I played Skaven

Yesterday (or in fact today) I, like a fool, sat up to the early hours of the morning and tried out the playable Skaven on the PTS.

It was very interesting indeed, a lot of fun and I can safely say that Skaven are going to have a big impact on our tried and tested ways of playing WAR. First off let’s be clear, NONE of them seemed to do a great deal of damage to players. If you’re thinking you will be WTFPWNING!!! people with them, sorry folks, but that’s not going to happen. They will however influence fights through their unique abilities and in no small way too, but really from the off you should be thinking of the Skaven as support classes.

There are a few common things between the 4 Skaven classes:

• All of them have very high hit points; I believe it ranged from 17k to 34(?)k depending on class.
• None of them can use mounts, so you’re on foot and legging it around, slowly.
• Rat Ogres can only be healed by the Packmasters, but other Skaven can be healed by other people. So they will require escorting by other players, but they will be worth it. (thanks Anon comment for the correction!)
• You turn yourself into Skaven from a device in the keep and you will remain as Skaven until either you die or you leave the RvR lake.
• When you turn into a Skaven your tool bars change to Skaven abilities, with each class having around 6 different things it can do. These abilities need to be rearranged to your preference and reset each time you change into a Skaven. A minor thing, but quite annoying, so hopefully that will get improved.
• None of the careers have a spamable attack, everything has a cooldown of at least 2 seconds and more often 5.
• There are limited numbers of each type of the Skaven careers available at one time, except it seems Rat Ogres which appeared to be unlimited.

Rat Ogre

The throwing people around is going to be hugely popular. It’s intended for throwing people onto walls, but it’s uses will go well beyond that. Hurling ranged onto rooftops, throwing people over obstacles for shortcuts, all sorts of things… Oh and you can only throw people in your group or warband, so the griefing concerns can be forgotten (except in PUGs…).

Other than using a ram, the only other thing that can damage doors are Rat Ogres. Keeping them alive will be interesting…

For general ORvR fighting Rat Ogres are going to have a big influence by guilds that make the most of them tactically. They have an AoE stagger for a start, but the real imposing (and hilarious) ability is their charge. You can hurtle forwards and quite literally knock enemy players flying. I ran straight through a warband and bodies went everywhere. Didn’t do much damage (if any), but it totally screwed up their postioning.

Packmaster

I had problems with this career. I may have been doing it wrong, but their heal seemed very underwhelming and I had a little difficulty telling when it was working or not. I was getting invalid target a lot, presumably because the Rat Ogre I was targeting already had a heal active? Not sure.

I really liked their summoning rats ability, it was just amusing to use, though how potent it was I’m not entirely sure. Oh and they can leap huge distances to the nearest Rat Ogre, which has to be the best get out of dodge ability in the game. All told I’m just uncertain on this class, I gave it a good go, but it just didn't click for me, but it could have been me being confused. I'd be very interested to hear how other people got on with it.

Gutter Runner

This little bugger is going to be very, very popular. The damage is pathetically bad, but with permanent stealth and a 60% run buff on a toggle, combined with their ability to leap up walls, these are the ultimate scouting class. For example you can easily get all the way into the inner keep and report on exactly how the enemy is setting themselves up. I spent a lot of my time running round watching stuff and it actually reminded me of my DAoC scout and being the eyes of our alliance in the old days.

They can sabotage enemy siege weapons, but I didn’t get to see the end result of that unfortunately. For general warband play they also have a quite potent AoE snare bomb type thing, which when delivered from their uber stealth could well be a right pain in the arse.

Warlock Engineer

I LOVE the look and sound effects from this class, very cool. Unfortunately I didn’t get to play it very much, but from what I saw it seems like the one class that might do some proper damage with its lightning gun and warpfire thrower. It also has some seriously good buffs . But like I said I didn’t get much time with this one, so can’t say too much.

How exactly this will all work out on live we can’t be sure, but these new classes provide some very interesting new tools for warband leaders to utilise. It looks to me like they are going to dramatically change things and we’ve got a lot of new stuff to get the hang of.

BTW sorry the screenies are low quality, was a bit of a rush job and I was tired :P

Change, change, change

There are more changes coming as a result of feedback and info from the Public Test Server. You can find Michael Wyatt's post here, or just read below.

+++++
(NOTE: This is not currently live on PTS) Tweaks and Adjustments made due to feedback from October 8th, 2010 test: 

• Deployable Siege may once again be placed in areas where mounting is not allowed.
• Battlefield Objectives will now lockdown for 5 minutes after being successfully captured. Resources will be generated, unable to be disturbed, during this time. Resource Carriers will continue to spawn every 120 seconds as well. (NOTE: This will cause a known issue where a Battlefield Objective's Resource Generation Timer will be reset when the Battlefield Objective transitions from Locked->Unlocked. We're looking for feedback on the locking itself before investing engineering time to correct the issue. While testing, please assume that this timer is not reset.)
• Resource Carriers will now automatically be issued orders 2 minutes after being spawned. Interacting with a Resource Carrier prior to this 2 minute timer will continue to cause them to dispatch.
• Reduced the Resource thresholds to rank up a Keep by 25%.
• Aerial Bomber abilities "Fire Bomb" and "Chaos Fire Bomb" have had their damage radius reduced and will no longer ignore AOE line-of-sight checks.
• Players may now only carry one deployable Siege weapon at a time.
• Siege weapons are once again repairable in combat but the repair duration has been increased to 45 seconds (up from 30 seconds).
• Reduced the amount of damage reduction provided to Resource Carriers by a Rank 1 Keep to 25% (down from 50%).
• Resource Carriers are now affected by their own version of Against All Odds. All damage received is reduced by a scaling percentage based upon the population ratios.

+++++

This backs up what I was saying yesterday about being your chance to get your feedback read and responded to. Those changes are clearly related to things being said on the Mythic forums right now. So if you cba to do it, well, do it ;)

Of particular interest from those is the 5 minute lock down time for Battle Objectives and the resource carriers automatically moving out after 5 minutes. One thing quite a few people have raised concern about is with the BOs being constantly attackable, if an outnumbered force manages to capture one, the bigger force can too easily take it back before any resources are generated. This in effect buys them some time, so sounds like a good idea to me though I wouldn't want timers much longer than that.

Resource gathers automatically moving off after a few minutes is a great move, as another sensible concern being raised was about people having to sit at a BO clicking a gatherer every few minutes. This change to that will allow defenders to mount a more mobile and less boring defence.

The more this gets tweaked, the better it sounds.

PTS ponderings (updated, again.. with some video)

My chances of doing a write up about last week’s testing events were scuppered by a clash with previously arranged real life events. However I did manage to go on to the PTS at other times and tried out for the new campaign system in a small scale roaming situation. I was part of a group and a half of Kill Frenzy playing Destruction against about the same number of Order (by their movement also guild groups), with both sides trying to get control of the battle objectives and resources. It worked very well actually, as we leapt from attack to defence and back, as Order and Destruction tried to outwit each other.

One of the things that happens at the moment on live servers is when you get into a zone you look at the map and more often than not the timers decide what you can do. Whereas on the PTS we quickly discovered we had far more options of where to go, as every single Battle Objective was attackable by someone and then there was the resource carriers to think about too. This got everyone quite stoked up in a good way and we had some awesome fighting for an hour or so before time got the better of us. I didn’t get to properly attack a keep mind you.

From reading the feedback and talking to people about the PTS events last week it seems like there’s a very mixed opinion about it all. I’m not sure how much that is due to genuine issues, different play styles or people not adapting. I suspect a mixture and/or combination of all three. If you’re someone that for whatever reason tends to follow the PuG zergs then these changes maybe a little overwhelming, as I just don’t think that play style is going to work out very well in future. Guilds and alliances that can reliably send a group there, a warband here, a guild there and so on will become dramatically more effective. The spread out barely controlled zerg will struggle to achieve much and will find itself milling around dazed and confused, as the more organised set ups take them apart and control the zone.

As an aside to this; I would certainly recommend that all guild leaders start thinking about how their guild and alliance will operate in the futur. I really do think the ORvR changes will drive people towards more organised places and it could mean some guilds suffer from members jumping ship. Just remember you don’t have to run the place like some kind of anally retentive dictator, but when you are doing RvR as a guild, do make sure your groups know their role and are moving together promptly at all times. Voice comms really do make all the difference for this. And make sure that you ARE doing ORvR as a guild... In future, far more than ever before, if people are in a guild but always have to PuG they will start to question what the point of being in that guild is.

Back on topic… From what I heard the first PTS events didn’t necessarily see that many people move independently. Many still tried to zerg, others sat queueing to try out the new toys (aerial bombers!) and it didn’t really represent a true zone lock battle on live.

Yet, a load of people from my guild went along to the EU PTS event and their feedback was mainly very positive about the overall concept. Of course they also had a range of comments and suggestions on things that need changing, but the overall feeling is good and despite the rather unrealistic situation they could see the potential. These changes suit us though, we’ve always tried (where possible) to move away from the zergs and do our own thing. So I’m not sure exactly how the PUG warbands will fare in the future, perhaps if they learn to coordinate things will work out ok for them, but certainly moving in one giant zerg is dead and buried. You’ll lose all resources and end up sat in a low rank keep being battered to buggery. That is as long as having the higher ranked keep works out as significant advantage enough, from what I’ve read and heard so far I’m not sure.

What is absolutely key to all of this though is making sure we get our feedback to Mythic. If you’ve been following the developer forums you will have seen they have already made changes based upon the PTS. So remember right now this is an evolving system and your feedback WILL be considered. Obviously not everything that everyone wants will happen, but if you don’t provide those wants to Mythic then you’re relying on someone else to say the same thing. If you’ve got a good idea, go post it on the suggestions forum or in the focussed discussion threads.

UPDATE!

OK I just saw these awesome videos by Oberheim from the PTS event.


And...

Now get over to his blog, there's plenty of other WAR videos there and I would highly recommend bookmarking it for future updates!

Oh and one other thing, this is funny as fook....

lol :)

Big post of rambling before going AFK

I’m going to be AFK for a week, which would have meant no posts, but thanks to the glory of iPhone I might be able to sneak in the odd post, but that may prove difficult… Still, worry not my bored at work friends! Just go check my blog roll for more WAR, MMO and other alt-tab work-time reading! ;) In the meantime I figured rather than post on a particular topic, I’d instead ramble about the various WAR related things ticking through my head and see where that takes me.

First of all we have the collision detection drama that I posted about yesterday. For good or ill, this will prove to be what 1.3.6 is remembered for. I saw this post on the WHA forums earlier which tickled me, it’s a quote from a Mythic grab-bag about friendly collision detection. LOL Poor Mythic, but that’s the curse of the internet and that special breed, the MMO gamer… if you say it, it’s never, ever forgotten. I have to say though; I agree with Mythic’s comments in that grab bag and would love to hear exactly why it was a problem then and not now. I say that without sarcasm. No, seriously, something changed their mind and would like to know exactly why.

Long term readers will know that this is not something I would say lightly, as I’m not one to go all emo-rage-quit, but there are 2 things that would make me seriously consider quitting WAR:
1 – WAR going free to play (thankfully ruled out)
2 – The PvP combat system becoming too much like World of Warcraft’s trash PvP.

As of 1.3.6 the jury is out on the second one. I’m unfortunately only little bit hopeful it will work out ok, I’ve got much louder alarm bells going off like crazy. Kiting through friendly targets, weakening of the relevance of terrain and a big step towards Zerghammer are genuine threats with this change. If Zerghammer replaces everything, then everyone will suffer and all of Mythic’s recent progress will be for naught. You may think I’m being overly negative, reading too much into it, but in a year and a half of writing this blog I’ve discovered it’s better not to write off my gut feeling on this sort of thing. Everything I’m hearing is pointing to this going in regardless of anybody’s concerns. Unless it’s for a like a temporary 2 week test on live servers, then I will be staying extremely worried for the future of WAR’s gameplay.

Moving on…

A mini Blorc update. Sorry folks, I got sidetracked… I will be continuing and will be posting about his progress, but I just got utterly absorbed by my Witch Elf. I’m approaching realm rank 50 with her, have got pretty well geared for that level and have become reasonably proficient in kicking arse. Of course I still lots and lots to learn to become “good” with the Witch Elf. It’s also dramatically reduced the time I’ve spent on my Chosen, which I need to address. The Black Orc I figure I’ll pick up again in couple of weeks.

Gamescom, Gamesday Baltimore and the big announcements for the future are fast approaching. Many of us are expecting this to be news on a paid expansion, whereas others are more than a little less optimistic (shock horror). There are all sorts of rumours flying around, but they’re hard to substantiate. For example I’ve heard from a respectable contact with extremely good links into Gamesworkshop that not only is an expansion coming, but it’s been practically ready for a while, but between the GOA split and the big scary Cataclysm approaching, Mythic’s release schedule was buggered. Any truth in it? I’ve no idea! I can’t get any confirmations and it could just have been someone involved pulling our chain. In a couple of weeks hopefully we’ll know the truth.

As an aside to that, something is going on general with Mythic and their games. Mythic have stated that Ultima Online has a big announcement coming. The lead for Dark Age of Camelot is also going to Gamescom and I believe Gamesday too. Hmmm. Speculation can lead you all over the place with this.

Next thought… Having had plenty of time to settle into our new Mythic version of the Karak Norn server I can confidently give a bit of feedback on it. The performance in ORvR is vastly improved. Is this to do with avoiding France Telecom? Having played MMOs for a long time, I wouldn’t be bloody surprised. I’m extremely pleased with the improvements in ORvR and it has been great fun. Alas, its not all good news. The lag spikes everyone gets in Tomb of the Vulture Lord (or any dungeon) when something happens elsewhere in the game world have not gone away with the GOA servers, so its obviously WAR itself at fault. I loathe wiping on a boss purely because everyone’s game froze up for a second or two. Actually I don’t know if this is related or not, but if you want to see some kind of server delay in visual form, just use a knockdown on the cousins on the 7th boss in Vulture Lord and notice how they fall to the floor several paces BEHIND where you and the mob are when you actually hit them. It happens almost every single time.

Finally in not WAR related, yet sort of is, news, I’ve been playing an awful lot of “Mount & Blade: Warband” and am bloody loving it. Once you get past the dodgy presentation, the lack of decent instructions and after you apply the Polished Landscapes add on to update the graphics, it is truly a brilliant game. The single player campaign is far deeper than it at first appeared and the multiplayer is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been in siege battles with 222 people, no lag at all and FULL collision detection. I’m sure for technical reasons that you can’t really compare a hosted battle game and a MMO on performance, but a big part of why this game is so amazingly brilliant is that full collision detection. Last word on that my friends, you don’t know what you had until its gone.

The Kill Frenzy WAR video auteur is making a video of some of the fights we’ve had, I’ll post it ASAP so you can see why I’m gushing about this game.

Anyways that’s me done, I’ll try and keep posting over the next week, but don’t rely on me for news or anything ;)

Go check out Werit's video from testing tomb of the Vulture Lord, WAR's RvR enabled instance (yay for new purge changes!). You can see a few new things in it including the (optional) combat damage/heal flashing on characters.

Also if you've not played WAR for a while or never dabbled at all, this video does a good job of showing off some of the high quality graphics inside the game's premier dungeon experience. I'm a big fan of the way The Land of the Dead and it's dungeons look. It's just so right, not one of those over-stated WoW fairy glowy crap things (which are impressive in their own way, but totally wrong for WAR), it's an ancient yet maintainted tomb of evil egyptian style buggers. Mythic absolutely nailed the Tomb Kings theme.

Youch! It burns!

There’s been WAR bloggers popping up all over the place lately, as my ever growing blogroll can testify to. I’m going to give an extra special shout out for Krosuss who’s been a regular commentator on my blog for a long time. He’s recently started his own blog called “Krosuss says burn…” and from his past comments I know the dude has plenty of ideas to share.


WAR’s resurgence continues!

Oh and on another topic... if you want to see the new city being tested live, check out Mykiel's site for streaming video uberness.

City siege improvements are good apparently

I couldn't get on for the Euro PTS lark, but from everything I've read so far things are looking pretty damn good. "Like a huge Nordenwatch" was one of the descriptions I very much liked the sound of. Game performance in the cities is meant to be much improved too, which would be a very welcome change.

Other bloggers weren't as slack as I and managed to get on to the PTS. There ares some comments over at Overly Positive and Werit which as always with those blogs are worth a butchers, plus there's the feedback threads over at the official US forums.

If Mythic pull this off and makes city sieges fun, then this could make a big difference for a lot of people. There's a whole load of us that don't bother going to attacks or defence currently because it's just fairly poor PvE with hideous lag. If that was to change to decent RvR and good performance... Well my friends, I'll see you in the city :)

AoE nerfage

The latest WAR patch is up on the PTS at the moment, which as everyone's probably seen includes an across the board nerf to AoE.

People are already crying, most of which is a load of old cock, but is a bit more valid for others. Whilst all AoE being nerfed sorts out the Bright Wizard/Sorc/Engineer/Choppa/Slayer AoE of Doom, it also makes the weak classes even weaker. For example Magus are hit hard by this nerf, a class which is already desperately struggling for popularity. I know Marauders are extremely unhappy, not so much that their AoE got nerfed, more that their class is in need of fixing not nerfs.

However, Mythic doing this across the board AoE nerf is actually sensible. In theory it instantly sorts out the AoE mania buggering up RvR now and it gives them the ability to balance up abilities and classes that need it. They key though is for Mythic to be very clear with their player base about what's going on. Otherwise you'll continue to see people quitting because there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for their gimped class. Mythic probably think they're posting and commenting more than enough, but seriously guys the player base needs reassurance right now.

My guild is large enough to regularly have full guild only warbands, but is now down to 1 active Marauder and Magus. That says it all.

1.3 patch notes are out and it's on the US PTS

Link : http://herald.warhammeronline.com/patchnotes/index.php?id=2009_1-3-0#_50

I'd copy it all here, but there's such a huge amount of info it will take too long to format :P You'd be better off reading the official page linked above.

There's loads of interesting things aside from the stuff we knew about too, just a few examples would be:
Public Quest Loot Roll Opt-Out
Auto Roll Tab
Large-scale Keep fights will now have the possibility of awarding additional gold bags for attackers or medallions for defenders.
Seizing an upgraded Keep will now yield additional gold bags, depending on the Keep's level.
Additional Ordnance Weapons
Crafting Inventory Improvements
Respawn checkpoints have been added throughout Gunbad. In most cases, this means that when a character dies, he or she will respawn closer to the location of death instead of at the dungeon entrance.rather These checkpoints also include a Healer.

Unfortunately it appears the Chosen is one of the classes included in this statement:
Due to the wide scope of these changes, we will be rolling them out on a career-by-career basis over the next few patches. Careers that did not get damage adjustments in 1.3 will be receiving them in the next update.

Ahh well, at least it's on its way.

Bring on the EU PTS pls!

Changes to 1.2.1 as a result of testing

Thanks to Werit for spotting this from Mythic.

Key bits for me are:

Increased base hit points on all pets. (Squigs, War Lions, Turrets, and Daemons)
If it makes them more relevant then that's all good.

Flurry/Lotsa Choppin': These abilities have been changed to a Cone area of effect that will only hit targets in front and on the sides of the character. Due to this change the abilities will no longer require a target to activate.
Fine with me. Generally I think the Choppa seems pretty balanced, but after a mammoth RvR session today, yeah Lotsa Choppin is as they say "OP". This seems like a fair change.

Players operating a Ram will now be immune to Knockback and receive reduced damage from Oil Siege Weapons.
and
Siege Rams will now do twice the damage as they previously did.
and
Keep doors will now have double the hit points they previously had.
and
We have significantly increased the hit points of Ram Siege Pads.
Excellent. I was asking for something like this the other day. Making siege weapons more important is no bad thing. Hopefully the start of more improvements.

Caltrops and Dynamite will no longer be introduced with the Ordnance system.
This I'm really pleased to hear. Players didn't like Caltrops, testing showed them to be to have a negative effect on the game, so Mythic got rid. GJ Mythic.

Now what I want to know is when is the patch going live? And when do we get the token based loot system?

Stat Adjustment pondering

Was chatting with some mates about this stat adjustment proposal yesterday, very mixed opinions.

I quite like the idea, as at the moment there's just too many irrelevant stats and I don't see it meaning I'll need to re-gear myself much. Other tanks I spoke to also seemed to like it, but some of the DPS nutters I chatted with were quite concerned. At the moment they've mainly stacked things like say Strength and Wounds, but to maintain decent crit damage with these possible changes they would also need to get a load of Weapon skill somehow. Apparently requiring quite dramatic changes to their current equipment.

It seems like the toughness change would fit in very easily, its not game breaking and I imagine those that would want the benefit already have a lot of toughness (i.e. tanks), but perhaps this isn't the case for stats related to damage. I've not seen any PTS feedback on it yet, but it's sounding like this could be a delicate one to get right. Here's hoping...

WAR Proposed Stat Adjustment! Hmmm :)

Check out this thread by Mythic:
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=1-2-1_fd&message.id=3#M

Very interesting indeed.

Critical Damage Calculations
Currently (on 1.2 live), the amount of base critical damage dealt is a random value between 40% and 60%, which then is further modified by career mechanics and buffs. The proposed change will remove this random range and set the base value to 50%. From that 50%, a formula that utilizes the attacker's secondary stat for that attack type (Weapon Skill for Melee & Ranged, Willpower for Magic) and the defender's Initiative will shift that 50% to anywhere between 5% and 75%, based on the values of each stat as compared to each other. With a high positive offensive ratio (more Weapon Skill than Toughness, as an example), the critical damage gain has the potential to be higher than exists on live now, but with a high positive defensive ratio extra critical damage can be greatly reduced.
Your Weapon Skill or Willpower and your targets toughness effecting Crit Damage? Wow, that really mixes things up. A lot of currently dodgy armour sets would look totally different, for example all those Magus items with lots of willpower. At the moment its useless, but with this? Hmmm... Look forward to hearing how this works out.

I like this a lot:
Health Regeneration based on Toughness
Currently (on 1.2 live), the player has no health regeneration in-combat. The proposed change would give every player a health regeneration tic every 4s that would occur even during combat. The amount healed would be based on the player's Toughness, with the current discussed value at Toughness / 5 worth of heal every 4s. Any health regeneration bonuses would then be added to this amount.
At the moment Toughness is the bastard red haired step child of the stat world, this could really change that. If this went live I'd be very keen to see how this works for tank classes.

PLEASE NOTE!
These are just suggestions being put on PTS for testing, they're not set in stone as going onto live servers. It's our opportunity to see if we like the suggestions and then provide feedback.

PS: GJ Mythic, I really like this style of being open about your ideas and promoting constructive feedback. It's refreshing to see a developer giving the players such an opportunity to shape development.

Chosen - Rending Blade nerfed, Dread mastery ruined again

- Rending Blade: This ability’s tooltip now correctly states that the ability is undefendable. Additionally, this ability’s reuse has increased and the cost has been lowered.

It's a 5 second reuse timer. Bah! :( 1.2 nerfed Chosen's single target DPS to the point of being useless, but with Rending Blade (if we specced for it) we had respectable AoE DPS and the range helped us deal with runners.

It made up for the nerf to Touch of Palsy, Cleave STILL not working and the weakening of all our other single target abilities. This 5 second has now basically killed the Dread tree again. :(

This post by Zaknarakh sums up the problems in each patch perfectly:
http://forums.war-europe.com/warhammeronline/board/message?board.id=choEN&thread.id=20

I don't expect my Chosen to be a top DPSer, but if I spec high in the Dread (DPS) tree, use a great weapon and build my armour up around strength, etc , then I expect my DPS to be pretty good. I have after all sacrificed a lot of survivability to do this and yes I know we're primarily a tank class, but we have the option to use great weapons for a reason. We don't want to go back to them being pointless and everyone speccing Discord again, but that is what's going to happen. Ravage is once again our only ability with any clout at all and that's not what it once was either. :(

What Mythic should have done to Rending Blade was just reduce the size of it's AoE effect to 20ft.

They also need to make Touch of Palsy worth using, it's our level 40 ability for crying out loud. At present as a Chosen you get "Ding 40! Uhm wtf is this shit?"

And for all that's unholy, why is Cleave, our undefendable skill, defendable? And why does it do a LOT worse damage than Ravage, even if you have full Dread and bugger all Discord?

Bloody hell :(

BTW I know I don't normally rant, so sorry :P