Author: Zubon

The RvR is good. The PvE is unexceptional, not particularly inspired or poor. The classes are fun. The US servers and subscription systems seem fine. Bugs, incomplete features, and imbalances still abound. It is a good game that is improving quickly, but it offers little new to the jaded MMO veteran.

I stand by my earlier opinion that Warhammer was the most ready-to-release Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG out there. I then spent the first week of release ranting that good for a YAFMMORPG is still not good. In the sense of polish, that remains true: the game is missing features so basic I never thought to test for them, some things are imbalanced, and others do not work at all.

But what impresses me most about the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the speed with which Mythic has addressed problems. They are working from a relatively solid base, they have a clear understanding of priorities, and they are addressing problems as they come up. Patches are frequent and meaningful. It is still frequently frustrating to be a first-month player, but Mythic is putting together a game that deserves to compete for your gaming dollar. Assuming you like DikuMUD with graphics.

Continue reading Warhammer After a Month

What gets rewarded gets done. Hence the assorted debates about what is counted or not in Warhammer public quests. How are things like taunting, holding aggro, taking damage, buffing, healing, and dealing damage credited? You want to optimize your Skinner box experience.

What gets observed also tends to get done. 10,000 years of evolution is not much, and your primitive brain still wants to make sure that you look good in public, to improve your reproductive odds and reduce the chance of being clubbed. (FYI, despite your brain’s hardwiring on alpha male status, having the best paladin on the server is unlikely to get you laid.) Monitoring increases other-directed behavior, which you know because of how Internet anonymity affects people. If your primitive brain recognizes that others can see you, it will act accordingly, just as it recognizes when it is easy to freeload.

Warhammer scenarios track a few things, reward a few things, and do not show exact connections between them and other factors. You get experience and renown. The scoreboard (at the end or any time during) shows damage dealt, healing dealt, deaths, and kills. It does not show damage received, damage prevented, resurrections, damage increases due to buffs, flag captures, or whether you were strategically useful at all. That last one is hard to measure consistently, but you might imagine how these other measures (or lack thereof) affect behavior. Healers will compete for their scoreboard, as will damage dealers. No one is rewarded for guarding the flag, unless the enemy is throwing itself against yours, in which case the best rewards are for turtling rather than risking an attack on the enemy flag. I get a better reward for healing you than bubbling you. Sacrificing yourself for the team means that you miss out while you wait to rez. And so on. And no one will know that you did anything that does not appear on the scoreboards.

You can be the greatest fielder in baseball, and it will not show up in your statistics. The pitcher gets credit for that. I hope someone is taking those Sabernomics into account.

: Zubon

The server log-in checks for a different password than the game log-in, but you can’t enter one? That seems like it shouldn’t happen.

: Zubon

Why does a game with “kill collector” NPCs have Kill Ten Rats quests? And why did they add more, repeatable Kill Ten Rats quests as a way to make things less grindy?

Come to think of it, why have the kill collectors? Just increase how much experience you get per kill.

: Zubon

Most of the Order and Destruction classes echo each other. The Rune Priest and Zealot are pretty clearly the same class with different coats of paint. Take a Bright Wizard, substitute “dark magic” for pyromania, and you have a Sorceress.

Other classes are clearly the same but sure feel a lot different. Take the Engineer and the Magus. You get it when I tell you that the turrets and the summoned demons are the same; the graphics are different, but you see how a “flamer demon” and a “flame turret” line up. Except that the flamer demons lines up with the grenade turret, and we’re just getting started.

My Engineer throws Acid Bomb: they burn and take away your Corporeal resistance. “Glean Magic” is a soul drain, doing exactly the same thing with Spirit damage and resistance, but getting your spirit sucked by a demon summoner seems a fair ways from an acid burst. You get the same switch between a Sticky Bomb and infecting the enemy with a Seed of Chaos: either way, boom. Does Surge of Insanity feel like a Flashbang Grenade?

The Greenskin and High Elf classes tend to mirror each other, but no one is mistaking a Swordmaster for a Black Orc, a White Lion for a Squig Herder, or an Archmage for a Shaman. Well, until the last two pull out their death rays, then they start to look a bit alike.

: Zubon

See the Rune Priest. Some differences appear at later levels, but they are almost the same class at level 10. Instead of a big stick, the Zealot has a dagger before him along with poor Yorick.

Zealots seem rare and/or difficult to kill. They are the only class for which my Engineer does not have “kill 25” completed. I assume the other options win out. If you want a healer, you can be a Disciple of Khaine (redefining overpowered) or a Shaman (great flavor, green death ray). If you want to play Chaos, you can summon demons from your hoverboard, turn your arm into blades and tentacles while shouting “Tetsuo!” or play the only armored knight-looking class in the game. “Slavering cultist” is less cool, as is the special mechanic “a buff.” They do have the advantage of being nearly invisible on the battlefield except for the characteristic slouch and dagger slash.

As a healer, the experience differs because the number of tanks does. Destruction has too many tanks while Order has too many ranged DPS. My Rune Priest ran a scenario in which the allied team was all Bright Wizards and Witch Hunters (one of them above level 5). My Chosen ran a scenario in which his team was five other meleers. These are only slightly unusual. As a healer, I prefer teammates who can survive the few seconds I need to notice damage, switch targets, and cast a spell. The Bright Wizard is blowing himself up even before two Marauders start mutilating him. The slavering cultist likes hiding behind meat shields.

: Zubon

Never seen that one before. It looks like everyone got full experience.

: Zubon

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

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