05-17-2004, 12:42 PM
Sigmire Wrote:While I love PvP and miss the excitement like you all are describing, I wouldn't be able to get over the tediousness of leveling. It's one of the major contributors to my ending of EQ.I thought the same thing, but I underestimated (or forgot) the amount of continuous interest generated by the simple fact that you are PvP+ all the time.
Even a run from place to place is exciting because I never know if that dark elf coming the other way down the road is going to pass me or try to kill me. I'm never thinking "Jesus, I need to kill 172 more of these things to level" because I'm too busy thinking, "Who's that? ... Ok. Who's that? ... Ok. Who's that? ... Ok. Who's that? ... Oh shit!"
Oh, a couple other interesting aspects --
1) There's radar, but the only things on it are your groupmates and your currently selected target. Terrain does not show up on it, nor does anything you don't have targeted. It's very EQ in that if you are hiding behind a tree, people on the other side of the tree won't know you're there.
2) Obstacles are obstacles. Hiding behind a tree seems to block ranged attacks. Someone does a bow special attack, you can see him warming up for it and have about 2 seconds to get your ass behind some cover.
3) You have no idea what kind of shape another player is in, unless he's in your group. You can't see their level or their "con" or their hitpoints or anything about them. You can makes a guess based on their equipment or watching them fight but that's not really safe either -- could be some level 50 guy wearing level 20 gear just because he can afford to lose it. That guy standing in the level 50 zone could be level 50 or he could just be some noob tourist. That person sitting down could be recovering from near-death or they could just be topping off their mana. The only way to tell is basically to attack them and see what kind of damage you're doing.
4) You have enough mana to kill several people in a row. True for fighters as well as mages. Whereas in EQ you'd buff yourself, rest, blow someone up and have to rest again, in L2 your biggest limitation is running out of hit points, not killing-power.
Granted I'm only a couple days in, but if WOW came out tomorrow I don't think I'd switch. I'll be surprised if the PvP in WOW is better than in this game.