Just how worth it are the founder packs

Tags

founder packs

The middle one isn’t decent at all, I know you’re trying to be helpful, but OP please, IF after a purchase of 75 euros (I’m euroman, so that’s what we’re using), you’d EVER over the lifetime of BnS think you’ll spend 45 euros in subscription, NCoin purchases, or even NCoin purchases for other games, do not listen to this guy.

Initiate = if you want to play in beta weekends but don’t feel like spending too much money (completely fine!)

Disciple = if you don’t know how to math or feel like giving NCSoft money for no reason, or you don’t want to spend more than 75 euros over the lifetime of the game, but do want to spend it all in one go, as a sort of one-time purchase.

Master = Best value for money if you’re ever going to spend that much, pay 45 euros more than Disciple, and you will get 60 euros worth of NCoin more (already 15,- profit on the first point), 2 months of sub for free (yes im using free, the NCoin already broke us even need Blade And Soul Gold), free skins, higher premium tier, more bagslots, more character slots, second name reservation slot, an extra customization voucher, and some shitty title.
So if you’re going beyond initiate, go all the way and roll master, you’re likely the kind of guy that would buy NCoin or subscription over the course of the game anyways, you’ve just saved money in the long run.

The CBT access and 3 day headstart are fairly straight forward, if you’re interested enough in the game then the initiate pack is all you need. If you think that you’ll really like the game but still a little hesitant whether you’ll commit in the long run, then the Disciple pack is probably what you want. I don’t care too much about the titles and stuff, but I do really like the idea of the Name Reservation slot. Being the only one in your region across all servers with your specific name is pretty neat. The few extra char slots are probably great too. 2 is way too little.

Perhaps the price is a little steep, but you do get a bunch of things out of it, so it’s just a matter of playing the game enough to justify the price. The game will be F2P anyway, so it’s only a one time thing.

If you know you’ll be hardcore, just go for the expensive one I guess. In yesterday’s livestream they said you get 90 EUR worth of NCcoins or whatever they are called in the pack and you get a bunch of extra stuff, so it’s probably worth it.

Advertisements

Black Desert over Blade & Soul

I prefer Black Desert over Blade & Soul. While the B&S alpha was alright, I can see the P2W features a mile away and while most people are complacent with that, it’s too much for me.

I’d rather B2P like with Guild Wars 2 and not face things like bots and P2W shops while still being able to further support the game with a cash shop for cosmetics.

Also these two games are wholly different from each other. Other than both of them being MMORPGs, there’s really not a lot to compare. Blade & Soul is largely based around it’s dungeons where Black Desert doesn’t have any and instead opts for world bosses. There’s also a lot of other things to do in Black Desert to gain EXP (fishing, farming crops, merchant trading, ect) that B&S simply doesn’t have.

When it comes down to it it’s really all about what you want personally in a game because no one will force you to put up with something you don’t enjoy

You can pay as much as you want in BnS but i will still own your sorry butts with free account in arena if you two are so noob that you think those things are pay to win.

On the contrary, BDO is a huge farming game and open world pvp is the ultimate end game. If i am willing to get more Blade & Soul Items, i can pay farmers to farm for me and since main pvp are gear based and skill cap is lower than BnS, i will literally own you with my bought gear. This is why BnS arena has equalized gear so gear doesn’t matter in serious competition.

If you think buy to play stop this… easily get around with. A guild can be a farming guild who ally with a pvp guild for protection. Then the farmers can easily feed items to the buyers. Even if the admins find out, how do they verify it? Its not like theme park games where if you sell a high price thing for 1coin, its obviously suspicious. Here guilds ally and make concessions all the time similar to Eve online.

Arena Invitational Event of Blade & Soul

Tags

Arena Invitational Event

You won’t just be able to watch the pros battle in the World Championship though, because we’re going to be bringing out Jaesung Lee—one of the best Blade & Soul Arena players in the world—and offering you a chance to challenge him during Closed Beta Weekend 3.

We’ll be providing a submission form where you can sign up to be one of the lucky few to fight against Jaesung for glory and prizes. Everyone we choose to participate will receive a faction t-shirt, while those who actually manage to defeat Jaesung will receive a Limited Edition Blade & Soul jacket—and the audience wins too! The entire event will be streamed on the official Blade & Soul Power leveling Twitch channel, and we’ll be giving out prizes in chat based on player performance in the matches. While we’ll be giving out beta keys the whole time, each time Jaesung is defeated, a Master Founder’s Pack will be given out. Whether you think you can take down Jaesung or not, you’ll want to be sure you’re there to watch the matches.

During Closed Beta Weekend 2 (Nov. 13–16) we encourage everyone to participate in the 1v1 Arena. From the internal rankings of that weekend, referenced against the signups we receive, we’ll be reaching out to the top individual participants in both our European and North American communities to battle Jaesung in best of three 1v1 Invitational showmatches. We’ll start streaming the EU Invitational at 10am PST on November 24, with the NA Invitational starting at 3pm PST.

Stay tuned for the signup form and more information on the Invitational, but until then be sure to participate in the 1v1 Arena during Closed Beta Weekend 2 if you’d like to participate.

EU Update

We’re continuing to work diligently on our localized German and French clients, and will now be releasing those language versions for Closed Beta 4, beginning on December 11. The European servers will still be available with Closed Beta Weekend 2, and anyone with a Founder’s Pack or that’s been invited to participate in a Closed Beta, can play using the English client.

As previously announced, all beta characters are receiving a one-time copy to the new EU servers for Closed Beta Weekend 2 at Blade-Soul, and all returning EU players will be able to pick up from where they left off in the previous weekend, but from new local EU servers.

Selling names in Blade & Soul

Tags

Blade & Soul

The name reservations were promised without any sort of catch. Nobody knew that several GMs would get seven names each before the players, at any time, until the very day before. That’s a bit of bad business.

The reason for the names being taken was shown as “to prevent people from selling the names for big money”. This is nothing but a poor excuse unfortunately. The names were chosen for personal use, and on multiple occasions I have seen tweets saying they took it because they “liked it” or it “came to mind”. How can you take 7 names away from the players, then turn around and claim it’s for their own good? That’s a very bad message to the community to get some Blade & Soul Items. Plus, what hidden algorithm is telling us that a name like “Saber” is a dangerous name that people would sell, whereas a name like “Ahri” or “Asuka” would not be sold? That alone makes the excuse fall apart at the seams.

The part that bothers me the most isn’t the big response, it was actually the initial reply that he just took 6 random names past Saber because they’re popular and popped into his head, on both regions for that matter. People paid for this opportunity and have been planning for it, but go ahead and just takes dozens/hundreds of names because you can, GMs. Glad to know we’re paying for what’s left over – if the point was to make original names that no one would fight over, then we didn’t need a reservation period at all.

Even then if GM’s got special privileges towards reserving names they should of probably been allowed 1 or 2 more then the master pack owners. I understand that they work for the company and should be allowed something but I mean 7 names? Are they really going to play 7 characters? Specially when hongmoon levels are introduced?

Blade & Soul and The Wheels of Fate

Tags

Wheels of Fate

Blade & Soul introduced a quite unique and highly addictive way of obtaining some rare outfits, evolution material weapons and accessories and Shield pieces. We played around a few hours with these spinning wheels and these are our findings.

Wheels of Fate are located in some of the major zones of Blade & Soul and by obtaining certain types of essences you are able to spin them and receive various nifty rewards. Some of these rewards are essential to obtain as they are required to evolve our weapons and accessories.

We can already encounter a Wheel of Fate around level 8 in Foshi Pyres where we can obtain one of the best-looking outfits, the Jiangshi Raiment and also the first weapon that is necessary to evolve our class weapon.

The essences that are required to spin the Wheel of Fate are acquired from World Bosses that spawn very often, usually within minutes to Buy Blade And Soul Gold. Most of the times, you will find plenty of players who are grinding these bosses (mainly on Channel 1) and you don’t even need to group up to receive the essences.

As I am fond of killer outfits, I actually spent days grinding some of the World Bosses to obtain them, including the Wolfskin that drops from the Wheel of Fate located at Lilystalk Tradepost in Lycandi Foothills. For this specific outfit, you will need to hunt Fallen Sacred Beast Lycan the Mighty. What a name, right?

There are other decent outfits that drop from Wheels of Fate, like the Stinger which can be obtained near Yehara’s Mirage in the Cinderlands.

Whether you succeed in getting these rare items from the Wheel of Fate or not, entirely depends on your luck, but the higher level outfits seem to have very small drop rates and most of the time you will be getting Shield and weapon chests that not always drop items that match your class.

As long as you manage to find some players around to kill the World Bosses, you should gain plenty of useful stuff from the Wheels of Fate, but be warned, you might just get addicted to it.

Restricting the Wardrobe is a terrible idea

Tags

Wardrobe

So as i’m sure a lot of people have realised the wardrobe is apparently being restricted to premium players. I -REALLY- think this is a terrible idea, and I hope NCSoft can see why, but let me explain.

Firstly, the inventory is restrictive as it is – You don’t get that much space. It is usually occupied with a variety of items that you effectively need to lug around with you at all times. Hammers, buff items, unsealing charms, etc etc. Costumes, you may think are purely cosmetic – They arent in Blade & Soul. Many of them tie in to PvP, restricting what costumes we can carry around is simply frustrating. Frustrating experiences put players off.

Secondly, the endgame doesn’t actually have much going for it outside of PvP. Collecting costumes is an enormous endgame drive, and if you are actively discouraging “hoarding” of costumes by restricting the wardrobe system, Blade-Soul imagine a lot of people, myself included, are going to be really upset with the wardrobe being blocked off.

I know they need to make their money, but will the amount of frustration garnered by locking off the Wardrobe be worth it? I honestly don’t think it will. A healthy player-base encouraged to go out into the world and collect all of the -amazing- outfits and cosmetics in the game is a far better situation for the game to be in.

Before anyone whines about entitlement and such, keep in mind no other region locks the wardrobe behind premium – I genuinely believe this is because cosmetic farming is an enormous part of the endgame that needs to be perserved.

To clarify when I say it is an enormous part of the endgame, I mean for PvE players primarily, but some PvP too. If this game is entirely directed at PvP’ers, it isn’t going to be widely successful. They -need- to give everybody something to do. And cosmetic farming is something a great deal of people enjoy.’

If NCSoft requires some sort of proof regarding the impact cosmetics have on games, look at Tera Onlines success. You can effectively buy any cosmetic item in the game with ingame currency no problem, and yet they are still raking in an incredible amount of cash from it. B&S has the potential to blow that game out of the water if handled correctly… The Wardrobe feature is one of it’s major hooks.

Yep, another one… Another reason this should not be restricted in my opinion is due to the concept of “Whales” in free to play games. That is, the vast majority of people spend very little, however a minority of people spend a ridiculous amount of money. This has been observed in basically every F2P game, mobile games thrive on it, etc etc. My point is, with the ability to change your outfit anywhere in the game world so conveniently, it will encourage F2P players to actually purchase BNS Gold with NCoin. If you have restricted inventory space for cosmetics, that person might go. “Hmm, I guess i’ll stick to one outfit i really like” instead of continuously changing.

Thanks for all the replies. Keep this conversation going honestly, the only way for NCSoft to see our thoughts is to make them visible. Sadly I don’t use the Blade And Soul Power leveling, but I may need to make one just to repeat this there and make sure it is seen.

I Love Blade & Soul

Tags

Blade & Soul

I just quit (at least, for now) FFXIV and have been looking for a new MMO. I watched a few videos about upcoming MMOs and saw Blade & Soul mentioned a few times. I had never heard of it before, so I decided to check it out. And the game looks absolutely amazing! But I know looks can be deceiving…

I love the focus on action combat and avoiding damage rather than face-tanking everything and depending on gear or your healer to keep you alive. I like the mobility it offers and the possibilities of vertical exploration. I also really like the Chinese-fantasy setting for the game. I was surprised I’d never head of this game before since it seems it’s been out in Asia already for a couple years?

Anyways, I am wondering what you all think of Blade & Soul. As far as I know, it’s getting Western release sometime relatively soon, but there’s no exact date yet. Are people excited to play with Blade-Soul Gold? I just haven’t heard much about it yet so I dunno what the general vibe is. Have any of you played it before? Pros/cons or thoughts? Am I getting my hopes up prematurely?

It will probably be one of the top games that can provide you with action oriented open world combat with good PvE and PvP content. I’m not that excited to play it, at least not anymore. It’s quite an old MMORPG already (in terms of the first release version). Still, I think it would be a good game to play while waiting for your awaited MMORPGs (from Korea specifically) to release.

Still waiting for an MMORPG that will blow my mind. I got way too addicted to Dragon Nest combat that I can’t play non-action MMORPGs anymore, and lately I’ve been getting into open world games. So the best combination for me is the combat of DN in an open world game. Black Desert is a good contender, but I heard that PvE content is lacking. Dragon’s Dogma Online should be great for me. Now if only it would come sooner…

I played a very small bit of a private server back in the day, and from what I’ve played and have seen and heard is that the combat is top notch, graphics and animations are smooth, but the rest of the game is sort of standard fare for MMORPGs. The experience will be somewhat similar to TERA imo, I had a ton of fun in the beginning levels in TERA as well because the combat is good, but the later levels dragged on like a ball and chain because of how boring quest was.

Blade & Soul: Difficulty Rating

Tags

Difficulty Rating

I’d say the difficulty rating simply shows how much effort you will need to play the class at a decent to good level.

As a summoner, for PvE, all you need are LMB/RMB/F/TAB (Charge Focus/Damage spell/Self heal & Damage spell/Cat Charge), you do have more skills naturally but those 4 buttons are generally enough to do decent to good DPS, survivability and “support”.

As a KFM, you generally need to use more than that and counter is a fairly vital part of your gameplay. Since you will likely tank, you’ll end up using 1/Q/E to dodge damage and counter, which lead to other skills such as stuns and dazes. You have several charging skills, need to backdash a lot on fights and have “dps rotations” even on the basic level.

This also goes from a PvP stand point. An equally “low” skilled KFM player will get violated by a summoner. Once he knows how to fight the summoner that’ll reverse and Summoner will be 1-shot combo’d. However, the higher the skill goes for both players, the matches will be more difficult and equal.

The difficulty scale of each class lends no important value into providing insight to help you decide what to Buy Blade And Soul Gold. You should ask yourself what kind of gameplay you would like to experience in the game, and then go on do a bit of study on what classes provides what kind of experience. Do you like to have a pet to do your bidding? If so, you may consider the Summoner. Do you like to go all out kung-ho with your fists and good legworks? You might want to try out KFM. Some people like to go out hardmode on the first try into a new game but other people prefer to go it slow with easier classes. Difficulty here refers to a some sort of a subjective terms, so if you want to go logical about picking a class that you would like, do not fall back onto the difficulty scaling.

Another note, this game expects every player to be independant of their Blade And Soul Premium Membership. We do not have a “i’ll tank so you heal me” kind of thing, every class can do anything just that each class have something that they do better than other classes.

Sins in Blade & Soul

I normally try to catch them in the opening by jumping and pulling them with Z, into a X knockdown. Wait for a second because if they pop their ground counter you can hit them with C to stun them, and get an air combo, but alot of sins will panic and roll or panic and to Buy Blade And Soul Gold. If they panic and roll you can catch their roll with a 2 charge, and then they will tab out 90% of the time. From there try to SS their jump to you. If I can butn their tab AND roll I will tab out of their web and charge on me, then throw them in a heavens blade combo to go for the kill, or atleast heavy heavy damage.

(C) to T3 Form 2 — Instead of hitting only a target, this hits everything up to 8m infront of you, this is important because it can be used to pull assassins out of stealth with some practice. It is important to note though that it costs chi instead of returning chi, so you need to account for that in your combos.

(V) to T2 Form 1– The knockback can push them out of stealth when their ontop of you, you don’t need the T4 version because they don’t have a grapple for it to break.Alternatively, you can attempt to use T4 Form 2 to try and 100-0 the Assassin if you can force them to Tab out of something and then catch them.

Floating Point Goes to Flicker Tier 4 Form 2 — When in draw stance aim ahead of where the assassin is moving and toss a LMB. You have to aim ahead of them because of the netcode of the game. (Even when im on 40 latency I need to aim a bit ahead of Blade And Soul Items.) This helps by reducing movespeed on a hit, not essential, but useful. Alternatively you could put the point into Lightning Draw for the range, and try to do the same thing, aim ahead of them and try to pop them out of stealth. (On the NA patch, Assassin’s have innate evasion on stealth, so even if you hit them, theres a % chance you will miss).

The extreme ping/skill lag in Blade & Soul

Tags

ping/skill lag

This is a weird issue, but if only Blade and Soul is giving you extreme lag (up to a full second to register skill activation), it might be an ASUS bit of software running.
Here’s how to turn it off and fix the game:

1. Hit the START button, and in the search box type: services.msc
2. Locate “ASUSGameFirstService” in the list.
3. Right-click “ASUSGameFirstService” and got to “Properties”
4. Change the “Startup type:” option to “Disabled”
5. Press “Apply”, then “Okay”

That’s it, now you can play Blade and Soul normal.

I have been working on this for weeks! Ive tested internet speeds..changed router/modem…changed port both on router and client…increased router power…upgraded and downgraded windows 10….had a long fought battle with svc host and finally came to the conclusion it was either server side peak hour lag bombs or i had a faulty asus rog g20 motherboard or wireless adapter. I was going to return it tomorrow when i stumbled upon your post with the help of Blade & Soul Power leveling. I am calling asus customer support tomorrow (whom ive spent hours on the phone with for this exact problem) to give them a peice of my mind and inform them their game first service is garbage….maybe ill get a coupon or something! OMG ..you are my hero, truly a champion of gentlemen scholars. why is this program running on a rig thats designed for maximum gaming power…what in the hell does it even do besides skyrocket ping and make games unplayable?