Phantom Roxas

Happy to see this new forum. There was a lot of foreboding over YCM being on its last legs, and while I imagine the site will be back up sooner or later, I can't say I blame everyone for migrating over here.

For those of you who know me, I'm hoping to not bring over any baggage from YCM. For a while, I was of the mind that I only really wanted to stay for the GCRP, and while I am determined to see that through to the end - assuming it can be salvaged on here somehow - I realize that I had retreated into only a couple of sections on YCM, and hardly for the better. Maybe I'm being nostalgic for an era that never truly happened as I would love to remember it had, but the Card Maker community has always been something of an online home for me. Mostly I just want to grow back into it and be happy here, rather than wallowing in bitter anger and regret.

Here's to a new beginning, everyone. I know "New Year, new me" is silly and all, but if that can be the case for NCM as a whole, I might as well see if that can hold true for myself.

I'm loving the Mining and Smithing rework. The skills have needed this, and I think it does wonders for bring all the equipment in line. While I know people decry the game as "MeleeScape" (And with good reason), as a melee player myself, this is incredibly satisfying. I'm pretty bad at PvM, and have never really felt much of an incentive to raise my combat skills or get Malevolent Armor, but the Masterwork looks like the definitive armor for my style. The rework is certainly great for QOL, but that armor does offer one of the best incentives I've seen to actually train these skills.

They've mentioned they'll also be reworking Firemaking, and while I'm not as excited for that - especially since I already have 99 Firemaking - that skill has long needed its own rework, and they've mentioned that the rework should make the balloon network worth using. I'm a little curious how that will pan out, but I'm optimistic.

My main frustration with the game has been the serious lack of quests over the past few years. I like the Sixth Age, and Sliske is easily one of my favorite villains of all time, but it made the quests feel like they're either going to be pieces of a story that will invariably be required for a Grandmaster, or rather bland Novice quests. I'm interested where the Dragonkin storyline will go next, and they say they'll be making some changes so quests are easier to produce, so I hope that turns out to be the case. They've been bleeding too many JMods, and the teams they have left have been stretched too thin, but the M&S rework was one of their largest projects in a while, so hopefully finishing this rework means that those JMods now have more freedom to work on other projects.