Warhammer Online

Block · Post by **Block** » 2008-09-12 06:47pm

Stark wrote:I'm not sure if I'm being unclear or if you can't read - I'm asking how FLEXIBLE the SPEC SYSTEM is, not what silly names the classes have. As I said, if WPs strongly tend towards one build, that's going to get pretty lame, but if each class is a flexible set of bonuses that can apply equally across all three spec trees, that'll be pretty cool. BCG's WP example certainly seems that their cost-reduction will be useful no matter what tree you use, for instnace.

Oh ok, now I see what you're asking. The answer is no one knows yet outside of those still under an NDA. We're all restricted to lvl 20 out of 40, and the masteries don't start until level 11, and you get a point every other level, so you get like 5 points to play with, which isn't enough to get near the top of the tree.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-09-12 06:52pm

Ah I see. To be honest I'm just glad to hear they even HAVE different trees - some of what I read in previews seemed to suggest it was much more restrictive, with each class being very narrow.

I have another stupid question - are there conditional attacks? WoW and GW has them, and AoC sucked because it didn't. I mean things like 'if strikes blind target, xyz' or 'if strikes moving target, xyz' or etc. In WoW and GW it's used for complex stacking and crowd control stuff, but in AoC the lack of a simple 'if strikes moving target, target is knocked down' means kiting was stupid easy in PvP.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2008-09-12 06:59pm

I had a level 40 WP going for a little while during the Tier 4 RvR testing. It was confusing as hell having level 40 shit all over plus a full mastery spec, but from what I saw:

As a WP, you're going to be reliant on melee combat no matter what. Now, depending on how you spec, you can alter that dependency to your preferred play style. If you go with a full Wrath spec, then your out-of-combat healing is going to be almost worthless, but if you spend all your time in melee whacking the shit out of everything in sight your healing will be pretty solid.

If you go for a full healing spec, you're going to have much more respectable behind-the-lines healing. Your melee attacks will be significantly less effective and you won't have a lot of nifty in-combat heal procs and HoTs that the Wrath WP has, but as a WP you're still based around melee healing and so you can do it to some degree. As a full healer WP, you'll have to balance melee and stand-back-to-heal much more, but you will be fair-to-decent in the latter role, unlike the Wrath WP.

Of course, you can mix and match trees and I haven't even touched the third tree on account of not really remembering what it does. It's a lot more viable (and indeed, encouraged by the system) to take a mix of spec trees and be good in several roles rather than exclusively focusing on one.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2008-09-12 07:00pm

Stark wrote:I have another stupid question - are there conditional attacks?

Lots. Every other attack either applies some condition or exploits an existing one.

Block · Post by **Block** » 2008-09-12 07:01pm

Well there's some ranged attacks that snare if they're back attacks, a silence for my witch hunter, I know there's a couple stuns, the one complaint I could see there being about this game might be the lack of complexity. Not a lot of crowd control, no mezzes, that sort of stuff.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-09-12 07:01pm

Yeah your description of the melee-magic reduction thing is the kind of 'overall' class bonus that would be useful whatever you're doing (more or less), instead of what I imagined where each class would get a set of bonuses that was very directive in how you should play. Melee-based healers seem to be all the rage these days.

Block · Post by **Block** » 2008-09-12 07:04pm

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:
Stark wrote:I have another stupid question - are there conditional attacks?
Lots. Every other attack either applies some condition or exploits an existing one.

Bah, I wish there was more of that for the WH. Like I said I get a silence, and some dots, but that's about it.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-09-12 07:07pm

After AoC, just having attacks that add or exploit conditions makes the game better already. AoC combat was so fucking boring.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2008-09-12 07:07pm

I'm only familiar with level 40 stuff as a WP. If you're only at level 20 max, that's your problem, I suspect. A lowbie WP only has a couple conditionals, whereas my level 40 had a godawful pile of abilities I didn't even know what the fuck to do with. This attack Cripples, this attack deals a DoT if target is Crippled, this heal heals extra if you're Hexed, this one removes a Hex and heals as well if Burning, this one removes Poison but deals damage if Hexed and this one...

Block · Post by **Block** » 2008-09-12 07:13pm

One thing you'll probably like Stark, is that being in a guild means a shitload. Only guilds can capture keeps. Your guild standard, that a member carries into battle and can plant on the ground(making it capturable by the enemy) or carry(though this restricts him from doing anything else) gives guild members bonuses in combat. You can get tactics(little passive bonuses like+5%xp or bleeding procs from crits at the lower levels) from guild levels. There's all kinds of bonuses which is really cool to me anyways.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-09-12 07:20pm

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:I'm only familiar with level 40 stuff as a WP. If you're only at level 20 max, that's your problem, I suspect. A lowbie WP only has a couple conditionals, whereas my level 40 had a godawful pile of abilities I didn't even know what the fuck to do with. This attack Cripples, this attack deals a DoT if target is Crippled, this heal heals extra if you're Hexed, this one removes a Hex and heals as well if Burning, this one removes Poison but deals damage if Hexed and this one...

GW was like this, and I really got used to it - it was quite a shock to play AoC where attacks were 'this one does 20' and 'this one does 22' and 'this is your one knockdown with a huge cooldown'. I don't evne know what more than 30% of the GW skills I had back in the day DID, but there was a skill for every occassion.

Jaevric · Post by **Jaevric** » 2008-09-12 08:20pm

*EDIT*

Took out some stuff. pretty sure the NDA is lifted on the game, and at this point losing my Open beta access won't break my heart, but give me 5 minutes and I'll take a look and make sure I can talk about this.

*Second edit*

Yeah it's lifted, we can talk about stuff in-game that isn't still on the Closed Beta test servers.

The spec system isn't terribly flexible. Each class has 3 "paths" they can go down and it's pretty much a straight shot. Most of the "Paths" have different benefits that are useful, however they aren't ENORMOUS changes. Nothing like, for example, the difference you get with the WoW druid or shaman depending on which class you go down.

Take the Marauder for example. Chaos melee DPS class, based on using different mutations to handle different situations. Focusing on one Path gives you low-ish damage for a melee DPS class but some nice debuffs to armor and healing. Focusing on another is straight single-target DPS. And the third path is AoE melee damage. They're all useful in certain situations -- some people complain that the debuff Path isn't useful because the damage isn't high enough, but the massive armor debuff and healing debuff can be VERY handy. It's just not as much of an e-peen path as the straight damage one.

The Warrior-Priest has one path that focuses on healing, one that focuses on melee combat and buffs, and one that focuses on melee combat and debuffs. All three are (situationally) useful from what I've been able to tell. All three can heal to some extent, but the "healer" path is obviously going to be better at it than the other two.

Robert Treder · Post by **Robert Treder** » 2008-09-13 12:19am

Stark wrote:After AoC, just having attacks that add or exploit conditions makes the game better already. AoC combat was so fucking boring.

Agreed. The only thing I liked about AoC combat was the melee splash damage.

Meest · Post by **Meest** » 2008-09-13 05:27am

The spec trees mostly follow this style, single direct damage, area damage, then the debuff/buff/utility damage over time lines. For healers just convert that to heal style. The difference to how masteries affect skills is that each point in the line boosts all skills that fall into that tree (core and spec skills).

Melee and ranged have gated or conditional moves, ranged is mostly if target is cursed then this next skill will snare, if not sometimes will still do the base dmg component. It's a mix of all previous systems, there's the 5 point combo system the "rage" style meter build up with a few twists, black orc has 3 tier combo system that you can mix and match (can do any phase 1 move then that opens phase 2 then can do any phase 2 move to get to 3 etc, so can mix and match). Each class has one style associated with it. My favourite is the caster style one, you have a 0-100 meter, each spell builds it up a certain amount, and it gives you a bonus as it climbs, but the higher it goes there's a chance of it backfiring and damaging you. It's good that it prevents pure spam casting so have to manage that meter somewhat.

The amount of skills I had at 40 was 2 full 12 slot bars +1, so expect 20-25 skills. Three were buffs, one was the flee/sprint, then the rest class skills. Most are useful at least on the sorceror, use maybe 75% of them, had a row for single dmg, then another for AE, last 25% are the longer cooldown depending on situation, ie disarm root or silence. About the graphics you need to force your vid card to do AA and AF in settings, the newest patch added some new slider options for graphics so it's getting quite good. Haven't done a siege or anything big with the new options so not sure how it holds up.

That's all I can think of to what's been talked about.

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2008-09-13 09:23am

Bah. I'd love to try the beta and even pre-ordered to do so but my local Gamestop was out of codes and doesn't think they're going to get anymore. EAstore takes 3-10 days to send them out, I keep hearing about Amazon giving out duplicate codes, and Direct2Drive for some reason won't let me complete a transaction.. bah and double bah.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2008-09-15 09:24am

Son? The beta's over already, it's a touch moot.

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2008-09-15 04:07pm

White Haven wrote:Son? The beta's over already, it's a touch moot.

Wasn't when I made my preorder. Did finally get things sorted with D2D but not before the end of the beta. Got in on the Headstart and got the preorder items at least though.

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2008-09-17 02:33am

In on the headstart and I've fiddled with a couple classes though so far the Witch Hunter seems to be the one that's caught my attention the most (What? What? BURN HERETIC! *shoves torch into enemy's face* ).

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2008-09-17 03:31am

I'm running a Black Orc and a Warrior Priest at the moment. Look me up as Grotznub on Tor Elyr if you want to say hi or Waaagh! it up Gork'n'Mork style.

eyexist · Post by **eyexist** » 2008-09-17 08:35am

I've been in since Closed beta. Rolled a treachery-specced Witch Elf on Ostland server.

I was big into DAoC a few years back so I'm having a blast.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2008-09-17 02:17pm

As a note, my Order server, along with a bunch of old friends, is Badlands. Yes, we're one of the 'oh sweet go that's a packed server' servers. Ah well.

Haven't rolled my Destruction characters yet, so that's up in the air.

And as for the spec system, I can't speak for everyone's, but some of the Archmage abilities in various trees are dramatic and interesting enough that my planned 40 RvR-healer spec has two points in the actual 'healing' tree, and looks to be viable and fun to play as a combat healer.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2008-09-17 10:22pm

Tanks are fucking tough.

With just one Shaman healing me, I occupied all 6 of those Order punks for a good 2-3 minutes just sitting there beating on each other. I finally went down after a very long time once a couple more (plus some ranged guys) started wailing on me too.

I don't know wtf our team was doing during that time to lose all 3 points while I had nearly half of their team attacking me, but damnit if I wasn't doing my job.

eyexist · Post by **eyexist** » 2008-09-17 10:55pm

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Tanks are fucking tough.

With just one Shaman healing me, I occupied all 6 of those Order punks for a good 2-3 minutes just sitting there beating on each other. I finally went down after a very long time once a couple more (plus some ranged guys) started wailing on me too.

I don't know wtf our team was doing during that time to lose all 3 points while I had nearly half of their team attacking me, but damnit if I wasn't doing my job.

It's because folks like to run off and play cowboy, or don't prioritize targets. If that group was smart they would have thought to go after the healer first , then you.

With me being a Witch Elf I like to skulk about and jump on a target that someone else is attacking. Pop Kiss of Death to make any heals that land on them 45% less effective, then finish them off with a fully charged blood lust attack.

Can't wait til level 16 so I get my new attack that silences spellcasters.

Block · Post by **Block** » 2008-09-17 11:01pm

I have 25 witch elf kills to my credit as a level 15 Shadow Warrior. I like how squishy they are

And yeah, I don't get why two or three people wouldn't just ignore you and rape the healer. Healers are always my first target, though for some reason Destruction always seems to have twice as many healers as Order most times.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2008-09-18 12:48am

I need to get a healer dedicated to helping me next time I do some scenarios, because when I had a guy buffing me I could take down folks something fierce.