So Archeage started yesterday...Follow

Well, you can Dual Wield any kind of weapon as long as it's One-Handed. Swords, Axes, Katanas, Knives, Clubs, Scepters, you name it.

Dualwielding always gives you a flat 10% increase in attack speed, Battlerage has some skills that add critical hit when dual wielding in their passives. You also get a 7% increase in damage to some of the skills found in the Battlerage and Shadowplay tree. That said, purely going for damage, Two-handed weapons are said to be better attack/delay/stat wise. For the most part, i just pick what i have the best weapon for. If i have a Good swords and a reasonable Great Sword, i'll dual wield swords for a few levels, or visa-versa.

Quest rewards for the first half of the game will be mostly Sword (one-handed), Nodachi or Staff. There are some Blacksmiths who will sell you other kinds of weapons (even a scepter!) found in most reasonable sized encampments/towns. The auction house has the rest laying around.

People will find unidentified weapons on most monsters, i got a knife in the first 5 levels of play off a monster. With that being the case, there's bound to be a lot of people putting them on the Auction Boards for you to purchase (usually found near a portal/doorway to mirage island). Other than that, a lot of the gear is crafted and sold that way too. Dungeon drops are pretty plentiful and the runs arent long, that's always a good bet if you're looking for something specific.

I was just clownin, not a serious question. But thanks, it sounds similar to ESO, and GW2 with the weapons/armor helping to define the build. Then finding neat synergies among that.

Well, good news and bad news.

I've found that the higher you get in levels, the game does become progressively more fun. Boats are great, i've been having the best time laying in wait at a port for a trader to arive to deliver packages, stealthing on his boat and trying to get out of range before he/she can desummon it. Trade runs are a really good way to make money as well. Even something as simple as Solzeed -> Marianople gives you 5 gold (for 50 meat and 35 grapes).

The bad news is, the higher you get, the more you realize the amount of blatant timesinks in the game. Crafting doesnt cap out till 50.000 points/labor (833 hours of waiting-for-Labor) of skill per craft, and it takes an eternity to get there as well as materials. And there's 18 crafts to take up. Also Labor Points are seriously crippling. I basicly make sure i never logout, yet i can barely get enough labor points for a few basic actions. The trees i'm after take 25 labor points to cut down. I basicly have to save up an HOUR worth of labor just standing around, so i have enough to cut down two trees. Tradepacks take 60 labor to make and 60 labor to hand in, which translates to 2 hours worth of free-to-play "standing around" labor just to hand it in, not including materials (50 to harvest grapes, 35-45 to get enough meat, which would bring it easily to 3,5 hours of doing nothing).

Also so much botting, i saw 10 something trade-pack carrying botters warp to the rough place where the gold trader is at, like raindrops they fell from the sky and randomly scattered all around him to trade their stuff in, only to vanish instantly again afterwards. Chat spam was starting to become rediculous too. They removed the ability for people under level 15 to use Nation/Recruitment/Trial chat, lets see if that works. It's clear so far, can finally talk on Nation, Trial or Recruitment @_@;

This is how bad it used to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5gy-XfEEFk

This is how bad it was after they discovered to input so many spaces that the sender couldnt be blocked anymore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egW1SlZb-ZQ

We can only hope. Giving the game another week myself before i decide if i want to move on or stick to it.

Edited, Oct 3rd 2014 2:44pm by KojiroSoma

The cap on labor points only goes up if you are a Patron member, to a cap of 5000. They also get 10 points every 5 minutes online, and 5 every 5 for being logged out.

Bots have already started their mass leveling adventures, on Tahyang we've had about 4 that I've seen make it to 15. They were immediately blocked by 90% of the server, but it has helped. I still don't like the idea of restricting chat channels, hopefully that's something they can look at removing at a later time once their anti-spam system is actually working.

Really my only complaint is still the botters. It's still impossible to own land, especially with 'them' being able to instantly teleport to one when it comes up for sale or destruction. I know instances would really destroy some of the immersion most players want, but if a majority of players can't own land or a house (and then have no choice but to farm unprotected), that's really going to be the main downfall of this game.

For those who were asking...

You can't de-level from losing XP.

I learned that the hard and painful way in a dungeon.