (which seriously could have been 2600 because it’s the amount needed for skins but this is another debate, a compensation is already nice).

What I really not enjoy with Neowiz is that, given all the attention people made to Bless, they did an Early Access for 48 hours only. This was totally bullshit considering most of users are not fiber optic connected and have 7 hours download for standart ADSL. When you finally downloaded the game either you were lucky enough to play on Physis or just had to wait for maintenances to get servers out. Obviously those who really wanted to meet their friends on Physis who were already playing had to wait for 3 days (which is 1 day after the official launch…).

Now 7 days after the EA, we still have a queue to log in our servers. For physis it’s like 1 hour for 700 slots in the queue. That’s very sad and I hope there will be a lot more compensations once you fixed this because all players deserves to be able to play a game they PURCHASED. Not to mention Physis crashes at least 3/4 times a day !! Which puts you back in the super queue.

Besides all the bad notes and theres tons more to add, Neowiz is still working hard to fix everything and just make bad decisions at important times. This can be forgiven but don’t think people are fools, your game has been out for years now, make it GOOD and make it WORKS.

Final words :

- Graphics : 9/10 (Everything got amazing details but the floor is poorly designed. Wish we had the same floor than the witcher or Bdo.)

- Mechanics : 5/10 (Mechanics are subject to change in the next few days with propre patches, can't really tell much about this but now I don't really know if I like it or not that much).

- Interface : 6/10 (I like the Aion styles and the police. Could be better if people gets to place things wherever they want, this is 2018 and have been possible in every other games since forever).

- Cursor selection : 2/10 (Selection is the worst of every game I've played so far)

- Gameplay : 8/10 (I like the faction mode, the open world pvp, how thing works for progression, cristals stuff and so on)

Should I recommand the game ? Definitely not now. When I tell people to come onto a game it's because I think it is good to play. I would really feel bad if my friends could'nt join my server, would be stuck in queues for hours while they don't have much time to play, or when mechanics change totally from day 1 to day 2. Actually everything that happened in this game so for the moment I don't recommand playing it. Obviously this would change when things are fixed.

Don't forget this is all my personal experience with this game and can not be taken as granted.

Insomnya

Ok guys, there's a LOT to say about this game. This gonna take some time to write and to read. I made it in 3 parts with 1 all I have to say about gameplay from EA creation to the damage patch nerf, 2 my point of vue of the damage patch nerf and 3 a point on server stability. Let's start !

-- PART 1 --

With all the hype around I started the early access on the 28th may with a collector founder's pack. I mained Healer in most of MMos past 15 years with some notoriety in games like WoW, Aion and FFXIV. I'll tell you my story on Bless and my perspective.

When I successfully logged in the first time it was like Oh the splash art is so nice. Selecting my region which is EU and my server which is Physis. There was only one server at this time by region so this was pretty straightforward. Now there's like 7 servers for EU and I think 6/7 for NA too.

When you enter the game for the first time you have to pick a faction like Aion and WoW back in the old days. You can not create 2 characters on 2 separate factions so this will determine your future in Bless. I picked Union with a couple friends and started to create my paladin which is the only healing class released yet, Mystic coming in the next few months.

The character creation is very detailed and complete, can't tell if Aion is better or not on this point but for sure they are very close and theres good option to make your character unique !

My Paladin looks terrific I now press Start, and I enter the basic tutorial guide. Oh god, this tutorial was a nightmare. No idea how people can do that bad to teach people basics. Keybinds are set originally from a QWERTY keyboard when I'm using AZERTY. I started to do my keybinds first and go through all the spells binding. What a mistake ! When I got the first fighting quest to teach me basic of combat system, I have to press a key [`] that is not even working from my keyboard. This on azerty is CTRL+7 and did not work. Took me several minutes to figure it out before I went in options and change the "stance convertion" key to something more natural. Finally in step 2, now quest tells me to use this or this spell in a form of chain. Well here again I have to take several minutes and random tries to complete this because the traduction was garbage ! The spell asked was not even in my spell list. Thank you guys for this headache. Exiting tutorial after finally understood everything by myself instead of being lead by the game, I now have to do all my keybindings again because they weren't save by the tutorial zone server.

I pick the main (and only yet) quest. I made an Amistad (which look like humans) so the race is what decide your starting zone and not the class. How to say, this was the hardest early quest I've ever made in a game because damage/mana werent well balance. The final monster of the Amistad's starting zone is a berserker that is 1 level ahead of you at this time. It is so easy to kill with any other class. I tried fewer hours later with a guardian and literally 2 shotted him. Well lets come back to my paladin. This guy was hudge to kill as a paladin by this time. I even had to use and manage health pots to get him killed while having 5% hp left when I finally succeed (and it took me a few tries !).

The paladin was supposed to be the healer, but it has literally no healing spells before u hit 2X. So before that you are just a damage dealer with half damage than everyone else and a manabar which depleates entirely in 2 combos with close to no way to regen it because regen spells come with the healing stances at 2X. You can switch between your 2 stances but it has a 10sec cooldown so do it wisely.

Coming back to the main quest and entering the capital, all monsters to kill are now super easy even with a paladin. It's like you've been thrown in another world where everything is easy. The only complication could be the spells you miss, that monsters either resists or dodge. In this case you are fcked and forced to wait several seconds without doing anything but for most fights, it's pretty easy (even if 50% slower than any other class in the game).

Grinding in the 2X level you finally hit your first healing stance ! Happy ? Well you have like every other stances, 3 chains starters skill in this tree. Or will have when you hit 3X. So for now you just have 1 skill that heals in that stance and can't really do much with it. Keep on leveling you might have your 2nd healing stance soon !

So you are still playing a small DPS while leveling to your 3X (mainly doing 22 level dungeon solo which takes more time than other class but is actually do able and simple to do). When you hit the level to have your second healing stance you now have almost all spells from the 1st stance. But the spells for your 2nd stance will be all unlocked at level 38 for the 2nd chainskill and 45 for the 3rd.

At least now from your first stance you get the Prayer spell that gives you 40% mana instant every 10 sec and close the page of all your mana issues.

So, you leveled up hard to play healer you will now be able to play your 1st healing stance at it's full potential (or almost).

Be prepared for what's next :

-You want to click a target thats not in ur group (because you don't see it's hp bar) : tip#1 tell him to stand still for the next 10seconds because if he's moving to avoid ennemy's damage or jumping, you have to be very lucky to be able to select him with the cursor. This cursor is pretty bad, the reaction delay between click and selection is awful, the window to actually select somebody is awful and it feels just BAD trying to do so.

-You realised that hp bars werent showing up if your friend was not in your group, there you decided to group with him. Great job. Now you can see it's hp bar... unless if he moves more than 12meters than you (when your spells could possibly heal him at 25meters). If he just gets too far than you (around those 12 meters, then the hp bars arent showing up anymore! How great is that to heal some people ?)

-You can't move while casting your spells and if you ever try to move inside of a chainskill, you will be interrupted. (example : spell 1 you dont move -- theres an ennemy coming for you and you gonna take a big hit, if you move you just can't throw the spell 2 in the chain anymore and enjoy the cd from spell 1)

-You can't do anything else than healing when playing healing stance. You were told you were a healer right? so you heal, you can't do anything else with that stance. If you actually want to heal and be able to clear monsters or assist your team with a few CC's/dmg, then you have to swap to the Damage/CC's stance. Enjoy your 10sec cooldown.

-Interface wise, the group window is locked. There's no way to move the window or the people inside the window. Both are locked and if you are used to heal your tank pressing F2 because always second in the group, then you might be screwed cause it could be where your range DPS is. Also, there's no way to see if a target is too far away of you to be healed. a 25m checker could have done the job because when it comes to 15v15 and your AoE spells only heals your group member, you could heal others with manual selection but you at least need to know where the fck they are.

-Before the patch they made on dmg, healing in PvP was like :

you > "Hmm you have 9000 hp it's good ! Don't worry mate I can heal you around 1500 no crit every 1,50sec cast."

your mate > "Huh I just took 10800 hp in 1 hit from this guardian why did'nt you heal me ?????"

Self explanatory imo, but for the courtasy of this review I'll explain it in more details : When it came to PvP before the damage patch (so at the time I was playing my first PvPs, you would as a paladin 2/3shot people in damage stance while you would also being 1/2 shots from other ennemys. You couldnt expect to heal anybody because healing 1500 when people takes 1hit or 8-10k dmg is a joke.

I decided to reroll on a guardian and left my healer for now considering this was definitely not I would enjoy in this game.

When I create my guardian and do the same game again it took me around half a day to pass my paladin's level, and another half to hit 38. WIthin the same day I went further than everything I could have done on my paladin in 2 days. Here again, self explanatory. You can pvp around 30 when your mainquest enter the disputed zones. From this point I was just doing my main/side quests jumping on every ennemy I saw no matter the level. From level 20 I was starting dueling people and even won against people more than 38 without any difficulty (besides all the miss/dodges).

The combo 1 R R R basically killed anyone in 1 combo if crits occured, or mages in 2 if you could delayed their 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 spam with some dmg mitigation ability.

This was not fair but the gameplay looked dynamic.