Darkfall Day 7

PvP was the theme for Friday evening. Our pacifist came out of his shell a bit and attacked an ork who was skulking around some of the human newbie hunting grounds near Heart of Eanna. In Darkfall you can attack anyone anywhere with varying degrees of consequences. Generally humans, dwarves, and elves are aligned, so there's a negative consequence to attacking them for me, a human. Orks and Mahirim are aligned, but enemies of humans, so there's no problem attacking them. Alfar are aligned with nobody and are open season. In the twisted logic of the Darkfall community, though, I'm sure it would be considered carebearish to only attack a legitimate target ;) At any rate, me and the trusty laser-cannon town towers slew her (carebear!) and found that she'd likely been looting newbies hunting goblins, so there was a bit of justice there as well.

But lest you think that I think that I'm now the PvP gawd, I did get my ass handed to me by a couple of Alfar on mounts. That running battle convinced me to spend some time reconfiguring my key bindings because while I would be sprinting and trying to switch spells I would instead be switching to different hotbars. Battle's chaotic enough without having unexpected results to your frantic key pressing. I also got ganked by a group of naked humans, which was less expected. I even got a system message after they killed me "Do you want to forgive your killer?" Hell no! I suppose that has something to do with the alignment system, maybe for cases where someone inadvertently kills you? Not in this case. Nope.

There was also a fun bit where I was trying to work on my melee skills at a goblin camp and this clan kept sweeping through. I guess they were running some sort of newbie circuit. It was good to see people firing back at them, and the persistent zap of Mana Missiles behind them seemed to hurry them along. They were definitely not as ruthless as they could have been.

My basic PvP strategy at this point, which isn't much of one, consists of Mana Missile, Heal Self, Magic Shield (if I have time) and lots of Sprint. It didn't take long to figure out that strafing while you run away is fairly useless. Better to make sharp turns to avoid incoming spells and arrows if you hear them in time to do so. Also a jump here and there can help with spells because they're often aimed low. I'm also trying to make use of the fact that you can hold down the left mouse button when casting and hold the spell indefinitely. Helps a little when people dodge expecting the spell to come whizzing at them but you're able to delay it.

To conteract the violence, I also did something I imagine few people have done in Darkfall: I stood by the clanstone in Heart of Eanna and healed people as they respawned after dying. I wanted to work on the Lay on Hands spell, or whatever it's called. You have to shoot it at them like all spells, but it does a few ticks worth of healing. No one thanked me, alas, but I enjoyed it and got to raise the spell level a bit. Pacifist FTW!