Adventures in Skyforge Part 2

Skyforge Goddess

Adventures in Skyforge Part 2 - Blaugust Day 11

Yesterday I talked about the classes, the Ascension Atlas and other bits of Skyforge so today, I thought I'd tell you about combat and story details and questing.

The combat style in Skyforge is an active combat style. You have the usual 4 movement keys but you have to use the mouse for direction. Main spells are on keys 1-4 as well as keys Z, X, C & V with a couple of others in use too. I struggle with this type of layout as I don't have any muscle memory or agility in my fingers but I'm not doing too badly in Skyforge.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to play a tank class though! I can either move or fight whereas a tank needs to be up in the bosses face all the time, moving and fighting at the same time. I've chosen Kinetic as the first class to open up on the Ascension Atlas - I get to uproot trees and rocks to throw them with my mind powers which sounds really cool! I did think of trying for the berserker class - it was great fun to see a tall skinny girl wielding a massive sword like it was made of paper in the training area but realistically, I can't yet manage the combat style a melee class will require.

The storyline of Skyforge unlocks as you move through the quests - not in a prewritten quest text like WoW though. The premise is that on this world of Aelion, when some mortals die they become immortal - that will be your opening scene. There are higher ranked immortals and gods giving you your introduction to your new life and through them, you get involved in a storyline that has you chasing information all over the globe.

They are based in 3 or 4 hub areas - The Park, The Observatory, the Hall of Greatness and the Research Center. I haven't found any other areas like these yet so I don't know if there are more. The Observatory is the main quest hub/transport center. It has a huge virtual reality style globe which you use to jump to quest zones instantly.

There are several types of quest areas too - there are dungeon-like Squad areas designed for 1-3 players, open world areas for soloists although you can run with others and pvp arena style zones too. The open world zones are huge areas with multiple quests in them. You have to finish the whole area to get the good Sparks reward at the end but you do get rewards for each quest the first time through. If you go through again, you get different types of quest rewards and as you've opened up the transporters, it's much quicker to go through a second time!

Once I understand it myself, I'll try and explain the various currency systems as well as the followers - you are heading for godhood after all and all new gods need followers! But that probably won't be tomorrow's post - there's a lot of different stuff that is building up in my character tab and I have no idea what half of it does yet!

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Adventures in Skyforge Part 1

Adventures in Skyforge - Blaugust Day 10

For the last month or so, I've been playing a lot of a new free to play MMO called Skyforge. The graphics are really good and the world we play in is beautiful. At first I was dubious about adding yet another MMO to my playlist but as time has gone on, I am getting more into it. Needless to say though, my WoW time has reduced greatly again - there aren't enough hours free in my day to play two MMO's.

You can only have one character but you start off with a choice of three classes - Cryomancer, Lightbinder and Paladin. I went with the Cryomancer for some reason - mainly because it's a ranged DPS class (think heavy duty Frostmage). The Paladin is a tank build and the Lightbinder is a hybrid DPS/support class - not a healer though, more shielding and buffing your allies than healing them.

That's one of the strange things about Skyforge, there aren't any healers! Instead some of the mobs and all of the bosses drop healing globes as they die. Their health bar may show x10 next to it during a fight so a 10k health boss will have 10 globes to drop. You see a full health bar which reduces as you fight but when it's down 1k, it will look like it refills but it's actually just another 1k health bar and will drop a health globe once it's empty. It's kind of hard to explain and confusing when you know you've been hurting the boss but he suddenly has a full-looking health bar again!

Class Atlas

The talent system is different too. It's called an Ascension Atlas and is made up of 3 colors of nodes. You collect crystals to fill the various nodes - minor nodes give you small increases in stats like might, strength, luck etc and the major nodes are mainly new talents or spells. I guess you could say that the minor & major nodes make up a cluster on a talent tree which you can see in the Ascension Atlas screenshot below.

Underneath the Ascension Atlas is a class atlas - this is the one that you start to unlock straightaway but you don't realise it until you get to the main node. When you get to the main node, the main Ascension Atlas opens up and you begin collecting class sparks as well as the 3 colors of sparks that you have been using up to now. This also has major & minor nodes in clusters. I didn't zoom in for detail on the Class Atlas, but it still only shows a tiny part of the whole tree!

Start of Cryomancer Ascension Atlas

You open new classes by working your way through the Ascension Atlas and changing class is as easy as choosing it from a drop down box. It's not quite so simple though - you don't gain XP in this game, each new piece of gear, new spell, new node collected in the Atlas gives you a certain amount of prestige. If you change class, you don't have your class specific Atlas unlocked yet so you are slightly gimped at first.

Other classes available include necromancer, knight, slayer, berserker, archer and kinetic to name a few. You can try all the classes out in the training area and completing the training will award you the class costume. There are also some quests that let you play as other classes long before you unlock them in the Atlas. I'd suggest going back to an easy area to play through though - it takes time to get used to the new combat moves and of course, you don't have level appropriate weapons either.

I'll cover questing, story and combat style tomorrow I think otherwise this post will turn into an essay! Have you tried Skyforge yet? What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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