The idea is pretty similar to Guild Wars 2’s dynamic skill system, with which your action bar changes with the change of your character’s weapon, attunement or some Utility skills. Blade & Soul’s abilities have shorter or no cooldown which makes the combat faster and action bar change constantly. Besides, Blade & Soul’s action bar layout is very different from other MMOs’: the number keys 5 – 8 are less important because they are no longer occupied by frequently used abilities but consumable items. Blade & Soul has no normal attack and many of the game’s abilities are aligned to buttons like Tab, Z, and X, which we don’t use for major abilities in other MMOs. Strangely, the OBT version doesn’t allow you to change keyboard settings.
There’s also never been a better time to get into Blade & Soul thanks to the recent release of the Rising Waters content expansion. The free content update sees players facing the Blackram in the Bloodshade Harbor party dungeon and partaking in a test of trials in the single-player instance dungeon Mushin’s Tower. On the edge of Hogshead Pastures lies the berth of the flagship of the Blackram Pirates, and home to the great Admiral Hae Mujin. blade and soul gold Available at Level 45, this 6-player Normal difficulty and 4-player Hard difficulty party dungeon boasts some of the hardest bosses in the game. It’s a real test for those looking for a new challenge in which to show off their martial arts skills.
I don’t dislike it, either. And after a bit of playing, I think I figured out some of what was getting to me, why I liked the game more the less I played of it. The game has a whole lot of depth, but all of that depth is concentrated in areas that I find far less interesting. Many MMORPGs have QTE when for chained skills. Blade & Soul’s QTE is unlike any other MMOs’ like Cabal 2 or Aion. It uses an intellegent QTE mechanic that automatically switches the abilities on your skill bar to those that are in the skill chain you are currently activating. With this mechanic, you don’t have to put dozens of abilities onto the skill bar and set dozens of hot keys for these abilities.
In Blade & Soul, you can use less than 10 buttons to cover 20 to 30 abilities for simplified control and more effective combat. Each character class in Blade & Soul has unique active block and counter skills. A successful active block will not only decrease the damage you take from enemy attack, it gives you the opportunity to fight back. Counter ability varies depending on your class, and some are easy to use while some require good anticipation and fast reaction. The block and counter abilities require player to think of defense instead of focusing on attacking only.
Thankurroundings, correctly positioning yourself, knowing when to defend, when to attack, and choosing the best response to your opponent are all key to being able to truly master your martial prowess. Case in point: the game’s combat. The system on display is indisputably deep and requires attention and careful play to make the most out of it. No simple matter of tabbing to a new target and following a steady rotating of combat. And yet the steadiness is still there; it’s just based upon a different set of timing, a cadence of block-attack-repeat in stable loops.
The mechanics of combat are very solid, well-tuned for PvP battles and character duels, buy blade and soul gold set up to become more interesting as blocking becomes second nature, and yet the practical upshot was that combat felt so rote that it became less engaging, not more. Because of the narrow range of different skills available, everything comes down to that central mechanical flow. Rather than giving you two dozen different abilities with unusual interplay, the game gives you about a dozen with a very set interplay that you can mildly tweak in one direction or another. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s not the part of MMORPG combat that I enjoy.