Love this game!

I love how you can early cast but at the expense of more Focus.

 

welcome

Yea the combat system is pretty complex, but I love it. The early cast (heat) system is neat, if you get it wrong you will burn out all your focus and the cool down on the glyphs will increase exponentially and leave you in deep doo-doo. But its a good +dps option if you want a quick low level kill or if you're in trouble and just need to dps a mob to kill it before it kills you.

Edit -That said, the more combat glyphs you get, the less you will have to spam the same one and you'l be able to cycle around them and let each cool, or power them up.

Sounds like you are playing around with a locked (power up) deck at the moment as opposed to an unlocked deck with stacking and combos?

You will be tweaking your deck for ever, patience and experimentation rule

 

You can level all skills, with the exception of the "specialization" skill in most adventuring skill trees. The combat bar keeps you from being able to use every skill at the same time, thus being a sort of self-imposed class. The "innate" skills that don't go on the combat bar often take 2x or more the XP to skill up.

Just keep in mind that skills take more XP as they go higher. If you don't turn them off with that little triangle in the skills window, they will drain your XP pool dry. You should try to cap them at various levels as you take on bigger stuff, 40, 60, 80, 100. Skill 80 is considered to be regular mastery of the skill, and 100 is grandmaster. You shouldn't go beyond 100 unless you've been playing for a while and understand what you're doing.

 

Hi and welcome. I started in a very similar way. Eventually I found that I needed to also learn archery skills for some of those seriously nasty beasties that you shouldn't let get too close. But that was later in my game development. For now, have fun kicking arachnid derriere

 

So you can end up with 100 in every skill, all at the same time with the same Character?

 

100 is lowlevel.
If you want to be competetive look for 120-140 and as much skills as possible aka all skills.
Magic Attunement gives you Resistancies.
I'm out of this because of grind and no "Role"play as i understand it.
Your character end up beeing versatile via switch deck or alt+ F... become a Heavy Plate guy in seconds , switch to Archer or light Mage, switch to Healer, to whatever you like.
You need to become the omnipotent Avatar and have all roles in petto more or less.
I dont like that, but have fun if you can .

 

Thanks for the info, so does that mean that everyone only has one (1) Character and they do everything with it ?

 

To me, role play is completely separate from PvP. In fact, PvP and competing with other players is essentially the opposite of RP.

 

Greetings @happymarc!

If you are willing to invest your time in one Avatar instead of several, yes you can do a lot with this Character

 

more or less - yes - at least you can do it this way.
thing is if you dont do it you shoot yourself in the foot somehow, that at least my opinion and i recently returned to the game to try again, but ended up with the same complaints an annoy a lot of people here in the forums - APOLOGIZE

whaaaat?

unbelievable - i allways cry if i RP and cannot PvP in case of.
RP in the Tavern only and dancing is lame, i dont want to say i dont do it sometimes or dislike it, but the salt in the soup for RP is PvP.
why do you think @Elgarion has a RP-PVP Town.
Those there are more courageous than me, i just fear the PK's at my level

If i am a guard and i cannot fight a PK off, what sort of RP is that.
Just blablabla

RP is way more than just talking and dancing. Have you ever been on a RP PvP Shard in Ultima???

 

Usually. The most common reason to have another character so far has been extra accounts to buy more pledges in the early days of the game, and to hold NPC property lots for those who bought a lot of pledges. (There is a limit of 3 lots in NPC towns per account.)

Extra characters on the same account (IIRC) share bank, virtue stats, and guild membership. The most apparent reasons to have an extra character slot are RP and special builds, possibly for PvP.

I know it may be hard for you to believe, but some of us really don't care. There are other forms of RP than open-world fighting against other players. The only form of that which I could respect (posses to hunt down characters which have been flagged by the game as "bad") lacks the game tech to flag them as "bad". I think that's much important for PvP than silly stat caps.

 

Let’s see how this feels. I am from the school of thought that ala UO you should have a character that has a specific flavor and not a character that does everything because thats always kind of weird and less flavorfull. But then again in Guild Wars 1 you could change your secondary profession and it was always fun to switch around and try different builds. Also I have to admit that although I play a lot, I never become a super competetive player. In UO I would usually be the one following leaders who knew everything and had everything, and that satisfies me. I will definately sacrifice power and effectiveness in exchange of building a character that I like and that has the flavor I am looking for. I never felt like it was a must to be super effecient and have the one and only most powerful build and thats it. I think it is important to keep an open mind and go along with the game without trying to always be the most powerful combo.

 

huh? so if I RP, I can't PVP.
I disagree, pvp is also part of RP.
As they really goes well together.

 

I remember hearing Lord British talk about how this game would aim to have people play together with their friends. Maybe the importance of all skills was a way to push people to play coop together and share the effectiveness of merging skills?

 

@happymarc as you are finding out, these forums can be.... Interesting.

The beauty of SOTA to me, and partly why the forums are always raging is you can play this game any way you like. There are very few, if any boundaries. There is no right or wrong way to play.

I am a melee dual-wield tank/dps wearing chain. I mainly solo in PVE, do quests, repeatable content (troll, engineer hand ins, overworld encounters etc) and love gathering, crafting and exploring.

My build serves me well for this and I certainly don't need to turn my Avatar into a swiss army knife! I have very little magic, except what I need for my Earth attunement, and a few passive (innate) and active damage and stun debufs I had to learn to adopt the hard way. So far I do very little pvp, so my build is probably completely useless for that, but as castle defence and pvp sports (Obsidian trials) get refined I plan to do a lot more, as long as its fun.

My advice is certainly to absorb what people say here but make your own decisions. Anyone who says 'this build is wrong' or 'that doesn't work' or 'you must do this' is more than likely talking out of their hat, so come to the forums with an open mind and a sack of salt!

 

@happymarc and all the others.
Dont get me wrong, i sure was and still are a little bit desperated how it is, but i dont want to talk bad or spoil the game for you. Never! Although i know my comments above sound disappointed.
If you can have fun the way you described above, DO IT!
I did it too and i was a long time happy, but after 1700 hours into the game since persistence and "plans and imaginations for my own RP Guild, players leaving, no cool groupplay with interdependencies and allways the feeling of beeing behind, lacking this and that, and all the self restrictions - you know i once was a healer and pure Mage, i choosed to pick a role and ended up having problems here and there, asked at forums and was recommend to do this and that, but all these tips make me loosing identification with my character. I need to train skills i dont want to, i dont even use , but i needed the attunement and the resistancies against fire for example.
Thinking of what the goal was Roleplay with PvP and such , it more and more drove me away and i more and more become desperated. Friends left , because they missed that UO Balance and dislike that SotA developed more into a game for people who love progressing and min maxing. You can read in recently started threads by me, that a lot of people believe the core thing about a MMORPG is grinding and progressing. I'm totally on the opposite and to me the process of progress, skilling, leveling was more or less only a neccessary evil to become Max level and start Sandbox RPvX gameplay, go and hunt a dragon with your friends, go and wage war on other guilds, fight pk or fight the Blue Knights or whatever (in fact i once founded the Brotherhood of the Grey Path).
This is imo not possible because of the great power disparities we have and the thing that matters the most is grind as many skills as high as possible.
Sure if you have no sense for competetive gameplay or just like to be around and dont care you can have a lot of immersing fun with SotA as i had. Combat is cool, atmosphere is great, emotes to roleplay are great, you can smoke a pipe, write books, make music etc... I liked that all, but i dislike i cannot bring that RP further into the environment aka pve and pvp. To me the game lacks neccessary interdependencies because if you have the time and the patience you end up self sustainable for everything. I disliked people farm Dragons Solo and switch modes for faster respawn, its not good for economy ir rarity of items (crafted , but also Artifacts), i dislike grouping is allways a disadvantage, at least it was regarding loot, harvesting , gold, but i have to admit there were some changes and adjustments i dont know exactly.
For example the XP for groups is somehow adjusted. Before it was that you just suffer to get xp if you group and regarding mob and ressource node density it was and is also and imo still a disadvantage to group. Nowadays "everybody" just grind Upper Tears for xp/hr.
It was so much about xp/hr that they cut this to 1 Million per hour.
A good advice is to not read to much here and keep things mysterious for you and this way you cant be desillusioned that fast
Dont take every gift or help you get offered, it may take away a lot of self exploring the game. Maybe if you have also played for 1000+ hours you see things different.
Until have fun - Stun

 

Welcome @happymarc ! I'm glad you're enjoying the game.
SotA is one of the few games where the player is free to do what he prefers, obtaining excellent results in PVE and PVP.
Much of the gamplay is affected from your irl skills and training, after level 80 any kind of character can be competitive and can work well in groups or alone, all depends on how good you are at playing and how much passion you put into building the character.
In short words, if you're good at playing you will have so much satisfaction, for example i'm one of the top pvper in the game, i'm still level 104 with no skills over level 100, this should help you understand how things work.
Take with pliers what you read in this forum, carefully evaluating the contents, sometimes what you read is only the result of personal experience and does not actually reflect the heart of the game.
I wish you a good stay, do not hesitate to contact me via pm, on discord (Antrax # 1555) or in game Antrax Artek if you need a guide, information or If you are looking for a pvp oriented guild to have fun with.

Cheers!

 

I had one character initially. It was a primarily tank/melee/sword fighter who subsequently learned archery skills. However, once I had completed all of the main game quests, I created a second character and am now developing a different (mainly magic) set of skills as I progress through the game quests again. I still use my original character when exploring new areas or gaming with other players because it's a higher level.