*sighs*
(sarcasm) I just love playing MMOs by night. (/sarcasm) You meet all the broken Engrish fellowz on this side of the pond. And since most Asian adults do NOT play gamez, you sometimes get the feeling that you're babysitting a bunch of 10-12 year olds.
To make matters worse, there's not many online, so you're not exactly spoiled for choice.
Through much patience, I am, however, level 4, and I feel non-newbish enough to start to pick and choose the teams I'm in on.
Take for example, the PUG I just dropped like a hot potato even before I took the trouble to walk to the mission door. Strike 1: Blind invite. Strike 2: There's already 5 members on the team, and most of them have no hp left. They all look in various states of mangled. Strike 3: Hi, the leader says, we're doing steam tunnels.
(This is one of those long continuous 4-parters that takes a minimum of a cohesive group to do. Think a little like a short task force, eg. Hess TF. Having followed a level 6 group through it, 4 of which were in the same guild and on voice, I can't imagine a PUG surviving well unless they were pretty good.)
Strike 4, and last straw: Hey, another member mentions, did you know that you have a lvl 1 and 7 on your group? Leader says, soooo?
Now thanks to my more positive Asian farmer group that I -just- left, I happen to know that a level 4 and a level 10 on the same group garners zero xp - at least for the level 4. The level 6 was getting no xp either. Pleveling safeguard, basically.
I can only see pain ahead in the future. Either the party is going to wipe, or I'm going to spend all my spellpoints babysitting the level 1, or someone is going to whine through the entire 4 parter that they're getting no xp, or worse, -I'm- going to get no xp while healing my ass off and getting yelled at? Er...no thanks. So I just up and left. :)
<===== clerickins learning to get pickier. After all, worse come to the worse, I can always group up with American groups on non-work weekend mornings.
Oh, I mentioned my more positive Asian farmer group a while back, didn't I? This was kinda funny and enlightening, though I could only sit through about two rounds of the same mission back to back - one on normal difficulty, the other one on hard.
Good point 1: The leader of the group sends me a tell. He asks if I want to do Redwillow quest for fun. Lvls are a bit high for xp.
Ah, this person has a clue. And he states up front all the terms and conditions. So I don't freak out when I say 'sure' and join to find the group mostly level 10s, a lvl 8 and a lvl 6 and me, a lvl 4.
Inside the mission, the xp window is clear. It states in explicit terms: I am being powerleveled by higher lvl characters, therefore you get 0 XP. Ah well. I knew what I was in for coming in, I was just joining for fun, and he did prep me beforehand.
Funny point 1: The leader (a level 10 cleric) is a control freak. Literally. And he does it all in bad engrish. Which gives it some surreal WoW and EQ overtones.
Funny point 2: Most of the group appear to be koreans/chinese/japanese or something. Names like Risen, Jisung Park, Zcktwlk (whatever it was, it looked like someone banged on the keyboard) abounded, so they all seemed to comprehend explicitly whatever the leader was saying. No teamspeak, no nothing. But they all moved together like a cohesive unit.
For example, at the start, the leader's sooo lazy at typing, that he calls me "li". Before him, I've never come across anyone who truncates Liara even further. :P
He explains to me earnestly, "li, focus 4 heal, k?"
Of course, my only reply to this masterpiece of communication is "what?" as I valiantly try to recall if there's some kind of spell called 'focus' I have no clue about.
Thankfully, he's patient enough to explain further. "i use my mp for buff, u use your mp for heal, k?"
Ohhhh. Ok. Sure. He was trying to divide up labour and make a plan beforehand. Kewl enough, I suppose. You're the level 10, you know what you're doing. True enough, he did. I was sooo jealous of his buffs - his bless lasted 20 freaking minutes, while mine lasts 4. I take it it's a minute per level, and he probably has a feat that extends spell duration. (Have to look into that some day.)
Surreal experience no. 2: His way of gathering people for buffs is to type "close me" "close me" "close me" over and over.
:P
I guess he means "come close to me" but was too lazy to type or bind that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that "gather" would save typing two characters. Besides, the guys he normally groups with might not understand that. :/
I'm poking gentle fun at them, but the truth is, I had a pretty darned good time running through the mission with them and I learned a lot about the vagaries of DDO while grinning at the Asian 'Everquest' style tactics.
The group was way overpowered for the mission, of course. I had previously done this level 6 quest with an entire group of lvl 4s, and we managed it with no sweat. So you can imagine what short work lvl 10s made of it. We were running through monster encounters like a knife through hot butter, and taking longer pauses at each chest filled with loot. Hence my Asian farmer comment.
I kept getting visions of Guild Wars and the common perception that Asians 'farm' chests of loot. We were pretty much opening another treasure chest every 5 minutes or sooner. Lvl 10 cleric stacks on the charisma (which is rumoured to improve treasure pops) and then pops the lid open, we all loot our share dry. My inventory stuffed up really quick with +1 items, and I was seeing $$$ in my eyes and thinking, no xp ain't so bad when I got all this stuff to sell for gold and buy myself a new enchanted goodie from the pawnshops.
Course, according to the team leader, he was just doing this for fun cos there's giants in this quest. I suppose lvl 10s get even better chest pops if they do a higher level mission, but I was pretty darned happy at lvl 4, even with treasure scaled to my level.
Oh, and I had visions of Everquest overlapped onto Guild Wars as well. Even though I've never played Everquest. Apparently, wizards/mages in Everquest are all about the crowd control. Well the wizard we had with us was pretty much a two-trick pony, and ordered about mercilessly by the leader, because he tended to be a little too slow for the control freaky leader. "haste" "haste" "haste" - used mostly for being able to run quickly to the next point, rather than increase weapon swing speed. And "web" "web" "web" - which, I have learned, is a pretty freaking amazing crowd control spell.
One or two casts of this (except this wizard couldn't seem to aim it too well, dunno if it was the UI or the guy was just a bit weird) and the entire spawn of hobs, scorpions, giants, what have you, was entangled and stuck and couldn't hit back very well if at all.
Then everyone just had to run up and swing wildly and everything died.
I saw some other good applications of tactics as well, as some fighter tripped up a giant, who landed flat on his face and took ages standing up as all of us surrounded him and whacked the stuffing out of him.
Contrast this with the American style we used the morning earlier. Ranger pulled a giant with one shot of his bow, got him stuck on a slope/tree, fighter tank ran in to draw aggro and swing away, and I had to watch his health bar carefully, while everyone peppered the giant with damage, including the mage.
Granted, the difference in levels mighta made a huge diff as to why one group could engage an entire spawn at a time, while another pulled singles.
The good news is that the control freaky part of the leader never landed on me. Perhaps I was prioritizing heals enough to keep him content. And perhaps he had 'heal' up his sleeve anyhow, because there were a couple times when damage hit so fast my pathetic 'cure moderate wounds' didn't do much, and with one cast, he restored their health bars in a flash.
The equally good news is this: If an Asian farmer can be a battle cleric that focuses on buffs - he was right in the thick of things, swinging away - and yet heal up well when he wants to, and let's not even talk about his capacity to restore mana with divine vitality, put me to shame. :P Of course he also happens to be six levels higher than I...
...Then by golly, the naysayers are wrong. Clerics do not have to be healz0rs. If anything, the Asians will know. :P Cos they tweak their builds to be maximally effective. He's probably capable of dropping back to EQ priest on a raid if needed, but can pwnz0r in a lower level quest perfectly well.
Oh, and the last good news is that I got a rather sweet weapon out of running it on hard difficulty. Acid light mace + 1. Should be pretty cool. And I'm rich, rich! For the moment anyhow.
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