Sunday 19 January 2003

Pic of the day: Ordinary the Valkyn Bonedancer, and his Returned Commander skeletal pet. (Not very talkative except when killed, incidentally.) Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot with the Shrouded Isles expansion pack.

Shrouded Isles day 2

Today I joined a BD/SM group, and dished out some serious pain. BD is, of course, the DAoC initials for BoneDancer. I promised to report on that class today, remember? And SM is SpiritMaster, the original Norse controller class. Yes, it is common on this server at least to refer to classes by a two-char acronym. ValeWalkers are of course VW. Perhaps I should have named my walker "Fahrvergnugen". (No accents in names, I'm afraid.)

Anyway, as I expected, bonedancers are superior. We were both level 5, and the spiritmaster sent his "pet" first. But when my skeleton arrived, the monsters soon turned on it instead. This is a pretty good hint that the latest arrival is doing substantially more damage, as monsters have an "inertia" that makes them stick with their first victim unless they are in acute danger or the victim is being healed.

If this is not enough, bonedancers also have not one but two spells of continuous damage. Fairly good damage it is too. So as long as you fight one enemy at a time, it is fairly simple. Send in skeleton, apply double damage over time; heal if needed.

The problem with bonedancers is that there is no safe way to pull. If the monster you hunt is in an area with aggressive creatures, they will jump on your hapless pet. And if you heal, all except one will come for you. I solve this by casting a low weakness spell on one monster and at the same time tell my pet to attack it. They run toward each other, and if all goes well the pet skeleton manages to grab the attention of the monster before it starts whacking at me in earnest. But it would be nice if the skeleton could cast its own pulling spell, the way the zombies can.

***

I also got to try the Animist class, the one with all the fungi. Now that was weird. The descriptions of the spells were not particularly informative, so I tried them out. I had to press F5 to assign a piece of ground to grow the mushrooms; but when I cast the spell, they grew somewhere else instead, and I could not find any pattern in it, except that it was near me. Each mushroom seems to do a rather small amount of damage but in a fairly wide radius.

My experiments were cut short by the need to write this, and by a fellow player constantly inviting me to his group despite me telling him otherwise. I'll probably try again, but offhand Animist seems like the worst possible class to play. You pull in a lot of critters, and then your fungus die and they all converge on you. Each fungus lasts for 2 minutes, and I have no idea how to keep them alive longer. Documentation is nonexistent on this feature. Instead the handy little handbook goes on about how animists want to become one with nature. Yeah, but not by ending up face down in the dirt every couple minutes.

***

Because I still only have the GeForce 2 graphics card, there is little difference in how the game looks and runs. The trees now have leaves ... the tree graphics have become much more detailed. But the more advanced features, such as realistic shadows, are still absent. I understand that with high-end graphics cards you get reflective water surfaces and much smoother animation. I guess I will find out this week, if nothing goes horribly wrong.

Now, I have a superhero (or at least superperson) story to write, and sleep to sleep, so if y'all will excuse me. Oh, and do I recommend Shrouded Isles? It's OK, I guess. But you'll not be in any hurry unless you have the newest hardware, in particular a GeForce Titanium 3 or 4. The GF4 costs about the same as a cheap PC, so I recommend thinking this over.