Hey everybody,
welcome to my CBT1 Review. Please do not kill me if you’re able to find grammar or spelling mistakes 😉
On the 1st CBT weekend for Cabal2 I switched my whole timezone to PDT, sleeping at the day and testing Cabal2 in the night. The first part was starting at 4am in my timezone and I have to say that the start of the CBT was done well. Even tho I have heard that there was a problem for Windows 8 users who could not take part until a hotfix was released a few hours into the test.
My plans for the CBT were to test the Priest and the Force Shielder as I want to main one of these two on the release of Cabal2, yet I decided to start the first day with a DPS class to be able to compare the killing/leveling speed from a full DPS and the two support classes. I decided to go with the warrior as I prefer heavy armor and, lets be honest guys, he has a frikkin huge sword to swing around! As I wanted to start playing as soon as possible I skipped the whole character creation (well that character was just supposed to be played for the first few hours) he has now the basic warrior look, to bad for him. 😀
The first thing I noticed after I started the game was that the cutscene had their own volumne control and that you could not skip them. (I am always skipping cutscene, I also do never read any quests if possible) After the first fight with in the battlemode and another cutscene my character was standing in front of a tower telling me he wants to be a merc, so people will talk to him.

Sister stolen by white haired evil character into go to train yourself to catch him. Epic story!

Ignoring the quest NPC who was looking at me I instantly started chopping myself through rabbits? and crabs, testing my basic attack and the two skills I had to determine which one was the best. To be honest I ignored the basic attack after the first kill to decide that the basic single target consecutive chain was far more superior than the other skills and the basic attack I did not use any other skills but that chain for the next ~15 level. Why would I, every enemy I had attacked died in three hits.
But lets get back to the massacre of the crab population! Killing the crabs and being level 2 from it I did realize that those enemies were bad XP so I turned around and started with the first quest.
Easy beginner quests to not ask too much out of the noobs we all are. As quests were decent XP gain I sticked on only killing stuff I needed for my quests. A few minutes later I arrived at the first city. I saw a lot of people already riding a mount so I spoke to like any shop NPC I could find to buy one for myself without realizing that big golden blinking button on the right side of my skills. After none of the enemies would be so kind to sell me a mount I took a look around the interface and finally found that blinking button that was telling me there is something new here. A few clicks later I was sitting on my mount riding in the direction of my next quest.

Did you know: Moving your mouse above the quests on the right side would add a target to your map, were to find the things needed for that quest?
Moving the mouse above a finished quest would remove the target from your map!

The first quest I had to read, and because of that I still remember the name, was “A Sticky Situation”. Boy I was lucky to be like one of the first players who got to that quest! A sword every ~10 seconds spawning sword you had to pick up to progress on the quest, I guess most people loved that quests as much as the world chat did ~15 minutes after I finished it.
I loved the fact that the quests did not sent you back to were you picked them up but to the next hub of quest, saving a lot time. A few quests later I was standing on front of the first dungeon of the game and once I got the quest I went for it as fast as possible. As I did not want to looking for a group I decided to try the easymode for the possiblity to solo it. Yep two hitting dungeon mobs worked for me and I got through less than five minutes as I skipped like 95% of the enemies in the dungeon killing only those directly standing in my way. kickthemoutofthepicture.gif
After my first run through I was curious about the diffrence on normalmode to easymode and put myself into the dungeon again. Even with without the EM buff, running through the first instance solo mode in a few minutes was a piece of cake. A few quests later I was able to leave the starting area with two possiblities to choose from.

FYI using the teleport system in zone and from zone to zone is completly free!

As I did not read the story again I went to the crafting Island first, so I decided to take a closer look around!
Four tradeskill professions, four gathering professions with you being able to learn one of them each I decided to go blacksmith and mining first. While “scrolling” through the availible recipes of my blacksmith profession and the costs to learn more recipes I swapped to alchemy and agriculture in a matter of seconds to be able to craft something useful at level 1 of my profession. Talking to the agricultre NPCs about gathering made me really happy: No gathering in this game! GG! (imho extracting is no gathering!) After setting up my production chain I went for the other new area Frey Hilltown!

Entering Frey Hilltown I started doing what I was in the last area, go straight for the quests which were fast and easy to do. After doing some quests at level 14 I suddenly had no more quests but repeatables to do and I thought they did not add any more quests because of the beta, with a tear in my eye I started doing the repeatable quest, a hyper abysmo core quest, and got my level up doing so. The moment my level up was done new quests plopped out and I realized that you can only see those quests which are at your level. Again I went out of quests before reaching level 16 but this time I knew what to do and finished they rest of the level quickly doing that abysmo quest.
After reaching level 16 I decided to finally search for my skill trainer as my skills may have an upgrade availible. I bought upgrades for my current skills as well as a bunch of new skills only to realize that the skill descriptions, sorry for my language, were just shit. (I will come back to this later). So I just added my physical attack buff and my first AoE skill the my hotbar and kept questing. Still killing enemies one by one I was able to progress in a decent speed and just before the server were shut down I was able to hit level 18. With the end of the CBT I decided to hit my bed as it was already 9am and the next test would start in only 12 hours!