In one sense I do agree with Stillkeeping, but I am 110% for twinking though.. And think that it's still awesome to do.. And amazes me how much effort can be put into twinking (and the really insane twinks, that takes skill..)
However I want funcom to come up with something that makes it possible to level consistently without twinking too hard.. It's really hard to get above the 60 mark for new players who can't understand the system really well... And if you're new to games in general and hit that brick wall of Anarchy, you'll have a really hard time figuring that out on your own.
But there's actually a few things I like more than preparing my toon for a hard long session of levelling... I remember tweaking my toons at 105ish to give ely hecklers a real go, and I enjoyed that so much... Even if it would be hours upon hours of hecklers, I would prefere that over Kiting any day.
Y'know at 100ish the hecklers are so damn hard, even if you twink pretty nicely... And after a good while when you start reaching 140 you see that you can start to solo them, that feeling was awesome:P Hecklers were so powerful.. Now they are just **** on with 220's tanking and an NT nuking in Ely.
And even if it was really hard for first timers to achieve that, it didn't matter if you had 1-2 semi twinked players in the team a team could always manage to level... That is a good AO to me.
Today after Nascense hecklers, what do people use to level on? Mainly Mortiigs in Ely, it's hard to find teams for this at least on RK2. And furthermore, what about when you hit 105 on mortiigs. Ely beach stands empty, and no one around... You want to kill hecklers, but you have to pay 5m/lvl because some NT is running a business there... Is this right? How is he supposed to level?
I also miss RK hackers and 8x8... As Notcrattey's signature says, give RK mobs better xp, and make RK matter again.
RK is lovely because you can use a weapon that has rubbish min damage... Makes weapon selection easy, enfs can use tango dirks, advs can us BBI's.. In general stuff that's easily obtainable and deals nice damage. Ofcourse this too has to be tweaked on, or you won't do as much damage as the next guy who did! But that my dear friends, is the lovely uniqueness of AO...
And I love that, I love to be that rock... That when I level my teammates don't have to be uber, or twinked.. Because I am that rock that carries it
Reason I'm so worked up about this lately, is my younger brother started playing and... I see how really inconvenient it is to get "into" AO... We're currently doing ely hecks, where I'm logging 220 doc/220 enf 220 crat for perks and 160 NT to nuke.. So I fill all roles. Before I intervened, he never managed to get above 70 or so. Because his weapons were just horrid, he had very bad implants and what not.. And most important he didn't know how he could manipulate stats and interfere with skills Which left him very weak.
So my stand: Twinking is awesome, and makes AO very unique.
Seeing draining disapear for traders (will be level based drains) and such would be horrible. I just hope they let wrangle stay the way it is now. But as I sated give new equipment to new players that will do a good job levelling, but make sure that the ones that want to twink into something always get an better alternative. This should be doable.