Bowen's First Impressions

Well I finally got to play a release for a couple of hours. Due to my bandwidth situation I am pretty conscience of my usage and so have opted out of several releases until now.

First, gotta say that on the subject of bandwidth usage I'm pretty happy so far. Having played for a couple of hours in multiplayer mode with one eye glued to my network meter I only used upa bit over 50M I think. I am constantly watching this and so far happy.

I like the current iteration of the overland map so far. It makes the world seem that much bigger. Liked the travel music also. Moving on the map still feels a little clumsy to me though. I'm not sure I can really put my finger on it.. perhaps the areas that effect movement speed need to be refined a bit? There were some roads in wooded areas that didn't improve travel speed.

Getting used to combat but I find I'm watching glyphs and health more than anything. Feels a little like whack-a-mole right now. Still, it's my first time really using the system. Perhaps if the same glyphs tended to appear in the same slot rather than a random slot so you're not constantly scanning the hot bar. hmm Not sure how feasible that idea is. In either case, it was interesting.

Random encounters are interesting but feel a little forced. I suggested in another thread that perhaps instead of simply pulling people into the encounter they would see something on the map with a chance to avoid it. I suspect that may be intended for the future anyway?

Some bugs of course but they could be fixed by now. Will hopefully get some more play time in over the weekend.

 

It sounds like what you need is to sink a few skill points into 'Eidetic Memory' in the 'FOCUS' skill tree. Its on the left side. It lets you lock a certain card into a slot, and you could potentially have a completely locked hand, like most mmos are these days. Or you could have only a heal and buff skill locked, and the rest would still be random, etc... The locked skills will generally have a longer cooldown timer, though

 

yeah I didn't really play very much with deck building. I really didn't want to spend that much time figuring out how to set it up. I didn't want to comment on it too much more until I had figured that out.

My biggest obstacle right now (and probably for awhile still) is my limited bandwidth. I've only got so much to play with. So I try to get my patches at the library and copy the files over. As such I haven't played today at all and won't again until Friday night after patching up again. I'm sure I'll have a better handle on it over the weekend.

 

Yep it just takes some experimenting to find what works best. I only have a heal locked with a 5-card hand, so i have 4 randoms.