Will the european headstart make it?

So, I’ve contacted my retailer (polish language alert) to make sure about when they are actually going to bill me for the preorder and send the headstart code, here is the anwser I got (roughly translated):

Yes, five days before the official release day you will receive an email asking for confirmation / payment of your order. First 800 people, who’s payment verification for Warhammer Online will go properly, will receive special items and headstart access.

They have strange politics with those 800 people, but that’s not my concern as I’m online 24/7 (how do you kill the one who has no life?). 5 days before release is the standard procedure for my retailer as this is not the first preorder I’m getting there, that would mean they will actually send the codes on Saturday 13.

On the Warhammer Alliance forums Magnus has confirmed that nothing has changed about the dates, and GOA will actually try to bring the headstart registration before it going live:

(…) We’ve previously announced that we’d open the registrations for Head Start on the day it opens. In response to this week’s events we are working very hard to enable registration before the 14th. I’ve yet to see this confirmed, however. I’ll get back with an update as soon I can.
(…)
HS is planned as follows
September 13th - Open Beta servers close
September 14th - Collector’s Edition Head Start
September 15th - Standard Edition Head Start
(…)

Seeing how CE still seems to have problems with Open Beta I’m actually glad I didn’t order CE copy of the game. SE headstart beginning on 15th also gives them 1 extra day to fix stuff in case something goes terribly wrong on 14th (not like the CE owners aren’t going to spam GOA to death on forums in such scenario). We can only hope everything goes smooth.

Orcs officially can’t count

Patch 4.1.1 is out, the notes are pretty darn long - mostly bug fixes and last-time enhancements to crafting system and such. Anyway, there few class changes, and along them one is pretty funny:

T’ree Hit Combo: This ability now hits 5 times instead of 3, and its damage per hit has been reduced.

This is the official proof that Orcs can’t count, or rather can count only to 3 - 1,2,3,3,3 combo! On a serious note, this should be a bit of a dps boost on this ability, which is rather good as I didn’t even consider taking it in my last planned build, and that’s a deep-Brawling damage dealing combo finisher, so it should be good.

Armor and resistance calculator

And to end this post, I’ve added armor and resistance calculator to Tools, checked it against profiles on WARDB, should you find any mis-matches in game let me know.

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

Just a quick note today, I’d like to clear something up. Yesterday patch notes for beta 4.1 were relased on closed EU forums. NDA is lifted and we are free to talk about anything the game has to offer, but we are still under BTA and as such can’t talk about anything that happens on closed forums (it’s closed forum after all). People asked if we can discuss the notes in public and we got a positive from one of EU CMs. The problem arised as it turned out to be patch notes dedicated for elder test server ONLY (internal beta server), and as such are still under the NDA, there was some mistake on Mythic - GOA communication. So, officially, there were no patch notes, you can stop sending me private messages on WHA. I’m actually pretty sure that everybody interested have already found them, the damage has been done. We are going to see full notes when Open Beta starts, after patch 4.1 comes back from the elder testers to “live” beta servers, and they are probably going to be quite different.

Terhix