Okay, this is a long grip so pass this topic if you are just going to leave one-liners that don’t offer a new perspective.
I have been playing AO for a long time. Not consistently, but it is always my #1 game I turn to when I want to play an MMO. I have only recently been able to get players to end the game to finally seeing how the leveling system leads to the final result.
I love it, except how everything is so cookie-cutter and lacks any real reward for breaking the mold and just rewards doing what you’re told from Funcom devs.
I feel like my main issue is how the breeds pretty much set the tone for your endgame and make it pretty much a template based on stats with no creativity. Particularly how the Nanomage breed is built for one thing and one thing only, and that is to be a nano pool with a body.
Seriously, all the other breeds are cool, but are not nearly as handicapped or set into a mold like the NM. Sure, NMs are engineered “cyborg-ish” type, but considering we are RK and not any other planet, you would think they could use their intelligence to figure out how to do more than just cast a nano sooner than their Solitus counterpart.
For example, you can literally have any breed be an MP, NT, Crat, Engi, and so forth, which are what NM is supposed to excel at. But NM cannot be a Shade, Soli, or Fixer, without some major handicaps that make it almost just not really worth it. (I have seen Atrox NT being just as viable as an NM NT which totally stinks, imo)
Don’t get me wrong, I am still doing it, working on my NM shade and have a 200 NM fixer. However, it’s not that satisfying. I mean I do it because I feel loyal to my breed preferences, but I feel like AO has been designed just to create molds and not a real system that rewards player choices.
Another example: A 200 Opi fixer with GA3, and no Lijotur armor or anything can run The Reck no problem. My NM with GA4 and Lijotur (minus the sleeves) can’t kill the sided Dyna bosses without getting below half health and almost dying. It’s like okay… do their big brains make them easier to hit, or what?
It seems like Nanos don’t do anything except enhance what the breed is already capable of, and if you go NM your only capacity is to dish out a bunch of static programs that don’t reward stats nearly as much as weapons reward their weapon stats.
I know this won’t change anything. I am simply trying to talk about what the benefits others have found from trying to break the mold if there are any.
I also just need to finally get this off my chest about how much it annoys me seeing an Atrox shade run around just because of the health pool, while the NM only has one offensive nano to cast and it literally doesn’t matter how much nano skill they have because the drain is fixed, and isn’t a variable meaning it doesn’t reward shades that master nanotechnology, but those that just scrape by.
/me continues gripping into inaudible muttering…
