Left Axe was funny:

 

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LA by a mile

 

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If you were in a midgard play at the time and had a zerker / SB - Left Axe was the single more devastating nerf in DAoC history.

I have played this game off and on since about a month after release. I have always had fun at it. The times I did not play were because real life demands. As much as I hated ToA, I played through it and rolled a few minds on classic as well.

But I have always had fun because I don't have the whiny bitch attitude that some other people who play this game do. Any old vet looking to come back and play can have lots of fun. But, it all depends on your attitude.

If you think you can small man / solo and beat down other toons constantly - you are going to be wasting your money. Just go play TF for free.

If you are social, friendly, have a good attitude and are just play this game for fun and not trying to compensate for some shortcoming you may have in real life, then you are going to enjoy coming back.

Anybody can play this game and have a great time despite the nerfs, population imbalances, zergs, etc - it all depends on them.

LA might have been a big nerf(or fix) but devastating? What you couldn't handle not two shotting casters? It was absolutely ridiculous that SB's/Zerks were doing so much more damage than their counterparts.

100% agreed

Negative on the rangers.

LA or Smite no doubt.

If for no other reason than when they happened in the game's life.

When you have one level 50 character and it took you 30 days played to get it to 50 and some good gear then having it gutted like that is just awful.

The poor sb's had it pretty bad, the hardest archetype to level because noone wanted them in groups and then got nerfed just because some clueless alb sorc's dex/quick debuffed some zerks when their shields were down and got one shotted.... . Remember this was back when the lore hadn't morfed into an abomination of Aurthurian legend with vampires and cow people. Midgard was the melee realm, they were supposed to have the huge troll with two axes and having one bear down on your skinny dress wearing ass was supposed to invoke pants pooping terror, just like Hibs were the magical realm and Albs were the....uh....favorite realm?

I would say Smite was the biggest because it wasn't just a nerf, it was a complete redirection of the class played. You leveled up a fighting, chain wearing caster and then BAM! Mythic turned you into a bot lol...Isn't that when people first started using bots alot too? Dunno could be making that up.

 

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Agreed, everyone seems to think it destroyed the LA classes, but let's be realistic, it was totally needed

 

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I remember playing my Paladin in the Alb Frontier getting like 3-4 shot by a Zerker... made me shelve her right then and there and start up a Minstrel lol.

 

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It seemed to me LA wasn't that big of an issue prior to Mid getting end regen, because Doublefrost would run you OOE after about 4 swings, so you might kill one person really quick, and then spend the rest of the battle running around auto attacking. It was the end regen buff that didn't have any range limit and didn't drop when the shaman died that really made it overpowered.

I still remember the first day end regen came out, it turned my shadowblade into an absolute killing machine.

The reason LA hurt so much for shadowblades was that prior to the nerf, Mythic had done a bunch of balance attempts between the assassin classes, changing armor tables so that infs/ns were neutral/resistant to slash instead of vulernable, giving them better RAs, etc. so when the damage was bumped down to about equal, the other assassins were way ahead in other areas and shadowblades really sucked, and it made the LA nerf feel a lot worse than it would have been had they implemented it prior to the other changes.

 

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The smite nerf helped push Albion to the lead in realms though because prior to that there weren't a lot of bot accounts. Once that happened about every cleric that had been rolled because smite was so overpowered it was laughable, now became a buffbot. Also up until that time you could not find clerics in alb groups when leveling up that actually wanted to use their power on healing...they all wanted to nuke. So the nerf gave albion many times the buffbot accounts of the other realms and also made it so clerics that were created from then on had a high chance of being a group player.

The Left AXE nerf was probably the biggest negative nerf I can remember. It gutted midgard's melee and it wasn't like everyone and their brother was rolling zerkers and sbs at that time anyway due to the other inherent weaknesses. I think that nerf was a bigger blow to the population and supposed advantage that midgard was supposed to have than anything.

 

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