Kicked things off with my Zealot

It’s been another mixed week of gaming temptations, with the highlights being of course WAR and then last night a Kill Frenzy Arma2 session providing much comedy and tension. Only in Arma 2 will you get a spectacular death caused by a police car and a chain reaction of exploding motor cross bikes, a herd of cows murdered after being mistaken for Spetsnaz and our KF elite special forces team assaulting an airfield on mountain bikes as several miles of woodland burned to the ground after to a collection of Stinger missile related calamities. Arma 2 I love you.
 
Anyway, regarding WAR, as mentioned recently I’ve been dabbling with alts a lot and have decided to turn that into a little test of what WAR would be like for a returning player with level 40 characters with relatively low RR. Which careers would be ok and which would be a nightmare?
 
I’ve mainly been playing my Zealot this week, taking him from renown rank 40 something to 58. I’ve also focussed my play style on DPS, only switching to healing when absolutely required. It’s actually been really good and I have really fallen for the class again. I now think that the change to Harbinger is actually an improvement, certainly for someone in my position, as it so dramatically buffs your heal or damage stats that it frees up renown points to be used elsewhere. This allows you to set up a much more rounded character than is possible with any other career. If you don’t know, when Harbinger is turned off it transposes all your Intelligence, Magic Power and Magic Crit into the healing equivilents, Willpower, Heal Power and Heal Crit. When you turn the Harbinger on it does the opposite. As such without any effort at all you can have extremely good healing stats relative to your level and it takes a lot of pressure off you to desperately upgrade your armour. It also means that regardless of spec, you can switch modes and at least heal or hit moderately hard, certainly enough to be able to rescue a situation or finish someone off.
 
From this week I feel that the Zealot is generally in a pretty good place. When I used heal based tactics I’ve been able to quite comfortably keep my group alive, found it to have an enjoyable mobile play style and also had excellent renown gain. DPS mode is not as effective, but was still quite reasonable and I at least felt like I was having an impact. It doesn’t hit that hard compared with the proper DPS classes (mainly…), yet it is potent enough to kill people and I have won plenty of 1v1 fights against a range of careers. Scenario scores don’t mean a great deal, but for what its worth I’ve regularly been in the top 3 Destro when there were enough other healers that I was able to focus on just doing damage. Also with it’s heal and armour/resist debuff tactics the Zealot can have a real effect on the outcome of fights. In a couple of city sieges I was in a heavy AoE warband and the difference when I used the AoE heal debuff was quite noticeable.
 
AND the class has a range of perfectly viable specs that can both heal and DPS well simply by changing tactics on the fly. This is a huge bonus for me and as you can probably tell, I am very pleased with how the Zealot performed. I’ve had to force myself to play other characters and am constantly tempted to switch back to the Zealot. I’m thinking I may concentrate on getting him into Worn Sovereign armour as a priority. So Zealots, yes indeed, I can recommend them for both returning and new players alike.
 
I’ve started dabbling a bit more with the Squig Herder and Magus, more on those as soon as I’ve put enough time in to trust my opinions.