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

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

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

I work in IT, web development to be precise. When WoW was released in November 2004 about 75% of web browser market was taken by combined IE6 and IE5, there were other browsers, namely Mozilla - placing itself somewhere around 15% - and Opera with about 2% of the market. If you ever worked with websites, you probably know how disgraceful making anything work under IE can be, and as such the “alternative” browsers were mostly used by people interested into them, ordinary people wouldn’t even know about them in the first place. Why I’m mentioning this is to make you realize that only few years ago, many people wouldn’t even think about another browser than IE getting more than 30% of the market share, yet becoming more popular than Microsoft’s product pre-installed to Windows. Not once was MS sued for monopolistic practices. Why Opera was never a board success? It was, and still is, a very good browser, it has a lot of functionality and works like a charm. So why not?

Because they didn’t do it right. But when the browsers of the past failed at the competition, it didn’t mean that the competition was lost. It was also November 2004 when Firefox was released. Firefox finally did it right - it was fast, light, free, open source, secure, had tabs and addons. On the other hand IE was stagnating and had a lot of problems with security. It just had the right timing and was a great tool. At this moment 63.6% of you - visitors of this blog - use Firefox, and only 29.5% still has IE (seriously? what are you waiting for?). On the other hand, it didn’t made IE obsolete, it actually made Microsoft think about their shit, IE7 was a step in the right direction, IE8 AFAIK is going to get better. Granted, the world is not so pink, MMO gamers are a bit more advanced internet users than most people, but even then Firefox stands overall strong.

I guess you know why I’m talking about this. Neither Vanguard, nor LotRO, not even Age of Conan did it right. Those games had some good ideas, but failed in a much larger scale. But just because they failed at the competition with WoW, it doesn’t mean that competition with WoW is impossible. Warhammer Online isn’t going to be an instant win, Firefox was not either, it will need time even after release, but it’s on a good road. It doesn’t have to beat WoW’s amounts of subscriptions to be successful, getting anywhere near their scale will change the MMO market forever.

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

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