Ryzom

Greetings homins! I'm d/ling the game to give it another go. I played for a month or 2 after release but got discouraged by some of the early issues but have allways remembered certain aspects of the game as being exceptional. So I'm eager to try again and get ready to see what r2 is all about.

My char back then was a light armor/dodging halberd wielder and I was taking the time to level up gathering/crafting enough to make all my own equipment. Magic and 1h I remember being fairly ineffective compared to 2h weaps. I remember getting discouraged because the time requirements to level seemed to be spiralling out of control. It was taking longer to find materials, taking longer to gather them, requiring more of them to craft, the search skills were a bit buggy, and then items were degrading so fast that the whole process had to be repeated more often then was enjoyable (I prefer combat). Then a patch came out that made everyone cry and seemed to make everything more difficult so i gave up. Could any current guru's help me out with a little info about how things have changed?

It sound like you left shortly after Patch 1. It's hard to summarize everything that's happened since then, specially since the biggest changes took place immediately after Patch 1.

Patch 1 changed a lot of the basic mechanics of the game. Some of the fixes that made things harder were really fixes to exploits, e.g. level 1 blind was never resisted by the highest level mobs. Some things became harder because of bugs or imbalances in Patch 1, e.g. item decay was so bad a set of heavy armor would wear out and fall off after a couple hours of tanking. Some things were harder because they were different and it's hard for players to adjust to change. It didn't help that Patch 1 coincided with the launch of WoW and EQ2 which would have captured a lot of the SoR players even with out the problems.

The game that emerged from Patch 1 was much better, but the player base was much smaller. The excess item decay is long gone, but items wear out fast enough to keep crafters in business. The number of mats pulled was increased at higher levels of harvest so that it's reasonable to keep crafting skills up with harvest. They even increased the drop rate on herbivores if you prefer hunting for resources, although they just did this yesterday. There are plenty of crafters around if you don't want to make your own equipment.

Elemental magic, 1hd and 2hd melee are reasonably balanced and all have their roles to play. You won't want to be a main tank in light armor, but it works in a group and there's no skill needed to wear medium or heavy armor so you can go that way if you'd like.