Warhammer: first impressions

I like it.

Please take note my highest character is level 3 or 4. So I haven't done much or ventured very far. Also this post isn't orderly, I just wanted to get some thoughts out there.

I was able to join a scenario (think WoW battleground) almost immediately after creating my character. The scenario instance bumped me from my rank (level) 1 you up to 8. The highest I faced was a level 11 which allowed me to run around and not just get slaughtered. Nice feature.

Since WoW's PvP was an afterthought, your goal is to level/gear up first *then* participate. With WAR you can jump right in. Not sure if twinking will/can occur, but so far I like being able to PvP right away.

What can I say about quests? They are straight-forward. Kill x of this, get y of that. And while we might complain about collecting 10 bear asses, honestly how would *you* revolutionize questing? Post your ideas here. I'll wait.

Yeah its not as easy as you think.

One thing warhammer does differently than I've seen before is show the area on your mini-map where your quest objective can be found. I know some will say this is dumbing it down, but before I left WoW I had come across mods that essentially did the same thing and I have to say they were pretty friggin' sweet. The only difference in warhammer you don't have to add a mod for it.

And that's what I'm noticing about this game. It's like they took ideas from WoW mods/addons and put them in. Simple things like cooldowns showing on the icons are already in the game instead of you having to download from curse gaming. If people really hate it maybe they'll add an option to not show it.

People have begged (don't understand the appeal myself personally but I'm also on the side of "do we *really* need housing") for dying armor in WoW. LotRO has it and so does warhammer.

I get this feeling that Warhammer figured it can't beat WoW so it would focus on the stuff WoW doesn't have. I mean really focus on it. One of the first tooltips you get is about dying armor. Good grief it isn't that important. And no one is going to leave WoW because they can dye armor in another game.

This isn't meant to devolve into a WoW vs. WAR discussion. It's not fair to WAR. I'll just say it again, I like it so far. Hmm what do most people post about.

Performance - I haven't reached in huge skirmishes, but so far the game is playable on my computer. For comparison I didn't even dare to try out AoC and I lagged during the beginning of lotro when everyone was trying it out. I also lag in Shattrath. I expect to lag, but haven't felt too much of it...yet. Definitely not enough to make me log off in disgust.

Graphics - Good (since its subjective). Someone complained about the graphics and I really don't get what they're talking about. I think the game looks great. It doesn't have that cartoonish feel that many people complain WoW has (never bothered me).

Combat - This was what worried me. LotRO combat doesn't feel right, hard to explain but it just doesn't. I heard similar grumblings about WAR but so far it seems okay to me.

Community - I think people are too busy playing to fill up chat with garbage. And I was jumping around from server to server too much to say what the community will be like. Although in scenarios people are already complaining (what?!?! say it ain't so!?!?!) about healers not healing. That gets SO old. Why don't people just give up on expecting people to heal? If someone is playing a healing class and not healing you they are not going to be pressured into healing just because you whine about it. They will
A) either ignore you
B) heal you, but if they do it's because they were already doing so, so your whining doesn't help, instead it does just the opposite! It makes us feel like apparently the healing we *have* been doing is going unnoticed.
C) reroll a non-healing class so they can join the crowd that moans about not getting heals.

Whew sorry about that tangent*. Disclaimer: That rant applies to all games.

Anyway, if things stay like what I've experience so far, Warhammer appears to be a game you can jump in play a little and enjoy.