SubscribeFirst, I’d like to correct something from my last post, there was a 3rd thing that was good about Perfect World: The piggy emoticons. In-game you could use emoticons in chat, and you could buy a speaker that let you use different emoticons. One of them was the piggies.
Anyway, gotta start this shit off with the gay theme song again.
Step into a not so Perfect World (2/3)
Elf Priest Chicks… Their chest is like a soft pillow
I played an Elf Priest on Perfect World. I had just come from Rappelz and felt like playing a mage-type character again, preferably one who didn’t suck as bad as the Dark Magician. There was the Human Mage, Elf Priest, and Werefox to choose from. Mages and Werefoxes didn’t start with flying capabilities, also Werefoxes are fucking furries, so I picked the Elf Priest. Also Elf Priests are hot and their chest looks like a soft pillow. Hot elf chicks are why I played Lineage 2 for so long. I don’t even remember anything about Lineage 2 to any great detail except that I was an elf chick and also probably something faggoty like a Plainswalk-…
…WhatTheHellAmIDoingThinkAboutSchneizelInstead.
Perfect World has 4 stats, Str/Int/Agi/Con, and the different equipment types required you to have certain stat amounts to equip shit. Like all of the magic gear, the robes and magic weapons, had low Str/higher Int requirements. It worked out that you had to put 1 Str every 2 levels or someshit to equip mage equipment. At first I was building my Priest to have minimum Str and Int needed for equipment with the rest in Con because that raises your HP and shit and Priests are like lolsupporters. Although accessories (rings/necklaces/belts) didn’t have stat requirements so you could always wear those for a stat boost.
At one time I used stat reset items to make myself a light armor priest, which required Str/Agi and then you have a nice crit % since Agi gives crit % and you do okay damage and physical shit doesn’t beat you up as much. Most mobs in this game, when you get higher level anyway, have both a long range attack -- either magical or physical -- which they use when you attack them from long range, or a close range physical attack they use if you’re too close to them. The way it worked out, light armor was actually better for a while in the beginning of the game when most mobs just used physical attacks, then magic robes became better when mobs would start responding to your magical attacks with their own magical attacks.
Leveling and equipment appearance was pretty lame in this game. See not all of the equipment pieces can be equipped right when you hit level [y]. When you hit level 50, you put on the Tortlen Eido top, but you need to be level 53 to put on the Tortlen Eido skirt. You’re probably wearing the dumb Lv 43 purple mini skirt, or the red mini skirt from the military ranking equipment. Shit is mismatching and looks dumb. Alternatively you could wear fashion gear, but fashion gear always came in a random color from the cash shop and finding a matching outfit was tough shit. The color dyes weren’t implemented until way later, and those also came random from the cash shop. 
Anyway, lets go over the AWESOME SKILL TREE and I will explain the “uses” and “practicality” of the skills along the way. The skills in theory don’t really sound bad but it’s always a different story when you actually play. I fucking hated this skill tree because I felt like I was always being fucked for SP because every other skill and its mom are important/wanted by party members or are just useful in someway. Meanwhile, turboether, who made a Werefox, found himself with massive amounts of SP and nothing to spend it on. 
Pure Heart Spell: -9001/10. Shittiest healing spell ever. You know I never knew the difference between the cast delay and the cast time because the documentation for this game sucks, but it made this spell total shit. It took too long to use. Oh, and it’s your starting heal spell too so like if you have no clue that it sucks, you just use it and think, “Welp, I guess this is how you heal in this game D:” and you level it because all of the guides for this game are in Engrish and/or use different terminology.
Whisht Heart Spell: So this spell, you get Lv 1 of it at character Lv 6, and it’s like your main healing spell. Whisht is a heal over time that casts in 1/3rd of Pure Heart’s casting time, but what the game doesn’t tell you is that Whisht stacks, so later on you discover that being a healer in this game for a boss or whatever is stacking a few heavy coins on your Whisht hotkey then falling asleep at your computer.
Sapience Pour: A less restorative but quicker version of Pure Heart. Typically you go back and forth between casting this and Whisht at lower levels until you discover that Whisht stacks. Still it’s a quicker “spike” heal than Pure Heart Shit.
Resurrection: You get level 10 of this or your party members kill you. Raising the level lessens how much EXP you lose when you die. Who cares if you have other things to level!
Purify Spell: Purify is a status effect removal spell that starts at 12 sec cool down and the cool down gets shorter when you level it so its kind of like Resurrection where at lower levels everyone and their mom will speak like they expect you to have level jesus christ of it even though you have 80 billion other spells to get. The most vivid memories I have of this spell are using it while killing Dracon (he pdef debuffs the tank) because I killed Dracon so many fucking times because he’s the first “OH MY GOD WE’RE DYING WE’RE DYING HOLY FUCK” field boss you’re given a quest for so while running my guild all of the lowbies were like “;_; I need pt for Dracon ;_;” and if you don’t help them they go ragequit your guild. So.
Chromatic Healing Beam: Hey so this spell is pretty cool its an AoE heal… but it takes longer to cast than Pure Heart so when you start casting it to save people they’ll all probably run out of range before its done casting! 
The range goes up when you level it, but it’s not very high on the “must level” list and it also kind of costs like a billion MP or so.
River of Rejuvenation: This spell is like, “Pure Heart on crack combined with Whisht Heart, also on crack”. It does a huge spike heal then adds a heal over time. It sounds awesome but like, it has a fairly long cast time, and the heal over time amount is set based on the level (Whisht’s is a set amount + a % of your own HP). Also you get level 1 of this skill on level 49. Whisht maxes out on level 51. Whisht, by then, will have a much better range and sometimes you need the long ass range for healing due to how large boss AoE’s are. Also the cast time kinda blows if someone is constantly taking damage.
Extremity Recovery Array: See my last post. Fucking AoE parties.
The Four Buffs: Elf Priests get 4 buff spells for Pdef, Mdef, Matk, and HP/MP regen. All of them except the HP/MP regen are pretty useful and the regen one is maxed like dead last. People who say that the regen one makes a remote difference must not have actually tried testing if that shit actually had any effect or not, and just assume it does because the skill description saaaid so. After you get the max level of the buffs, 3 levels later you get an AoE version of the Lv 10 buffs which last a whole hour which saves you time/effort from re-casting them over and over (the single target versions only last 30mins).
But there was some fucking dumb glitch with the Aoe Mdef buff and few people ever believed me about this even though I managed to catch the occurrence of the AoE Mdef buff wearing out before the other buffs on Fraps. If you sat around doing nothing, it wouldn’t wear off, but if you were constantly fighting shit it would wear off early and unlike Whisht Heart, which stacks, buff timers wouldn’t stack so if you’re some freakishly anal person this game would drive you insane from constantly mistimed buffs. Also the party bar would block which buffs the party members have, so you’d never really know by default when the AoE Mdef buff wore off until someone told you or unless you were meticulously selecting each toon and looking for the icon on the longer buff bar under their name.
Oh, and the AoE versions are actually the developers trolling you. See at Lv 89 you do a cultivation to become enlightened/holy or become an evil demon thing (this adds a sparkly holy fairy or a red sprite thing that hangs out with your character), and all Lv 10 spells you have change based on which you picked. The AoE buffs don’t change at all, but all of the single target buffs do. Like on the HP/MP regen buff, the Holy version adds an additional HP heal over time, and the Dark version adds an additional MP heal over time after casting it. So when you hit 89, and then go find the holy/dark spell books to upgrade your spells into whatever you picked, you now might have a use for those spells you thought you could ditch off your hotkey bar like 30-some levels ago. Fucking 234234jksdf.
Heaven’s Array: Works similar to recovery array, you can’t move, blah blah. It doubles your equipment’s contribution to your attack and magic power ratings, and also raises spell casting speed and attack speed by 20%. It also has a larger range than Recovery Array. Heaven’s Array is pretty cool and I have nothing bad to say about it unlike maybe 90% of this list. Zephyr however could complain a shitstorm about this spell because he found it made his mage too powerful and he’d frequently take aggro and then die. 
Maybe I have nothing bad to say about this because I’m an asshole and Zephyr suffering is very fabulous since he is a lazy fuck who QC’s a lot of nothing. I told that fag to go QC TotA 11 like 3hrs ago, and does he? Nope.
Flying Mastery: This skill would raise your flight speed, but only when you wear the newbie, starter wings. So if you bought cash shop wings because they looked different/cool or seemed faster, you were actually not getting something faster. When I played, the white starter wings + Lv 10 flying mastery was all of 1.0 faster than the most expensive cash shop wings.
Plume Quill and Cyclone: Plume Quill was the generic mage spam spell you come out of the box with at level 1. The damage was considered physical, so you’d use it against mobs who had magic resistance, or other mages who wore mage robes. Cyclone was it’s magical metal damage spam spell buddy that you got at level 3. (By the way, Perfect World used Chinese elements and the metal element in this game is what we’d equate to wind/lightning in other games.) You’d cycle between using Plume Quill and Cyclone due to the cool down on both. Cyclone also had a debuff to reduce movement speed which wasn’t that bad to begin with but later on when most mobs responded to you with magic and they’d stay in a static position, a movespeed debuff kind of loses its usefulness in PvE. It’d be okay in PvP if it weren’t for there being potions that blocked movement impairing debuffs and warriors had some skill that did this or whatever. Anyway who gives a fuck you were probably using it for damage~
Feather Razors: This is some physical damage AoE and I never found a use for it because I was rarely aggroing multiple things at once.
Plume Barrier: More realistically, this should be called the “BUY MP HIEROGRAMS FROM THE CASH SHOP” skill. Plume Barrier decreased physical damage done to you, but takes off MP in lieu of the damage. At Lv 1, it’s -53% damage, 2.0 MP per damage. At Lv 10, it’s -80% damage, 1.1 MP per damage. This is a useful skill but the MP loss is pretty big making it a skill that advertises MP hierograms. Oh, and hierograms don’t work in duels, so using this in a proper invitational count down duel was like something you do when you don’t want to have MP to cast spells at your opponent.
The Pdef and Mdef Debuffs: Fuck these debuffs I never saw a difference in my damage when I used them. I maxed them both too. 
The Paralyze and Sleep Debuffs: You know, fuck these too. They sounded so useful at first. These 2 have side effects like halved magic damage and reduced movement speed, respectively, and their duration is unreliable. The paralyze one has a “max” effect time of 16 sec, and the sleep one has a “max” effect time of 33 sec. “Max” as in, any number in between 1 and the max = Randomly how long the status effect will work. The side-effects on the other hand last for like 6 and 15 sec respectively. I used to wonder if maybe the effects had a minimum duration time equal to how long the debuff side effect lasted on you, but one day I used Five Hue on Zephyr and it stayed on for like 2 sec while I still had the movespeed debuff. So the side effects will stay on you unless go dark cultivation at 89 so the side effects don’t occur, regardless of the fact that your paralysis or sleep effect might last all of 1 sec. Fuck that shit.
Thunder Sphere: A 15sec metal DoT. There’s no plain damage at the start, its pure DoT. If you take longer than 15sec to kill something, it won’t do full damage. It doesn’t grow off your equipment stats like all of the other magic spells do, so once it hits level 10 its reached its damage potential. Shitsux. However it did look cool and since our guild was called Sphere I felt compelled to max this.
Hurricane Blast: An AoE that does damage and causes Paralyze for 3sec. This might sound useful… But it consumes 1 fury point. Fury is this game machine, you have a yellow bar and it builds vigor. Every 100 vigor = 1 fury, and your fury point(s) were represented by glowing red sphere of doom to the right of your vigor bar. There are better uses for vigor/fury than this spell. Purify Spell and Plume Barrier, in example, both consumed vigor. The cast range is dumb. I recall you have to be very close to something, and then it’ll hit whatever is in a small area around your target. In any other MMORPG, “paralyze shit around you for 3sec” might sound like a good opportunity to cast this and run away then start casting something else (or just run), but Perfect World has a chant time, which was this delay time in between when you hit the skill button and when the cast bar actually pops up, so “paralyze for 3sec” doesn’t really buy you any time. Also the damage worked like Thunder Sphere’s, so once it’s level 10, it hits max potential.
Thunder Wield: Thunder Wield was cool because it was a higher damage spell than Plume and Cyclone! But because of the cast time and cool down, it was one of those “opening attack” things. Also it looks like Force Lightning which is pretty cool, imo. (When I played KotoR, I went Sith so I could use Force Lightning.)
Galactic Storm: The big AoE metal nuke thing. ULTIMATE SPELL, etc. Consumes 2 fury, does lots of damage, debuffs movespeed (no one really cares about that but I’m adding it on because its not necessarily bad). Galactic Storm was pretty cool and I remember using one of those temporary cast speed potions then using Storm during a territory war and a bunch of people in the Spanish guild we were fighting got 1hko’ed and I was like, “Hurr I think I like this spell! 8D Oh wait people in my party are dying because I’m killing people instead of healing them. D:” and then I realized that casting this was probably a bad idea and after that I never really understood what the use was for except maybe picking off lowbies in an AoE and/or showing off something flashy.
tl;dr = If you hit your Thunder Wield, Plume Quill, Cyclone, and Whisht Heart buttons, with an occasional Purify Spell or two because those monsters have stacking poison DoT’s, you were pretty good.
In part 3, running a guild on this game. Actually maybe part 3 is coming never because being reminded of our FUN TIMES in Sphere on Perfect World is like this gigantic headache.
