Halfling Rangers FTW
Dec. 16th, 2010 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_gneechCame home on a snow day after the office holiday part today, and spent some time playing a new (to me) MMO. It's actually quite an old one but has had enough graphic upgrades that it's still presentable. It's not as lovely to look at as LotRO, nor does the setting have the depth, but it's at least something to scratch that "something new" fix I was talking about a while back.
I'll leave it to interested parties to speculate which game it is, but as you can tell from the title, it has halfling rangers in it, and I'm having a good deal of fun with one. There's something very satisfying about a character 3' tall who appears out of nowhere, fills the nearest giant spider full of arrows and steel, and then disappears again like he's engaged a cloaking device while still putting his knives away.
Full speed stealth on demand is nice, too. This game's version of the ranger is a kind of hybrid tracker/thief, who specializes in ambush and can travel deep into enemy territory without pulling aggro all over the place. That's a big deal for me, because it helps me feel like I can go "straight to the good stuff" without having to fight every trash mob between me and the thing I'm supposed to go click on.
I did play around a little with a barbarian warrior type too (I mean, how could I avoid it, right?); it was more fun than Age of Conan, but also more than a little bland. "Run over here, kill anything that's killable, click on anything clickable. Yawn." The ranger's skills actually do different things, whereas the warrior version I was playing basically had a bunch of different buttons to push that amounted to "Do some damage, do some damage with a different animation, or do some damage and maybe knock them down."
(re: Age of Conan, I actually have a theory that the only way to have a good "Conan-esque" experience in a multiplayer game would be to play in any setting other than the Hyborian age — because one of Conan's defining features is how unusual a person he is. But in a Conan-based MMO, what are you going to see but a bunch of barbarian warriors running around? It totally negates the purpose. That, plus the fact that most derivations from Robert E. Howard's work get it all wrong, or at best fixate on the weakest aspects and totally miss all the best aspects.)
Anyway, it's a fun change, and I like the implementation of this particular class. It's also been very solo-friendly so far. I might start looking into group stuff later if I get more into it, but right now I'm happy to treat it like a giant solo game that just occasionally has particularly deranged NPCs running around in it.
But now, bedtime!
-The Gneech
I'll leave it to interested parties to speculate which game it is, but as you can tell from the title, it has halfling rangers in it, and I'm having a good deal of fun with one. There's something very satisfying about a character 3' tall who appears out of nowhere, fills the nearest giant spider full of arrows and steel, and then disappears again like he's engaged a cloaking device while still putting his knives away.
Full speed stealth on demand is nice, too. This game's version of the ranger is a kind of hybrid tracker/thief, who specializes in ambush and can travel deep into enemy territory without pulling aggro all over the place. That's a big deal for me, because it helps me feel like I can go "straight to the good stuff" without having to fight every trash mob between me and the thing I'm supposed to go click on.
I did play around a little with a barbarian warrior type too (I mean, how could I avoid it, right?); it was more fun than Age of Conan, but also more than a little bland. "Run over here, kill anything that's killable, click on anything clickable. Yawn." The ranger's skills actually do different things, whereas the warrior version I was playing basically had a bunch of different buttons to push that amounted to "Do some damage, do some damage with a different animation, or do some damage and maybe knock them down."
(re: Age of Conan, I actually have a theory that the only way to have a good "Conan-esque" experience in a multiplayer game would be to play in any setting other than the Hyborian age — because one of Conan's defining features is how unusual a person he is. But in a Conan-based MMO, what are you going to see but a bunch of barbarian warriors running around? It totally negates the purpose. That, plus the fact that most derivations from Robert E. Howard's work get it all wrong, or at best fixate on the weakest aspects and totally miss all the best aspects.)
Anyway, it's a fun change, and I like the implementation of this particular class. It's also been very solo-friendly so far. I might start looking into group stuff later if I get more into it, but right now I'm happy to treat it like a giant solo game that just occasionally has particularly deranged NPCs running around in it.
But now, bedtime!
-The Gneech
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-17 06:17 pm (UTC)"Brutie, what is best in life?"
"To chew your pies, see them devoured before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women bakers".
no subject
Date: 2010-12-17 06:19 pm (UTC)*rumblerumblerumbleRUMBLERUMBLERUMBLERUMBLE*
Oh noes! HALFLING STAMPEDE!!! =:o *gets swept away by a tidal wave of halflings*
-The Gneech