Mini-boss spotlight--Arachne

Here's a new feature on The Friendly Warcaster that will hopefully continue for a long time. Throughout this game there appears to be a series of mini-bosses and bosses that a player will encounter as they progress through the game. These same bosses drop rare and unique loot, so players may end up farming them for equipment and money.

Today's Mini-boss spotlight is on Arachne in Echidna's Swamp.


Background Mythology on Arachne on Wikipedia.
Hitpoints: 850 (unknown if this is more when fighting with other characters)
Quest: The Weaver (90 exp, 50 gold)
Experience for defeating: 125 (at 5th level)


Arachne is a pretty straight-forward fight; however, she does summon spiders to help her. These disappear after she is defeated. Also note that the landscape in this particular area can be full of "cradles" that spit out baby spiders. If you fight Arachne in the wrong spot, things can go from bad to worse. Try "pulling" Arachne up the steps toward the nearby mana regeneration shrine or using that shrine to your advantage before engaging her in a fight.

Keep throwing the stones!

First Night of Open Beta

By all means it was looking like the first night of open beta was a success. There was only one server up and it was stuffed to the gills. Stuffed so much in fact that it seemed to be causing a lot of lag and hanging between screens. The only way to get out of the eternal loading screen seemed to be exiting out of the game through the task manager. This happened to me a number of times last night.

It happened so much that my character, Friendly, the level 9 Warcaster got toasted in the process.


Bye Friendly! Here's what Friendly looked like:


He had a really sick sword that would proc this poisonous green cloud whenever he made a critical hit. I loved fighting monsters near crates because it would bust open the crates at the same time with the damage. haha! TIME SAVER!

So the end result of this of course was to test out True Games/Petroglyph's customer support. I filled out a ticket and got a response within the hour. I have sympathy for the support people staying up for the open beta like that! I guess within the industry staying there during open beta launch is pretty standard fare? Or maybe it was funneled to some guy's e-mail at his home? This is the type of stuff Friendly thinks about.

Anyway. I got a nice note saying they've received a lot of feedback and that Thursday morning all characters were going to be deleted. They also threw down 1,000 mytheon coins for my troubles. They also said that the open beta contest period had been extended due to the extended downtime they were taking do a complete database wipe. SO, it's looking like people have until 2 May now to download and try the game out to be entered into the contest to win the goodies (also looks like they added in some Mytheon hats/shirt swag combos to the prizes as well).

From my point of view, this is all positive. Character wipes, problems, and issues during beta are pretty much expected, right? This is all good information for them I'm sure. (hint: add more servers!)

There was a character wipe in closed beta as well. It's just kind of how it goes with betas. On a personal level what I noticed was that on my second go around with the game, the controls felt much less "wonky," and I kind of figured out how to move better. There always seems to be a period of time where the controls feel a little uncomfortable to me when I start a game. Right click to move? WASD moves the screen? All these things became a little more comfortable to me over time.

So, I'm interested in hearing how your experiences were!

OH, one more thing: Since I was stuck on the loading screen so much I got to screenshot a few of the hints haha. Here's a stitch-together graphic of them:


Learn something new everyday! Now I just need to figure out this merge combo thingy. hmm.

Keep throwing the stones!

Mytheon PvP Video

This is a glimpse into pvp in Mytheon.



I haven't tried this out myself in game, and I'm really not much of a pvp'er, but this looks to be really fun. For some reason I'm reminded of the old game Nox when I watch this.

If I was to lock down a time in my life when pvp really gave me a rush, I'd have to say it was the capture the flag events I used to run in Nox. That was a fun game. Another Diablo clone, but the spell casting and switching between spells was unique.

hmmm, wonder if I could find my old Nox CD somewhere?



YUP, there they are, all snuggled in between Men In Black and Dungeon Seige. haha, nostalgia. :-)

LOL, look how bad the Nox graphics look compared HAHA!



Then again, graphics aren't everything. Some solid game play goes a long long way.

Keep throwing the stones!

Day 1

Well, I can’t blog about Day 1 of me playing Mytheon since that was last weekend and I’m still playing under the umbrella of NDA (Mytheon is still in Closed Beta). So far the game has been exactly as advertised in the Wikipedia entry. Let me just pull a few of those points out from wikipedia:

1- free to play
2- massive multiplayer online video game
3- Visually, Mytheon is played similar to other top down isometric action games such as Diablo . . . (AND, we can just stop there)

Check it out!



. . . and I can't say much more than that . . . but soon I'll get down to some more specifics. SOON!

IN THE MEANTIME, you're really going to want to check this contest out: Open Beta Event. As it says on that page:

"Come and play during the first three days of the new Mytheon Open Beta (April 28-30th) and you’ll be entered to win from hundreds of great prizes. Compete in PvP, PvE, and explore the newest MMO from True Games and Petroglyph. Players can win an Alienware M17X laptop computer, multiple iPod touches and up to 100 iTunes gift cards."

FREE STUFF! SIGN ME UP!

Keep throwing the stones! (hmmm, catch phrase might need some work . . . :-))