Hellgate:London

[Thecla]

I decided to play a Blademaster as my first class and this class is really an exercise in frustration in a number of areas during the game.

I actually think that all the classes are powerful and fun to play, and the melee classes aren't inferior to the ranged ones. They were definitely worse early in the alpha, but they got buffed very significantly, to the point where the guardian is arguably the strongest class in the game. I also think there's quite a bit "under the hood". It's not so easy to figure out, say, how to distribute skills or match up items, and maybe there's quite a bit of flexibility there. I've been playing since the alpha and I still don't feel like I have a real handle on the game yet (but maybe I'm just slow;)).

The bane for this class is the dry river areas where you have large open areas with some cover here and there, but when you have the level filled with ranged mobs, expect to die...a lot...even with charge and the aura that destroys incoming ranged attacks (because you're only going to be level 15 to 19 in this time period and may have a max of 2/4 in the aura for a total possible of destroying incoming shots of 30% max and mobs are typically firing 2 to 3 shots each with each shot doing around 30 to 40 damage per shot).

In situations where you're facing large mobs of ranged attackers, you can use a grappler (on a wepaon switch) to pull them in one by one and destroy them with a sword equipped in the other hand. I didn't like this much in the beta, but have found it to work pretty well. Mostly you need it for the orbile types, which tend to float around out of melee range, but it can be useful against other rnaged attackers too. I haven't found the sword throwing or "heavens arc" skills to attack flying demons to be much use though, I must say.

Another major issue for the Blademaster (and this may carry over to the Guardian as well) is that Stun defense is probably the most important defence skill you can get as typically when you are stunned in melee combat, you're likely to die if you're not near full health or the mobs are close to death themselves (and even then you can still die).

Yup --- high stun defense is a must for Templars, as is good ignite defense, but that's just a matter of equipping yourself properly, which is not hard to do. (One way they buffed templars was to increase resistances to special effects on all templar armors; the first blademaster I played in the alpha spent almost the entire time getting stunned and ignited, and spent all the money he collected on health injectors and other potions). Also, you can keep gyro-stabalizers and fire retardents on your belt to remove those effects if you happen to get hit by them.

Using different types of damage -- with corresponding sfx's -- to attack to best advantage, and defending yourself against those sfx's procing (and especially stacking) is IMO an interesting and vital part of the combat system. (Quick summary for anyone who hasn't tried the game: physical=stun; fire=ignite and lose 5% health/sec: nasty if it happens to you and good if you ignite a boss with lots of life; poison=no heal: so you have to pay attention and take an antivenom before a health injector if you're also being beat on by high da demons when you're poisoned; lightning=shock: can't use skills, which also cuts both ways).

The other sad thing about the Blademaster is it is mostly a one hit wonder since you will be dealing with a lot of packs, you will depends more on skills like Sword of Justice and Sweeping strikes and trying to get things like Sword of Authority for single mobs like bosses means you have to gimp yourself a lot for dealing with packs of mobs (which is what you will see a lot of, it's difficult, if not impossible, to split off single mobs most of the time and deal with them singly).

I found skills work pretty well even with not so many skill points invested, and they automatically improve with your character lvl, so you don't need to keep adding points to maintain their effectiveness. Also, dual-wielding splash damage swords gives blademasters a pretty powerful melee-aoe attack that works well against packs.

The Surges are also a waste of points grabbing them. While you could potentially do some big damage as the various Surge powers do stack, trying to keep them up will be problematic (you have to get the killing blow on the mob with the surge attack to get the surge to stack up and/or refresh as they last 12 seconds after the last killing blow with the surge attack).

I didn't like the surges either, and the health one especially seemed fairly ineffective. But I may be biased --- I don't like that kind of skill anyway: it reminds me of the "charge-up-and-release" type of attack that is too much micro-managing for my tastes.

If you do not buy Aura of Power to high level and Matched Blades to high level, you're going to be in for a world of hurt later in the game as you will be losing you power too frequently from skill usage and you will need a huge amount of will to use two weapons along with the various relics, fuels, and batteries to boost those weapons further. In essence, by the time you get to 50, you will most likely have spent 18 talent points into those two skills (10 to Aura of Power and 8 to Matched Blades) leaving you with 31 talent points to spend on other skills (another reason why trying to go heavy surge will not work and why trying to spread your points out will ultimately doom your character even though FSS has said you should be able to spread out your points more unlike D2 to make your character viable, but it won't work as you can see this occuring in late Act 4 and Act 5 of normal where it really gets painful if you haven't specialized).

I've no idea what any of the character builds will look like by the time you get to 50, but I really doubt that it will work that way, unless it's by choice. Just my experience, but I've never really encountered problems running out of power (in part, for templars, because the normal attacks work very well on their own, which I sort of like, so you don't have to use your skills non-stop. Some points in matched blades is essential, but it may just mean you have to decide eventually how yo balance your stat point distribution into willpower and your skill point distribution into matched blades. It is a different thing that your stat point distribution is basically determined by the stat-cost of the items you want to equip, but I actually sort of like that too. So far, I've found adding stat points for my items (strating around lvl 10, which is when the stat-costs of your items start to exceed your beginning stats) and skill points here and there according to their appeal has worked fine. Maybe I'll discover that I'm thouroughly gimped at lvl 50, but I'd be surpried.

Terrain bugs are also a major issue in the game

That is for sure, and it's not a good thing (even if they put a stopgap "/stuck" command into the game to work around this).

My advice to anyone looking at the game right now, wait a few patches for them to get things worked out more as right now the game has a lot of bugs and there are some definite balance issues for melee classes (they may be there for the caster and ranged classes as well, but they're quite glaring for melee) right now that need to be worked out.

The game was definitely released with way too many bugs and annoyances, but I'm not so sure about the balance issues.
I really like the caster classes. They're strong but I don't think they're unbalanced, or that the blademaster is worse off. A blademaster with good swords can end up doing more damagae than a similar lvl evoker, and a marksman can do a ton of damage from range but is really fragile when compared with a guardian.

Anyway, these comments aren't intended to be argumentative, just some thoughts about the game in response to what you found.:)