Ok, long time no updates, took me a while to gather myself and write something, a lot has happened in past days, so this post is probably end as a quite long one.

All hail the Earthshatter

On saturday’s night I’ve finally dinged 40, and started to play with builds. I’ve went with the 14/0/11 route from my last post, and I’m very happy with it. The only thing I’m not actually using is Punishing Knock, I just feel that I’ve more than enough CC already and I’m often using Inspiring Attack just to buff my strength or my healer’s willpower, in such case having an inferior knockdown (which, as it turns out, is a stun and not a knockdown), which also apply 18 seconds immunity on my target making me unable to use Cave-In problematic in some cases, definitely good stuff if you are not that deep in Vengeance tho.

So, instead of that I’m loading Focused Offense on my bar, now many people will tell you how Focused Offense sucks and how you are not a tank when you are using it - they lie as they have no idea how meaningless armor can be in the endgame. From all destruction classes that deals physical damage: Black Orc will stack Wot Armors on you for -75% armor debuff (I know the math says 73%, but the tooltip of 5x stacked Wot Armor? actually shows 75%), chosen deals a lot of spiritual damage anyway, marauder can insta debuff 75% of your armor with Cutting Claw in savagery build or just ignore 50% of your armor with a tactic, Witch Elf doesn’t stay behind with armor removal either and Squig Herder has options to deal non-physical. It’s not like having less armor isn’t noticeable, but it’s not as bad as many people try to make it, what makes you a tank actually is your Toughness and Wounds above everything else (and shield block if you are running around with a shield).

The ability I was very positively surprised with is Earthshatter, going with the flow of Vengeance tree I was expecting this ability to apply a dot for the duration of the snare it applies, but as it turns out, it deals instant damage, and it’s a lot of damage, on 100 grudges it hits like a fucking truck, an aoe truck of doom:

 
The underlined damage is on a squishy after applying 100-grudge Stone Breaker and Taunt, probably some buffs from my group and/or debuffs on the target increasing damage as well, it’s usually under 1.5k mark for crits, and it crits not that often as I’m not using a single +crit tactic or ability atm, 1k non-crit hit is still quite a lot of burst damage anyway.

It’s also a good thing to notice that, while it’s an aoe ability, it actually (unlike Grip Of Stone) requires an offensive target in range, so you will never waste the cooldown into air - this is extremely sexy when chasing someone and spamming the button to get the snare from the range, much like piercing howl in WoW is used (PH doesn’t require a target, but it doesn’t have a cooldown either, so one can catch a target out of melee range with it).

Two-handed wielding tanks?

This is a very hot topic, as it has been since the release, there are countless topics about how two-handed tanks are viable, and just as many about how you have to use a shield to benefit your team in RvR. The truth lies in between, as two-handed wielding tanks are neither a true melee dps, nor are they a true hard-rock tank, but rather, as it’s often called - an offensive support.

I’m often actually playing the role of melee dps in scenarios, mostly assisting in melee trains (well, calling targets as I’m used to do that from WoW, but this time it’s not me who brings the mortal strike to the table), but I try to never loose an eye from my healer(s) and always keep the one I’m guarding in my defensive target so I see when he needs my help. There are times when all I do is staying at back near the healers to make sure that every Witch Elf trying to attack them ends watching the respawn timer, and this is something an offensive specced tank do really really well. 1h + shield tank can guard a healer just as well, but it will take him a while to kill any attackers, his best bet is to peel the attackers from the healers and wait for support to finish them off, offensive support is totally independent in this role, handling any ambush attempts on his own.

I’ve already had a good chance at doing pretty much everything with my Veng/Brotherhood hybrid, from T4 scenarios, to open RvR, to keep capture and defense, to PvE. In all aspects of the RvR I can always find myself very valuable, and in PvE when you have to tank, just grab a shield, switch the tactics and skill bars and you are ready to go, no respeccing required (same applies to tanking keep lords). Either way, having a shield in your backpack is a must, you never know when some big zerg fight starts (haven’t really seen them on live yet, but seen them a lot in last stage of Closed Beta), at which point not having Hold The Line when pushing is asking to be killed.

DAMN! Those Doombolts!

Well, not only Doombolts, but when wondering about what resists to pump up, your best shot is Corporeal and Spiritual, as those are the schools the glass canon of Destruction - Sorceress - use. Once they get to 100 dark magic (and they get pretty often in scenarios with healers at their back) they hurt a lot, and it makes it quite of a pain to do a melee push when facing multiple of them.

Stacking Corporeal and Spiritual resistances are your best bets for RvR as Order, and Dwarves have it pretty good, as we not only have a tactic for corporeal resistance (I don’t see anyone using it anytime soon), but also an ability to buff it on us and our oath friend - Stubborn As Stone - pretty cheap and has a quite nice haste effect for auto attack as well. I’m sitting at 49% corporeal resistance with this selfbuff, above that when buffed with Prismatic Shield by Archmage easily getting above 50%. Now resists are not granted, they can be debuffed just as armor can be, which makes stacking lots of them even more important, as having low amounts often counts for nothing (literally). Get the right gear and talismans, and you will see the results:

 
Eltharion queues, lags and poor GOA support

Eltharion is THE Open RvR server for Europe, which means it’s has HUGE population. In the primetime Destruction has to wait 2 hours to get in (if you have 5 hours of quality time to play after work, that means you are spending 40% of it just on waiting), and even Order gets to as high as 40 minutes queues. But that’s not what’s worse, it turns out the lag inside scenarios can really destroy a lot of fun from the game, when everything in open world zones works perfectly fine. Using some morale abilities is often virtually impossible - and I’m talking about self-castable stuff like Skin of Iron, where latency problems with target out of range are out of question, these are often life saving abilities, if you spend 10 seconds trying to activate a 5 second duration life saving ability, you end up dead. Fix this shit, seriously!

We had patch server unavailable for few hours, and there was no word from GOA at all, not even a simple confirmation “we know there is a problem and we are working on it”. Nope, nothing, the first information we got was from Mythic employee, seems like US is more concerned about European players, than European company running the game for us. It’s really sad that a company which can setup such a professional booth on Leipzig GC, is showing such a lack of customer support. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes, but after years of running Dark Age of Camelot in Europe I guess we all expected something more.

Terhix

The very first Tool is here!

Nothing really complex, but I’ve decided to get my lazy ass to work a bit instead of playing OB, so here it is - Instant Attack Damage calculator. This will take some basic data such as your strength, weapon dps (also accept offhand for dual wielding careers), enemy toughness and, obviously, the base damage of an ability. The result is, if i’m not terribly mistaken at the formula, the actual damage of an ability before armor mitigation. Ever wondered what’s the difference between 1h and 2h damage? Want to check which weapon is better? If yes, this should be helpful.

Da Toughest! is exploitable after all

In my previous post about Da Toughest! I was actually wrong. As it turns out, you can remove the buff manually and the healed HP will stay. That means if you are removing the wounds buff quickly enough, you will get it proc more often (as it can’t proc again once the buff is up) getting pretty insane healing. I’ve soloed some Champion marked mobs with this, and it’s just down right broken, hopefully mythic will do something about this, as it looks like people are already starting to cry about it.

Terhix

 
At rank 10 Bright Wizards gets Fire Cage, which is pretty hard to handle when you have full melee group and abilities that remove CC come late in tier 2. We played some more organized scenarios and in quite some of them there were like 5 bright wizards (that’s 12v12 scenario) backed up with a rune priest and/or archmage here and there. Not all of them were rank 10-11, but some were which effectively stopped our melee train. So I’ve decided to change a tactic, bought the RvR 1h sword and shield and, as I was rank 10, put Hold the Line on my bar.

This is a pretty nifty ability, especially now when it got it’s cooldown removed. You get 45% increase to dodge and disturb chance, which gives you huge defensive power against spells and ranged folks, and everyone behind you (in a line, picture above) gets 15% buff to disturb and dodge as well - pretty easy to notice since everyone with the buff gets a green foggy texture on them. If you have 3 tanks, all of them can use it at the same time to stack the group buff to 45% as well. Anyway, that 45% chance to dodge and disturb combined with pretty high (30%+) chance to block with shield gives you a lot of avoidance, with zealot at my back 5 ranged guys were not only unable to kill me, they were unable to move my hp bar down by a pixel. It was pretty darn funny to see them push all that dps they have only to have it soaked by a tank while my team successfully captured the flag.

I found it also pretty effective for closing the melee range with a BW or SW trying to kite me - you can actually move at full speed while “holding the line”. The downside is the AP drain, 12 seconds of channeling and you are left with 10 AP, but it’s still ways better than when it had a cooldown.

The other noticeable shield abilities are: rank 2 morale Shield Wall available at rank 12 (this is basically 10 seconds of god mode) and Can’t Hit Me! from path of da toughest - ability very similar to Hold The Line but with a lower AP drain and giving you protection to both ranged and melee, no group utility tho, and reduced walking speed can be a bit of a problem. Sadly, no avoidance can help you register your Open Beta key on GOA website which seems to still has problems. I hope they can figure it out before headstart, I’m taking vacations next week to play the game, not to spam F5 :P.

Terhix

Yesterday Open Beta started. Looks like GOA has/had some problems with their flash site and OB registration, but since I was in closed beta my account got upgraded to Open so I didn’t have to wait for them to resolve the problems. I wanted to post about Da Toughest! yesterday, but I sank in with few guildies and didn’t go to bed until I was rank 10 renown rank 9, basically farming scenarios since rank 6. It seems that they lowered the amounts of renown needed for the new ranks, and experience alone was awarded pretty fast as well.

 
My main objective however was testing new Da Toughest! and I’ve to say I’m really happy with it’s potential use. From my testing it seems that the way it works - upon proc it turns on a 10 second buff and heals for the amount increased, it’s 3 wounds per rank so far, so at rank 10 it’s already 300 hp healed, about 10% hp. The trick is, once the buff is up it can’t proc again. Once the buff naturally goes down, your max hp drops but your current hp stays as it was, another proc will heal you again. Removing the buff manually, as far as I tested it, will lower the hp gained with the buff, so it’s rather hard to exploit. To say it in language that’s understandable for everybody - this is basically a ~10% hp selfheal proc with 10 second inner cooldown, basically same healing rate as second wind in WoW. In the screen above you can see it’s healing me for about 30% of my total damage done, that rate is going to be lower as my dps is going to be higher at higher ranks since I’ve no tactics atm and I’m going to have hardly any spare mastery points to spend into path of da toughest.

The build I’m now considering is this variant of 17/4/4, going into tri-spec is maybe not the best idea ever, but I still want to have the detaunt immunity from da boss. I never liked T’ree Hit Combo to begin with, so I can drop a point here, An Bestest! is going to be pointless if I’m not going to use Da Biggest!, so a free point here as well. Rank 4 morale, well, I can use the trainable one so a free point here as well. The good news are, we are going to get extra mastery points from renown ranks 40, 50, 60 and 70 which makes it possible to get 17/8/4, giving me everything I must have from brawling and detaunt immunity from da boss and relatively strong Da Toughest! for a good mix of offensive power and survivability.

Terhix

Ok, looks like the patch has been finally pushed to beta servers, Open Beta should start tomorrow on GOA servers, tho I guess I’m not going to play it till Monday due to announced 3gb patch. There are some changes that affects Black Orc directly, three that are most noticeable for me are:

Focused Offense: The effectiveness of these abilities has been reduced, and we have changed the damage-taken debuff to an armor debuff.

A pretty clear drop in dps. However the change of % damage taken to an armor debuff is really benefiting. Sure having less armor is a bad thing, but a lot of melee classes have abilites that bypass armor or armor reducing tools, in this form however Focused Offense gives you no penalty vs casters and no penalty when guarding people with Save Da Runts, good stuff IMO.

Da Biggest!: This ability’s effect now triggers a random stat drain from all targets near you.

This is something I’m concerned about, and frankly, this change makes no sense to me what so ever. The guys at Mythic probably got a conclusion that the strength buff provided by this ability was too much, but the random stat drain seems just… meh. Don’t get me wrong, this is probably going to be effective, but anything that has a word “random” in it is a bad mechanic IMO. I’m actually thinking about using Da Toughest! war bellow instead, but that would require me to offspec path of Da Toughest instead of Da Boss. Will see, maybe I’ll convince myself to the new Da Biggest! after testing it in game. It’s hard to judge the effectiveness basing on WARDB as they have some problems with few abilities, including all of the War Bellows.

Big Slash: Reuse increased to 10s, now has a Medium Knockback, 2 target restriction has been removed.

Obviously, when you want to kill somebody as a melee class, throwing them away from the melee is the last thing you want to do. This is however the first and only knockback available to the class without any mastery specialization, and for that it’s a pretty good thing, we lacked such an ability to protect allies.

There are other changes, most of them is increasing the duration of our buffs and debuffs, so it’s easier to maintain them, feel free to check out the full notes.

Terhix

In order to become a walking machine of death we all want to be, you need good gear, and good spec. Spec in WAR is more than one layer, it’s not only about the mastery path of your choice, but also about the tactics and morale you are going to use. I’ve presented some strong points of the career previously, but due to popular request I’m going to give you a bit deeper insight into speccing for offense. The build I’m personally planing to go with atm (everything is subject to change as we are in beta and things changes all the time) is a variation of 20/0/5 - basically getting everything from path of Da Brawler, and putting spare points into path of Da Boss to increase the damage of Shut Yer Face.

The key abilities from brawling are Gork Smash! and Down Ya Go. An Bestest! is good to have since it’s a nice dps boost and turns Da Biggest into a group buff. T’ree Hit Combo is pretty good dps, as it’s fully utilizing Gork Smash! And since we already have filled the whole mastery bar, there is no reason to not take Puddle o Muck, rank 4 morale isn’t something you are going to use often, but when you get to that 100% morale it’s going to be a waste not to have a rank 4 ability at your disposal. From path of Da Boss You Got Nuffin’ is pretty much a must have, once people will actually l2p, they will spam detaunts left and right, some classes can keep detaunt up 24/7, having a tactic that negates their 50% damage reduction from detaunt is HUGE.

Ok, so we have the mastery build set, time to pick up tactics. There are only 4 career tactic slots at rank 40, but there is more good tactics to put your hands on. Whenever you want to deal some damage, two tactics are basically a must have:

• Stab You Gooder - core tactic trained at rank 23, it makes your crits deal 200% damage (base is 150%).
• Gork Smash! - we got from brawling mastery.

Those two tactics produce a nice synergy and turns you into a crazy crit whore, crit streaks, mmmm. Ok, two slots are still empty, now depending on what you are actually going to do you want to use two of the following tactics:

• Focused Offense - I R DPS. Doesn’t need comments, but (if it remains the way it is) it’s pretty dangerous to use. In many cases, mostly large scale RvR, using this is a suicide. Also, if you are defending someone with Save Da Runts, you are going to take increased damage from guarding as well, and in case of guard you take 50% of damage against cloth, your base mitigation and toughness doesn’t matter here. You can block the damage from guard, but that requires a shield obviously ;). Perfect solo tactic still.
• You Got Nuffin’ - doing any non-1v1 RvR? Take this.
• An Bestest! - overall good tactic, pretty much self-explanatory.

That’s my tactics of choice, and I’m most likely to use them the most. There are however some other tactics that are also pretty good for offensive spec that are worth mentioning:

• Loudmouth - with 25% chance to proc a War Bellow, this is a good dps boost. The downsides are that it’s another RNG so it’s not really controlable, and to be fully effective with that you might have to use a fast weapon. Granted, weapon speed doesn’t mean much here, it doesn’t affect your abilities at all, but who doesn’t like huge crits with 4.0s weapons?
• Keep It Goin’! - the first tactic from brawling mastery, it gives Big Slash a pretty big damage boost, turning it into the biggest burst damage available to the class.
• Unstoppable Juggernaut - reducing the cooldown of Juggernaut to 20 seconds, pretty good thing if you are obsessed about mobility.

And that’s it folks, should you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.

Terhix

Offensive and defensive target

 
One of the cool small things in WAR is double-targeting. You can have one enemy and one friendly character targeted at the same time, where the enemy has a red and the friendly character has a yellow circle under his/her feet. This is also represented in the unit frames (picture above), friendly target is the one on the right. This is extremely effective for classes like tanks and healers who usually have to switch targets a lot in the other games - use a damaging skill/spell, it will land on the offensive target, use a healing or buff ability, it will land on defensive target, just like that. You can obviously select yourself for your defensive target, and use abilities like Follow ‘me Lead to buff yourself, but nothing stops you from buffing someone standing next to you. Without double targeting such abilities would be rather hard to implement.

Disorients

People keep asking about that, so it’s high time to mention it. Many games use same words for different things, just like you shouldn’t expect to get a dodge in melee in WAR, you shouldn’t expect disorient effect to put a stun that breaks on damage on your target. Disorients in WAR are used by some abilities, Black Orc has access to disorient (aoe one to that) with Big Brawlin’ tactic. Putting a disorient is increasing build times (or casting times) of all abilities of your target by X, usually that’s 1 second. This is effectively decreasing dps or healing of someone using spells with casting longer than global cooldown, but also adds casting time to spells/abilities with casting time lesser than global cooldown, instant abilities included. I’ve yet to test (give open beta already ><) how this affects actual instant spells, as I haven't played casters in recent phases of beta, but melee abilities can be "casted" while running, so it's not like you disorient someone and he has to stand still to dps now. This is however a very good way to mess up with somebody's response times, when landing a silence or knockdown in one specific second could be critical, having 1 second delay on your ability can be a killer.

Knockback and Knockdown confusion

Crowd control in WAR is limited if you look at it from WoW’s prospective. There are no long-duration spammable CC mechanics like fear or polymorph. This however doesn’t mean there is no CC in WAR, there is quite a lot of it, it’s just that “hard” ones that make you loose control over your character are really limited in terms of duration and cooldown. WAR use a lot of Knockdowns and Knockbacks, and people quite often confuse them - they do what you would expect from the name - knockback is going to throw an enemy away at some distance, where knockdown will make your enemy fall on the ground for few seconds (so it’s basically a stun). One of the reasons for the confusion is, other than names being similar at first, the fact that knockbacks, for various reasons, works exactly the same as knockdowns in PvE. Knockbacks and knockdowns are two completely different things. BTW, throwing someone off cliff is cool at first, and it force them to run around to get where they were, but it does not kill anybody anymore, fall damage is disabled on knockbacks, that’s maybe not a very realistic thing, but it was exploited to extreme levels, especially on scenarios like Stone Troll Crossing (Chaos vs Empire tier 2).

Terhix

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

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