Thoughts on Warhammer Online: The Third Week, Part Two

Not surprisingly, I was correct in my assumption that Mythic would soon close the “AE your way to 40″ loophole, which they did the day following my second week wrap-up post.

But, that didn’t stop me from wanting to try it anyway. Not for the experience, but for influence.

As I mentioned in my third impressions post, there are a great deal of Public Quests in the game. Killing mobs and completing objectives in them rewards you with influence, and when you get enough of it, you can cash it out for a nice blue item reward.

Sounds like a sweet deal, right?

Not so fast. Once you start getting up there in levels, each chapter’s worth of influence begins to take a longer and longer period of time to fill up–chapter 1 might take you ten minutes, chapter 2 takes fifteen, and so on.

I’m now up to chapters 13 and 14, and barring the occasional exploit, grinding your way through the influence bar could easily take you two to three hours.

I think what they had in mind was that you could complete each of an area’s PQs from start to finish to max yourself out–but, some of them are much easier (or reward greater influence) than others, so naturally players gravitate towards the least risk for the most reward, and the rest of them largely sit undone.

So, the other day, two of my guildmates and I decided to get together and AE the hell out of everything in a PQ, which just so happens to be the Sorceress’ specialty.

This worked out surprisingly well–no doubt moreso due to the healing abilities of my guildmate than to my abilities as a tank–and we cleared everything out in record time, never once even getting low on health, despite the fact that I was constantly rounding up and nuking over a dozen mobs.

When I hit 25 and trained the spell Pit of Shades, PQ clearing suddenly became even easier. The spell is so ungodly overpowered (particularly due to the fact that I’ve been putting nearly all of my mastery points into Destruction, which increases the strength of AE abilities) that I only have to cast it once and those aforementioned dozen mobs are laying dead on the floor.

All of this damage-dealing ability, however, while nice in PvE does have its price to pay in PvP. If someone (particularly a melee someone) is really determined to kill me, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, aside from running away.

Sorceress has very limited control… you have a root on a long timer, and a 40% snare that’s a three second cast and requires another spell to already be active on the target.

This, combined with the traditionally low armor and HP on caster classes does not make for particularly high survivability.

To close out this week’s post, I’d like to spend a little while discussing the Tier 3 scenarios… or, more specifically the Tier 3 scenario, as no one on my server seems to be interested in queueing for anything else: Tor Anroc.

The map features the classic oddball mechanic: Get to ball, pick ball up, make sure other team does not get ball, collect points as long as ball is in your possession.

Where this formula goes awry is when you add high, narrow walkways over lava, and then make sure you equip both of the teams with numerous AE knockback abilities.

Ironbreakers and Swordmasters, in particular, seem to love nothing more than to charge someone, say, the ball carrier, or your pocket healer, and send them flying off into the abyss, all the while spamming the /lol emote.

Once you actually get into the lava, it’s not all that bad–around 500 damage a tick. The problem is, sometimes you can walk right out of it, and other times you’re rooted in place, unable to move an inch, seemingly at the random whim of the game. This fact makes what might be a minor inconvenience completely and utterly infuriating.

Add this to the fact that there are several “cracks” where players run the ball to nearly inaccessible areas to prevent it from being taken away from their team, and the map is cheap incarnate.

I queue for it only under extreme duress, as it’s the only one that’s available 95% of the time. If I didn’t, my renown rank would fall too far behind my PvE level and I would be unable to equip my set items.

This is all the more heartbreaking because most of the other Tier 3 scenarios–Doomfist Crater, which I enjoy because of its huge AE potential, in particular–are actually great fun to play.

There is a special place in Hell awaiting the members of the Tor Anroc design team, where the Devil himself will hurl them a hundred feet through the air into a pit of boiling lava while doing the /lol emote for all of eternity.