Darkfall Day 3

Day 3 was a Sunday spent idling in the queue to get into the game broken up by a few hours of playing in two different bouts. Lag was worse than usual and my ping was pretty high, so I stuck mostly to gathering near towns. First I got my Lesser Magic up to 25, the first level that allows you to buy additional spells and skills to enhance it. Each of the many types of magic in Darkfall is its own skill with subskills that rank up separately. The spells themselves are also like skills in that they increase their level with use. So, for instance, my Lesser Magic is now around 27, my Mana Missile spell is around that, and my Heal Self spell is around 20. After reaching 25 in Lesser Magic, I picked up a spell that converts health to mana, a spell to heal other players, and some protection spells that protect me and others against the Lesser Magic damage spells.

I'm not sure how useful the protection spells will be. The Mana Missile, and perhaps other Lesser Magic damage spells, do "splash damage" in addition to their regular damage. So, for instance, if I shoot one at an enemy that's right up on me (or even just at the ground at my feet) I take damage from the spell as well. The same would apply if I were working with allies and trying to use these spells while they're engaged with an enemy. My thinking is that the protection spells, levelled up sufficiently, can help mitigate that splash damage so that I won't hurt myself or my allies as much when using them. The problem is that, at its lowest rating, the protection spell for the caster at least persists for only 2 minutes. Which sucks, honestly. Now I also purchased a subskill of Lesser Magic that extends the duration of Lesser Magic spells, so maybe it will have some benefit. I'm hoping for a doubling of the duration, but even a 50% increase would help. It is used automatically, so now that I have it, casting Lesser Magic spells should level it up as well.

The Heal Other is, at this point, not a factor, but when I get to the point that I join a clan, I'll try it out. I'll probably do a separate post on my thoughts on healing soon.

The hinderance with all of the spells but the initial Mana Missile and Heal Self spells is that they require reagents to cast, so I'll need to start carrying around sulphur, mandrake, nacre, etc. I did a bit of gathering to build up a small supply of these, but I'm thinking it will be more effective to focus on one gathering skill, such as my lumberjacking, sell what I gather, and use the gold to just buy the regeants I need. Right now, though, it's cool to try out the different gathering skills and see which will work best for me. After fishing a lot, I took the fish and cooked them up. Food gives a short boost, I think to stamina regeneration, but the specifics, as on everything in this game so far, are murky. I actually kind of like the fact that it requires some experimenting. But again, the buff is only like 2 minutes for some of the basic foods. Better quality foods have longer buffs, but I'd like to see all of the durations increased. Right now food is more annoying to keep up with than worthwhile, IMO.

Travelling from one human village to another, I did encounter a few goblins in the wild that had no other players around. So for once I was able to use only magic to kill some monsters and it worked out well. Fortunately you can cast while moving, so that helped me dodge and weave a bit and still use some offense. As their health would get low, the goblins would run away, and they were pretty good at moving erraticaly enough that I missed a few times shooting at them. It's going to be a LOT harder to use against players, I imagine, especially since most of the offensive spells move slowly enough that an observant player can dodge them.

I also bought a few rank 20 staves from a player who was selling them at a reasonable price. These will make my spells more effective. The item "ranks" correspond more or less to the skill level, as I understand it, so in if your sword skill is in the 20's, you'd want a rank 20 sword to do the most damage. The next rank of item I've seen is rank 40. Obviously this is another area in which, because I didn't play in beta, I really have little idea how it works. I guess I'll find out.