A big patch for the big picture

Righty then ladies and germs, having had a bit of time to think about the patch notes what do I (and you) think?

Bloody hell! This is a BIG patch! There are a lot of things I didn’t see coming, as well as a lot of things we all knew were on their way. In general terms I think this has the potential to be the best WAR patch in a looooooooooong time. Perfect? No of course not. But there are lots of clear improvements, a range of excellent new options, recognised headache bugs being zapped and of course the new city siege. It’s far too big a patch to review in its entirety in a single blog post, so excuse me for skipping a fair few things for now.

Clearly the focus of this patch is the new improved city siege system. Unfortunately this will mean that some people bitch and whine that their class hasn’t had this buffed or that fixed, but then unless they get an uber buff from God himself, well… they would bitch and whine anyway. Mythic appear to have changed their strategy regarding balance to making smaller focussed changes to careers, rather than the gung-ho widespread nerf-gimping of the past. This is a good thing, remember how much people hated that in the past? No? You bloody well should, the crying was epic. Small and considered change is a better way of doing things. Does this mean we have to wait longer for our buffs? Yes. Is that a shame? Yes, of course. Is it better than ruining loads of things at once because you can’t see the impact on individual careers? HELL YES! Having the end game turned into something worthwhile is more important than my poor Magus getting the buffs he needs. This is a big patch for the big picture.

The NEW 100% RvR City Siege
Which leads me to the big picture change, Mythic’s attempt at delivering an end-game worthy of Warhammer. Have they delivered? This is hard to say with complete confidence as this is all on paper still, but it looks like they’ve delivered with style. Each stage is now completely RvR focussed, with the NPCs supplying reasons for us to fight other players. The NPCs are mobile targets and the goal of each stage is to kill or protect them, but crucially they don’t attack us, they are JUST a target to be killed or protected. There’s no boss tactics or PvE style stuff, no shitty kite fights or other such tedium, instead it’s all about one side defending against the invading players. Winning sovereign will no longer be about how good you are at (or interested in…) PvE, it will be about how good you are at defeating enemy players. Also the city has been opened up, with the war quarters areas included, so the fight should feel much bigger. On paper this sounds excellent.

Probably the next biggest changes for city siege instances are the change from 48 vs 48 to 24 vs 24 and each instance being self reliant. This is really good news. No longer are we reliant on someone in some other instance not fucking up, no more being hampered by unrelated and unknown players screw ups. This change also has another excellent knock on effect… At the moment one of the main reasons people do alarm clock city sieges is because pushing to stage 2 in the city is a lot easier without any defenders, and the reason it’s easier without defenders is because of that thing where one instance can screw up the entire king push for your entire realm. This patch gets rid of that. How well you do is now down to how well your warband (and your enemy’s warband) performs.

Career changes

• Auto-attack changes… Good move. People defending auto-attack were deluded, as anyone that has actually fought against a tier 4 slayer (with the related gear) would testify to, this was insanely over-powered. Regular readers will know I’m not one to jump on the nerf this nerf that bandwagon, but this was a genuine serious problem.
• Runepriests and Zealots getting buffed… Excellent news, these are two classes that really did need some tweaking and I’m chuffed for them. The changes look great too.
• Chosen and Ironbreaker get changes… All good as far as I’m concerned. The ironbreaker Gromril Plating morale ability was rather potent and having the Chosen morales moved around and aligned with that makes perfect sense for me, despite them not being career mirrors.
• Sorcerers and Bright Wizards… I have to say I’m not well versed enough with these classes to really tell what this means for them. I’m reliably informed it’s not really nerfs or buffs, more just changes.

RvR currency

As I can’t see the new prices for gear this is rather hard to make a judgement on. It does sound like we’ll earn a LOT more crests in future, though I have to say the breaking crests down on a 1 to 1 basis seems very, very odd. Why???

Combat Highlighting!
I had no idea that this was on its way. It sounds very useful for healing people outside of your group. And as an option you can have turned off or on, with a range of settings between, it sounds like an excellent addition.

Tomb of Vulture Lord 7th Boss changes
VERY good news. The problem with this boss is it's too reliant on either certain classes being present or kiting mobs. The problem with kiting is that the mob pathing in WAR is just not good enough and it will regularly bug out, teleport or worse. If you have a group of friends that want to clear VL, but you don't have the right classes, the 7th boss (and only the 7th) is a complete nightmare. I go with different group set ups, sometimes its a doddle, but sometimes when those staggers, etc aren't available, its just total bollocks.

Ok, there’s loads more in the patch and lots more to comment on, but I’m trying to wall of text a bit less, so this will do for now