A big “thank you” goes out to the kind folks at Namco Bandai, who sent me this very cool Treasure Abyss wallpaper this morning. It features the characters who pop up now and then on their Facebook Wall to introduce new features or dungeons. Namco Bandai has kindly offered to let me post this up on the blog.

The folks up on the upper left are clearly mages. To the right, a warrior meets a thief. On the upper right, a class we haven’t yet seen romances the bartender. A healer class? We can hope. Note the brace of turkey legs hanging above the bar. Mmm.

At the lower left, a warrior looks over a map with a ranger. We haven’t seen a ranger yet in game, either, but he’s popped up in the interstitial screens.

Noticeably absent: monks and samurai!

Those samurai never get any love.

Namco Bandai‘s social RPG Treasure Abyss may have started off slowly, but the Japanese gaming giant has kept expanding the game, in some good and some not-so-good ways. Good stuff first.

Two new high level dungeons — The Catacombs (for players level 30 and up) and Tower of the Samurai (for players level 40 and up) — provide some challenge and the chance of new gear for high level groups. The Catacombs allow for the crafting of the Ifrit Staff for mages. The AE-casting weapon finally makes mages not only viable, but a necessity to any group. The Catacombs also introduced Great Swords for warriors, a weapon with incredible hate gain, and the Cursed Dagger for thieves, which does nothing, unfortunately, for their role in a group.

The Tower of the Samurai brought a new class — the Samurai, a warrior variant who sacrifices defense for damage and uses two handed weapons (the katana and the Butcher’s Cleaver) and an instant-kill ability to slay foes. The instant-kill ability doesn’t fire off nearly enough (once in maybe a dozen fights) to make a difference, and the samurai doesn’t come close to matching a monk’s damage. The class is considered a disappointment by most players.

Just introduced is a new dungeon for low level players. Battlefield Cave is a six floor dungeon for players level 15 and up. It is said to provide an alternate means to find the highly prized Lightning Crest, previously found only at the bottom of the high level Dragon’s Nest. Several of these crests are required to make the second-best warrior sword, the Thunder Blade.

Not all changes have been positive ones. Where previously it was possible for someone to farm lots of candles (required to move in dungeons) and potions and complete a dungeon without heading to the cash shop, the vast damage done by creatures in The Catacombs and the Tower of the Samurai requires multiple cash purchases to complete. And then to find that the rare crafting components only have a small chance to drop from a slot machine at the very bottom of the dungeon after fighting the toughest mobs.

This reached a peak in the Tower of the Samurai, a place so punishing that I couldn’t even spend enough money to finish it (yes, I bought items from the cash shop). After trying unsuccessfully several times to survive the seventh floor, I just gave up and farmed a slot machine on the sixth floor for the items to make the samurai weapons. I may never know what lurks beneath.

The new low level dungeon, Battlefield Cave, is not extremely deep but is very large nonetheless; each level will take full candlepower to fully explore. This continues Namco Bandai’s design to get people returning to the cash shop for more candles, health potions and return flags.

The game desperately needs a healer class. Some way to manage the fights in the high level dungeons without having to buy potions after each battle is absolutely required. Now that the death of the player character means a sudden end to the dungeon and all their progression, the game has become a lot less fun.

I’ve been wanting to write more blog posts, but every time I sit down to write about Minecraft, I end up playing Minecraft, and then it’s suddenly midnight.

If you’ve managed to avoid all the Minecraft hype over the past few weeks, I hope it’s warm and cozy under your rock. The basic premise is, you’re plopped with nothing into the middle of a world that is fully moldable and destructible. At night, The Monsters Come. You must first build some sort of shelter and hide before the sun goes down.

Your only tools are your imagination and the world around you. Lots of other blog posts and guides exist to get you started, so I won’t get into the rules of survival in Minecraft. Instead, I just want to tell just how much this game scratches my Explorer itch. Not since EVE Online, and before that, EverQuest, has a game really been designed around the Explorer, rather than the Killer or Achiever, gaming personalities.

It comes down to this. If you love exploring, Minecraft is your game. If you love leveling up and being rewarded by games for accomplishing pre-determined goals, you won’t.

Wiith the Breen arc ended and the Devidian arc not expected for a few weeks, Cryptic has offered us a new ship (and a lot of smaller updates) to keep us interested. On offer soon is the Nebula-class science ship, a cousin to the famous Galaxy cruiser. I only spent a short time with it on the test realm, but I like the looks of it. Given that, though, I can’t see it replacing my Intrepid refit with the ablative armor. I end up using that armor a lot — especially after setting off a few area effect weapons.

Still, I’ve been cruising the stars in my Galaxy X dreadnought lately, and I imagine I’ll be able to find a spot for its cousin in my hangar. It really depends on the final number of bridge positions open — if I can get a higher rank science officer in, that would make my mind up. Higher rank bridge officer positions are golden.

Bandai Namco’s social RPG Treasure Abyss got an update a couple of days ago. There’s now a fifth dungeon, a dungeon filled with seven floors of undead meant for characters level 30 and up. The experience is good, but the loot is bad — there’s only one spot in the dungeon, on the bottom floor, where the rare component for the new wizard, thief and warrior weapons can be found. That would be the slot machine in the corner — 7s gets you the Hex Stone (thief, wizard), cherries gets you Stainless Steel (warrior), and bells gets you a 50% health potion.

The new wizard staff takes a vast number of hex stones, so I haven’t gotten those yet. The new thief and warrior weapons are above. The increased damage for both weapons over the alternative make them must-haves for those two classes, though thieves pay for their increased ranking on the MVP scale with more aggro. I imagine the wizard staff will be the long-rumored AE staff, which should put wizards high on the meaningless death list once used.

I have a lot of stuff to write about, this is just a quick update. If I can just put Minecraft down for a few minutes, maybe I’ll be able to get to those.

Quick Edit: Namco Bandai just added “Adventurer’s Flags” to the Treasure Abyss cash shop. These allow you to plant a flag in the dungeon so you can return to that point later. Pretty handy for farming Dragon’s Nest, especially the first couple encounters on floor 8 which drop pretty much everything you need for the Giant Sword. Also, the slot machines are a lot faster, and candles now show how much candle power they will restore. Dungeons are markes “CONQUERED” on the map after you have cleared them.

Most Facebook games I just play until I understand them well enough to review them. I did play Frontierville a little longer than I absolutely had to because I wanted to help out friends, but I eventually managed the strength to block the application, ignore everything from that application, and just basically put it away. I went through my Facebook permissions — there were a LOT of apps I knew nothing about with permission to do everything they wanted with my info. I got rid of them all.

You have to be harsh.

Still have Treasure Abyss, though, and all the dozens of people who I’ve befriended just so I can have their characters for my party, and they can have mine for theirs.

Even with the new dungeon, Dragon’s Nest (warning: no dragons were harmed or even used in the making of this dungeon), the game is fairly short. The only real challenge is making the powerful new warrior weapons; they’ve added one, the Giant Sword (a big piece of steel with a giant’s fist still attached), and two previously revealed weapons that only now have become craftable, the Ice Brand and the Thunder Blade. (The wizard equivalents, the Ice Staff and the Thunder Rod, have also become possible to construct).

A little bit of a spoiler: the Ice Crest comes from the slot machine on the ninth floor. The Thunder Crest comes from the slot machine on the tenth floor. When I wrote my last post about TA, I hadn’t yet found them. So after a lot of farming, I’ve made the new weapons, and with the help of a couple neighbors, I snapped a picture of a four warrior party with the four most uber weapons currently available: the Ice Brand, the Thunder Blade, the Giant Sword and the Flametongue.

With the help of Noffin/Michael and a lot of candles, we have figured out that the Thunder Blade is the most powerful of them all.

Since anyone can change to any class at any time merely by equipping the appropriate weapon, it’s instructive to see what classes people choose. When the game launched, there was a good variety of wizards, thieves, warriors and monks. Then all the wizards vanished, and then the thieves, and then the monks. Everyone was a warrior! Now, today, a good third of my neighbors have become monks.

Why? Because after every battle, the game shows you how the DPS ranked up. Monks and warriors vie for first. Wizards and thieves are lucky if they even get one kill.

There was a brief blip in the number of thieves when Namco Bandai announced that thieves would increase the money rewards, but that tapered off because nobody likes seeing themselves at the bottom of the DPS chart, MVP to nobody.

Anyway, with the final dungeon conquered, all that’s left is the slow climb to 50…. but it’s still the best Facebook RPG I’ve played.