f13.net

linky (http://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=109321363&brd=22997&replies=2)


17 pages should be a fun read.

For posterity:


http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14972.msg529958#msg529958

10 things? Shit, why not, in my deepest of hearts, I still want to play the game:


NOT ENOUGH, REWARD EVERYBODY.


Nothing better than having to balance to fix all of the balance changes. Buffs and nerfs are one of the only things in any game I think should be taken really, really, really slowly.


Then why is there nothing about killing the grind in the 10 things that are supposed to entice me? Or anyone for that matter? (Or itemization/loot drops for that matter, other than that weak gold bag shit).

I almost cracked up when I read the "one additional gold bag for keep takes"

I mean , if that doesn't show just how out of touch they are with how bad open rvr is I dont know what else does

Nothing about what really matters. /sigh

The sheer amount of virtual ass kissing that is going on in that thread is beyond anything I have ever seen

No wonder it's the one place Mark keeps going to ,

Oh, now that's grand.

On a no scenario server, he had this gem to say, page 4 of that thread.


So his point was that a no scenario server WASN'T needed? Really now? So he kept insisting on that retarded idea every single time (and still does) because he honestly believes it isn't needed?  :oh_i_see:

Why? Why does he still think this a good idea?

Why are they altering class balance at warp speed and altering RvR incentive at a snails pace?!?

Clownshoes.

I'm quite impressed with 17 pages of class changes, they are quite needed, and I do think they aimed their efforts in the right direction here.  I'd venture to say more people are frustrated by that than anything else, so these changes actually impress me.  This is a very good start.  This is the stuff I would have expected to take a while to happen, judging by my experience with other MMOs, so to see it so quickly is refreshing

Alot of the unmentioned stuff isn't hard to fix.  1 extra bag for open RvR is a joke, Keep Takes dropping 5 gold bags, 10 purple bags and 20 blue bags or so might be more interesting, as it is the only way you can hope to get any keep loot is to repeatedly sneak in with a tiny group of guildies off hours and ninja cap a keep with 4-5 people.  Which plenty of people do, I'd say more keeps switch hands at 2-5am than any other time of day, usually by small guild groups farming loot.  But making mobs drop more loot isn't hard.

XP, well, again, not hard to fix.  Triple quest XP across the board, and implement some sort of diminishing returns on XP loss for grouping so that you don't get hammered on your XP/RP gain so badly by being grouped, make that apply to both PvE and RvR.  2-man groups could maybe get 66% each, 3-mans get 50% each, 4-mans get 40% each, and so on, some sort of scale that makes it worthwhile to group up and play together, nothing like being in a warband in Open RvR and getting 100xp per kill when you need a half million to level, just because you're splitting the reward 24 ways.  That's unnecessary.

RvR incentives are very important, but they are also relatively easy (in the short term - they might need to actually create new items and rewards in order for a "real" fix) to fix, it's mostly a matter of numbers.  If everyone got good XP and good loot from Open RVR they would do it, and to make that happen all they need to do is twiddle a few numbers, I would think.

I agree that 1 gold bag per keep take is a joke, though.  Nothing is going to be imbalanced by offering a shed load of bags so that everyone walks away with something (not vendor trash), and at least 5 people walk away with something good they will wear.  Take all of the people around the keep, count them (they already have, of course - the participation table is there), then spawn 10% gold bags, 20% purple bags, 30% blue bags and 40% green bags according to that number of participating people, and I can't see how that would imbalance the game at all and everyone would probably be happy.

Do the same for overland PQs, but shift the quality level down a notch - 20% purple, 30% blue, 50% green, or something, so that gold bags only drop from open RvR (and maybe dungeons).

Because some people think that it is scenarios that detract from the number of people who play RvR, so if they took away scenarios then things would be fixed.

Of course this ignores the reasons why people play scenarios, the way WAR is structured, why people don't currently do RvR en masse and even basic common sense.

Pending further patch notes, the thing I see time and time again from Mythic is that they have no idea at all about why their players behave in certain ways. None at all. The designers appear to have it in their heads that players should be behaving in a certain way, then when they aren't, get all confused and try throwing a meagre extra bone onto their system of choice as if that will fix it. An extra gold bag for keeps? Really? No freaking idea at all.

Also, it is nice to see that I wasn't the only one finding morale powers difficult to activate (especially when you only have a second for it to go off before you are in big trouble) and that it looks like a player can bind to multiple locations at once for quick travel (probably once every 60 minutes, but it is a start).

As for class balance there is obviously a recognition that players are playing differently to how the classes were designed to work... but I'll wait until I see the patch notes before changing my mind that Mythic has an understanding of the issues at play.

I have this deja-vu feeling with the way they're hyping the patch. "We will have a new patch soon!" --> "Patch notes, 17 pages of them, up soon!" --> "Top 10 patch notes!". I've never seen a patch with so much developer hype around it, let's hope it does not dissapoint. I also find it a bit worrying that their first 10 highlights of the patch doesn't include any ORvR incentives other than the 1 extra gold bag. I hope there's more in the other 16 pages.

I was disappointed that Mythic decided not to reward every single person in the Witching Night PQ with a mask/item/ANYTHING from the PQ chest.  No chance they would go for blanket keep/fort rewards.  Fun be damned.

Tick tock tick tock.  News of  people fleeing back to WoW (http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/05/want-to-leave-wow-for-conan-or-warhammer-good-luck/) may give us an 84 page patch-note to the 17 page patch-notes.  One can only hope.

100% agree an extra gold bag isn't enough...
I hope its merely to appease people until REAL RVR reward changes can be made for 1.1 or earlier.

I am pondering resubbing atm to check out these patches tomorrow and so I can transfer my character off of Ulthuan.

Hey, that's great!


That's, uh, less great.  Reduction of snares and EM/Rift are great news for my melees, but vague and mysterious possible nerfs hanging overhead of every class are... less good news.  Especially given how confused Mythic seems about their mechanics.  I'm worried that I'm going to log in and find some "adjusted" ability that completely kills one of my favorite characters (*frets about Ironbreakers*).

As a related note, the addition of a test server is interesting, but does it come up before or after this "seventeen page list of changes to every class" patch goes live?

protip: this is how they get you to continue paying.

Not a bad idea. I'm playing a 33 shaman, grouping with my friends (sorc, BO) and we're group-grinding PQs with all melee mobs doing AoE pulls, around a banner with 9% exp bonus, while on a 20% exp bonus transfer-server and I'm rested and I still think the exp is going a little slow and could be a bit faster. Boggling just how bad the grind gets.

I'm excited about the class balancing and such, but the 1 gold bag is a slap in the face. Everyone I talked to that read it said the same thing "Wow one extra bag? Woop de fuckin do!"

We'll see how it pans out, but 17 pages SOUNDS good right now, I'll probably be saying something different when this patch hits the servers, though.

 I  like that they are putting rally masters in the war camps, can't for the life of me figure out why they insisted on making RVR hard to get to.

I find the scope of #10 rather frightening.  No way they can have adequately designed and tested such sweeping changes.  Rift and magnet needed emergency maintenance, sure.  But every single class with multiple tweaks?  Yowza.  Unless they weren't well tested to begin then I guess who the fuck cares?  How the fuck did rift/magnet get in at late Beta anyway?  Bleh.  Bunch of frigging tail chasing.

Protip: this is how they get me to quit playing.

If I ever wanted to play again, I don't want to be stuck on some dead end server because Mythic fucked up, so I will pay $15 to make sure it doesn't happen and so that I can stay with my guild...aaaaand if 1.05 rolls out like they say I will get to test the balance patch, which was my main complaint with the game in the first place.

Besides its not like I said I'm going to buy a 6 month subscription.

This was almost the exact same phrase that came out of my mouth... every single class?? I can understand the Squig Herder buffs, that class was a JOKE in beta and we reported it time and time again but they put band aids on it for release. BW crit mechanic is out of control, WE proc rates for kisses are just insane... Rift/Magnet was just stupid. Being able to kite people inside of a keep with this ability considering they hyped up all this collision detection is beyond me.

So, what have we got, a net loss of about 10 servers, a 1.0.5 patch that looks like it might have been the 1.1 patch but the ship is sinking so fast they had to make some sweeping changes now, and btw not to be a hypocrit I did get on last nite I did get 35 on my Warrior Priest on Ostermark and you know how many people I saw in Praag or Thunder Valley or any other T4 RvR area? About 4 people...

Yes, 4. A couple High Elves running around questing, one dwarf, and one baddie that ran when he saw me (probably exploring). Wow...

I really liked that article about folks heading back to WoW, and it's so true. I already split my time to get ready for WotLK and I am sure once it hits we see those source servers merged and we see more transfer.

Edit: I would really like to see a statistic of players that put DAOC on hold to try WAR and are already back on DAOC, that's where I would expect to see the mass of folks that have swapped back. Sure folks will come over from other games to try out the new shiny, but if you touted a game as RvR heavy and folks are just leaving to go back to DAOC's RvR you got problems.

I wish Mythic the best (even though I wanted them to die in a fire with old patch notes in DAOC), but changes to every class, server mergers under the guise of free transfers within 6 weeks is writing on the wall for this game and far earlier then I expected.

Lol at Engineers

From MarkJacobs

"Okay, but just because it's you.  I hope the notes will go up early tomorrow and then we begin testing on it as well on PTS. Once the PTS is up and running players will begin to be able to play there and help test the patch. As to one tidbit per class, sorry but I have to turn that request down. However, here is a sample from one of the most talked about abilities on the VN:

Electromagnet: The cost has been reduced significantly. The cooldown has been increased. The build time has been increased. The ability can no longer be cast on the move. The pull-in maximum number of targets has been decreased and can now be defended against."

Prior to Jacobs posting this up, I was reading a thread were people were convinced that there were going to be "no nerfs" in WAR's career balancing - that everything could be fixed by buffing classes to a "balanced point".

Those poor dumb bastards.

From what I understand, the patch will be put on the new PTR first, to be tested there by the players before it is sent to the live servers. How well the patch does depend on whether people will actually join the server to test. We will be able to make character copies to the Test server so it should hopefully be done well enough. Time will tell though.

They've already broken the first rule: Having some classes able to generate dps high enough to kill someone in a heartbeat.  This is the first in a long line of class nerfs.  Those of you playing overpowered classes, get ready to suck. 

are there any classes besides BW/Sorc and WE/WH that are capable to do that?

The marauder, at least up to t2, sure as hell can't.

There are a few things in PvP that IMO needed to be adjusted.  One was the electromagnet BS and pulling people through walls needs fixing.  IMO what he posted addresses both problems and I love the fixes proposed.  There are definitely Eng on my server that abuse this ability at every chance.  Next up is  BW's damage needs a nerf, especially the dots.  If they dont nerf BW damage then other classes including sorc need to be brought up to par.  Also AE snares need to be fixed cause an entire team stuck in a AE snare for 10 seconds is retarded in PvP, especially on the class thats far outdamaging all others.  Third is knockbacks, I fully expect some rework here either longer cooldown or capped # of players it affects as well.  Something is wrong when an IB can knockback and entire team.  Aside from these few items I dont have other issues and the only reason I have issues with these is because of the amount of abuse they get.  In fact I know a number of people who rolled these classes after they found out about how powerful these abilities are.  

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/games/warhammer%20online/tick_boom.png)

Good picture.

The Enchanted Arrow tactic in the Scout line for SWs used to allow the Festering Arrow to also bypass all resistances. Pop Vengeance, Steady Aim, shoot your Throat Shot and then Festering Arrow and almost 1 shot Shamans... used to do it in Praag on Beta, was brutal. I just shook my head and thought, what a joke.

You can still almost replicate it, but they changed the Enchanted Arrow tactic a bit so it doesnt effect Festering. However, with Corporeal debuffs from BWs, if you /assist a BW you can bring down anything you want, even if they are healed. Considering both the BW and the SW have roots, and the SW has a knockback = a good SW is very hard to take down with non stealthy character, period.

Things like this make me wonder wtf where they thinking in their conceptual designs...

I don't know when you think they changed Festering Arrow + Enchanted arrow to not go through armor, but as of the last time I played, it still did - this is a couple weeks ago. That shot was in fact done with Festering arrow.

I've capped out at around 4k on a hit with my level 2 morale popped. It's just silly.

Either way, doesn't matter, had my fun, game is in the arms of death.

This overview is in the right direction, And for those that missed this, its going to the test server. I look forward to the patch notes, and the QQ'ing that will come.

Yeah I didn't verify (my bust), I thought they changed it because we turned in a lot of damage logs parsed out showing HUGE hits with Festering in Beta, oh well. I do remember them saying they were looking into it, but that was it.

SW in beta with the massive amounts of pathing issues was like shooting fish in a barrel, talk about boring as shit. I would watch tv and solo farm PQs all day, never getting touched because of the bad pathing. Shoot mob, it faces you, turns around, runs sideways, starts to head your direction, second shot, turns around, goes back to spawn point still damaged, third shot it realizes you are in THAT direction and starts towards you, fourth shot, it's dead.

You could almost do it with just auto shot, but that would be dreadfully boring.

I should have never played live because I do feel bad ditching my guildies should I quit cold turkey within the next week due to the patch sucking huge amounts of donkey balls.

Oh its gonna be funny as hell to watch some of these high power classes bitch when other classes get caught up or they get nerfed.  Since I play a class thats going to be on the major improvment list Im sure I will enjoy the new things I will be able to do I cant today :)  Its payback time bitches!

*gets popcorn*

nah BW is perfectly balanced with top RR kills in every server. L2P Sorc.

As long as my WH stops feeling inferior to WE I'll be happy with this patch.

I really think they're trying hard, and trying to be responsive. Lots of credit for that. But I also agree that they don't really seem to understand why players are doing what they're doing and what they're not doing, and how that connects to player enthusiasm and retention. This is not unique: developers often don't understand player culture and behavior very well, for reasons that continue to both fascinate and puzzle me.

The tone in this update note, however, certainly doesn't synchronize very well with the MJ who has been out there saying, "We have 800k subscribers, we're doing better than we expected, everything is rosy and happy, everything is on schedule and as planned."

The Rally Master thing does not really make a whole lot of sense to me.  Its a case of missing the forest for the trees.  A FP in each PvE hub is what they need.  So that I can be out doing my PvE thing and then quickly get to the oRvR when it happens.  PvE is boring for the most part, but frankly its mindless entertainment like playing bejeweled so I do it when I don't really want to work and some of the quests provide an interesting framework for the mindlessness.  When I am at the beginning or end of a tier, I rarely RvR because the opportunity cost of the travel is so relatively high.  The rally master in the warcamp just offers the opportunity to put the travel cost at the end of the experience rather than the beginning. 

If they don't want to do the full flight master, they should implement the DAoC horses.  At least then I can AFK for the ride instead of having to pay attention to dodging everything that will knock me off my horse with any hit.  Heck, WoW copied the horse routes with the birds.

And to piggy back off that, they should either do the FP in each PvE hub bit or just change the whole RvR lake setup completely in T4 and make it identical to DAOC RvR with the keeps being hubs to head out into the 'frontier' so to speak and fight. Have a centralized location where people port into it, to help with lag from the surrounding PvE content, and folks form up groups, warbands, whatever, and head out to fight. They will however have to adjust their keeps and forts, make more towers or something.

At this point, I am about ready to go back to DAOC which I swore I never would just to have the old RvR experience when they release Origins (which will be never at the rate they are going).

Well, hi I am new here.  Been reading for a while.  

You know at first I thought this was great news, and it still might be, I am watching.  However, for vast career changes is 17 pages really that much?  There is what 22 careers right now?  Less than 1 page per career, not including misc changes etc.  At a time when this game is reaching for a life line I feel that balancing C&C might have been a bit in the wrong direction.  If I have a guy dying from some terminal disease, I think ok lets try and fix him over time.  If that same guy is also spurting blood from a central artery, I would expect to see that gusher stopped first.  ORvR is gushing life from WAR, class balance could have waited.  I saw a post from MJ talking about this and he stated that fixing class balance was more important to do first.  I disagree, I feel that the heart and soul of an RvR/PvP game should be those mechanics and from there balance the careers in line with the desired outcomes of those RvR experiences.  I think it will get fixed in the end, but to point out the obvious - there is a 500lb gorilla about to come back with his buddies to give you the beat down and you respond with class balance/nerf?  Are you serious?  

As for the "one additional gold bag"  that line might just go down in MMO infamy as the most game killing patch note of all time.

That one additional gold back quote is pretty insulting.
Like, "NO DON'T QUIT, WE'LL PAY YOU 5c MORE AN HOUR!"
Hopefully the other 17 pages are about shit we care about.

I agree with your analogy 100%. I cannot fathom how they went from DAOC to WAR, it's almost like they took a giant leap backwards with their RvR model endgame. They are probably pushing Origins back to make way for 1.1 so folks dont leave WAR in droves to play DAOC again...

I'd prefer if players couldn't get to the ORvR action in 2 minutes and Mythic sees it the same way. Yeah, travel time sucks, but so does trying to do anything in oRvR only to have 50+ people fly there within 2 minutes to nullify any strategy you were attempting to use.

If you want faster and instant RvR, there is always scenarios.

The line about "multiple bind points" seems to be a fairly workable fix, to me.  Set one bind point to the warcamp, and another to whichever PvE hub you're currently working through.  Someone starts raiding the keep or something, you can recall back to the warcamp, and when you're done, you can recall back to the PvE hub, but you've still got the hour cooldown so it's not like suddenly you can just teleport instantly all over the place the way you could with six or seven flight masters in each pairing.

I understand your point Waffel, but you know to be honest, I kind of do want 50 players arriving there, and then I want 50 my side and then I want a WAR.  If that is not how it goes down most of the time its a server pop balance issue.  Players are very defensive if they feel they just got cock blocked by the enemy and will mobilize on both sides as you described.  I thought that was the whole point of ORvR, not stealth ninja castle sieges?

So while I agree - instant swarm of death is wrong - I also feel making a sensible travel time to RvR before its over is critical.  

Things I’m hoping will be addressed very soon:

The ORVR

The one extra gold bag really is clueless.  I agree with Ashmodai’s (and others) post about the extra bags; lots of high level bags, everyone should get something.   Also, no more gold bags without a set piece inside.  Up the gold in the bags as well, a T3 purple bag with 9 silver in it is a slap in the face, especially considering I can turn in my scenario quests every 10 minutes for 1g. 

Gold & Crafting

Once there’s more gold in the bags, give me something to buy!  Introduce new faster mounts at levels 30 & 40.  Dyes are so underutilized at the moment.  Make them more desirable.  Remove dye vendors, give crafters more ways to craft them, and make players buy them from other players.  If not that, maybe one of the elite rewards for say each chapters PQ should be the permanent ability to buy a new color dye.  Why am I a TM?  None of the good gear (T3ish) has slots.  Every piece of gear should have a slot and better gear should have more slots.   Also, I’m not an Apoth but I have a full bag of potions.  Why do potions drop like candy?  Make people buy them from other players.

XP

Either make ORVR reasonable for leveling and/or ramp up the PvE XP.  Bring back killing sprees, ramp up quest XP and get people into T4.  Killing mobs for 200-300 XP with 3k quest turn ins when you need a half million is demoralizing.   It shouldn’t feel like a waste of a night for me to want to go out ORVRing or to Mt. Gunbad.

Character Attachment

Quick, name a piece of your gear without looking at your character sheet.  I can’t do it.  I want to feel attached to my new cool sword or staff or robe or whatever.  Right now it’s just all another upgrade, there’s nothing cool or distinguishing about any of the items while leveling up.  Honestly this is more of a problem for some classes than others.   I find a lot cooler stuff for my WH alt than I do for my AM.  If people don’t feel attached to their characters their interest in logging in fades too quickly.

Balance Changes

Well, I’d prefer these happen over time than sweeping changes, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

I don't know that its necessarily a lack of oRvR that is a problem, but rather a general lack of variety in the readily accessible options.  I see War as a three legged stool of PvE, oRvR and Scenarios.

Look at PvE, its always the same and theres no real challenge to it.  Nearly every fight is exactly the same with some dude running in and beating on you, there are a couple of ranged mobs here and there and the stunningly rare linked mob, but other than that is a bunch of homicidal maniacs running right to their deaths surrounded by their completely apathetic friends.  No real variety there.  PvE is frankly a huge cluster at the moment, fixing it would probably take more time than it is really worth and it kinda "works".

Scenarios offer the only real avenue for variety in the gameplay experience because it guarantees the human element.  Yeah, Tor Anroc is mostly boring, but you run across the rare game that one or the other group tries and succeeds with something outside the normal.  There was one excellent game where the destruction team decided to run the whole time with the bauble.  That completely changed the whole game up and was entertaining. Some of the maps actively work to hamper something happening - here's looking at you Black Fire - but even bad maps offer something to do and a quick Skinner jolt with the end reward.  Scenarios are generally fine, though there may be too many options and the rewards may be too good, but nerfing rewards is a fools bargain.

oRvR lacks variety simply because it rarely ever happens at all.  And even then if it does happen, up through T3 most of the lakes are setup for mindless slug matches between zergs because they are generally wide open, mildly rugged areas offering little in the way of close flanking opportunities which are necessary with the general speed of most RvR combat. The only interesting RvR lake I have seen is T1 in the empire.  New Emskrank offers a variety of options and avenues with its village format.  Plus, it makes sense to fight over a village.  The T2 Elf area might offer similar fights in the Shadowlands, but the never ending darkness makes finding your way around the random Armageddon asteroid inspired geography a pain.  Additionally, as has been stated before, there are too many oRvR areas.  On a given evening, there may actually be enough people to support healthy oRvR, yet they can be spread over 6 different widely dispersed areas in T2 and 3.  They need to think of a method to address this problem as well.  Poor map design is probably too much to handle at this point.  But they need to address the travel and the funneling issues.  Travel should be the most solveable with the already in place scenario zoning mechanic, flight masters or some new process.  Funneling should not be that hard.  They should take a page from Blizzard and add daily quests for oRvR to funnel people into areas.  And then address the incentivization by extending the kill collector mechanic to apply to the daily quests.  Who cares if you are only getting 20-30xp a kill in the warband if you know that at the end of the night you can go to the daily kill collector and get xXP per guy you helped kill?

TLDR:  Variety is lacking.  Encourage variety by easing travel to oRvR and add incentives to oRvR by introducing oRvR daily quests and kill collectors.

So then all RvR will be a mass of congealed zerg just like the witching hour PQ.  No strategy, no planning...................no fun!

They're in complete and utter denial that grind is a problem.

Notes are going up here: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109335186/p1/?59

Are you shitting me?

Odd, it looks like they want people dead more.  Most DoTs are normalized up.  And HoTs are normalized down.  Non-morale CC grants a 5 second immunity.  Engineers and Magus have an odd giveth and taketh situation with increased damage and corresponding increase in costs.  As a DoT spec'd bright wizard, I get strangely more powerful.  A minor nerf to the detonate explosion, but all of the resultant dots are stronger.

I do see an annoying continued focus on single groups when most PvP happens in multigroup warbands with the noted about group buffs and things like Guard looking to still be only usable in your group.  They bailed on this idea in WoW for a reason.

In all, I don't see a whole lot to be really upset about, maybe the healing reductions, but at the same time there is not much here really addressing the core problems of the game.  This should have been handled after game mechanics.

They...buffed damage for almost all classes AND nerfed healing.


:awesome_for_real: :uhrr: :awesome_for_real:


Also, I weep for the ironbreakers. Seriously. You couldn't kill Black Orcs before, now there's no way in hell you'll ever have a chance to kill one.

That's right I'm still uber.. even though I'm not DoT specced.  lol

So... if you give honest feedback on how shitty our patch notes are, we'll stop posting them. :oh_i_see:

Yeah, they went and kicked both my runepriest and white lion in the nuts.

Oh hey, lets nerf the spells the healers use to keep others up, but not the ones that make the runepriest himself invulnerable most of the time.  Great plan there.

Oh, and lets increase the power of the already stupid as rock lions and lower the damage on the elf... but hey, at least they finally got a non-lion based snare... at the cost of one of the other debuffs I actually liked for pve.

*sigh*

Seriously, what the fuck Mythic?  Get your guys to stop playing WotLK so they actually know what's wrong with this game, please.

Changes to DoK are horrible and virtually useless.  I dont need flimsy DPS increases, I need major DPS increases or survivability of some kind.  Also didnt get any healing improvments at all so I can still be focused fired and die in 1 second as my useless HOT's do nothing.  Not impressed at all by what I see. 

Every Shadow Warrior ability got buffed?

alt+f

"experience"

no results

I'm done.

You know these aren't live right?

BUFF BRIGHT WIZARD FTW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :uhrr: :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear: :pedobear:

Why does that matter?

Oh ok.. you just bitch alot.. I get it. 

No, seriously, what does your post mean? These aren't live yet?

Explain that.

The pants on head retardedness of that change is so great it motivated me to register and post a huge WTF?!?  :uhrr:

If that change makes its way to live servers it will by far be the worst decision yet in a long long list of terrible pre and post launch decisions by Mythic imo.

I play a healer in T4 and can't possilby understand how any of their designers could think that is a good idea.  Healing struggles to keep ahead of dps even if your stacking willpower and sacrificing survivability.  The dps increase in each tier outpaces the health increase leading to noticeable decreases in time to kill at each step.  Then add in all the healing reduction debuffs that almost half the careers in the game get naturally or can spec for by late T3 or T4.  Mix in terrible debuff indentifaction and pathetic limited debuff removal that doesn't prioritize healing debuffs.  This is the recipe for mediocre endgame healing that requires playing like robot jesus or sheer luck to keep people alive.

More than half the healing spells in the game are hots or have hot components and they want to nerf the willpower coeficient for hots?   :ye_gods:

This is enough to make me reroll dps/tank or just push me over the fence and cancel my sub.

I know these are initial patch notes but it has put me 1 step closer to cancelling as well.  I cant believe they are padding BW's and nerfing healing, wtf.  I didnt plan to play WOTLK and these notes were one thing I was holding onto in staying with this game but Im really not impressed at all.  The only way I could stay with this game is to not continue playing #1 not as a DoK, but #2 not as a healer in general. 

I can't guard outside my group as a tank anymore?  WTF?  Was it too abusive to guard the only damn healer in the warband, even though they're in that other group?

Guess that answers that.  You really are expected to grind PvE to get your PvP armor.

So.... all this talk from Mark before release about wanting meaningful PvP with strategy and not dying within 3 seconds of being engaged in combat....


...just went right out the window, landed in the middle of the Interstate and was flattened by an assload of 18-wheelers.


Next thing you know, they'll implement resilience and we'll have to grind out Public Quests to get gear we can PvP in.

It means just wait and have unyielding faith in Mythic! Since these are not yet live, Mythic is going to fix ALL the problems that people would have expected them to logically address, just like they fixed everything when going from the beta to release!

I am extremely disappointed with the patch notes, completely ignoring any balanced changes.  I think they fixed two bugs total.  Each class can list at least two skills or tactics that down work right.  Mythic just happily ignores them.

This is why waiting a long time and trying to get everything at once is bad, you miss stuff and then the next patch doesn't come for another month.  The end result is 2-6 months before a skill is fixed.

Basic skills not doing anything is one of those things that stacks up the annoyance over time.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/games/warhammer%20online/tick_boom.png)
[/quote]

Hello 1999 gfx! Good lord that is ugly.

Hello 1999 gfx! Good lord that is ugly.


[/quote]

r0flcopters.

get a job and a new computer n00b . hahah :drillf:

My take, in short, is that I want testing before I am convinced these are as bad as they seem.

People are screaming about notes and have no hard data to look at.

I think the screaming is silly, both here and over there.

I remember all the screaming bloody murder from mids prior to the patch that ended up boosting mids significantly, something that was not obvious on paper.  As a result I have more faith in Mythic than the players, and I don't have much faith in Mythic.

As to the comment about this going to the test server ... if you have any experience with DAoC, once on test you can pretty much count on it going to production.  But the bigger issue, I think, is people feeling like Mythic is going in the wrong direction with these changes.  I adressed thata bove, but if they are going in the wrong direction what does it matter that it's going on test first?

Excuse me?

Also, about the notes: It's not what's in the notes - it's plainly obvious Mythic could never balance anything, ever. Fine. It's what is not in the notes that's bothering me.

Forest, meet trees. Palm, meet forehead.

Getting insta-gibbed or close to it is already common in T3 and especially T4, and healers are often powerless to stop it if the person has a healing debuff on them.

Do you waste a gcd on a cleanse that has a 50% or lower chance to remove the healing debuff and have them die before you can get off a heal to follow the cleanse, or do you try to heal through the debuff with hots that tick for 100-200 every three seconds and 3 sec heals that hit for 400-500 and crit for 600-750?

Answer: doesn't matter either way they will likely die barring some miracle :why_so_serious:

This patch if it remains as is will only make this situation worse.  :uhrr:

Across the board damage increase, across the board healing decrease.

Dear mythic: WHAT THE HOLY FUCKING SHIT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING AT ALL?

I don't really think the notes are that bad other than the unexplainable hot nerf, it makes no sense when paired with the general buff in damage. 

The real issue is that they appear to be ignoring the much larger much more important problems.  Like how to get the players to make use of all of these fancy rejiggered spells and abilities in pursuit of the core game idea, beating the other guy down and taking his stuff in the world, ie War Everywhere.  None of these address the lack of War everywhere. 

Nothing to address shitty experience gain from quests and oRVR in the patch.

Getting really hard to care about logging in. Maybe the move to REM for Bat Country will help.

It very clearly isn't a balance patch.  It is more of a fix crap to make it consistent patch.  A vast majority of the changes are simply making sure skills of the same type (ie instants and dots) get the same benefit from stats.  They only addressed what they felt were extreme balance issues.

The game gave me REM.  REM sleep.  

It's 2008 but the patch notes read like Mythic circa 2002.  I am really depressed by the lack of thought going into WAR.  This is especially sad when you consider that I used to be the resident f13 DAoC fanboi.

Funny, because it reads to me like nothing BUT a balance patch. There were buffs and nerfs across the board.

While the game needs balance, these people are obviously ill-equipped to balance such a game.

So the cock blocking is in full effect now?

edit: this is really fucking stupid

On Ironclaw it is not unusual to have scenarios where 7 of the Order players are Bright Wizards.  In fact it is very unusal to have less than 4 BWs.  Buffing BWs is the stupidest thing I have ever seen in patch notes... in any game.

Link (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109335186/p10)

Love how he thinks there's an "if".  :awesome_for_real:

Very uninspiring but at least my morale ability should now work when I press it  :oh_i_see:

It my understanding that for an oRvR-only person, the only ward you need is the first one.  And you can get that from the Baston or the keep lords.  The rest of the wards are for the various PvE raids.  So as long as keep lords drop enough items with wards its not a big deal.

Seems like everyone's been complaining about either the grind and poor rewards or bad client performance on a lot of machines.  But they throw out a sweeping class balance patch?  Whatever sense of urgency they have to fix things it seems a little misplaced.

That's it? I mean? seriously? that's it? Nothing wrong with aura not stacking with other buffs?
Or the shitty twist mechanic that doesn't even add much. I counted 1 nerf. and 1 buff.

As has been pointed out, he said "if". Does anyone think this will not adversely effect healers? There should have been big red flashy letters at the top of the patch notes saying healers will be compensated once the change in damage numbers are totally understood (never mind the fact mythic should understand how this changes dps before they change it. Its their algorithms).  Going from how they handled daoc, very little will be changed before it hits live. 


Furthermore, someone actually had to sit down, think about healing for a minute, and say, "You know, these hots are just too damn powerful." Someone made the conscious decision to actively nerf healing, and then convinced everyone else to sign off on it.

  :ye_gods: seems to be the most concise way to express the patch notes.

cockblocked at work for several more hours... anyone mind posting the WH info  :heart:

Sure:

Witch Hunter

• All Witch Hunters have undergone significant changes and will need to reallocate their career mastery points as a result. Be sure to speak to your trainer right away to regain your abilities!

• Repel Blasphemy: This self-buff is now right click removable.

• Blessed Bullets of Cleansings: The damage of this ability has increased and the amount of Action Points stolen
has been increased. This ability is now available at rank 35.

• Blessed Bullets of Confession: The damage of this ability has increased, and this ability is now available at rank 9.

• Blessed Bullets of Purity: The damage of this ability has increased, and this ability is now available at rank 4.

• All Bullets now persist through the Witch Hunter's death. This means that the Witch Hunter will not have to recast a Bullet after respawning or being resurrected.

• Sanctified Bullets: This tactic has been adjusted so that Blessed Bullets of Purity will now heal for 50% of the damage they cause.

• Fervor: Fixed a bug in which this ability was receiving double stat contribution on the direct damage portion of the ability.

• Sweeping Strikes: This tactic will now correctly affect two other targets.

• Emperor’s Commendation: This ability now triggers off of from-stealth openers.

• Fervor: The amount that stats contribute to the damage of this ability has been increased to make it consistent with other damage over time abilities.

• Burn, Heretic!: The amount that stats contribute to the damage of this ability has been increased to make it consistent with other damage over time abilities.

• Burn Away Lies: The amount that stats contribute to the damage of this ability has been increased to make it consistent with other damage over time abilities.

• Seal of Destruction: The Witch Hunter’s attacks will now ignore 50% of his or her target’s armor.

Like pet pathing they probably just don't know how to fix it just yet.

I am curious how those 6 patch notes warrant significant change enough for a free respec, considering only one of the mentioned abilities is even a mastery ability. Clearly we're due some more information!

I picked a Witch Hunter because it's generally thought to be weaker than it's mirror "class", and it's on under populated side, Order.  Reading that, I still got bloody nerfed. 

Only 50% ignore armour on seal of destruction instead of 100%, Sanctified Bullets I was considering switching to, the change is making it to be what wardb already says the skill does, so I'm guessing there's a bug making it more effective that's going to be fixed.  I use Fervor all the time, fixing a double stat bonus to be single, while buffing the damage, sounds like it might be a minor nerf.  I'll have to try it and see, oh, I'll probably have to wait, someone surprise me by saying there's no PTS planned for Europe.

Also why balance all hot and dots the same, what's the point of planning a different class at all?  You might as well name them dot1, dot2, dot3, oh shit I got a WH dot3 on me, no wait, that's exactly the same as a BW dot3.

Ac2, remember that?  That was the most balanced game ever.  Seriously fuck balance, who starts a thread about a game they are considering buying and says, "Hey guys, which class is really well balanced?  I really want to check that one out".

The bright wizard changes are huge. A cooldown on that AOE they spammed in order to max out combustion, and lowering it to only build 10 combustion per, instead of 20, is massive.

Order is going to fucking fold overnight when this patch hits. Condolences, those who still play on Order.

it's not exactly hard to build combustion, even without that spell

Yep... It will just stop them from running up to a fight and instantly being at max damage potential... Now it will just take them about a minute instead of 7.5 seconds to get 100 combustion.  With the changes to combustion decay it seems like it will be easier to keep it at 100 now too.

I think it is a good change though, but we'll see how it plays out, with the dot changes BW may put out more damage now than they did before.

I r newb.  Clicked quote instead of modify for failure.  :grin:

Remember, "additional" means that a gold bag will need to drop in order for there to be another gold bag added.

So for the roughly 4 out of 10 times that no fucking gold bag drops when taking a keep or fortress, this change won't do shit. I'm also glad Bright Wizards needed more fucking DoT damage.

Instead of now only needing the tanks to have 5 wards, now EVERYONE needs 5 wards.

I may have to go home and piss on my copy of Mark of Chaos, because it has both the words "Warhammer" and "Mark" on it.

In order to buff the healers, first we must nerf the healers. It is the only way.  :why_so_serious:

Lantyssa saw this too.

What it does, of course, is suddenly make everyone who isn't wearing the full armour set sub-optimal in a team in this situation (well, perhaps not healers, but then they just got nerfed, didn't they?  :awesome_for_real:). Plus given that the armour sets escalate several times, so you'd have to go after a number of different sets to do the various different high level areas...

Remember kids: WAR is all about the RvR.

You mean we'll just spam fire breath and get the same thing.  There's not even much of a big deal about that now that our 100 combust doesn't die as fast.

Oh and all our dots boosted.

BW Root was overpowered, made a lot of situations silly. No root should last that long, ever.

Yeah, the Witch Hunter changes seem clownshoes. Making Seal of Destruction only ignore 50% of armor is shit, "fixing" a double stat bonus or something sounds like a very subtle nerf. They need to give WH some kind of big direct damage ability that doesn't drain all my goddamn action points, or buff our armor, or stop giving us fucking pistols with WILLPOWER on it. Or they could make stealth actually worth a shit but that won't happen.

But hey, at least they fixed roots.

Just because I thought it was funny, according to a comment below the article (http://www.killtenrats.com/2008/11/03/the-amount-in-question/) the only way the rewards for keeps can be distributed as they are is if they are bugged and reversed; i.e. the person who contributes the least gets the highest contribution score. So then: gold bags for the person who is AFK.

Given the opaque contribution rules, it could very well be true.

I'm sorry am I the only one who is already wearing 100% PQ gear as it is simply better than anything else available?

haven't had a talisman slot since about level 15. 

what the FUCK? God damnit, I have been representing the "it's not so bad" crowd for weeks, particularly regarding the armor sets shitty implementation of gating.

When talking to friends:

"Only tanks are going to need them"

"C'mon guys, I heard if you only have 1 piece it counts double, plus you can buy them!  :awesome_for_real:"

"Hey, Bastion Stair/Warp/etc. is pretty easy/fast!"

"Hey, Conqueror boots can drop in T4 RvR!  :awesome_for_real: Now you can get TWO pieces easily! That should be totally fine for anyone who isn't a tank!"


Thank you Mythic for making me look like a fucking idiot.

Are you shitting me? They broke hovercast. :crying_panda:

Healer nerfs are boggling. The fact that they need to test the patch before noticing the nerfs is even more boggling.

Its like nerfing a car down to three wheels and having testers drive it around the parking lot for awhile just to see what happens.

Ok, so:

50% increase on damage received in high-level encounters.
50% decrease on damage dealt in high-level encounters.

GameDesigner1: "But won't good players bypass our tedious cockblock still make it past the high end encounters?"
GameDesigner2: "You're right!  Lets nerf healers, just to make sure."

 :uhrr:

As I've said before, I'm rather encouraged by the fact that they seem to be working hard to fix things.  I just think they're making a lot of bad decisions.  I mean, the ward stuff was rather heinous before----but now it's even worse with the damage nerf.

But honestly, I'm a single issue voter here.  Until xp gain is upped dramatically in all phases of the game (especially RvR and Quests) then I don't care that much.

I can't tell if they're "balancing" for RvR or PvE.

I can MAYBE understand if it's balancing for RvR. People will die more, since healers can't heal AS well as before, they can contribute by doing damage. More kills = more XP/more Renown.

But doing it that way is like calling a cab to take you home from the pub you live next door to. Seems like a contrived way of doing something simplistic.

Balancing it for PvE makes more sense. Heroes and Lords will fall faster due to more DPS, but since healers can't keep up, you'll need more of them, so it doesn't become TOO easy.

However, if that's the case, why the hell are they balancing a RvR game for PvE?

The DPS boosts for Zealot and Runepriest look like solo PvE buffs to me, unless they've completely lost their minds and buffed them so hard that they'll be able to DPS on an Engineer/Shadow Warrior level.  I'm not terribly worried about the nerf to HoTs, since they're way overpowered in tier 1 and in later tiers there are other healing spells to lean on.

Ironbreaker nerfs, I have no idea what the hell they're thinking.  Kill grudge generation, make it decay faster, and nerf Guard for all the tanks, but now they can use hammers...?

Squig herder could be good or bad.  Their main nuke got a nerf, but a lot of their situational abilities got buffs.  White lions, similarly, could really, really use the pet DPS boost, but some of it is just wacky (Training persists after death, so you don't have to retrain your lion after you die?  Huh?  Since when did your lion persist after death, trained or not?).  Engineers and Magi with boosted turret/daemon damage sound nice, too.

I cant tell either, mostly seemed PvE related... but who knows with Mythic.

I got half way through 35 last nite, seemed faster but then again I was watching TV at the same time. I saw some fights in Praag finally but Dragonwake was a complete ghost town and Thunder Valley was very quiet as well. I guess if Ostermark can at least have decent fights in one out of the three zones we should be happy right?

This weekend will probably be my last push on WAR for a month or so anyhow.

Given that they didn't buff Scourge, or even bothered to reduce the cast time on that shitty spell, you can rest assured that Zealot dps still sucks gonads.

One question, do people actually wear the sets for RvR?  For Bright Wizards at least, the stats look awful, lots of stats with low numbers.  The entire Sentinel set has 46 wounds.  I have more that on my ch 13 influence staff.  It also has a whopping 36 weapon skill for those times I just feel the need to beat on something with my stick.  The set has a whopping 76 resist to spirit, elemental and corporeal.  Again, more on my level 20+ green crap.  There are some unique stats like dodge, threat reduction, HP regen, and bonus damage.  However they have such low stats, I can't see what they do and really, what does 2 to dodge mean?  Is that 2%?  Well woopty freaking do, now I have a 7% chance to dodge.  Its not like I can find other dodge gear to stack so I can be some sort of ninja wizard.  So, we apparently need crap gear with magical hidden buffs that don't appear anywhere on the tooltips or apparently even on WarDB in order to advance the War?  WTF batman?

This quote captures perfectly my skepticism about the "Oh, we don't need official forums" arguments. It's pretty much exactly what I predicted would happen: that Mythic devs would jump from fansite to fansite looking for the most properly sycophantic community (and dangling before local fan mods the added traffic and ad revenue that might flow from dev presence), and any time they didn't like what they were hearing, they'd be gone. Eventually leaving communication entirely one-way, e.g., that they say whatever they want to say through website announcements and give no indications at all about whether they're really listening or not to any players.

I quite agree. The sad thing is, for as obnoxious as the WHA forums are, its a large, active community posting from the heart, and at times spending far, far too long compiling information than one would consider healthy. In the very same thread you quoted, a VN board member posted a c/p of a sticky in the Chosen WHA forums, a compilation of Chosen problems (source: http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148417). This was entirely news to Mark, who had never seen the list before.

Now I can understand not wanting to post on the WHA forums, but literally never viewing them anymore as a developer? It's irresponsible. I'm sure Mark has also turned off viewing the F13 boards out of disdain, and as a result turned off yet another source of great feedback, regardless if he agrees with the views or wants to be handled with kid gloves.

Its just like the Bush Administration on media for the first 6 years.

Folks,

Some good news as the weekend approaches:

1) We hope to have the PTS up and running this weekend. Right now we are shooting for sometime tomorrow. The Herald will have all the latest information.

2) As promised, our C&C team has combed through this thread (and pertinent links) and here's what they have found in regards to bugs. Unfortunately, there were a number of both unreported bugs and reported bugs that didn't make it up to the C&C team in time for this patch (initially). I am in total agreement with player sentiment that these bugs need to be fixed along with 1.0.5 and as such, the team is already working on doing that today and over the weekend. The current plan is to fix the vast majority of them in time for the patch but some, because of the coding involved or if they are minor bugs (display) will not be fixed for 1.0.5 but will be fixed as soon as practical. The update to the 1.0.5 patch will be updated to reflect these fixes once these changes are incorporated into 1.0.5.

3) We are also going to look at making some additional changes to some of the classes/archetypes. As I've said before, 1.0.5. is not yet up on the patcher and we expect to continue to make more tweaks/adjustments until the patch goes live. Among the changes currently going into 1.0.5 are:

a) BW/Sorcs will have their crit chance lowered for combustion.

b) Sorcs will also see Word of Pain’s debuff changes from a willpower debuff to a resist debuff to match BWs and it will no longer stack Word of Pain and be a single application that deals damage at the end. Stricken Voices will have its cast time removed to match Bright wizard Choking Smoke.

c) For IBs, we are going to make some changes that will allow the IB to get to low grudge more quickly than initially proposed by increasing Oath friend grudge thresholds from 5/3/1 grudge generated to 10/5/3. Also, we are lowering the grudge required (and making a couple other changes) in the following abilities:

Shield Sweep: Cost reduction from 30 Grudge to 25 Grudge.
Oath bound: Cost reduction from 30 Grudge to 15 Grudge.
Avenging The Debt: Increase heal value.
Away With Ye: Reduce cost from 30 Grudge to 25 Grudge. Increase damage. (Also requires cool down from 0s to 10s)
Watch An' Learn: Reduce cost from 30 Grudge to 15 Grudge. (Also requires cool down from 0s to 20s)
Grumble An' Mutter: Increase heal value.

The combination of better contribution from OF and lowering the grudge cost of some abilities should help alleviate some, if not all, of the IB's concern. We will continue, of course, to look at the IB as a whole to determine if additional changes are still necessary.

d) For our healers, we are looking at making the following changes:

Ranged Healers

Long Cast Big heals go from 3s cast to 2.5s cast
Interrupt / setback value on long heals is reduced by 50%

Melee Healers
Divine Strike and Rend soul will now heal for 350% damage dealt instead of 250%

Like the IBs, this is just part of an ongoing process. As I said yesterday, the team will continue to look very carefully at the healers on the PTS and if more changes need to be made, we'll make them.


e) The Chosen seemed to have a higher number of potential (we haven't confirmed them all yet) bugs but in the meantime, we will make the following changes:

Convert Blast Wave, Bane Shield and Quake to magic attacks that use STR instead of INT for bonus damage
Push Aura code fix up that makes twisting easier

f) The Marauders have a similar bug to the Chosen (using INT not STR) so we are making the following change:

Mouth of Tzeentch will use STR instead of INT for bonus damage

g) For the Black Orc the biggest bug appears to losing their place in the combo chain randomly. The team has been trying to duplicate this all day and so far, no luck. If we can duplicate it, it will be fixed.

So, a few things:

1) Let me once again express my thanks to those great people here on the Vault (and elsewhere) who spent time and energy posting helpful (critical, insightful, positive, etc.) messages. You have helped us quite a bit by doing so. The 1.0.5 thread was, at its best, a great example of how developer<->community interaction can work very well at times when you have motivated players and interested developers who are actually paying attention. So again, you have my thanks.

2) The changes here are still part of an ongoing process of evaluation and reevaluation of 1.0.5. Nothing is final and until the PTS is up and running and 1.0.5 goes through the ringer, will it even be close to final. So please, when the PTS goes up let us know what you think through feedback here and in the game.

3) Some of the bugs/changes that I'm listing here will not be fixed/up by tomorrow of course but they will be during the time that the PTS is running and *before* 1.0.5 goes LIVE. We will keep you informed about the changes through the patcher.

4) A number of people have commented that this patch seems more chock full of ranged DPS changes and while the team believes that a lot of the changes we made to the the rDPS group will have a significant positive impact on our tanks and mDPS folks, they will turn their attention to those careers again after the 1.0.5 version. Again, please keep in mind that bugs for the mDPS/Tanks will be fixed for this version as well.

Again, my thanks to the many members of the WAR community for their efforts in regards to our game.

Mark

alt+f

"experience"

Phrase not found.

lol.  I was excited when I heard the news that a big balance patch was incoming, too, and when I saw it, er, yeah.  Not sure what the rules for profanity on this board are, so I guess I will just say "fail".

I'm not usually one to make sensationalist remarks like "do they even play their own game?" .. but really, do they?  damage buffs, healer nerfs, lol and I thought AoC devs were clueless!

The scariest thing is that, more and more, this is starting to sound like exactly what HRose was bitching about earlier.

Yup, having no official forums is terribly amateur.  Can't think of any games that have tried it and had it work out well, either.  Vanguard tried this same approach and well.. haha, don't think I need to expound on that one.

And using the VN boards as semi-official forums is hysterical, too.  Internet message boards I visited in 1999 had better functionality and usability than they do there, I actually broke down after a few posts and asked how to properly quote people on those forums as my quotes came out as a block of .. unquoted text .. and I had seen others quote properly, and I was told by a moderator that being able to quote without your post looking like a heap of shit was an extra feature that you had to pay a subscription for.  Words failed me at that point.

To be fair to Mark, it would be impossible for him to track every single list for every single class. He should have people underneath him doing it. They really should be posting separately for each class (or even each pairing) about what they are trying to do.

The issue is not only no official forums, it is Jacobs being both CEO of Mythic and official forum PR person for WAR. He's top level view, whereas class design is the grit of gameplay and needs a different focus.

I understand your point of view, but the issue here is aside from Mark, who else is talking to the community?
I mean shouldn't he really ask questions to his team about the short Chosen list of issues "Are they really OK? I mean, only 3 issues? Seriously?"
If he still can't get enough feedback from his own staff then he just gotta dig his own stuff off the official class forum ("Hey wait a minute how come the Chosen forum has a list of issues?!")

WHA has a class issue compilation post for almost every sub forum... way more constructive than 99.99% of posts on vn, I honestly can't believe they never look at those lists.

I am disappointed because I've helped contribute to a few of the compilation posts and to find it was all basically for nothing is ... wow ... just ... wow.

Melee Healers
Divine Strike and Rend soul will now heal for 350% damage dealt instead of 250%

Does Mark Jacobs think that the 250% is standard with the ability? It comes from a talent. What is he buffing, the base ability or the talent? Does he even know?

I still don't understand why they made tanks unable to Guard people outside their group.

From what I understand, even if you were guarding people out of group and the icon was there, it didn't even work anyways.

So... no change really.  Someone wanna test to make sure?

oh fuck that shit. lol .

uhh, you're wrong. The regular rend soul does 250% without any talents. I know it's popular to bash mark here, but at least make some research first.

I was agreeing with you :-)

Jacobs and Barnett worked well in promoting WAR, but it looks really bad for the CEO of the company to indicate something hadn't been seen. It very well may have been seen and discussed among other devs at Mythic, but for the CEO to go "huh? wha?" publicly just makes everyone at Mythic look clueless.

I appreciate that Jacobs posts on forums. But he appears not to realise what it means for the rest of Mythic when he replies. The lead class designer should really be fielding these queries... assuming there is one and he isn't Jacobs.

But it is Divine Assault, not Divine Strike so he got the name of the skill wrong but he did get the percent right. 350% is too much, but I'll take it until my sub runs out.

The chap went from nerfing Ironbreakers HARD to buffing them (although there's no mention of dropping that retarded "decay starts after 10sec" thing). So.... they had no fucking idea what they were doing to the IB in the first place, so awesome   :uhrr:

His people skills improved a bit, though.

Making rend soul heal for 350% is still shit.   Problem isnt the value but the set back.  Tool tip says it can hit up to 4 times, it typically only lands twice, often once.  NOthing like repeatedy using an ability that "can" potentially do 2000+ healing(4 hits) which most of the time does about 500(1 hit).  The ability that DoK's have that is supposed to reduce the set back by 50% doesnt work either so GG

Not sure what the deal is with "Away with Ye," though (that being, of course, the single most important IB skill in Tier 3).  What does "also requires cool down from 0s to 10s" mean for a skill that currently has a 20s cooldown?  Reducing the grudge from 30 to 25 sounds nice, but I'm fairly sure that the current ability costs more than 30 grudge (the tooltip says 30, but never lights up as available until I hit 40).  Grudge generation is still nerfed when you're over 60%, though, and the big problem is that skills like Binding Grudge and Heavy Blow deal damage based on your current grudge, so I suspect this will still hit the IBs as a DPS nerf (though not as big as originally proposed).

Edit: okay, I'm stupid, it does cost 30 grudge, but for some reason, can't be used until you have 50 or so.

This is one of the things that is really confusing me lately.  From what I remember of Mythic - I left right after Darkness Falls came out - they really focused on the community with DAOC and saw that as something they really wanted to improve on from EQ.  They had multiple well defined people that interacted with the community.  I really believe that this is yet another thing that Blizzard copied from them with WoW and then polished it.  For as bad as the Blizzard forums are, they are no where near like what the EQ forums were.  If you go beyond the General forum to the class forums, there is always good information to be found in the community developed stickies and not universally terrible discussion in most threads.  Its not EJ with its relentless focus on moderating, but Blizzard has done an adequate job of handling the community.

And here in Warhammer, we see Mythic needlessly reinventing the wheel yet again with their community practices and in the process acting decidedly B team about the whole thing.  Really, why is Mark Jacobs, one of the visible heads of the thing, slinging mud in a forum?

Because he gets off on it , for years now from taking jabs at EQ/EQ2 to the latest , insert foot in mouth , MTV blog interview , MJ gets his jollies from throwing out his brash statements and trying to act like his opinion is just that important

Deep down I think he cannot stand the fact that even before WoW , many people that don't play mmorpg's still had heard of "Everquest" but no clue about DAOC , now with WoW doing that x10

And on that fact he has always tried to play both sides of the fence , constantly trying the "we're not trying to compete with WoW nor expect to" line , while then in the next breath basically saying "look out WoW, it's a marathon and I think they are scared of us"

The one thing he is an expert on from what I've seen ,  is acting about as unprofessional as can be for an exec as part of a large company , talking about how every other game did X wrong , while his own game begins to burn around him

Pure Speculation:  Sanya did a really good job of communicating (grab bag, general PR stuff), AND was instrumental in getting MJ to not run his mouth and shoot himself and Mythic in the foot... and I think it chaffed him.  I think he felt she got more credit then she deserved.  I think that he thinks that he's a good communicator.  I think he finally got rid of her, and now we're really seeing what a good job she did, especially given the circumstances of her employment.

Communication seems to be Mythics greatest failing.  They just randomly post what they want and if people don't suck up to them, they take their ball and go home.

The fact that very basic skill and tactics bugs aren't being fixed (they skill and tactics don't work or do nothing like described) indicates they aren't even bothering to look for the most basic bug lists in any forums and are pretty much ignoring the in game bug report feature.  Heck, even releasing a list of "Known class bugs" could do a lot for communication.

Mythic currently seems to be delusional about their game.

mmmmm, delicious three star ability.

The only difference between Mythic's communication from now and from the DaoC days, is the communities expectations (we put up with far less). The level of quality (or lack thereof) has not changed in years. They've always reeked at communicating... just about everything. News to Mechanics to Documentation to Policy. I'm personally waiting for the super secret tester only forums to be made again, if they haven't already  :awesome_for_real:

Exactly - useless and detrimental comments like that have constantly popped up from Mythic that just come round to bite them in the arse. I'm not saying every comment should be polished to the nth degree through PR speak so that it blandly says nothing, but a little thought about what is being said is vitally important, especially when such commentary is rare and comes from high up.

Does the CEO of Mythic have nothing better to do than read fan forums? I think it is a great thing to do sometimes, but surely there are other people working at Mythic who can go into this kind of thing.

I decided against resubbing to test 1.05.

Thanks for your insightful post.   :heart:

I'm glad to see Squig Herders get buffed in damage-dealing.  I'm glad to see Mythic seems to have a sense of urgency about fixing their game.  I'm glad they are adding more bind points.

But no mention of increasing xp gain, quest or RvR-wise, does NOT make me glad. 

Just remove the cockblocks, let what few players you have left get to 40 so that will fill out the RvR there.  Then improve oRvR rewards, more than the now-infamous "one gold bag".  Once thats done start adding content and levels.  RvR is the ONE thing you have superior to WoW, you have got to make and keep it your focus.

You'll never know.  :uhrr:

Patch 1.0.4b (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=439)


This is a great change. It's somewhat hampered by the adjustment to Ward items (really, were people chewing thorugh your end game content so fast that you had to implement this ASAP?), but it's a step in the right direction.

They're just going to work their way up to everyone getting a goddamn bag. This tip-toeing is just silly. Doesn't particularly matter considering how long it's taking to get there.

Holy shit, you're fast.

Hmmm. Maybe. Mythic sure isn't. :awesome_for_real:

Edit: OK, that was a cheap shot. They didn't quite deserve that.

And, if you ever happened to make a trip to Vegas during their round tables Sanya was a a Mythic rock star. People didn't even know what Mark Jacobs looked like, let alone who he was if he opened his mouth without an introduction.


I agree, it's in the right direction. But, I won't lie, I have shown up to a keep take, never swung my hammer or cast a heal and still placed for a bag (lesser, but I still placed). The overall system is broke, more rewards is only putting a band aid on it. Give people more loot, that'll fix it! Ok what now, people get gear even faster and run Serpent's Passage 25 times a nite? Wooo? The gear grind is akin to WoW, the Scenario grind is akin to WoW so why am I paying for another game with the same basic principle behind it? WAR needs some umphf, and fast.


/soapbox on

Why don't they deserve it. We should hold gaming companies up to a higher standard. Look at their revenues yearly, its staggering. We should hold them at the same level that we hold our car companies if they make a shit car. If a car company said "this car makes 35mpg" and yet we drive it and it makes 20mpg we should complain about that. We should hold them accountable for their shit product. Yes it's a game, but look at how much they make per year across the US and abroad... that amount of money has to come with some amount of accountability and responsibility to deliver on promises. They made their bed, and Thursday nite they are going to sleep in it. If I was Mythic and I was sitting at a meeting next Monday morning and I look at the numbers that Wrath is about to sell just in the US I would put my resume out on the streets that afternoon.

/soapbox off

Aye, the gold bag thing is no more than a band aid, a microscopic one. AFAIK the contribution system in keeps is still borked at the test server. Plus this only encourages more keep trading instead of keep holding. There is still no fucking point in holding a keep, you get a measly 100 renown every 5 or 10 minutes, meanwhile Bob The BrightWizard is getting 9k every 15 minutes *sigh* at Serpent's Passage.

Well, at least its a small step away from crapnarios.   :why_so_serious:

You have to get some historical perspective here to see why Mythic's style of customer relations in the early history of DAOC seemed like a big improvement over the industry standard of that time, most signally over Everquest. You have to remember what the basic style of the Everquest live management team was at that time: openly revelling in fucking over the players, openly loathing their customers, openly mocking the idea of being responsive to player requests and concerns. So basically when DAOC opened, and players said something like "Hey, Hibernia is kind of unfinished, isn't it", all it took was the devs saying, "Yeah, sorry, we're working on it" and it felt like "Wow, that's an amazing change!"  The EQ live management at the time would have said, "No, Hibernia is meant to look unfinished because that's the way Irish magic is, kind of shoddy and stuff. So fuck you if you don't like it: you're in our world now, bitches."

We seem to be on the same page here.  I played EQ, I remember nonsense about the Vision and promoting bitter community people into design positions.  My point is that Mythic seems to have regressed from their DAOC community model to a more EQ model when I really believe they need to move on to the stronger better position that Blizzard has taken and even go beyond it somehow if they can figure a way to do that.

lol, reading you guys speak about Warhammer is so priceless :)

You should rename this forum to something like : Warhammer Bashing

Can I play too ?

"MJ is a fucking cunt who does not understand my super duper game designer expertise! Come on I play games since I'm 10 I should now what is better?"

Also schild you must not have played a lot of mmo do you ? Poor boy near more experience boooo, leveling is too slow! Come on dude this is already fast compared to the vast majority of MMO, just stop posting about how Mythic and MJ suck and play maybe you'll advance!

Oh wow. I thought I was done deleting people for shitting in my house. Catch ya on the flipside, catass.

On renaming forums, I'm wondering how long it will be before Warhammer Alliance gets renamed to something else by Garthilk, just so he can position it as more of a generic fansite.

War Alliance predates WAR itself by quite a bit, if I understand things correctly.

Funnily enough, when I posted on the WAR Alliance forum I already had an account. I looked it up two weeks ago, and found out I'd registered in 2006 to bitch about some asshat claiming that grind and tiered gear were staples of the genre and that you couldn't have an MMO without them (also other stuff).

I laughed then, but... who's laughing now?

(The answer is Blizzard. All the way to the bank.)

So you're the reason Jacob's doesn't visit those forums anymore. I hope you're happy.

Well, since it's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic... I thought Jacobs stopped visiting those boards because of some sort of personal abuse/attack?

Mark loves attacks that he can form some sort of rebuttal for - unfortunately there's no rebuttal. He screwed the pooch and we called him on it. I wouldn't come back either. It's not a personal thing, I don't think anyone here holds any ill will towards him, but him posting here pissed off a lot of the entitled community, it's probably best for him not to come back as an ambassador for WAR. Shit, most of us don't play it anymore, so atm, he has no reason to come back.

UnSub was talking about the WHA boards. I forget exactly why Mark refuses to even look at those boards (which I feel is inexcusable given his position as PR / class designer / lead designer / community relations manager).

I was being sarcastic. The thought of Jacobs being told off 2 years ago that something wouldn't work, then implementing it, then for it not to work amused me.

Jacobs will go on about how badly online forums have treated him in the past (which they have) and uses it to justify why he doesn't have an official forums. However, he can't expect to get better behaviour at a fansite, especially when a the vast majority of the abuse he took was posted up on fansites the first time around. 

Jacobs also likes to talk about 'listening to the community', which he does... when they agree with him. It was sad to see him mention scenario-less servers about three times in that thread when every time it was shot down hard.

It's just how he operates. He loves to be RIGHT.

Heck, most, if not all of the 'old guard' of MMO leadership share that quality. It's probably what fueled the first bunch of MMO's creation. That desire to have their vision realized and created.

They designed their games the same way most of the internet argues. Not with facts or reasons, merely with the intention if 'winning'.



The Unwillingness or the inability to remove ones 'self worth' from ones own ideas. Fantastic motivator, but not much else.

I thought so, but it can be hard to tell.

In further news, the problem with contribution seems to be related to the damage counter exceeding 100k. Which is why PQ's work great in T1 / T2, but Keeps and later PQ's seem to be completely random. Stick under 100K damage (80K seems to be fine) and you should top Contribution. Heals and buffs seem to add to the damage counter.

It's an interesting theory, and possibly explains a few things.