Ridiculously, my hands are still messed up >_< So I've been unable to play any games for the past few months, or even use my computer much in general.. after trying a whole wack of ideas to improve them, including rest, wrist braces, acupuncture, vitamin b6 supplements, yoga with a wii fit, cutting out caffeine and seeing a chiropractor.. in the past two weeks they've finally started improving some, and I'm hoping after another month or two they'll be good as new.
Despite all that, I got to have my first few steps in Aion last night, as my girl friend bought the game and I finally got to play around with it some. After waiting since February for the game it was nice to experience it for a little while, even if I won't really be able to play it for another couple months. So what is my initial impression?
The aspect of the game I anticipated disliking the most, human only characters, actually seems not to bad after playing around with their customization features; it's incredibly detailed and you actually can make your character look like an elf, dwarf, dark elf or hobbit if you wanted; I was worried I wouldn't be able to create a character I would like but that seems it won't be an issue after all.. though I worry about other users getting a little too creative and having too many bizarre looking characters roaming the world.
Upon actually stepping foot in the game, my first thought was, Smooth!, everything is sooo smooth! Having last played Warhammer, I am so appreciative of the responsive controls, a working UI, and an impressive graphics engine that doen't lag. The gameplay in Aion is just leagues ahead of Warhammer. How much fun Aion still is after a few months remains to be seen, but so far I am very impressed.
Unfortunately that's about all I got to experience for now, character creation and some brief time in the starting area; and some of my friends are already 20+ on Lumiel! Hopefully in a few months my hands finally heal and I can start playing and writing on my blog more, but for now its back to mostly quiet on here and waiting...
I finally decided to signup for a Twitter account... and so far I really like it =)
I plan to use Twitter as a micro-blogging service, when I don't feel like writing a full post but just want to share a few quick thoughts, and since I'll mostly be talking about MMOs, gaming and other related topics, I decided to add it to my blog.
One thing that bothers me about newer MMOs is they are all designed to have an endpoint, like a single player RPG. The world gets built around an endpoint the developer creates; and zones, quests and gear all get based around it.
Players view the endpoint from a gear pointof view usually, it's all about the gear, and when you have the best gear you've reached the endpoint. Unfortunately once you do it almost feels like the game's over. There is nothing left to do. You have the best gear you can get! So you become bored. The developers know this will happen, so what do they do? They define a new endpoint and update the game, adding new content and gear focused on the new endpoint. And then everything is exciting again until you reach that endpoint. So they create another endpoint, and so on and so on..
I am not a fan of this design at all, it's just a gear treadmill you get tricked into repeating over and over. There must be an alternative? A better way? Perhaps...
Items and Gear First, gear needs to stop being used as a carrot to force players to do things. Too much gear just gets handed out because of that damn carrot mentality. The more special gear that gets handed to you, the less special each piece seems - so lets tone down the amount of gear handed out for carrots.
Next, crafting needs to be the main source of special gear players want. Special gear shouldn't drop nearly as much in the game world, instead players should turn to crafters for their gear. This promotes a better economy and features like auction houses and player shops. It also puts more emphasis on crafting recipes and special metals, gems and other materials. All this helps to make tradeskills an important part of the game, which is a good thing.
So if the best special gear is made by crafters, what do raid bosses and other epic encounters reward players with? Welcome to your introduction to Artifacts.
What is an Artifact? Artifacts are the best gear available in the game, always better than any special gear that can be found or crafted in the world. But with great power comes great restrictions, and Artifacts need at least two - the first is they should be unique items, not unique-equipped but actually unique, only one of each Artifact exists in the game world; the second is Artifacts should be temporary items with a one week duration, after which they are destroyed and reset to their loading spot to be found by another player.
Benefits from Artifacts The first benefit is that the "Best set of gear" endpoint vanishes. It's gone! Players will never have the best gear because Artifacts always trump their special gear, and Artifacts only last one week and are rare because they are each unique. This setup allows players to have a good set of special gear, but to always be working towards a better set with Artifacts, but never reaching it and becoming bored.
The second benefit is crafting never becomes useless due to overpowered sets being introduced by new raid bosses - raid bosses drop Artifacts, not special gear, and those Artifacts are temporary. So players will always need special gear, even with their Artifacts, which keeps crafters always in demand.
PvP and Artifacts How would Artifacts factor into PvP? Easy - they need to be lootable from your victim's corpse! This may sound crazy to some people at first, especially ex-WoW players who spend weeks or even months raiding to earn their "Best set" and may scream at the thought of losing it so easily.
But rather then thinking of how this may work in WoW or another gear treadmill game, imagine how it would work in a world where special gear is fairly easy to come by, and you're instead focused on the Artifacts. Now imagine there is around 1,000 different Artifacts available in the game and you're playing with about 5,000 players online. And looting only affects Artifacts, not your special gear or coins or other items.
How might this play out? When you kill someone it would surely be exciting to see what Artifacts you may have just received. And when you die you still have your special gear and other items so its not too harsh; you can get back into the action quickly. Really this just adds more reasons to want to kill and stay alive, which are both good - PvP needs purpose!
Personally I would love to play in such a setting. Anyone else with me, or am i way out in left field? =p
Well, I think I am done with Warhammer. My hand is still messed up (though improving!), so I can't play yet, but having not logged in to war for over a month I don't miss it. So what better time then now to take a look back at the journey =)
The Early Days I followed Warhammer Online since the very day it was announced. In the beginning I was extremely excited, convinced this would be my dream game. I love PvP, I love Warhammer, I love Orcs and Goblins and I liked a lot of what Mythic did with Dark Age of Camelot. How could it not be my dream game!?
The first year and a half of Waiting on Warhammer felt like f-o-r-e-v-e-r, but there was little to shake the faith that it would be a game worth waiting for. I remember my only two real concerns back then were when Mythic announced there would be only two realms, which everyone seemed to be pretty against and I still feel was their single greatest mistake, and that the PvP would be heavily dependent on scenarios, which was also hotly contested on fansites at the time and something I disagreed with (I detest scenarios/instances for PvP). Still, given all the excitement abound for the game, in no small part due to the great videos by Paul Barnett and the rest of the staff, you couldn't help but give Mythic the benefit of the doubt and continue with high hopes.
Beta Access! The second year and a half was much more interesting for me, because I was one of the very first beta testers - 16 months prior to launch! When I first got in I was ecstatic! Everything was fun due to the initial rush of trying a game you waited so long for. I would "oooo" and "aaaah" at everything, even the loading screens, in those first few weeks. But after that initial excitement wore off and I saw more of the "vision" for Warhammer, I grew more concerned with the game.
The game was still very much in development, so there were the expected bugs, lack of polish and missing features; but I was mostly concerned with their PvP design. Their concept for PvP seemed bizarre to me for a game being marketed the way it was. PvP felt so disconnected from the game; the RvR lakes were separated from the PvE environments, and they contained absolutely nothing to do. I often roamed the RvR lakes in beta only to find them empty; no quests, no mobs, no npcs, no outposts, no shops, no keeps, no mobs - literally nothing! Unless there was enemy players standing around in that void, you had nothing to do, but as anyone who entered had no reason to stay, they were always empty in beta - it felt broken and wasn't much fun.
As launch approached things improved a little, with keeps and a few PvP quests added to the RvR lakes, but still no where near what I was hoping for. By launch my hopes for the game were far down from what they once were; but I still had some hope, perhaps it would improve after launch, and perhaps it would be more fun once I got to play with some friends..
Launch And The First Few Months The launch of Warhammer Online I can only categorize as a disaster. Going from 1.2 million boxes sold to only 300k subscribers within 4 months, it's clear Warhammer Online wasn't the game many were hoping it would be. The loss of so many players so quickly I attribute to at least two big mistakes Mythic made. The first was they did far too many things to make the game world feel empty, launching with too many servers, splitting up players too much between tiers, fronts, instances and scenarios, and not having enough social aspects (remember when chat channels didn't even work across the whole map you were on?). The second was their love of scenarios they tried to force on the players, by making them the best path of advancement for your character, sucking more players into instances and simplifying the game world to basically a lobby waiting for a team fortress 2 map to launch; and likely burning out their playerbase quicker as they played the same instanced map over and over. The plethora of bugs and broken combat didn't help either.
We had a strong guild going into the game at launch, and recruited quite a few players in the first few months, but our playerbase dwindled far too fast; within about two months our 60 some players from our guild resulted in usually less than 5 online at a time. It wasn't just our guild, it happened to everyone. Mythic started merging servers to try and keep healthy populations, but the retention rate was just too low.
Mythic realized many of their mistakes early, fixing some of the social aspects, and putting less emphasize on scenarios and more on Open RvR by adding more PvP quests and influence gear to the RvR lakes, and enhancing gains from killing players within the lakes. But by this point they were fighting against their own original design, which was a more scenario style pvp game, and the maps and game design with only two factions just do not support it well enough.
The Final Months of WAR In my final months of WAR I was actually having a fair amount of fun, but I was seriously fighting the game's design to accomplish it. I roamed solo in the RvR lakes looking for solo or small groups of enemies I could attack and hope for a fun fight. I gained nothing for doing it, would sometimes be critized for not helping "push the campaign", and often got ran over or chased all over by large zergs, but despite all that it would still be enough fun to still play, though I knew it was never going to be the game I hoped for by this point.
Originally I had hoped Warhammer would be something like WoW's Alterac Valley, but non-instanced, out in the real world. Each RvR lake would be this interactive battlefield like Alterac Valley, with mobs you can summon and rescue, quests, buildings to destroy, resources to collect, just tons of things to do; and actual objectives, like capturing a mine that provides gold to your npcs who eventually use it to build a giant battering ram that gets pushed down a road where you must destroy an outpost for it to get past, so it can knock down a gate to a keep that you then invade and sack, which then captures the map; Alterac Valley had real objectives and goals, and I thought Mythic would basically pull that concept into the real world, make each map have unique objectives and goals. Instead we got empty maps with a few rocks and keeps plopped onto them which had no meaning or purpose, that often flipped or got captured for no apparant reason.
But after playing Warhammer i now realize that isn't what I want; I hate objective driven, guided PvP where you are expected to work towards a set goal. What I want is a well designed world with a lot of things to do in it, where you can explore, quest, gather resources, kill bosses, group up and venture into dungeons, fight mobs; just a well-designed immersive world that encourages people to wander through it and be active. And then I just want that world to be PvP-enabled, with some rewards for doing well at pvp (titles, points, etc.). I like questing while being on guard for ambushes in a PvP area, I like ambushing groups while solo, I like hunting for prey..
The Approach of Aion I never really knew about Aion until a few months ago, but after some research into the game and their "Abyss" setup, I became absolutely stoked to try it. The Abyss is really exactly what I want to play in, one large pvp-enabled map with the best of everything in it, xp spots, quests, dungeons, flying raid bosses, crafting supplies, artifacts, and even a few keeps. And the game is built as a vertical world where everyone can fly to add even more variation and tactics to it. Hawt!
Their PvP setup I absolutely adore. You gain points for killing players, and lose them when you die; making you actually have to think about who you attack to advance. And the pvp ranks have limits to them, only 1 person can be the top spot at a time, 3 the rank below, 10 the rank below, etc. A real ranked pvp system! You also gain titles, visual enhancements and even gear from pvp. woot!
Aion is already doing incredibly well everywhere it has launched, and those that have tried it rave about how smooth and polished it is. Monkeyfish made a nice post with some videos from a beta event recently, and he states "Combat is more involved and engaging than WAR even at this level".
It seems a lot of Warhammer players are planning to give Aion a go, which is not good news for Mythic. When Darkfall came out, the amount of players on my server in War felt noticably diminished for a few weeks; and that's from a small PvP game not even released in North America. The Phoenix Throne subforums on Warhammer Alliance has an Aion thread with over 600 posts already, and there is over 500 active threads discussing Aion on Warhammer Alliance just within the past month! Interest in Aion has definitely picked up in the past few months!
So with that, I suppose I shall say "Goodbye Warhammer, thanks for the fun!"; I'll be shifting my blog to post more about Aion now as it nears release and my hand gets better, and to those going to Aion hopefully I get to see a few of you in game =)
Warhammer has a very unique makeup to the game, that could allow a quite different, more harsh PvP setting to exist within it, more true to the Warhammer tabletop game, and perhaps more fun - or at least different. It's what I was actually hoping for when the game was first announced, and to make it possible all it would take would be a new server ruleset and a few small tweaks..
Racewar PvP Ruleset The basic premise is each race in Warhammer Online would be its own faction, and at war with every other race, making the game much more similar to the real Warhammer fantasy game.
This setup would work quite well with what Mythic has already built, because each race has the 4 archtypes (tank, healer, melee dps, ranged dps) available to it, along with their own items, gear and mounts. Each race even has its own starting area, and a leveling path all the way up to 40. In the future (presumably), each race would also have their own city. It's like Mythic originally planned to make this ruleset!
So, jumping forward for a moment and assuming this ruleset could be worked into the game, how might it play out different than the other rulesets?
A skirmishers dream! With only 1/6th of the population as your ally, that means 5/6th of the population are your enemies! And with the population so divided, you would likely not see the giant zergs like you do with the current rulesets, but instead much smaller teams. Each faction may only be able to field up to a warband each, rather then the current 3+ warband zerg you encounter. Smaller fights are much more fun, in my opinion, and this ruleset would favour them greatly.
Unpredictable chaos! One of the main reasons I hate and rarely do scenarios is they are far too predictable. You know who is on your team, who is on their team, how many players are on each team, and you know exactly whats going to happen. I find Open RvR far more entertaining, not knowing how many allies or enemies are out in the field, not knowing who you will encounter or how many, and not knowing what kind of reinforcements may arrive in the midst of battle. Now imagine a 6 way war! Battling a small band of dwarves with your greenskin team, to see a group of dark elves arrive, unsure who they will attack, only to see them being chased by a group of high elves. The chaos and confusion of never knowing what enemy factions may do would make the RvR lakes infinitely more entertaining for me than what we currently have.
No dominate faction! Currently, there is only two sides in Warhammer, with even small shifts in population balance it is very easy for one faction to greatly out number the other. In a six sided game, this would be next to impossible. Even if say, the Dwarf Faction was the most popular, it may outnumber each of the other factions individually, but it would be highly unlikely to outnumber 2 or 3 of them combined, yet alone all 5. Any sort of temporary alliance between the other factions could easily take away their numbers advantage. Changes Required For Ruleset So if you're with me this ruleset could have some benefits and play out quite differently then the current rulesets. So what exactly would Mythic need to change to get this ruleset into the game?
Scenarios could continue to function exactly as they do, supporting two sides within it, and the queueing system could just be tweaked to support the six realms. Very simple and little effort required. This would perhaps make scenario populations a little lower, likely more of a 6vs6 environment for most unless many are queueing, but could also add more variety, as each scenario you may be up against a different faction, which of course each have their own tricks!
PvE from 1-39 would also need very few tweaks, each side already has its own leveling path. You would really just need to update the flight paths to restrict them to your sides warcamps.
RvR Lakes would require a few changes, but not too many! The map layout is far from ideal to support this type of ruleset, but it could work.
The first big change required would be a flight path and landing camp for the other realms (so that dark elves would have a place to land in the EvsC front to fight); personally I would like to see this work by having them create small camps near the fortresses (so in EvsC, the Dark Elves and Greenskins would come in from the bottom left and bottom right corners of The Maw. Making it a bit of a trek north to other zones, but making it feel more like you were invading enemy territory. Similarly the Dwarfs and High Elves would come in at the top left and top right of Reikwald. Just a small camp with a few mobs and a flight path would be all that's necessary.
The second big change required would be how victory points and zone capture works. Zone domination could remain the same, though would be very difficult to pull off against 5 other realms. I would say an easy solution would be to remove zone domination and change Victory points, so that it works as a pie chart broken into 6 slices (one for each realm), where you earn points for killing, taking/holding objectives and scenarios only. Then the first realm to 45% or so would take the zone (with each starting at about 18%, the home turf realms would get the bonus of starting out with the objectives when the zone resets).
Here's where it could be made interesting. We could maintain some semblance of an alliance with zone capture, where if a destruction realm captures the middle zone of praag it moves to chaos wastes, and if an order realm captures praag it moves to reikland. But then in the next zone, whichever realm captures that gets to go for the fortress, and the home turf realm defenders. The other realms would be locked out from the fortress zone.
Fortresses I think should be modified to be the end-game for this ruleset. Scrap city sieging altogether; face the music Mythic, we all think city sieging sucks. If fortresses were made the end-game, in this ruleset managing to hold yours while capturing another nets big points and nice gear, and take the current city siege gear and just tie it to renown.
Cities I'm not a fan of personally. If an auction house existed at warcamps I would never go to Inevitable City. Let Empire and Chaos have their city and just place auction houses at warcamps and I would be fine. The other 4 cities are still being built right? If so those can just be plopped in when they're ready.
Optional Changes I'd Love To See Along with the required changes to make this ruleset possible, there is quite a few optional changes I would like to see go along with it.
Make all characters start at level 32, effectively eliminating tiers 1-3 from this ruleset. Werit made a suggestion on his blog recently, with a ruleset where chars start at 40, and I like the concept but feel level 32 would be a better fit. It gives you a few levels of progress
Eliminate PvE dungeons and make it a true PvP ruleset. Get rid of bastion stair, bilerot and lost vale entirely. Leave this set as a PvP only ruleset with PvP gear! That would be hawt!
That's all I got for now, what do you guys think? Would it work and would you play on it?
In case you are wondering why I haven't posted in over two weeks, I got injured! Not through sports, or an accident, or a failed kidnapping attempt of Jeff Hickman so we could live out Grimnir's comic. Nope, nothing exciting. I got injured by my blasted computer.
Apparently its called RSI - Repetitive Stress Injury - which can occur from lots of things, but actions such as typing and mousing use a lot of the same muscles in your hands repeatedly, which over time, can build up stress on your arms and cause injury. And since I code most of the day and then often put in extra time playing games or browsing the web, my computer use is probably a little beyond excessive.. perhaps I had it coming =p
Anyways, the point of sharing my little story is apparently this could have all been avoided if I had just stopped using my computer for a few days when this first started occurring. But since originally it was just a dull ache that persisted when I tried to work or play, I ignored it... until a few weeks later when it started causing sharp shooting pains up my arm, and by then it was too late. Now I must minimize my computer time for another week or two to rest my hands so they recover, so I won't be playing or posting much in the meantime, but I'll be back =)
So, learn from the little gobbo's pain and if your hands start hurting, don't ignore it! take a few days off!
Before I go into patch 1.3 let me first say, I finally got my Conqueror shirt!! Mythic reduced the medallion prices for the RvR gear which meant I finally had enough to purchase it, allowing me to wear 4 conqueror and 2 bloodlord as my set, providing set bonuses of +138 Intelligence, +66 Willpower and +66 Toughness. Woot! Not too shabby for a DPS shammy!
Now on to patch 1.3, which is a pretty monster patch! This will surely shake up Warhammer when it goes live. I'm only going to cover the parts of the patch which affect or interest me, so if you haven't yet go read the notes!
To start with, and perhaps the most needed change coming with the patch, is the near global reduction in power of AoE abilities. AoE completely dominates the game at the moment, both in damage and healing. I sometimes group heal myself even when not grouped, because it heals for just as much and casts faster! AoE needed a reduction and this is a very welcome change!
To offset the AoE reduction, Mythic is making a bizarre move however. They are increasing single target DPS for nearly all classes. Witch Hunters are perhaps receiving the most benefit, with 18 of their abilities going up in damage! As someone who sees a lot of 1vs1, I think single target DPS is already too high. As a DPS shaman I can burst down most classes in less than 20 seconds, and I consider that quick. But I don't kill fast, not in comparison to witch hunters, slayers or other true dps classes. I've been hit for over 4000 from a single ability by a witch hunter, and I only have 5000hp (6000 with the +100 wounds potion). I lose over half my life if a slayer gets in melee range of me for 2 seconds. Scooter, an engie on Phoenix Throne once caught me and dropped me from full to dead in 5 seconds. Personally, I think this game would be far better if both healing and damage were toned down some so you had more time to react and use abilities before pressing respawn.
Now for the real goodies! Shamans are getting their mastery trees shuffled this patch and the possibilities sure look exciting! Hybrids are being crippled, and Mythic is making you choose to be either a DPS shaman or a healing shaman, but both options each look excellent. Here's a few of the changes I'm excited to see:
First up is Eeeek! This ability is being changed to now snare the enemies it knocks back, and no longer knock yourself back. There is mixed feelings on this in the forums, and I'm sort of torn over it too. On one hand, the snare is awesome, and I have way more control with it in combat now. On the other hand there will be no more amazing escapes by eeeking off cliffs or bridges.
Personally I think this looks awesome. Gork is receiving few changes, but Mork and Green are getting a good shuffle. The two popular choices for 1.3 will likely be Mork/Green and Gork/Green, and Gork/Green will be Nazgum's choice! The healing power of a hybrid is getting nerfed, so willpower based heals won't be so useful, but Green is receiving our shield and we'll have 3 lifetaps, which heal based on the damage dealt (intelligence based), so I'm hoping those 3 lifetaps + a shield will be enough.
The final thing that interests me in the patch notes is of course the Land of the Dead. I'm not very excited about it however, the more I read the more it sounds like a giant PvE zone where PvP may occur, but likely won't be too common. I hope I am wrong.
Its been a while since I posted some videos. Mostly due to me not playing as much, as Phoenix Throne got pretty unbalanced for a while which made the game a lot less fun; but Order has been making a comeback recently and there's been a lot more fighting, which means I gots some videos! =) Gratuitous Use of Eeek! I stumbled upon Ceelee (WH), Phez (SH) and Izzzo (Choppa) near the ambush stump in Reikland, engaged with about 4 order. And they were losing! Ack! I start recording as I approach the fight and within the first 15 seconds Izzzo and Ceelee both die and Phez kites out of my range, things weren't looking too good... and to make things worse even more order shows up!
Back and Forth at the Fortress The Shining Way fortress was under siege and order was hanging out near the front, preventing destruction from approaching. I found a small group of order there and we played a bit of back and forth attacking, with their ranged dps pelting me and their witch hunter constantly trying to flank me =)
Today I came across a post about Dragonica, a game I hadn't heard of before. I wasn't initially too interested, but being a lazy Sunday I decided to do a quick google search on it and find a bit more info. I'm glad I did, this game seems it may be quite fun =)
If anyone remembers way back in the old days, before the Internet took over our lives, we used to actually visit our friends houses to play games. And in those times, when Super Nintendo ruled the world, Secret of Mana was an awesome game to have a few people over for. It was a fairly straight-forward RPG, but with a very action-oriented combat system, rather unheard of back then. And it was multiplayer, allowing up to 3 people to hack and slash together and adventure through the story.
I had such fond memories of Secret of Mana that after Super Nintendo's time had passed I once tried setting up an SNES Emulator on my PC, grabbed the japanese sequel and an english patch and hoped to get a few friends to come play. But alas, the Internet is here now, and few people will be up for abandoning a 3D MMO to come play a 16bit 2D scrolling game through an emulator at a friend's house..
Which is why Dragonica makes me excited =) This game reminds me a good deal of Secret of Mana. It has the same action combat feel to it, where you can play with your friends and progress through a story. It even has a similar graphics style. Curious to see how this game actually plays? Check out their trailor:
Dragonica will be free to play and is currently in beta. I couldn't find any estimation of a release date, but when it arrives I think I shall definitely have to give this a shot =)
If the other servers are anything like Phoenix Throne, a lot of people are frustrated with Warhammer. Maybe not so much in the lower tiers, but tier 4 has a lot of problems. With enough time, hopefully Mythic can work most of them out, but in the meantime, I got 5 suggestions for Mythic that can perhaps make their game more fun until they get around to it. So 'ere we go! 1. Disable City Sieges I think it cannot be denied at this point, the majority do not find city sieging fun. I personally find Mythic's concept for city sieging horrible; after a long, hard fought PvP battle with other players in the open world you get shoved into instances, where you repeat a public quest over and over for two hours, with a super boss that hits for 30,000 damage and one shots anyone except warded tanks, that is nearly impossible to complete with defenders. Whut? While city sieges are underway, the rest of the PvP game is effectively shut down, all the zones are locked preventing you from doing anything but participating in the city siege. It's either suck it up and city siege or log off. And worse, should a city actually be captured, the PvP lockdown persists for up to 16 hours afterwards, no scenarios, no RvR lakes, nothing!
It was pretty much unanimous way back in beta, and not much has changed since then. No one likes city sieging. If you removed the loot aspect from it who would subject themselves to this voluntarily? Not only are city sieges not enjoyable by a large portion of your playerbase, they are literally forced on us by just playing in the RvR lakes. Until they can be improved to the point where they are enjoyable and do not remove large portions of the rest of the game when they're active, they should be disabled.
2. Completely Remove Morale The concept of morale, as I first heard it described, was to allow swings in battle as each zerg charged and released their morale abilities. In reality, morale in Warhammer is often used in situations such as DoTing a siege pad and then running into a player and firing off a powerful attack. Or an enemy zerg that is attacking a keep and is high morale from nuking the door fires off their 7 second stuns at defenders trying to get in, who then get focused down and die. The morale system in Warhammer takes more away from the game then it adds to it. It is a crowd control haven. There are 42 crowd control affects distributed across the different morales! And, as you can imagine, people will slot the ones which have those affects, making most morale abilities that get fired off just result in a stun, silence, AoE knockdown or some other form of CC.
Too much Crowd Control is an issue frustrating many players in Warhammer. It is unbearable in zergs and even running in small groups or solo I lose control of my character far too often. Going from full life to dead while stunned is not fun. Removing Morale from the game would go miles towards fixing the horrific amounts of CC you get hit with while trying to play. And yes, I love my Gork Sez Stop, but take it if it means I can actually control my character while fighting. 3. Make Leveling Faster Warhammer was built well for leveling alts, in theory, as there are 6 different PvE leveling paths all the way up to 40. Except, leveling is so slow in Warhammer I only have one level 40 character and little interest in investing a month or more to level a second. Making it faster to level would make alts a much more enjoyable experience past level 20.
4. Remove Random Loot Distribution For Set Items Mythic choose to follow the same model most MMOs use to distribute the majority of their loot - the random loot roll. Unfortunately, Warhammer is not setup well to support this due to the class restrictions on nearly all items and the fact there is 12 classes, more than most MMOs. Because of this, it makes it that much harder to obtain items you want in Warhammer compared to other MMOs. Running a dungeon and killing a boss you need something from with a 1/12 chance of getting the item is just slightly disheartening. Especially on your 23rd trip through the place. There is people who have been running Blood/Bile for months, every 3 days, without completing their Sentinal set. Just ask poor Snafzg. To add even further pain, you need those sets to progress, so you need to keep investing 3 hours every 3 days, hoping you get lucky. Why? Mythic decided to apply this same concept to the loot they offer from PvP, combining two random rolls for a bag in a chest..
Random loot distribution isn't too bad in some cases, but when you use it to block the progression you force on players it just builds frustration. Many new players to tier4 are going to have a seriously rough time completing their annihilator set, which they need for fortresses, yet alone their conqueror set, which they need for city sieges; why block progression with astronomically small chances of receiving the items you need (such as a conqueror piece, which breaks down to a 6 in 200 chance of receiving after 5+ hours of work; I know of no one, on any server, with a full set)
Either scrap the wards system entirely, or remove the random loot distribution from set pieces and replace it with a pure token system, in both PvE and PvP and make the tokens faster to obtain. Use random loot distribution for weapons, jewelry and other items which are nice to get but not mandatory to progress. And, while I'm on the topic, why can't some rare weapons, jewely and other items drop from players? Why just set piece gloves and boots? Would be nice for some more variety ;)
5. Separate Bug Patches From Content Patches I know I've said it a few times before, and while I do find Warhammer fun, it is still by far the buggest game I have ever played. Nearly every play sessions I sigh in frustration from some bug that just shouldn't exist in the game at this point. The combat bugs are the worst for me, a PvP game with broken combat gets old fast. But its not just combat, everything is just plagued by bugs; logging in, questing, viewing a map, viewing an item tooltip, clicking an ability, viewing the realmwar site, submitting an appeal, training renown, training masteries, clicking a postern door, messages for BOs being taken, keeps not showing as under attack on the map, logging into the official forums, searching the auction house, retrieving items from mail, seeing group member locations on the minimap.. just everything is broken! I could go on and on. The bug fixes need to come faster. Wrapping 500+ bug fixes into your content patches that only come every six weeks is no good.
So that's my list. Besides for my plea for quicker bug fixes I tried to list items that can be tweaked quickly (xp increase) or just simply removed.
I haven't been able to play WAR much recently. Not due to real life issues, but because Destruction has Altdorf on farm status for the past two weeks. Four times that I've tried to login since Thursday we have been attacking Altdorf. When Altdorf is under siege everything else is locked down so you either participate or log off..
My goblin has perhaps gone mad, thinking Destruction must be his true enemy, conspiring against him, using the most powerful yet least awe-inspiring force in any MMO universe... boredom! I detest city sieges. I think they are terrible. I dislike instances, and an instance where you have to repeat the same public quest over and over for 2 hours just feels awful to take part in.
I thought myself unfortunate to find Destruction continually sieging Altdorf and failing, preventing me from skirmishing in the RvR lakes for those two hours, which is the part of Warhammer I find most fun. Yet, apparently there is an even worse fate awaiting..
Should one side actually capture a city, all of RvR gets locked down. All scenarios closed, all RvR lakes locked, no keeps, bos or zones available for capture anywhere. Locked down! So how long does this lock down last for? According to this thread containing some rather upset Dark Crag players its 16 hours!
I enjoy skirmishing in Warhammer when its possible, but when the endgame gets triggered that gets taken away. Its either participate or leave, so I usually leave. Currently its a relatively small period of 2 hours, and though I usually only play for an hour or two each day, I managed to hit that window 4 times in the last 6 days. If destruction keeps Altdorf on farm status, and there appears little reason to think otherwise, and starts actually capturing the city, that 2 hour unplayable window may go to 16 hours. At which point it appears there would be little use in me attempting to login.
Fortunately, there is a little hope provided by Producer Jeff Skalski, who responds in the Dark Crag thread I linked above:
Sorry for the late reply on this and being MIA on the forums lately.
Just been a little swamped with Tomb Kings and just got back from being
out of the office for two weeks. So, I want to let everyone here know
we are actively working on a plan to resolve this RvR endgame concern.
I just asked the RvR Strike Team Lead to put up a post today listing
out what we are currently discussing for City Siege improvements to our
Core Testers. (so keep an eye out for any Core Testers reading this)
For those who are not Core testers I'm not going to leave you
completely hanging. Our goals for what we are proposing to do is to
make sure there is never a moment in the the game where no RvR combat
exist. As we firm up the details we'll get them posted to the public,
but please keep posting suggestions on how you would like to see the
city sieges improved.
One of the interesting things about EA buying Mythic is we get to see real subscription numbers every few months. Unlike many smaller game companies, EA is a publicly traded company, and because of that, they divulge information about their earnings to their shareholders.
The last earnings call which took place earlier this year revealed Warhammer had "over 300k subscribers" at the time, which could in no way be spun as a positive. By Mythic's own admission they were hoping to still be growing, and "to be successful" they wanted to be "north of 500k subscribers". 300k meant they had lost over 1/3 of the people who bought a retail box at launch, and were far below their mark. Ouch. Even worse, those numbers may have been high, as anyone who signed up for a six month subscription but lost interest and cancelled would still be considered among those.
Tomorrow is the next EA Earnings Call. Predictions? Personally, I'm thinking they will fare a little better off this time around. Their trials seem to be getting some new blood into the game. They've solved quite a few issues with the game and merged servers to make life easier for newcomers. It's also been a few months since WoW's expansion so some of those folks will be getting bored. And, as far as PvP MMOs, there isn't much competition out there for Mythic... yet anyways.
I'm gonna guess 350k. I think Mythic continued to sink below their 300k mark but managed to turn things around a bit in the past couple months. Wanna venture your guess?
I stumbled upon a hilarious thread this morning I just have to share.. it's about a DoK complaining that a Bright Wizard is over-powered, which of course spawns a whole lot of trolling in the thread. Yes, a DoK, perhaps destructions most over-powered class complaining about orders perhaps most over-powered class. But don't be so quick to dismiss the thread as mere trolling, there is more going on than first appears. See if you can catch on before others in the thread do.
And for extra "epic winning lol", it appears a forum moderator was tricked by it all and locked the thread.
It seems lately I'm just being barraged by deaths from combat bugs. For a PvP focused game, combat really needs to not have serious bugs in it to be enjoyable. I don't mind getting run-over by the zerg, or when someone gets the better of me, but it sure is frustrating to die to bugs. And as it occurs so often lately, when I go back to check my combat log to see what happened, I find some bug was the cause of my demise.. so what's new today?
Pretend you get hit with two different disables at the same time, say Cannon Smash and Scintillating Energy. What should happen? I would think, whichever hits you first should land and disable you, and the second should be ignored. Or worse case scenario, both fire at the same time due to unstoppable not going up in time, and you get disabled by whichever is longer. Well, in Warhammer neither of those situations happen.
Disabled til death!
Instead, they stack! Somehow they get queue'd, and instead you get disabled for the full duration of the first, and then for the full duration of the second. In my combat log you can see I get disabled for 12 seconds (13 apparently, according to my log).
Fix its! Draw inspiration from your Gobbo mobs who would say, "Go Do It!"
I waited a while to give the token system a chance before writing this post, but I have to say, WAR's PvP gear is just far too hard to obtain..
Personally, I have the full annihilator set and 3 pieces of the conqueror set. That initially sounds pretty decent, but as you'll see that is hardly the case. Let's look at it first ignoring tokens:
Starting with the Annihilator Set. I got lucky, by starting out on Ostermark I had less people to roll against for gold bags at keeps. And, truthfully I got most of my annihilator set 4-maning empty keeps; yay RvE. Nowadays on Phoenix Throne though, I imagine Annihilator set is pretty rough to get. Last night keeps were being sieged by 188 destruction at a time! That is a mighty low chance of you being lucky enough to receive a bag. 4-man keep sieges really aren't possible on Phoenix Throne due to the population, you'll always be interrupted, which is a good thing, but it sure makes the gear harder to obtain..
Let's move up to the Conqueror Set. This is the set I've wanted for a while, and as I've mentioned I have 3 pieces of it. Not too shabby, no? Well, not really. I bought the gloves from a vendor back when that was possible. And I bought the belt on the auction house. The only piece I've seen from RvR is the boots, which drops off players. The rest of the set only drops in fortresses, and you are basically competing with even worse numbers attempting to win a lucky roll. I've been at maybe 50 fortress sieges. Never, ever won. In fact, I would be shocked to learn if anyone, on any server, in either North America or Europe has their full conqueror set.
Let's move on. Invader Set. This is the set up from conqueror and only available at the city siege stage. This set is completely out of my grasp now. Why? Because I refuse to ever subject myself to the pain that is city sieging in warhammer again =p If city sieges were improved however, this set is almost reasonable to obtain. You're in an instance with only 48 other people, and 3? gold bags drop, and you can likely complete the quest 5 or more times before the 2 hour timer is up. Unfortunately, Mythic decided to make stage 2 have four hero mobs that hit for like 20,000 damage, making this completely impossible with any kind of resistance. Some players got "lucky", if you want to call it that, and managed to deck themselves out in full invader back when the instances were bugged and you could get in one with 0 enemy players. That doesn't happen anymore, so these sets are basically unattainable.
Finally, there is the Sovereign Set. This is also only available from city sieges, and only once you win the first instance (which seemingly is no longer possible). So this set might as well not even be in the game at the moment.
That's all the PvP sets I know of. As you can see, they are all very difficult, some perhaps impossible, to obtain. So, Mythic added tokens as a way to make these sets more obtainable. Except, the costs from these tokens are just far too high. I've been saving up for the conqueror shirt and am not even half-way there after several weeks, many fortress sieges and a lot of kills. And that's for one piece!
What Mythic Should Have Done Players don't mind working for their gear, but there needs to be some measure of hope that they will eventually obtain it. Mythic's addition of influence to the RvR lakes was great, and while a little slow to work through, gave you a clear goal that if you invest enough time in each lake you get certain rewards.
The renown system should have worked the exact same way. All the PvP sets already have a renown rank requirement to use, as you gain that renown rank you should be able to go and just buy the item from a vendor exactly how influence works. To me this makes a lot of sense, I would then be able to use my Conqueror set now, and as I progress further, know eventually I can get invader and then sovereign.. currently my gear is at a standstill and it feels like I'll never progress at all.
Keeps, Fortresses and Cities should have never been about personal gain. It should have been about your realm and provide benefits to your realm. Just look what happened with the last update, making it so guild leaders who claimed keeps get a gold bag to hand out, I've never seen so much bickering in /2 over who gets to claim the keep. If all of the personal gains were removed from keeps, fortresses and cities, and instead placed where they make sense (renown, which is really your personal progress), then the game would be so much better off. And if they do that and everyone just PvPs and stops sieging keeps, fortresses and cities - guess what? Then keeps, fortresses and city sieges aren't fun enough. Improve them!
There is a rather nasty bug live in the game at the moment, that allows you to fire off an ability multiple times in the same second..
I'm not sure exactly how it is done, though from the discussion on the official forums, some players are suggesting its done by binding macros. All I know is its brutal, I got run over yesterday by a group of 3 bright wizards where at least one of them was doing this, intentional or not it needs to be fixed immediately.
Scorched Earth Bug Example
As you can see in the screenshot, Ethaon hits me 3 times with Scorched earth in one second. Attempting to play with these kinds of bugs live can be extremely frustrating, Mythic please hotfix this!
Looking back, I find it kind of humorous that I can never bring myself to group with people in Warhammer anymore. It's not that I don't like my realm-mates or guild members, most of them rock! And really, I made a shaman over a dps class so I would be useful in groups! But, whenever I do join a group and it starts to balloon up past 3 people I find the fun starts to go downhill quickly and I just want to log.. why is that?
Personally, I think its because, for whatever reason Mythic seems to have disliked the 8-man gameplay that developed in DaoC and has gone out of their way to not make that possible in Warhammer. I know a lot of people, especially former DaoC players, were looking over the skills near launch trying to come up with good 6-man strategies. Hey, I was too! It was a reason I picked the shaman, the Green tree looked awesome for a full greenskin group, toughness/elemental debuffing with a few squig herders blasting explodin errer! It looked hawt! We were discussing this and other 6-man setups way back in August!
Unfortunately, not once did we get to try that out though, or any other 6-man team for that matter. Why? Well for us personally our guild just fell apart too fast with everyone returning to WoW who was unhappy with Warhammer. But beyond our guild, I noticed there was very few 6-man teams from other guilds either! I think this is because 6-mans have no place in Warhammer. The maps are too small, often only having 1 or 2 routes to travel through (with the exception of a few zones like praag and black crag), and there is no way to escape a zerg once they are upon you, let alone pull off some kind of victory like in DaoC. Attempting to run in a 6-man results in either you being continually runover by a larger zerg, or you managing to pick off smaller groups of players (1-3) looking to meet back up with the zerg; neither option is overly fun.
But, despite 6-man groups not being viable like many hoped, there is still a lot of fun to be had in this game! Though you may need to wittle your groups
down to smaller sizes than 6-mans to find it. Warhammer is actually a suprisingly fun solo and duo game. A few quick points to backup my claim:
In a 1vs1 or 2vs2 situation, most people never hit morale 3 or 4, which is where a lot of the rediculous abilities exist that get fired off in large scale combat.
Mass AoE nukes, disables, knockdowns, disorients and the rest of those aren't much of an issue in small fights, which is usually one of the first things I get frustrated with in warband+ size fights
The classes in Warhammer are remarkably balanced for 1vs1, as a shaman I've lost a 1vs1 to every class except a runepriest I think
You get to use far more skills each fight. As a shaman in a warband I basically only need one skill, group heal. In a small group fight I use at least 10.
Warhammer's terrain is awesomely built for separating people, and almost every class has knockbacks. This makes Warhammer a far easier game to handle adds while you are soloing, because you can just dump them off a cliff while you finish with your primary target.
Why solo over larger groups? Well, you have to think of how you're going to find fights in Warhammer. There are no quests, or public quests, or other things to do in the RvR lakes. So there is no where to go looking for enemies. There is basically 6 objectives and the zerg usually hits them one at a time. For players just logging in, they will want to rejoin the zerg. So the best way to find fights is to position yourself between their warcamp and their zerg.
Why not groups of 3 to 5 people in size? I view it as, if you're solo, you just need one enemy to run into to have the potential for a fun fight. If you're in a duo, you need two. With three you need a group of three enemies, and etc. all the way up. You are far more likely to be in the "fun fight" zone the smaller your group size is, with a group of 4 you are not often going to be running into other groups of 4 enemies in Warhammer, but in a duo you're much more frequently going to run into pairs of order! =)
So what's my summary? Warhammer can be a great game to play solo, you'll use more of your skills, find more challenging fights and perhaps, just perhaps have a little fun ;) As the gobbo mobs in Warhammer love to yell at me after I accept a quest, "Go do it!"
Patch 1.2.1 went live last week, and with it came a nice damage buff to the shaman class. I waited to respec DPS until last night (Friday) to see how my kiting spec did, as with the castlag gone I wanted to make sure I didn't eat a ton of extra dps from other classes who also benefit from it. But on friday I took the plunge back to full DPS! So how is it? Intense! I kill fast and die faster, making each fight shorter and more dangerous. Fortunately, I have some videos from that first night! =)
DPS Shaman vs Warrior Priest I find Warrior Priests are probably the hardest targets to kill as a shaman; especially kiting spec'd. You can't AP drain them, they heal well, and they can hit hard. So trying out my new spec against a few WP seemed like a good first step; I had just respec'd to DPS moments before this started, which you can catch me telling snarglers in the chat ;)
Non stop order in Eataine Knowing I can down Warrior Priests, this spec makes me happy! Before I'd often just have to watch other healers run by knowing I likely could not kill them; now there is no need to allow anyone to pass by! Lets try a more real pvp situation, with people hunting me! This video starts with me attacking an engie who was part of a larger pack of order, which leads to an odd string of chasing and hunting around orders warcamp between me and several order =)
Solo keep defence Normally, I completely avoid keeps while I'm solo. Often there is just too many order at them, and they have their morale abilities charged from the door; I get near and eat a 7 second stun from range and then get focused and die. Not so fun. But, on friday I decided to ignore my usual rule and ventured down to the southern keep siege in Reikland, to find no destruction defenders and about 10 order! What would Gork do?!
With the help of Gork and a wee bit of Mork, the keep was saved and about 50 minutes later we were assaulting their fortress ;)
Sanya Weathers wrote an article a few days ago titled WoW patch 3.1, The Secrets of Ulduar; though really, her post has little to do with the patch. Instead she chooses to share a story about "a company that was supposed to be brainstorming for a Brand! New! Game!". Now, in case you're not in the know, Sanya was the main Community Manager/PR person for Dark Age of Camelot, Mythic's prior game, and left just prior to Warhammer launching. Here's an excerpt from her story:
[...] The point was, at the company to which I refer, it was pretty clear
that if you wanted a seat at the idea table, you needed to be in the
team leader's WoW guild. That was where everyone was bonding, building
their relationships, and drawing all of their plans. Since I was
supposed to doing some consulting with that team, I installed the game.
Wow! We can only make assumptions, but how many game development teams has Sanya worked with since WoW launched? I think its pretty safe to assume she was talking about Mythic building Warhammer Online. Sanya is a great writer and always entertaining, so if you haven't yet go read her article, it should prove interesting if nothing more =)
I made a post earlier about how I spec my shaman, so I figure I should make a post about how I stat and gear my shaman to go along with it ;) So 'ere we go! Which stats are important? Shamans, being a hybrid, need quite a few stats. Willpower for healing, intelligence for damage, and toughness, wounds and initiative to survive. All 5 of those can can be useful. If you're going the pure healbot role you can likely skip intelligence, though it is very nice to have when solo or in a small group.
How high should each stat be? Ideally, as high as you can get them ;) But I like to aim for the following:
Toughness - 350: toughness is my favorite defensive stat, it lets you
take more damage and therefore makes your healing more powerful.
Having toughness below 300 and you definitely die faster, I find up
around 350 is usually nice.
Initiative - 250: initiative's main purpose is to reduce your chance of being crit and help you evade. In reality the crit reduction doesn't help much due to the +crit tactics and huge crit %'s dps classes can pull off; but when you start getting over about 220 you get the benefit of spotting stealthers more easily; and at 250 you can often spot them a fair distance off, which can be fun =)
Wounds - 600: wounds is the most over-rated stat in my opinion. You definitely need some wounds to survive burst, I like to run with about 600, but focusing too much on it makes your character weaker, as you can always heal yourself as a shaman.
Intelligence - 500: I like having some offensive capabilities, so after I've gotten my defensive stats up to a survivable enough level I try and raise intellligence as high as I can. I find having at least 500 is nice, as your damage output is respectable then and don't have to sacrifice much to reach that level.
Willpower - 400: Willpower is the stat I worry about the least; it just doesn't make much of a difference, especially due to all the healing debuffs that exist in the game; and when you really need to play a more healbot role you can equip the +160 willpower tactic, so I never try to raise willpower beyond what bonsues the gear I'm wearing offers.
Where to get the stats from? I look at it purely from an economics point of view; here's two screenshots from the auction house on Phoenix Throne:
Wounds Talisman Prices
Intelligence Talisman Prices
As you can see, wounds and toughness talismans are extremely expensive, far more expensive then intelligence/willpower talismans. So we want to get wounds and toughness for free where we can. Wounds cost more then other stats when buying with renown points, so wounds we want from gear. The 4-piece bonus from the Sentinal set offers +66 wounds, so that is a must in my opinion. I get the rest of my wounds mostly from jewelry and that gets me up to about 600.
What about toughness and initiative? That brings me to my current staff, Zaptwig of Light. It's the oRvR influence reward from the elven front. With the 2 talisman slots (i got +19 int talismans in each), it makes for a nice staff with some good defensive stats. To further boost toughness and initiative I use my renown points; with the first 40 renown points I buy +60 toughness, +30 initiative and +30 intelligence.
That just leaves intelligence. Along with the 4 Sentinal pieces it would be nice to wear 2 pieces of conqueror (though I personally can't yet as I have neither the sentinal or conqueror shirt) for the +66 intelligence bonus. Besides that, I use all of my talisman slots for intelligence. As you can see in the screenshot, intelligence talismans are nice and cheap. You can often find the +18 permanent ones for less than 40 gold on the AH. Don't forget your liniments! Along with all your gear, talismans and renown points, don't forget about potions either! The liniments line of potions are amazing, +100 to a stat with an extra effect as well, and usually lots in the AH at a decent price. I like the Liniment of War: Genius (+100 wounds, +3% magic crit chance), but I have 4 different types of them in my backpack and alternate depending on my situation; the short story is they rock - use them! =)
That about sums up my guide, I hope you find it useful!
If anyone remembers way back in the old days, before the Internet took over our lives, we used to actually visit our friends houses to play games. And in those times, when Super Nintendo ruled the world, Secret of Mana was an awesome game to have a few people over for. It was a fairly straight-forward RPG, but with a very action-oriented combat system, rather unheard of back then. And it was multiplayer, allowing up to 3 people to hack and slash together and adventure through the story.
One of the interesting things about EA buying Mythic is we get to see real subscription numbers every few months. Unlike many smaller game companies, EA is a publicly traded company, and because of that, they divulge information about their earnings to their shareholders.
It seems lately I'm just being barraged by deaths from combat bugs. For a PvP focused game, combat really needs to not have serious bugs in it to be enjoyable. I don't mind getting run-over by the zerg, or when someone gets the better of me, but it sure is frustrating to die to bugs. And as it occurs so often lately, when I go back to check my combat log to see what happened, I find some bug was the cause of my demise.. so what's new today?
