Gamer considering picking up DAoC

Dxburc

Over the past few months, I have been growing tired of WoW. The mindless Instance running to the even More dry PvP has gotten to me.



I was considering picking up DAoC. It's not run by Sony, and everyone seems to have an overall positive view of it.  As a complete newb to DAoC I have a few questions.



Everyone says the Classic servers are better because they removed the ToA Expansion. What is the differance, what exactly did that expansion do to damage the game to warrant a classic server. (does it also relate to the NF / OF topics I kept reading about)



How does one go about leveling? Is it just a pure grind fest? Or is purely quest based (like WoW) Or a combination inbetween.



When you go about leveling is it pretty much all group based? Or can you completely Solo till end game?



If it is group based, are there still any lower levels playing the game to be able to group with.



My last question would be, what classes are very proficient at soloing and what classes aren't



Thanks for reading.

Silverwatch

i played DAoC for years mate, and the classic servers are in my opinion best suited for newer players. ToA basically made the game a hardcore grindfest so get all the uber items/weapons/armour etc and whilst it took a while to get all that you then had 'Master Levels' which took an age aswell. As you can probably tell i was not a fan of ToA as i am a more casual gamer. The classic servers have all the expansions except ToA. There is still a bit of a mission to get to the best but then what game isnt, but the good thing it isntas hard as you think. Levelling in DAoC back in the day was full groups and havin a laugh, nowadays there is groups about but most people solo/duo to the top and tbh its not very hard. I never saw the point in questing in DAoC since they take ages most of the time and the time you could of spent pounding mobs would have been better. If you level up in classic/SI zones now i believe there is somethin like 200% increase in XP but this week i think? its somethin like 300% bonus everywhere to make up for a mistake the devs make. So in all it is worth playin since the player base is rather good on the US classic server neway. I played EU originally and the player base dropped to rubbish amountsof players but US remains strong. At the moment i have a lvl 49 Scout called Cokaine and a level 49 Paladin called Kokaine. The reason they are level 49 is because the PvP is best as they have a special area for lvl 45-49 and no one is really overpowered by massively high realm ranks so its easy enough to get some expierience and points there for yourself.

As for the classes to solo with it really depends which realm you go for, im sure you have done some research into this but the easiest way to 50 is using a Necromancer, but apart from farming/powerleveling they arent used much tbh, but most classes in the game will find it easy to solo par main healers but still hybrid healers like shamans, wardens etc will manage fine. Just get back to me sayin which realm you like the look off and ill see if i can help you out. Plus i wouldnt reccomend an archer class at the moment as they are reinventing the whole archery system and basing it on the casting system or some bullcrap like that but i hope i helped neway.

JulianDracos

1.  Ignore the NF/OF.  It has nothing to do with the current game and will have no impact on you.  MMO change over time.  Some people do not like the change, or they stop playing and then in 'hindsight' place the blame on something.



2.  Classic or regular does not matter.  The main differerence are: classic has a higher level of low level characters, it also tends to have more new players on it.  It does not have the ToA expansion which removes most of the raid content.  On the other hand, with the loss of abilites and items that you loose with ToA, it makes RvR different.  I would say the best RvR is on the regular servers and not the poorly named Classic. 



3.  You can easily solo from 1-50 with pretty much any class.  Some will be faster than others, but none are slow.  You can simply go around killing to level, or you can do quests.  If you are doing quests, then outside of the tutorial quests from 1-5 I would just go and do the quests that are in Catacombs.  There are still a lot of old quests whose rewards are not worth the effort in the original zones.



4.  So here is the deal with ToA: it was an expansion better suited for EQ (or I guess you can think of WoW now since it is a glorified EQ clone).  It used to take forever (50+ days in game played so if you played 40 hours a week it would take you around 8 months to get 1 character to level 50!).  This expansion just added insult to injury.  You needed to spend just as long if not longer to earn 10 "master levels" and then get uberpowerful armor and artifiact.  These highly powerful items destroyed the crafting part of the game.  With the release of the expansion before it, came spellcrafting and the promise from the CEO, and then "lead designer" that crafted items were going to be the best items in the game.  We were told no new levels, and here were basically 10 other levels to go through altough the offical level cap was still 50.  So, when ToA came out, your "hardcore" player had 6 level 50's.  Your casual player had maybe 2.  So here is the problem.  Those hardcore players started to get these uber items and abilities that allowed them to win far easier in RvR than before.  So now you had an arms race going on with all of those players needing to get items from ToA.  This cause two problems: first, most of those players did not want to PvE anymore and now they were forced to just to be able to RvR and not die instantly.  Further, the casual player which would compete in RvR, was now no longer able to.  That player then needed to do ToA and that just was not feasible.  Those players then either quit, tried to do ToA and spent years trying to do it, hung out in the lower level BG's, or just did basic PvE.  What ToA did was put unbearable strain on the game between the casual and hardcore players.  The expansion made neither group happy and drove both of them away from playing.



Playing is a key word hear.  The subscription numbers went up with ToA release and stayed up until WoW.  The active playing population decreased.  ToA is not the only reason people played less.  The original players graduated school, got jobs, got married, had kids, got bored, etc.  What ToA can be blamed for is giving these players less of an incentive to login. 



ToA was designed for PvE whores.  Whoever designed it is an idiot.  Whoever thought it was a good idea, is an idiot.  I think ToA gets blammed for a lot of things wronly.  Yet, ToA is a horrible explansion.  It was poorly implented, Atlantis is not Arthurian, and it destroyed crafting. 



5.  With all of that said, ToA has been hurt by the nerf bat.  So much so, that most of the players that left for the classic server came back to the regular server.  There is really no reason to what the "classic" servers anymore.  Getting equiped it easy.  Raids are scheduled at a fairly frequent basis.  You can even purchase ToA items with bounty points (rewards for RvR kills).  So the only real reason to go classic is: you want the easiest time finding a group, you do not ever want to raid, you do not want buff bots.  Getting a group on the regular servers is not that difficult (but for the most part the game is so solo friendly you can level as quick or quicker solo/duo than in a group). 

Tenebrion

To put this into WoW terms, the classic server in DAoC is like a WoW server that doesn't have Molten Core, Black Wing Lair, Naxxramus, Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, etc.



On the classic server, you get to level 50, buy / quest for any gear that you don't already have, and then PvP to your heart's content. It's a blast.