Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Second Week

Things have been looking up a bit since my prior post. My relentless nagging has worn down several of my friends, who were finally convinced to give the game a try.

This has, however, turned into something of a double-edged sword for me. While the game is much more fun to play when grouped with people you know, it’s also meant that I had to roll a new character to help them catch up to my Sorceress, which is going to put something of a delay on my review.

I’d like to apologize to all five of you out there waiting with bated breath for my verdict on whether or not you should rush out to buy a copy.

It would seem there are plenty of people who need no such leveling assistance from me, as I’ve already heard reports of numerous characters hitting 40 (the maximum level) within the past week, several of them on my own server. The trick to this superhuman feat of powerleveling is apparently just an abundance of patience:

In Public Quests, the first stage generally involves having to kill dozens, or even hundreds of mobs. Out of necessity due to such numbers, they tend to respawn very quickly, and aren’t particularly spaced out from one another. So, people just go in with a Marauder, round up five or six at a time, and AE them down. Rinse, repeat, level 40 in six days /played.

I seriously doubt this was what Mythic had in mind when they designed the PvE side of the game, and it’s likely to get changed very, very soon.

These friends and I have now managed to get a guild up and running, so I’ve been able to see the Living Guilds system in action first-hand.

It’s about what you would expect: As members grind, the guild receives experience, as well, and once a certain threshold is reached it gains a level.

Level 1 is simply, “You can have a guild.” Level 2 allows you to access a calendar to schedule raids and whatnot, level 3 allows you to set up taxes on members, and so on.

This also goes all the way up to 40, by which time you’ll have access to a “communal” guild hall, several standards, custom heraldry, and the ability to claim keeps, providing a steady stream of experience towards the guild’s level… which, I suppose isn’t particularly useful if it’s already 40.

We’re not a very large guild–we might be able to fill a group and a half if everybody logged in at once–so the leveling has been relatively slow. Guild levels seem to be directly proportional to the number of people invited, so while we’re level 6, other guilds on the server are pushing level 20, and I’m sure something like the 500+ member Something Awful goonsquad would have capped out already.

It’s not the most elegant system in the world, but, given enough time everyone will eventually hit 40, and as the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there.

We’ve also been partaking in a great deal of RvR over the past week. Mostly scenarios, but I did have the opportunity to see one keep defense first-hand. Open-world RvR is really what the game should be all about, so I was both excited about the opportunity, and disappointed that it didn’t happen more often.

Keeps are arranged in a very defensible format: A lower floor with several guards and a door that must be rammed down, and a narrow staircase leading up to the next level, where the keep lord, who must be defeated to claim it, resides.

As has been mentioned many times in the past, WAR is one of the few MMOs out there that actually features collision detection between players, and in keeps this plays a part in a big way: Parking two giant Black Orcs at the top of the stairs, while the healers stand back and keep them alive, and DPS blows the hell out of everybody trying to come up makes for a very good time. My Sorceress in the engagement I participated in was easily pushing over 1,000 DPS.

But, as I mentioned, keep defenses have so far between few and far between. More often, guilds just get together at 3 AM and take every keep on the map without having to bother with opposition, rather than having to deal with defenders during prime time. I could see this being a large problem once guilds start actually claiming keeps, when members log on the next day to find it’s been taken during the night, with nothing they could have done about it–unless they wanted to come in to work on two hours of sleep.

Scenarios are still fairly fun in their own right, though, and I look forward to trying out the Tier 3 versions once everyone is caught up. As you can see by the scoreboard on the left, sacrificing your clothes for DPS occasionally does pay off.

Also, in a development which I take full credit for, just today they announced that the glaring oversight I groused about last week, not being able to queue for any scenario in a tier from any zone, has been corrected. I greatly applaud this apparent willingness to listen to the playerbase–I just hope people don’t start demanding the nerfs to start rolling in, next.

That’s the gist of my second week in Warhammer Online. Tonight I should be able to get back to leveling my main, and by this time next week, hopefully, part one of our review will be available for all to see. Until then, stay tuned.