Relmstein's State of Play

I haven't talked much about Tabula Rasa in the last month and most people could have guessed that I had finally canceled my account. It was a fun two and half months but in the end the game had a lot of game design that made it ill suited for long term play. In fact this seems to be yet another game that NCSoft forced to be called a MMO even though it would have been better as a console or single player experience. The number of times I made a wrong turn and had to back track through an area that had already respawned was ungodly. It reminded me a lot of early dungeon RPGs where accidental leaving a room would automatically respawn everything.

I'm still playing World of Warcraft and enjoying the PvP side of the game no matter how unbalanced it has become. Arenas have especially gotten rough since the proposed changes to the matching system did not go in with the patch. As a result my teams often find ourselves playing against classes with the Season 3 weapons. While some of them are ringers others are just players who already farmed the rating on a 2v2 team. We seem to be stuck around 1600 but we don't have exactly have the best class balance. We do a lot better in the 5v5 bracket but almost never have all our team members on at the same time. A lot of our friends have cut back on their play time even with the new patch.

I'm looking forward to starting out in Age of Conan next month. It's not that I think it will be the game of the year or anything. Instead I just want to experience something that has a different play style then World of Warcraft. I've been doing PvP for so long in that game that me and my friends were very rusty in running dungeons. It's embarrassing how many wipes our first Magister's Terrace run had. Admittedly our only crowd control was a hunter and none of us knew anything about the boss fights. Still that little experience has whetted my appetite for more dungeon runs. The only problem is that World of Warcraft only has one new dungeon and it doesn't have any upgrades for our characters. Since I think the expansion for World of Warcraft won't be out until at least June it looks like Age of Conan will have to supply my dungeon crawling needs.