Monday, February 08, 2016

Updates, Blade and Soul Classes

I haven't written much lately. I need to get back into the habit. Especially when there's a lot of stuff that happened that I do want to talk about.

I've mostly been playing Blade & Soul lately. It's a little surprising how long it's lasted for me. The things I usually like in an MMO, the stories, are pretty terrible in B&S. But the base combat is really good. I especially like how the combat mechanics for each class really capture the flavor of that class.

I've tried three classes so far: Force Master, Assassin, and Destroyer. The Force Master is a fire and ice mage, with lots of freezing and control. It's a very even class. The Assassin really feels like an Assassin. You set up, and then it's like stealth, backstab, triggered slash, counter the enemies attack and automatically return to stealth behind them, backstab, dead. It's very fast and efficient, but requires a bit of time to set up properly. Destroyer is the big warrior with the axe, and it uses slow powerful attacks, with a lot of grabbing the opponent and throwing them around.

Another interesting thing is that each class usually has multiple "paths" in combat. If one set of cooldowns is up, you can use combo A, if not, use combo B. It's more chaining of combos, rather than executing a repeat rotation.

I'm still not sure how long I'll play it. But Blade & Soul is definitely worth trying if you're on the fence. Just treat the story as if it was a bad kung fu movie from the 70s.

2 comments:

  1. So, do you think Blade and Soul is a PvP/fight game with a story tacked on? That's the impression I got from reading your reviews.

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    1. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that? Blade & Soul is a themepark PvE MMO, with a strong PvP component. There's a fair amount of group PvE content like dungeons.

      The story is a very important part of the levelling process and is pretty central to that part of the game. It's just not that good a story. Actually, it did get a bit better at the end of the first zone, but the voice acting is atrocious. It's entirely possible that if it had been in Korean and subbed, I probably wouldn't complain about it.

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