Made my mile long treck through the ice and snow last night. And that was
even BEFORE I bought Velious... hehe Managed to snag a copy at Best Buy.
They had tons of copies, whereas CompUSA was out and wasn't expecting any
until Monday.
The boat ride is a long one, but make sure you get off at the one and only
stop it makes (ok, I didn't take the return trip yet, so I'm assuming
there's only one stop).
Levitation definitely helps. The Great Divide has a lot of very abrupt
hills and valleys (actually almost more like cliffs), plus the island
hopping you have to do to actually get to the bridge from the boat can be
quite painful, especially if it's snowing and you don't see the cliff, but
you can hear the ocean.
A lot of the wandering mobs were aggressive, and seem to hit very hard for
green conning mobs at 49, much like Kunark I guess. As mentioned earlier,
invis seems to work extremely well for the most part.
Surprise, surprise, most of the mobs are extremely cold resistant... I'm
sure you all saw that coming.
So far exp looks very good. A level 45 druid friend and I kited around a
few giants and got quite a bit of exp from them. We killed maybe 6 giants
before we had to log, and gained 3/4 a bub of exp at 49. The frost giant
berzerkers, some scouts, and the elites were blue to me and ranged from blue
to red to the druid. The giants make a goofy "Doh!" sound whenever they are
hit. The higher level ones seemed to be hitting for around 130.
The dorf city was neat looking, but the vendors made me feel like Joe
Tourist in Disneyland. I mean one was actually selling SOUVENEIRS!
Be very careful on the crystal clear ice spots in the dorf city. It's
entirely possible to slide off to the side (if you're aiming that way) and
drop into the pit which you'll have to get someone to port you out of unless
you can gate. It's also difficult to change direction once you get on the
ice. Actually it'd be fun if it wasn't dangerous. I always thought the ice
in Everfrost should be like that so you could iceskate on it... hehe
The new inventory screen is interesting, but will take some getting used to.
I like the new "auto-equip" box that you can drop an item on it and it
will be equipped in the appropriate slot on your body. Should be great for
quick corpse looting. Unfortunately, it's also more difficult to manually
place items in the appropriate body slot since they are no longer labelled
(ie. shoulder, legs, feet, etc.)
For some reason, transparent polygons don't seem to work. This is the
grey-ish tinted background to see-through windows (ie. like the chat area).
Now, whether you have transparent polygons on or not, it's completely clear,
making reading text difficult over the bright snow background, regardless of
the text color.
Another thing I hope they fix is the loot-inspection pop-up. When you right
click an item you are looting, the info text pops up in the upper left
corner of the screen, making it almost impossible to read the stats. There
is no window, just the text drawn on top of the lag meter, the name of the
corpse you are looting, and the loot box. They need to fix that soon.
All in all, it was an interesting voyage. See you all in Velious!
Olgwinn Pendragun
Bard of 49 Missed Notes
Crimson Legacy
E'ci
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