postcards from invisible cities

[GE] v.20 Test Client

2007-01-04T00:39:00.000+08:00

Wow. Um. Have been playing on the v2.0 test client since yesterday; it has something like 10x rates so main chars are lv 40+ now (chars will be wiped after testing, but all's good for trying out combinations). Went fighter/wizard/scout. Polearms are <3
I'll never never never never never get over wizard clothes. Seriously the designers must have been on almost as much crack as the people who designed dark elf robes for Lineage 2.
Poses yay! Andre sells all the pose books, I think books 4/5 are probably the most hilarious. brie was all 'try ハート~~’ it is HILARIOUS.
Heaven & Hell is so stylish >w< though I still prefer polearms in dungeons, you tend to get mobbed without warning.
I love my fighter :3
The wizard's voice actor is absolutely champion. He kind of sounds like er. A dashing, Gallic version of Londo from Babylon 5. (Probably because, like Londo, he is ravishing in purple~) If GE had any kind of storyline I bet all the wizards would find themselves somehow related to Andre the hat seller xD;
ハート times three xDDDDD WHY IS THE WIZARD MAKING THAT FACE. GODDDDDD.
Aight enough mucking about. See you in the English beta!

[GE] Thai Open Beta

2006-12-27T19:49:00.000+08:00

I never blogged about Granado Espada much when I was playing on the Japanese OB. Here are some screenshots from my current intermittent adventures on the Thai OB (family Aigle, Andromeda server):

Fighter/warlock/scout is great for powerleveling, especially after 24 when your fighter gets AOE weapon/skills and warlock has maxed out the ice AOE. Some warlock skills are nerfed in this version, though I've heard wizards are extremely powerful now. I still love the musketeer though :3
Huge parties are fun, though you still do tend to die a lot if your melee fighters run off after mobs (some mobs flee when their hp drops to a certain level).

English CB in 2007, see you there!

[Shu] A Blue Moon

2006-08-27T09:39:00.000+08:00

My periods of playing ZerA are ultimately dictated by how often Streamyx (my ISP and practically the only BB service provider in Malaysia) can actually deliver to me the bandwidth I'm paying for. Yesterday, for once, all was good, and I actually got about 60% of the 1M line I'm subscribing to. I would just like to say that if you like having fast, reliable internets, DO NOT MOVE TO MALAYSIA. Yet. I will give the OK signal once we get WiMax (if I am still here).
Bitternesses aside, the new loading screens are really very sweet. Welcome back!
Logged Shu for the first time in a month and headed straight to Ombre. The routes have changed since the Pedit/Primaz area is now fenced off by giant gates, so you get to pass by Rivle now. There is an even prettier waterfall in Delice Contree, which used to be the 27-32 leveling area.
Ombre mobs are higher level now (26-29) and frankly the new skill system is really not hot but makes for very exciting moments, every single time I got mobbed and did not run away I died. Partied with a couple of rangers and a wizard which was really really good for the wallet, picked up a lot of drops and upgraded the old bow. Though I'm beginning to think I need to research the new weapons grade a lot, it is weird how an A1 bow costs 550k at player shop but to upgrade a B2 bow to B3 costs 480k??
Almost 26 ;3; You get +damage and +defense potions for every hour you are logged on :3 although really I could just do with having the old IK skill method back xD
I made a sword wizard, because the sword spells are somewhat more interesting and the female wizard is really really cute >w< She's only level 12 since I hardly bring her out though.

Life after Take #1

2006-08-23T03:08:00.000+08:00

Played for a couple hours today after a very long hiatus. Still haven't figured out where the new trainers are yet, or how one gains new skills, or what, indeed, one is supposed to do any more. xD

Changes include massive increase in class HP (though mobs just hit you harder D:), massive increase in weapon damage (which is really retarded for wizards since they are supposed to be nukers imo), major geographical upheaval, and slight relocation / upgrade of mobs. All my pretty armour skins gone, weep; nothing above the old level 4 remains. The armour class system has been revamped from the old straight 1-9 to D, C, B and A class, with a sub-grade of sorts ranging from (1, 2 ... 5) /5 per class.

Celebrated my return in the usual style i.e. last man standing with 3 digits of hp left. Went down to 59 once <3

Playing Shu should be fun (TECHNICALLY) with the pure weapon damage, we will see.

ps. I tried Rohan but didn't like the looks of it. Could have put up with the graphics slightly because seriously the elf/healer and halfelf/archer are incredibly camp (seriously I will post screencaps), but the font is so asdjkl; tiny :/ and the aliasing was driving me batty. Will give it one more go and see >.>

Granado Espada SG (Closed Beta)

2006-08-11T21:00:00.000+08:00

http://www.granadoespada.sg

I'm hoping that since the server is so near by my connection to it will be ok xD
The website loads pretty fast, hope it doesn't count as 'international' or else my Streamyx connection will totally fail at connecting to it.
In October / year end we should get WiMax anyway...

ZerA Take #1 has gone through but I'm not very excited about it, I guess I haven't explored enough of the new changes yet.

[Shu] Fantastic Pants

2006-07-24T21:30:00.000+08:00

This new Anger egopanel is great xD I have more rage than I know what to do with and my suicidal love of gathering trains is suddenly not suicidal any more. My luck with drops is pretty crap lately though. At least Shu has new pants!
Nielithiem is great for levels 17-22, I am starting to level sluggishly here after 23 so I will probably head south of Yett Bertrone next.
Have not found any good bosses like the ones I used to farm (another reason I think I will stay on Korean OB if I can, don't feel like starting all over again). This one is a nasty caster bitch who puts up a good fight and debuffs the shit out of you at close range. But this is no problem for a crossbow cowboy!
I cannot say how much I love the graphics in this game. I do wish you could choose to explore / interact more with the cool things you see, like these giant floating ships that hover all around the hills and open up cryptic whirling portals of light from time to time.
I leave you with caps of wizard lv 6 armour (moen). I like the lv 7 staff, it is a pair of wings enfolding a jewel :3 Wizard stuff seems to cost half of what ranger stuff costs, it is insane.

[News] Zera Take #1, Funny Videos, Anger Egopanel

2006-07-19T13:51:00.000+08:00

From Nexon's official ZerA website, google-translated a new announcement regarding changes to be made in the game. Couldn't find a timeline for when these will be added:

1. Addition of class change / item grade balancing, quests to be added, areas to be developed (sounds like they are trying to make interactive geodata? lol)
2. Open PVP will be introduced but with controls (sounds like invite is still in)
3. Guild tag / uniform / recall point / market to be introduced, sounds like sieges might be introduced too and a guild will be able to control the taxes / profit from economic activity in an area under their control. No idea what areas these are - the outposts, I would think?
4. This one is beyond translating. xD I gather it's about chat and something that is either a water-based transport system, like the bikes, or I have gotten it completely wrong and it is not about water at all.

Also from the Nexon site, some amusing videos from the GMs:
+ The Bosses Strike Back - gameplay recording of large-scale boss raids (though laggy as hell)
+ For the Victory of Korea! - hilarious video of dancing GMs in um, support of the World Cup. xD It is really great, especially one bit with three male summoners. GREAT sound synchronization.

Edit: Been logging on and off a bit and today I found a guy selling Anger egopanels for 1.3mil, which I happily bought. Helps Eli a little bit, though he still runs out of rage even with the two x5 bonuses. I think it will work better with Shu, will try it out in future.

Finally got a shot of this spell (the falling meteors in the background, they fall from the sky and surround your target. Very cool.) I've seen it around quite a bit, very flashy. It seems fairly common, hope I get it through quest or trainer at some point :p

News, Moen 4/5 & Hiatus

2006-06-25T16:51:00.000+08:00

News: Nexon has removed its registration service for foreigners without KSSNs and is planning to purge current foreign accounts, although no date has been given. Source as usual from Zera Nexus forums, kindly translated by davidkim1106.

News(2): Have discovered new method of getting harassed - spamming PVP invite windows faster than they can be closed, leaving you frozen in place while angry mob mauls your hp towards zero. This is quite unique as people in L2 usually just attempt to PK you. Not sure what do to about it, it's been reported elsewhere on the Nexon user forums so hopefully they will do something about it.

And now for pictures; not so many this time because I've been having ISP problems again, so I've been playing for about half an hour a couple of mornings.
New summons in town o.o I haven't seen this one before, it's selling in player shops for quite a good deal more than the golem and wolf. Haven't seen it in action before, in fact I've never seen players use their summons to PVP (wolf and golem take quite a while to respond to commands).
Upgraded Eli to lv 6 boman staff and lv 4 moen; then I moved to Rivle (before it became overrun with KSers and griefers) and happily got enough drops to upgrade him further. I wish wizard hats were not so ugly though. The lv 4 moen hat looks like a blue bonnet and the lv 5 hat like a pistachio nutshell.
Lv 5 moen <3 This is the set the wizard was wearing in the gameplay movie. By the time I got this I was kind of happy enough to take it easy, and then of course I had to start running into the same KSers / griefers at Rivle, repeatedly xD
Gratuitious shot of my favourite character, in case Nexon really do delete my account on the Korean beta. I won't be playing for a while (until JP beta maybe) as I'm trying to work on a webcomic, but I'll be keeping on eye on some of the game's current issues (PVP system and class balance) and hoping Nexon develop some patches to fix them up a bit. Will also post some more ZerA fanart here if I ever finish it :p

[Shu] Ding! 20

2006-06-18T14:05:00.000+08:00

Open PVP system evidently isn't up on Noen yet because I still get challenged instead of getting attacked randomly. I suppose this is good since my summoner is pretty much invincible once fear lands.
Hit lv 20 on Shu this morning; now he's the same level as his golem. Still undecided as to whether I should use bow or duals more, but duals seem better for AOE, so dual it is.
After farming myself sick on the orc chieftains at Rivle I upgraded a bunch of stuff (lv 5 armour, lv 6 duals) and went to Sauvage Hillock to powerlevel. I'm too lazy to check the map for where to go next, and the bosses here are faster and quite challenging to kite. But this is not the hard part.
The hard part is this: Sauvage is overrun with normal lv 17-18 ratmen mobs who mutate at random upon death into scary ass boss rats with 4000hp. This is not a problem (bow rangers ftw). The problem is when you are down to like half hp, have been gathering mobs to mass-melee at close range, and do not yet realize that the bastard has transmogrified.
Sauvage has pretty pathetic drops though; in one level I've only barely made enough to upgrade to one piece of lv6 armour =_= I might go back to Rivle for more 4am farming, or level Eli instead since he has a lv 36 golem.
One funny thing about the transport system in ZerA is that you can stick your character on a n auto-pilot bike (Carriner) to a known destination, go away to do chores and come back 5 minutes later to find him stuck in the middle of a bunch of girls in fancy costumes. By the time I move him out of there he looks pretty subdued.

[Other] New Aion Trailer

2006-06-17T15:23:00.000+08:00

The trailer for Aion (not the new one, I am slow) was so amazingly amazing it lagged my computer. It is a gameplay trailer with some pretty nice graphics and suspciously GE/ZerA-like gameplay (AOE attacks, damage/dodges/dizzy-stars shown on-screen). I've heard the character classes are tilted toward group play, so here's hoping it will make a good successor to L2. I've yet to see a pretty male sprite though, so I'll wait for the next trailer to make any judgements..
In ZerA news: Moved Shu, Eli and Vin to Noen, am leveling Shu and Vin around Sauvage Hillock in the company of a gazillion wizards. I am not kidding xD On an average day one cannot heave a brick without hitting a stray wizard jogging slowly towards their prey.

[News] Servers Merging

2006-06-12T09:18:00.000+08:00

As of 7PM Seoul time on Monday (12 June) two new servers will be set up:

Noen (open PVP)
Genesian (current duelling system)

You have a week left to play in your current server and a month to transfer a maximum of 5 characters over to the new servers.

Details here

Thanks to davidkim1106 for the translation.

[Vin] <3 Summoner

2006-06-08T19:51:00.000+08:00

Over the past week I've moved to Kwan server, where, despite the gheiness of the male wizard and the ukeness of the male ranger, I've ended up playing my female summoner the most. She's much less frail than the others and the combination of I/IK poison + fear (prevents enemy from attacking) is pretty enjoyable. Also the male summoner, while skinny and lanky and utterly cool, is simply not camp enough :/My summoner in lv 2 and lv 3 armour

My current skills setup at lv 13. The two guys in the background are a warrior and summoner, I think they're in Panse en route to Klainkast or something.

Carriner's-view shot of the Rhome-Juron Plateau.

Bonus cap of a wee ranger waiting for his player to come back from AFK. Gotta love how uke the ranger looks even sandwiched between two girls.

Summary of class playstyle so far:

Warrior - big tough melee DD, very hard to kill but boring
Ranger - quick ranged & melee DD, fun but dies easily
Wizard - very slow, very powerful glass cannon & mp/rage sink
Summoner - AOE/ranged poison DOTs, servitor skills, decent melee damage, second highest hp after warrior

Also, since it is unlikely I will be stuffing my boys into any high-level armour soon, here are screencaps of ZerA armour sets levels 1-7: Summoner | Warrior | Ranger | Wizard

Kwan is the most populated server, so you do have to struggle for grinding space more than on other servers. I left my PVP disable off, but everyone seems fairly wary of summoners and I've yet to see any open-field duels anyway; there's a fair amount of PVP but mostly around bike camps or in Aquilon, i.e. away from mobs.

Moving Servers - Kwan (콴)

2006-06-05T13:34:00.000+08:00

Moved to Kwan(콴), which is a lot more fun than Hangina for the following reasons:

Cheap buys from the player shops - I got a lv 20 ranger golem for 1 rona :3
High level PVPs in Aquilon - summoners look like the kings of this so far, IK fear+poison ftw
When I start getting lv 4 skills I can sell them on the market for 20k instead of 2k to the NPC.

The downside is of course that I can no longer exclusively camp all the minibosses I want, and my luck with drops on Kwan is terrible xD Also noticed that the fail rate of my heals has been a lot higher these days, probably more due to a patch than to specific servers.

I leveled my ranger (Shulei) over the weekend, kind of gave up on the wizard for now because he runs so slow. I picked up a lv 3 summoner weapon, so I'm also leveling a summoner (Vindicta). The name is misleading though because while they do get summons as skills (whereareas other classes get summons as drops or buy them off the market), the main difference is in their attack skills, which are mostly (if not all) poison / DOT skills.

[Shu] Intro Clip, Cowboy With A Crossbow

2006-05-29T00:29:00.002+08:00

Short in-game clip (28Mb) - roughly 2 minutes' worth of in-game footage from character screen, newbie demiplane and Shu preening for the camera :3

Spent most of yesterday grinding Verbaz for gems to enchant gear/weapons with, though the novelty has worn off and I just want to get back to leveling now. I've also heard that enchanted gear has a higher probability of failing when upgraded (--v--"") I don't have half enough money to upgrade either my swords or bow for a while, so I just upgraded the rest of Shu's armour to lv 4 to match and AHAHA NOW HE IS A COWBOY. Saw a lot of lowbie rangers running around with bows, didn't really like the look of them.. and then one day as I was slowly kiting a miniboss to death, a high-level ranger using a crossbow came along to help her friend; three swings of that and I fell in LOVE. Predictably the gorgeous swinging action the ranger makes with the crossbow looks a lot camper on the male sprite ♥ Screencao from the Verbaz demiplane. I'm usually trying to beat my old record so I always forget to cap the final boss. I also usually fail to take a cap of the giant spiders because they always SHOVE ME UP AGAINST A FENCE AND TAKE MY LUNCH MONEY.
The ranger's taunt is mainly cute because he is so dorky. The wizard's taunt is ADORABLE xD I'll remember to fraps that for next time.
Ranger gymnastics! Drops (skills, gear, gems, quest items) appear as mysterious shiney boxes on the ground, which is pretty fun because when you pick them up later it's like guessing what you got for Christmas.

[Eli] Panse & Lv 4 Matium (orz)

2006-05-23T03:06:00.000+08:00

Took Eli all the way up to Panse (lol I wonder how you pronounce that), apparently the North Pole of ZerA's world. I like it there, barren but beautiful. Did a whole bunch of quests there that took him up one level when I collected rewards (god I hate those plasma spewing monkeys) and camped the white monkeybears because wizards are just made for taking big single targets down. I was too lazy to run there the second time so I took the bike instead.
Eli's lv 4 armour on the other hand is too camp even for me (--v--"") and the lv 5 matium which I need to upgrade this to is lavender, so he's not got much to look forward to until 6 hopefully.
So guess who's back in the saddle :3 Should be easier than before now I've figured out roughlyyy how to do the quests. I just need to get him a bow and he's set :x

[Eli] Recornir Alps

2006-05-20T01:35:00.000+08:00

Got most lv 6-9 quest items from mobs around the Recornir Alps, though can't seem to get the quest I went there for (NPCハジス, forgot his Korean name). The dialogue which is supposed to display when you cross into the Alps just doesn't appear. Oh well. At least it is not like Lineage with its horrible horrible job transfer quests. And the scenery is gorgeous:Eli is all mine now :DDD because his original owner is going back to L2. D: Wanted to get him to 12 tonight but I get tired very fast because of the zero downtime and no one to talk to. Playing around with skills and tactics trying to control rage/mp keeps me occupied though. Anyway.. This is a cap from when I got lazy and paid to be biked back to Aquilon instead of ambling along at slow slow mage groundspeed.

[絵] Zera Class Ranger: Shulei

2006-05-16T17:02:00.000+08:00

There are valid reasons I level slowly in MMOs - a) I suck at games, b) I don't have much time after work, and c) I do a bunch of other things instead, like reading, and playing online flash games, and drawing. Also if the MMO has stellar artwork and pretty sprites like Zera I will likely end up drawing fanart for that MMO instead =_=

I'm really enjoying B's wizard (I think I'll kidnap him) but I'll always love my uke ranger more~

I think I must have really been in love with Lineage because I spent more time playing Lineage than I did drawing fanart for it T^T

Demiplane Cinematics

2006-05-14T23:59:00.000+08:00

Gave up playing for a while because I couldn't find any information on quests; I'm disturbingly short of I/IK skills and I can't figure out how to make my quests work. But in the spirit of boredom I borrowed B's wizard today and went into the newbie demiplane, which had some really nice cinematics like the boss below:

Wizard boy has a lovely name but I wound up calling him Ohtori (Choutarou). The gameplay is um, well, I still prefer the ranger but that's probably my habit of winding up surrounded by enemies so I can 5-hit crit. I'm very bad at managing mana (I, IK) and rage (C, IK, CK), and I don't see any passive skills that help mana/rage regen. It's a lot less linear than L2 to be sure =_=++
Below are some of the NPCs (modeled on player character skins) gathered after you complete a mission to 'rescue' them in the demiplane. This cinematic looks like they're thanking you just before running away and leaving you to save the world because you've just proved how capable you are.
He did look worried about it too, but it wasn't too bad and I gave him back mostly in one piece and a couple of levels (and a LOT of gems) richer. I really don't know what to do with the gems, since his current gear isn't worth enchanting yet, but they just look so nice and shiney in his inventory.

New Patch & Level 12

2006-05-05T12:00:00.000+08:00

News: Big patch went live last night, according to the ZN forums this means:

gear upgrade prices (lv8 to lv9) have increased drastically (in the millions)
chance to fail for 8+ gear is increased
fees now charged for entry into the 38+ PVP demiplane (cheapest 22k)
harder new mobs

To the lowbies like me this is interesting but far off :) just made lv 12 on Shu the night before and spent yesterday patching, this weekend I'll try to clear Verbaz and upgrade to level 4 gear. Screenshots to follow! Level 1 screenshot attached below for posterity:
I'll be posting all Zera stuff here in future for a clean break, and also because I like making new things.