Trial of the endless Trial - Chaos Chosen Impressions

While I mainly decided to play DPS classes because I thought I would like them more, before WAR released I originally thought the concept of mostly all of the tank classes in the game were pretty neat. Facing them on the RvR scenes I found out that tanks can be quite formidable but still easy to dispose of with a group. So with that, and the want to try something different, I went into the world of tanking in WAR, with the form of a Chaos Chosen Champion, or just Chosen for short.

The playing style of a tank is fairly standard of most people come to expect, you don't do as much damage as a DPS class but you can take a significant more. As a Chosen at level 5 right now I only have 2 attacks. The first attack is a direct strike that also increases my threat significantly, and the other is a attack that does no damage on striking, but it causes damage over time. I also have a few auras that are quite interesting, they both affect different stats, and they buff your allies while at the same time debuffing your enemies, it really gives the feeling that the Chosen is someone who inspires awe on the battlefield as it's described to be.

Playing a tank character itself is quite a different feel from a DPS, solo questing is somewhat slower because of the lack of damage, but of course I was really never in any danger of dying. The real difference is what I started to notice in group quests. The first one I did I noticed that I would struggle to keep my threat above everyone else on something unless I was constantly spamming my direct attack ability, leaving no time for the DoT. It might be because that's how it's suppose to work, or at low levels the abilities of a tank are super limited. I also have no form of taunt to further increase the threat problem, and usually even when spamming the threat strike over and over again, I still lost aggro against ranged classes on occasion, so while that part was kind of a bummer, it wasn't entirely unexpected. Even with that, the real charm of a tank I found to be in PvP.

Tanks aren't exactly the most popular class in most games in terms of PvP, but it seems like Mythic knows how to implement them well. As tanks we can't exactly taunt players, or at least not right now, and force them to attack us. However, what are able to do is block them off physically, or use the chaos of the battle field to have their attention centered on us, resulting in them attacking us over other our more vulnerable allies. This is aided by the game itself by providing a system that prevents player characters from running through each other most of the time. I have definitely seen a few people slip through me, but for the most part, the system works very well, and if a tank is at a good location like a bridge, rather than a open battlefield where one can simply run past them unless the tank actively blocks them, then being the role of a tank is definitely active and the effect on the battle, noticeable. This also plays on the tank's toughness, I felt like I generally enjoyed melee combat much more as a tank rather than a melee DPS class because I was able to stay fighting for a much longer time, in fact as of right now I have done only 2 Scenarios but only died once in both of them combined, while I definitely don't do as much damage as a melee DPS, it almost feels like they're regulated to throwing themselves at the enemy, inflicting a large amount of damage, and retreating or dying in the process, rather than enduring, and having a actual battlefield presence. Of course if you simply compare and contrast the two, then all of that sets the role as they should be, completely unique in their own way of playing.

I'm definitely eager again to see how my Chosen will advance and grow stronger, but in the end it seems like Tanking in WAR is made into a fun, unique, and active role that still utilizes what one's image of a tank, and presents it onto a PvP scene.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Four (Final on Choppa)

Today I logged into my Choppa and grinded out the rest of the way to the 10^th renown level, RvR combat remained quite fun, actually going back to the main base camp was the unpleasant part.

I withheld on training from level 8 to 10 to grow out the suspense but I wasn't exactly impressed by the skills I had ended up getting, the level 9 skills however still made up for that. I'm still not entirely sure if using a “great weapon” is better than dual wielding, or what stats to exactly go for, but I had done a few public quests again to gain some magical salvaging components, which let me upgrade all of my items to have a talisman that I wanted in them. As of right now, I believe strength to be my best stat which increases damage directly as well as increasing parries, followed by weapon skill which allows me to penetrate armor. A lot of the jewelry items didn't have offensive stats on them, so I had decided to stack wounds which just increased my health by noticeable amount, that or initiative seemed like the best defensive stats to have. I was able to get new boots, chest, level 8 weapons, and jewelry overall, however that seems like where the endless trial ends in terms of character progression, which disappointed me greatly, as there are even blue weapons on one of the merchants that are within all of the set restrictions of the endless trial, but it doesn't let you buy them unless you have a active subscription, at which point if you did you probably wouldn't really want to stick around in tier 1 anyway.

So in the end while the endless trial does a great demo of WAR I think it almost gives you too much, leaving you ending up wanting to fully experience the first tier of RvR completely, but at the same time, if you want to upgrade that much, like I said before, you probably won't be staying around in the first tier of combat, making the endless trial almost seem unfair, as it does provide advantages to the minority of players who do actually stick around in the first tier of RvR over the endless trial players. For example, every player who seemed neigh invincible were usually level 15s which is the maximum level in tier 1 I believe, it's also the level that the game system sets you at when you enter a scenario or RvR zone, however that player will always have the advantage over trial players since they can only get to level 10. Overall I don't fault the developers for going with this system, as it's not entirely free to play, nor does it ever state that it is, however at the same time, I don't think they would lose much by making the first tier of combat more balanced for the trial players, as it would truly provide a possible “endless” experience rather than having a clear end to it, although in the end, “endless trial” pretty much sums up the experience, there is no end to the trial, however it is a trial.

As for me, I plan on doing some more experimenting with the trial that I'll write about afterward, I want to take another DPS class up for a spin to see if it's experience is similar or completely different than the Choppa.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Two

Promises of power, and more is a reoccuring theme in the Chaos quests, which is what I spent most of today doing with WAR for about an hour, or more specifically more public quests.

When I logged in today I decided to turn in a quest that I had completed yesterday, but on the way using WAR's fairly confusing-at-first but very comprehensive and soon easy to use map, I spotted another public quest area. Still eager from yesterday's experience with it I quickly ran to it and joined the fray.

This time the quest involved a lot more killing, 3 phases of killing to be precise; first up was 50 militiamen men which fell easily before me and the rest of the forces of destruction, and then things got harder. Duelists appeared afterward, all of which were “champion” ranks so they were super hard to solo, luckily most of the players around me were willing to lend a hand, but in all honestly I mostly just looked around for people to assist rather than killing on my own, and with good reason too, the duelists softened up a lot of players, including myself, and as I haven't really found any sort of regenerative out of combat food so far, it's impact on performance was noticeable. Finally the third phase was something else, a hero ranked defender came out and joined the fray, and as expected he was much much stronger than any of the duelists. My first experience of him was pulling aggro and him laying waste to me fairly quickly, luckily the only real penalty for dying was a 15 minute debuff that lowered my stats for abit, however I also died enough repeating the quest in consecutive attempts that I found out that it stacks to 5. At 5 stacks I was super weak, but still able to fight, a lot easier than death penalties I found in other MMOs that I've played at least (Lord of the Rings Online, and of course World of Warcraft).

As I still really enjoyed the public quest, I kept on waiting for the next session to start. The wait was somewhat longer this time however it was hardly noticeable as well, since normal enemies spawn in the area in the meantime, allowing for some quality grinding time for a few minutes before the real thing started. I ended up doing the public quest about 3-4 times mainly to fill up my influence bar, and then I decided it was time to move on. I headed back to the main camp to find the rally master, and received a few new upgrades from the influence points, and the loot bags I received during the public quest itself. A lot of these items had talisman slots, so I did some looking around at the nearby trade skill trainers, and I was definitely surprised not to find the standard ones such as blacksmith, or mining. However I also didn't really look into all of the trade skills in depth; from what I gather there is Scavenging which takes additional items from dead bodies, Salvaging which allows you to break down items into magical components, Cultivation which I was curious about but ended up not taking, I don't entirely know how that works, and finally there is Butchering, which is probably the most standard, but it still is a new take on “skinning” animals. There is also of course still trades that let you make items, although these seem to be fairly minimal as well. Apothecaries make potions and work hand in hand with Cultivation, and Butchering. While Talisman making creates magical talismans and gets supplies from Salvaging, and Scavenging . I ended up taking Talisman Making mainly because it was the first thing I chose at random, and Salvaging with it, I ended up really liking my decision because a few pieces of the new items I got had talisman slots on them, and I was able to fill those in with “weak” on the talisman “power meter” that displays while you create talismans, but way better than the normal quest reward talismans.

While I didn't do much today, that concludes the second day of WAR; to be honest it was a much more positive experience than the first day for some reason, and I'm even more eager to jump into it tomorrow.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Introduction & Part One

For awhile now I have been curious about Warhammer Online or rather WAR as it's short hand would be. I'll admit that I'm somewhat one of the types that a lot of people would label as a MMO jumper, or I would have been if not for my own decision. After quitting World of Warcraft a few years ago before WAR came out, I was looking for a game that would have a emphasis on PvP to my luck WAR was starting to be announced around then and I decided to stop WoW for WAR. However eventually after a long series of waits I decided to go back to WoW and then from then on I forgot about WAR entirely, now after a long period of time (if I remember right, WAR was in the stages of near final and final development throughout Burning Crusade to the WoW player's timeline) and because of the interest in finding out what the Endless Trial is about, I decided to go check it out.

My first few hours with WAR

From the start I thought I knew what class I wanted to play since I spent, quite literally, days of staring at the classes of WAR while it was only a website, but when I got into the character selection screen itself, I was quite fascinated by all of the classes and how they have different animations when they're selected and high lighted. After simply just watching the small animations play over and over again, I decided to go with my first choice of class before looking through the others, the Orc Choppa; although it was very hard to choose against playing as a Black Orc after thinking the selection animation for him was funny (he hits his blade into the ground and has trouble getting it out for those who haven't seen it).

Unfortunately right at the start I was already kind of disjointed from the game as I expected to start out in a racial zone where I wouldn't see anyone but other Greenskins, and maybe a few Dark Elves and Chaos players around, instead I was apparently summoned through the warp by the Chaos directly to be a part of their army. While this part was unexpected it was definitely not entirely unwelcome as I thought exploring the Chaos would be interesting too, and since the characters are predominately Chaos there's plenty of exploring to do, infact I only saw one Orc npc so far.

The style of questing from what I gather is very similar to the post Cataclysm expansion style of questing in WoW, where you actively move with the quests rather than going to a quest hub and picking up dozens of quests, and doing that for pretty much your entire stay. I personally prefer the Cata style as it's more attention grabbing, whereas the other is definitely more classically MMOish.

The combat is very interesting on the other hand, as a Orc Choppa it seems like a lot of abilities are meant to hit hard but also increase the damage I take to the point of being super easy to hurt. To me this in turn means that it would be a overarching factor to deal with as a Choppa as there are some abilities that would exhaust my berserking and thus reduce the damage I take, but also increase the chance to get a critical strike on myself. While all of this sounds counter productive, it remains to be seen if the game's balance is enough so that my offensive power makes up for my vulnerability. On the same note, I enjoy how flashy and decisive most of the attacks are, that's alittle strange coming from a Orc Choppa I know who is suppose to redefine wild and undisciplined, but it's still true, a lot of the strike skills leave a stream of fire from the swing which makes it easily identifiable which attack is just a auto attack and which one is a used attack. At the same time the animation is often so fast you won't gain a appreciation for it the first few dozen times you use it, instead it takes awhile but it still doesn't at all detract from the deserved attention it gets when it's really looked at.

After doing a few quests that mainly involved going to a location of undead or minor daemons and killing them to prove my worth, I came up to the first actual quest hub of a small outpost where the forces of Destruction were mounting an attack on a village, I at first thought this was very neat because it reminded me of the Death Knight intro sequence where pretty much the entire thing is about raiding a town called Havenshire and New Avalon, in WAR however this is where I first encountered public quests.

The addition and style of public quests really drew me in, the set up was that players in the town would have to defend cultists who were preparing to summon a daemon to aid in the further razing of the town. The first thing I noticed is that you never had to actually be in a group during the quest, a window simply popped up that said you were in the vicinity of the public quest and that allowed you to participate in it, even if it was ongoing, the main and only problem with that part of the system is that there really is no visible boundary of the quest, but there still is a boundary, so leaving it would remove you from participation. It does however keep your progress in that session, making it a minor point. The quest itself had multiple short stages making the quest overall fairly fast and painless, the first was to kill milita men that threatened the cultists, moving onto gathering nearby stones from the tombstones to aid in the summoning, finally there was a small scene of the beast coming forth, however as most could suspect the beast itself isn't controlled, and it soon turns on it's chaos controllers, from then on it has to be put down by the players. At the end of all of this a scoreboard pops up ranking your contribution against everyone else, I'm not entirely sure what the contribution scores on but I assume it's based on completing objectives, there are of course other factors like for slaying objectives in terms of how much damage I did to a particular enemy against someone else, but again the scoreboard gives no representation of what it actually scores contribution on. In the end, while that part isn't specifically stated, generally the contribution score is right on the nose. Another factor in a player's score is called the “persistence bonuses” which are awarded if a player participated in the last match but didn't win anything. Finally at the end, everyone does a random dice roll seeming to range from 1 to 999 and that adds to a player's overall score which determines the quality of loot bag they get, and if they get a loot bag at all. I'm not entirely sure if the amount of players participating scales with the amount of loot given out, but I was able to get at least a minor loot bag each time, and sometimes a green quality loot bag. On one occasion out of maybe only 4 attempts in the public quest, I scored the highest on the contributions but ended up being in 5^th place because of the roll. All in all I think the public quest system is a super fun and innovative addition to simply questing, they're more like instances but not entirely as they take place in the world itself; the addition of loot, and competitive ranking helped make it quite easy to come back a few more times.

While I was redoing the public quest just to see what kind of ranks I could get against other people, there were a few Empire players that came by, they were of course level 10 while everyone else around me was level 3-4ish so they were in a clear advantage, however after the current session that was ongoing, everyone decided to team up on them. After a short while the Empire was able to easily kill a few of my allies including myself. We were able to kill them, and as a result I got my first renown points even though I had died. Although I haven't really looked into renown, it seems like it's simply a ranking of how much PvP, or rather RvR that you participate in; success probably also plays a factor into it, however even as a causality I was still was able to gain a degree of points, so it seems like a fairly lenient system, but only time will tell.

Public quests also have another role to attend too as well, the gaining of influence points. Currently I'm not sure if public quests are the only way to gain influence points but it was the only noticeable increment point for me, not that that's a bad thing. Influence allows players to gain “Influence Rewards” which are simply just extra items, you are limited to only one item per tier of influence because as I found out once you use up influence you are not able to gain more of it if you've already reached the maximum amount.

That's about the end of the first few hours I spent with the Warhammer Online Endless Trial on the side of Destruction. There are quite a lot of ways to advance your character from what I've seen so far, from achievements, to stat tracking which is definitely a hook for me. However it remains to be seen if I am able to handle it's all too familiar MMORPG conventions and game play. While WAR definitely has new takes on those said conventions, and game play, it still doesn't separate it enough from the feel of familiarity of other games I've played for me, but I guess the same can be said for every person, and game out there.