Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Vana'fest! It keeps going... and going... and going...

I don't know how I missed this, but a couple of days ago, SE stealth added even more content to the Vana'fest website. It isn't any amazingly earth-shattering information, but it is at least a better English translation of what we have heard so far. The first thing to check out are the video reviews of Vana'fest. The first two videos are of the NA Community Team doing a review of the event, and the rest of the videos are very high quality versions of the event itself. They are all definitely worth the view time.

The second thing that has been added is a listing of the potential changes that are coming to all 20 jobs in the next year. These are insanely vague, as SE hates making promises before they can deliver, like they did with the whole new Summons debacle. You can't point to anything in the discussion that makes you say, "Oh, we are getting that new ability". In fact, I don't know if any of this is going to equate into specific job abilities themselves. It is more of an explanation of the design philosophy for all of the jobs moving forward.

Honestly, I am at a loss as to how SE is going to handle the level cap increase for everyone. Are we going to get more JA's and spells as the levels rise? I don't think there are any jobs that truly get new JA's at level cap. For the most part JA's are pretty much finished by level 60. So while, I, and probably everyone else, is hoping that we end up getting a huge number of new JA's, I just don't see it happening. That said, if they are going to give us some new JA's, then level 80 would be a nice round number to give us those new abilities. Spells on the other hand are going to need to come more often just because that is how they are designed. Most spell casters get at least one new spell every level, and raising the level cap without more spells just doesn't seem to do very much. At the very least, healers are going to need a new tier of spells because as levels rise so will HP pools, and so will damage from higher level mobs. To deal with this with the current tier of spells would quickly drain almost all healers. But then again, maybe that is why all healers are going to have access to Refresh and Convert.

I don't know if this is how SE is going to feed us information regarding the announcements made at Vana'fest but I will keep an eye out and see if anything new pops up!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/videos/gameID/446/videoId/1669

Almost as pretty as Izman in the morning!

BG