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Andy Belford | Community News | 06/01/2009 @ 04:27:01 EST

Greetings!

Tomorrow night, 6/2/2009, we will be hosting another Developer lead Public Test Event for Game Update 1.3. We will be doing a focused test of the Realm Resource Quest which will control which realm has direct access to the new zone, The Land of the Dead!

The event will get rolling at approximately 8:30 PM EDT and will continue on throughout the evening. Be sure to copy over your characters, by accessing the Mythic Account Center, to the Warpstone Public Test Server. For more information on how to access the Public Test Server, please read this thread.

Don’t forget, everyone who participates and submits feedback will be entered for a chance to win either an Imperial Griffon mount (Order) or an Enslaved Manticore mount (Destruction). So come on out and drive your enemies before you on the field of battle, and possibly score a sweet ride in the process!

As you level, in Grenadier:

Level 21) Sticky Bomb, skipping extra powder. It’s an extra DOT that explodes after its duration for an AOE DD or if the target dies… this helps DPS considerably.

Level 24) Go up to Throwing Arm and slot the tactic alongside Steady Aim (the ballistic skill tactic). This makes grenades have a 98ft range vs. 65ft normal (nukes in general are 100ft), so they can become part of your main damage rotation without being deep in the danger zone of nukes-ville during combat.

Level 27) Go up to Strafing Run and train it. This is a slow line DD that hits pretty hard, but most importantly, is a short knockback that does NOT trigger immunity, meaning you can then use a turret self-destruct knockdown, or a knockback grenade, to further CC the enemy. As with all knockbacks, it knocks down monsters.

Level 33) In Rifleman, get Crack Shot. It’s an invaluable tool, and again, strafing run then a disarm = nice combo. I often if jumped by a witch elf or whatnot will pop strafing run to knock them back, and while they’re in midair throw on Crack Shot (disarm) to begin the attack. It also helps to protect a healer or whatnot that’s in trouble from any melee’r, and gives a HUGE boost against enemies such as the Squig Herder (who I usually throw an Acid Bomb dot grenade/debuff, then a flashbang grenade to interrupt whatever he’s building, followed by the disarm and a quick burst with hip shot/focused fire to try to finish him off or get him to a critically low health level before he can retaliate).

Level 38) Napalm Grenade in Grenadier. It is a 20 foot “square” AOE on the ground that grows in strength every 10 seconds (doubling in power). It is a great tool to force someone to move, or try to block off a corner that you think they may try to use to block LOS. Note that the first tick of damage is instant upon landing, so it functions as a makeshift DD as you set it if you’re doing it on top of the enemy’s spot or close enough for it to touch them. In addition, it is a huge DPS tool in PVE, and benefits from Unshakeable Focus as all abilities do once you pop it, even though it’s already in-progress.

Level 40) Finish off Grenadier’s mastery points (you can’t train the Morale 4 until RR40 but I can hardly remember many times I have used that, it’s more for the DPS boost and napalm grenade priority in RVR (highest level napalm in a spot deals damage, anything else is rendered inert as they don’t stack with other Engineers)).
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A few quick tips:

1) Grenades take a second to actually “land” and do their damage. Thus, the double damage Morale 2 ability can be used immediately after any medium-long range grenade throw to apply double damage to that grenade, and have 7 seconds after to continue using quick abilities for double damage. I often debuff someone with Acid Bomb (dot/corp debuff), throw a flashbang grenade at a caster, punch Morale 2 (the nade then lands for double damage), fire off a Hip Shot, then Focused Fire, for a huge damage output in a very brief time. By the end of that most people are nearly dead if they survive. I then throw a quick firebomb followed by another flashbang or knockback as the situation demands.

2) You can combine most knockbacks with a root or melee snare. Due to lag, if you punch say the knockback grenade then hit a root as you run away, it 99% of the time catches them with the root as they fly and you’re running away, making a rather lethal crowd control combo. You can do this with any combination that doesn’t trigger immunity with eachother.

3) SPANNER SWIPE… it’s the melee snare so long as any hex is on the target (aka any of your dot’s). Use it even if you’re snared, after a couple of seconds, because most people fail to reapply a snare to you until the first one wears off, giving you a few seconds of faster runspeed than them and possibly a full escape. You can often hit a knockback grenade with the snare, or snare then knockback-root, and really mess people up. I sometimes will purposely manuever at an angle into a melee’r to snare them as I play “chicken” with them, then knock em back and unload. Don’t be like me and forget half the time that you have it… it is a fight turner!

 Basically, you start with zero “High Magic” for the Archmage on the Order side between Serenity and Force, while starting with zero Gork or Mork for the Shaman on the Destruction side. Whenever you cast a healing spell, it builds the High Magic or Gork/Mork for the opposite type of spell that you cast. This can go up to five build-ups, but if you use a spell that has the opposite effect such as a damage or debuff spell, it uses the build-up of High Magic or Gork/Mork to augment the spell.

If you were casting damage spells and use a healing-type spell such as a heal over time, damage shield, resurrection, etc. it will use the build-up to augment those spells. Any spell that uses the build-up does not cause a point of High Magic or Gork/Mork to appear for the other type of spell. So, if you had four damage-type build-ups, and used a healing spell that was boosted by them, it just resets your build-up to zero for both sides.

For spells with a cast time, this in almost all cases reduces the time to cast by 20% per point of build-up, making it an instant spell at full power (yes, this does include even resurrection spells that could normally take up to six seconds on these particular classes). For spells without a cast time it affects them by 5% per point of build-up, for a total boost of 25%. For channeled spells, it also increases the effectiveness of the effect on a per-point basis.

The mechanic works very nicely in actual gameplay. While you cannot opt to “store” your build-up if you use a spell that would normally consume it, every single spell you cast uses this mechanic except for pure long-duration buffs (such as a resistance buff that lasts an hour). Short-duration buffs will count for this though as well. Even instant-cast spells will build up points for the mechanics of High Magic and Gork/Mork. You’ll find yourself trying to store up points and balancing what spells you cast to plan ahead. You might cast a bunch of damage spells quickly when you think you might want a quick, large instant heal with five points built, or a resurrection, expecting to need it in the next several seconds. Likewise you might do some quick healing so that you can cast a very powerful channeled  nuke when a target is being damaged, to help be ready for when the group is trying to finish him off.

Every player has a maximum Action Point pool of 250 points. You regain 25 action points every second you are not either casting or building an ability, and not in the Global Cooldown (GCD) after using an ability. The GCD is 1.5 seconds. This means that, if you use an ability that is instant-cast/use, you won’t begin the one-second period to regain 25 action points until 1.5 seconds after pressing the key (you’ll gain 25 points after 2.5 seconds total from pressing it). Likewise, if you activate an ability that takes two seconds to cast, your regeneration period will begin immediately once the cast is finished (first points after 3 seconds from pressing the key), as the GCD is done with by then while you were casting.

This means, in practical gameplay terms, that while Action Points regenerate quickly, you need to balance your bursts of abilities with your Action Point pool. You can opt to wait a second after an ability to get some extra AP back for instance, or even stop all-together for a few seconds to get a lot back, or you can keep firing off lots of abilities, at which point you’ll run out of AP and have to stop while you wait for some to rebuild (from 0 to 250 AP takes 10 seconds of not using any abilities, though you can start again at any point during that time).

Some equipment that is rarer will grant AP regeneration that works to add, typically 1-2 points each piece, every second to your normal regeneration.  These are extremely powerful pieces of gear that are generally coveted as they enable you to have a much longer burst period and get back into the action when you’re out of AP much more quickly. As an example, if you had +13 in action point regeneration bonuses from equipment, you’d get back to full from nothing left in a little less than half the time it would normally take. The value of this is quite high!

From high Renown Ranks, you are automatically granted an additional 25 points to your pool (RR 65) and an additional 50 beyond that (RR 75). There are no other ways of adding to your pool.

The main difference between these “secondary” healing classes and the “primary” ones (Runepriest, Zealot) is that they are most effective when balancing the two, often exceeding in bursts what the “primary” ones could do if their cards are played right. The downside in exchange for this is less of each tool type than the “primary” classes of each archetype would get that they draw their abilities from, with more focus on utility spells such as buffs/debuffs. Their general DPS and general healing is a bit weaker, but with the combined abilities these “secondary healing” classes can exceed the “primary” ones in many situations. Of course, your Mastery and Tactic choices can swing the class either way, or just balance things out anywhere in between that you prefer.

As far as the “primary” healers go, the Runepriest and Zealot are more like the Smite Cleric in the very early days of Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC). They have a lot of good damage tools, a few utilities, huge survivability with a large number of various ways to heal (quick casting heals, heal + heal over time, heal over time,  damage absorption shields, damage absorption shields that also heal once they are depleted, longer casted heals that are very prone to being pushed back or interrupted,  heals that heal over time then jump to several nearby targets with the same effect, group heals, and more). The healing tools in particular greatly increase their survivability, as they can stack several effects to help mitigate the effects that incoming damage will have on them. One important thing to note is that the absorption shields make it so you won’t suffer from spell interruption or pushback from damage that they absorb.

I’ll use the Runepriest of the Order side as my main example here to help answer this question.  Without any mastery abilities or tactics, he does “light nuker” damage with his spells (as well has having a medium-damage PBAOE that damages all targets within 30 feet of him), “primary healer” amounts of health when he heals, and “light crowd control.” Now, here’s the big thing: He has mastery paths for each one of them. You can invest heavily in the nuking path and improve your damage to high levels, allowing your instant nuke, instant pair of Damage Over Time spells, normal direct damage castable nuke that uses light amounts of Action Points, etc. and your PBAOE to be highly effective. However, by doing this, if you invest too heavily you won’t gain some nice goodies for crowd control or healing. Likewise you won’t become quite as strong at say, damage, if you focus more on crowd control and healing, though even without any investment you still maintain a good baseline ability set and amount in each path.

For the Runepriest, each path at six points into it gives you a “Master Rune” that you can place on the ground with just a two of second cast time. These are a major tactical decision for any given battle, and you can obtain all three if you spec your Masteries for them. You can only place one at a time (placing a second one destroys the first), and each lasts one minute with a one-minute re-use timer (”cooldown” in WOW terms). Each has a large radius (65 feet in all directions in a circle) that covers a good area of the battlefield. The three types he gets are:

1) A spell-haste rune that reduces all build-ups for abilities for groupmates, including casting by 0.25 seconds (1/4 a second), which is huge since most spells are 2 seconds casts, some are 1 second, and very few are 3 seconds (that comes to 25% on the one-second casts, 12.5% on the two-second casts, and 7.5% on the 3-second casts). It affects all of the groupmates within a 65-foot radius

2) A healing rune that pulses every three seconds, healing all groupmates for the equivalent of a light quick-casting heal each time so long as they are within the 65-foot radius.

3) An Action-Points rune that gives a 20% chance to replenish 50 action points (a full bar is 250 points, so that’s 20%) to any groupmates within the 65-foot radius, every time they activate an ability (including melee attacks, spells, pretty much everything).

Further in the mastery paths are entire new abilities that can dramatically alter the play of the class, as well as tactics. Each point not spent on an ability also increases the effectiveness of most of the abilities or spells based in that path by a few percent each. The maximum number of points in a path is 15 points for the base. You are able to buy an ability once you have specced to the amount of points required to buy it, and are not automatically granted it upon reaching that level of Mastery. So, if an ability is located at five points up the ladder, it would take one more (for a total of six) to actually buy the ability. If it is one you don’t want, you can skip it and use that point to go another level higher. Points spent on abilities do not improve the abilities or spells in that path, only the ones used to climb the ladder do.

Overall, even when focused on healing paths, they still do respectable damage (certainly enough to justify using those abilities when they’d be useful for the group), enough to solo in RVR with even. The same applies vice-versa in all directions.

Armor Factor is used to mitigate melee and physical ranged damage only. It scales very well, with abilities that provide additional AF really making a noticeable difference in damage numbers on you when attacked (20, 30% or more depending). Like all stats, it trails off after a certain point (a “soft cap”) with diminishing returns at 75% mitigation. Armor Factor can be buffed by a few classes such as the Disciple of Khaine, Runepriest (with a tactic that gives a 25% proc chance to boost the target’s armor every tick of their instant Heal Over Time spell), Ironbreaker, and others via various abilities, some being actual buffs, others being procs or short-duration effects.

Damage for magic, likewise, is affected by the three resists: Spiritual, Corporeal, and Elemental. Spiritual attacks encompass a lower number of attacks such as “holy smiting,” while Corporeal is done by most physical-effect attacks or things that affect your character’s physical actions (i.e. damage for every half a second or full second you’re moving, a big chunk of stone effect smashing down, a wind blast to knock you back, etc.), and finally Elemental, the most common resistance that spells check against, is of course things such as fire, water, etc.

Damage is primarily increased by your main stats: Strength for melee physical attacks (such as swords, shields, axes, and others), Ballistic for ranged attacks (such as a Shadow Warrior’s bow or a Witch Hunter’s gun), and Weapon Skill for both of those. Magical effects are determined by your Willpower and Intelligence: Willpower increases healing effects, or the healing component of spells with damaging effects (such as a lifetap that damages an enemy and heals you for that amount), and Intelligence affects the damage per second factor of your spells. Your Wounds stat gives you more hit points for every point you have of it (10 HP per point): in fact, your hit points are 100% based off of your Wounds stat and nothing else. Each class gains a different amount of Wounds (and other stats) each level. Equipment can increase your Wounds, as can the Warrior Priest’s buff high in one of the mastery paths (13 points to reach the trainable level, + 1 to train it, providing a 1.5x level boost to Wounds). Finally, your toughness score affects a flat damage per second reduction to help mitigate damage done to your character, which can have significant effects.

In addition, your resistances change how much damage you take from magical attacks. High resistances (such as 400+) will provide around 25% magic mitigation, but since most good items at the top levels only have around 50-80 of any given resist depending on their rarity, that can be hard to reach. Debuffs for resists, stats such as toughness, and others affect this. Buffs for them of course reduce the incoming damage, within the scaling mechanism of diminishing returns. Buffs for Wounds are very rare (but significant: 600 HP from the Warrior Priest’s group buff when he himself only has about 5800 HP at Rank 40 on my test character), and only a couple of classes per side (Order or Destruction) have buffs for other stats and resistances. Buff bonuses are affected by your Mastery levels, and speccing higher in their path does indeed raise their effectiveness by a good amount, similar to how a damage spell or heal would be altered.

On another note for resistances, while they are “soft-capped” at 40% (about 680 points), resistance debuffs are based solely on the numbers, not a percentage. So, “over-capping” your resistances to, for example 800 for around a 43% resistance effectiveness, is quite valuable, as a debuff that might normally take off 200 points, leaving you at 25-26% resist if you had exactly the soft-cap, would only bring you down to about 37% resist by “over-capping” the resist (800 - 200 = 600 resist left, for that percentage, versus 680 - 200 = 480 as an example).

The only way to increase the effectiveness of your buffs and other skills aside from tactics, Mastery skill, etc. are very rare and powerful armor pieces at Rank 40 that provide +1 or 2 to a Mastery (or the incredibly rare ones that do +1 to all three). These count as extra skill points in the tree for effectiveness, but do not allow you to train a skill you don’t have enough natural points invested in a line to train. For instance, if you have 6 Mastery points invested, and you need 7 to be able to purchase an ability at the 7th spot on the Mastery line, a +1 skill item will not enable you to spend one more point to purchase the ability: you would have to invest one more actual point to be allowed to then purchase the ability still. Think of it like +skill items from Dark Age of Camelot, where it increased the effectiveness of your spells/abilities but did not change the skills you had. The other way to get additional Mastery Points or effectiveness for them is Realm Ranks: at RR40, you get your first bonus Mastery Point, and one more for each milestone after: RR50, RR60, and RR70. These are actual points you can spend for abilities or to move up the line further. At RR80, you gain an innate +1 effectiveness bonus to all three lines, though it is not an actual point (it works like the item bonuses do).

As you may or may not be aware, Mythic does not typically release much information on the formulas behind how things work. Most buffs and debuffs however seem to be 2-3 x your level for the actual number of points they do. Most damage spells or healing spells scale on a 1.5x-2.5x multiplier, with DOT spells and HOT spells having scaling typically higher than others in that range. Mastery points seem to boost things around 2.5-3% per point invested in the line. Note that the Mastery points improve your skills by raising their effective level: they do not provide an actual flat bonus percentage. Items with +Mastery skills can provide effective levels of over 40 total, while the current system only allows actual trained Mastery points to provide an effective level of up to 40. These items will be very rare as well as hard to obtain, but quite powerful.

One final note: you can have a melee attack which deals magical damage (and can therefore be blocked or parried, but will mitigate based on magical resistance types) or a magical attack which deals physical damage (and can therefore be blocked or disrupted, but will mitigate based on armor) (paraphrased info from NLevy of Mythic). Basically, your defenses are based on the attack type: if it’s a melee attack that does magical damage, it can be blocked/parried/etc. but is mitigated by its magic type resistances, not your armor. The same applies for ranged attacks that do physical damage, though: they can be disrupted or blocked, but not parried, yet they will be mitigated based on armor because they are doing physical, not magical, damage.

Lastly, here’s the breakdown on what each stat does for your character:

These statistic descriptions are based directly off of the in-game tooltips and clarifications that the developers have posted. Note that the flat DPS increases will be changed to a percentage-based system as of the 1.3 “Land of the Dead” patch cycle. All stats are “soft-capped” at 1,050, at which point they grant half-effectiveness for anything further granted by items, buffs, etc.

Strength is a flat damage-per-second (DPS) increase on your melee abilities, which also affects autoattack damage and activated abilities. Additionally, it reduces your enemy’s chance to block or parry your attacks.

Ballistics  is the same as strength, but affects your ranged physical abilities (such as a bow and arrow, or a Witch Hunter’s pistol). It reduces your enemy’s chance to block or evade your ranged physical attacks.

Weapon Skill changes how much armor penetration you have as a percentage, which is around 20% on average as a Witch Hunter at Rank 40. This is a percentage of armor on the enemy that your attacks will completely ignore. It also boosts your chance to parry physical attacks.

Toughness is a DPS decrease for all attacks against you: basically, a flat damage reduction that counters increases from others.

Wounds is the stat that your hitpoints are based on. Each point of Wounds gives you 10 HP.

Initiative is your chance to detect stealthed enemies, as well as the stat that reduces enemies’ chance to critically hit you. Due to the formula it is based on, the higher initiative you have, the less gain you will see for adding more initiative per point as a percentage reduction. Thus, flat “reduction in chance to be critically hit” items are quite valuable.

Intelligence is “strength” for magic attacks, offering a DPS increase on magical abilities to make them quite a bit more potent. It also decreases the chance your enemy has to block or fully resist/disrupt your magical attacks.

Willpower changes how much you heal someone for on a DPS basis. A heal spell or ability “proc” that you cast on yourself is affected by this as well, as you are in that case the caster. It also increases your chance of disrupting/outright resisting an enemy’s magical attacks.

Thanks to this, I personally have found it very fun to explore the zones. Most everything in them has some sort of purpose for being there, whether to help contribute to the lore of the zone, guide you towards a Public Quest, or be a fun spot to romp through and see (one example being some statues with Tome of Knowledge unlocks of some famous Warhammer characters hidden away!),  it’s all good. I rarely felt like a zone was “too full” and more like a small forest than an expansive valley with surrounding canyons, or a true area of land with enough mass to really exist on its own. You can and will find spots that the developers knew people would find just by exploring, and you’re going to find a lot of easter eggs hiding out for your efforts, from XP bonuses, to item rewards, to Tome unlocks, to plain incredible sights, there’s a lot to find!

There’s one way I’d describe WAR’s classes: Amazing. Simply amazing. The classes, even though there are twenty (20) of them in the game as of launch, are all very varied with distinct play styles and ways they accomplish their roles in combat. Even the “mirror” classes between Order and Destruction play very, very differently from one-another. While a healer is an archetype that is supposed to “keep the group alive and healthy” the way you go about it as each class is quite different.

While a Runepriest is focused more on heal over time spells and damage, the Archmage is more of a direct healer with lots of debuffs and a little crowd control. The Archmage is best off balancing its damage/healing output thanks to the High Magic mechanic, while the Runepriest is effective doing either as the situation dictates, providing a more steady output of damage/healing, but less burst effectiveness than the Archmage. While the Runepriest has lots of heal over time spells allowing him to be more proactive a healer, the Archmage has more direct healing effects that don’t linger. The Archmage by default is more offensively oriented, while the Runepriest is more of a defensive type.

Another example of this sort of distinction would be the Chosen and the Ironbreaker. Yes, both are tanks, but they perform their roles, again, in a very different manner from one another. The Ironbreaker uses his “Grudge” mechanic to help build up power for special attacks and enhance his normal ones, unlocking some abilities only once he’s accumulated enough Grudge. He also is able to buff his Oath Friend in the group (a buff he casts on a groupmate that gives him Grudge every time they’re hit, and makes many of his attacks buff the Oath Friend and himself, instead of just being self-buffs). Additionally, he has some crowd control, and is extremely durable in combat while being able to continue attacking for extreme lengths of time thanks to the Grudge mechanic. Balancing your available Grudge with the abilities you can use that deplete it, or keeping it around to boost your normal abilities, is a nice tactical decision to make as to when to use it or keep it.

The Chosen, on the other hand, has auras that pulse around him, and is more focused on offense than defense to help his team. While the Ironbreaker can go up to the front lines and do some good damage and crowd control, he does very well staying closer to his support. The Chosen’s auras are powerful, such as resistance debuffs or damage, and make him a target you want to take down for sure as they are more than an annoyance. He sacrifices defense somewhat for this, and durability, but gains quite a few special tricks to make up for it. So, even though both are tanks, they really do things differently to achieve the same end result: harry the enemy and damage them, while protecting your support and trying to force the enemy to focus on you rather than them.

Overall, I have not encountered a class that really didn’t mesh with me except for the Engineer, which mainly is because I played classes similar to it in other games so much that I wanted something new. I tried every class to the end of Tier 2/beginning of Tier 3, as well as most of them with pre-made templates that gave Rank 40 plus Realm Rank 30-40 for many of the focus tests as an Elder beta tester. Between that and having played Dark Age of Camelot since its launch for over six and a half years, I can say with confidence that while there are fewer classes, the hybridization is just right to make them all fun and less straight-forward.

If you are a former or current player of Dark Age of Camelot, read no further: it’s much like that, though without special artifact abilities. If you’re not, it basically boils down to roughly 85% skill, 15% gear as far as the split goes. The best gear will probably give you a roughly 15% advantage in terms of character power over someone in lesser/average equipment. A good player is able to turn an advantage like this into a landslide, but then again, a skilled player with worse gear is going to generally be able to beat a worse player with somewhat better gear fairly reliably, luck and situational circumstances notwithstanding.

It absolutely is not at all like World of Warcraft where gear made such an immense difference in character power that you may as well not try bothering to fight back if an enemy had much of a gear advantage. While it’s a nice tool in your arsenal in WAR, it is not the thing that truly dictates a fight unless two people are of even skill, in which case it gives them a small but decisive edge that could be overcome with some luck and improvised tactical play. You’re not going to see weapons that do twice the damage of ones that most people have, or give a doubling of stats. While there are lots of good items to strive for, and are worth getting, they aren’t going to be the difference between life and death in duels (1 versus 1). For group on group combat (6v6) you will see an even lesser divide as was seen in DAOC.

At Rank 40, while you’ll want to get a decent set of gear, there is no true “need” to go for the absolute best the game has to offer if you don’t have the time or even don’t want to, period. Yes, they do convey some advantage, but the overall required “grind” amount will be significantly lower than games such as WOW, and around the same as modern-day DAOC, which has undergone many changes to Master Level and Artifact requirements to make them easier to obtain. With the soft caps and diminishing returns on stats, there will be a need to make sure your items fit together well. While not being full-fledged templates like they would be in DAOC, Talismans will provide a small level of adding stats to armor and weapons in a way that mimics having a spellcrafting slot or two on an item. Note that at launch there is no player-made armor or weapon in the game at all, so you will have to put forth an effort to fit things together nicely and use Talisman-making gems to make it work, ala DAOC. One major advantage over the spellcrafting system is that these gems can be applied by anyone, though they have to be made by a Talisman crafter of course.