Hi fellow HoXes.
A lot has been announced lately, lot of stuff that will change the future of this game and that hopefully will allow us to enjoy it a lot more thanks to a wider player base.
The Savage Coast of Turan will be an add-pack that will be released at fall 2011, it will allow players to access the zones that are related to the film which will come out in the theaters during the summer (August 2011 afaik), it will bring new contents for both solo playing in terms of ACG instances as well as group and raid instances, new armors and I dare to say also probably new factions to deal with.
This has been the first announcement made by FunCom and although I think it's good to know they'll release stuff I'm disappointed. There's lack of PvP content and still no word about the B&G ruleset that was announced for May and after postponed to a more generic "Summer". Also, B&G won't be a solution, we don't know how they will handle the character progress, the AA gain, how they'll prevent the Bori farming and how they will allow players to make us of PvE content without guards, allowing then gankers to stay there and kill you over and over and over.
If it has to be a real PvP Hardcore server, every single PvE component of it should be removed (PvE AA as well I dare to say) unfortunately it won't be so, cause as it has been said already "Core System won't be modified".
The second huge announcement is the Age of Conan:Unrated.
What the hell is it? Simple, Age of Conan is going Free 2 Play on a hybrid model, which means that starting from this summer, all the customers with an active subscription (or with ROTG) will be considered premium members, having access to the full content of the game, new players will be able to play the early parts of the game for free with:
1) Limitation on Class, only 4 classes out of 12 will be available;
2) Limitation on instance content, major raid won't be allowed.
A store will be created in which you would be able to buy armor (good but not at pair level with raid armor apparently), special passes to allow you to join instances as a F2P member and whatsoever.
No word has bee given about how and if the PvP will be affected by restrictions too.
Related to this announcement there's a close up activity, on June the 1st at 09:00 GMT all the European server will be taken down for a merge.
All the PvE server will be merged into 1 server and all the PvP server will be merged into 1 server, they will activate 1 free transfer to move to the other ruleset so PvE --> PvP and vice-versa for the lenght of 30 days.
Last but not least FunCom declared that next on the schedule there's the beginning of the works for the server optimization and the introduction of the cross-server functionality which will probably affect also the minigame mechanics, a good new.
There has been also a shy announcement about possible tweaks and fixes to the classes ingame.
There's a lot of stuff to read and verify, and my intention was just to give you a quick overview, for there will be really a lot of stuff on the horizon.
As usual I reccomend you to go and give a check at the official forums and at the site www.ageofconan.com for further details on the matter.
So stay tuned.
Special Mention:
I'd like to say Goodbye to Aquilonia, it has been my first and only server and I'm going to "leave" it only because of the merge.
It has been a lot of fun to be there, I saw many guilds come and Go, but everyting comes to an end at last.
So... See you AQ server, it has been a pleasure!
Arcalimon
Welcome to the Temple of Xotli a blog for the Herald of Xotli Class of Age of Conan.
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Friday, 20 May 2011
Technical Notes: RAM usage for 64 bit OS
Hi guys,
wanna share my experience and hopefully it will be usefull for some of you out there.
Tech world is a Jungle and finding a config which suits perfectly with all your needs is not always easy, and most often we can't expect top performances on everything we are running on our machines, being it due to bottle-necks on user end side or for programming failures on the Software side.
The last case is clearly the case of Age of Conan, everyone who plays that game is perfectly aware of it's issues managing a multicore CPU as well as its insane requirements in terms of RAM memory.
Many 64bit OS users with an average ov 4GB of RAM DDR3 may have noticed how the RAM usage (I was using G15 performance screen) can be established pretty much always in a range between 95-98%, which obviously take out all the memory available on a PC (and 99% of the products out on the market are running absolutely fine with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, just to let you know) making you pretty much difficult to do anything.
This leads to some issues in game, which are often masked as lag spikes with really huge pings (around 4.5k ms), I discovered that this is not real lag but it's strictly linked to the RAM usage, there are some posts talking about it on the official forums, but spreading the word it's not a bad thing at all so I will describe the symptoms I had and the really easy solution I found to solve them.
First of all my rig:
Mobo: Asus p7p55d LE
CPU: Intel i5-750 OC 3.2GHZ
RAM: 4GB Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz
GPU: GeForce GTX 570
HD: Maxtor 7600rpm (500gb) and another Maxtor regular rpm 250gb roughly
Cooler: Noctua Tower
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
With this rig, I've always been able to enjoy the game, there were sometimes some mini freezes while loading textures, loading time were average but with huge spikes in terms of time when it comes down to loading heavy zones like Paikang, Chosain or Northern Grasslands.
The most common issues i found were a heavy rubberbanding, average lag on 150-250ms (yellow), npcs loading while I was walking in a zone with consequent freeze on the screen, alt-tab crashing, game crashes.
Although I managed to play the game like this for almost a year at some point I grew tired of this and I started to verify what was my machine doing when a freeze was occurring, so I deactivate my antivirus and any background running application and I noticed to important things:
1) My HD led was always active, like there was a swapping during the read of information;
2) My RAM usage was always at 95%, regardless of any other side activity of the machine;
3) The trend on the RAM usage was always increasing.
I was damn sure though that the issue was on my HD, so I did a deep clean of it, uninstalled obsolete stuff, launched a complete cycle of cleaning for apps and win register with "CC Cleaner", made a great scanning with "AD Aware" and finally made a deep and long (5-6 hours) cycle of defrag with "My Defrag".
After that I launched the game again with 50% of my HD space free and optimized.
The situation was a bit better, but after a couple of hours the problems came back in all their might. At that point it was clear that it was not a HD related issue, I had the suspect but I wanted to be sure.
So I went to my PC shop I bought other 4GB of DDR3 RAM and I installed it on my pc.
Result?
Yesterday I did a full siege in full graphical setting with 4 application running on background without having my fps down 40, without a single lag spike, I can safely alt tab without crashing, my loading time decreased from 3 minutes to pretty much immediately regardless of which zone i'm loading, NPC are all loaded as soon as i'm out of loading screen and my HD can finally rest a bit more without being stressed.
So far fellow players, if you do not mind spending money in a 4GB more of RAM and you like me really want to play AoC having top performance, with 30€ you can solve all your issues installing a new RAM block.
Some side notes: That was my case and those were my signals that there was something not working, if you find that you have similar issues and your rig is similar to mine, and you know for sure your connection cannot be accused of anything, well this may be the solution, I cannot of course guarrantee that you will solve everything with this, but in my opinion it is worth a try.
IMPORTANT: If you are a 32bit OS user, do not buy other RAM! 32 bit OS will accept only 4gb of ram regardless of how many ram you phisically have installed on your machine, so before wasting your money take your time to read through the InternetZ to verify if your PC can sustain this new memory and if you meet the requirements.
Hopefully this will help :)
See ya!
Arcalimon
wanna share my experience and hopefully it will be usefull for some of you out there.
Tech world is a Jungle and finding a config which suits perfectly with all your needs is not always easy, and most often we can't expect top performances on everything we are running on our machines, being it due to bottle-necks on user end side or for programming failures on the Software side.
The last case is clearly the case of Age of Conan, everyone who plays that game is perfectly aware of it's issues managing a multicore CPU as well as its insane requirements in terms of RAM memory.
Many 64bit OS users with an average ov 4GB of RAM DDR3 may have noticed how the RAM usage (I was using G15 performance screen) can be established pretty much always in a range between 95-98%, which obviously take out all the memory available on a PC (and 99% of the products out on the market are running absolutely fine with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, just to let you know) making you pretty much difficult to do anything.
This leads to some issues in game, which are often masked as lag spikes with really huge pings (around 4.5k ms), I discovered that this is not real lag but it's strictly linked to the RAM usage, there are some posts talking about it on the official forums, but spreading the word it's not a bad thing at all so I will describe the symptoms I had and the really easy solution I found to solve them.
First of all my rig:
Mobo: Asus p7p55d LE
CPU: Intel i5-750 OC 3.2GHZ
RAM: 4GB Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz
GPU: GeForce GTX 570
HD: Maxtor 7600rpm (500gb) and another Maxtor regular rpm 250gb roughly
Cooler: Noctua Tower
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
With this rig, I've always been able to enjoy the game, there were sometimes some mini freezes while loading textures, loading time were average but with huge spikes in terms of time when it comes down to loading heavy zones like Paikang, Chosain or Northern Grasslands.
The most common issues i found were a heavy rubberbanding, average lag on 150-250ms (yellow), npcs loading while I was walking in a zone with consequent freeze on the screen, alt-tab crashing, game crashes.
Although I managed to play the game like this for almost a year at some point I grew tired of this and I started to verify what was my machine doing when a freeze was occurring, so I deactivate my antivirus and any background running application and I noticed to important things:
1) My HD led was always active, like there was a swapping during the read of information;
2) My RAM usage was always at 95%, regardless of any other side activity of the machine;
3) The trend on the RAM usage was always increasing.
I was damn sure though that the issue was on my HD, so I did a deep clean of it, uninstalled obsolete stuff, launched a complete cycle of cleaning for apps and win register with "CC Cleaner", made a great scanning with "AD Aware" and finally made a deep and long (5-6 hours) cycle of defrag with "My Defrag".
After that I launched the game again with 50% of my HD space free and optimized.
The situation was a bit better, but after a couple of hours the problems came back in all their might. At that point it was clear that it was not a HD related issue, I had the suspect but I wanted to be sure.
So I went to my PC shop I bought other 4GB of DDR3 RAM and I installed it on my pc.
Result?
Yesterday I did a full siege in full graphical setting with 4 application running on background without having my fps down 40, without a single lag spike, I can safely alt tab without crashing, my loading time decreased from 3 minutes to pretty much immediately regardless of which zone i'm loading, NPC are all loaded as soon as i'm out of loading screen and my HD can finally rest a bit more without being stressed.
So far fellow players, if you do not mind spending money in a 4GB more of RAM and you like me really want to play AoC having top performance, with 30€ you can solve all your issues installing a new RAM block.
Some side notes: That was my case and those were my signals that there was something not working, if you find that you have similar issues and your rig is similar to mine, and you know for sure your connection cannot be accused of anything, well this may be the solution, I cannot of course guarrantee that you will solve everything with this, but in my opinion it is worth a try.
IMPORTANT: If you are a 32bit OS user, do not buy other RAM! 32 bit OS will accept only 4gb of ram regardless of how many ram you phisically have installed on your machine, so before wasting your money take your time to read through the InternetZ to verify if your PC can sustain this new memory and if you meet the requirements.
Hopefully this will help :)
See ya!
Arcalimon
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Herald of Xotli: PvP after the 2.2 patch
Greetings everyone.
I've been slacking a bit on this blog lately (Slith will enjoy this statement) essentially because I wanted to test out the PvE side of life with my alternate toons and to see how much smoother was the faction progression.
But I've also invested some time in PvP with my HoX trying to draw a line and compare how much the gameplay on the overall changed, and for good from my point of view.
I've been in some minigames mostly Hallowed Vaults and Lost Temple with my beloved HoX and I have to admit I had a lot of fun. Yesterday I ended up in a minigame full of rogues (melee ones) and I was already feeling the pain, my last memory of minigames with this setup was limited to a Stun - Dead - Ress behaviour without any real chance to do something concrete, beside rare exceptions when I managed to found a small hole to unleash the flames of Xotli.
It was the heaven of the CC-lock and of the huge damage spikes from sins, it was really hard for an HoX to survive enough to call it fun regardless of the deaths, in fact spending 10 minutes just clicking on the "Resurrect" button can hardly be defined as fun or challengin, it's rather frustrating and annoying.
Back on the trial, I was so expecting another devastating experience, but I came out from that mini with a big surprise. I've been able to move, without being thrown all over the place and raped by the first shade that approached me, mostly due to the new CC mechanics, I was able to move around and I was able to time correctly my HFB to interrupt dangerous moves from my enemies which could have been the cause of my death.
Admittedly after a month of non-pvp activity my result was not so shining, but again I think that once I'll remove some rust from my wheels it will be even more fun.
You know, for the first time in a minigame against sins and barbarians I've been able not only to play, but also to be a real support for my group, carrying the flag, protecting the healer (they don't need it so often and being dead does not help when they really need) or simply slowing down those who were chasing at our flag carrier.
Let me be clear, if caught in the wrong place and affected by a CC the HoX will still die in pain, and it is still most susceptible to it than most other classes, but the situation really changed and even though I still believe the HoX suffers from a weaker base than others in the game, its status has been improved indirectly by the new CC mechanics and received a small direct boost from the changes at HFB.
I'm sticking around with a Poss/Gen build still which is highly reccomended for a "pew-pew" tactic, but I'm slowly building the idea to develope a new kind of hybrid build removing some points from the general to add them in the Avatar Tree.
It's all under test though I don't expect it to work properly nor to convince me to switch to it anytime soon :)
Generally speaking about AoC apparently the new zones that will be released in game are Turan and another Arashadir-something (can't recall the exact name), rumors confirmed by the "Search for Zone" feature in game which shows Turan in the list, also Silirrion said on Twitter that we should expect something on the level of announcement in this week or next week when the 3 years of AoC Birthday will fall (a lot of speculation about the date though so I'm officially confused).
Also there will be soon enough new content to test on the Test Live server as well as the announced set up of the Blood&Glory ruleset which should be released during the summer.
Busy times are ahead indeed, let's just see what the future will bring :)
Stay tuned!
Arcalimon
I've been slacking a bit on this blog lately (Slith will enjoy this statement) essentially because I wanted to test out the PvE side of life with my alternate toons and to see how much smoother was the faction progression.
But I've also invested some time in PvP with my HoX trying to draw a line and compare how much the gameplay on the overall changed, and for good from my point of view.
I've been in some minigames mostly Hallowed Vaults and Lost Temple with my beloved HoX and I have to admit I had a lot of fun. Yesterday I ended up in a minigame full of rogues (melee ones) and I was already feeling the pain, my last memory of minigames with this setup was limited to a Stun - Dead - Ress behaviour without any real chance to do something concrete, beside rare exceptions when I managed to found a small hole to unleash the flames of Xotli.
It was the heaven of the CC-lock and of the huge damage spikes from sins, it was really hard for an HoX to survive enough to call it fun regardless of the deaths, in fact spending 10 minutes just clicking on the "Resurrect" button can hardly be defined as fun or challengin, it's rather frustrating and annoying.
Back on the trial, I was so expecting another devastating experience, but I came out from that mini with a big surprise. I've been able to move, without being thrown all over the place and raped by the first shade that approached me, mostly due to the new CC mechanics, I was able to move around and I was able to time correctly my HFB to interrupt dangerous moves from my enemies which could have been the cause of my death.
Admittedly after a month of non-pvp activity my result was not so shining, but again I think that once I'll remove some rust from my wheels it will be even more fun.
You know, for the first time in a minigame against sins and barbarians I've been able not only to play, but also to be a real support for my group, carrying the flag, protecting the healer (they don't need it so often and being dead does not help when they really need) or simply slowing down those who were chasing at our flag carrier.
Let me be clear, if caught in the wrong place and affected by a CC the HoX will still die in pain, and it is still most susceptible to it than most other classes, but the situation really changed and even though I still believe the HoX suffers from a weaker base than others in the game, its status has been improved indirectly by the new CC mechanics and received a small direct boost from the changes at HFB.
I'm sticking around with a Poss/Gen build still which is highly reccomended for a "pew-pew" tactic, but I'm slowly building the idea to develope a new kind of hybrid build removing some points from the general to add them in the Avatar Tree.
It's all under test though I don't expect it to work properly nor to convince me to switch to it anytime soon :)
Generally speaking about AoC apparently the new zones that will be released in game are Turan and another Arashadir-something (can't recall the exact name), rumors confirmed by the "Search for Zone" feature in game which shows Turan in the list, also Silirrion said on Twitter that we should expect something on the level of announcement in this week or next week when the 3 years of AoC Birthday will fall (a lot of speculation about the date though so I'm officially confused).
Also there will be soon enough new content to test on the Test Live server as well as the announced set up of the Blood&Glory ruleset which should be released during the summer.
Busy times are ahead indeed, let's just see what the future will bring :)
Stay tuned!
Arcalimon
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
2.2 What we were not expecting
The CC revamp and Faction revamp has been released on Live servers, and it is a hell of a work, lot of stuff has been tweaked and fixed and I reserved myself some time to check stuff out before posting anything.
I've had the chance to test both the PvP effects of the CC revamp as well as the PvE effects of it as well as the Faction improvement and I have to say i'm impressed.
First of all, based on my last post there have been some stuff modified for the Herald of Xotli, stuff that greatly changed the horizon of our class, small tweaks indeed but they affected our gameplay thanks to the big design of the CC revamp.
Mainly the 2 biggest changes were the reduction of the casting time for Word of Command from the original 1 second to a 0.5 seconds casting time, still many can perceive it as a nerf compared with the previous instant cast status of this skill, but inserting it in the new mechanics of the CC system it results to be a good move. Also a new feature has been added to Hellfire Breath which is now capable of interrupting combos as well as casts.
In PvP the changes are pretty good, as soon as there are less CCs around the HoX is more capable of moving around without being stun-locked and therefore has more chances to deal damage without great issues, of course as soon as we get a CC on us and we can't removed we will be devastated, but compared with the pre-revamp situation, everything seems to be better.
What I unexpectedly like was the change to Dread Visage, true thing is that it is a 1 second cast instead of a 0.5 second cast, still I feel I'm now obliged to use it wisely, hence I need to time it correctly and I therefore have the feeling that i'm forced to play more in a tactical way, I used to cast it for defensive purposes but I find it more usefull now for offensive purposes, as we need to stay out of combat in the first frenzied phases of a melee fight, we have enough time to get in the middle and lessen the pressure on the Soldiers or healers, we are now more supportive to the group, and this is a good thing.
Without mentioning the chance to interrupt combos with Hellfire Breath, in this way as well we can now consider it more than a mere spamming spell, we can time it to interrupt for examples incoming CCs that are now more noticeable than they were before.
As I said these changes modified the gameplay for the Herald of Xotli and improved a bit its status, still we would need some more modifies, the cons of this revamp is that a Possession based HoX will have even mre the upper hand over an Avatar specced HoX, a rework of Avatar would still be really appreciated, it should be much more viable than it is now, but who knows, the tide seems to be changed, it's allowed to hope for something more in the future?
I would hope so.
About the faction revamp i'm really impressed.
Yesterday I tried to start the faction progression from 0 with another toon (a DT) and I picked up the Last Legion in Northern Grasslands. I admit I didn't go for the fastest way possible and I wasted sometimes trying to enjoy the storyline, the result was that at the end of my 3hours of playing I found myself with more than 50k faction point (so Rank 1 i guess) and with roughly 100 MoAs much more than all the MoA I obtained in my intensive and rare farming session before the revamp.
While doing quests I also noticed that the CC importance in PvE has been a bit reduced as long as you receive less CCs from the mobs and you can then time your skills a bit more, relying more on tactic rather than on pure CC frenzy spamming.
I read rumors about the next expansione, apparently it will be in Turan, I rather think it will be an "add-on" so let's wait to have more infos.
In the meantime I'll try and dedicate myself a bit more to the 2 new districts in Paikang, I've had a glance at them on TL server and they looked impressive, I will come out with something on them as soon as possible.
Keep your heads on your necks in the meantime!
Regards,
Arcalimon
I've had the chance to test both the PvP effects of the CC revamp as well as the PvE effects of it as well as the Faction improvement and I have to say i'm impressed.
First of all, based on my last post there have been some stuff modified for the Herald of Xotli, stuff that greatly changed the horizon of our class, small tweaks indeed but they affected our gameplay thanks to the big design of the CC revamp.
Mainly the 2 biggest changes were the reduction of the casting time for Word of Command from the original 1 second to a 0.5 seconds casting time, still many can perceive it as a nerf compared with the previous instant cast status of this skill, but inserting it in the new mechanics of the CC system it results to be a good move. Also a new feature has been added to Hellfire Breath which is now capable of interrupting combos as well as casts.
In PvP the changes are pretty good, as soon as there are less CCs around the HoX is more capable of moving around without being stun-locked and therefore has more chances to deal damage without great issues, of course as soon as we get a CC on us and we can't removed we will be devastated, but compared with the pre-revamp situation, everything seems to be better.
What I unexpectedly like was the change to Dread Visage, true thing is that it is a 1 second cast instead of a 0.5 second cast, still I feel I'm now obliged to use it wisely, hence I need to time it correctly and I therefore have the feeling that i'm forced to play more in a tactical way, I used to cast it for defensive purposes but I find it more usefull now for offensive purposes, as we need to stay out of combat in the first frenzied phases of a melee fight, we have enough time to get in the middle and lessen the pressure on the Soldiers or healers, we are now more supportive to the group, and this is a good thing.
Without mentioning the chance to interrupt combos with Hellfire Breath, in this way as well we can now consider it more than a mere spamming spell, we can time it to interrupt for examples incoming CCs that are now more noticeable than they were before.
As I said these changes modified the gameplay for the Herald of Xotli and improved a bit its status, still we would need some more modifies, the cons of this revamp is that a Possession based HoX will have even mre the upper hand over an Avatar specced HoX, a rework of Avatar would still be really appreciated, it should be much more viable than it is now, but who knows, the tide seems to be changed, it's allowed to hope for something more in the future?
I would hope so.
About the faction revamp i'm really impressed.
Yesterday I tried to start the faction progression from 0 with another toon (a DT) and I picked up the Last Legion in Northern Grasslands. I admit I didn't go for the fastest way possible and I wasted sometimes trying to enjoy the storyline, the result was that at the end of my 3hours of playing I found myself with more than 50k faction point (so Rank 1 i guess) and with roughly 100 MoAs much more than all the MoA I obtained in my intensive and rare farming session before the revamp.
While doing quests I also noticed that the CC importance in PvE has been a bit reduced as long as you receive less CCs from the mobs and you can then time your skills a bit more, relying more on tactic rather than on pure CC frenzy spamming.
I read rumors about the next expansione, apparently it will be in Turan, I rather think it will be an "add-on" so let's wait to have more infos.
In the meantime I'll try and dedicate myself a bit more to the 2 new districts in Paikang, I've had a glance at them on TL server and they looked impressive, I will come out with something on them as soon as possible.
Keep your heads on your necks in the meantime!
Regards,
Arcalimon
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)