Rohan origin comeback thread.

[soulholder]

... a day in and we're back to this, lol. Things never change.

I think your dates are just way off. And I've been at or near the tops: in beta in the 60's/70's, and built a reputation as a skilled ranger despite being under-leveled thereafter. I also ran with NW fighting Forever and hit full glacial and the likes before calling it quits in 2012, and literally let other people take Bez/Rulers while I was in NW pre-walter's/twins. My friend/prior commander in Deceit who moved to NW with me ended up with what was supposed to be my set of the drops because I just stopped caring enough to keep putting in the effort; I'd done my share of "PvP" in the game, and things were starting to spiral even beyond hope of control with how much RNG and cost kept getting put in. I've never been at the true pinnacle since post-beta, because I never cared enough to spend that much cash to max out in order to make myself the best. You've seen what some people charge to leverage themselves into power. I'm not one to care that much about e-peen over budget. I'd rather win an intellectual argument.

The reason I think your dates are messed up is because R5, and subsequently feathers, didn't even exist in 2008. Nobody had T5 exotics/ancients then, either, because the last > level 100 items per weapon type weren't even in the game until then in order to do the forging. R5 and the surrounding gear was post-release content that came out in 2009, and the 100+ gear content patch didn't come out until a number of months later. The giant for CtB didn't even come out until winter 2009/2010. The absolute best thing one could get at the time was R4 rings, which are marginally better than Wings and the likes, which I had even before level 60 because there were guilds on Ahkma literally giving them away to random people, myself included, in order to fend off their opponent guilds.

A lot of people from '08 Ahkma will reference a few rangers who were particularly good at the game: Zukii, Rod before transferring to Syrephis, the GM from Element whose name escapes me, and myself. Frankly, I taught Rod and some of his high-ranks of his guild (Vic and Tae) how to play and beat ranger as dhans, because they were my guild officers before they moved off the server.

Epics/upgrades "balanced" PvP by devaluing stats and build choices and the variance between builds. Everyone ran the same gear stats in the competitive scene, and thus the game became mostly a proof-of-concept about whether or not the classes were numerically okay. And they were in the context of the meta; that's it. That doesn't mean anything for the general game-state. All they did was make WFFS/DFFS less-potent after the Hero patch due to differences in relative health. Most 2008-era players didn't stay here post-epics. I've seen the metrics; 70% player reduction in less than a week to never return. A majority of the rest either burnt out sooner from crafting or other reasons, or they lost interested with the blatant cash-grab. So anyone you ask is probably likely going to be inherently biased because statistically they weren't likely to have actually been here at release.

I didn't partake in the serious post-epic PvP because I just didn't care at that point to. The damage had been done. The forum PvP was more fun than it was in-game, especially given the number of users here.

You compare skills to how they were in '08 vs post-'09 reworks vs whatever reworks have happened since I last played, and 7's were hardly necessary in '08 for most skills. Some of the essentials, absolutely they were huge helps. But many skills didn't improve past level 6, or were barely improvements to a point where even at endgame it didn't actually matter. In fact, in '08, some skills actually saw tradeoffs going from 6-7 which carried potential negative utility. One of these which is lingering now is the duration on Piercing Root in Origins. What it doesn't mention is the hidden 50% cooldown cut which *used* to exist at 7 (I haven't tested it for Origins and don't care to), despite losing 70% of its duration. Early MB worked on the same principle: higher shield, lower duration.

And you should know full well that templars only had insane magic attack because the values got inflated so much. You know the math behind how blunt mastery worked. In 2008, those values weren't achievable enough to make them worthwhile. Tell me the name of a templar in T4 gear that's ever out-damaged an agi dhan, guardian, defender, ranger, wizard, or dekan at those same levels/gear. There wasn't one, because that's just how the game worked at that time. Templars were a mix of priest and defender, as they were to be. The 2009/2010-era of the game was horribly imbalanced, yes. But to say that 2008 wasn't balanced is just negligent of the game's history, because at release, it pretty much was very well-balanced, the only questionable builds being dex guard and agi dhan if they were very well-geared and well-built. If anything, things didn't die fast enough, because wizards with Psy shield could keep whole parties up with everyone dealing such relatively low damage.