Blade and Soul - Kung Fu Korea - Action MMO

Srathor_sl said:

Played most of the weekend off and on. Got the summoner to 20 and it is a fun strong class. Insane damage with the pet doing a crapton and the right click bees 2 shotting most things. Also got a Kung Fu Master to 20 as well still pretty easy but drank many more pots overall due to 1 second block timing being hardish. But when I got used to a mobs attacks it was fun as heck. I did have issue soloing pokey (The giant scorpion boss) on the KFM but got it done where with the summoner I just blew past him like nothing.

Odd thing is I miss playing it today, if the run speed was a bit faster (Or I could get some gear to help for out of combat speed) it would be a great time waster for a few months. Or having a gang of folks playing and pvping up would be a ball too. Especially if you could guild pvp with uniforms on.

I will sub to if for a few months when it comes out though, well worth throwing a few bucks it's way.

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Pokey is actually really simple when you compare it to the later dungeon bosses. I hit 45 on my KFM and soloed almost everything but the purple dungeons(other than blackram), some of the blue dungeons and one green dungeon(which is retardedly overtuned, we almost wiped with 3people). Pokey has like a really simple non random pattern, and everything is single hit so you can counter it np. It's like quick telegraph, followed by a quick pincer attack without telegraph, medium speed telegraph and slow telegraph and that's it. Later on what makes the bosses hard is some of the attacks have more than one hit, which means you need to sidestep them instead of block them(sidestep once speced in has a 1.5s window of invulnerability, so you can dodge several attacks at once, counter does get a 2nd block if you spec into it but it's weird) and they'll change patterns at varying % or throw some weird timed stuff inbetween.

Once you unlock the Hongmoon secret techniques, which I have no idea how, might be 50, you can make the counter a ton better though. Like it'll proc a 1sec invuln if you block, so you can use it a lot more like the BM block.

The hard part for me atm is keeping track of the sidestep cooldowns. I should probably move the cooldown bar somewhere more visible and shit but that was my biggest issue, I'd see an attack, try to sidestep, but that sidestep was on cd(but the other was fine), then you get hit and you lose like 50% of your life and it's hard to recover. There's also times when you're out of actual dodges, so you need to use counter whenever you can and only use the others for stuff counter doesn't work on, but it requires good knowledge of the fight. Also counter is fucking shit if there's adds around(without the hongmoon technique, or at least the 2nd block spec) because you'll often block the add then get hit in the face by the boss you were trying to counter.

You can also spec a decent amount of other skills to have invulnerability frames on them, which lets you use "cooldown blocks" on top of the usual. Like the C multihit combo is really good for that since it lasts like 1.5seconds, and you can spec the Z rotating kick to have it too which is short but helps a decent bit.

The class is definitely fun, but damn it requires some work. I mean, for bosses soloing and shit mostly, in groups stuff dies way too fast with the current balance if you have a full group and non bosses you kill in like 2-3seconds anyway. I'm thinking I'll probably go BM instead so I don't have to bother as much. I did like the fact that you never run out of Focus on KFM once you have the spec stuff though if you have a bit of crit. Like you can spam the full DPS rotation even without blocking stuff, while on BM you really want to soak hits from the front with block to use Cyclone or whatever to fill your bar instantly so you can go back to draw stance spam.

I "finished" the game but like I'm not doing any of the endgame, plus there's more endgame that's not even available now, so I think I'll be fine, I wanted to check the leveling path, so I know which quests to skip and be able to skip cutscenes and shit. Story is actually fairly nice, other than the terrible voice acting on most of it.

Gems feel weird, I've never gotten anything gem related other than in surveys, daily dash and the one world boss that drops gem boxes. Like the way it looks like based on the gem crafting thing, you're supposed to find gems, salvage them, then use the salvaged part to make more gems until you get the right gems. But you never find any gems it seems. At least I've never found one anywhere but that world boss and the gems you get can't be salvaged. It's a bit the same thing with the Costume crafting, it says you're supposed to salvage costumes, but I couldn't salvage any of them. Maybe it's only dropped costumes on bosses and shit in dungeons? The faction costumes that drop every now and then can't be salvaged either. I wonder if I'm missing something or there's some feature NYI in our version.

Yeah the xp is a bit short surprisingly, considering you outlvl everything for most of the time and then the last few zones are pretty bad xp, quest wise. You can grind for a bit though, doesn't take very long like a typical korean game. Like an hour per lvl or so even at 40, 30mins if you have double xp food on. Depends on your class and the spot though. There's that one spot with a tons of undead but it can only really support 2people or so, and there's only 2 channels so yeah.

I leveled a summoner to 16 right now before the end of alpha to check it out, god is this class dumb easy for pve. You can aoe the entire low level dungeons easily, makes leveling early on super quick compared to other classes and especially KFM(who really are quite shitty until like 25 or whatever). Combat definitely felt less interesting though, there are combos and you have a counter, but it mostly felt like traditional gameplay rather than the super action packed gameplay you get when playing the melee classes. On the other hand, the pet is a lot squishier than I assumed and the heal spell is garbage. I guess you want to spec into various healing tools for it and give it some aoe mitigation thingies, since it kinda derps and stays in front of the boss and shit.

Edit: Also hadn't noticed you get less money for turning in daillies directly without going back to the NPC, that's quite a lot of money too. I knew that getting mail or doing crafting/gathering orders without being at the proper NPC cost more, but hadn't noticed daillies turn in, and unlike the remote order/mail which seem to cost a fix low amount of coppers(like 41coppers at lvl 45, so nothing really), the remote turn ins remove most of the money.

Yeah that's what I meant with healing, not the actual heal which sucks. First 2points I put were in the F skill to heal the pet for 20%, I think I'll put 1more in Q and C and then start getting DPS shit like sunflower and better LMB. But was mostly just fucking around with the class. I'm keeping Sin for EU beta, I probably won't play until then as there's not much to do and I can't be playing the game too much just yet or I won't play it later on. Wish it wasn't so far away from release though. Fucking beta weekends forever. It's not like they need that many either.

Yeah there might be tweaking to do on that, but since they haven't added the zones or updated to the last patch they're launching with(we're like 1-2patches behind) I'm not sure if the beta is for that, and translation wise, the end is quite a bit rougher but for the most part it's all already translated so not sure why they need 2months. I guess they're using the weekends as promotion and shit but it's a fucking long time, it works ok in a mmo that has a much longer leveling process but I think after 3weekends most people will be capped and then you don't have shit to do considering it's all getting wiped.

Tbh I think they'd be better off launching with 50cap, but I guess they want to keep content to do steady updates, since patching to korean state right away would mean insanely long times between patches since the game gets slow patches over there apparently.

nyn_sl said:

Its the pirate istance open? if so getting gem is easy, there is a wheel you can use inside (i dont remember where you get the coin for but i think from dailies), the weehl will give maxed out gems of every colors (no drop tho, so you cant trade em). You also get gem from the mineral nodes iirc. Been quite a bit ive played it.

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Never gotten a single gems from nodes, just quartz for crafting. And the pirate instance isn't opened, I didn't necessarily mean endgame gems, I meant like leveling gems and shit, there's a profession that makes jewelry and gems, but I didn't really see a way to get gems to get the gem fragments to craft for the profession, which was pretty dumb. The whole thing feels incomplete, probably partly because of the 2.0(or 3.0 whichever it is) patch reworking a lot of the basic stuff. AH is filled with old content items too it's annoying as shit, they should remove that from our version since we're never getting those old items.

Crafting is weird too, maybe because of the 45 caps. But basically, nothing is worse doing but Soul Shield crafting and Pottery to go with it. Pottery makes the items literally every other craft needs, as well as the quest stuff. Soul shield makes soul shields obviously which are surprisingly good but weird, basically you only craft one piece, so you can't have a 8pc bonus, however the one piece you craft has stupid high stats, like the moonwater soul shield has 235crit on it, while the Jianshi 42 blue set tops off at 93 or so, so that means you get 5pc+crafted+2random pieces but they also get Transformation Stones as their key item and that shit sells like hot cakes since you need a bunch to upgrade your gear.

The other crafts are weird cause they get shitty items. Like they get to craft repair tools/keys/unsealing charms but tier 1 makes the same as tier3(just less per craft so lower output, but also lower cost since it uses tier1 materials), only repair tools have a tier3 version with field repair tools but those are stupid expensive. Then you have like weapon/jewelry crafting which feels useless since Hongmoon gear is better, TP seals which are useless since you can TP everywhere anyway, slightly better potions that might be on different cd but not sure, only one type of food(crit+health regen) and so other than gems which seem weird atm and like poison curing potions and rezing charms, I don't see much use in the rest.

So basically, it makes the most sense to be Pottery/Soul Shield+Tree/Herb, which I guess what everyone will pick, so it'll drive the prices down, but it'll probably still be better than the rest because transformation stones aren't obtained in any other way(repeatedly, you do get a few from story quest/survey) and you need a large amount and F2P players probably won't have the money to spam crafting/gathering and level it for themselves. Then you make like a mule for repair tools/unsealing charms with Tree/Herb gathering, can get up to tier2 at lvl 11 for gathering, sadly need to do the story to get to the 3rd tier area but with how fast the leveling is, it'd probably only take like 8hours or so if you rushed it.