…Please?

You know, there’s always a lapse between gaming, and blogging about gaming. Problem is, if you’re crazy enough to blog about gaming, that lapse is likely to feature MORE gaming. Sooner or later, if you keep putting it off, your content for blogging builds up to such garguatuan proportions you’ll just cry out “Gawd! I can’t do this!”

That’s what happened to Flyff for me. One week became one month…two months… Now it’s been a bleeding year since I’ve played Flyff, and I still haven’t wrote a blog about it yet.

GOD NO, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS PIXELS/ON FIRE/JUST PLAIN NUTS.

Cabal just happens to fit all threee, btw. =P More on that later.

I had so much fun these few days, it would be a sin not top immortalise this in text, and eventually (now) in digital format.

Rebecca and Vance will take a backseat for now. Sorry ><, but I still have some issues to settle now, and Cabal is basically owning my free time now. I’ll get back to it, I promise.

Without further blathering, on with the blog! (And this was just the intro. Fasten your seatbelts, forget your helmets AND DON’T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE LENGTH. You just know this will be a long ride.)

With all the discussion and hype surrounding Cabal on MMOTales, you knew it was a matter of time before this gamer nutcase joined in the fun.

having a few friends online at the time helped too =P.

I’d originally planned to wait for Dome to install Cabal on their computers, since the crappinees of my computer is a long-time running joke between friends. It’s more than five years old, sentient and eternally grumpy. The only MMORPG it can play satisfactorily is Maple, and even then it’s constantly lagging. Don;t even get me started on the times people spawn onto my map. When I tried to play Flyff on it, the moster I was whacking refused to die, even though it’s HP bar had been empty for at least a minute. (Mia, if memory serves. Good times.) However, the same lag protection evidently did not extend to me, since despite my spamming of the pots key, my HP refused to rise even the slightest bit and eventually, I died. X_X My number of pots hadn;t even changed.

Ahem, back to Cabal. I’d just gotten off the phone with Silver, listening in on her first forays into Cabal, and was getting ready for a unprecedented five hour night’s off. Life was good.

Imagine my shock when I stepped into Crossfire, the lan shop I frequent on my night’s off, and the first thing I saw was some kid playing a 3D MMORPG I didn’t recognise, and believe me, I’ve either played or seen most of em.

*Ding*

Graphics analysis. Not as intricately detailed as WoW, characters look to grown up to be Flyff, nope, ain;t Perfect World…. Should have recognised it by now….

IS THAT CABAL?!

A few minutes of frenzied typing, clicking and account creation later, Blader Imppala spawned into Cabal with training items, two blades, and a insane urge to kill everything in sight.

LET THE WORLD TREMBLE.

Cabal’s basically divided into three different worlds linked by a warp centre. A little small, but considering the map list still has space for at least five maps, I guess developers are planning for further expansions. I’ve heard of a new town, but apparently you need a super rare item, so no dice for now. The towns have such interesting names though. The desert town is called Desert Scream, the ice map is called Bloody Ice (no blood ever seen, especially since the map is dominated by the undead. Has anyone ever seen zombies bleed? They always seem to… disintegrate.)

The kicker, however, has to be the forest city. Its name is Green Despair, which always leads to amusing exchanges.

Imppala: I’m in Despair now.
SIlverFx: Cheer up!

Case in point.

I’ll never forget my first quest that entailed monster hunting. After doing a few basic “run around and say hello to the vendors” quests, I was handed a request to rid the world of ten Garlies. Finally, we get to da killing.

Found the right monster on the second try after I exited on one side and was confronted with many many monsters with names in red. Like Flyff, Cabal emplys the same colour coding of monster names, using your level as a guideline to estimate your chances of taking it down.

Meh, whatever. Now I’ve got ye, you wascally wabbit lookalike. Prepare to taste cold stee-

Click.

Nothing happened.

Click.

Still nada.

Maybe it’s right-click, like in RTS games?

Click.

Nope, still breathing. In fact, it had started wandering away.

I decided to try using one of the sword skills I had learned earlier. A satisfying ring of steel and an outraged squeak possibly along the lines of “WTH was THAT for?!”, ol’ Garlie was missing around three quarters of it’s HP.

I’m definitely missing something here.

It wasn;t until I had a closer look at the shortcut bar that the giant chocolate penny dropped.

<Shortcut key1> Normal Attack

Well slap me with a flaming chainsaw and call me Impala. I had to keep spamming 1 to whack it. I just KNEW I should have stopped to read the explanations.

If you don’t want to tire out your fingers, you can change it to auto attack under Game Options. Just keep in mind you still need to press 1 to start the clubbing spree.

Skills pwn, though. The second skill for bladers does damage in a wide arc in front of him. Better still, there’s a chance of knocking ’em down. Perfect for crowd control.

This was the first time I saw an assasin class with AOE skills at such an early stage in the game. In fact, I’d just barely started!

THIS WAS SO GONNA ROCK.

Thatr night, I partied together with Silver, Gumster (Leaddie) and Dustbunny, Silver’s brother. Cabal has an interesting party system in which if I read correctly, exp isn;t shared, but everyone receives an additonal 40% exp bonus, and the effect increases with party size. Didn;t bother to verify it, though, since the four way chat was fun enough. Besides, it’s easir to check on each other’s level this way, and compare levelling times. Gumster’s rants at me levelling faster than him are always entertaining =P. WOnder what happens when he logs in and sees Maria at lv 44…

Power levelling in Cabal is insanely fun and easy. There’s always a myriad of quests to do, all of which give a truckload of exp and some ALz (the in-game currency). By the time you’ve finished doing the quests for your level, you’ve already levelled and there’s a NEW set of quests to do. These get progressively ahrder, of course, but so do the rewards (100k exp?!). In the span of three days, I made a level 36 Blader and level 38 Force Archer. And when I meant three days, I MEAN three days. Don;t try this at home.

Yes, I’m insane. Read my self-description.

Every ten levels, you get a quest to level up your battle style. At level ten, you gain Combo, in which you can chain your skkills together to increase the damge they do, and since exp is linked to damage, more exp. It’s quite difficult to grasp at the start. If I had a dollar for every time someone spammed the public chat about how to use Combo, I’d buy over Nexon already.

But it’s not until level 20 that the fun really starts. At level 20, you get elemntal Auras, which basically give you a HUGe stat boost while making you look cool. All of them give the same stat boost, so it’s down to which element you like the most. No prizes for guessing what aura Imppala chose. =P

HELL YES. S’DEATH ON TWO BLADES, WIELDED BY A GUY WHO’S ON FIRE. NOW, WHERE’RE THE CHAINSAWS?

Battle Mode at lv 30 is even better. Affectionately termed my Cabal Bankai, these give more or less the same stat bonuses as auras, but give a wicked cool ability according to your class. Bladers get crazy, crazy critical hits, and Force Archers get the Split Shot ability. If there are two enemies in front of you, the shot will SPLIT to hit bopth of them. Now even Archers have AOE dmg! Not to mention the purple light show that announces your activation is always cool to watch. I can;t wait until my Force Archer gets to lv 50 and Battle Mode 2. Force Archers get GUNS.

I’m pretty rich on Cabal now, too. My blader got to 800k the hard way (farming and npcing drops), my Force Archer now has close to 3 million, even after buying my Adept set. After you don;t fall into the MP Pot lv1/2/3 trap, hp and mp pots are extremely cheap and there’s not much other use for Alz, except to buy what you may need. If you get a Chaos Lamp, sell it for now. It’s worth 250k at npcs =P. This only accounts for 1 million of my assets, btw *stares at 5 chaos lamps in storage*

One minor complaint I have of the game is that storage is shared between characters. It’s pretty easy to transfer stuff between chars, true, but I could do with more slots. I’ve had to create new chars which are now outfitted all the way to pprobably lv 20 or so, so I might make even MORE new chars.

Blader’s pretty easy to play, with high dodge and AOE skills making for excellent mob clearing even in early levels. I still think I mucked up skills, so I’m staying on my Force Archer for now. Not to worry, since Cabal allows you to freely reallocate skill points at the expense of some Alz, but Force Archer is WAY too much fun now.

Force Archers start out slow, I had to stay on the edge and snipe at creeps to make sure I wouldn’t get ganged early on. With only decent dodge, crappy HP and no AOE, my force archer died quite regularly at troglos. Patience, though. Once you’ve hit lv 20, with levelled up skills (Critical Shot is a WINNER), decent armor and weapons, not to mention Auras, Force Archer becomes a force to be reckoned with. In fact, I died at lv 28 simply because I had clean forgotten where was my pots key. =P Force Archers also deal extremely high damage in this stage of the game. I was esctatic when my Blader under Illusionst Battle Mode (Bankai!) critted for 200+ dmg… My force archer topped that easily, critting for 300+ dmg. The main motto of Force Archers is: Kill the thing before it reaches you. Gangs become less of a problem once you’ve levelled your skills to Regular expertise, as Explosion shot has crazy AOE and a 50% chance of knockdown/back. Still fun to play at level 44 =P=P.

I know this reads more like a game review than an actual blog, and I’ll blog more about Cabal when I have the chance ><. Sorry about the lack of screenshots, ’cause I play in Dome, and they don’t allow access to their C:. I could figure out a backdoor, but I don;t think they’ll trake kindly to that, and they’re way nicer than the school comp lab technicians.

If any of you decide to pick up Cabal, drop by Venus server on channel 19. Look for Imppala or MariaTraydor. I’ll drown you in good stuff =P.

Cheers,
Imppala

Makenaide, ichii no hana.

Edit: Hell yes they’re nicer. Maple auto patch doesn’t woprk, so they allowed me admin access to dl the manual patch. Catch Mandos on Maple soon =P.

Edit Edit: what. Base.wz corrupt -_-. I’m going to have to re dl the client from scratch.