Is a third side or a new race on its way?

On the WAR Europe boards someone asked about the possibility of a new race being added and after a bit of back and forth there was a tiny tidbit of information...

Xmoe wrote:
i dont think ther will make new race..


You, Sir, are mistaken

Magnus Aalto
Imaad
English Community Manager

Now really we can't look too much into this as anything of substance but I honestly believe there could be something in the works to help balance servers that are struggling on certain sides and this would simply be an NPC faction. Right now the logical idea would be the Skaven that could weaken defenses and strike keep lords and not to mention champion mobs could suddenly tunnel up in the midst of attackers to help the underpowered defence...

Maybe not though, it's only a random thought there. Of course, it might simply be the Tomb Kings helping to balance the Tomb of the Vulture Lord to ensure that access is never totally blocked off for one side for an extended time.

One thing I feel fairly confident about though is that we won't see a new playable faction or side for a while. Mythic need to focus on getting the balance right with the existing classes first before adding more to the mix.

So.. What could be coming?

+DISCLAIMER: REALLY, THIS IS JUST CONJECTURE SO DON'T LOOK DEEPLY INTO IT+

oooh shiny...

Just so you know if the site looks a bit.... funny.. I'm messing around with a new template, so don't worry.

*gets back to hammering away*

Right.. dat looks about finished for now. Will touch it up over the next couple of days but any glaring problems or missing blogs on my ready stuff then let me know, I lost my old ones and had to import them from an old Google Reader *grumblez*

Fluffy Bitz (part 1)

I'm a huge lover of fluff in games (that's the geeky term for background and the things that pad out the game) and WAR has possibly the deepest licence for fluff that any MMO has, you can pickup a Warhammer novel or a rulebook and see lots of great background and items mentioned that the game just doesn't have enough room to fit in. Look at the noteworthy persons alone and there are a huge number of people mentioned with great quotes and... fluff to fill the game in with. There's a rich lore and background but yet still so much of it untapped.

So this is the start of my random thoughts upon the fluffy aspects of the game. GirlIRL did a wonderful article about it already so I don't want to step on her toes in my hobnail boots but it's something I've been thinking about a lot as well recently. It adds to the depth of the game and really, sometimes we just don't want to grind more scenarios, participate in a zerg or hit a buggy instance so lets see what else we can add to the game, which wouldn't take too much effort but would give us something to do.

I picked up an old Orcs & Goblins Warhammer rulebook off ebay for £1 the other week just to have a browse through it. The background section was quite thin I have to admit but what actually interested me was the magic items and the descriptions.

It shames a waste that there are a bunch of items with wonderful descriptions sitting in the rulebooks which the fans of the game could see in the..ermm.. 'flesh'. Now everyone loves shinies.. Don't care what they say but shinies mean progression and it is the most basic and fundamental need for an MMO, for a player to want to keep on playing to improve. Once the character remains static, that's when interest starts to wane. Adding more items to collect (and even better if they are usable) and a sense of achievement once you get your sword or shield that you desire.

So how would I go about adding the old magical items with the descriptions into the game in a way that would let players collect and desire them?

I'd start with adjusting the armoury section of the Tome to include Weapons and Amulets. Now with the amulet sets you complete small quests and can then go and purchase the amulets themselves from the Librarians. Lets keep this concept with the weapons but add in a mix of the other tome bits to fill it in. So lets grab a random weapon to see how we can fit this together.

FUMPA'S CLUB OF FUMPIN'
Since the dawn of last Thursday, Fumpa's club has been the traditional symbol of leadership amongst the Blacknose tribe. Of course, to start with there were a few who didn't see it like that, but they've all since been, er, convinced.

OK, lets ignore the tabletop stats and well, the in game stats, we're wanting to make this fluffy enough to want people to collect it. In the Tome, under the armoury you'll see (well you would do...) the weapon section, under Greenskins there are lots of ??? and not much else. Now you've just been bashing away some rowdy Goblins in Black Crag when one of them drops an item "Fumpa's handle" now the item is bind on pickup and you can right click on it. Upon doing so, it unlocks a tome entry in the Greenskin armoury with the following:

FUMPA'S CLUB OF FUMPIN'
..... ... .... .. .... ......... ...... .... ... ...... .... traditional symbol of leadership amongst the Blacknose tribe. Of course, to start with there were .... ...... ...... ....... ..... ..... ........ .... ....... ..... .........

O ???
O ???
O Fumpa's Handle

Upon finding more of the pieces it will uncover more of the story and once you have all three unlocks you can purchase the item from the librarian in your capital city and to show it off as an Unlock item you can paint it orange as well (because right now with the current itemisation, certain greens can be just as good as Mythic orange). Give the items more than just a proc, make them unique for situations, in our above example the Fumpa is a symbol of leadership, so give it a nice +strength bonus (Orcs only respect strength) but also give it a use affect. With a one hour cooldown, using the item (must be equipped) will grant all party members 100 points of Morale.

Would adding unlockable weapons give you something to do during the downtime when you're not up for the usual day-to-day of WAR? Would it add to the depth and lore of Warhammer to see interesting and unique weapons with a sense of achievement to them?

I'd like them for sure.

Six months on and are we now ready for release?

Well we're now six months or so into the life span of WAR and we can pretty much now stop with the "Well it's just new" excuses (not that anyone really did recently). We finally have the missing careers but sadly no sign of our missing cities. Is WAR now at a stage where you would release it or was it released on time?

I think everyone agrees that the release was decided by EA to get in before WoW's expansion regardless of the state of the game and while it went relatively smoothly all things told, the game overall was still very rough around the edges. I'm guessing a lot of what we're seeing is what was planned in the background before it was cut.

The game itself is starting to feel as finished as an MMO as it can be, the big bugs are getting squished and the game itself is feeling more responsive and less clunky. There's still silly little things that can be added i feel (characters weight for example... as a Black Orc in full heavy armour when I jump and land on the ground I make the tiniest little skip and noise on the ground, the same my shaman does, characters seem to lack substance to them). Of course we wouldn't have the same level of testing *coughs* as we've had over the last six months of the game had it still be in closed beta for longer then a couple of months of open beta.

I do feel that we're finally starting to get somewhere with WAR, we might be a couple of patches away yet, but WAR is almost ready for public release... Six months after it was released

My Blocka!

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your appeal. We have investigated the issue and found that the item was sold. We have restored Blocka o' da Doombull in Lokax's bags and removed 34 silver and 99 brass coins.

For any further queries don't hesitate to contact us via the in game Ticket system.

Kind Regards,

WAR European Customer Support Team

*Blushes* How did I manage that? And I checked the buy back option on the merchants and it wasn't there. Anyway, thanks GOA!

Da picture box o' Lokax #2

You don't even know where to begin with this...

It was possibly our Gobbo Snikkit... Or maybe it's his clothes... And that looks like something sticking into him... and I don't even want to know what happened to his legs...

The scorpions weren't that scary were they?

WCPI Blog o' da week.

I always feel I should be promoting the lesser known, possibly the little hidden gems of blogs but I don't feel guilty for this one.. It's a big WAAAAAGHHHHHH to GirlIRL, who is well known, well established but is just a great writer and a wonderful read. Little else needs to be said other than if you don't already have her subscribed, then do so!

GirlIRL

----

The WAR Community Promotion Initiative, or WCPI for short, is a player-wide effort for WAR fansites, blogs, forums, and other WAR community efforts to cross-promote and expose content to everyone who visits them. Members of the WCPI regularly promote each other through links, spotlights, and other features. If you have a WAR site and you’d like to join, check out the WCPI thread or PM PhoenixRed on the Warhammer Alliance forums.

Weapon Skill for da Warboss?

+++ Caution! Dis 'as Thinky Stuff +++
(07/04 updates in red)

So with the European PTS now up and the ability to copy Lokax over I decided to check out the possible secondary stat changes and how that would affect me. A weapon that Black Orcs have access to, the Badmoon Bigchoppa has always intrigued me with its proc and raw strength bonus. Now with the secondary changes looming overhead in 1.2.x it the weapon skill bonus on it suddenly makes it a lot more appealing.

So I did what any good Orc would do. I went out and bashed stuff till I found out what was bestest!

Here's what I found with no tactics used and hitting 96 times on level 38 spiders in Kadrin Valley.

Without any weapons equipped here are my stats (was in my rvr gear)
Strength: 557
Weapon Skill: 299

Numbers from live are in red

Bigchoppa of the Darkscale - with 2x +15 strength talismans in it
Auto attack hit: 254 / 253
Critical hit: 372 / From 34 crits: 354-402 (375.79 average)

Badmoon Bigchoppa - NO Talismans in it (because I forgot)
Auto attack hit: 274 / 273
Critical hit: 427 / From 34 crits: 382-434 (407.38 average)
+ 5% proc

Earthkeepa's Cutta & Blocka o' da Doombull - Wounds talismans (only other weapon I had)
Auto attack hit: 150
Critical hit: 220
+ lots of blocks

Using the Badmoon Bigchoppa and opening with a rank 32 Follow 'me Lead (+96 WS) upped my damage to the following:
Auto attack hit: 284
Critical hit: 486
+ 5% proc

Update:
Was on live this morning to note my strength and weapon skill as I forgot to do that. Also ran the first two tests again in a live environment. One thing I must point out though is that the Darkscale Bigchoppa is 3.0 speed whereas the Badmoon is 3.5, however I did not have any talismans slotted into the Badmoon. I'm no theoryhammerer (see wot I did dere?) but by stacking some Weapon Skill in place of strength certainly seems to help a lot (even on live) on the PTS.

Now imagine putting a black orc in a melee group and using No Choppin' Me as well as 'Ave Another One simply because you'll be spamming it and I think this might work out quite well for us...

What if we had three sides?

In Dark Age of Camelot you had three sides (or rather realms). Albion (Arthurian legends), Midgard (Nordic legends) and Hibernian (Celtic legends). The obvious advantage to having three sides in realm versus realm was that no-one side ever became too powerful since the other two could combine to take down the dominant side, and the cycle repeated itself so no-one ever gained continual dominance over the other two. The major flaw was that power and population on sides would change dramatically with each patch and people would often hop servers to play the perceived imbalanced realm only adding to the need for the other realms to team up.

So the question lies, would WAR have benefited more by having three sides rather than the traditional two and if so, how would they have managed it?

The more I thought about it, the more the concept of a third realm grows on me. It would certainly help towards a lot of balance issues should one side be buffed a bit too much in a patch, plus allows for more interesting battles as two sides possibly take on one only for the two to turn on each other to claim the keep or fort for victory points for there own realm.

Of course, this will never happen, it would require building the game practically from the ground up and a lot of what we have (the tug-o-war tier 4 zones for example) to be completely redesigned and ripped apart, but it's nice to think.

The fun bit however is imagining how the realms would form as the current triage for both sides wouldn't work too well. I'd imagine something like this.

Empire & Dwarves:
Knight of the Blazing Sun, Warrior Priest, Bright Wizard, Witch Hunter

Ironbreaker, Runepriest, Engineer, Slayer

Greenskins (Orcs and Goblins)
Black Orc, Boss (imagine an orc healer.. Shouting instead of traditional healing... "Oi, dat was a scratch, get movin' again", "Yer not dead ya runt, get back up an 'it 'im"), Arrer Boy, Choppa

Troll (with Goblin handler.. imagine a pet tank class), Shaman, Squig Hunter, Fanatic

Dark Alliance (Chaos and Dark Elves)
Chosen, Zealot, Magus, Marauder

Black Guard, Disciple, Sorceror, Witch Elf

So of course, one realm had to disappear and (not so) sadly it was the High Elves. Simple reason is that I couldn't 'fit' them in anywhere and they seem quite stuck out there on the little island of Ulthuan. However, the same case could be made for Dark Elves so you could change them for Greenskins and simply add in the "Brettonia and Wood Elf" realm in place of the full Greenskin faction.

Ach, as said, it's just not going to happen but would WAR have been better with a third realm to balance out the odds when one side starts to become the dominant force, or is the Order vs. Destruction working fine?

Secondary Stats

One sneaky little thing I found in the PTS notes was secondary stats.

"1.2.1 PTS introduces a number of changes to “Secondary” stats to give them a stronger effect on overall player performance. Please keep in mind that these new effects are in addition to existing bonuses that are already present in 1.2.

Critical hits: Critical bonus damage is no longer random, and is now a range of +5% to +75% based on stats (see below).
Critical heals: Critical bonus heal effectiveness is no longer random, and is now a range of +5% to +75% based on stats (see below).

Weapon Skill: Increases your Melee Critical and Ranged Critical bonus damage dealt.
Willpower: Increases your Magic Critical bonus damage dealt, and also increases the effectiveness of Healing Criticals from your healing abilities.
Initiative: Reduces your critical bonus damage suffered from all types of attacks.
Toughness: Increases the bonus Healing Critical effectiveness of heals which are used on you, and also grants you minor Hit Point regeneration while in-combat."

Hmmm interesting. The need to balance your stats is to me, very important for a game to have to avoid one button face smashers who stack one stat and use one skill. Giving stats more use in game and in fact for some classes a requirement to have to function well stands good for game balance.

I don't know what sort of willpower the average sorc or BW runs with, but I don't expect it to be too high, and with crits being quite a useful thing to have having to drop raw damage output to gain crit damage boost makes it a decision, do you go 50/50, or stack one at the expense of the other? Either way it should reduce the potency of one-stat classes if they have to find ways to balance them.

It may cause some headaches with itemisation but I'm certainly all for making people have to think of what they have to get on an item and balance it with the other stats.

Two Orcy thumbs up for this