A Dark Age of Camelot Veteran's Review of WarHammer Online

A little history

My wife Kira and I are thrilled about the release of WarHammer Online, since we were both avid players of Mythic's first major MMORPG: Dark Age of Camelot. We both had about 5 years under our belts in that game, and loved Mythic's realm vs realm concept.

In Dark Ages, we played on the Percival server. My main character was an Armsman named Soriven, and Kira played a Cleric named Sabryna. I mostly Soloed in Dark Age's RvR, so leveling up Realm Rank wasn't super fast. In the end, I retired from the game at Realm Rank 7, but made 3 videos in that time. My 3rd video contained a rather popular segment (I didn't title the video!) showing me going solo against a Midgard Zerg, and lasting a for quite a while. Some other characters I leveled to 50 and actively played in RvR were: Krystie: Infiltrator, Kryi: Sorceress, Ikatuk: Necromancer, and Kaerik: Cleric.

When creating our Warhammer characters we decided to switch rolls. Kira created a Black Orc named Kirwagh, and I'm playing a Goblin Shaman named Sori on the Phoenix Throne server. So far we're both really enjoying the switch as it really gives a whole new perspective to combat for both of us. At the time of writing this, both of these characters are level 21, and we've each leveled several alts to the 9-11 range.

Getting Started with WarHammer Online

The character creation system doesn't quite offer the same level of customization that Dark Ages had when we left. You can choose from a few ranges of faces, hair, and accessories styles (scars for orcs, tatoos for chaos etc..), and you can customize the color of your skin, hair, and eyes. The variety is decent though, and I'm sure it's something Mythic will expand on in the future.

The game holds your hand as you enter the world with a series of tips displayed as '?' icons above your command bar. The tips pop up a few at a time as you make your way into the world, explaining things as you encounter them. They do a reasonably good job at introducing you to the basic game mechanics, so we never had to read a manual or look at a keyboard cheat-sheet. Some of the more advanced game mechanics aren't explained as well, however people were generally helpful and offered advice when people asked questions.

General Gameplay

The game doesn't really feel like Dark Ages at all. I've never played World of Warcraft, but most people claim the 'feel' of the game is very close to that. Overall I don't think it's necessarily better or worse, just different. The biggest changes in my opinion are the new interrupt system, abilities system, and collision detection.

Interupts no longer completely cause you to stop casting a spell, but instead have a chance of setting the spell back a second or so, which delays the cast. Some spells get set back more than others, such as the Shaman's big single target heal. I think this is a big improvement over Dark Age's interrupt system, which worked well for veterans but could be very frustrating to new or casual players.

Abilities are now throttled by a global 1.5 second cool-down, meaning you can't spam insta cast-abilities more than once every 1.5 seconds. Your character also has an auto-attack based on your weapons swing speed which executes automatically and is independent of your ability usage. Some DAoC veterans feel that this setup is too "dumbed down", compared to DAoC but I think it just offers a different set of challenges. The range of useful abilities you end up with in Warhammer is a little larger than Dark Ages, and a lot comes down to using each one at the opportune moment.

Collision detection is both a great improvement and a pain in the butt, mainly because you also collide with realm mates and in large-scale choke-point stand offs, it really starts to turn into a mob scene of stuck characters. On the plus side, it also allows a wall of tanks to setup at a choke point and drastically slow down the advancement of enemy forces.

Leveling

There are now 40 levels instead of 50, and they go slower than leveling to 50 in DAoC today, but a good deal faster than leveling to 50 when DAoC first came out. Also, almost all of the PvP action is available as soon as you enter the game.

When leveling up in Dark Ages, it would often involve finding a good camp of monsters and killing them as efficiently as possible. Thankfully this is no longer the case (I haven't even done it once). Leveling in WarHammer consists of pretty much doing anything in the game. I would guess that the fastest way to level is a combination of doing quests in rapid succession while queueing for scenarios. At 21, I felt experience was still coming in at a reasonable rate, and the intermittent PvP fights help break up the "grinding" feeling. However, after playing a scenario over 20 times, they start to get a little mundane. I still prefer this to monster-spawn farming though, so it's a step in the right direction. Ultimately, if you have the attitude of "Do what feels fun, and don't worry about leveling" it'll just happen automatically in the background, and you'll probably be pleased with the pace of things.

Gearing up your character

Here is how you will get good gear in Warhammer:

• Random drops from monsters
• Random drops from killing players
• Quests rewards
• Public quest rewards
• Area influence rewards
• Open RvR influence rewards (particularly nice)
• Auctioneer (player-sold items)
• End-game instanced dungeons
• Capturing keeps

Random drops just happen from time to time, and they're nice little bonuses. There isn't really the option of farming for specific items since loot tables tend to be very large, and the chance of getting one thing in specific would require about 1,000 kills.

For quest rewards, wardb.com has a great resource for identifying good quest rewards. Use the item search and filter by quest rewards to find stuff you like, then look up the quest for that item.

Many of the Public Quests offer great rewards, and they're actually quite fun sometimes. In my opinion Public Quests is everything that Master Level encounters should have been in Dark Ages. To handle loot distribution, each time a public quest is completed, the top contributers get a bonus of up to 500 points, which is then added on to a random roll of 1-1000 that each participating player gets. If you get a loot bag (between 2-10 bags per PQ), it's always tailored specifically for your character's class.

Area influence rewards are gained by participating in public quests for your area. Participate in enough of them and you get up to 3 rewards in each region (there are about 4 regions in each zone). These rewards range from decent to great.

Open RvR influence rewards just came out a few weeks ago, and are absolutely superb! However, in order to earn these rewards, you have to participate in War's open RvR regions extensively. oRvR is supposed to be the focal point of the entire game, so ideally this should be the most fun and exciting action to be had, unfortunately that's not always the case (see Realm vs Realm)

Auctioneers are your standard player-driven marketplace, which offers a decent search engine to find items you might need. Note that Tier-1 items are generally a little pricy as they're very popular for people twinking their alts.

I haven't participated in the end-fame instanced dungeons, but I know it's generally where people go to get the best end-game equipment.

The PvP alternative to instanced dungeons for getting the best gear is participating in keep takes, which each give 3 very nice items in the same public quest loot-roll style distribution. This method of getting nice gear is available starting with Tier 2 (Level 10).

Realm vs Realm

I'm going to preface this by saying that this is largely in my personal opinion, and it is quite possible you will disagree with me here. That being said, I can summarize by saying Warhammer hasn't quite got the RvR component figured out yet.

Good changes:

• Classes look distinct, so its a lot easier to make sense of a large hectic battle
• Scenarios allow for fast guaranteed action, so no running around for a half hour only to get wiped by a zerg
• Open groups allow you to find and join RvR groups quickly.
• Level bonuses to keep lower level characters competitive (Your character is auto-boosted to level 8 in Tier 1, 18 in Tier 2, etc...)
• Group setups are a lot less restrictive than Dark Ages

Bad changes:

• Rewards for taking objectives encourage each realm to ignore the other and just PvE objectives instead, so they can be easily swapped
• When you do have a keep fight with the other realm, they tend to cause dreadfully boring standoffs which are horribly mundane
• Instead of roots, stuns and mezzes, you have knock-backs, knockdowns, disarms, silence, and unpurgeable roots, all with only 5 second immunity timers. CC and disabling abilities are a bit out of control right now in Tier 4, and somewhat in Tier 3

I think Mythic took two steps forward and three steps back here. However, I do expect Mythic to address these issues over the next 3 months or so as more and more people start to hit the later part of the game where the problems become much more apparent.

Personally, after a taste of tier 3 RvR, I put leveling my Shaman on hold, and started leveling a range of characters in tier 1 (I've done 6 or 7 so far), where the RvR is much more enjoyable. Tier 1 doesn't have any keeps, so there's no dreadful standoffs. Also, there isn't all the crowd control problems in Tier 1, as characters don't receive those abilities till much later in the game.

Right now, I honestly think Tiers 1 and 2 offer the best RvR action in WarHammer, which in a way is good for me because I just don't have as much time to play these games as I once did.

Conclusion

Overall Mythic produced a great game, which more or less sits somewhere between Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft. They've still got some work to do to get their RvR experience as good as Dark Age's is, but then again Dark Ages has been out for over 6 years now, and has since seen a major overhaul to its RvR system (New Frontiers). I expect that by this time next year WarHammer will have hammered out most of its kinks just in time for their expansion pack to introduce a whole new set of them. Summer of 09 will probably be a great time to have a level 40 character, so focus on enjoying the game instead of getting to level 40 as fast as possible, and you'll probably have a grand ol time!