Friday, January 21, 2022

Has Runes of Magic Lost their Friggen Minds? Ding 100 AGAIN!

So I log on yesterday and my guildmate, Eni, immediately barks in chat, "Sting, do the event." Therefore, I immediately went to work collecting 100 Coins of Petals, clicked over to Veranas Channel 1, and turned in my 100 coins . . . what came back to me was a 50,000,000 exp orb and 10 1,000,000 talent point orbs. The real shocker came when I saw that turn in could be done . . . 10 TIMES EACH DAY!! That's just insanity.

It's . . . real . . . and . . . beautiful?

So I start thinking to myself, where can I find the largest concentration of low level enemies with the fastest respawn time? I started going around to a few old haunts in Northern and Southern Janost, and they were ok, but they weren't great. Then for some reason I remembered an instance that I've soloed through several times called The Heart of the Ocean.

The Heart of the Ocean is a great instance. You have to complete a quest chain to gain entrance, and I had already done that a month or so ago. The Peak quests I've been doing lately have been really wanting to send me in to battle against the fourth boss there, so I'm pretty familiar with the layout.

Loopy Dungeon is Loopy!

In between the third and fourth boss there's a group of 12 fish warriors blocking your way. Come to find out, these warriors respawn . . . it might actually be the only group in the entire dungeon that does this. If you run the easy instance of the dungeon, only 8 of the warriors respawn, but if you run the normal instance, all 12 respawn.

Thank you for stacking up in a nice AoE right there

Typically none of these respawns drop loot, but during the event, all of them drop a Coin of Petals. So, here I sat and nuked ,and looted, and nuked, and looted, and etc. until I had all 1000 Coins of Petals that I needed.

Roasted Ayum Initiate!

It was boring but effective. The next thing I knew, I was back in Varanas Channel 1 and talking to Frank. (Now that's a good Event NPC name: Frank).

Frank and Friends in Varanas Central Channel 1

Frank gave me back 9 more 50 million experience orbs and 90 more 1 million talent point orbs. I switched my class to my often forgotten 3rd class choice of Knight and made 10 clicks to bring my knight level from 43 to 89 in the span of less than 10 seconds.

It's hard to explain the feelings I felt in that moment. It was a reflection on all the time I spent to get my Mage from 43 to 89 . . . all the quests . . . all the begging for help . . . all the time . . . and really all that I had learned.  Here I was a level 89 knight who had never even played the game as a knight. No, all I ever really wanted from this game was to play as a Mage/Rogue vampire.  That's it.

This morning, I logged on and did the same thing and went back to Frank with another 1000 Coins of Petals. Five more clicks and my knight was level 100.  Five more clicks beyond that, and I had earned maybe half of a peak level.

To be honest, gearing 3 classes for one character seems like it's going to be a lot of work and money. I'm able to survive in Korris with my current gear on the Mage, but my Rogue is still wanting . . . I haven't even thought about gearing a Knight.

Look, I don't want to say that's WHY this event exists (to get a player to the part of the game where they'll spend more money), because if that's the case, they really should have made 1.5 exp the standard exp gain rate in the first place (as I've argued before). 

Overall, this game feels like a multiboxer's delight.  I can't tell you how many people call their characters "toons" in this game, and while that typically gets under my skin because it belittles the time you put into developing your "character." An event like this seems to naturally encourage making multiple level 100 (I'll go ahead and say it) "toons." Throw away characters you can just add to your personal army. Really, it's not odd to see a pile of characters sitting on top of each other with the same name only with a slight variation -- imagine StingiteA, StingiteB, StingiteC, StingiteD, and StingiteE all riding a 7 person bone dragon mount together.  Yeah, I don't like thinking about it either.

I don't know. It's weird. I can't even believe the event rewards are so good right now.  I guess if you really want a max level character in Runes of Magic without all the pains of actually leveling, yesterday was your day to log on and start playing. Not to worry though! You have a full week.  This crazy event is running through January 27th.

Happy Dueling!

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