The Ossiranth Chronicles

I was turned off a little bit by the lack of an Assassin class on day 1. I then rolled an Arisen Mage and decided to try the other side of the fence. The newbie experience over there is much better, and though the events are all triggered, there isn't the feeling of being rushed through the entire affair. You can stop and take your time to look over the menus, read the stats and talents, and so on.


I'm liking the play experience on the mage. As you go, you automatically learn new spells. The is a Mage trainer NPC in the capital city who offers talent respecs and sells specialty gear, so I'm not sure if the automatic spell learning continues forever, or just for a limited amount of time after which this guy takes over the teaching.

There are two mechanics that the mages have that I haven't seen before in other games. The first is that several spells can be pre-cast. You can cast them the normal way by targeting an enemy, starting the cast, and then firing it, or you can just cast the spell and it saves it for later use. When you see an enemy you want to use the spell on, casting the spell is then instant. It's nice, and likely serves some pvp functionality for having an instant retaliation when being attacked.

The other mechanic is Entropy. There are three spell schools the mage has access to (and I'm not sure if other classes have their own schools or mechanics). Each time you cast a spell of one school, you gain an entropy point of that school. When you cast a spell of one school, you also lose an entropy point of a specific opposite school. Ice removes Fire, Lightning removes Ice, and Fire removes Lightning (I think). If any of the three entropy counters reach 5 points, then a random effect occurs. You could gain or lose mana, health, cause your next spells to be instant, or cause all your spells of a school to go on cooldown (or a few other effects I don't remember right now. You also have a set of three spells (one for each school) which triggers this random effect early. These spells offer a greatly increased chance of getting a positive effect, and scale the effect for the number of points you have. It's a fairly nice mechanic, though I think it would be better if the regular 6th point trigger had a much higher chance for a negative effect. It would cause players to actively pay attention to how many points they have and use that expending spell to get as much positive benefit as possible. As it is now, I haven't even paid attention since most of the negative effects have been largely ignorable.

I'd also like to bring to everyone (or anyone)'s attention something I saw just a few minutes ago:

Yes. That's right. They gave me a quest where I have to go kill guys and take their elf porn. I can bet you 100 bucks that there isn't really any investigation and that cop is just trying to get some free porn.