Darkfall Day Three
David X. Messer continues into Darkfall. Today, Clan helpfulness, weapon skills, and gathering.
Day 3 in Darkfall was a bit disruptive. Having joined a Clan only the day before, the conversation in the Clan channel naturally turned into a shopping list of the things I'd need to do and offers of items of gear. Christmas had come early.
Following on from yesterdays post about the weapon skill needed to use a particular weapon appearing in red on the item description, this turned out to be bogus. I could use the item regardless. So I went charging off to level one handed swords. While I managed to completely miss the finer points of armed combat and how you should time your attacks, I found having a weapon that levels weapon skill to be game changing. The default weapon you start the game with, and indeed always have even when you die, doesn't level weapon skill. The one handed sword I'd looted from a mob started aquiring skill points and in these early levels and on these n00b mobs you suddenly start to appreciate the skill based system. Just about everything you do in Darkfall earns you skill points and improves that particular ability.
The Clan channel piped up again and someone had a whole bunch of two handed axes they were willing to trade me so I could build up that particular skill.
Gathering in Darkfall is incredibly easy. The limiting factor is your stamina. Once you equip your mining pick and click go, you'll stand there until your Stamina bar runs out. This is a good 2-3 minutes or so where you don't need to be hands on. You can then rest up, and start the whole process again. It's a pretty painfree way of gathering and WoW could learn a thing or two from this. The only gotcha here is that being a PVP game, you need to keep an eye out for people lurking around who might wait for your stamina to run to zero and then try and kill you. As stamina is the trait used in the sprint skill, if you can't fight the person off you're not going to be able to just run away. For the most part, in the starter zones, this is less of an issue.
Having not tried mining for a day or so, I decided to have a good long go at mining, and as my skill points racked up I started getting the odd gem appearing. This had the side effect where I found it hard not to keep doing the same thing, racking up the skill points is pretty damn rewarding.
After a brief diversion into my starting city again to pick up some two handed axes from a Clan member I tried my hand at two handed axe combat. With just some minimal training the caster mobs which had given me so much trouble the day before were a bit easier.
What I'm taking away from the whole skill based thing is that it's quite daunting at first. It's difficult to know which skills are going to be useful to you, which you should be developing, but I realise that's because I come from a MMO that's guided to death. In WoW, you can only have 2 trade skills. In Darkfall you can do them all! The only limiting factor is how much time you have to develop that skill, and you don't have to drop one trade skill to pick up another.
I've mixed feelings about today. On the one hand I've managed to start making some headway into developing weapon skills, with an eye to trying this PVP thing, on the other hand I've still a hell of a lot I want to try with the crafting element.
Darkfall Day 3 was brought to you by the word "skills", and the phrase "Would you like a two handed axe with that?".
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 11, 2009 11:44 AM
