ArcheAge – Head Started

ArcheAge continues to top the list of most popular posts and search terms on my blog for some reason, so I feel like I should say something about the head start.

I played a bit over the weekend, but not as much as you might think. For one thing, I kept getting disconnected due to the persistent server issues, and for another, I didn’t particularly want to spend all of my time staring at a queue screen. (Eventually I figured out I could leave ArcheAge on the queue screen and fire up FFXIV at the same time.)

As it turns out, if you didn’t play within the first hour that the game was up, you lost out on your chance to get a good spot for your farm and/or house. And by “a good spot” I mean “any spot anywhere in the entire world.” I feel bad for anyone who comes in September 16 thinking they’re going to be able to do any farming quests. I can’t even imagine where they’ll be able to build. I guess they’ll have to sail up to Auroria and stake out some land on the permanent PvP continent. Good luck with that.

I managed to grab a spot for my scarecrow down in the Dewstone Plains north of Royster’s Camp on the Naima server. (I had some designs on playing on EU Kyprosa but that server is slammed all the time right now.) I’m playing a human on the Western continent. Neither of the Eastern races appealed to me, which I guess makes me a racist.

By the way, even though ArcheAge has 50 million character creation options, I can’t help but notice that everyone still comes out looking basically the same. There are no body customizations at all, it’s all face customizations which you never actually get to see in the game. Maybe it’s just the males. The females have more hairstyles at least.

In the alpha I played a fairly plain Sorcerer-type build. This time I started out running an Occultism-Vitalism-Auramancy build which ends up as an “Edgewalker” whatever that is. I wanted something mobile with lots of crowd-control abilities, because, you know, PvP and stuff. That’s pretty much the entire philosophy of playing PvP in any MMO: Stun the other guy so he can’t attack you.

Unfortunately the Edgewalker is extremely defenseless against archers, which is probably what 99% of everyone in PvP is going to use. So I swapped out the Auromancy for Battlerage and presto, I have an instant gap-closer and can smash archers in the face with my staff. (Being able to melee with a staff and produce reasonable damage is one of the cool things about ArcheAge. I love using non-standard weapons.) Time will tell if it’s any good for PvP, but it works great against mobs.