Just finished listening in on the Spellborn dev chat/’webinar’. Lots of interesting discussion, some of which is after the break.

While the devs were talking, I was programming. I went through everything on the Acclaim website, trying to figure out what combination of memberships, terms of subscription, and quantities of coin bought would combine to form the cheapest monthly cost?

They will be, at some point, adding a set price of $15/month (for now, possibly rising to $18/month when they end the introductory price), but I thought we could get it cheaper.

I’ve plugged all the numbers into the equations, exhaustively tried all the combinations, and the cheapest (in the long run) way to get coins is to buy a Silver membership for $10. This gives you a 30% discount on Coins purchases for a month, but you only need it for one purchase. Buy 10050 coins for $70 (with the 30% discount). This nets you 11555 coins with the bonus coins, or 13060 coins with double bonus coins when they run that promotion.

A 180 day premium Spellborn subscription costs 7800 coins (for now). That will cost you $13.33/month if you play for that term and then never play again. You’ll have enough coins left over for two more months (at 1500 coins/month). So 180 days plus two times 30 day premium subscriptions — eight months total — comes to $10/month on the nose. If you bought your coin during a Double Bonus Coin weekend, you can squeeze an extra month out for $8.89/month — and that’s not bad.

Or, you could just pay the $15/month when they offer that option.

The Webinar software let us see El (Spellborn Lead Designer) Drijver’s computer, and he casually dragged several sets of new armor onto it for us. I was pretty darn quick on the Print Screen button, and got pictures of them all to share. All of them are, I believe, High House specific armors. The black set is for House Shroud, and I don’t know about the silver and the red sets. Click on the pictures for a slightly larger look.

Full dev chat transcript (the typed portion, anyway) after the break.
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The second round of closed beta has begun, all the old characters were wiped away (well, at least mine were), so I started up a new mage and brought her through level 5 so that she could become a Void Seer.

Void Seers were, I thought, going to be pretty close to a basic healer. This isn’t the case — not at level 5, anyway. The only heals she has are the heals all mages get (and every class gets some kind of heal, even if it’s self only). Mage heals are curses placed on a monster, and when that monster gets hit with melee, ranged, or magic (depending on the curse), the group gets healed. To heal in Spellborn, you don’t spam the “more healing” button. You attack more.

After I posted about the Skinshifter, which included a video where my character circle strafed a lot to avoid a mob’s special attacks while positioning myself to deliver powerful flanking and rear attacks, a lot of people decided that Chronicles of Spellborn required too many twitch skills to play.

That’s going to be true — if you play a rogue. Warriors and spellcasters play different ways.

Mages, in particular, only need to move to avoid AEs and lingering damage attacks, like poison. No matter what your class is, if you see a monster pausing to use a special attack, you’re going to want to step to the side or something.

Nonetheless, I went into the game tonight to show just how little you really need to move, as a mage. Here’s my level 3 mage taking on a level 4 boar — and ending the fight with nearly full health. Watch.

I was killing for a quest in the boar fields behind the lumber yard — and this is not a good place to fight. Adds everywhere. Stuff just kept adding to this one fight. By the end of it, I’d killed five boars and one bear — and ended the fight at full health. I did move around a little to keep everything in front of me and bunched together for my AEs, but nothing really twitchy. Click on the picture for the full, unaltered, screen shot.

So those people who insist the only way to play is to move about madly? They’re scaring you. You DO have to move out of the way of special attacks, especially out of the newbie fields when monsters begin to use all the special abilities YOU have. But you don’t have to always be moving; just generally be aware of what the mobs are doing and don’t let them get behind you, and you’ll be fine. Moving all the time is going to interfere with your ability to build and manage your combos, and combos are key to survival, so ask yourself — how much are you really getting from running around?

Anyway. The Void Seer.

Every discipline gets special “body slot” abilities — the class-defining abilities. For the Rune Mage, these are special glowing tattoos that can be pulled from your skin and tossed on the ground. For the Ancestral Mage, these are your pets. For the Void Seer, these are special attacks.

The Rune Mage is the AE mage. The Ancestral Mage is the pet mage. The Void Seer is the DPS mage (as near as I can tell). I haven’t particularly seen anything at level 5 which suggests they are the best healers, but from what I understand, mages in general have decent heals, so while some later abilities may give them a healing edge, you’ll be able to make do with another sort of mage in your group — plus, the warrior classes have various ways to help keep their groups alive.

The first bodyslot ability Void Seers get is Cyclone. This makes their next eight melee attacks strike with far more force. Combine that with the ability that heals the group whenever you hit the cursed mob, and you can see why Void Seers won’t be stepping out of the melee to heal from afar. They are going to be right in it.

I bought two of them so I’d always have one ready. My only objection with Cyclone is that stuff dies too fast to get decent healing from killing it. That will change, I know.

Having played Skinshifter, Rune Mage and Void Seer thus far, I’m still no closer to deciding what class I’ll play when TCoS goes live. I kind of want to go back to the Rune Mage, because I’ve figured out how to build my skill deck now, and think I’ll do a lot better now. But I want to try out a warrior class, and I think I would like to see what the Ancestral Mage brings.

Warrior next, though. For one, I’d like to see if they have to strafe to live, or if, like the mages, they have enough built-in healing to take a beating and survive to give better than they got.

This isn’t going to be a new player’s preview to the Chronicles of Spellborn — you can find links to that sort of information after this post that point to my experiences playing on the EU servers prior to the Acclaim closed beta, or take a look at Dragonchasers’ excellent initial impressions.

On the EU servers, I played a Rune Mage. My special power: Special tattoos that could be triggered to cause explosions. Rune mages are the EQ2 warlocks (or WoW frost mages) of Spellborn, and since many of my damage spells also triggered instant heals or heals over time, I felt very comfortable mostly tanking things, moving only to get out of enemy AOEs, but mostly just building and executing combos through the skill deck.

I got lambasted in a comment on Youtube when I posted a movie of my mage just kinda standing around, tanking while casting spells (which worked FINE for me). They said I should move around more (but why!?) When the Acclaim beta came around, I decided I’d try a melee class that moved around more, so I could experience that kind of play.

I decided to try the Skinshifter, one of the rogue disciplines.

While I was creating the character, I figured I might as well be really daring, and try out one of the non-human Daevi. They play identically to humans but are somewhat taller, and they have hooves. I expected most people to be playing humans, but I did see a fair number of other Daevi about.

One of the issues with Spellborn is that you really can’t approach the game cold. From the very first time you level, you’re asked to divide skill points between “Mind”, “Body”, and “Focus”, without any clear indicator of which is best. The discipline you pick at level five will draw power from one of these, but if you have not looked ahead and already chosen a discipline, you might have points spent without much benefit to you in the long run.

This is the largest issue I had with both the Rune Mage and the Skinshifter — I had to make decisions pretty much from the start on how I would play each class. I knew I would want to AE tank on my Rune Mage, so I had to invest in the kinds of spells that also healed, and the kind of spells that would trigger those heals, and AEs. I could have brought the mage in a totally different direction, but I figured out soon enough what I wanted.

For the Skinshifter, I wanted a character that could pull from extreme range and have the monster hurting before it came close enough to hurt back. Then have some debuffs and finally a nice selection of fast and positional attacks all on one ring of the skill deck, because I knew I’d be moving around a lot more with the rogue.

Here’s a video of my char fighting a bear and moving around some. I was able to figure out later how to keep multiple mobs in each other’s way so I would take even less damage, which is kind of neat. I mapped movement left and right on the skill deck to the mouse wheel, so I wouldn’t have to take my hand off the movement keys to select a column. I pull on the right column, drop to the middle column for my two Distract debuffs, and then spend the rest of the fight on the left column. On longer fights, I move back occasionally to the middle column, but one of my Distracts roots me for a second, so that skill is going to be replaced.

By the end of the day, I was able to go four or five fights without resting, which is better than my mage was able to do. Some of the players in the beta claimed they never took damage. Well, I’m just not quite that good.

At level 5, I was invited to visit the academy in Hawksmouth City and choose a Discipline. I’d known from the start that this character would be a Skinshifter — someone who could go where nobody else could go, someone who just has to see what’s over that next hill, or in that Ousted tent. They change form to move around freely.

My first two Crystal Mazes — the mystic devices which shift your skin — were for a Wolf and one of the enemy Ousted.

As a wolf, no animal bothers me. I can dance with the wolves, doze with the dodos, hang with the hogs, whatever — none of them mind having me around in the least. Run right through the forests instead of sticking to the roads? You bet!

The Hawksmouth City guards don’t like wolves that much, it turns out. Not too much. Luckily, after they hit me once, I automatically shifted back to my Daevi form, and they were okay with that. That didn’t work so well when I stumbled upon a group of Ousted. They don’t like wolves AND they don’t like normal Hawksmouth citizens much, either. That particular misstep was my only death of morning, and dropped my PEP from 2 to 1 :(

If I’d remembered to hit the Ousted crystal maze instead of trying to run, I’d have been fine. I may not look too pleasant as an Ousted, but I can walk right into the center of any Ousted camp, give the secret sign and just be one of the guys.

I can’t attack them, though. You can’t attack things or use any ability (can’t even learn a new skill!) while shifted.

The Skinshifter wasn’t quite what I expected. I was very much looking forward to appearing to be someone’s friend, then stabbing them in the back while people looked on, wondering why their friend was going berserk. As it is now, I can walk into an Ousted camp, but if I want to attack them, I have to go hide somewhere, shift back to normal form, and attack like any other class.

That said, I might still take another look at the class in the live game. But for now, I’m going to move on to my next selection: The Void Seer. As close as the game gets to a pure healer.

From Acclaim’s Community Manager, Historian, comes this news via Twitter:

The Official Spellborn Download for Acclaim is up on our forums.

… and when asked if those accepted into the beta test would know by checking their account status at the Acclaim site, or if there would be an email, replied:

most likely checking your status will be faster than the email.. but If I get word people have been activated I will post it.

So there you have it. Spellborn is finally going live in the US. See you in the Deadspell Storm… if I get into the beta, and the NDA (if any) lets me post about it.