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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Previews: Patch 1.3 Class & RvR Changes
Land of the Dead is getting all the press, but we also have a short preview of some other changes fans can expect in Patch 1.3.
By Dana Massey on May 12, 2009
;)
Patch 1.3 is all about Land of the Dead, but Mythic is doing more than adding the brand new Darkness Falls-esque dungeon when this update goes live in early June. During Baltimore Games Day, MMORPG.com spoke to Combat and Careers Team Lead Nate Levy and Producer Jeff Skalski about what else the team has in store.
Their much maligned Ward system has received an overhaul. Wards were previously attached to specific pieces of armor and were often instrumental to high level encounters. Simply put, some players couldn’t survive unless they’d collected the right ward sets.
Now, they’re calling it the Sigil System and they’ve entirely removed the link between wards and armor. Too many players were wearing the exact same outfits and it was all rather silly.
So now, when a player gets a piece of armor with the ward, it is tracked in their Tome of Knowledge and permanently affixed to the character, regardless of what they do with the armor. A set of five wards is called a Sigil, hence the name change.
What’s more, they’ve provided PvE and RvR mechanisms to collect these wards. It can still be done in the traditional format, but if farming for items is not high on your list of things to do, they’ve added new options.
This system should be a relief to many players who were rather frustrated by the previous system and the need to carry around entire sets of armor for different situations.
Nate Levy, the poor sap in charge of class balance, also stopped by to provide an update on some tweaks his team has in mind for 1.3.
Nothing too major is planned, but he did admit that the Shadow Warriors need a bit of attention. They plan some tweaks to how their stances work, based on user feedback. It’s a class that is good at a lot of things, but not particularly spectacular at anything. They hope to fix that with some smaller changes.
;)
He also noted that Area of Effect spells (AOEs) are a bit overpowered at the moment, which is great for Bright Wizards, but not so fun for most everyone else. So expect some changes there too. Shamans and Archmages will get some tweaks as well, a continuation of the work they began in the previous patch. Though every class can expect minor adjustments, Levy emphasized that all changes would be closer to tweaks than overhauls.
On the RvR front, Producer Jeff Skalski talked about their desire to get away from what has been called RvE situations, where people must fight NPCs as part of the PvP war. A big area of part of this is how City Siege works. For example, they’re going to dial back the number of NPCs in the cities based on the player population in the area, to make it more about RvR.
They also recently gave keeps upgraded defenses to encourage guilds to somewhat move in and hold their ground. Unfortunately, this has meant that attackers just avoid the upgraded keeps to attack the less defensible ones. Thus, Skalski plans to introduce greater rewards for the conquest of these upgraded keeps.
In general, everything they plan in RvR is all about “magnetizing players” and getting them to fight each other, which they still believe strongly is the core of their game.
Beyond 1.3, Skalski also mentioned that they are in the process of refactoring the keeps themselves to add a second ramp up to the keep lord room. The final stage of keep conquest was a bit cramped for the number of players involved, so in the next while (no exact date was given) they will simply swap out all the keeps with these new ones, a change that should help more people get up into the tower.
For a full preview of Land of the Dead, the main new content iniative in this patch, check out our hands-on first look.
God dammit all, nothing said about the ever so broken magus class once again! Way to listen to the community mythic! And while you at it, your also ruining one of the only things a lot of maguses still play, AoE.
Too little, too late.
Do they think I'm going to continue to pay money for a game that isn't remotely 'finished', and where the goalposts are constantly moved. Dream on.
Warhammer is a PvP game where the players do everything possible to avoid each other. It is a failure of biblical proportions in this respect.
Sounds like some good changes. It's a start.
This is an unfortunate fact about the game. Even though this is supposed to be an RvR game, there is little incentive, even now, to do ORvR. It's still a lot faster and easier to level doing scenarios.
Really, they should either take scenarios out of the game entirely or make each one only doable once a day, or something along those lines.
Also ORvR needs a major overhaul. Making the keep sieges more like DAOC would be a good idea. You'd think the guys who invented RvR would have been able to make the same system again.... I guess not though.
The real problem is that there are only 2 sides to the conflict. So while 1 side is taking one keep.. the other side is taking another keep. With a 3rd side, like DAOC has, there would be 2 sides competing for the same keep. If it's the last keep that needs to be taken there would be 1 realm defending and 2 realms attacking. This alone would lead to some epic battles.
I don't see this happening any time in the near future though. :(
Toning down AOE damage is a step in the right direction. AOE damage is so ridiculous in this game. I have stated before how, being a witch hunter, I could stand next to a group and be killed in a matter of seconds despite not being targetted by a single person from the opposing faction.
They also need to tone down reactive damage (I.E. I hit a Chosen and take damage.) Infact, I think Chosen are able to just hurt people if your standing by them in their aura or whatever. This is such a lame ability because added with the ridiculous aoe damage that everybody has, I feel like I do more harm to myself then to others by actually trying to kill people.
Yea exactly. My character in beta and that I played from release all the way to T4 was a Black Orc. In tier 1 I was an absolute monster. Could take tons of damage and as long as I had 1 healer I could stay up forever even with 5 guys beating on me. Was a real annoyance to healers.
Then in T2 I was stil pretty hard to kill but I died quite a lot more than T1 because of the AoE damage.
Then T3. Now I was dying pretty quickly. I was stil needed in groups because of keep sieges and I could protect the healers, but all in all I was dying to AoE in about 10-20 seconds even with a healer.
Now comes T4. I literally die in 2 seconds. I rush the enemies front lines (like I thought a tank was supposed to do?) and before I can even get 1 hit on a healer I'm dead. So Instead of being a front-line tank I decided to try and defend the healers from attacks, but my damage is so pitiful that a mosquito would cause more harm to my targets than I can.
In a WB vs WB situation I couldn't kill someone even if I had a gun held to my head.
It's just not physically possible for a BO to kill anyone solo in mass RvR since our only real damaging melee attack was nerfed.
Then I made a Choppa when they came out. I live just as long as my BO but instead of killing no one I can rack up 30-60 kills in a normal RvR skirmish and be resurreced just as many times as my BO.
So to recap. I could play my BO and not have surviability, not do damage, and generally not be able to contribute anything to my group. Or I could play my Choppa and die just as quickly as my BO, but be able to kill 5-10 people before I get taken down.
I think the game is awesome I think that it's great that they are balancing the things they have listed. People that complain just usualy suck at pvp in fact I am sure of it it's obvious that they are very concerned about balance. It's a great game going in a good direction.
An amazing sounding patch for WAR, and about time BW had their AoE dmg adjusted to be more in line with sanity, even though I do have a BW alt I know the class was hurting the game and needed sorting out.
This patch is hopefully the sign of many good things coming our way in the future, and it's nice to see so many different ideas being introduced either in RvR/PQ's or PvE content, there is bound to be something for everyone.
I look forward to entering a flipped Pyramid instance and surprising a Greenskin grp =) and making sure all their hardwork is repaid with a swift death.
Thats rediculous. The only aura that CHosen has that damages people in it is Dreadful Agony. It only does 60 DAMAGE, 60 freaking damage per second. That is nothing when most players have 8,000 HP or more. Your clearly mistaken.
This patch will be loads of fun! Looking forward to it.
This is an unfortunate fact about the game. Even though this is supposed to be an RvR game, there is little incentive, even now, to do ORvR. It's still a lot faster and easier to level doing scenarios.
Really, they should either take scenarios out of the game entirely or make each one only doable once a day, or something along those lines.
Also ORvR needs a major overhaul. Making the keep sieges more like DAOC would be a good idea. You'd think the guys who invented RvR would have been able to make the same system again.... I guess not though.
The real problem is that there are only 2 sides to the conflict. So while 1 side is taking one keep.. the other side is taking another keep. With a 3rd side, like DAOC has, there would be 2 sides competing for the same keep. If it's the last keep that needs to be taken there would be 1 realm defending and 2 realms attacking. This alone would lead to some epic battles.
I don't see this happening any time in the near future though. :(
This is what angered and confused me the most about this game.. Without a 3rd faction or 5th wheel, who is going to break the silence or uneven the playing field? Even if it is just an NPC only faction that randomly raids and takes over keeps from both factions.. Anything to break that comfy shit up. I still cannnot believe they turned a wargame like Warhammer into this theme park game. I would have prefered something with a little more tactics and emphasis on things like terrain and formations. But eh.. I moved on so what do I care.. heh
I know there is a lot of Warhammer hating here but you have to give them props for trying to patch up the game. 1.3 Patch Land of the Dead content that other MMorpgs would easily charge for an expansion you get free? Lets give them some credit here.
Give this game a few more months an it could be great, but the playerbase grows tired. A very easy fix which probably will come to get more RvR happening is simple... Greater rewards. If they really want people hitting keeps, make it to where attacking a keep with 20+ on defense you get double the bags dropped than keeps that are defended. Its a pretty simple process as in life that translates to games as well.
People will always take the path of least resistance unless the hard path has a lot greater rewards. As has been said theres no reason to attack a defended keep that could take and hour, when a warband can take out an undefended keep in 10 minutes or less with the same rewards.
TBH the huge flaw in the keep upgrade system is whats the point in spending all that money on a defence that gets reset via zone locking anyway? You defend the zone keeps to the nines for 3 hours, and the zone locks due to domination anyway. All keeps are atm are a money sink..
IMO removing the locks and changing the city unlock to owning a percenage of the WHOLE teir for so long, would at least give owning a keep a meaning long enought to WANT to update it, and at least slow down the city seiging which on some servers is now a nightly thing, and TBH has lost all excitment from it... It's pritty much on farm mode atm.
sounds good about aoe nerf an ofcorse new dungeon sounds alot of fun, but theres no mention of any nerf to the Warrior Priest hope this means patch after this one that class gets an overhawl, playing there sorta mirror the DoK as my main, an also rolled a WP to compare i find it hard to believe they die at all lol.
Been playing since launch an the cat an mouse of the game has got old an without SC's would have left long ago usely the only time we get a good fight, without the lag of the forts
"War is Everywhere""War is overthere....lets go overhere insead"WPs are only that good in t1 and maybe t2, like many other classes their survivability changes thrue the tiers. And I think there's a wide missunderstanding of the word mirrored classes, there are more diffrences then just visuals between them, and that's a GOOD thing!
The Chosens auras are what make it a class. Take that away and they have nothing. Anyways, what I really wanted to say is that I wish MMO's would return to the basics. All these classes doing many different things takes away from the simplicity a game needs in mass PvP.
It's not just WAR, it's every new game these days. They all gotta make classes able to do all sorts of stuff, counters for practically everything. Maybe I just suck at PvP, but when a fight lasts only seconds, and I have 4 bars of abilities, it gets a bit much. Take away AoE fighting and all these counters to everything, and you're reduced to a good old fashioned brawl. Wizards hurling fireballs, and trying to stay out of the fray. Rogues backstabbing, applying their poisons and then running. Tanks and MDPS on the front lines giving and absorbing damage. Clerics in the back trying to keep everyone alive. Maybe I just miss DAoC. Weird that I call DAoC simple considering it had more depth than WAR. I guess it had depth in the right places.
Then again, I could just not know what I'm talking about and could chalk it up to it being 6am.
While I am currently playing warhammer and enjoying it I do have to agree with this sentiment for the most part. One of the best ways to stop the other side from flipping a zone in T4 is to simply...not show up.
This is what angered and confused me the most about this game.. Without a 3rd faction or 5th wheel, who is going to break the silence or uneven the playing field? Even if it is just an NPC only faction that randomly raids and takes over keeps from both factions.. Anything to break that comfy shit up. I still cannnot believe they turned a wargame like Warhammer into this theme park game. I would have prefered something with a little more tactics and emphasis on things like terrain and formations. But eh.. I moved on so what do I care.. heh
It's really hard to talk about WAR, because on one hand they did a good job with many things, but on the other, they completely blew it as the low population shows.
When I resubbed about 3 months ago, I was gung ho on leveling up only through RvR and PQ's. No scenarios and no quests. Well, after a month of learning what RvR really consists of (us against enemy PC's at BO's), I started doing more scenarios and saved RvR for lvl 8-9 to get my Influence for that tier. I don't think any game is good without a good balance of PvE and PvP. Before you get weird about me saying that, I actually loved DAoC's PvE. I actually liked the PQ's in WAR, but people rarely did them. Instead, you might see 1 or 2 farming the first step for influence.
So basically, something is seriously broke with this game. I can't say what, but it doesn't take a genious to see it when people go to the RvR lakes to fight NPC's and avoid players, and people do not even team up for PQ's (which have good rewards btw). My guess is that the game relies on a heavy population. Many people in the RvR lakes means you can't help but fight people. But we've also seen what happens when large RvR fight happen: lag and crash central.
I decided to go back to WoW. I started playing WoW when WoTLK came out, and actually liked it. It was nice having an actual population in the game. It like how they spread out the dungeons so that you can practically do dungeons the whole way to max level (after the initial new areas). Now they've added que up from anywhere BG's, so WAR doesn't hold that over WoW anymore. WoW has Wintergrasp, which I found to be better siege PvP than WAR's keep sieges. Plus the game doesn't have the stability problems WAR has and the graphics aren't much worse than WAR's. Hopefully something good will come out soon, because nothing is really worth playing other than WoW and I've already beat everything, but Ulduar and I'm not that into raids like I thought I was.
I'm going to use DAoC as an example here. The only rewards DAoC offers for attacking a keep with people actually defending it is the realm points (think renown) from killing players. That, in and of itself, is all people need in DAoC to motivate them to find other people. WAR on the other hand gives renown, random drops from players, and bag drops with super loot on Lords, yet people still don't want to fight others. So I doubt rewards will do anything for this game, because the game already has more rewards than it should have already. People are like crack addicts with these rewards. They are all happy to get the gold backs that drop off lords, but now that they're used it, they demand more rewards for the same amount of time they put in before.
People will also not "always" go the path of least resistance. All it takes is one exception to disprove that theory and I'm that exception. I seriously doubt I'm "that" special, so I have to assume there are others who don't take the path of least resistance. Which says one thing, people pick to play what they find fun and the rewards is the icing on the cake. What this says is that many people find WAR's RvR unfun for one reason or another. Maybe it has to do with these class unbalances?
While I am currently playing warhammer and enjoying it I do have to agree with this sentiment for the most part. One of the best ways to stop the other side from flipping a zone in T4 is to simply...not show up.
another tactic I heard about is bringing a lot of people to the zone. All of your people combined with all of their people tend to crash the zone.
Obviously no one here plays on volkmar in T4. The other night order took Fell and we took Reikland and we had an all out brawl in thunder mountain for hours. The only reason there is rve is the small servers. Come to a big server and give rve a shot. You'll be rolled plan and simple. As for the new content, I'm looking forward to the great new ideas with the pqs and the land of the dead. And the new ward system sounds great.
Good ideas and all, but when it comes to class changes, the Class Lead, Nate, is a complete idiot. Want proof? Goto the main forums and look at the lesser played classes and see how many problems there are. Oh I forgot, most of those classes are destruction. Since we all know that Nate is an Order loving freak, why else give BWs out of control AOEs. The rain of fire exploit by them is still fresh in the minds of most people, as is the gamepad exploit (linking 2 or more abilities to the same key to get them to go off several times in less than a second). In short destructrion needs a lot of loving, order, not so much.
You did read the part of the article where he specifically said AOEs were overpowered and that was being addressed, right?
Cant wait for expansion and patch, still playing and will continue to play as the game progresses and gets better!!
Mythic has said this before about ae's, closed beta players told them about this, players since launch have told them this, so forgive the doubt in them actually doing something about it in a meaningful way. If it is anything like the typical Mythic they will completely break BW and Sorc's to the point of them being worthless(think assassins or archers in DAOC) or do so little no one will even notice.
I'm not sure if you played beta or not by this statement, but I did.
I can tell you first hand that BWs were even more overpowered then they are right now.... by a lot, to the point that there would be almost entire warbands of BWs running around the battlefield because no other class was really needed for Order to win.
I had a few screenshots of 22 BWs and 1 RP totally decimiating two full Destruction WBs in beta. Unfortunately they were lost when I stupidly deleted my beta folder.
So, believe it or not, Mythic actually did do quite a bit to tone down the BWs in beta.
While I am currently playing warhammer and enjoying it I do have to agree with this sentiment for the most part. One of the best ways to stop the other side from flipping a zone in T4 is to simply...not show up.
Maybe you haven't played lately? That is why they added the Zone Domination system a few months ago. If the enemy never shows up, you'll lock the zone that way to.
another tactic I heard about is bringing a lot of people to the zone. All of your people combined with all of their people tend to crash the zone.
That currently does not happen, that worked in a fort a couple months after Launch because people would bring in a bunch of lowbie characters in but forts are 37+ now and have a pop. cap. This has been the case for months now.
Here's the thing, as I see it - not all problems are created equal.
The very first thing you need to fix is stability (both server and client) and performance. When you've fixed that, you can work on attracting people to large-scale battles, and ensuring that those battles are balanced in terms of damage output.
The truth is, for a significant proportion of the player-base, performance in centralised mid-sized battles - and that can be as small scale as a warband or two going against the same number - is poor enough that the experience isn't enjoyable. Some don't have to deal with lag at all - I'm envious in the extreme of them. Others deal with it. Others still have to basically avoid those situations entirely.
Generally, though, it is bad enough to detract from the gaming experience for a significant amount of gamers - anecdotally, I'd say "a majority", but that's just an opinion.
While I respect the changes, it's the equivalent of putting a really nice paintjob on a car that doesn't have an engine.
ROTFL....
What part of (A)rea (O)f (Effect) doesn't make sense to you?
EDIT: BTW, you are a Witch Hunter? What the hell are you doing standing next to a group? Get your ass some distance away and use the damn guns you have. Geez...
ROTFL....
What part of (A)rea (O)f (Effect) doesn't make sense to you?
EDIT: BTW, you are a Witch Hunter? What the hell are you doing standing next to a group? Get your ass some distance away and use the damn guns you have. Geez...
It makes non AoE classes worthless and the game boring.
Why has Mythic planned sweeping changes to AoE and has already publicly tested sweeping AoE damage AND AoE healing changes? Because it is quite obvious it is a problem and the majority of WAR gamers have been asking for 6 months for AOE to be toned down.
It makes non AoE classes worthless and the game boring.
Why has Mythic planned sweeping changes to AoE and has already publicly tested sweeping AoE damage AND AoE healing changes? Because it is quite obvious it is a problem and the majority of WAR gamers have been asking for 6 months for AOE to be toned down.
Really? I have no problem dealing with AOE in the game. You just have to play smart and work a little bit harder. God forbid anyone should see a challenge and work toward overcoming it. That would...well...just be wrong...in a game.
You know what the acronym WAR stand for, right?
(W)oW (with)
(A)dded
(R)vR
At least, that's what it is well on it's way to becoming...