Allods Online Forum

Quoted from "Doughdough"

Hi all, I used to play back when wild shore was released and decided to take a break. Recently I've been thinking about coming back to Smuggler's Paradise but I would like some information.
1) How is gearing nowadays? Is it still a grind? I plan on playing a healer if that makes a difference.
2)Should I level up a character in order to fill up on what I missed or just jump in on my older toon?
3)How is the population? When I left the numbers were dwindling and most of the activity happened in EU times.

1) Still a grind, while it is not as grindy as when the patch just hit.

2) Well that's your decision. You wouldn't be able to fill up on anything because there's nothing new during leveling.

3) Each faction has less than 100 active players, as far as I know, maybe even less than 50. People are fairly active and doing things like BGs, raiding and raiding the other factions city, at least it was like that when I still played a month ago.

where you from dough?, I am thinking of re-starting but want to get a group together so that we can do dungeons etc without having to wait around im from England and play at around 18:30 gmt until about midnight

"do dungeons" If you mean instances like XAES, Lab 13, etc., then you don't need to find a group. Once you get level 7-8 or so, you'll be able to learn the Mercenary Contract skill and summon mercenaries to help with instances.

You have to be in an instance to summon the captain, and then you hire the NPCs themselves. They aren't as good as an experienced crew of players, but they are tough and disciplined, and their AI follows what you'd expect from their character type - the healer stands back and heals, the wizard stands back and AOEs stuff, the warrior runs in and engages in melee, etc. (Compare: Guild Wars heroes and henchmen, who are undisciplined maniacs.) Back in 4.x, nobody much queued for the free-merc astral flights as a healer because Matron Lighthand (the mercenary healer) was better at healing than 90+% of player healers.

yeah mercs are great
almost noone does better
there is only a small handful of players that are superior to mercs...

Quoted from "ALLODS-ONLINE-PLAYER"

there is only a small handful of players that are superior to mercs...

Ouch.

I feel sorry for you if that is really true regarding the players around you.

i think he means leveling and there is not too far from reality in lowie instances like tt1 etc they can nearly onehit the mobs which is absolutly impossible as a normal player but yeah in astral they are shit

yes it was meant for leveling primary and for "easy astral" as we had it when there were free flights to the starting sectors with the mercenaries (level 55)... with mercenaries it took me only 6 minutes for some allods
with players these allods took 15 min + in most cases, it was horrible
i really missed an option to select "play ONLY with mercenaries"

ofc there were really good players which were as good or better than the mercs, but as i said, only a small handful
the great thing at these was that we did not ANY conversation, we just gave our best to kill the mobs as efficient as possible - again, without a word
maximum was a friendly emoticon at the end of the run
it was like we recognized each other just by the playstyle; thats the kind of social interaction i really ENJOY
i put these few on my friendlist and when we were at astral academy we went into a grp to minimize the risk of gtting into a grp with silly players

it seems that the harder the instance, the higher is the possibility to find a competent other player - and vice versa, so in the "common" instances there are many incompetent / beginners / silly players

HI DoughDough ...

To your first 1. question it there cant be an actual answer because only the players, playing on russian servers as well know how gearing in 1-2 weeks in the new patch will be ....

Greetings

Taleron