I'm still really going to try to hit level 60 in Rift, but after that I can't imagine I'll be doing a whole lot. Unfortunately, all of the friends who started playing the game with me have stopped by now. I guess I can understand--there's not a ton that differentiates it from other MMORPGs, but I feel like it has a decent amount of polish and some great ideas. I guess I like the idea of playing through it for the perspective it gives me on the genre as a whole. I've played WoW extensively but this is the only other game in the genre that I haven't spent more than a couple hours on.
Still, I've been playing it a lot less the past few days. I think I'll try to gain a couple levels per day, but I won't be hitting it quite as hard as I have been. Instead, I'm going to spend a bit more time on Vagrant Story, which I neglected for the first days of playing Rift. I'd like to get back to Gungnir as well, but to be honest the game is so slow it's hard for me to keep up a steady progression. I'm sure it becomes slightly more fast-paced later. Hopefully I will get back to that at some point--I do have quite a bit of loyalty for the Dept. Heaven series.
My co-op partner (who has now tired of Rift) suggested that we try TERA, another recent free-to-play MMO. I'm not entirely against it, but I'm wary of it since its reviews are lower overall than Rift. It also appears to be a more graphically intensive game, which isn't great news for my integrated graphics. There's good news on that front, though. A friend of mine is buying a new video card and he said he would have no issue gifting me his old card. My GPU has been busted for ages now--I would love to be able to play some of the games I love without having to turn the settings down to ultra low.
I've just passed up a very slow portion of Vagrant Story populated by heavily armored human enemies. The interaction between weapon types, enemy types, and armor types is fairly complicated. Although I had a weapon primed for use against human enemies, it was very unsuccessful against these human opponents, seldom hitting for beyond single digit damage numbers at the beginning of a combo. The reason for this is because the weapon in question is a sword, an edged weapon. Edged weapons evidently do not fare well against heavy armor. When I experimented with a mace against these opponents I had much better results, despite it having no particular affinity against human opponents. This makes me wonder if I should carry around more weapons for specific situations.
As I may have explained before, weapons used against a certain type of enemy will gradually become stronger against that type of enemy while making them less effective against that type's direct counterpart. Therefore, I have three different weapons for use against humans/phantoms, undead/evil, and beast/dragon. The human/phantom weapon is a scimitar, as previously mentioned. It makes me wonder if I should start carrying edged and blunt weapons for each enemy archetype--although that would leave me with no options in the event that I needed a piercing weapon. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to carry nine weapons--and I don't want to carry much more than five because I want to pick up new weapons to store in my warehouse.
Storing weapons in your warehouse allows you to have a lot of raw materials for use in the workshops scattered around Lea Monde, the world of Vagrant Story. You can combine blades, hilts, and gems to make new weapons. Oddly enough, you can even craft crossbows in this way. Each of these materials impart your weapons with new properties. You can also take a blade that has a ton of affinity for a certain enemy type and combine it with another blade to make a higher quality blade that keeps (most of) those affinities.
It seems pretty unlikely that I'm going to be carrying the specific weapon type that I need for a certain situation, so I guess it comes down to trial and error. Hopefully I will generally have access to my warehouse before major boss fights so I don't get completely stonewalled.
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