Zithe

Cool, I haven't had to chance to play her yet. Look forward to it the next time I hop in.

P.S. What ever happened to that Vindictus caption contest? I never saw the results for that come up. Has Massively given up on it?

To be fair, this game does have more justification for gender-locked classes than most games do. The characters are supposed to be heroes from the Mabinogi universe, as far as I know. This is also why they have names instead of simply being called "Knight" or "Barbarian."

They are also slowly finishing up the characters, and there will eventually be more than one male character (I think there are 3 on the select screen right now, with only one available). It doesn't bother me though. Maybe I'm used to it from playing so much Diablo II over the years. I like to play both genders to mix things up.

What you're saying sounds awesome, but I don't know if our tech is at a point to handle this yet. If you look at games that have been taking steps in this direction (the two that come to mind are Oblivion and Fallout 3), they still seem to have difficulties with stability and AI, and they are only focused on making the cities feel alive. I guess this could be chalked up to Bethesda's engine just being dated and having its own issues. It's hard to say, though, because no one else is doing any better at this point.

"No, no! I said GNOME punting."

I agree it would be nice to see the real numbers behind this, but I feel that your 3-5 players per zone comment does not fairly represent the game. To get those kinds of numbers, you must have been on some combination of: low population server, RP server, mostly useless zone (that Cataclysm will fix, thankfully), or it must have been like 4:00 in the morning.

I was playing with a higher level guy who pulled one of these out today. He set it up right before we fought the Gnoll Chieftain (I'm only level 8 or so). The buffs were pretty nice, and the boss didn't aggro us until we moved forward so it worked out well. Pretty neat mechanic.

Nice article. I will probably check out the SG when I have time to play.

Are you aware that Regen starts dropping off and healing weaker every tick while blocking? Seems like you implied the opposite at one point.

Also, while PFF is certainly not recommended for a tanking character, I don't think the power is awful. I have a character who uses it and has breezed up to level 25ish so far on his own. As long as you have a decent amount of End/Ego and pick up Field Surge for emergencies, I usually never drop below 75% health.

Glad to see all the different colors and holding styles on the lightsabers in the screencap above. I hope those options are all available in-game.

Guess I should add that they are from the TV comedy series called Community, in case that wasn't apparent. It's a great show.

The characters, from left to right, are modeled after the Dean, Britta, Starburns, and Abed.