Also today.. RvR Adjustments in 1.3.6

ZOMG! Double post day!!

http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=dev_discussions&thread.id=10655

We'd like to announce some upcoming changes for RvR in v1.3.6. As stated by Carrie Gouskos in a recent Producer's Letter, there are many upcoming changes for ORvR in the near future. While some of these changes do affect ORvR, they do not conclude the list by any means. We are vigilantly working on much larger improvements to be released in a later version.

• ORvR: Victory Points for PVE and Prior Tier have been removed. New pool values are as follows:
  • Tier 1
    • Objectives: 40%
    • Scenarios: 40%
    • Skirmish: 20%
  • Tiers 2 & 3
    
    • Objectives: 45%
    • Scenarios: 35%
    • Skirmish: 20%
  • Tier 4
    • Objectives: 45%
    • Scenarios: 30%
    • Skirmish: 25%

• ORvR: Zone capture rewards will now only be awarded to players within the RvR lake or an associated Tier's Scenario. Players will remain eligible for rewards for 5 minutes after leaving the RvR lake or an associate's Tier's Scenario as long as the player is within the appropriate pairing.

• Against All Odds: in the event that an army is outnumbered within an RvR lake, members of the outnumbered army will receive a scaling bonus to Experience, Renown and Influence. This bonus becomes active on qualified players after being outnumbered by 20% or more. The bonus cannot surpass 400% and requires at least 6 players of each Realm to be present within the RvR lake.

• Scenarios: players with the "Quitter!" debuff will no longer suffer a penalty to Experience and Renown but will now be unable to queue for a Scenario until the "Quitter!" debuff has faded.

• Contested Cities: Players belonging to the Realm that lost Stage 3 will now always be properly disabled by the Routed ability.

• Contested Cities: Portals leading out of the Khorne War Quarters and Slaanesh Chambers no longer check for combat status.

• Contested Cities: Guards will no longer spawn at the six objectives within Altdorf and The Inevitable City.

• 
  

This is all quite a lot of info to digest. Against all odds only gives xp/renown/influence so wont impact the actual fighting (I initially misread this part, so apologies if you read something else here :D ) . Quitter change looks decent as well and how many people will we see hiding just inside the rvr lake but still close enough to the warcamp to get guard protection? Fair few I bet,

Changin' da plan

So we get a new ability in 1.3.6 known as "Changin' da plan". Here's the details straight from Mythic.

Black Orc:

• A new ability, "Changin' Da Plan", is now trainable at Rank 3. This ability will instantly shift you from No Plan into Da Good Plan, or from Da Good Plan into Da Best Plan, or from Da Best Plan into Da Good Plan. It is off of the global cooldown, and has a 5 second cooldown of its own.
  

To add to this, Mythic have stated it won't cost any AP.

So what to make of it. Well it's something which isn't a nerf lets put it that way. It does seem a very clunky way of handling things, adding an extra ability for us to fit onto overloaded action bars. Removing it off the global cool down is good but certainly not a huge advantage as the game is fairly unresponsive at the best of times, let alone in laggy situations where it won't actually help (and possibly will end up making you change plan when you don't want as it queues your actions all over the place).

I am thinking of ways to use it already and can skip out parts of a rotation now, a lot will involve timing and proper use of CDP will make a Borc more effective, however bad use of it can cause more problems than it's worth and possibly you gain it too quickly where you will still be getting the hang of using the plan mechanic leading to over complication.

Is it good? Yes for the simple reason that if it's bad we don't NEED to use it.

Is it a fix? No. The mechanic is still horribly broken with poor game response, bad action design, ill thought out combinations and our CC is still on cool downs which limits the effectiveness of changing plans if you activate it too early leaving you with the choice... Use another ability or wait for the cool down and lose precious damage.

I'm still trying ot think of a better way to run the mechanic within the limits that Mythic would put in, but it's harder than thought. I do love Bootaes idea of adding in the effect of the tactic which grants 0/+10/+20 crit depending on the plan, however I would drop that to 0/+5/+10 and also add the same rate to be added for Block and Parry (after all we're tanks).