Hehulks WAR Update - As requested by Canaine Pantalones

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » January 14th, 2009, 15:00

Point One - I wana solo!

They've updated PQs so that tiers 1-3 have at least one PQ in each chapter than you can complete alone. They've also updated the loot drops from these PQs so that there's now greater chance of gold bags as a reward and these bags contain extremly nice set items. I've got a couple of the T4 pieces and they're really really nice.
Trying to solo in RVR is just a bad idea. People are always going to know someone who's willing to come kick your face in, or your going to run into a class that's suppose to counter you on the battlefield. This is especially true in T3/4 when classes really start getting their roots/snares/disables/silences/knockdowns/knockbacks. Time was, people would spam these ability like mad, but around 1.06 iirc they added a cooldown so that you become imune to all of these effects for 5 seconds once the cooldown on whatever was effecting you had expired. 5 seconds probably doesn't sound like alot, but it made a hell of a difference.

Point Two - Itemisation

In 1.1 they updated every set in the game to make it far more desirable than they previously were. Before 1.1 everyone I knew was toating random green/blue/purple items. Post patch everyone is after these set items, which has as a result increased ORVR because 3 of the 5 items from the sets only come from taking keeps, while the 4th drops from players.
To encourage more ORVR they also implemented influence rewards for RVR. Some of the items from that are amazing and are really only outclassed by proper end-game gear (Such as [url=http://www.wardb.com/item.aspx?id=656378]this staff[url] discovered by me. World first drop, I was proper chuffed

)

Point Three - Faction Balance

Destro do still outnumber order on just about every server going, but by the time you hit T4 order has such powerful defensive tools that (and I'm sorry to quote movies here) destros numbers count for nothing. I've been in fortress fights with possibly 24 order defending vs god only know how many destro, and because orders tanks are just that awesome and our AOEs are better than destros, we just sat there and held them for a full hour until destro gave up and fucked off. Lower tiers, the balance of power does swing from order to destro, especially in T2 when witch elves from from an iritation to really dangerous. As a counter-point, in T3 scenarios order has alot of their defensive tools, most RDPS classes have the bulk of their AOEs and a good 6 man order pre-made will easily dominate 12 destro of any mix.

Point Four - Client/Server Stability

At launch I considered it stable-ish if I went an hour without crashing. Since then they've been able to really sort out alot of the issue of WAR having memory leaks when some other programs are running. Right now, the only conditions my client will crash under, is when there's 3-400 hundred people sluging it out in a 200ft area around me. They've removed ghosting and warping is a severe rarity. Server stability got alot better in the last 6 weeks. Before that, the best defence was just to node crash by getting a massive amount of players. regardless of level, in on the fight. On sunday we had close to 500 people (according to GMs) fighting in a fortress zone along with about 100 skirmishing on the zone boarder trying to get in to help/stop reinforcements.

Point Five - The Travel System

They've added rally masters to warcamps, making it easy to have a book of binding set that is 10 seconds from a flight master. Also, at guild rank 16, you unlock Guild Recall Scrolls, which let you teleport from anywhere in the world to Sigmar's Hammer, literally right next to a flight master. With these two things, it's possible to re-deploy hundreds of people to a different warzone in under two minutes (something we have done a few times)

And now a few (hundred) word about why i enjoy this game

I lead a good guild (Eve players will find it no surprise than I ended up in charge

). We have certain gear standards and a very rough somewhat un-written code of conduct about how we RVR, and it works well. If you want to RVR, your on teamspeak, you have the ISAssistTracker mod installed and your stacking resistances into whatever set pieces/weapons/jewlery you can. In our experience, this has amazing effects on survivability, and only leaves squig hearders, bitch elves and marauders dealing any serous DPS to our squishies.

Using the assist tracker, we focus all RDPS onto these targets, with healing de-buffs going onto marauders and squig hearders. Bitch elves drop under any kind of focused fire anyway, so it's a waste using such skills on them. If your not playing with a good team, and using some basic level of tactics, even as simple as focusing fire, you do usually end up getting frustrated as destros zerg of MDPS classes over-run your lines and butcher healers.

Destro do have lots of tanks, but every squishy class in the game has a de-taunt ability that will reduce the DPS of a single target by 50% and since tanks don't do damage as a rule anyway, once de-taunted you can ignore. Some classes are better at this than others, such as archmages who have an AOE de-taunt which at lv35, iirc, has a 15 second effect with a 20 second cooldown. That's enormously powerful.

Last bit I really enjoy about this game is the community. In the last few weeks order on my server has been working together, with massivly impressive results. As a leader, part of that is down to me directing my guild, making sure the few standards we have are upheld, getting feedback on any new recruits and helping/getting others to help if they need it. Between the 10 properly organised guilds on eltharion, only about 2-300 active players we completly turned the war around and instead of twice-four time weekly sieges on order fortress we've been assault destro fortress again and again. When your side wins a fortress assault, and it's down in part to the tactics, strategy and preperation your guild went to, it's an amazing feeling. I honestly never though any game after eve would give me such an adrellin kick, but WARs manage that.

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » January 14th, 2009, 15:04

Updated with point five, because I forgot to write about that

Post by **Dog Pants** » January 14th, 2009, 15:18

It does sound like they've addressed the few things I didn't like about WAR. My suggestion as to how to balance the Order/Destro mismatch was to make up for the lack of aesthetic appeal of Order by upping their technical appeal - basically by buffing them. By buffing their defence they've made survivability viable without making them a killing machine. Well done WAR. The travel thing sounds great too. In a game that requires co-ordination, taking as long as it did to get to the action was a problem.

The game sounds to have fixed a lot of its problems, and it was a good one from the start. Unfortunately for me it sounds like I'd need to put Eve levels of commitment into playing to enjoy the game, and at the moment I can't even use TS, let alone be co-ordinated. I'm impressed with what you're doing on your sever though, I always hoped the numerical imbalance would be addressed partly by hardcore Order players fighting an organised war against the numerically superior but poorly organised Destruction. I'm sure you get lots of calls for nerfage for that.

Finally, what's the auction house looking like now? Crafting was a right bitch at the start because there was no economy. Can I assume this has improved as the game has matured?

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » January 14th, 2009, 15:37

High level crafting isn't hard at all, due in fact to the amount of lv150 crafting items that drop and that's the max level item you need to make end-game items, but getting the trade skills that high now are no-where near as easy as pre 1.1 when you could melt down vendor gear to level. Best way is to pick what you want to do at character creation instead of leaving it until later so you can level it as your character progresses and gets access to better seeds/higher level items from mob/player drops.

As for time committments, I trust alot of you remeber the average hours a week I use to pull in eve. That said, there have been people who joined and pre-40 did pull ludacris hours to get to 40 (One guy joined, and went 1-40 in 12 days when KOTBS came out) so it's definatly possible. At the other end, there's guys in the guild who only log in once a week and it's taken them months to get to 40, and are only geared properly because on the rare occasion they're on it's for pre-organised group runs to get specific items or for pre-arranged large scale RVR events (like last sunday).
Not being on TS though. That's a real killer than few organised guilds could overlook just because of the importance of being able to relay intel and targets quickly.

I rarely look at the auction house, but when I do there's a few bits of nice gear and a huge pile of useless crap. Generally in SHC we've got a policy of passing down spare decent gear to whoever is going to use it. Junk and spare high ends that no-one wants get melted down for talismans and we've got a good system going for potions. Rarely is the guild bank not stocked to the brim with masses of resistance, shield and health potions because of the efforts of a couple of my officers once a week.

Lastly yes, destro on my server do cry massivly about how over-powered certain order classes are and how we're al exploiters and cheaters and such like when we win. Sorry to keep going back to sunday, but it's a great example. We assault the maw. Destroy both doors in just under 10 minutes, break every defender in the place in another 10 and get to work on the keep lord. We'd have downed that fortress there and then if it wasn't for some random tank pulling agro, dying, and then the lord doing a number of alot of our healers and DPS. Sadly right after that, the allowed time limit to assault the fortress ran out and it re-locked. 3 hours later we took a different fortress upon which the doors, for reasons known only to mythic, had failed to spawn.
Destro blaimed that fact for the reason why we took the fortress and completly over-looked the hows and why of why we really beat them. Even the good destro guilds are intent on blaiming bugs and not their performances so while we keep getting better, they stagnate.
Also taking a defended fortress is one of the hardest things to do in war. It's taken us weeks of planing to do it sucessfully, and even that was touch and go for a bit at the end as the defenders rallied. More lessons learn't, block off their access points next time

Post by **Roman Totale** » January 14th, 2009, 18:45

Dog Pants wrote:Unfortunately for me it sounds like I'd need to put Eve levels of commitment into playing to enjoy the game

To many numbers, stats and "build requirements" to make it sound any fun to me. I suppose on large scale, large time frame PvP perspective it could be fun - but to a casual gamer it all seems like too much effort with not enough reward.

Other than PvPing keeps, what else does end game offer? One of the things that put me off were the measly number of decent abilities available after a certain level, and the basic recycling of quests.

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » January 14th, 2009, 23:18

Same sort of thing eve offered as an end-game narf. Lots of RVR.

Tonight for example, 2 fortresses assaults, 1 successful. That's 5 straight hours of fighting right there.

By the by, the gear thing is a personal guild requirement thing that came into being because 1) it's effective and 2) it's easy to achieve. Most of the gear we set as standards can be obtained by getting the basic reward unlocks on PQs in t4. The rest is obtained though T4 dungeons you'd run 20 times anyway.

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » February 20th, 2009, 16:17

And now for another update:

Slayers. Honest to god Slayers live on the server

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » February 20th, 2009, 16:19

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » February 20th, 2009, 17:47

Dwarves who love melee and don't much like armour. Take vows to die in battle to correct a great stain on their clans honour.

Also, lotsa fun to play

Post by **HereComesPete** » February 20th, 2009, 18:41

short arsed dps. With big ginger mohawks and serious anger issues. These were the very characters I wanted for order. It still needs khorne berserkers though.

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » March 4th, 2009, 23:17

GOA have just announced a new round and server transfer avilability and since I remeber you guys being on karak Norn, I though I'd share this bit

Characters on the Core servers Axe Bite Pass, Karak-Hirn, Karag Dron, Karag Orrud, Karak Ungor, Karak-Izor, Karak-Vlag, Karaz-a-Karak, Worlds Edge Mountains and Zhufbar may transfer to
Karak-Norn (Core)
Karak-Azgal (Core)
Karak Eight Peaks (Core)
Burlok (RP)

In the time since 5punk stoped playing, I gather KN has become quite active, and this is only expecting to make it more so although I'm going to predict now that alot of people will go to karak eight peaks instead just because it's got a rep for city sieging while KN is quietly building up to that.

Post by **Dog Pants** » March 5th, 2009, 10:07

I think if 5punkywow starts dropping off (not that there's much indication it is doing) I might have another crack at this. Or at least poke at people to see if they fancy coming along.

Sheriff Fatman · Post by **Sheriff Fatman** » March 5th, 2009, 18:38

I dare say most that care have already tried it. However, free trial ahoy:

http://www.war-europe.com/#/trial/

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » March 20th, 2009, 20:49

Last update from me

After 1.2, Mythic managed to screw over the balance a bit too much for most players liking, and people at least on the two servers I play on are deserting in droves. On top of this, about a week after the patch GOA (They manage the EU servers on Mythics behalf) opened server transfers. The result was 5 servers that had fairly equal too and fro in campaigns, with one side having a minor upper-hand at any given moment were flooded by guilds of one side but not another. To cite two examples, Eltharion has a good fight, but destro won a bit more often (Going on city siege counts) while the situation was reversed on Karag Eight-Peaks.

Now adays because of Eltharions rep for being full of good order who won alot, it's been over-run with order reinforcements from dying servers while destro didn't get any, resulting an at least one city siege a day for order, and no hope for destro. Reverse that, and you've got the situation on K8P.

My guild isn't interested in playing like that, so we're evacuating and just pising about with a few other MMOs while waiting on Jumpgate Evolution.

Post by **Dog Pants** » March 20th, 2009, 21:35

That's a shame, but not entirely unexpected. Population management was a big issue for me when the game started, and now it seems they've fucked it right up. Jumpgate Evolution looks really good though.