The Farstrider Scout

Gina’s giving me some flack about not writing about how I feel about Warhammer, but trust me, I’m getting to it.  I DID say that I might have to make several posts, after all.  One of the major things that I didn’t cover yesterday was the classes.  Now, I didn’t go out and try every single one, so I can really only write about those that I played.  Maybe I can get Gina to write a supplemental for the classes that she tried.

The first class I tried out was, naturally, the Shadow Warrior.  It’s the only bow class for Order, and if you’re thinking it might be like playing a WoW Hunter, LotRO Hunter, DAoC Hunter/Scout/Ranger, etc., then you’ve got it all wrong.  The Shadow Warrior has 3 different stances to work with – Scout, Assault, and Skirmish stance.  Scout stance is essentially for sniping, giving an increased range and ballistic skill.  Assault stance is a stance best used when being pummeled on, giving the player a 100% armor boost and increasing weapon skill.  Skirmish stance gives an increase to crit chance and toughness, and is a requirement for many of the Shadow Warrior’s “on the move” abilities.

In fact, almost all the abilities for a Shadow Warrior require being in one stance or another, with abilities overlapping stances in the lower ranks, and becoming more specialized by Tier 2, allowing for a gradual introduction to how things work.  One of the best mechanics for a Shadow Warrior is the Skirmish stance setup, where almost every single one of the abilities, while still having a cast time, continue to build up while the player is on the move, allowing for easier kiting as well as running down fleeing mobs/players.

Unfortunately, this flexability seems to come with a price, for the time being, as the Shadow Warrior seems rather underpowered in DPS no matter what stance, and unless Assault stance is being used, gets dragged down quickly.  If anything gets done with the Shadow Warrior to fix this, I would hope that it would be a DPS boost and possibly a slight increase to movement speed while in Skirmish stance.

The Engineer was the second class that I tried.  The turrets tended to do about half the damage of my normal shots, but could take a beating, especially if I sat there repairing it a la Team Fortress 2.  My only dissapointment was first the low number of turrets available – gun turret, grenade turret, and flame turret – and the fact that the “special” abilities only occured 10% of the time, which ended up being very rarely.  I didn’t spend much time playing the Engineer though, so I don’t really have much of a grasp on how it comes out in relation to the other classes, but I would place it about on average as a support/range dps class, but still nowhere near the Sorceress/Bright Wizard.

One big thing to note for the Engineer and the Shadow Warrior is that for both classes, their first morale ability is a medium range knockback which has enough force to kick an enemy player backwards a good distance, either away from you, back into the crowd of people that they’re running from, or off the nearest bridge/cliff (which in many cases results in death).  This can be quite hilarious, and will result in one of two things – they’ll either get fed up with having to run around from the spawn point or wherever they landed and leave, or they’ll try to single you out and kill you repeatedly, giving you even more chances to send them plummeting to a rocky doom.

I also gave the Sorceress and Bright Wizard a try.  Both of these classes have the same mechanic – as you cast spells, a separate pool builds up slowly, depending on what spells you’re casting, which increases your crit chance and damage, as well as the chance that a spell will backlash and cause damage to yourself.  You also have one ability that dumps the entirety of that pool and does damage to your target.  This mechanic is both good and bad for the player.  Good, because with a full pool, it’s possible to nuke almost anything down before it even touches you, but bad, because there’s the potential for doing great harm to yourself, to the point of death.  This also seemed to play out to be one of the most overpowered classes in RvR.

Among the other classes that I tried were the Witch Elf, Black Orc, Warpriest, and Iron Breaker, but none of them to really get a grasp of the class mechanics.

So, I promised a writeup on Warhammer:  Age of Reckoning, but I figured it would be best until after the Preview weekend.  I’m glad I did, as they were changing things even through the weekend.  There are quite a few things I want to touch on, so I will probably end up splitting this up into two posts.  So here it is:  the good, the bad, and the ugly.

First off:  Character creation.  It wasn’t completely up and running by the time I got into beta, but by the first day of the preview weekend, it looked like they had all the bugs worked out.  Creation is set up a lot like WoW and DAoC, with simple choices, instead of the detailed sliders that SWG and AOC went with.  Still, there are a wide range of options to choose from for each race/class.  There’s also a “Randomize” button for features, for those that are feeling lazy.  There was a “Randomize” button for the name block as well, but it still wasn’t functional by the end of the preview weekend.  Another minor note, simply starting to type would not affect anything in the name block – you had to actually click in the block to activate it.

PvE was simple and straight-forward.  Each of the areas that I went through had a definite smooth progression from one point to the next, with various quests introducing players to the RvR aspects of the game (which I’ll go into later on), as well as getting them involved in the public quests.  For those not in the know, public quests are a new thing for the MMORPG setting, where anyone and everyone can join in and work towards a common goal – as one person put it, “Raids without the bullshit”.  Each PQ has several different stages, the first one usually beginning with a large number of kills or collections to complete.  Once completed, a timer starts as it moves on to a more difficult stage, with each stage after that getting progressively more difficult.  In the starting public quests, there are only 3 stages, with the second stage pitting you against Champion-level (elite) mobs, and the final stage pitting you against Hero-level (boss) mobs.

Each Public quest comes with it’s own set of rewards.  Completing a stage of the PQ will reward you with a large amount of XP and Influence, while killing PQ-related mobs nets you a small amount of influence, plus the standard amount of XP you would get for killing a similar mob outside of a PQ.  Each PQ is connected to a rally master, and as you work through the quests, influence is built up through multiple levels.  As you reach each level of influence, which may require repeating a PQ several time to max out, you can return to the rally master and choose from the available rewards.  In addition to the influence rewards, at the end of the PQ, a chest appears and a loot roll is done for everyone in the area of the PQ.  Those that have more participation, via damage, healing, or whatever else the quest required, are given a bonus to their roll. 

Unfortunately, here is where things begin to fall through.  First off, the chest rewards, as well as the influence rewards, are always catered to your class, and the chest rewards have additional items that can be chosen, or just straight cash – you only get to choose one from a list.  This is definitely a plus, but the down side is that while it may cater to your class, it does not cater to your level.  Most of the gear I was getting from the second set of public quests was well below my level, and the renown gear that was available at that level was better (more on that later).  Secondly, in the case of the loot roll, ANYONE in the area gets a roll.  What this means is that no matter what amount of participation you give, you have a chance to win a loot bag, whether you stayed through all 3 stages, and got first in participation, or just arrived.  Several times I walked in on the tail end of the boss fight, opened fire, and got a loot reward.  This seems rather unfair to me as those that just walked in really shouldn’t get much consideration at all unless they contributed a significant amount.  No participation should NOT garner a reward.

Another downside is that with everything that there is to do, you outlevel your gear, and the area you’re in, rather quickly.  During the closed beta, I was still wearing level 4 and 5 gear at level 14 because I hadn’t been able to get anything better.  There is no crafted gear, and the only merchant gear available is the RvR gear.  Overall, this isn’t much of an issue though, as you’re pretty much able to solo anything that comes your way if you’re following the progression.  The only other issue, which was later fixed, was generating enough money for training, much less purchasing any item.  They dropped the price for training significantly during the preview weekend and it made a significant difference.

RvR is, for the most part, was a blast.  The preview weekend saw some massive battles over keeps and capture points.  A little explanation first – PvP is called RvR, or Realm vs. Realm in WAR, just as in DAoC.  The difference in the two lies in the fact that in DAoC, there were 3 realms - Hibernia, Midgard, and Albion – but in WAR, there are only two – Order and Destruction.  The emphasis is on open field battles, but they have RvR scenarios, essentially WoW-esque battlegrounds with set objectives and a timer.  Each “tier” and realm has a different scenario, with quests to go along with it.  The open RvR areas also have quests tied to them as well, ranging from capture to player kill quests which net a good amount of money.  RvR also has a separate experience type bar for Renown level, of which there are 80.  Every RvR kill, scenario, and battlefield objective will net some Renown, and every kill will also net XP, and cash.  As your Renown rank grows, you are able to place points towards Renown abilities, as well as purchase gear from special merchants in the battlefield keeps.

Another major piece of RvR is siege weaponary.  Each race (I’m not entirely sure about the Destruction side) has its own set of single target and area target siege emplacements which are available to be used at the edge of every war camp, as well as to be bought and placed on siege hookpoints around keeps.  Keeps also have a pot of boiling oil above the main door, to be poured down upon attackers, and attackers are able to use a ram to batter down the keep doors.

Capture points in the RvR areas for each zone allow a side to take “control” of the zone if they hold them all, giving that side certain bonuses, such as more XP per kill, or cheaper merchant prices.  This progresses through the tiers from basic capture and hold points, to keeps, and eventually, if one side controls a certain number of zones/control points, they will be able to siege the opposing realm’s capitial city.  Each capital city has its own set of tiers, allowing for more options to open up as it levels up through the tiers.

There were some glaring issues in class and realm balance that I noticed, especially over the preview weekend where I got to see the progression of everyone starting from level 1 and working up.  As I played through the RvR scenarios, Order seemed to always come out ahead in the beginning, with everyone being around 1-3.  From 4-5, it seemed about balanced, but after that, Destruction was constantly coming out on top, with the occasional fluke when they had a glut of lower level players.  By the end of the weekend, Destruction had control, or at least majority control, over every single zone.  This made for a very bad time for Order players.

Probably the best part of RvR combat, however, is the anti-griefing mechanic that’s been put in.  When a higher level player walks into a lower level RvR area, or attacks a flagged lower level player, they are turned into a chicken with little to no armor, significantly reduced hit points, and damage reduced to a 1-hp peck.  The number of players that got turned into chickens during the preview weekend was hilarious, as most people had no clue what was going on.

Grouping is handled differently in WAR.  Each group can consist of 6 players, which can expand to a warband holding up to 24.  The biggest difference, however, is open grouping.  This is a system where anyone can join a group labelled as “open” from a special menu which lists the leader name, group size, range in minutes/seconds of travel, and objective, which is determined by their location.  In addition, pale blue arrows around your character ring on the ground indicate the direction of each group member, allowing you to keep track of them without having to look at the mini or main maps.  This is a wonderful mechanic as it allows for greater coordination and effort in many aspects of the game.  Loot rules can still be set by the group leader, but by default it is in a round robin, with need before greed rolls for items above a certain threshold.

There are quite a few ways to get equipment in the game.  Most of the very best equipment can be gotten from a lucky roll on a public quest chest, with items ranging from the standard green through purple quality.  Renown equipment is probably some of the best equipment to obtain overall, based on quality and how easy it is to purchase.  It may have a renown requirement as well as a level requirement, but it doesn’t take much effort to fill either one.  Another way which is unique to WAR (that I know of) is broken items.  Broken items will occasionally drop from mobs around the world, and when taken to a merchant, can be repaired into an item usable by various classes but the majority of the time it seems to always be an item usable by your class.  A broken staff could turn into a bow for a Shadow Warrior, or a moon staff for an Archmage.

The last thing I want to touch on for this post is levels and skills.  There are only 40 ranks in the game, with the 80 Renown ranks.  Each rank unlocks one or two skills for purchase from the trainer, and skills bought scale with the player.  At level 11, you get your first mastery point, with one every other level after that for a total of 25 by the time you’re 40.  These points can be spent in point trees similar to those in WoW, each with a maximum of 15 points, allowing you to go all the way up one tree, and halfway up another.  While this setup probably won’t see the end of cookie cutter templates, it certainly allows for a lot of customization.

 

Supposedly comes down tomorrow.  Look forward to an info dump in the near future.

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve written anything, mostly because, well, there’s really nothing to write about.  Things are pretty stagnant at the moment.  I’ve applied (under duress, mind you) to the Warhammer Closed Beta, and gotten in…  And there’s still nothing to write about.  NDA, blah blah blah…

Expect more once the NDA drops though.