Improving RvR in Warhammer Online Part II: Keeps

My first post about improving RvR in Warhammer Online dealt with Battlefield Objectives and suggestions to make them worth taking and defending beyond the simple desire for free bonus renown and influence. In this post, I'll delve into the keeps and my suggestions for improving keep battles, both for offense and defense. Though some of this applies to fortresses as well, I think that Fortress attacks should be truly spectacular rather than simply a larger, laggier keep, so I'll have a more detailed Fortress post later on.

I originally started writing this several months back, and since then, there have been some changes to keep defense that I would like to touch on before we get to my ideas about improving keep combat.

First off, and the change with the most impact, was the fix/addition of the ability for melee DPS to enter keeps via the postern doors. This has added a welcome facet to keep sieges. No longer are you always safe while pouring the oil or manning the walls. You have to always keep an eye out for that Witch Hunter or Choppa sneaking in through the side door and charging into the defenders. Single-player defenses are much less effective than they were before.

Another new feature is the addition of Ordnance. Ordnance can be found as drops from players, and in random locations around Battlefield Objectives and Keeps. Players can use these items to purchase upgraded, ranged siege equipment that does more damage. Sounds great on paper, but the exorbitant cost makes this addition completely useless. It costs 900 Ordinance to purchase one of these siege engines. After several weeks of play, picking up Ordnance everytime I see it and grabbing a dozen or so from our Guild Vault, I have a grand total of 50. So, at that rate, I can look forward to trying out one of these new siege engines in October of 2010!

And finally, we have the new keep upgrade system. This allows guilds who have claimed keeps to spend more gold to upgrade the keep. Again, this system looks great on paper, but the charges are ridiculous, resulting in players upgrading keeps when they come under attack, and then downgrading them once the attack is repelled. Basic cost is 3.6 gold per hour. Each upgrade after that adds anywhere from 1.2 gold per hour to 6 gold per hour. So with just two upgrades, you're already looking at paying at least 10 gold per hour, which adds up very quickly. (note: and apparently, the upgrade costs are being taken from the guild vault every 3 1/2 minutes instead of every 5, which further compounds the issue). I understand that there needs to be a noticeable cost for owning a keep, but this is a little much. I think that increasing the base cost of keep ownership and lowering the cost on most upgrades would be a step in the right direction.

So there we have the recent changes. And though I like them, and they have altered keep battles a little bit, it's still not enough. Follow the link below to continue reading and see my suggestions for further improving keep combat in WAR.

Currently in WAR, keeps are very simple affairs. Bash down the door, bash down the second door, kill the keep lord. This has been slightly improved recently with the change to allow melee DPS to enter enemy keeps via the postern door, but it's still basically the same assault and defense, modified only by the number of defenders and attackers.

Keep sieges should be epic events. Siege engines firing on both sides. Tanks cursing as they swing the ram against the door and do their best to avoid being boiled alive. Attackers trying to scramble up siege ladders and gain a foothold on the wall while the defenders throw them back. Battles swirling across the entire keep area and surrounding environs. Something to be remembered and where different tactics can come into play on a siege by siege basis.

One of the main problems with keep defense is the sheer speed that a warband can tear apart an undefended keep. A full warband can destroy both doors and the keep lord in under 5 minutes. Simply receiving a message that a keep is under attack, running or recalling to the nearest flight master, flying /loading to the correct zone, and then running to the keep can often take several minutes. And that's just for a single individual. Trying to actually organize a group to defend the keep takes much longer. Generally, significant keep defenses only occur after there has already been some activity from both sides in a zone. This has changed a bit with the ability to upgrade the amount of hitpoints on keep doors, but they are still very flimsy when focus-fired by a significant number of players.

On the other side, taking a heavily defended keep is extremely difficult. So often, the general strategy when hitting a zone is to take both keeps first, as you'll hopefully be able to secure them before any sizable defensive force arrives.

Improving on these issues requires a careful balance. We want to make keeps hard enough to get into that it gives potential defenders a time to respond once they hear that the keep is under attack, but we also don't want to make it overly difficult to assault a keep.

So there are several things I hope to accomplish with this proposal:

* Provide more time and easier methods of responding to keep attacks

* Make it easier for attackers to stop stragglers from entering the keep

* Provide more assault options to reduce the issue of single, monotonous bottlenecks

* Spread the combat out in and around the keeps

* Provide more decision points for both attackers and defenders during a siege


I'll break this down into specific sections, though of course, since this is all about keep battles, there will be overlap between the concepts.

Defense Improvements

Front doors. Currently, keep doors are ridiculously fragile when hit by a full warband. I've seen them destroyed in as little as 60 seconds. Front doors should mitigate 90% of all non-ram damage. This puts the door focus back on the ram crew, which is where it should be. Everyone else should be guarding posterns, manning siege engines or trying to lay down suppressing fire on the walls to help keep the ram crew safe.

Oil. Oil should do more damage, making it nearly impossible for anyone to go beat on the door while the oil is being poured. It does decent support damage currently, but any group with decent healers can easily outheal the oil damage. Oil currently relies on other AoE attacks at the ram in order to kill anyone who isn't overly squishy and/or missing a healer.

Patrolling guard groups should have a champion to lead them. The leashing range on patrols should be heavily increased. It would be nice if they would chase all over the keep, only stopping if they lose line of sight for a few seconds. To avoid someone kiting an entire patrol on their own, ranged guards should have a snare attack.

Ranged guards on walls. Regular guard-types, except they are rooted. Also, the biggest problem with rooted, ranged AI in MMOs is their inability to switch targets. If their current target runs out of LOS, they should look for and acquire a new target. They should also be killable and respawn at the same rate as other guards.

Portcullis. Every keep should have a portcullis (gate) on the inside part of the main entryway through the outer wall. This cannot be destroyed, and must be opened via a lever in the tower above the gate. Bashing down the front gate is just one step of the attack. There should be a lever in the tower above the gate that controls the portcullis, allowing the defenders to drop it down in the middle of a charge, cutting the attacking force into two parts. This creates a strong incentive for the attackers to grab and maintain control of the gate tower.

Keep recall scrolls. At some point, this was listed as a reward for high-level guilds, but either its been removed, or its much too far up the guild progression meter. These should be relatively expensive (lets say 50 silver), and when used, should send you directly to the keep that your guild has claimed. If your guild doesn't have a keep claimed, then the scroll is unusable.

Offense Improvements

Rams. Rams should be more interactive. Hitting it near the sweet spot should have a major effect. Currently, its hardly noticeable. Whats more important is having warm bodies on the ram. As long as the controller is swinging, it really doesn't matter much what the other players on the ram do. I often take the opportunity to grab a drink or go to the bathroom when I have a secondary spot on the ram. If everyone hits the ram meter at 50%, the ram should do 50% of normal damage. Make hitting that 90-100% section more important than it currently is. Rams are already difficult to set up due to AoE, oil and the extremely low health of the ram pad. But getting one into place should be the primary focus of a frontal attack. Rams should also mitigate 75% of the incoming damage to those using the ram. Manning a ram is already a boring and thankless task. At least make it easier to survive while staring at the door and the ram-o-meter.

Postern attacks. Postern doors should be attackable and destroyable. The doors should be tough, and the area just inside the door should be a narrow, cramped, killing zone. Attacking through the postern should not be the best nor the easiest choice, but it should be an option.

Opening the gate from the inside - A lever in the room above the outer door that allows an enemy player to open the door. Casting time should be long (15 seconds maybe?), and should be completely interrupted when receiving any damage. Add a couple of champion guards.

Siege ladders. 5-second casting time, completely interrupted on damage. Once in place, it takes a defender 5 seconds casting time to throw them down, at which point the ladder is destroyed. Climbing up the ladder also takes a 5 second, interruptable cast. On completion, you're transported to the top of the wall where the ladder is anchored. These are only usable on the outer wall (and if it helps, you can even add in 'pads' for them). They should also have a cooldown, maybe 30 seconds or so (and only triggered after successful usage) to prevent insta-invasion via siege ladder.

General Improvements

Doors - Postern doors AND front doors cant be used while you are in combat. ALTERNATIVELY, make them actual doors that open and close so that if you want to open the doors to allow your friends inside you can, but, if there are enemy players nearby, they might be able to dash inside as well. At the moment, it is much to easy to run through the sieging force and jump in the front door, which is completely ridiculous. You should have to fight your way inside. Or, if that's impossible, harass the sieging force from the outside, picking away at their numbers while causing a distraction and forcing them to turn some of their forces to deal with you. Even if you can't get in the door, it's still possible to be ressed to inside the keep as long as you have a friendly healer on the walls. But the dash through the middle of an enemy warband to be insta-ported to safety inside needs to be thrown out entirely. Excursions from inside against attacking forces should almost always come from the posterns. Hopping in and out the front door to harass the ram crew is another annoyance that needs to be removed from the game. If you're coming out the front door in the middle of a siege, it should be because you have an army behind you that is charging out as well.

The main issue with this suggestion, is that once you're in combat, it's hard to get reflagged as being out of combat during a siege. I'm not exactly sure how to resolve that. One option would be to allow exit door usage during combat, while disabling the ability to enter a door during combat. That way, if you want to go out and make a suicide run, you're welcome to do so. But getting back inside safely is not as simple as frantically clicking on the door.

Ranged Siege. Ranged Siege is almost useless in most keep battles. Their damage output is too low, and the speed with which the front door usually falls makes their setup time. Increase siege engine damage. Add a short knockback to ballista attacks and a short-duration snare to catapult attacks. It also doesn't help that a number of siege pads, both inside and outside of keep, have poorly planned placement and/or LOS issues. Someone should take the time and carefully go through each and every siege pad, trying out various siege engines to make sure that every option is viable.

Multiple Points of Interest Inside Keeps

Another big problem I have with the current WAR keep design, is the fact that 90% the space inside of the outer walls goes unused. And some of the keeps have a number of buildings and other such things that would make battles in and around them interesting, but there is no reason to hang out away from the main keep unless you're trying to hide.

So, I propose that there be a number of important capture points within the walls that if owned by the defenders provide from defensive advantage. Unfortunately, a lot of the Tier 4 keeps aren't designed with this feature in mind, so you have places like Bloodfist Rock, which is nothing but barren ground inside the walls, and XX, which has almost no space to place any points of interest, so there would need to be a pretty significant overhaul of the keep layouts in order to make this idea work.

Here are a couple of suggestions for possible Points of Interest that would be worth fighting over within the keep walls.

Barracks - This will be the spawn point for all patrols in and around the keep. There will be a flag here, guarded by the guard captain (hero level NPC). Once the captain is killed, the attackers can take control of the flag (which would be presence-controlled, like many of the flags in scenarios). If the attackers control this point, guard respawns stop completely.

Respawn point - For the defenders. That's right, a respawn point within the keep! This would make it much easier to defend the outer walls (which will be needed with the alternate methods of getting past the walls mentioned earlier in this post), and also give those who can get in via the postern something to focus on besides the oil cauldron.

Teleport-in pad - To go along with my suggestion above about allowing guilds to recall to their owned keeps, there should be a certain, controllable spot within the keep walls that the attackers can take to prevent the Keep Recall scrolls from working for that keep.

Final Thoughts

So there are some ideas. Even though a lot of details are glossed over, I'm going to cut it off at this point to avoid writing a novel on the subject.

In short, I would love for keep sieges to be larger, more varied and more interesting affairs all around. A lot of these concepts won't stand alone, and some may be hindered by current game mechanics, but no armchair design doc should ever be implemented as-is. But I do think that some tweaking and brainstorming around these ideas could lead to some exciting and innovative changes to siege combat in WAR.

How to Acquire RvR gear with tokens in Warhammer Online

Another in my series of WAR guides, attempting to explain Mythic's poorly documented RvR schemes.

The latest RvR system change comes at us with recently released patch 1.2.1. As of this patch, there is now an additional way to acquire the RvR set gear. These items can still be found in gold reward bags from keep/fort/city captures, but now you can also collect the new medallions, and use these to purchase the gear.

The are several sources for these medallions: drops from enemy players; rewards from keep and fort captures; rewards from keep and fort bags; and rewards for T4 zone captures.

Enemy players now have a chance to drop one or more medallions as loot when they die in addition to their normal loot. The type of medallions players drop is based on their renown rank. The highest level medallions can only be found as drops from players with a renown rank of 71 or greater! Loot bags from keep/fort/city captures now give you an additional choice of taking a lump of medallions instead of the other rewards. If you don't win a loot bag at a fort or keep capture, you are automatically awarded Officer (or Conqueror for forts) medallions which will appear in your backpack. Being present in a zone when its captured will also automatically drop a number of medallions into your pack. Successful defense of a keep, fortress or city invasion will award medallions also. And finally, there is a repeatable, chained series of RvR quests in each warcamp for which the final quest rewards 4 Officer medallions.

High-level medallions can be broken down into numerous smaller ones, but they can not be reassembled into larger pieces, so take care when breaking down a medallion.

So what do you do with all these medallions you have collected? Well, you use them to buy armor! All of the RvR set gear, from Obliterator on up through Sovereign now requires these medallions to purchase, with prices increasing as you go higher up the ladder. You can no longer buy any of the RvR set items with gold alone. The vendors in keeps still only have a limited selection of the RvR armor sets, but there are not several new vendors in the Viper Pit that sell all the pieces.

Note: RvR set boots still have a chance to drop as loot from players based on their renown rank, so it is still possible to acquire the boot armor pieces without ever winning a loot bag or a single medallion.

Edit: As of April 24th, Mythic applied a hotfix to the servers which now gives a chance for gloves from all the RvR sets to drop from appropriate level players. So you can now acquire two pieces from each set without using any tokens.

How to Dominate a Zone in Warhammer Online

With the release of patch 1.2 yesterday came the new Zone Domination system for Tier 4 RvR areas. As a supplement to my previous post about How to Lock a Zone in Warhammer Online, I present my summary of how this new system works...

First off, I find Mythic's mention of 'points' in the domination system is kind of misleading. There really is no accumulation of domination points. You can't save points for later nor can you gain multiple points from one objective. It's more of a binary system. You either dominate a zone or you don't. To dominate a zone, you have to have full control of ALL objectives and keeps in that zone. To gain full control of a keep, it has to be under your realm's control, and claimed by a guild for two hours straight. To gain full control of an objective, it has to be controlled by your realm for 30 minutes straight.

In short, to lock a zone via domination, everything in the zone needs to be controlled by your realm, and all the timers displayed on the map need to finish counting down. If an objective is under your realm control and has no timer, then you don't need to worry about (aside from stopping your foes from taking it from you). If a keep is under your realm control and has no timer, first off, check to make sure that it is claimed by a guild. If it is, then everything is great. If it's not claimed, then you need to get a guild to claim it ASAP if you're trying to lock the zone via domination.

Allowing the other side to take an objective adds a minimum of 45 minutes before you can lock the zone via domination (15 minutes until you can retake the objective, and then you have to control it for another 30 after that). Allowing a keep to fall adds a 2-hour minimum wait (not including the time needed to retake the keep) before the zone can be dominated and locked.

So if you're going for a domination lock, acquiring, claiming and holding the keeps is of primary importance. Objectives are more fluid and you don't have to stress out too much if they get taken while the keep countdown is still going. But, once the lowest keep timer gets to under an hour, you will want to capture all the objectives and keep them out of the hands of the other realm. This usually equates to stationing a few people at each Objective to slow down attackers and to also send out a timely warning. You'll also need a decent sized group at a central location that can respond to these attacks in a swift and brutal manner.

On the other side of the coin, to stop a zone domination, all you really have to do is take a single objective every once in a while. The difficulty comes when the opposing realm has enough bodies to follow the tactics outlined in the previous paragraph. You either need a warband that has enough force to quickly overwhelm an Objective and then hold off attackers for the three minutes it takes to capture the flag, or you will need multiple coordinated strikes and feints so that your foes aren't able to respond quickly and effectively enough to interrupt the captures.

Also, one very important thing to remember is that Zone Domination is not the only way to lock a zone. The previous system is still in place (IE, accumulate ~97 victory points). Zone Domination is simply an alternate method of locking a zone, and you can work on both paths at the same time. Zone Domination will likely have a larger effect on servers with severe population imbalances and off-peak times on all servers.

Warhammer Online: Patch 1.2 First Impressions

Here are some random thoughts from my 4 hour play session, of which ~90% of that time was in the RvR areas.

Seems like load times for zoning have decreased. My lag was about the same as usual. I didn't have any of the crashes that a lot of players were complaining about last night.

The Twisting Tower scenario is interesting, though it does seem overly laggy. Also, I'm really tired of the whole pie-throwing gags, especially in scenarios. We don't need extra distractions in the middle of a pitched battle. Add in achievements for accomplishing the goals in the scenario rather than throwing pies! I also had WAR lock up on me in the middle on the new scenario as the eye 'cleansed the tower'.

Being able to see everyone in your warband on the mini-map and full-size map is pretty sweet. And the graphic dot used to denote the position of other players in your warband is very distinctive and readily stands out on the maps. I can finally tell where everyone is with a quick glance at the map! Certainly you can say that this is something that should have been in on release, but at least they've polished it up at the same time they fixed whatever issues were causing players to not show up.

Not much comment about crafting, as I don't really do any in WAR. I do have a low-level cultivator and was happy to see seeds available on the guild quartermaster. It was also exciting to occasionally get dye ingredients. I haven't read up on the details, but I thought I would be able to get seeds back when harvesting, which so far, hasn't happened. Perhaps my skill level is too low?

The new RvR domination system is interesting. It definitely spiced up the RvR last night. I think we've had a total of 5-6 zone flips since the patch (probably more by now). I haven't yet decided whether the constant zone flipping will be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run. Previously, I always felt a strong sense of accomplishment when we locked a zone. And I still felt that last night (especially after expending a lot of energy to defend numerous assaults on Objectives we had locked down), but I wonder how quickly that will pass.

Some RvR zones have now have a contested PQ. We completed it a couple of times in Black Crag as we passed, simply by killing the dwarf slayer guarding the flag. Not sure if something different happens when you keep your hero alive instead. It also wasn't clearly explained that you pick up your reward in a chest off to the side of the warcamp. If someone in our group hadn't known, we probably would have missed it entirely.

Things are a bit different in PvP now. I'm still working on figuring out how I want to setup my tactics since a lot of abilities have changed. And I'll need to respec my mastery points sometime soon, as one of the mastery tactics I had previously purchased is now a 2-hander buff (I use a one-hander and shield). I ran the Da Biggest shout pretty much all night. Not sure if anyone in my group noticed the additional buffs they were getting. And despite knowing beforehand that melee DPS would be able to enter the postern doors of enemy keeps, it completely slipped my mind in the heat of battle and I was very surprised to have several White Lions charging up the ramparts! I look forward to seeing how this plays out in the future. It did seem overly easy for them to simply run through the patrolling guards and get to a spot that was safe from the NPCs. I think there should be several guards stationed inside of every postern so that they have to fight to get inside rather than simply Flee their way in.

Crowd control is still out of hand. I spend over half of any large-scale fight either disabled, knocked down, disarmed or rooted. It's especially bad for melee as roots effectively bring your contribution to the battle to 0. Burst damage also seems to be pretty crazy at the moment. I started thinking about equipping the wounds and/or toughness tactic for most of my tactic sets. I'm also hoping that will start seeing some small class tweak patches over the next few weeks.

WAR 1.2 Patch Notes - Initial Thoughts

Last week we were given the first iteration of the patch notes for Warhammer's much anticipated 1.2 patch. And, as of today, the PTS is up and running, though character transfers are not yet available. My comments below are from simply reading the patch notes. I have not yet seen any of the changes in action myself.

Overall an interesting set of patch notes. No real major changes to classes, but tons of tweaks and fixes. Every single class got a buff of some sort, and a few classes had minor tweaks to reduce abilities. I also notice a lot of notes about changing abilities to receive less bonus from stats. This sounds like they're working hard to keep the emphasis away from gear. This also tells me that Mythic is confident with the foundation of their classes performance, which I can mostly agree with. While some classes could use some rejiggering, I don't think any current classes need a complete overhaul (though there was a developer post stating that they planned on making future changes to how the Shaman / Archmage class mechanic works).

It's interesting to note that neither Disciples of Khaine nor Warrior Priests, both classes which are generally considered to be slightly overpowered, received any nerfs. In fact, they both received a number of minor buffs. But looking at all of the changes we see a lot of minor damage increases and changes to damage types for abilities for every class across the board. I would hazard a guess that Mythic feels that this general damage increase / change will help balance out the incredible survivability that these two melee healer classes can demonstrate.

I like all of the animation fixes. I get stuck animations on a regular basis, either as a result of being disabled or having my target die during the animation. Hopefully they'll actually work properly! And though I didn't see it specifically mentioned, I pray that the 'ghost' mounts issue will be resolved as well.

Crafting changes look nice. Cultivation got a lot of love, which it desperately needed. It's also good that they've reduced the insane variety of additives. And of course, I think everyone will be happy about being able to use potions and have their effects stay with you for the entire duration, even through death! I think that crafting will be a lot more interesting after this patch.

Good to see some RvR changes as well, though I imagine a lot of players will complain that its not enough. But from the looks of things, I would guess that more intense changes are coming further down the road. This patch mainly just fixes a few issues. The zone domination concept is interesting, though it seems like it will overly easy to flip zones in off-peak hours. Allowing melee DPS to get inside of keeps is huge and should make keep defense much more interesting (and probably obsolete my late-night 1-orc, oil-pouring, wrecking crew). Already there are lots of threads claiming this will make it impossible to defend keeps. And while it will make things more difficult, especially for small, defending forces, it wont make it impossible. And you have to keep in mind that this is simply a first, small step to making Keep and Fortress battles more exciting.

Lots of other fluff-type fixes and changes such as changes to the party / warband UI, new variations of mount graphics, the ability to right-click on items in your pack to use additives while crafting, and many many other little tweaks.


All in all, good stuff, in my opinion. And, of course, this patch is also the beginning of the event to introduce the Choppa and the Slayer! The addition of these classes will certainly liven up the lower tiers as well as fill a much-needed role in Dwarf and Greenskin guilds.

Improving RvR in Warhammer Online Part I: Battlefield Objectives

This is the first in a series of posts with details about how to improve and embiggen Open RvR in Warhammer Online. This post deals with everyone's favorite renown farm, Battlefield Objectives! For this post, I'm not going to deal with whether or not BO's should given renown/influence/experience. Instead, I want to focus on making Battlefield Objectives a meaningful and important part of Open RvR that are actually worth fighting over and defending.

Click the link below to read on for details.

The basic concept here is that Objectives give bonuses / advantages to those who control them. However, I've also thrown a wrinkle in to give them more flavor and to also make it so that pushing zone control back towards a fortress becomes harder as you lock zones. So, the bonuses for Objectives work for both sides in the center T4 zone, but then as that middle zone is locked and the war is pushed back towards a fotress, the Objective bonuses only benefit the 'defending' side. The attackers will still want to control the Objectives to deny the bonuses to their enemies, but they won't receive the bonuses themselves. This concept is designed to instill a desire for control of the Objectives prior, and during, keep assaults.

To give specific examples, I decided to create a list of potential Battlefield Objective bonuses for all BOs in the Dwarf / Greenksin pairing. I tried to match the bonuses to the official Tome of Knowledge Lore for each objective, but some objectives just don't really make sense. Thunder Mountain is particularly bad about this (come on now! An out-of-the-way, tapped-out Gromril mine that goes nowhere?! Who cares?). Below are my partially thought-out suggestions, along with the official, in-game descriptions for the Objectives.

Black Crag

Lobba Mill - Though goblin constructions are semi-chaotic messes of thrown together bits of whatever is handy (which often includes weaker goblins), their machines are suprisingly effective. The Lobba Mill is one of the most productive spots for production of siege engines in all of the Greenskin lands.

Control of this objective grants a 20% damage bonus to siege engines for all Destruction players in the zone.

Despite its unassuming name, the Lobba Mill is Black Crag's most prolific rock lobber construction camp. The mightiest Lobbas in the Waaagh! are built in the camp, and the abandoned Dwarf stone quarries that dot the mountainsides provide more than enough ammunition for even the longest sieges.

Squiggly Beast Pens - These pens are the source of some of the biggest, nastiest Squigs around.

While the Pens are controlled by Destruction, there will be several champion-level squig and herder patrols added to all keeps controlled by Destruction in this zone.

While the Night Goblins of the Old World Mountains have always been the most cunning, nasty and independent of greenskin tribes, its often easy to capture a few here and there. When kept in small groups they are more craven than rats, and easily forced to work. Most often they are put in the squig pens, where their considerable expertise helps Grumlok and Gazbag's Waaagh! grow the some of the most vicious squigs in existence.

Madcap Pickins - The mysterious shrooms found in this area of the Crag have been known to drive some shaman crazy, but their potential for bolstering magic power is too great to ignore.

While this Objective is controlled by Destruction, all Destruction players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their chance for critical heal and spells increased by 3%.

If there is one thing that Goblin Shaman know how to do when they aren't eating mushrooms, it is growing them. Among the dank mountain caverns many different varieties grow, and every shaman knows that the best mushrooms grow in the darkest, muddiest, and smelliest places. Of particular valley are Madcap mushrooms, a type so potent as to enhance the sorcerous power of the Waaagh! to unpredictable intensity. Consuming a single mushroom will turn a normal Goblin into a frenzied, frothing lunatic. Few Goblins, shaman or not, survive and encounter with a Madcap mushroom, but that hasn't stopped them eating them by any stretch.

Rottenpike Ravine - Controlling this objective allows the Goblin Shamans to harness the restless spirits that linger in the area and utilize their energies for protection.

While Destruction controls this objective, all Destruction players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their magic resistances increased by 100.

This brambled and terraced ravine has been a hideout for all sorts of riff-raff, vagrants, and vagabonds. It is a place of death, and is haunted with the spirits of the innocent men and women who were killed here. In the middle of the ravine is a bend called Hell's Half-Angle where everything from bad luck to full-scale military ambushes seem to occur. The debris of dozens of carts and wagons and towed items such as cannons are strewn about, and even found in piles, and made into defensive redoubts by some forgotten army. In terms of the war, it is an ideal choke point on an obvious line of advance, and both sides desire to control it.

Thunder Mountain

Doomstriker Vein - Controlling this important source of Gromril is vital to creating higher quality weapons and armor.

While controlled, Doomstriker Vein increases melee damage and armor by 5% for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

While many Dwarfs march to secure Thunder Valley against the coming greenskin Waaagh!, an elite few must follow the direct orders of the High King and obtain the gromril needed to complete the Doomstrikers. Only through the strength granted by these mighty weapons do the Dwarfs have a hope of turning aside the massive horde commanded by Grumlok and Gazbag.

Gromril Kruk - Though the Gromril in this mine has long since been tapped, controlling this mine is a source of pride for both sides.

Whichever side controls this Objective will receive a +3 bonus to Morale generation.

Also, controlling Gromril Kruk and Doomstriker Vein at the same time provides a teleport option between the two locations. If either becomes contested, the teleport is disabled.

For the Dwarfs, Gromril Kruk has transformed into the cruel joke of Thunder Mountain. Recently discovered, the area was heralded as a ripe new source of gromril from which the Dwarfs could finish the Doomstrikers and rebuild their kingdoms. However, the vein gave out quickly and suddenly, proving as false as an Elven promise. No sooner had the Dwarfs come to grips with this truth than a contingent of Orcs took up residence in the barren mine. Now the Dwarfs must contend with a constant stream of enemies from the depths of their false hope, while they scour the mountains for what gromril they can find.

Karik Palik - 10% damage bonus for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

I couldnt find a description for this objective.

Thargrim's Headwall - 10% armor and resistance bonus for all players and RvR NPCs on the controlling side.

The campaign to capture the summit of Thunder Mountain is a long, painstaking affair. The route to the top of the mountain is narrow and treacherous and easily defended if one holds one of the many choke points alongside the mountain.

Thargrim's Headwall is a large defensible stone redoubt overlooking two smaller redoubts below it on the path up the mountain. As the first major choke point in the route up the mountain, he or she who controls the Headwall can easily frustrate the movement of an enemy army up the volcano.

Note: The above two Objectives were hard to create flavored bonuses for. Apparently, they are both meant to be choke-points, but they really don't serve as that function in-game. Riding past either is no problem, though Karik Palik could potentially be a choke-point if there were player defenders there.

Kadrin's Valley

Gromril Junction - Keeping the trains running on time is important for quick manuevering and defense of this zone agains the rampaging Greenskins.

While Gromril Junction is under Order control, there will be an active teleport to/from Order warcamp and this Objective.

The Dwarf railroad stops at this station at least once every day, as the train engineers proudly boast. The Dwarfs are as hard-nosed and inflexible about keeping this train running as they are about anything else, and will not tolerate any mischief that would cause the trainmaster to have to delay the timetable. The greenskins are fascinated with the idea of interfering with the train, stealing its valuables, slaying the stunties who run it, and at last, breaking the thing into small pieces if they can.

Dolgrund's Cairn - Possession of the Cairn instills a sense of pride in the Dwarven folk and their allies.

While this objective is controlled by Order, all Order players in the zone will receive a +3 Morale generation bonus.

Dolgrund Dralminsson, former commander of the Gharvin's Brace Regiment, gave his life fighting a rear-guard action centuries ago, single-handedly saving the lives of a hundred seven Dwarfs. The burial site of Dolgrund Dralminsson is sacred to the Dwarfs, for no action is as undeniably Dwarfy as an embittered last stand. The greenskins have sensed that they can easily goad the Dwarfs into a fight at the Cairn with a few well place piles of drek, yet such a decision may prove foolish at such a revered location.

Icehearth Crossing - This tunnel provides a quick, easy and secure route for forces moving north and south through the valley. Securing and maintaining control of this tunnel is of vital importance.

As long as this objective is controlled by Order, there will be level 55 Dwarven hero guards blocking the north end of the tunnel.

Icehearth Crossing marks the main passage through the Icehearth Crag. During the winter the cold is so intense that only a being blessed with the legendary stoutness of a Dwarf could bear to cross from one side to other. In the battle for Kadrin Valley, the underpass has proved a valuable route, and both Dwarf and Orc bleed in its chill caverns.

Hardwater Falls - The icy falls provide a source of fresh, clean water for the dwarven camps in the zone.

While this objective is under Order control, all Order players and RvR NPCs in the zone have their health increased health by 10%.

A large waterfall continually pours gouts of fresh water into the Kadrin Valley, where the water collects in many small pools and streams that trickle through the lush terrain and rock formations.
The Dwarfs now call the area the Hardwater Falls after the freezing torrent of water that blasts down from the rock above. The Dwarfs are trying to preserve this source of water to keep their armies supplied, but the Orcs seek to defile the waters in anyway they can.

Are these suggestions balanced and fair? Probably not. Are they all equally useful? Again, probably not. But I'm not a Mythic developer. This is merely meant to be a rough sketch of what could be done to make Battlefield Objectives important, valuable, and interesting.

Addendum

Personally, I would actually consider taking it a step farther and making the bonuses race-specific for the zone. For example, Madcap would only effect goblins. While I'm sure a lot of folks would complain about it being unfair, so what, life is unfair. These additional restrictions would add a different dynamic to the game. I can imagine that Greenskin and Dwarf players would be more interested in fighting in the Dwarf / Greenskin zones because thats where they would get the bonuses.

But if it were race-specific, then you could do interesting things such as making the bonuses bigger and/or adding in potential negative side effects. For example, we could say that Madcap Pickins increase the spell crit chance by 10% for all goblin shaman, but also gave them a 2% chance of being overwhelmed by Waaagh! energy when casting a spell and being disabled for 3 seconds.

But, I know how much most players hate that sort of restriction, so I'm merely adding this suggestion as a note rather than incoporating it into my main proposal.

Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style: Part II

I figured it was about time for a followup to my initial post about altering the UI for WAR. Unfortunately, Mythic hasn't done much of anything to address UI issues and make their default UI more acceptable (in fact they made it worse by introducing an annoying global cooldown flash that appears on ALL your buttons EVERYTIME you use an ability. I had to download an addon just to disable that 'feature').

So, I am now up 19 addons! Much more than I generally want to maintain, but every one feels needed and or useful at the moment. Click the link below to read all the details and see the screenshots (click on the images to see larger versions of the screenshots).

Here is a basic screenshot of what my UI looks like when I'm not doing anything in particular.



The square mini-map in the corner is provided by Custom Map. In addition to being more compact than the default mini-map, it also allows you to zoom out to region map feature, and displays info about your current influence level for the area you're in.

Simplified group and warband health displays provided by Squared. Has a ton of settings available. I have modified the class colors, the bar size, the text, disabled showing buffs for others and chosen a texture to give the display some pizazz.

Vertigo allows for creation of action bars. You are still limited to the six that the game comes with, but you can define how many buttons they have, and how many rows and columns each bar has as well. Excellent addon for those who like to customize their action bar layouts.

I have a four action bar setup. You can see my main action bar at the bottom. It uses three pages and is controlled by PlanB, which makes it auto change pages based on the progression of my Plan (Black Orc mechanic). Though this hasn't been updated in a while, it still works like a charm. Highly recommended for all Black Orcs and Swordmasters.

The bar on the right hand side has various potions and miscellaneous abilities. Most of my other abilities are on the other two bars which are hidden using Phantom, which is an addon that lets you hide all sorts of basic UI windows and parts that the default UI doesn't allow for. I have run into some issues where it won't reshow previously hidden bars. Something to do with configuring it on a different character. I'm not sure of the details, and it hasn't bothered me enough yet to look for a fix. But the author for it is one of the most respected and active modders for Warhammer Online, so I feel confident the issue will be fixed sometime soon.

War Effort is the little graphical display at the top, center-right of the screen. This addon shows the current status of all T4 zones, including current victory points for the contested zones. The display can be toggled on and off with the little 'W' icon next to it.



In this second screenshot, you'll notice that my current target has red vertical bars around them. These graphics are courtesy of Target Ring. This addon makes it much easier to keep an eye on your targets in a crowd. It uses green bars to denote your friendly target (unfortunately, I didn't have one at the time of this screenshot).

Clean Unit Frames are used to show health for myself, my target and my friendly target. Just a simple layout, without any unneeded fancy borders or graphics.

Duff Timer gets rid of the annoying cluster of buff icons (the number of buffs, debuffs and DoTs in this game is insane) that are constantly shifting and changing during battle, and puts them into a nice, timed display that includes the name of the effect. You can configure, move and size buffs and debuffs separately for yourself, your target and your friendly target.

The black boxes in the bottom corners are courtesy of SNT Panel. Pretty simple mod. It lets you create background panels that can be moved, resized and made transparent via the default UI configuration options. I use this for my chat windows, because the fade-out really bothered me and made it hard to see the text depending on the brightness and color of the terrain I was in. It took some careful resizing and placement, as well as help from a chat mod called Chatty Cathy to get the chat windows looking good in relation to the panels. Chatty Cathy allows you to remove the fluff from the chat windows, including the tabs and scrollbars. A simple slash command redisplays these items if you need to resize or change settings for your chat tabs.

Dammaz Kron is THE must-have mod for anyone that wants to track their PvP kills and deaths. It's very full featured and even integrates directly with your Tome of Knowledge. I'm so impressed by this mod, that I've included a screenshot of it, just to try and encourage others to check it out.




Then there are the addons that can't be seen in the screenshots.

alertMod - This mod allows you to change the size, vertical location, and duration of the text for the alert messages that pop-up in the middle of your screen, for example, the notification you receive when gaining a level. The default text is rather large and can be annoying when it appears in the middle of a fight.

Aura - Lets you configure pop-up icons and/or text messages that appear when certain events occur. As one example, I have an icon that pops up over my character's head when my health drops below 40%. Helps me quickly and easily know when I need to fall back or drink a healing potion.

Think Out Loud - Another mod that wouldn't be required if Mythic allowed you to put more than one action into a macro. This mod simply allows you to say configurable text when using abilities. You can even set the percentage chance that the text will fire.

Global Cooldown Remover - The flash appearing on ALL of your icons is especially annoying when you have multiple action bars. This mod simply removes the global flahs for that 1 sec global cooldown. This is one of those mods that I never should have needed to begin with. But when I had 4 visible action bars on my screen, seeing all of the buttons light up everytime I used any ability was driving me insane.

Realm Status - This is another RvR mod. This one has a couple of different features. One is that it shows you a summary of all victory points for all zones. This display can be shown and hidden with a simple slash command. But, the feature that I find most interesting is a pop-up window that informs you of any change in VPs for any T4 zone. Mythic isn't very good about accurately updating the status of keeps (and since the RvR addons rely on information that Mythic provides, they are generally slow to update as well), but when I see a popup window telling me that the victory points for a zone have changed by 15+ points, I know that a keep has just been taken.

Lib Slash - Required mod for slash commands.

Clean Cast Bar - Simple but sexy looking cast bar.

So there you have it. I actually consider this post a sort of mid-term update. The modding community for WAR is getting better at what they do, and the addons are becoming much more versatile and slick. I already have a couple of new ones that I'm keeping an eye on. Look for another WAR UI post in a month or so, hopefully with better screenshots as well!

The Liberation of Black Crag: A WAR Story

I wrote up this little RP story about one weekend afternoon when the Destruction forces on the Ostermark server locked the Black Crag zone, pushing Order back to Thunder Mountain. Now zone locks have become rather common on our server and occur daily at this point, but the reason this particular one stood out for me was twofold.

1) Order had pushed the conflict into Black Crag and controlled Thunder Mountain for several weeks prior to this. And being a very nationalistic orc player, that was just unacceptable from my viewpoint

2) This was the first time I had ever felt like I personally (along with a few guildmates), had made a distinct and noticeable impact on the zone control.

Click the link below to read the story.


"Skahin' hoomeez," Azh muttered as he picked up the limp body of the shaman, Khargug.

"Wake up ya dum git! It's time ta get ta smashin'!" Azh roared as he violently shook the poor goblin back and forth. A Witch Hunter assassin had snuck right in between the hulking Black Orcs and skillfully stuck a blade into the tiny shaman. The human had tried to make a quick escape afterwords, but while Orcs are often slow on the uptake, nothing stirs up their bloodlust quicker than seeing one of their own cut down in front of them. The red, pulpy remains of the assassin still lay at the end of the road leading out of the Black Crag warcamp as a few ravens circled, eying the fresh meat.

"Oi Boss! Me wakee, me wakee," Khargug groaned as he slowly opened his eyes. Azh set him down on the ground and the shaman muttered a few strange words, calling upon the power of Gork (or was it Mork, Azh could never remember which was which) to mend his grievous wounds.

Azh grunted in satisfaction as he saw the final two Greenskins of his band ride in across the bridge, two not yet fully-grown gobos, Pachum the Shaman and Scraak the Squig Herder. Along with the two other Orcs, Mlarak and Grubdug, Azh had gathered this small Shadowclan force here to probe the enemies defenses and see if they could wrest control of the Crag from the damnable stunties who had inhabited the many ravines of the area for much too long.

Azh had checked in with the goblin scouts at the warcamp who informed him that both keeps were already under the control of Destruction forces. All that was left to secure were the small, odd ruins below the Skar called Rottenpike, and the Squig Pen caves in the north.

But first, it was time to try and throw a wrench into the stuntie machine that allowed them to maintain control of the area. In a small, out-of-the-way niche amongst the many gorges and dead-ends of Black Crag, there was a vital crossing point over which the Greenskins and Stunties fought on a daily basis. Each side had a small encampment nearby, flanking a seemingly never-ending supply cache of Stuntie Boom Barrels. If the Greenskins could permanently blow up the stuntie camp there, they would have a tremendous advantage in pushing the front back towards Thunder Mountain.

So the Shadowclan band gathered their choppas, prepared their mojo and moved into the fray known as Howling Gorge. After nearly an hour of constant combat, including a number of encounters with the same Witch Hunter that had impaled poor Khargug earlier, Shadowclan withdrew, battered, tired, victorious, but ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to drive the stunties out of the area completely. Numerous booms had been placed, many foes slain and much blood shed, but it was not quite enough to destroy the stuntie camp. Shadowclan rode away from the Gorge, patrolling past Rottenpike and the Pens, discovering in both cases that some other clan had already secured these points. Continuing their patrol of the winding chasms and paths, the Greenskins happened upon a few unlucky Order and gleefully chopped them into little bits.

Finding no other activity in the area, the Shadowclan force once more headed back into the meat grinder known as the Howling Gorge, more determined than ever. This time was different. With the Black Orcs stubbornly carrying the Boom Barrel repeatedly, at great risk to themselves (Orcs aren't known for delicately handling anything), the Destruction forces set up a chain of support from the center cache to the stuntie camp, flowing back and forth in response to pushes and attacks from their Order foes. Explosions echoed through the rocks as the stuntie camp was obliterated from the Gorge once and for all.

Battle yells of victory rang out across the land as the powder-singed Shadowclan force emerged from the Gorge. After months of fighting the stunties on the doorstep of the Greenskin fortress, Black Crag had finally been liberated from their grubby little hands, and the push on the dwarf capitol could begin again in earnest.

Azh raised his choppa and gestured northwards as the group mounted up. "Guud job, boyz! On ta Tunder Mownt. Dem stunties gonna be hoppin' mad an us gonna be der ta greet dem when dem come out ub dem holez!"

Azh let out a roar and led his troops onward to the next battle.

How to Lock a Zone in Warhammer Online

6/22/09 Note: This post is about locking via victory points. If you are looking for information about locking a zone via domination, please see my other blog entry on the subject.

In Warhammer Online's RvR endgame, locking zones is the key to pushing the war front closer to your enemies and opening up fortresses and capitols to assault. However, the way this is done is not especially intuitive. So this post is my attempt to summarize what I have learned about the process over the past couple of months.


To lock a Tier 4 zone, one side needs to gain ~97 Victory Points in that zone. Victory Points are gained for controlling objectives and keeps, winning scenarios associated with that zone, completing Public Quests in that zone, and controlling the Tier 3 zones for that pairing.

Victory Points go as high as 97 and as low as 0 and will decay slowly over time if there is no action in the zone or its related scenarios (but the VPs will not fall below whatever the baseline is for the controlled keeps and BOs). Each objective is worth ~6 Victory Points, while keeps are worth ~15. So controlling all six points of interest in a zone will only give you about 54 total points.

Scenarios can contribute significantly to your faction's VP total, but the key is winning on points rather than having time expire. This makes the scenario objectives vitally important, something that many kill-happy players don't seem to understand. Winning a scenario with 500 points will grant your side 6-7 VPs for the appropriate zone. Winning because time ran out, on the other hand, only generates 2-3 VPs. Quite a difference!

PQs only give 1-2 points, which makes grinding PQs to flip a zone rather difficult and not especially efficient. PQ grind should only be considered if you just cant seem to get those last few VPs to lock the zone, or there is major overabundance of players on your side in the zone.

Skirmishes between players in the zone seem to contribute almost nothing to the VP total. Occasionally you will see a 1 or 2 point gain as the result of a large battle, but that's pretty rare.

The bulk pressure of locking a zone still seems to rely on scenarios. And as a result, scenarios are not always the casual, quick fun that they are in the lower tiers. And remember, scenarios only affect VPs for the pairing they are in, so if you're trying to lock a zone, it's best to queue for only scenarios in the pairing that you want to lockdown. Unfortunately, this relies of the other side also queuing for that scenario, but there are usually enough players choosing the queue all option to make it work. Supposedly, if the other side never tries to join the scenarios and you have enough people queued to get it started, your side will still get a few VPs, but I'm not exactly sure how this works.

In my experience, one of the best ways to lock a zone is to first win a bunch of scenarios to push your side's VP total up. If your opponents control the keeps, so much the better. It is unlikely they will notice your point creeping upwards unless you take a keep from them. If you can reach 40 or so VPs without controlling any objectives or keeps in the zone, then you're pretty much set. Run out and grab all the points of interest as quickly as possible, running a scenario or two at the same time to buffer your VPs and keep VP point decay from setting in too much.

To assist in your zone-locking attempts, I recommend installing an addon or two that will give you more information about the Victory Point progression. I use Realm Status and War Effort, myself.

War Effort is a nice addon that shows a window with basic info about all the T4 zones, including current VP count and keep status.

Realm Status is dual-featured. It has a window with VP info about every zone, and it also has popup windows that notify you about changes in VPs for the Tier 4 zones. I almost never look at the main window, but I love the popup notifications. By keeping an eye on these, I can generally get a good idea of whats happening in each zone without actually being there, which makes it easier to see when the RvR focus needs to be moved to a different pairing

Where me Choppas!?

It was with heavy heart that I read this interview with Adam Gershowitz and Josh Drescher where they stated that there were no plans to work on additional careers for Warhammer Online! Which means, that the Dwarfs and Greenskins are left out in the cold. Not only do we not have the racial capitols available for either race, but they are also both short one class, that of the melee DPS variety.

Having recently started working on some Tier 4 PQs with my all-Greenskin guild, we ran into some extremely difficult end-events for a couple of early T4 PQs, ones that it seemed would have been a lot easier with the capacity to output more damage. Makes me wonder if these PQs were initially designed with all four Greenskin classes in mind, but never re-tuned when they decided to cut one of the DPS classes.

In this post by Mark Jacobs back in March (which was in response to the outcry when he announced the major content cuts) he says:

As to the future of these careers, I would love to say that they will be put into the game at some point but I can't. We will continue to look at them and if we feel we can make them great, then we will put them into the game. If we can't, then we will put in other classes to take their place.

The emphasis is mine, but I think the point still stands. And the devs in the first linked post aren't just saying that there are no plans for Choppas, they are saying that there are no plans at all for additional classes! So given that there aren't even any ideas in motion, the earliest we would see any filling out of the Dwarf and Greenskin factions would be six months down the line!

When Warhammer was first released, I remember there being a lot of complaints about how completing PQs required tanks and how the Dark Elves and Empire factions were having trouble due to their lack of tanks. Now, they are magically blessed with new tank classes. So I just have to ask...

WHERE DA CHOPPAS!

Improving RvR in Warhammer Online

Mark Jacobs made a big announcement yesterday about Mythic's plans to focus on changing and fixing the RvR portion of Warhammer Online. It sounds like their brains are moving in the right direction, but I think there needs to be some significant changes to RvR in WAR aside from simply adding in an influence system.

Below are some various thoughts and ideas I've had about Open RvR and Keep Sieges in particular. And no, this article doesn't discuss the maligned contribution system and the gold bag rewards. I really don't care so much about the items. Having fun is my focus when I play. This post will also not touch on any issues regarding scenarios.

Note: My babbling below comes from playing up to level 31 on an active server, participating in a handful of Tier 4 battles and sieges as well as too numerous to count fights in Tiers 1-3.

Second Note: Most of this was written long before the announcement from Mythic linked above. But this information did prompt me to finish up this post.


OPEN RvR

Lets start this off with some talk about Open RvR. Open RvR is combat in the RvR areas, usually centered around Battlefield Objectives or pushing the opposing side back into their warcamp.

One of the big issues with Open RvR is simply the large, empty spaces. Coupled with scattered objectives, awkward terrain (such as thousand foot high cliffs), and lack of anything else to do, makes it very easy to march in, capture the area and then march back out without ever seeing an enemy player.

Another issue is the lack of purpose regarding Battlefield Objectives. Aside from the experience and renown gain when capturing them, these spots really serve no strategic or tactical use. Give each side a reason for controlling these spots.

BOs should provide some advantage to RvR in the local area. The buffs from the guard captains at BOs can be nice (aside from the fact that the easiest BOs to get to always seem to have the merchant buff!), but give us something interesting and useful. Maybe a long-range siege battery that if controlled by your side, can be commanded to drop AoE catapult-type attacks on either the keep or the besieging force.

Or how about Bugman's Brewery in Blakfire Pass or the Tavern in Tabelecland? If Order controls this spot, then the NPCs in the BOs and keep in this zone have plenty of beer to drink and thus are emboldened to fight harder. Something small, but meaningful like making them do more damage. BOs could provide also provide a discount to owning a nearby keep. For each BO owned by your side near the keep, upkeep costs for claiming that keep are reduced by 5%.

Here are some other thoughts and ideas about Open RvR in general.

• Markers on the world map are not up to date. There have been a number of times where I've traveled to a land where I saw the enemy held a keep, only to find when I arrived that the keep had already been taken by my side.


• Keeps under attack should have better grading of how much of an attack is occuring. One player wandering by and getting one hit in on a guard is treated the same way as an assault by four warbands with siege equipment as far as the indicators are concerned.


• On a related note, the cryers in warcamps should speak up whenever ANY keep is under attack. Along with slightly varying messages, such as "The outer door has been breached by our foes at Gnol Baraz!"


• Battlefield objectives should have a little marker on the zone map indicating whether or not they are available to be captured. It sucks to spend time running to an objective only to find that you can't even try to capture it yet.


• There needs to be more points of interest in the RvR areas. Something else to fight over besides the one to four focus points that are currently there. (Just one example.)


• Ability to bind in a Warcamp. Making it difficult to get to the RvR areas was not a good decision. Why do I have to bind in a PvE area? (note: This was just added recently but since it was already in my list of things to improve, I figured I would leave it in for future reference)
  
• More Contested PQs. There seem to be only a handful of these, and they are awkwardly placed so that one side has a clear advantage to accessing them. Contested PQs should be everywhere. Give us a reason to engage in PvP outside of the RvR zones


• Add in more NPC patrols to the RvR area when one side controls all the objectives. And not just around the fort, but between the BOs as well.


• NPC 'scouts' that shout out warnings about enemy warbands. If they see more than XX number of enemy players, they make a zone-wide shout announcing their presence and where the enemies are located. So, in order to move through the area without drawing attention, you would want small, scout-killing parties out in front of your main force that can dispatch the scouts without causing them to raise a zone-wide alarm.

KEEP SIEGES

There are numerous problems and bugs related to keep sieges. The biggest defensive issue is getting to the keep before its taken. A full, prepared warband can tear down the outer doors in the time it takes me to recall to the nearest warcamp and run to the fort. The problem for attackers is the lack of options and strategy. Basically, there is only one. Bash down the doors, charge up the one ramp and kill the lord. There really is no strategy involved. And if there are player defenders, the ONLY way to succeed is to have them heavily outnumbered.


Step 1: The Initial Siege

First off, someone really needs to very carefully go through every single siege pad in and around every single keep and check their LOS, as well as actual visibility (ie what the player can see). Their are numerous places where siege engines have no LOS to other siege engines, or, they are out of range. A catapult placed on a siege pad should never be useless. I should be able to see and target all the enemy siege pads.

Secondly, move the guards back from the doors. Having them run in and out constantly getting in single hits is extremely annoying and just plain dumb. Or better yet, keep them from runing through the doors altogether. And on a similar note, increase the leash range for the guards and patrols. Too often I see them rubberband back and forth because they decide to attack a healer who is out of their leash range.

Next up, you need to stop the ability for defending players to run inside through a gauntlet of foes. If a player is in combat, they shouldn't be able to go in through the doors at all. This will give the attacking players incentive to defend the postern doors, and it will also provide incentive for those inside to make a sally outside in order to secure that door for their reinforcements. Getting in and out of the keep should be about control, not about who has the most lag-free connection.

Add in some interesting siege options such as the Orcapult (Greenskin special catapult that Black Orcs can use to try and launch themselves onto the walls. Sometimes they miss with disastrous results.) Allow the option to seize the gatehouse from the inside and open the gates (put a lever in the gatehouse with a long interaction time that can be used to open the gates).

Along with these changes to give more options to the attackers, you need to help out the defenders as well. The main issue I've found when defending keeps is simply that by the time I recalled to a warcamp and ran out to the keep that was under attack, the outer doors would already be down. So give the gates some more health and make it more resistant to spells and bleeds (in fact, I think that doors should be immune to all sorts of things, but that's another issue).

Also, put some NPC archers up on the walls! What kind of shoddy keep defense has noone on the walls!?


Step 2: Inside the Outer Walls

For Tier three keeps and up, we really need to some more points of interest inside the first keep walls. You have all of this area inside the walls that is virtually useless and generally ignored. The only points of interest are the gates, the walls and the postern doors. Much too narrowly focused.

Having such a single, narrow focal point throughout the entire keep assault really makes things boring. Here are a few random ideas that popped in my head.

1) A Barracks with a hero-level guard captain. If the attacking players don't go and kill this captain, he periodically spawns a full group of guards that head for the front door. Not enough to seriously hamper a sizable warband, but enough to be annoying and provide another point of conflict in the fight for the inner keep. Attackers have a reason to kill him, while defenders have a reason to defend him.

2) Magical teleporter - This provides another way for defending players to get inside aside from the postern door and also a way for the defenders to sally from an unexpected spot. Attackers will obviously want to destroy this.

3) Add-in the ability to break down a postern door. These are doors after all. However, they are generally small and placed in awkward attack locations so that a ram cant be used. However, if the attacking players want to try and beat it down with their swords, that should be an option. Inside the postern door should be a narrow, easily defended hallway. Not the best solution for storming a keep, but something to add another layer of potential strategy and tactics.


Step 3: The Final Assault

Once inside the keep, things really get ugly when you have defenders (and are simply boring when you don't). Trying to crowd up a single-narrow staircase that opens directly onto a tiny room with more narrow stairs up to the third floor is just annoying. In particular, a heavy mass of players combined with the decreased room for camera angles makes this fight not much fun. Make the room bigger and make the Lord and his guards move faster if you're worried about players kiting them.

Make the inside of the keeps interesting. Currently they are extremely plain.

Turrets and whatever else attacking through walls, floors an ceilings is a pretty awful bug. This really needs to be fixed ASAP. These bugs seem to result in lots of extra lag as well.

One of the worst things about the Lord room is the fact that the Lord and his bodyguards reset when they reach the top of the stairs. And where is the first place they make a beeline for when they get low on health? That's right, the top of the stairs. The easy (and sensible) solution is to just make it so that they don't try to run at all. They should stay and fight to the death once engaged.

The inside of keeps definitely need some love. Multiple stairs, larger interiors, hallways and passages to fight over. One room down, one room up is so boring and uninteresting. The rooms themselves should be larger to start with. Give us some room to maneuver and engage our foes rather than having everyone pile up into one big mass.

Step 4: The Aftermath

Killing a Keep Lord is a bit of a letdown after the crazy combat of an all-out assault. Insta-spawn guards and keep lords are boring. Have the new troops spawn slightly outside the keep and march inside, taking their assigned spots.

I understand that supposedly, keeps NPCs do upgrade after a while when a guild claims a keep and holds onto it for extended periods. However, I have never seen evidence of this in-game, nor have I seen any official info about this feature from Mythic. It sounds good in practice, but given the fact that a keep can go from completely safe to dead Keep Lord in 20 minutes, makes it pretty much impossible to ever maintain a claimed keep on servers with active, balanced populations (and even on those servers a late hours raid could easily make short work of any NPC defense).

Pimpin' the Interface, WAR Style

After a month of getting by with the default UI options, I finally broke down and looked into installing some player made addons.

My general goal when looking at addons is giving myself more empty screen real estate and a cleaner, more streamlined UI. I like to do as much as I can with the built-in interface options and find addons that are simple and to the point, without a lot of extra fluff that I don't use. I also try to keep the number of addons I'm running to a minimum. The more you have, the more you have to worry about conflicts, updates, etc. Five or Six addons at most would be ideal for me.

I did quite a bit of interface tweaking in WoW via addons, and its obvious that the WAR addon community (as well as the WAR API that allows addons) is still in its infancy. So while the addons themselves are generally easy to install (simply copy the folder into your Interface -> Addons folder), they all use a variety of slash commands to change options in-game and there are a number of minor issues with a lot of them.

One of the first addons you will likely need is Libslash. This is a dependency that many other addons require. It allows the addon authors to easily incorporate slash commands to allow users to control the addon settings.

First off, a quick note about what I changed with the default UI options. Looking at this first screenshot you can see that I have hidden both my experience and renown bars. It's not overly important to me to know exactly how far along in rank I am, so out they went. I decreased the size of the game options bar and the zone control bar, putting both in the center. I've also broken my chat into three tabs and removed the combat tab altogether. One chat tab is the basic default tab, the other is for all guild and alliance chat as well as tells, while the third is for say, emotes, party, warband and scenario. General and guild chat tabs are on the left and the local chat tab is on the tight. I also moved around a number of screen elements to try and keep everything compact and near the edges of the screen.

Click on the images below to see a larger version.



In the bottom right you can see my minimap, provided by Custom Map. Not only does it remove the extra graphic fluff around the mini-map, but it makes it into a nice square shape (which is great for fitting it into a corner) and also allows me to zoom out to the zone level, which is nice for getting a quick view of the local battlefield objective and keep status. Current location is displayed above the map, and at the bottom of the map, it gives your percentage influence for the current area.

Warband and party healthbars are controlled by Squared. Makes everything nice and simple and also has numerous commands for changing the shape, size, layout, colors, etc. It has an option for displaying buffs/debuffs on players in your warband, but I have that disabled to try and improve my system performance. You can move the Squared display around by going into the Layout Editor and moving the Squared Anchor box.

The only issue I've had with this addon so far is that every game session, I have to go into the warband UI and manually tell it to not display the default warband healthbars. There doesnt seem to be a way in Mythic's UI options to just not display this. Apparently there are are other addons that will take care of hiding the default warband interface, but so far I've just been manually disabling it every time rather than adding in yet another addon.

Healthbars for myself, pet, target and friendly target are all controlled by Clean Unit Frames, I've never really understood why MMOS force me to look at photos of myself and those I have targeted. It would seem like this would be an obvious option to add in from the beginning. There is a little bit of weirdness with this addon in that each UI element has a small sliver of black space on the left side, and to get mouseover info on buffs and debuffs, you have to hover over a very precise, tiny area at the top of the buff icon, but otherwise it works great and has a compact, sleek look that I appreciate. Character rank and renown rank are both displayed on my healthbar. Champion, hero and lord level mobs are noted by the + signs next to their names on the target healthbars.

Vertigo is used to control the layout of the action bars. You can change the number of buttons each bar has as well as how many columns the buttons are arranged in. The bars can be moved and sized as normal via the layout editor. I have Action Bar 1 reduced to 6 buttons and use it for storing all of my attacks (it switched pages based on my current 'plan'. See the PlanB info below). Action Bars 2 and 3 are below that along the bottom of the screen and I altered the hotkeys for one of them to use the F1 through F8 keys. And then, over on the right next to the mini-map, I have a smaller, vertical bar where I store consumable items for quick usage.

MinChat is a simple chat mod to remove the scrollbar from the side of the chat windows and also removes the extra graphics fluff. The mousewheel is used to scroll through the text in the chat windows.



Note: It looks like I hadn't yet installed MinChat when I took the above screenshot as you can see the scrollbars on the chat windows.


On top of those I also have two mods that cant really be presented in pictures.

PlanB - This mod is a godsend for Black Orcs and Swordmasters. It sets things up so that your first action bar will change pages based on your current Career status. This way you can reduce icon clutter on your screen. Unfortunately, Mythic has it setup so that page 2 of action bar 1 is the same as action bar 2, which makes it kind of useless for people who want more than one action bar on the screen. Luckily, PlanB has ways to handle this. First off, I used the /planb pagemax slash command to increase the number of pages available. Then I used the /planb pages command to make it scroll through pages 1, 5 and 6 on action bar 1, so that those buttons wouldn't overlap with my other action bars. Very handy. I held off on installing this mod for a while, but as soon as I got it setup and configured, I kicked myself for not installing it earlier. It makes combat as a Black Orc much easier to deal with.

Buff Throttle - Controls how often buffs and debuffs refresh. Given the extreme number of these seen during RvR, this addon seems to be pretty much required if you are interested in engaging in large RvR battles. It definitely put a dent in the amount of lag I was having to deal with.

So that comes out to 8 mods total. One is simply a library for some of the other mods, and another is only in place due to WAR's poorly optimized client. I'm sure there are lots of other mods out there that many people would find useful. I don't do crafting and I also don't get a lot of emails, so I haven't looked into any mods that help out with those two features.

So this is just Round One. I expect to continue tweaking my interface (and in fact, I've already made some modifications since taking these screenshots). Look for another post on tweaking the WAR interface soon.

Warhammer Online: 2-week Impressions

It's been exactly two weeks since the official launch of Warhammer Online (not including the head start). And I thought it was about time for another post. Most of it will be complaints (because the annoying bits seem to stick in my memory), but I give the game a thumbs up rating overall!

In my last post I bitched about the dumb way that Mythic decided to roll out their servers, and I still stand by that.

My guild had initially chosen Skavenblight as its server of choice. But since that server wasnt open until the official launch date, it has a very low population. So low that we felt forced to switch servers. There just wasn't very much PvP action. And to top it off, Destruction had a great than 2-1 advantage in numbers, making our chances of finding a fun fight very slim. We switched to a more populated server (Ostermark), and even though we're a week behind most of the larger guilds, both in guild rank and character levels, our intra-guild activity is at an all-time high and everyone seems to be having lots of fun. Encounters with enemy players occur often, and the keeps come under siege from one side or the other on a regular basis.

Skavenblight is still a low population server to this day. And its unlikely that this status will change anytime soon. Most players want interaction with other players in their MMO, particularly when its focused on PvP. So new players will gravitate towards the more populated servers, leaving the low-pop servers out in the cold.

The interface needs a lot of work. Chat tabs have lots of issues (hopefully somewhat alleviated with todays patch). You're unable to customize what you see in the frames (for example, the large player pictures next the their status bar). Text sizing within frames is independent of frame size, so if I shrink down a window, the text shrinks with it, making most text unreadable. There is a lack of real options for the action bars. I can only have 1 2 or 4? Not 3? I can't turn them sideways? Or have them active but hidden? I'm sure some user mods will come out with these features, but since the game is only two weeks old, the mod community is still in its birthing stage. I installed a mod that gave me different unit frames, but then it screwed up my ability to edit the interface, so I had to remove it entirely.

I've also had horrible, horrible graphics lag in major RvR encounters. I've tried all sorts of changes to the graphics settings, but oddly, the one that seems to work best is using the default 'balanced' setting. Manually turning all the settings down and turning off the extra fluff seemed to actually make things worse. I also had someone suggest that I remove my combat log tab, which I've done. We'll see if that makes any difference.

Another issue I've run into with my guild is a severe lack of guild vault space. I can fill up our entire guild vault by myself after a couple of hours of PvE and Scavenging. There are just so many varieties of crafting materials. And for a large guild with 100+ players, this really becomes a major problem. We've ended up using the Guild Auctions as storage space instead. It's also pretty annoying that you cant stack items in the vault. You have to pull things out to your pack to get them to stack properly.

The amount of gold/level selling services spam via tells and in-game mail is pretty ridiculous. I reported them at first, but that doesn't seem to have much effect, as I find myself getting spammed by the same people the next day. Hopefully this will die down, as gold really isn't very useful in WAR once you get your mount. But this ties into my next point

No right-click functionality within the chat window. Right-clicking just brings up the options for opacity and such. I cant actually interact with the text in the window at all. I'm used to WoW where I can do such things as party invitations, sending tells and reporting gold spammers, all with a quick click. I have to say that I'm pretty surprised that such functionality didn't make it into WAR.

They just changed the way scenario queuing works other day so that you can queue for any scenario for your level from any zone pairing or the same Tier. This means that I can queue for the Chaos and Dark Elves scenarios without leaving my preferred Greenskin lands. This is an excellent change for those who love playing in the scenarios, but overall, I have found that I'm enjoying scenarios a lot less due to this alteration. No longer do scenarios have racial flavors. I used to go into the Gates of Ekrund and find that at least half, if not 90%, of the players were Dwarves or Greenskins. I knew that I could encounter my hated enemies there. Now its just a random mishmash of players from all over the world. All racial flavor has been removed. Also, this change has also had the undesired effect of pushing the average level of characters in scenarios up quite a bit. Now a large percentage of players are at the top end of the level range, making scenarios much less enjoyable for lower-level players.

Open RvR can be quite a bit of fun, provided that both sides show up for the fight. And though most large fights are reminiscent of the old Hillsbrad/Southshore battles back in the old days of WoW (ie. pre-battlegrounds), it has become apparent that there is room for tactics to play a part in the results. Using terrain to your advantage both to hide your own forces and to force the enemy into choke points is a viable strategy. Flanking maneuvers can also be highly successful. For example, a few nights ago there was a keep under siege by the forces of Order. We ran out there and went inside via the back postern door. But sitting in a keep waiting for the door to fall is not something I particularly enjoy, especially since I didn't have any siege equipment on me. So we sallied forth, catching a couple of players who were trying to camp the back door and then moving around towards the front. This resulted in some initial success, as we pulled a few players over and tore them up, but soon our foes realized what was going on and smashed our ranks apart, sending us back to the warcamp. After a couple of run backs and more defeat, the Order forces finally broke through, took the first floor and began trading long-range fire with the Destruction forces camped inside. Myself and several other players took positions out front, attacking any Order reinforcements that tried to run inside. A few of their stouter characters managed to get past our blockade, but we effectively blocked and/or killed the majority of them. This in turn forced those players inside to try and clear us out, which in turn gave the upstairs defenders an opening to push down to the first floor, and in-between our two groups, we crushed the remaining Order forces and drove their army back to their warcamp! Good times!


But beyond any issues I listed above, I am having a lot of fun, which is really the most important part of any game. All of my complaints can be fixed by Mythic to one degree or another. And in spite of those, I still login daily.

We have a large, active guild (which makes a huge difference), and there is almost always at least one warband engaging in RvR somewhere in the world. Just so long as I can get my graphics issues worked out, I see myself continuing to play this game for quite some time. My WoW time is way off in the distance of my rear view mirror and I wont be looking back that way again!

How to Screw Up Your Initial Server Release in an MMO (A Lesson from WAR)

1) Purposefully stagger your server launch so that the initial ones are overly full and the later ones are ghost towns.

2) Make copies of the full ones a couple of days later and encourage players to play on the new copies instead of allowing/encouraging transfers to the ghost town servers.

Warhammer Online: Preview Weekend Thoughts

Played some over this weekend, though I tried out a lot of different classes using my newly patented Smash 'Em leveling technique (queue for scenarios constantly as soon as you log in, doing quests while waiting in line. I hit level 5 and renown rank 5 in under an hour using this technique).

Here are some random thoughts and comments in no particular order.


I noticed that a lot more low-level items come with slots these days. I assume this is to give the as-yet-unreleased Talisman Making profession a use from the start. I just wish they would patch it in so we can see how it works.

It seemed to be very popular to level up to 11 (the max for the Tier one scenarios) and queue for scenarios. That way players could feel powerful by tearing through the lower-ranked opponents. But, since PvP gives experience gains (and pretty significant ones at that), at least these putzes will eventually level out of that Tier, which is a godsend in my opinion. None of that perma-twink BS that is the bane of low-level WoW battlegrounds.

I took some time to stop in one place and just look around, taking in the action that was going on. Even though WAR is a themepark MMO, they do an excellent job of making it feel alive, with NPCs fighting it out, reinforcements running around the camps, explosions and artillery combat happening at a steady pace. It would add some flavor to the game if these bombardments actually caused some damage (not a lot, just something to keep you on your toes).

Every class plays differently. I haven't played them all, but I've spent at least a few levels with Shaman, Squig Herders, Ironbreakers, Engineers, Bright Wizards, Marauders, and of course, lots of time with the Black Orcs, and they all have different mechanics or styles of play. Add this on top of the ability to PvP right out of the starting gate, and replayability becomes a huge draw for WAR (at least in the early levels. The grind might get more tedious as you get to Tiers 3 and 4).

Scavenging is a very useful money-maker. Butchering not so much, since animals are less common than humanoids.

Still no functioning banks, guild or otherwise. Same with the auction house.

The polish is definitely in progress. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the clunky feel of combat, but for those who have been in beta previously, the new system is much improved (though it can still use more improvement). The low-level game just seems a lot slicker and tighter than it did a month ago.

I haven't played all of the starting areas, but the Greenskin area seems to be a lot more compact. I felt like I was running around a lot more in the Dwarf, Empire and Chaos starting areas.

Warhammer Online: Guild Beta Impressions - Part III

Phase 3.3 saw the opening of the Tier 4 zones, along with character wipes and the ability to make level 31, templated characters.

Seeing the Tier 4 zones and getting a chance to try and push the zone control so that your side can assault new zones was interesting, but it also revealed some flaws with the system.


For example, its possible for your side to gain control of all the objectives and keeps in an area, but still lose control of the zone. I know that PvE and Scenarios also have an effect on the zone control, it just feels kind of weird to have physical control of a zone, but the magic meter tells you something different.

Keep combat is very one-dimensional. Attack the front gate, run in, attack the keep lord. The only difference with the higher tier keeps is that they require you to bust down two doors. The keeps look fancy, but 90% of the area is never used. It's also odd that there are no NPCs on the walls. You would think they could stick in some static archers.

Tier 4 areas have a bit of an interesting setup. In the middle there is a zone that is 80% RvR, flanked on either side by two PvE zones that feed into the middle zone for control purposes.

Thunder Mountain is the central Tier 4 area for the Greenskin/Dwarf pairing. It is a badlands type area, with a volcano in the center. Very cool atmosphere, very crappy for actually getting anywhere. Due to large chasms dominating the landscape, you often have to take a very roundabout route to get to where you need to go (note: this is for the RvR area. The PvE areas of the zone don't have this issue), resulting in a lot of running around. This is especially annoying because it is the RvR area. I don't want to spend more time running back to the combat than I do actually fighting.

The Empire vs Chaos area of Praag on the other hand, is a great RvR setup. Almost the entire zone is encompassed by the town, which each side having a warcamp on the outskirts to give them easy access to the interior. Objectives are on a general line through the middle of town, with one keep at each end. This is much more fun than running around on windy paths in Thunder Mountain. It also gives more of a feeling of an actual war, since you're fighting in a city instead of out in the middle of nowhere at some random spot.

I really think that Mythic will have to revisit the RvR zones for the other two pairings to make them as interesting. Currently, 90% of the outdoor PvP action happens in the Empire vs Chaos areas.

Another thing that really bothers me is zone control resetting periodically? I find this feature a bit odd. Apparently, you are under a time limit in regards to gaining control of zones. Otherwise, the zone resets entirely. Pretty lame design, IMO, but I guess it goes along with the theme park style of gaming. After several posts about this issue, I finally got some details from a Mythic employee. Once you start a keep assault, you have 60 minutes to win before it resets (though I'm not sure what exactly causes the timer to start. Hitting the front door? Destroying the front door? Attacking the keep lord?). Also, once one of the final fortresses is taken, you have 36 hours to take one of the other two, which will then open up the capitol for attack. If you don't beat the time deadline, the Tier for which the fortress was taken resets back to its default values. All objectives in that zone become neutral and the keeps revert to initial ownership. I find this to be a pretty lame mechanic. Maybe if they had an NPC spawn that retook the keep, that would be interesting. But as it is, it just suddenly pops back and you have to start all over from the bottom. My preference would be to leave it in the hands of the players to retake the keeps. Make the players actually fight for what is theirs rather than just resetting the pins for another round. But, I guess that goes along with the themepark MMO.

Leveling is definitely slower post 30. But its still not too bad. Definitely much quicker leveling than any of the other fantasy MMOs on the market.

I continue to be impressed with the whole open party concept. It works very well, with most successful open Warbands being formed around a small core of guild players. There are a few issues. The main one that bothers me is that I cant always see where everyone in my warband is on the map. But, this is a bug that affects all warbands, not just open ones.

Talisman making is still not in game yet, but drops for it have begun to appear. Some items have enhancement slots, so I am assuming that Talisman making will create items for these slots, kind of like Jewelcrafting in WoW.

Got a chance to play with some of the dye options. The colors seem to be a lot more apparent on the higher-level gear. And it does make your avatar stand out. Unfortunately, there are only a dozen or so color options, and some of them are priced differently. I've seen some hints in-game that they plan on letting Apothecaries create their own dyes, but it seems that this feature isn't fully implemented as noone has managed to actually make any.

The game has improved quite a bit over the last month. Things generally seem a lot smoother, particularly client-side. I still get occasional graphics lag, but it is vastly improved.

And before I finish up this post, I suppose I should talk a bit about the guild system. Forming a guild in WAR requires a full party of 6 players to gather at the guild registrar in Inevitable City. You then pay a fee, pick a guild name and you're all set. The guild window has several tabs, including one for managing alliances. The UI has a few issues, but all-in-all, its well laid out and fairly comprehensive. One of the more unique aspects of WAR is its Living Guild system, whereby your guild gains levels. Each level opens up something new, from standards, to special access to the guild area in the capitol, to designing your own, personal heraldry (which has quite a number of options to choose from). This system seems to work pretty naturally, and quickly as well. We had to remake our guild several times during the beta, but we were always able to gain back the early levels rather easily. The highest level our guild achieved was 9, so I cant comment too much on the details above that, but it definitely was a source of pride for us to see our guild growing as a result of our efforts to bash in some stuntie heads!