What Would Matt Do

Yeah, I haven’t been updating as much as of late. It’s because I’m so busy/lazy… But, I have been playing a fair amount of Warhammer. And it’s been good…and bad.

Before I get to my opinion though, lets read what SJ liked and didn’t like:

Instant PVP. You can do the PvP thing immediately following character creation, and what’s more, not completely suck.  Thanks to upranking you can sort-of kind-of contribute from level 1. Which is appropriate – the game still gives you a reason to level upward. The same applies to equipment – you gain access to a baseline of equipment through “renown gear” unlocked through PvP, but you’ll want to supplement it.  And entering a “scenario” (instanced PvP battle) is as easy as clicking a big helpful logo button. No fuss, no muss, no running somewhere, you get teleported to a battle, then teleported back. Makes no sense from a fantasy immersion standpoint, but then again, neither do instanced battles, so whatever!

And most importantly, you can advance your character this way as well. You gain experience and money through simply competing in scenarios, and level-appropriate gear can drop from other players as well.

That’s really THE feature of Warhammer and it’s what will probably keep me coming back again and again. I agree completely with Lum here. I like some of the other thing he mentions, but I’m not really that worried about the open groups thing or the Tome of Knowledge. The open groups is useful sometimes, but the Tome just doesn’t do anything for me beyond letting me pick a title. I don’t go for achievements either though, so your mileage may very.

On to what he didn’t like, and it’s a much more damning list imo:

Grindgrindgrindgrindgrind. Yeah, this is the big one, and what is going to kill retention for Warhammer if anything not with the initials “WotLK” does. Anecdotal evidence from beta testers all claim that the levelling curve was radically “adjusted” immediately before the game shipped. This was a mistake. If there’s any game that shouldn’t be afraid of their users reaching max level, it’s Warhammer. Yet the last minute holy-crap-we-don’t-have-enough-to-keep-people-busy reaction from a development team seems to be a time-honored tradition of late. One could make a case that with many games, levelling is artifically accelerated in beta, then tuned to the release version just before shipping. That pretty clearly isn’t the case with Warhammer, since after the 2nd “tier” of content… you run out. Note: this is when you make levelling faster, not slower. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the first rewards granted to underpopulated realms has been faster levelling speed. That shouldn’t be a reward – it should be the default.

Yep, that’s the big one, no question about it. What a god damn pain in the ass the leveling is once you get out of tier 1. And I hear it only gets worse as you level up. I see grinding as a flaw in any system. I don’t like it Disgaea type games and I don’t like it in my MMOs. Which is why I burn out on them well before the end game most every time. If your game requires leveling, it will eventually lose me, one way another. WoW, for instance, has a lot class and style and a mess of pellets, which really helped disguise the grind for awhile. But after playing enough and seeing behind the curtains, I just can’t stomach WoW anymore. It’s all grind.

He lists a pile of other problems and I agree with every one of them, the most damning after grinding being either the boring as hell PvE or the class balance in PvP depending what kind of game you prefer. The PvE is boring as all get out and even worse in elvish lands (as mentioned above). But the PvP is my real problem… Playing a Witch Elf is great…sometimes. You’ll often help break healer/caster lines in back and sometimes you’ll even take down a tank or two if you find them by themselves…but you’ll never compare to a Sorcerer. They can stand back, way back, and do a mess more damage than you can. Not the end of the world…except, why play a MDPS class if you aren’t as good as your RDPS counterparts, at least in some way?

The rest of the classes all have their awesome. Tanks can stand their and take a fucking beating and even help protect one other person while doing it. Healers, both the melee and ranged type are gods in their respective ways (my favorite being the Warrior Priest…so much fun to play) and the RDPS guys can really dish out some serious damage. But what do the MDPS guys get… Well, I can stealth as some of them, but I still can’t come out of hiding with anything like a killing blow or even a disabling one. If I don’t attack a loner that strayed from the pack, I’m almost certainly going to die before I can even kill the one guy I just attacked from the back. At best, I’m going to do a enough damage and catch enough attention so that the healers stop healing and the RDPS guys stop hitting things and try to run or help. If I can keep their attention long enough, then maybe my guys in the front can push over their front line that is longer being healed and we can take the current battle.

But what does the MDPS guy get from that? Nothing. Just death and long respawn. People aren’t going to be doing that much when their is no personal reward for it. At least not in PUGs.

Here’s what they really need to do, play more Team Fortress 2. TF2 is created from the ground up to reward teamplay. The classes are so well refined and tuned that people are often working as a team without doing anything else other than playing their class roles. That’s a damn fine design and it’s something Warhammer PvP could really use. For instance, you don’t get RP (reknown points) for capturing a flag… You don’t get anything extra for defending someone that is being attacked. Etc.

If Mythic wants PvP to have long term legs and that to be the selling point of their game (it very much is for me), they need to tweak the MDPS classes a bit (do not, and I mean, DO NOT, gimp the other classes in the name of balance. Fix the MDPS classes.) to give them some useful way to be in group PvP. And start working on design improvements to get PUGs, the meat of any PvP game truthfully, working together. Don’t force them to, reward them for doing so.

What Would Matt Do: I’ll play more Warhammer for sure. And I’ll eagerly await the first class balance update for PvP. Here’s hoping the balance they have now isn’t a fluke, but by design…because otherwise they are just going to pooch it when they start trying to fix things.