The interview gives us a nice preview of the what is coming in 1.1.1 in terms of RvR and I have to say its been a long time coming and a welcome change. This will almost completely eliminate the concept of “defending by not defending.” So now if they don’t defend, the zone flips. For battlefield objectives, the defense is set to 30 minutes, meaning people will have to now defend BFOs if they want to flip the zone instead of all of them filling up the keep and waiting. For keeps, it is set to two hours, which in all honesty is either just perfect or too short, since a keep defense is pretty easy to setup with enough people, but now that we have to defend against zergs to BFOs it will be hard to keep 5-6 warbands at a keep. All changes that have been long awaited in T4. This alone will get me reinterested in T4 RvR, because up until now, I have been growing tired of the mindless zerg trains (which I will write a long article on later) and 500 people keep defenses. It will also speed up the T4 gameplay towards cities. Most servers can barely get one fortress locked, but now we will see fortresses active a lot more, and maybe I can finally get my Conqueror set, though my DoK still has to fight his way up the PQ Roll ladder, which is almost impossible on any healer that I have played.  So go check out the interview, and enjoy the coming months, they are filled with new, fresh material.

First we will start off with the herald announcement:

As announced in the newsletter, we are excited to bring you news of the latest additions to the Armies of WAR!

For uncounted centuries, the Dwarfs and greenskins have been the most bitter of rivals. Now that the Slayer and the Choppa are set to join the armies of Order and Destruction, old grudges will be answered and ancient enmities will be given new breath. Though the outcome of the war still hangs in the balance, one thing is certain: the battle for the Warhammer world is about to become deadlier than ever!

Once the Bitter Rivals live event begins this March, take part in daily challenges to earn a head start in the two awesome new careers.

This exciting news and more is described in detail in this month’s Newsletter, but here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come:

Call to Arms: Live Expansion

Night of Murder Live Event

Bitter Rivals Live Event

Read this morning’s Press Release for even more info!

Rose Colored Glasses

This addon, while not in-depth tested by myself, does prove to be a great tool for those that are color blind. It allows you to alter the colors of many aspects of the UI so that you can distinguish them better. While it can’t alter the red circles around quest areas on your map due to a limitation of the API, it does allow you to overlay the entire map and minimap with a color to better distinguish colors and handle many other things quite well. Rose Colored Glasses also allows you to change colors of many aspects of the UI that might be difficult to see. You can also change the color and add a letter over peoples head where the Arrow indicator of targets is. Lots of customization is allowed through the addon. So if you suffer from color blindness and you have problems seeing things on the map and minimap, be sure to give this addon a go and if it does work for you, do thank Bloodwalker for making it. Check out the curse page for more info and download links. I don’t have screenshots of this addon because I don’t currently have it installed anymore and Bloodwalker hasn’t posted any on the project page. But in all honesty, there is nothing to really screenshot.

State of Realm

State of Realm

Now this is a amazing alternative to ObjectiveTracker and RealmStatus. Made by Ratsug, it combines the two concepts provided by Aiiane in her addons, and makes them flashier and more graphical. I was gonna hold off reviewing this till some fixes were made, but Ratsug is fast, and managed to fix it up significantly in about 2-3 hours. Very configurable in colors, docking, positioning and very useful. I would recommend everyone giving this a try, I use it myself now. Head on over to the curse page for more info and downloads.

Gallery

Dammaz Kron

Dammaz Kron Grudge List

Dammaz Kron has to be by far the best Enemy Tracker addon out there. From the roots of the old Killing Blow, and Little Black Book, Valkea has taken it a step further by completely integrating it into the Tome of Knowledge. From killing blows, deaths, scores, classes, everything about the enemy and your battles with them are stored and saved. There are many features that come with it. Including a mini-view for selected targets that you can keep on your screen when your Tome is closed, in case you have a particularly nasty grudge against them. I was planning a similar addon, but when I saw what Valkea had in store, I immediately supported his efforts and scratched my project. So if you are looking for a good alternative to the old buggy Little Black Book, I don’t know what you are still doing here. Quick Screenshots are in the gallery linked below.

Kwestor

Right Oriented

Kwestor is a great and powerful alternative to the current quest tracker. While in looks generally the same it adds new features like auto-sorting based on zone, completion, and other variables. It automatically moves all quests for the current zone onto the tracker and to the top, then lists remaining ones if there is room. Once completed, it moves the quest under the still undone ones, and changes their color. It is very well thought out and has some good customization features. Just remember, to open the ToK entry for the quest, click the Icon for the quest, not the entry. He has made the entry unclickable and only the icon. Once you get used to it, its hard to not use it. And if for any reason you want the default quest tracker, just Shift-Click the quest hider arrow, and it will hide Kwestor and show you the default tracker. Highly recommended. Curse page for those that wish to try it.

Gallery

Combat

Combat in Warhammer is probably the better of combat systems in MMOs that I have played to date, but its not with its flaws. Snares, Knockdowns, Knockbacks, Disorients, Roots, and Disables all make current combat very tedious. Rarely do I see a fight past T2 that is not a game of who can keep the other side out of control the longest. The problem lies in the fact that classes get a lot of crowd control. Any given class gets at least 3-4 different CC abilities, and some classes get a lot more. For tanks, I believe that it should stay the way it is, they need it to keep their groups defended, but for other classes, it becomes overkill. A well co-ordinated group using vent can literally incapacitate half a team from 100% HP to 0. The current incarnation of immunity is either not long enough or does not apply to enough abilities, because it made very little impact on crowd control spam in the game. Us players can either resort to using these abilities less frequently (like that will happen), or Mythic needs to increase the time of the immunity timers and make it apply to all forms of crowd control in the game period. Warhammer developers boasted that crowd control will be minimal in WAR but right now, its just as bad if not worse than WoW’s crowd control.

Another complaint I often hear is the pulling abilities that the White Lion, Marauder, Magus, and Engineer have. Seems the Marauder one is not as problematic compared to the White Lion one, but in all honesty, I wish people would shut up already and learn to deal with it. In my mind this abilities are fine, and I play non of these classes, and I usually face these classes on my Disciple or Rune Priest. This is from a DoK point of view, but fetch can be easily countered by putting up an absorb shield, casting all your instant hots, and running back to your side. For Runepriests, I always save my AoE detaunt for sticky situations like this. I get pulled in, I pop that while I am flying, cast my hots, and run out while healing myself with our instant cast direct heal (sorry the names of abilities escape me at the moment). Other classes can do similar strategies to get out of sticky situations. Most classes have detaunts, damage reducers, and all kinds of buffs to help them out of sticky situations. I’ve had my share of deaths to pull abilities, but no way are they overpowered by any sense, all you need to do is gear up properly and learn how to escape from situations like that. The classes that get these abilities either have low armor and/or have to spec in a way that will not optimize their power (Magus/Engineer) so they are just as easily kill-able in that situation as you are. Now I haven’t played T4 RvR against a pull class on my Disciple as sacrifice spec, but I believe most classes have ways to either kill the puller, or escape if they utilize their abilities.

I would also have covered resist stacking, but its rumored that resists are receiving significant changes in 1.2, so I will hold off my comments on that till I have seen the changes.

ORvR

For now, Open RVR is great (and I mean open-field battles, not the server type, which I hate with a passion, so I won’t talk about it) in most cases, but what really bugs me is the zergs and trains that currently dominate T3 and T4. It loses all the fun that ORvR should have. 6v6 battles, keep defense, the occasional 1v1 where someone comes on top that normally wouldn’t have won. Stuff like that is what makes ORvR a blast, but people have reduced it to zerg trains to get Battlefield Objectives and Keeps. You don’t need 60 people to take over an Objective. Defense of keeps has been severely lacking to what I have seen. It usually takes the enemy side to be at the second door for any defense to form, and by then its too late. People are too busy being loot whores to have fun. The victorious feeling when 5 of you hold off a zerg of 50 because they were unorganized and you were able to keep them at bay till the front doors closed and then that massive tick of Renown, EXP, and Influence that pops up after while. Its all lacking. Usually keep defense are either non-existent, playing pong with keep trading or there are 100s of people inside the lord room, completely barricading any chance of kill the lord. Which brings me to my next topic.

Keeps/Fortresses

Keeps and fortresses need to be completely redesigned, from scratch if needed. The bottle necks that are present in these structures is flat out tedious and annoying. You have 200-300 people (fortress take) trying to get up a 3 yard wide ramp, into a room entirely flooded with the enemy. This is simply bad design. Add multiple ramps, make it interesting for the Melee DPS to sneak up and gank a few healers, while the other side is pushing. make the ramps bigger to fit more people, because collision detection completely blockades entire armies. At its current state, during Keeps and Fortresses, Melee DPS just sit there looking pretty up until the lord room. The fix to Bypass Defenses and Pick Lock in the rumored 1.2 are welcome changes to the bored Melee DPS classes. I just think everything needs to be redesigned about Keeps and Fortresses.

Dungeons

Due to the nature of the VP and RVR system, Fortress sieges are pretty rare on even the most populated servers. This leaves people dungeon crawling through City Dungeons and Lost Vale to progress their gear. This isn’t that big of a problem, until you come down to loot. The loot drop system for a boss, needs to be changed, even if its as simple as dropping 2 Tokens that can be traded in for the loot. At its current stage, a lot of people get jipped out of loot because a piece that no one in the group could use. Almost everyone I have run with is fine and happy if a piece for anyone in the group drops, but when something no one can use drops, it just feels like you wasted that last 20 minutes. This was the very reason why WoW went to a token system, and even more so for them, since WoW is a PVE game. This should be fixed soon, because I am growing tired of running both Bloodwrought Enclave and Bilerot and getting  only Squig Herder gear to drop when we don’t have on in the group. There was once two weeks that we got entire full Squig Herder Sentinel sets. Everything, head, shoulders, chest, gloves, belt, boot. It was getting ridiculous. We decided, lets get a Squig Herder once to gear him out. Lo and behold, we get Sorcerer gear, when we didn’t have one. This system need to be vastly improved and quickly, otherwise it becomes more work, and less fun after a while.

Well that concludes my thoughts for today. Lets hope Mythic responds to the cries of its players more promptly.

And what are the other healer sets going to be? Unfocused?

You don’t need a split choice set system, that wouldn’t help the problem anyways but just exacerbate it further. 
What you really need to do is ask yourself this: Why did Warcraft change their original design of split healing and damage stats after 5 years? Simple: Because it was crap. They ended up with classes that used only half their abilities, they ended up having to do the itemization for half their classes twice or even three times, they ended up with people getting screwed over because unlike other classes they couldn’t switch specs since their gear that they had to work just as hard for locked them into a single spec… It just causes lots and lots of problems if some classes are not running all their abilities from the same stats.

Warhammer has exactly the same problem, and it’s frustrating to no end that you can’t just admit that and fix it – especially since Warhammer was the game that said “No boring healers!” and it acctually sounded like you guys were serious..

I mean you don’t even have to look at WoW to see that splitting healing and damage stats for a class makes no sense. Look at the game that started it all, the game that first introduced the character archetypes that are standard for every MMO – I’m not talking about Everquest, I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons. Even in D&D a Cleric does not need INT to be good at casting his offensive spells, they run of WIS just like his heals. Even in the 70s they knew how to make it fair for everyone!

Please, stop reshuffling gear stats and fix the stat system. You’ll have to redo all the item sets anyways once that is done, so do it as early as possible. The current stat system is a thrice-fold self contradicting mess.

What it should be:

Strength: Increases melee damage & DoK/WP healing, decreases chance to defend against melee.
Ballistics Skill: Increases ranged damage, decreases chance to defend against ranged.
Intelligence: Increases spell damage & AM/RP/S/Z/ healing, decreases chance to defend against spells.

Weapons Skills: Increases chance to parry and increases armor penetration.
Innitiative: Increases chance to dodge and increses critical strike damage from ranges attacks.
Willpower: Increases chance to disrupt and decerease effectiveness of targets resistences.

Toughness: Decrease DPS from all sources of damage and chance to be critically hit.
Wounds: Gives you more HP

One Primary stat that decides effectiveness of your class abilities and reduces proc defense chance.
One Secondary stat that gives proc defense chance and grants reduction in passive defenses of the target.
Two survivability stats that manage your hitpoints and resistence to damage.

That would be a system that makes sense. Itemization wouldn’t have to be all messed up and crazy, you’d get your primary stat, your secondary stat and a measure of the two defensive stats, if you really want anything else in the mix you toss it in the talisman slot.

Time to Kill in this game is horrendously too fast. It’s ridiculous that anyone can be dropped within 1 second of any DPS class being on him. For healers this makes healing almost impossible. They are healing for about 1000-1500 HPS while their target is getting about 4000 DPS. It’s just impossible to keep anyone alive. Also most of the time, I don’t even have time to click and start healing before my defensive target is dead. 

TTK was great in early beta. We had long fights; everyone was hard to kill and it took strategy. Now it’s, get 2 DPS classes on the target, and they go down like nothing, with the exception of tanks, they take 2-3 seconds longer. Also with the GCD now at 1 second, responsiveness has been greatly improved, cast times lowered, and the amount of instants in the game, we need to severely increase time to kill. 

A simple way of doing it is raising the base HP of everything in the game, like you once did in beta. You can also make it similar to DAoC, where each archetype got a different bonus from Wounds. Right now we all get 10 hp per wounds. I suggest we change it to something like this: 
Robe Armor – 14 hp per wounds. – Same as light armor, they have 5-6k hp, so they go up to 7-8k hp now. 
Medium Robe – 17 hp per wounds. – Same as Medium armor. DoKs and WP have bout 5-6k hp that would go up to 8.5-10.2k hp 
Light Armor – 14 hp per wounds. – Most light armor has 5-6k hp, that would bring them up to 7-8k hp 
Medium Armor – 17 hp per wounds. – Most MDPS have about 5-6k hp, that would go up to 8.5-10.2k hp range 
Heavy Armor – 20 hp per wounds. – Most tanks have about 6-7k hp go up to about 12-14k hp 

This would greatly increase the TTK in most situations and will allow people to do more, especially healers, where they will have a better time healing. Most RDPS classes alone do 700-1200 damage per hit. When you have 5-6k hp, more than 1 DPS class on you, roughly guarantees death. Especially the squishier classes like Healers. This will greatly improve battles, and require people to assist to accomplish things, to use strategy, and have longer battles, fairer battles. This will also allow slight damage imbalances to not be as crazy as they are sometimes. 

The recent buffs to RDPS dps across the board, fixing 4 of the 6 DPS classes to be on par with the other 2, and then lowering healing power, has tern this game into an FPS game. I mean people drop left and right like they are being one-shotted. As a person that loves this game greatly, and I know I will play this game for many years, this will go a long way to getting a more enjoyable gaming experience. 

40 DoK, 20 Zealot, 20 Squig Herder, and a 20 BG as well as many Order characters that are working their way up to 40 (not to mention my gf with her characters and 40 that she lets me play sometimes). I have experienced all Tiers of the game, and all keep/fortress play. I play them all, and I see this all the time. Especially now with SH buffs, I do crazy damage, and drop anyone really quickly, especially healers and BW. Same can be said for all other DPS classes. MDPS has it rougher since they have to make it into the back lines first, usually taking immense damage on the way there, but they can do similar once they are at their target. 

So please increase TTK, as a healer, a tank, and a RDPS. I feel that healing currently does squat in keeping my team alive, as a chosen I feel like I can’t live long enough or do enough dps to make a difference in protecting my party. Even with guard, the healer or DPS I’m guarding lives maybe 2-3 seconds longer, all the while I’m taking his damage and my own, making my just as squishy as any healer. Tanks need to have the HP to take half of the person their guarding and their own and still be able to live longer than 4 seconds. As a Squig herder, especially after 1.0.6, I drop people faster than ever before, and I see that healers can’t keep up with the dps my side is dishing out. So most of the time we completely ignore healers, take out the DPS first, then concentrate on healers so that tanks go down just as fast as they do.

While this can go both ways, I still do feel TTK in WAR is slightly too fast, and it makes fighting a bit tedious, especially for a healer. Many times have I tried to heal someone, to either die as I am casting, or have my target die before my cast goes off. No amount of toughness/wounds/resist can help this at the moment. Also with the rumored changes in 1.2, resists will be severly downgraded, making damage from casters even worse.

Now that the pleasantries are over, I would like to put up a disclaimer that I have very strong opinions, and usually they differ greatly from everyone elses. Whether you agree or not with them, please don’t make too big of a deal out of it. I will talk about things that are touchy subjects related to balance, classes, and gameplay. Please just take the articles as they are and go with them. If you want to say something, whether negative or positive about the post, feel free to do so, but don’t blow it out of proportion or get mad at me for ignoring the comment, because once you get me started, I will debate with you for hours upon end, till I either convince you, or we stop out of frustration. Thats my disclaimer. Enjoy the site

P.S. I go by Daegalus on pretty much the rest of the internet, so if I paste stuff that I have posted elsewhere under “Daegalus” please know it is my writing, and I am not stealing anything.