Pikemen and Architects in Age of Conan and Star Wars Galaxies

So Age of Conan launches and /gasp they offer a Polearm spec.. in the tanking class. I drop my Barbarian and roll a Guardian, and get ready to spec Tempest. As I look through the different things you can add points to as a Tempest Guardian, I notice "Master Pikeman" and I am sold. Because, you see, a long time ago, in a broken galaxy far, far away, I was a Master Pikeman... and I loved it.

/brief history:

I began Star Wars Galaxies the day it went live. Myself and a few rl Star Wars fanbois, began our adventures on Talus. And strange to say, I never wanted to be a Jedi. I wanted to be an Architect. I did not care if I couldn't kill everything. I did not care about critting a mob. I did not care about having a lightsaber. I wanted to build houses.

I began with my surveying device, and began finding materials I needed. Let me rant about this for a moment.

SWG, as far as I know, is the only permanently broken game. ever. Permanently in beta. It works... but not so good. I understand this. But there were so many things in that game I absolutely LOVED. Architectect actually being a class was one of them. For all you first-time-mmo-WoW-players out there, it would be like Weaponsmith = Shaman, or Engineer = Mage. You would craft basically full time. Well. Not just craft, you would have to survey for materials, plant harvesters, aquire materials, craft, then put the items you craft up for sale on your vendors in your shop :) I loved it.

As I travelled each planet looking for what I needed to up my Architecture skills, I had to clear certain areas of mob lairs, mobs, or whatever. It wasn't just a crafting class... you seriously got to play! Just like the other classes you had to travel and kill. So there was a balance there. A balance that SOE somehow thought didn't exist for some reason...

After awhile I got greedy. I wanted resources from places that had mobs that there was no way I could kill. My friends were happy to come along and help, because at this time, most of the players were fed-up with the mystery of how to become Jedi. It seems this breed of player, born of strategy guides and walkthroughs, did NOT like the mystery(along with Eye Shot :P), and players began complaining en masse, which led to the leaking of how to be a Jedi, leveling every class to master. Well because of this I had harvesters EVERYWHERE, and I was ready to roll. Then a Jedi popped. Then another. Then my friends quit. I had harvesters in places I couldn't even attempt to believe I could get to. This frustration lead me to planting 10 harvesters with my 10 alotted zones, create a mule, build 10 houses on his zones, dump all my gear/resources in them, and level a fighting class!

My first class was Commando/Creature Handler.. and omg there should be another blog for that. After I got bored of being indestructible+massive dd+have pets that could omfg, I decided to level Pikeman. Pikeman in SWG, at the time I leveled it, is the funnest, most balanced class I have ever played ever in any MMO. And I have played a lot.

/end brief history.

Master Pikeman (which, I'm assuming Funcom agrees because they made the tanking class able to use Polearms) could and were tanks. Fencers ruled everything at the time, but besides that, Pikemen were tanks. I can't count the times I rounded up Sisters or Ewoks and spammed my AOE Knockdown while my friends destroyed them. I would simply stand in the middle of them, with aggro, and sweep them. Over and over. This is what Pikemen DO in the field. Just because you can't take hits doesn't mean you can't tank (see FFXI's NIN).

This is where Pikeman (Tempest Guardian) fails in Age of Conan. And honestly I think it's because the type of players that infest games these days. If you were to say "Tempest Guardian is broken" most would say "I do plenty of damage, it's not broke". IMO it's not about the damage. It's crowd control, or CC. Fuck damage. Of course a 2H weapon will do a lot of damage, the game would be backasswards, not broken if they didn't. The range on Pikemen's AOE "sweeps" is the same as the AOE attack with a 1H sword. That is fucked. And there is no 360 AOE, even though most of the animations for combos show the Pikeman swinging his Pike in full circle. This has saddened me. That and Architect.

How to make Tempest Guardian a viable class in AoC? - Add 360 degree AOE KD/Stuns. Then you have a sword'n'board tank OR a pike tank. Guardian class is so close to perfect Funcom... finish it up.

Architect (all the crafting abilities for that matter) is horribly stupid in Age of Conan. I would like to use a different term to describe it, but, it's stupid =/ The crafting "Trainers" offer you an ability @ lvl 40, and gives you a series of "quests" to basically make the first "tier" of craftable items. As an architect, you have to buy Parchment and Ink from a vendor, to create the schematics for each of the tier 1 items. The total amount of gold needed to get thru Tier 1 = 172 gold. Which is simply impossible. Just the way you go about doing it is CLEARLY created by a coder. No writers involved. This is the most generic, simple(as in Corky), and just horrible way to be a crafter. Then again, most players these days parse and want something direct. Something that can be defined directly. I heard somewhere there is an equation for fun and the guy who figured it quit MMO's to play his Wii forever.

So so far in my comparisons I somehow have the most broken game of all time coming out in the lead over Age of Conan. When SWG came out, it was broken... but broken in a GOOD way. You could one-shot players in pvp... you could crawl in a mobs lair and destroy it with out getting attacked for easy money... you could stand outside a base and pull the whole zone to an invisible wall and level every ranged weapon in every class before the day ended. SWG was broke in a good way. And I miss that.