Healing debuffs

This seems to be a hot topic recently. Healing debuffs are mostly a domain of dps classes (obviously), and there is one major difference between Order and Destruction here. When talking about melee DPS, we have to consider the two mirrors: Witch Elf vs Witch Hunter and Marauder vs White Lion. Both Witch Hunter and White Lion, being the Order classes, have a 50% healing debuff, in both cases it’s not a core ability and comes in one specific mastery path.

Destruction melee DPS has it different and I’ve already mentioned that in a post 2 days ago, as such Marauder has a core ability with a healing debuff, but it’s only 25%, witch elf has none. Both of those classes have not only to invest into a specific mastery path, but also have to use a tactic slot for their fully operational healing debuffs, but as such they are more effective giving both of those classes a 75% healing debuff.

There are other classes with healing debuffs as well, but nobody has it as strong as Disciple of Khaine - Curse of Khaine. From reading the comments, this does have an inner cooldown of 5 seconds, and as such doesn’t refresh when you land a crit while the effect is still up (no idea if that’s true or not), but boy it looks powerful on paper. We will see how this works out in the actual game, such an ability would be overpowered in WoW, but this is not WoW, and as such we have other ways of protection than plain healing.

Detaunts

If you are not a tank class, chances are you have some sort of a detaunt ability. Detaunts just as taunts have both PvE and RvR use. In RvR specifically they make you take 50% less damage from foes around for X seconds, which, frankly is very powerful. You can’t attack a guy you have detaunted, or the effect will instantly end, but if you are a melee dps ninja rambo guy, running into, let’s say a healer and two bad guys, you can drop a detaunt, attack the healer and still take only 50% damage from the bad guys.

But fear not my green friends who want to bash things to death, Dey Got Nuffin! This is a tactic available from path of the Boss, but requires only 4 points spent there, so you can max Brawling (or Toughest if that’s your kind of thing) and still get it. I guess it will be in my arsenal instead of Focused Offense eventually.

Over 10k downloads of my RvR movie on whmovies.com

To end this post, a bit of bragging. My first RvR movie from closed beta has hit over 10000 downloads. Got quite some comments, including critique, and I can assure you that come release, you can expect more, better and longer movies from me. I’m getting time off work for WAR release, so I’m hopefully going to level up pretty fast and have a lot of time on my hands to play with fraps.

Terhix

The big, the bad, the removed

 
Hammerers and Choppas were in the beta year ago, Knights of the Blazing Sun were in game at some point as well, out of the 4 classes that were removed from the game only Black Guard actually never made it to the beta. KotBS was shorter in the game, but when it comes down to Hammerer and Choppa you have to understand they had a lot of things - skills, art, models and items - actually finished. So why they removed them? Because it’s all about “Fun you fuckers!” I’ve played the Choppa a bit, and I actually liked the class, dual wielding is not my kind of thing as I prefer two handers, but other than that it was a pretty cool mixture of a rogue (gouge, positional attacks, sprint) and fury warrior (berserk, red glowing hands, pew pew).

The problem with Choppa, and Hammerer as they are pretty much in the same bracket here, is that they hardly had any gimmick what so ever, granted when I was playing my Choppa in Tier 1 the amount of skills I had at my disposal was nowhere near what it would be at rank 40, but overall the fight would look like that: Sprint to some poor soul, land a snare with a positional attack, launch berserk (20 sec duration 60 sec cooldown it was I believe), spam 222222222 and watch the target die, drop in a gouge if it’s a healer and tries to heal. This was effective, gave a good feeling of berserk, but in the long run was just plain boring. With career revamps done during the beta, things changed and were polished, Mythic has done a lot of hard work to implement 60(!!) different mastery paths for all the classes that are currently in. Could they ship the game in september with 6 cities and 24 careers? Yes they could, but the whole game would have lower quality then what people are expecting. It’s a pity that they didn’t manage with all of that, but I’m more than sure they will implement the lacking classes somewhere after the release (AFAIK DAoC was much faster with updates than WoW with it’s turtle speed of development ever was). Of course in the perfect world, they would postpone the release for the nth time, but even with EA at their back, development time = cost, and they have to be aware of the market, especially WotLK getting (theoretically) released at the end of the year. Personally, I’m a bit sad about how it went, but I’ve to admit this is the lesser evil and it required some balls to make a decision like this.

Communication between developers and the community

Blizzard is really good at listening to the community, no, they really are. For example, it took them only FOUR FUCKING YEARS to unlink Flurry from Enrage, something that had no sense what so ever from PvE POV since WoW was released.

Mythic has a vision of their game, and during the closed beta, that vision was changing. It was a whole new experience for me to see them going above their ego and changing the game (for better) according to what people said. Few examples: the whole mastery system was born because players felt they didn’t have enough impact on the specialization of their career. Tactics and morale got more spread over levels and tactic slots are now given as you gain power (from one slot to four at rank 40 - don’t be fooled, tactics are really powerful, a set of 4 tactics can totally change the play style of any character), because people felt they were given too early in the game and there was nothing exciting to get at higher ranks. One of the most important development decisions was moving away from being heavily scenario (read: instanced) based to more open world. Mythic was at some point even considering cross-server scenarios, and I guess we all know what happened to “realm pride” in WoW when cross-server battlegrounds were implemented. People were already bored to death with battlegrounds, we wanted the whole RvR campaign to be more based around open world, we wanted battlefield objectives to matter, and we got it, not only that, we got Keeps and siege battles all over the place.

With all that Mythic actually manges to keep behaving like normal human beings. Just as DAoC, WAR is going to have no official forums. If you weren’t born yesterday, I guess you are fully aware how brainless the official WoW forums might be. In fact, I think that’s one of the most retarded places in the whole internet. Obviously they do have forums for beta, since it’s easier to gather feedback this way and it must be a closed forum, but that’s it. The biggest hub for WAR community is the Warhammer Alliance website, which is fully fan-driven It’s kind of a wonder that without any PR bullshit a figure like Mark Jacobs himself can come to those forums, and post some important stuff, keeping people up to date and letting them know they are being heard, especially now that NDA is down and we are after the preview weekend. It’s even a bigger wonder that in the recent career poll, a class like Witch Elf can be placed somewhere at the bottom of the popularity list, on wow official forums it would probably be placed near top with posts like “BOOBS LOL!” all over the place. Hopefully, my faith in humanity isn’t going to get tested anymore and that community doesn’t change much after release. Who would have thought that the lack of official forums can be actually such a good thing?

Terhix

So, you are interested in WAR but still not sure what class to play? I’m set on Black Orc, but that’s me, there are other melee destruction classes out there, which one to pick? After reading this Blog I guess you have a pretty good idea about the class, so let’s cover the other ones a bit.

Chosen

Another tank class for destruction, which means it shares the common utility of guards, taunts and stuff like that. When considering the actual endurance for PvE in tank spec both classes are pretty equal (not the same by any means, they work different, but accomplish pretty much same level), what sets them apart is what you can do above tanking. Where Black Orc can shine as a dps machine, Chosen shine as utility machine, a good example of this might be 25% healing debuff aura - Discordant Turbulence. Auras are #1 Chosen utility - you can turn on one aura to work as a passive aoe buff-debuff and forget about it, or you can twist them. When you change auras the previous one will still last for 12 seconds, so if you don’t mind the button mashing you can keep them all up 100% of the time. Aura twisting might be annoying, but on the other hand you don’t have the combo mechanic that Black Orc has, which means that your every ability is available to you all the time, no building up.

Marauder

This class looks a bit underestimated by people. Marauder is the crazy viking mutant and belongs to Melee DPS archetype, which means he is not as tough tanks, but he is still tougher than Witch Elves. Marauder is the mirror class of White Lion, except it’s cooler since it doesn’t have a pet but has a cool mutations representing ’stance’ he is in, around which the mastery paths are build. What’s worth mentioning is path of Savagery, which has abilities like Cutting Claw, as well as Tainted Claw, which combined with Deadly Clutch tactic is a deadly combo. Marauders have quite some mobility with Charge! ability, and at level 40 they get Terrible Embrace, allowing them to pull enemies to them every 10 seconds, no comments required.

Witch Elf

If you are a Warrior vet, then this is not a class for you. If you are a Rogue vet, welcome home. Witch Elves, just as Witch Hunters, use a 5-point combo system. These are also the only two classes in game which have stealth and having stealth is never a bad thing in PvP. A system of Kisses mimics posions where you ‘Kiss’ your opponent, then murder him and his blood stays on your blades giving you some benefits (like snare). Just as marauder Witch Elf can get a healing debuff, even easier to apply through a simple Healer’s Bane tactic. At level 40 you get an Agile Escape action, which is bascially a self-backwards-knockback, and as such you can enter combat with stealth, do as much damage as possible, leap backwards and bang, you are safe. I never was into rogues so I can’t tell you much about their exact mechanics, there are also some changes planned for the class, such as giving them a snare on their Throwing Dagger.

UPDATE: I stand corrected by S4ndM4n (told you I never was into rogues :P). Actually, by the wording of it, Healer’s Bane is not a “Mortal Strike” effect, it doesn’t reduce the healing received by your victim, but it reduces the healing done by a healer, so if you are bashing a guy that’s not healing himself, it has no effect. However, Witch Elves have Black Lotus Blade in the same mastery path, which does have the usual 50% healing taken debuff.

The lack of generic warrior guy can be confusing, the characters in WAR are very iconic, can share some similarities across the archetypes, but generally have quite a different play styles. I hope I’ve helped you to pick the one that fits you.

Terhix

Mitigation and avoidance

I’ve mentioned a bit about mitigation in my previous post, time to elaborate now. There are 4 kins of damage in WAR:

• Physical - basic damage type for melee classes, if an ability doesn’t specify what kind of damage it deals, it’s physical damage and is mitigated by armor.
• Elemental - magic damage which has anything to do with elements such as fire or ice is mitigated by Elemental resistance.
• Spiritual - there is no holy or shadow damage in WAR, spiritual groups these kinds of damage, it’s a domain of healing classes, but it’s not limited to them. Mitigated by Spiritual resistance.
• Corporeal - any non-physical non-magical damage is corporeal, things like poisons, bleeds, shouts (WAAAGH! in path of the boss), explosions, anything that’s hardly magic but makes no sense to be mitigated by armor is mitigated by Corporeal resistance.

As such mitigation is pretty easy to understand. Other than that we have avoidance, there are 4 types of avoidance:

• Parry - increased by weapon skill, allows to avoid melee damage.
• Evasion - also called dodge, increased by initiative, allows to avoid ranged damage (bows & guns).
• Disturb - increased by willpower, allows to avoid magic damage.
• Block - based on shield’s block rating, allows to block all kinds of damage. Yes, you read that right, ALL KINDS, melee, ranged or magic, you can block spells in WAR.

And that’s it. It’s easy to understand and pretty clear, every kind of damage can be mitigated by either armor or corresponding resistances and every kind of damage can be avoided. Additionally, what’s especially important for tanks, we have toughness that’s flat per-point mitigation for every kind of damage, and shield block that allows to avoid everything as well. I really like how this defenses are designed in a simple and balanced fashion. If you are interested in the actual numers, check out this post on Warhammer Alliance.

More WAAAGH! on the page

As you might see, there are some changes on the page, more to come!

Terhix

I’ve launched Terhix.com on Chyrp as I’ve read a lot of good words about how lightweight it is. If a simple page showing one post and comments takes 17 SQL queries and generates over 1 second on the server side, then it seems that the word ‘lightweight’ means something totally opposite from what I thought it means.

Luckily, the blog was still young so I’ve copied the whole content of what was up on chyrp over here, including comments, so nothing is lost. Not to try anything new, I’ve just copied the new-old theme from WarriorPWNS, changed the background and logo. This is still NOT a final version, so expect more changes anytime soon.

Most of the perma links shouldn’t change, if some did - accept my apologies for the confusion. Obviously Chyrp’s atom feed is not working anymore, use RSS instead.

Terhix

I’ve been kind of sick past few days, so forgive me lack of updates. Closed Beta has come to an end, we are now waiting for open beta, and when that ends - headstart for preorder buyers which begins at 15th September, but that’s not what I wanted to write about.

Coming from WoW to WAR you will notice many similarities, as such the combat system is very similar - auto attack combined with instant attack abilities on 1.5 1.4 second global cooldown. Where WoW is using various formulas with normalized weapon speeds and other bizarre band-aids, WAR on the other hand has a pretty simple system. Depending on what type of character you are, you are using either Strength, Intelligence or Ballistic Skill to increase damage done, I’m obviously going to talk about Strength here, but the other dps stats works pretty much exactly the same way.

When you move mouse over Strength you will see that it increases your auto attack DPS by N and ability DPS by N*2, this is calculated in the simplest possible way:

Auto attack DPS = Strength / 10
Ability DPS = Strength / 5

Auto attack DPS is pretty much self-explanatory, add to weapon dps, multiply by attack speed, bam, you have your auto attack damage. But how does the ability DPS works Terhix? I’m glad you asked. It’s pretty simple, ability DPS * casting time is added to total damage done by whatever action you might be using. This obviously doesn’t apply to instant attacks which have casting time equal 0, for that reason everything that has casting time lower than global cooldown (reminder: same as WoW, 1.5 sec 1.4 sec), is considered to be 1.5 second cast. This means that every 10 strength translates into 3 points of damage on instant attacks. So, if I’ve two abilities, one dealing 100 damage and the other dealing 150 damage in tooltips, with 500 strength they will deal 250 and 300 damage respectively. AFAIK some portion of weapon dps (not damage, instant attacks are totally independent from weapon speed) is also added to melee instant attacks, but I’ve yet to see any valuable source that would indicate how much (if any) of it is taken into the calculations.

Every type of damage can be mitigated, either by armor if it’s physical damage, or by resistances for Elemental, Sipirtual or Corporeal damage (note that Corporeal damage isn’t physical mechanics-wise, it groups damage types like poison or “shout” like WAAAGH! from path of the boss). Armor and resistances gives % based reduction and are capped at 75%. There is however one more way to mitigate damage - Toughness. Toughness is a stat working exactly the opposite to Strength, Intelligence or Ballistic Skills, it lower your damage taken by X. This makes it extremly viable stat for tanks, especially in RvR as it mitigates all types of damage, melee or spells, it doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s damage it gets cut by Toughness. The easiest way to imagine how Toughness works is that it removes from enemy offensive stat, if you are running around with 400 Toughness and evul caster wanting to nuke you down has 500 Intelligence, his abilities will only gain bonus dps as if he had only 100 Intelligence. Hope this brings a bit of light into your wisdom seeking minds ;).

Terhix

You can say a lot about Mythic, but they know how to build up the hype. Warhammer trailer blows WotLK’s one out of the surface, plus nobody in Blizzard is as charismatic figure as Paul Barnett is. This has it’s good sides, as well as bad ones. It’s obviously good that there is interest around the game, but the expectations people might have might not be met when they actually play the game.

The release date before WotLK release is a pretty good timing, as people are getting sick of TBC and want something else, but on the other hand we observed the fail of AoC not so long ago. Luckily, WAR is pretty much complete content wise, unlike AoC, what WAR promised it does - RvR is here, sieges are here, renown system is here, pvp leveling is here, classes are pretty solid (except for the 4 that were removed). When it comes down to graphics it’s not the second best thing after sex, but it’s on a pretty good level, could use more polish, but is not bad at all. The biggest problems WAR have atm are purely technical stuff, crashes to desktop and some jaggy things with combat sometimes just can’t be forgotten. Luckily, bugs and technical problems can be fixed pretty easily, and while I don’t expect everything to be ready for release, I guess we will see some great improvements. Looking how AoC did, they managed to get their performance and stability fixed in the very last weeks before release, at least for the early zones of the game, we know how the game looked like past 30-40.

So, will Warhammer live up to the hype? Well, if you are expecting this game to cure cancer, AIDS and stop starvation in Africa, you better think twice before buying it. If you expect it to be better than WoW in every possible aspect - it’s not. It does what it does and it does it well, it’s a very solid MMORPG that’s heavily basing on RvR as it’s main feature.

Terhix

 
Well, I wanted to record some scenario action tonight, but it seems like I’m not getting into scenario anytime soon, Chaos vs Empire tier 4 taken by destruction, no action in other pairings, so what a bored Black Orc can do? Well, setting up an Orcapult and throwing order some stones seems like fun ;].

Terhix

 
Really short clip which is basically cut from a bit longer movie I wanted to post, but decided it’s a bit too boring. I’ll fraps some more action soon. The reason why I’m posting this little clip is because it shows perfectly how tanks operate in group PvP. I think I don’t have to post whole ability lists now that WARDB is up and running with pretty clear Mastery calculators, Actions and Tactics, so I’ll just stick with the stuff that makes tanks in Warhammer special, in a good meaning. Pretty much every tank has those abilities, they might have different names or icons, but they are there, so here goes:

Taunt - who the fuck use taunt in PvP? Well, warhammer tanks do. This is extremely sexy ability especially for dps oriented tanks: You enrage your opponent, interrupting any currently building abilities and forcing monsters to attack you. While taunted your opponent will take 30% more damage from your attacks. This effect will fade after 15 seconds or after your opponent has hit you 3 times. So, a ranged spell interrupt and damage bonus, which is supposed to force the enemy to attack you, if that doesn’t help, there is still…

Challenge - You challenge all opponents in front of you, forcing monsters to attack you. While challenged, your opponents will deal 30% less damage to everyone other than you. This effect will fade after 15 seconds or after your opponent has hit you 3 times. You probably already noticed that tanks in WAR works exactly oposite to warriors in WoW, where warrior is the weakest when ignored, tanks in WAR are working really well when ignored (and soak damage when focused, so either way you are doing your job). Challenge is a perfect way to protect your allies from opponents trying to train them, as is…

Where You Going? - Effected opponents are rooted for 5 seconds and cannot move. There is a 50% chance of the root breaking with every hit. CC is generally limited to short stuns/knockdowns, knockbacks, roots and snares in WAR (no fear or polymorph bullshit), and tanks have a fair part in those. Where You Going is a short duration, long cooldown (60 seconds is long cooldown by the norms that WAR has) AoE root, melee zerging someone, root them. Also a pretty nifty tool for catching runners if used like piercing howl in WoW. But what if I get rooted myself?

Juggernaut(, Bitch!) - You become filled with unstoppable power, removing all snaring, rooting, stunning, and disarming effects. What was that must-have must-farm trinket called? Bah, who cares anyway. WAR gives you instant CC removal every minute for free, can’t stop da Juggernaut!

And that’s it, those are generic abilities, all tanks has their own ways of protecting allies through various buff, knockbacks etc. So a fully tank-specced immortal Tank is not going to be ignored and killed last like he is in that other game, he will be there he can debuff you, burn your ap or piss you off by other means, while at the same time making sure any target you might pick is a wrong one. Obviously, nothing stops you from protecting your team mates with any build you might be using ;).

Update: changed the video from vimeo to youtube ><.

Terhix

 
Final update: ok, movie is now up on Filefront, also available for download (yeah, you better d/l it since the flash quality isn’t that high :P).

Terhix