Part 1 Update for Patch 1.05

[Riggswolfe]

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

[Khaldun]

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."

[dd0029]

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.

[Bismallah]

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).

[Fanatik]

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.

[fantasturbation]

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.

[Bismallah]

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.

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...

[waffel]

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.

[Kail]

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.

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.

[Fanatik]

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.

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.  

[Druzil]

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.

[dd0029]

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.

[ghost]

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.

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.  

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

[Jherad]

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

[Bismallah]

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

[mol]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you shitting me?

[dd0029]

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.

[Hindenburg]

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





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.

[Evildrider]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you shitting me?

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

[Hindenburg]

Folks,

I'm looking at about 20 pages worth of patch notes right now. We have 20 classes in our game each with different mastery lines, tactics and morale abilities. As you can imagine, balancing all the that is a tricky task. Compared to most other MMOs, a WAR character's combat abilities/choices are much more customizable on an individual basis and when you multiply that by 20, well, it's even more complicated. I have no doubt that we have more to do on the careers and I'm also sure that some of the things in these patch notes will change before going LIVE. However, to say that we are not paying attention, don't care or the ever-popular "I quit now" simply makes it less likely that we will continue to post and interact here. We're putting these up now because we want your feedback. We're opening a PTS so you can jump in and help test these changes. If after all the work that the team put into these changes (and pulling them in for this version) is met by those types of posts, then continuing this type of thread here is a waste of a time. You don't like the changes, tell us. You think we should do more, tell us. You think we rebalanced too much tell us but can we do it without all the drama please?

Like I said, these notes are just the start of an ongoing process.

Mark

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

[Ard]

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.

[Shatter]

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. 

[schild]

Every Shadow Warrior ability got buffed?

alt+f

"experience"

no results

I'm done.

[Evildrider]

You know these aren't live right?

[deadlyanteater]

BUFF BRIGHT WIZARD FTW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[schild]

You know these aren't live right?

Why does that matter?

[Evildrider]

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

[schild]

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

Explain that.

[Vash]

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

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

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?   

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

[Shatter]

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. 

[Lantyssa]

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?

• In addition to reducing the amount of damage received from high-level encounter NPCs, each Ward on high-level armor set pieces worn will now affect the amount of damage players are able to do to those NPCs. Players not wearing any pieces of the appropriate armor set will see their damage greatly reduced. For each piece of the appropriate armor a player wears, their damage against the boss monster will increase.

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

[Beltaine]

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.

[BitWarrior]

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

Explain that.

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!

[Warskull]

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.

[shiznitz]

[/quote]

Hello 1999 gfx! Good lord that is ugly.