Warhammer Online

[Samanna]

Goblin Shaman http://www.warhammeronline.com/armiesof ... Shaman.php

[Vasei]

[dindaur]

there is a weekly warhammer podcast made by fans on the wesbite http://www.onlinegamingradio.com and the name of the program is... give me a sec... podcast of reckoning. last episode i listened on they had a community leader from another fansite on and speculated about the new white lion class

from what these guys are talking about, im getting sucked into the excitement for this game

[Hibbert]

I had a chance to play Warhammer in the recent Preview Weekend event. While it still had a few rough edges, overall I was pretty impressed. The PvP is pretty nice. You can queue up for a scenario(the WAR equivalent of a WoW battleground) as soon as you enter the game. Once you enter, if you are below level 8(for the first set of scenarios at least), you are temporarily buffed up to 8, meaning even level 1's can contribute to the battle. There's some open world PvP also, but I didn't get much of a chance to try it out. The concept of it sounds good though, with keeps in the higher level zones guilds can fight over, and the eventual battle over the capital cities of each side.

PvE is more of an afterthought, but even so, there are some interesting ideas. The public quest system is really neat and something I expect to be copied by other MMO's. They are basically quests that anyone in the area can contribute to. The lower level ones I did typically had three stages: Kill 50-100 of Mob X, Gather 20 of item X(usually a clickable groundspawn in the area) while harder mobs start attacking, then Kill the Boss. That sounds a little simplistic but most of them had interesting lore, and I've heard later ones get more complex. At the end everyone get contribution points based on how much they contributed(which includes things like healing and even tanking), which is then added to a /random 1000 to determine who gets 3-6 loot bags of varying quality. Even if you don't win, you still get "influence" which is basically reputation for a few item rewards from a nearby NPC.

The shaman class is definitely my favorite. Casting any heal spell gives you a point of Waaagh, which powers up your offensive spells. The opposite is also true. I like this because it encourages you to mix it up a bit, and not just heal or DPS. Though in my experience, in any sort of heavy healing situation I would just have time to heal and maybe throw out an insta-cast nuke or DoT every now and again. It might change once I get to the higher levels and have more abilities open to me. Looking through the skill list, at higher levels shamans get a PBAoE knockback spell, a DoT that is refreshed if the target moves, and some various AP(the mana/endurance of WAR) drains. Sounds interesting enough for me.

Plus shamans are goblins. I've been wanting a playable goblin race in an MMO forever. I haven't seen a character model with as much goofy charm since the original EQ troll model.

I'm looking forward to the release date, which is September 18.

[dindaur]

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.