Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Seriyu]

Alright that sounds great to me, I fully agree on keeping some standards on invited people. I also agree with the last two points, so I'll be sure to buzz around and look for info on that.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Well that was a fun session. And I definitively have a better grip on the game after all of those duels.

Also, who's the guild blacksmith/craftsman? I have a few recipe books that I picked up which you might be interested in. Can't remember their names off the top of my head though.

[LordBucket]

who's the guild blacksmith/craftsman?

I believe Menos is our blacksmith, and our craftsman is Kohaku's alt...whose name escapes me.

Might be a good idea to compile a list of "Ingame name - Bay12 name - Professions"

ZhaoJia - LordBucket - Herbalist\Musician

[Seriyu]

Yeah, I'm considering setting up a spreadsheet for the new OP where we can put what gear we have and profession and all that pap, but Iunno if people would actually use it.

Also happy to help USEC!

[Android]

I am playing with some other people I know on Black Tortoise, we got a level 2 guild already.

[LordBucket]

It seems that I'm the designated guild tank. Which is probably a good thing, since Emei is a suitable class for it, and I have years of WoW raiding experience. Some mechanics translate well, others do not.

Doing our Shen Family runs last night I observed some things that generally made life more difficult. Granted, it was an easy challenge, soloable even, so we were never really in any danger of failing. That will not always be true, however, and it will help us in the long run to establish good habits in easy material so that we already know what to do once we reach the more difficult material.

Now, everyone please bear with me. Again, this is a different game, with different tools. My age of wushu tanking experience is limited. The guidelines might be subject to change, but we'll learn as we go. Consider this post a work in progress.

What a tank does
My job is mostly to be a great big target with a flashing neon sign on my head that says HIT ME! Unfortunately, age of wushu appears to have no taunt mechanic, no third party meters, and so far as I can tell,the AI does not  which makes this far more difficult to do than it is in WoW, where any time a boss aggros on one of you I'd be able to simply push a button and have him back on me. This is something we'll need to experiment with, and it's entirely likely from what I've seen, that late game "tanking" here will take the form of me standing nowhere in particular not even engaging the boss, applying damage mitigation and healing effects. Time will tell.

Area of Effect damage
Age of wushu has a lot of AoE. For some classes, AoE is the majority of their damage. The way this work is, you have an attack that does a certin amount of AoE damage, let's say 100...that means if you're standing with one target in range and use it, you'll do 100 damage. If you have two targets in range and use it, you'll do 200 damage. If you have 20 targets standing round you, you'll do 2000 damage. Once targets are in range, it really doesn't matter if you're hitting one or a dozen, you can kill them all in the same amount of time.

Remeber this.

Pulling
The tank will pull. Not you. Your job is kill things. The tank's job is not merely to take the beating for you, but more importantly to control the flow and positioning of battle. Given that AoE is such large potion of our damage, in most cases, ultimately what we want to happen is to have everyone and everything stacked up in a big pile on top of each other, and not split up into multiple group or spread out in areas with each of us fighting 2-3 enemies out of each others AoE range.

The easiest way to do this is to...

Wait. No really, wait
If I charge in and begin gathering up enemies, and then one of you gets impatient and starts attacking them, they will have a tendancy to ignore me running away from them and start fighting you. This is not helpful. Remember, if all opponents are gathered up on top of each other, and the entire party also stacks on top of the group and spams AoE, they will die very quickly. If you pull one enemy off of me, you're probably not going to be able to kill it as quicky as the entire party together. And even worse, if you pull several off, that splits the enemies in multiple group that then have to be AoEd down separately. By attacking early, you make the fight take longer.

Knockback effects
Many of us have knockback abilities. Abilities that when used, move a target around. This is obviously unhelpful in some cases. For example, if we have a group of opponents stacks in AoE range and you knock one out, that means that one opponent is not taking damage. And if the entire party is using knockback abilities, this means that individual enemies are constantly being pushed out of range for the stacked AoE of everyone in the party. This is, again not helpful. The extra damage you do with your single knockback effect is probably less than than the damage done my the entire rest of the party's AoE hitting that target..

On a boss fight in particular, probably all of you have been in the situation where everyone is knocking the boss around, forcing you to constantly reposition yourself.

So, everybody...you have a pve rotation where you knock opponents around left and right. That's fine. In a group setting, you'll need to have an alternate rotation without your knockback abilities. Maybe this means that you do less damage. That's ok. You doing less damage is better than the entire party doing less damage because the boss is constantly being pushed out of their attack range.

Now, admittedly, if everyone in the party is not using their knockback abilities, this means that everyone is doing less damage. We'll have to experiment to see whether this is better or worse than the damage lost from people having to constantly reposition. However, based on experiene in other MMOs, it is extremely likely that later content will have situations where controlling the location of the boss is very important. For example there may be cases where a boss gets healed depending on where he stands. Or maybe there will be multiple-boss fights where the two bosses heal each other if they get close to each other. Maybe we don't have to worry about these things now, but it's very likely that we will later. So, learn a no-knockback rotation now so that if and when it becomes absolutely crucial, you'll already be familiar with it.

Boss resets
Finally, as a standard method of preventing players from abusing positioning, bosses that lose pathing to their target will reset. This is terribly annoying, and something we very much want to avoid. As the tank, it's my job to decide where the boss goes, and where we will fight him. As mentioned, I have no taunt, so my ability to control this is limited. You, therefore, need to help make my life easier by letting me position the boss.

Obvious example, if I grab the boss then run off into an open courtyard and sit there and wait...I am deliberately pulling the boss into that open courtyard because there are no obstacles for him or us to get stuck on that might lead to a reset.

When you see this, do not go attack the boss. Wait. Do nothing. Don't engage the boss until he's on me. In fact, if you want to wait a couple seconds, that might be helpful. We're still figuring out the aggro mechanics, but based on other games giving  tank time alone on the boss is likely to make the boss more likely to stay on the tank. Which is a good thing.

[Evilsx]

Hey everyone, just downloading Age of Wushu right now, is their any tips you guys can tell me before i play?

[Seriyu]

I tell you what, log in and apply and we'll help you out, before that? You set meridians by clicking the little "sideways V" button next to your portrait. You'll want to activate and discipline (both buttons are on the right page, you'll understand when you see it), your school meridian from this page, activate and discipline the one that your school name is next to. If you haven't decided what school yet ,wait until you do.

Second, the only skill you should level is your first school internal (think a passive ability)  until about level 25. after that ask in school chat or look up a guide on what to do from there.

Other then that you'll mostly have to learn as you go.

[LordBucket]

Hey everyone, just downloading Age of Wushu right now, is their any tips you guys can tell me before i play?

I wrote up some general tips for beginners in the second half of this post, Seriyu wrote a school summary here, and Leyic talked about professions here.

Game is complicated. It is not WoW, and while good, it is badly and inconsistently translated and uses a number of mechanics that are completely different from standard MMO game design. Expect a learning curve. Ask questions, but ask specific questions not general questions.

[elci]

Area of Effect damage
Age of wushu has a lot of AoE. For some classes, AoE is the majority of their damage. The way this work is, you have an attack that does a certin amount of AoE damage, let's say 100...that means if you're standing with one target in range and use it, you'll do 100 damage. If you have two targets in range and use it, you'll do 200 damage. If you have 20 targets standing round you, you'll do 2000 damage. Once targets are in range, it really doesn't matter if you're hitting one or a dozen, you can kill them all in the same amount of time.

as far as I can tell, this is not entirely true. Since I play scholar and solo factions I figured out that there is a limit to target you can hit at once. when I pull whole shen on me and spin-to-win. It hits probably half the enemies.

[LordBucket]

as far as I can tell, this is not entirely true. Since I play scholar and solo factions I figured out that there is a limit to target you can hit at once. when I pull whole shen on me and spin-to-win. It hits probably half the enemies.

If there's a cap, it would be useful to know what the exact number is. Either way, having someone durable deliberately pull mobs into a single coherent group for everyone to AoE together is generally faster, easier and safer than than having half the party in one place while the other half is spread out trying to solo 2-3 mobs each elsewhere in the dungeon.

Which is more or less what happened the other night and inspired the above post.

[elci]

as far as I can tell, this is not entirely true. Since I play scholar and solo factions I figured out that there is a limit to target you can hit at once. when I pull whole shen on me and spin-to-win. It hits probably half the enemies.

If there's a cap, it would be useful to know what the exact number is. Either way, having someone durable deliberately pull mobs into a single coherent group for everyone to AoE together is generally faster, easier and safer than than having half the party in one place while the other half is spread out trying to solo 2-3 mobs each elsewhere in the dungeon.

Which is more or less what happened the other night and inspired the above post.

yeah it is faster and more efficient, that for sure. However sometimes it is neccesary to split. But you certainly know that Btw on which server do you play on?

[Leyic]

Advice re: terminology and combat:

-Inner Force = Energy = MP, three terms for the same thing, represented by the small blue bar beneath your health bar. Used by all skills. (Standard MMO stuff, but the multiple translations don't help).
-External Damage is physical damage and is subdivided into melee and ranged.
-Internal Damage is magic damage and is subdivided into hard/gold, soft/wood, yin, and yang.
-Brawn is the stat that improves melee damage among other things.
-Posture is the stat that improves ranged damage among other things.
-Breath is the stat that improves all internal damage among other things.
-Spirit is the stat that improves internal defense (reduction of internal damage) among other things.
-External defense only comes from equipment.

Read the mouseovers for your skills and pick your second through fourth meridians accordingly. More details regarding character attributes and terminology here.

Advice re: nutrition:

Don't worry too much about starvation, it will only bring you to 75% max HP, not kill you, and that's enough to deal with most openworld pve mobs. On the other hand, it puts you at a disadvantage if someone pvp's you. If you're going to farm or camp an ore node, eat something first and heal just in case someone decides to fight you.

[Seriyu]

sidenote on the nutrition notes, your nutrition also determines how much vigor (crafting energy) you get back every tick. So if you need a lot of vigor back in a hurry, fill yourself up. With that said there is a hard cap on how much vigor you can get per day so if you're not in a hurry you can go light on the food as long as you're on for a while.

Managed to run through another instance, leveled it by and large. Got another mantis fist style book, so that's great. Annnd made our first "better then the shitty vendor weapons" weapon, so we're moving up!

EDIT: Oh, also, we've invited our first random that I forgot the name of. We are still not publically recruiting but we're gettin there.

[Detonate]

I've finally added the new OP to the thread. This should help any confused newbies we have. It seems that the new guild is doing really well; much better than anything I could do. I've applied to it.