<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Due to the recent drought of good games, I went back and play Phantasy Star Online. After playing Altima (Newman Hunter) to level 58 it becomes painfully obvious that this game confused challenging with instant kill cheese. I'm now at Very Hard Ruins where I can kill just about everything under 2 comboes with virtually no risk except against sniping Dark Gunners (e.g. 3 Dark Gunners while fighting 3 Delsabers), and then there's a big dead end at the last boss. The spikes hit for 116 damage and is not effected by evade or defense, and I don't think they're elemental damage either. They tend to stun lock so if you get hit at all you're probably dead. With 999 attack power and a 35% Varista I still can't shoot down all the Spikes every time, which means if I ever get frozen I'm dead for sure (I might escape from a stun lock, but it's impossible to dodge the spikes if you're frozen), and State/Maintenance isn't exactly an easy item to find. The blue rain of doom does somewhere around 400 damage of unknown elemental but my resists are 20s across the board which is about as high as they go until you can equip some of the level 70ish armors. The blue gatling gun attack rotates the camera so that you can't see where the hell you're going and you must have a running start to even have a chance to dodge that. Never got far enough to get hit by a Grants, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to do more than the blue rain. The swipe attacks does about 400 points of physical damage too. I'm pretty sure there are classes with less HP than I do, and I wonder how they're supposed to survive these attacks at all. Yeah yeah, you say play online, sure, that'll work. It's not like he has that much HP. It takes under 30 seconds to kill him when I got my invinicibility on. As long as someone else ate up the instant kill attacks and that someone can survive the Grants, it shouldn't be that hard. But is that really teamwork? "Instant attack #1 coming, someone eat this up and Reverser him" is teamwork? I'm not seeing why I'd need anyone's help consider I'm killing everything in under two combos with a 30% Calibur, and that's usually the entire wave too. So a Force can cast Shifta level 15, I can cast Shifta level 12, a whole difference of 3%. I don't need Resta or Deband when things go down in two combos and I can always get two combos off on a full bar, and then heal before the next wave arrives. Rangers have Shotguns, yeah, but if I actually get a Spread Needle I'll still do more damage with it then the Ranger will, and until then I'll be content with 2 combos taking out a wave instead of one. Speaking of which, what's the point of evade if it never works on anything? I can't remember the last time I evaded something that's not a Claws and I can get my evade to 600+ pretty easily, and if you need like 800 evade to just evade things, why even have that stat at all? Ra series spell top out at 200 damage at most not counting resistances, which is barely more than my standard swing. It's exactly like Diablo 2. If I'm stupid and don't know how to play my class, then yeah conceivably I can derive some benefit from teamwork, but I've been killing stuff in the Ruins since about level 45 within 2 combos using pretty generic stuff (started with a Gunguir 20%, then Brionac 30%, and now a Calibur 30%). Yeah the online experience is supposed to be more than killing stuff in the fastest time and all that good stuff, but I find it hard to justify to play cooperatively when I can kill just as fast by myself. To make a game where cooperative play is meaningful it'd have to be literally suicidal for single player, and that's just not happening, except on the boss, which is just instant kill cheese.
Online RPGs have a long way to go before cooperative play is meaningful. This is not so much as against PSO in particular but to Online RPGs in general. I'm sorry but I can't just pretend I didn't know how to slaughter the enemy in two rounds and get impressed by 'teamwork' that does the same thing I could've done on my own. And I don't see PSO's approach with instant kills as a good way to remedy this problem, as it just adds frustration. I've been saying this for a while, but what RPG needs is better AI, that the boss doesn't need to have attacks that kill you before you have a chance to do anything to be challenging if they actually have a brain.
PSO is a decent Diablo clone for offline. The Ruins is a very well designed level, though the other levels aren't exactly impressive. But online, I don't see any real reason to play together, other than having more targets to eat up instant kill attacks on bosses.</div>
Online RPGs have a long way to go before cooperative play is meaningful. This is not so much as against PSO in particular but to Online RPGs in general. I'm sorry but I can't just pretend I didn't know how to slaughter the enemy in two rounds and get impressed by 'teamwork' that does the same thing I could've done on my own. And I don't see PSO's approach with instant kills as a good way to remedy this problem, as it just adds frustration. I've been saying this for a while, but what RPG needs is better AI, that the boss doesn't need to have attacks that kill you before you have a chance to do anything to be challenging if they actually have a brain.
PSO is a decent Diablo clone for offline. The Ruins is a very well designed level, though the other levels aren't exactly impressive. But online, I don't see any real reason to play together, other than having more targets to eat up instant kill attacks on bosses.</div>
