Month: October 2008

The Rune Priest is the most vanilla healer class. It special mechanic is giving you a buff that also lets you fire an attack once/minute. Other than that, it has all the standard healer abilities with names that start with “Rune of.”

Very early on, you realize why these things are buggers to kill in RvR. They get an insta-cast burst heal at level 1, while most classes have HoTs and/or casting times. Level 3 brings an insta-cast HoT, 8 brings the big slow heal, and 10 gives you the combo burst with HoT. The insta-cast HoT is the best except for the fact that it takes 15 seconds to give that massive amount of healing. The level 1 insta-heal is nice for RvR panic healmenowomg, but it is not efficient at all. The same 30 action points and 0 casting time gets you more than 5 times as much HoT. Again, “oT.” You also get a bubble at level 6, which is great even if it does not do much against RvR focus fire. It can give you enough time to stack your other heals on the target.

Continue reading Rune Priest at Level 10

Players in MMOs are well known to create their own fun apart from the developer-created fun.  Guild Wars has had rallies to save an evil enemy race.  Lord of the Rings Online has had chicken races going all the way to Rivendell.  Even World of Warcraft players will take time to march in-game for presidential candidates.

One of the best fallback player-run events is role-playing, especially in Warhammer Online where dancing is not allowed.  Role-playing can occur anywhere, and if you are imaginative enough (read: clinically insane) you could even roleplay with the NPCs.  So it was that a band of three Greenskins: Bukket the Shaman, Teefs the Squig Herder, and Lolrus the Black Orc, set out to WAAAAAGH!!!, and along the way roleplay by macro.

We each created 3-6 chat macros, where our character would speak upon a simple button press.  I am sure that more complex chat macros could be created, but ours were simply “/say [TEXT].”  An example of one would be Lolrus saying “TEEFS SHOOT YER ARRERS FASTA, GIT!!!”  Of course Black Orcs have to yell, but you knew that.  The interesting part was that with only 3-6 sayings each we were creating whole Greenskin conversations, which probably only really worked because we were Greenskins.

Teefs: Bukket you iz a smelly fungus.
Lolrus: DAS GOOD, BUKKET!!!
Bukket: Shut yer git-face, Teefs, and shootz da stunty!
Lolrus: TEEFS SHOOT YER ARRERS FASTA!!!
Teefs: Lolrus, you iz da biggest git I knowz.
And so proceed ad infinitum (until Mythic told me in chat to think about what I am saying).

It was great fun, and just a few button presses (that really didn’t affect gameplay) enlivened the game a lot. I loved the Heroes (and Henchmen) in the later Guild Wars modules that would speak out during combat and down-time, and the ability to emulate it was great. You too might want to consider a button-press combat shout to make sure the troops are awake. It can only add to the game. There is an add-on made especially for such fun: Think Out Loud for Warhammer Online that activates when you use skills.  If nothing else, it is super useful to auto-call rez’s.
–Ravious

Credit to Mythic, responses to issue have been timely. Early server clones, spammer updates within a week (and SpamMeNot recommendation in the meantime), leveling rate updates, a variety of bug fixes, and assorted post-release tuning. They are doing a great job with first month tune-ups, much of which is a credit to the state in which the game released.

I am expecting some new patch and a big announcement this week. This is purely based on timing: the free month is almost over, so you want to get people to stick around another month. Give them a bone, give them hope, and you have another month to work out any issues.

They seem to be doing this without a test server. I have this horrible vision of a Herald update: “We have taken servers down to resolve a bug that deleted any character that attempted to log in under the last patch. We have already restored deleted characters and are working on a way to deal with the rollback to the last full save point.” Or maybe I am just having EVE flashbacks there.

: Zubon

Looks like Altdorf is falling in multiple servers; even after the postern door fiasco.  On Averheim it took some good coordination, but Altdorf fell within five hours of the campaign starting.  My guild, Xen of Onslaught, started the assault with the alliance at 7:00 AM Eastern time in the hopes of a sleepy Order.  Mythic keeps making it sound like this is a truly epic endeavor, but I am not so sure Mythic has hit the mark.  Sure, the King encounter may be the pinnacle, but that’s not RvR… it’s a raid boss.  I have seen what great PvP players have done to “epic” bosses.  I heard in alliance chat that Mark Jacobs has nodded at the Averheim-Destruction victory, but I have not found the post.  I am looking forward to see if the Sunday morning-type assault on the enemy, while Order is clearly at church, is working-as-intended.

EDIT: Here (3rd down) is the Mark Jacob’s post.

While it’s against our policy to share exact formulas (in order to keep guilds from gaming the system), we do want to be sure and clarify these mechanics to the best of our ability for those guilds who are concerned about how guild leveling actually works.

The best of their ability is very poor. “It is a sound system involving a lot of math” does not tell us anything. “The system takes into account the characters’ level, and is balanced in a way to allow guilds of all sizes to level up at comparable (but not necessarily equal) rates.” This statement also translates to “we’re not going to tell you anything useful.” The best I can infer from the post is that completely inactive characters do not count against you, but mules and slightly active alts do. So Casualties of WAR was completely right about severely limiting alts, until we get a conflicting statement down the road.

The guild leveling system was obviously not part of any open testing. No one is allowed to know how it works, so we cannot tell if it is working properly. That is one way to keep the bug count down.

Conveniently, it does not matter in the long run. Every guild that sticks with the game will hit max level (or near enough) in several months. And what are the odds that anyone will quit because it took too long to get a guild emblem on their cloaks? Everyone will stick the guild leveling system in the “ignore” box soon and not think about it until someone looks at the code in two years.

: Zubon

Seriously Casual addresses the problem. First, there is not enough PvE to go around starting in the 20-ish range. I am fighting +3s and +4s regularly. Guildmates speak of completing all the PvE in all three areas without out-leveling the tier. For me, this has been a limited problem since I like leveling via scenarios, but if you are in long Destruction queues or a low-population server that doesn’t work. Even now, I am looking at a lot of scenarios before I am past the bolster point of tier 3. I do not feel the need to reach level 40 quickly, but I do not want to spend my RvR time feeding points to higher-level opponents. When players receive condolences in guild chat for reaching a new tier, that is a bad thing.

There are lots of games offering slow PvE grinds. That is not why we signed up for Warhammer. My buddy Cameron had the goods earlier, but then the ladies tell me he has always had the goods.

: Zubon

This? Changes little unless the numbers on that are large. Really, I can repeat one quest two to four times? That makes it much less grindy! That’s unfair: maybe it will help tier 2, but then I hit the wall in tier 3. Maybe I was already eating the tier 3 content in tier 2, so I did not notice. Maybe the later phases of “experience enhancements” will add up to more. I would gladly accept a retroactive boost to those quest rewards, if that is part of the plan. (Turbine can do that, nudge nudge.)

Update: oops, that is CHAPTERS 10-22, not LEVELS. Okay, that could make more of a difference. Again depending on the numbers, and again I could use that retroactively because I already did a chunk of that.

Update 2: having logged in, I can’t tell if it was retroactive. I forget how full that bar was. I scheduled this post before the Herald update, and I’m not sure how much is still relevant. Read Cameron anyway. I’m locking this down. Credit to Mythic for reacting to things quickly.

Holy crap, that was a big number. >3000 for a scenario completion. I must poke around and see what’s about.