Blade and Soul - Kung Fu Korea - Action MMO

Felmega_sl said:

Edit for confusion over gender locked classes. I had thought the BD could only be the lynn (female) race.

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Yeah there's male Lynn too, even though they look like a furry child kind of thing. BD and Summoner are Lynn only so you don't get much choices for these, but every other class can be Jin or Gon so you can get solid looks, and BD is relatively similar to BM so if you hate male Lynns you could play that instead.

Yeah that's what I meant, they do refunds so I asked for one so I could buy the better version. They already refunded me when I bought it on the wrong account when they opened preorder, they seem pretty quick about it. Not sure why they didn't have an upgrade feature right away, considering it's likely people would want to upgrade after playing the weekend(at least a few) and the current system is a hassle.

Played with Premium on alpha today since I found someone to gift it(NCoins are refunded for launch and premium only cost 1coin atm for testing purposes so pretty easy to get someone to gift it) and while I wouldn't say it's P2W, it offer massive advantages, from a fair amount of inventory space from unlocking the wardrobe to store costumes to adding gold drops to mobs which massively increase your funds(I'm talking doubling my gold from 1-15 doing 15 to 16 with premium, though the higher lvl you are the more gold you get from quests but the monster drops don't seem to change much so seems like it might be low level advantage only). Also the obvious xp benefits.

Like the game would most definitely be playable without premium but it seems to give a massive advantage, at least for the first few weeks, so an initial month is a pretty good expense.

Valderen_sl said:

Hopefully there will be enough people to find groups for dungeons because it was kind of hard this last weekend.

Also doing the PVP arena sucked because of so little amount of people...did 5 games, 4 times against the same player.

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I did find a group quick but yeah there weren't too many people. I then went and soloed the first dungeon though, it's a bit challenging but totally doable. Main issue is last boss phase 1, you need to really anticipate his grab and dodge it otherwise he kills you over and over. In a group though, and by group I mean like 2people, it's really easy as shit. You don't need a full 6man for it, hell 6man makes it completely trivial, it's mostly running around killing everything in 2seconds, takes like under 10mins for a full run. For reference, it takes like 15-20mins solo if you're not wiping a ton. Don't know how hard/easy the second real dungeon is though, I didn't get that far as I made a bunch of different chars to 15-20.

I think I'm mostly done playing though, I don't want to burn myself out before release and I hate fucking weekend only testing too. I might start an assassin or some shit next week, basically test every class and when the EU beta starts I'll probably do a summoner or some shit to fuck around.

Crafting seems really fucking weird, like there's very very few things to craft. Maybe if you level up you get more stuff but for example I tested Soul Shield crafting and you can only craft piece 8 for some weird reason. You have like 8 different versions(crit, block, evade, accuracy etc) but it's all piece 8, which means it's completely fucking worthless. You can craft full sets but you need the recipe unlock thing, there doesn't seem to be a way to craft each piece individually though so it's weird. Gathering is cool though, it uses a NPC gathering system similar to SWTOR and stuff so you just tell the NPC to go gather shit and x minutes later depending on the tier of the materials, you get the shit, then you can just resend him and so on. Means you don't constantly stop to gather shit, but there are world gathering nodes too for water and stones or some shit but they're fairly weird(seems long cooldown and shared with everyone so like it's pretty uncommon to get any of them active).

Oh and Dragon Veins has to be the most pointless cool looking stuff ever done in a mmo. It's like zone teleporters, moves you short distance through the zone, playing some crazy chinese kungfu movie animations where you jump around and fly and shit. Shit barely saves you any time(though sometimes you have to use them cause it lets you jump over broken bridges and shit) and can only be used in specific spots, so it's really pointless, but you still use them just to see your char do crazy flying shit.

Srathor_sl said:

I got a founders also. Hoping to try out most of the classes. This weekend right? I have not gotten an email yet.

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You get a serial code from ordering to apply to your NCsoft account, which should flag you for alpha for this weekend, but don't know, shit was kinda rushed. You'll get access to the beta weekends starting 2weeks from now at the very least.

Things to note if you're trying most classes is you have to do the same content a bunch of times, which is kinda boring. You can however skip a lot of sidequests and just do the main story, especially if you have premium(you can buy it for 1coin, so even if you have the 20bucks pack which doesn't have coins, you can ask people on the region chat to gift it to you, generally not a big issue to find someone), so that's nice if you just want to level chars to 15-20quickly. Combat is a bit shit until 10 or so tbh, I mean it's alright but it really takes off once you get the side dodges and backstep and a decent bunch of abilities. Takes like 40mins to get to 10 so it's no big deal either. Also difficulty is really low early on so probably don't want to judge that until you reach higher levels.

Kungfu Master and Blademaster tend to be the tanks yeah, though it's because of really good defensive abilities and some threat moves but that's not always necessary since in general whoever's tanking ends up doing more damage due to block/counters really generating a ton of ressources to dump damage skills.

Most classes can "tank" though, mostly the bosses and shit don't really hit very hard but do big moves and stuff and you have to get the fuck out of the way for these or you get squished, and a lot of them are large aoe/room wide aoe so everyone has to dodge, not just the "tank".

No shield class, Destroyers do get a temporary skill for a stone shield kind of thing but it doesn't really do much. Blademasters have like a block everything for x seconds(I think base is 2secs with 3secs cd, upgradeable to 3secs with 4secs cd) block while KFMs get a short 1sec block the next attack counter and they both have very strong dodges too(low cd, ways to reset them, large benefits from actually dodging stuff).

Other classes tend to have even shorter windows with Parries(0.5secs blocks) which in many cases have to be speced into and longer cooldowns on side/backsteps so they're worse at tanking as a result, but other than the really hard content it shouldn't be too much of an issue, especially since most dungeons are actually balanced for less players than can enter(like most content is balanced for 4people so if you go with 6, it kinda doesn't matter who tanks since shit dies in seconds).