Quick Thoughts On Allods

Allods seems like a really interesting title. I've only really played around for a couple hours, but I've been enjoying the experience so far. I don't feel like I have enough to put up a full post on the game yet, but I do have a few initial thoughts I'd like to throw out there.

- Many skills can be queued before a fight, which is a nice touch. My 3.5 second damage spell can be queued up and ready for when I take on a mob so I can launch it without a cast time. This adds a small something to the mix and, particularly for healer types like myself, help to give you the upper hand right at the beginning of a fight

- The hunter/rogue class's ability to queue different types of arrows is a nice touch, but a tad limiting. You can get multiple different types of arrows, like arrows that put fire-based DOTs on you enemy or pin them or hit for greater crit chance, and you can queue them up in a particular order so you can launch them back to back. Overall, I like the mechanic.

- The opening area for Empire is waaaaaay cooler than the opening for League. Seeing that giant Astral Demon trying to eat your ship (did anyone else look at it and think of Sin from FFX?) is just more interesting than saving cute gerbils and emo elves.

- In-game potions that increase DPS for just one minute do not seem useful at all. Hopefully the potions get better later on in the game and last longer.

- The community is terrible so far. That may be the cost of a F2P game, or just because it's a new title, or maybe because the population is centralized at the moment. Whatever it is, chat is just about the worst or the worst right now.

- Fatigue is a neat and annoying mechanic. Basically, as you quest you earn Fatigue on top of Experience. Fatigue has diminishing returns, so the more quests you do the less Fatigue you earn, until at a certain point you stop earning Fatigue. You can go to any inn keeper to "Rest," which converts your Fatigue into experience and starts the whole process over again. Neat for the extra experience, annoying for being a needlessly complex mechanic

- I really, really like the idea of the Arisen Heretic (undead priests), who are professed atheists that abuse religion for power.

Those are just a few thoughts I have on the game so far. I'm liking it and plan on playing it a bit more. Rumors abound in this epic buzz thread of $20 bag upgrades, but I haven't been able to confirm this yet since the item shop isn't up on their website yet (although it apparently is up in game).

More to come at a later date!

-Dickie