by dindaur » Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:20 am
so i picked up a copy of warhammer two or three days ago and ive been hooked. ive tried alot of the classes, mainly the black orc ( orc tank ) the squig herder ( orc pet / ranged dps ) and the bright wizard ( empire aka human caster dps ). it's alot of fun. there arent a huge amount of servers, at least not compared to WoW. Reason i say that is the games are really similar. AoC in retrospect stricks out as the odd one out that really didn't key into the same thing as WAR. you'll find alot of similarities between eq and WAR, at least moreso than AoC. the pvp is great, it reminds me of ... whatever that star wars game was that had the great pvp, battlegrounds? so the pvp from that, stick it into eq, and offer it worldwide ( anywhere, don't need any npc's or anything, just click a box and you'll auto cue into the next available instance ) so in the mean you go and do your quests, or explore, or just chill out, and then you get a box saying a new instance is starting and would you like to join. of course i click yes, then yer lumped in with your teammates if you opted to enter solo you'll be assigned a group and if you opted to enter with your group you'll maintain the structure. that'll let friends stick together but still gives loners teammates. as far as the actual battles go, it's pretty fun. certain classes really add to the chaos, like the dwarven engineers ( another cool class ) and their buildable guns which can be configred to either be aggressive passive or defensive, basically handling like a pet. but stuck in the ground. but in aggressive mode it'll just attack anything remotely nearby. one nice thing, there's no ammo. guns automatically have infinate bullets, bows have infinate arrows. even the built machine gun deals setup by engineers keep going. they can be destroyed, they've got a health bar like people. and they can be repaired ( by engineers only ).
the bright wizard was interesting, i did get some experience in eq behind the wheel on a wizard level 75 for a few nights and its comparable in some ways. not spell for spell, but general feel. you make things go boom. some spells off hand, direct damage fire stuff, an insta cast ae damage spell, an yeah some kind of stat ( combustion? ) which accumulates with each spell tagged as a +combustion spell, and you've got a number total hovering over your hotkey bar. there's a spell that corresponds to that and you can fire it to dump all your combustion points into one blast. or you can keep your number at 100 ( max ) and it grants you crit bonuses, so you'll get +50% ( the number may be off ) to crits on all spells while you keep your total at 100. diminishing returns at lower numbers. a spell may gave you 5 to 15 combustion points per cast, depending on the cast time or the potency of the spell. mostly the difficulty in the spell cast duration.
i just started the squig herder today, at level 2 or 3 they have a bow based damage over time which was neat as well as the typical direct damage fire, melee damage, and then the squig itself, a 2 legged ( no arms ) monster which can be configured and controlled using the exact same window as the dwarven engineer gun.
population wise you'll find tons of people in all the 1- 10 areas, outside of that it can seem real dead, i wandered into a level 30 zone and not a soul for a good two to three zones, and then after all that i had my first sighting of another player. conversely in the lowbie zones you'll see swarms of newbies, especially in the public quests.
public quests deserve a description and mention. basically contained within a specific geographical radius surrounding the objective, there's usually 3 stages, stage 1 being kill many of mob x, typically weak, then stage 2 typically being kill slightly harder and fewer mobs and stage 3 being the boss or bosses. the reward to doing these is twofold, a chest to roll upon ( the game auto rolls for you, afaik there is no /random command in game ) ... interestingly enough if you type /dance, the message you get is something along the lines of " your character refuses" heh. seems the makers got sick of the standard MMO dance emote. but yeah, the second reward for public quests is faction with the chapter merchant ( the world seems to be divided into chapters, first zone is chapter 1 etc )
pvp earns you renown which unlocks gear on renown based merchants, basically another faction.
i havent really gotten to see much of the game world beyond the 1 - 10 game, but so far it's been pretty fun. i had some crash problems early on which werent fun, but read through some forums and downloaded the newest nvidia driver which fixed it. however it'll still crash if i get an aim message, so it's one of those run solo programs. something all these new games could use is the way eq lets you have the browser, messenger and run the game without combusting.
anyhow its worth checking out, you'll get at least a weeks worth of fun out of it. i think there's a month free with the box so that might be enough for a gander ( could be wrong )
EDIT
ah yes, best orc model ever.