Warhammer: Second Impressions

It's okay.

I haven't thought about it too much to give any concrete reasons.

Maybe I'm not enough of a pvper to enthusiatically enjoy it.

Maybe the days of an MMORPG knocking my socks off are gone forever.

Maybe (most likely) the feel of combat is off. LotRO had this issue for me too.

Maybe I haven't found the niche (right guild) to give it that "This is awesome!" feel.

Maybe (most likely) I need to upgrade my computer or buy a new one (no plans to make this happen any time soon) to fully enjoy what WAR has to offer.

Maybe it's just me.

But it should be telling that I'm making this post instead of playing at this very moment.

Warhammer Public Quests

I like the idea of public quests. However there is a drawback and I didn't expect to experience it so soon. If there isn't a "public" around you can't finish the public quests.

I'm logging into full servers but the low levels areas are sparse. I'm sure everyone is pushing toward the higher level stuff. But for someone like me who isn't playing much I'm unable to keep up with the herd. I'm still haven't hit the teens yet.

I guess it's not a big deal, because you don't *have* to do public quests to advance. However not being able to even take part in something considered innovative is a let down.

Warhammer concern

As I waited for a scenario to begin the other evening I got a furrowed brow. How in the world...aww I can't use my meme here...will Warhammer keep populations balanced? How are they going to manage to keep players on both sides so the larger side won't have horrific queues and the smaller side won't get zerged all the time? Warhammer touts itself as a PvP game. It is much more important to have a plan for how to handle this than it would be in WoW where battlegrounds were initially an afterthought and is a subset of the entire game.

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.

Warhammer: Choosing a side

I've already read that the Destruction (read Horde) side is the most populated.

I came across some funny posts concerning choosing a side for RvR in Warhammer.

I think we will be faced with what I call the Richard Hatch phenomenon. Richard Hatch was the first winner of the Survivor series. Richard craftily formed voting alliances, which was ingenious at first but then was copied for seasons to come.

Many players started playing WoW without thinking about PvP. Many, not coming from a gaming background, didn't know much about the game at all. Those in the know, and those focused on PvP chose Horde. Those not in the know suffered and usually since you don't find out how bad things are until max level, you've made friends, good guilds, find it hard to start over.

But with the knowledge of things from WoW will you choose blindly (read prettily)? Or have you learned from the master(s) that choosing a side for looks isn't the best choice when you want to (or have to) compete. Sure the people in the first Survivor were blind-sided by Hatch's cunniness, but what excuse did all the remaining Survivor tribes have?

The big difference is PvP was only a part of WoW. PvP is Warhammer, so perhaps both sides have good pvp racials if there is such a thing. And perhaps both sides will balance out as far as populations are concerned. (How will they balance populations anyway???)

I'm going to admit that I haven't learned anything and that I'll probably choose whatever seems "cool" to me first. But I'm not going to think twice about switching if things turn out as they did in WoW*.

*Please remember my decision to take a break from WoW and try something else had nothing whatsoever to do with PvP.