Well my witch hunter is now level 8 and has been parked in the Empire warcamp on Karak Norn in the starter zone since about level 5, and I'll just briefly explain how it is for someone coming from WoW.

- The UI is the same as wow's pretty much, it has the same round portraits with the health bars sticking out to the right. One thing that's a shame is that the mobs don't have "portraits", just generic images, making me wonder why it has the round portrait thing in the first place. Using the little spanner at the top I moved my portrait frames to the middle. I hadn't seen the default UI before today as I was playing on a friend's computer who has a custom UI on WAR that looks exactly like several WoW UIs with eepanels, grid and AGUF. The default UI is fine but I'd like to mod so it looks exactly like my old WoW UI, all the addons are there already on curse now I just gotta get off my ass and download them :D

- The graphics are probably the biggest surprise. The backgrounds are cool looking but it's the character models especially that are amazingly detailed compared to wow's. The human characters look really awesome and on my ATI 4850 I have forced AA/AF etc and they are strangely realistic. Although the starter gear looks pretty ugly (basically a shirt and pants), I now have a set of gear that (at only level 8) looks very impressive already, and I dyed it all white (I wanted purple but it was too expensive, costs several gold to dye a set of gear with the expensive colours, which is too much imo) Overall the graphics at 1680x1050 are a huge step up from WoW, much more detailed and with much more realistic looking models and it all runs at 80FPS on my computer. Enabling AA/AF is a must though, I got it all maxed out on the ATI panel, 16x etc. The PVP looks pretty impressive and runs really smooth, but I hate how hard it is to kill the orcs :D

- The quest log in the Tome of Knowledge is pretty cool but the best thing was unlocking stuff in there and being able to read it between quests, there's a lot of detail on the lore tab that you can unlock. I went to altdorf once and ran around and got lost and HSed back to Nordland, but it filled my tome of knowledge with stuff and I understand the city a lot more now

- The quests are easy. It has a built in addon that shows where to go on the map with red marker zones and there's a cool variety in quests like shooting cannons, rescuing villagers, rallying troops, finding stuff, etc. Pretty standard stuff like wotlk. Anyway, quests are just what I do while waiting for BGs which I've found give me a lot of xp very quickly (especially as I take the BG quests from the warcamp)

- The BGs: Nordenwatch is great, I love this BG, it's arathi basin with 3 flags basically. 8 out of 10 times a BG pops, it's nordenwatch. Khaine's embrace I still don't understand. There are 2 flags and a tunnel and a statue and the whole place keeps blowing up. I've only done this scenario twice and both times I just followed everyone else and tried to kill people. Ekrund is great too and has 3 flags along a line so it's like a tug of war, our win rate in Ekrund is very much 50/50 atm.

- The community is really good so far, people on WAR spam less in /1 than in WoW but are very social when you meet them while questing or at the warcamp, and seem less childish than the usual people one meets while questing in WoW. I've often been in a bit of trouble at low health when a warrior priest comes around and heals me from a long way away and then we have a chat. I've been in 1 large raid group to fight in Emrank, the first world pvp zone and it was awesome fun, I got invited to the raid quickly and got healed! We fought hard in the market square of the city and down on the beach and although I was just following people and reading the raid chat, I got a sense of what was going on. We took flags and then fought a large group of horde down at the beach and got wiped out but we had defended the flag by then. You get automatically raised to level 8 when in the world PVP area so even a level 1 can show up and contibute and fight in world pvp right away.

- Guildies: some of the time we moved together as a guild and it's awesome to all level up together doing scenarios and questing. I think it helps to know people, or to get to know people fast in the game because everything is more fun and faster xp when in groups. Also as a guild group we've never lost a scenario, although it's a shame we can't join as a full raid. There's really no benefit to being shy as getting out there and starting conversations often leads to groups and meeting people very fast. We did a PQ where we had to kill everyone in a village, we were 11 people together in a raid doing it and we kept getting gold bags after killing the bosses, we did it just a few times and many of us dinged from it. I got a special set gear chestpiece from the gold bag I won!

- I'm still learning the ropes, there's a lot of stuff that's new but also a lot of stuff an experienced wow player can understand immediately. It's fun to be a noob again, but I can tell you it won't last long as we'll soon be pro :D

I played a witch hunter aswell.  You mentioned that at level 8 you got a cool looking piece of gear.  Well you better get use to looking at that design because all your future upgrades will look the same. 

Originally posted by TheHavok

I played a witch hunter aswell.  You mentioned that at level 8 you got a cool looking piece of gear.  Well you better get use to looking at that design because all your future upgrades will look the same. 

I played a human rogue in WoW. I had nearfull or full tier 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8

My witch hunter at level 8 looks cooler, more detailed and more badass than my rogue in any of those sets, including tier 5 which was my personal favourite.

So yeah, I don't mind :)

Ya you find out in WAR that the Tanks are TANKS..... Both the Black Orc and the Ironbreaker are both horrible to have to fight.

Originally posted by 7Fold

Ya you find out in WAR that the Tanks are TANKS..... Both the Black Orc and the Ironbreaker are both horrible to have to fight.

ya this one huge orc was level 11 and shows up as red on my frames and there were 3 of us trying to kill him and he wouldn't die. Not sure if he had a hidden healer or what but he was just backing up and escaped back into the destro warcamp, we just couldn't kill him.

Originally posted by Hatsoff2u

Originally posted by 7Fold

Ya you find out in WAR that the Tanks are TANKS..... Both the Black Orc and the Ironbreaker are both horrible to have to fight.

 

ya this one huge orc was level 11 and shows up as red on my frames and there were 3 of us trying to kill him and he wouldn't die. Not sure if he had a hidden healer or what but he was just backing up and escaped back into the destro warcamp, we just couldn't kill him.

 

 

 

they are tuff as heck to kill.
 

I got a R40 WH their cool but WE are much better imo (and most peoples I think), my WE is now R32 and im loving her.The have much better burst damage and the skill "On Your Knees" is godly.

Glad to see you're enoying the Witch Hunter. A little word of advice though, if you're expecting them to be the DPS monsters that rogues are in WoW then you'll be a little let down.

Witch Hunters play the role of single target assassins in WAR and have a huge assortment of skills to make their oponments life a misery. DPS wise they are a decent class but single target wise they are a little worse than the Witch Elf and White Lion.

I have one endgame myself and I can assure they look kick ass in sentinal gear and are perhaps the best solo pvp class.

@ OP

Nice post. I am glad you liking the game the game. I have to say that the end game tend to be a little bit repetitive, but Mythic is aware and working on it.

What I like from WAR the most is that is casual MMO. I dont have to be glued every day on my computer to be remain competitive and enjoy the oRvR

What I dislike most of WAR is that there are true penalties. For example:

Why push to the enemy city when they can get invader gear like we can. I think the game should incorporate penalties for the loosing side.

Are you serious about them graphics? I mean, I know compared to wow it's probably like crysis! Seriously though when I got this game I was HUGELY dissapointed with the graphics, I felt completely dissapointed! Bad lack of detail too. Don't say something stupid like "It's your PC LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" cus no. It's not :/

Originally posted by Hatsoff2u

Originally posted by 7Fold

Ya you find out in WAR that the Tanks are TANKS..... Both the Black Orc and the Ironbreaker are both horrible to have to fight.

 

ya this one huge orc was level 11 and shows up as red on my frames and there were 3 of us trying to kill him and he wouldn't die. Not sure if he had a hidden healer or what but he was just backing up and escaped back into the destro warcamp, we just couldn't kill him.

 

 

 

Word of warning this changes drastically in tier 3+.  They should have stopped the leveling at 20 or something.

As for the looks of the character this is also something that changes roughly by Tier.  People complain about the lack of change in WAR class looks, but the 60 levels of multi colored hobo in WoW was much worse.

Choices in WoW were multi colored hobo or be a clone in set gear.  At least WAR generally looks cool if you like your classes look and changes around once every 8-10 levels.  And is different enough to not be clone.

At least until you are forced to farm for cockblock set gear in Tier 4 then its just as bad as WoW or worse really.

Man the way this game gets so much worse in almost every way after level 20 is just pl;ain crazy.

Originally posted by Avathos

@ OP

Nice post. I am glad you liking the game the game. I have to say that the end game tend to be a little bit repetitive, but Mythic is aware and working on it.

What I like from WAR the most is that is casual MMO. I dont have to be glued every day on my computer to be remain competitive and enjoy the oRvR

What I dislike most of WAR is that there are true penalties. For example:

Why push to the enemy city when they can get invader gear like we can. I think the game should incorporate penalties for the loosing side.

It doesn't need penaltis so much as counters. 

Penalties are actually rather uninteresting.  They just say "Hey you are getting your asses kicked, but guess what?  If you don't fight we will kick your ass even worse".

The problem is there is no strategy really.  No counters or interesting avenues for the people who want to fight to do much.  In a sense this implies "penalties" in that you must give one side a way to punish the other.  But mostly this is in regards to "winning" rather than simply taking away something shiny if one side does not do something.

Its basically just everyone run around and cap point then come to this choke point called a Fortress.

As for them improving the T4 RvR.  Mark Jacobs most recent annuncement says very little about that.  Certainly nothing substantial.  Just two new classes and a darkness falls dungeon.  T4 itself sound like it will still be pretty hollow.

 Actually so far I've had the most fun on my Magus in tier 3. In tier 3 the keeps become more like actual castles with an external wall around them, and the fighting back and forth in the zones makes it hard to put the game down. In addition you start getting really deep into your Mastery path during this tier, which helps define your character even more. A lot of scouting and coordinating between warbands takes place to make sure keeps stay defended while trying to take enemy keeps. Strategy seems to pick up a lot in tier 3, perhaps due to people being more experienced with the game by then.

Originally posted by skippz

Are you serious about them graphics? I mean, I know compared to wow it's probably like crysis! Seriously though when I got this game I was HUGELY dissapointed with the graphics, I felt completely dissapointed! Bad lack of detail too. Don't say something stupid like "It's your PC LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" cus no. It's not :/

The art and graphics of a game are pretty subjective topics, in my opinion.

I notice from your posting history that you're an AoC fan.  Many AoC fans believe that Age of Conan has the best graphics period, and think that everyone must obviously agree with that universal truth.

Well, it's not a universal truth, at least in my view.  AoC has very detailed graphics to be sure, but I find the ART of AoC, what those graphics are representing, to be very bland.  Additionally, AoC isn't nearly as grim or gritty as one might imagine Howard's Hyboria to be.  In fact, if someone was looking at any random screenshot of AoC, I don't think anything leaps out at the average player and says "Wow, that's obviously Hyboria there."  At least not in the same way a game like LOTRO gives life to a recognizable vision of Middle Earth.  And, if you are a fan of one of the Warhammer tabletop games, there would be absolutely no mistaking the world - it's obviously Warhammer.

The detail in WAR is certainly not extremely high, but I think they've done a great job in rendering a very attractive world and models, and have done so with the aim of being able to have very large numbers of players in an area doing battle, all without the need for a large amount of instancing (as in AoC) which limits gameplay significantly.  They still have some improvements to make in that area, but as far as my play experience is concerned, it's been pretty good so far.

Then again, I've never been a big graphics snob in the games I play.  Gameplay is always more important to me.  In that regard, I think WAR is very good indeed.

Originally posted by Rohn

Originally posted by skippz

Are you serious about them graphics? I mean, I know compared to wow it's probably like crysis! Seriously though when I got this game I was HUGELY dissapointed with the graphics, I felt completely dissapointed! Bad lack of detail too. Don't say something stupid like "It's your PC LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" cus no. It's not :/

Then again, I've never been a big graphics snob in the games I play.  Gameplay is always more important to me.  In that regard, I think WAR is very good indeed.

Well damn, War's gameplay is even worse than its graphics and its graphics are really atrocious.

Originally posted by Brone87

Originally posted by Rohn

Originally posted by skippz

Are you serious about them graphics? I mean, I know compared to wow it's probably like crysis! Seriously though when I got this game I was HUGELY dissapointed with the graphics, I felt completely dissapointed! Bad lack of detail too. Don't say something stupid like "It's your PC LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" cus no. It's not :/

Then again, I've never been a big graphics snob in the games I play.  Gameplay is always more important to me.  In that regard, I think WAR is very good indeed.

 

Well damn, War's gameplay is even worse than its graphics and its graphics are really atrocious.

1/10.

You're going to have to try harder than that if you want to be a master troll.

damn I tried :(

Originally posted by Mampi

Originally posted by Brone87

Originally posted by Rohn

Originally posted by skippz

Are you serious about them graphics? I mean, I know compared to wow it's probably like crysis! Seriously though when I got this game I was HUGELY dissapointed with the graphics, I felt completely dissapointed! Bad lack of detail too. Don't say something stupid like "It's your PC LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" cus no. It's not :/

Then again, I've never been a big graphics snob in the games I play.  Gameplay is always more important to me.  In that regard, I think WAR is very good indeed.

 

Well damn, War's gameplay is even worse than its graphics and its graphics are really atrocious.

 

1/10.

You're going to have to try harder than that if you want to be a master troll.

Sad part is, he's right. I quit because of the amazing lack of content and PvP nowhere to be seen. I really so badly wanted WAR to succeed but turned out the BG's and arenas I hated so much in WoW were still better than non-existant content in WAR.

Some of you guys aren't playing the same game, this is "Warhammer" and the graphics are pretty stunning, the detail on character models especially is very high considering I was just in my first tier 2 major world PVP fight and there were nearly 100 people fighting at Stonetroll keep in Troll Country.

We took the keep after a very long fight and locked the zone, giving every player a 5% bonus to damage, HP and xp. Quite nice! (I'm in tier 2 now btw, my WH is level 16, did some powerlevelling yesterday)

A friend linked me this video of what Warhammer would look like if they added bloom, not sure why they haven't already as it looks good already but this just looks insane:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJL2silu_9w

Back to levelling!

Glad you like it :)

WAR isn't for everyone that's for sure, but it's not the same game as it was at launch anymore.

The client is much more stable, the population has matured and understands the game better now.

I think Mytic attracted more people than they should have done, people got cough up in the hype and had to high expectations. There was a reason DAoC never got bigger than it did, pvp isn't for everyone.

I like the look of WAR and it's playstyle to.

Today people do ALOT more oRvR and there's more content, don't dish out flames on this game based on what you saw 2-3 months ago please.