WAR thoughts on it.. from BETA

[mlwhitt]

Well back a week or so ago I said that I didn't care about the game, but over the weekend I played "A LOT" in beta and now I am hooked. I am going to try to dual-box as there are macros, assist and follow commands. Right now I am going for a Black Orc and Goblin Shaman.

[Dor]

this is from a post on wow forums, but is pretty much the same way I felt about warhammer

gotten up to about 16 several times on different characters and so far war pvp is ridiculous right now. it'll get better when you hit 40 and are with premades but even still there are bizarre things about PvP.


pvp consists of:

AOE CC that lasts for 10 seconds with no diminishing returns and no way to escape the snare (until later levels for most people and even then immunity only lasts for 10 sec)

massive aoe damage zerg fests (bright wizards lol)

seeing 2 ranged dps from a mile away, running away immediately, but being chased down by 2 ranged dps with instant attacks that hit from the other side of the moon (with snares to boot) and that, depending on the bugged ability in question, will go through walls, stone, trees, etc.

general zerging (pugs are not going to remotely work. ever. and forget trying to pvp with 2 or 3 people when you're getting zerged by 8 that suddenly come around the corner and snare you)

collision detection which is AWESOME when the only way to the top of a keep is one tiny staircase blocked by 10 billion people with ranged aoe in the back unloading non-stop.



plus some odd UI design choices:

the camera snaps back facing your toon's direction when you start moving, meaning it's impossible to really click or mouseover things while moving unless its right in front of you. infuriating. this also limits your maneuverability a great deal.

you can't bind mousewheel up or mousewheel down to anything but zoom in and out




and to top it off the PvE mob pathing is still completely !#!@ed ("Target Not Attackable" = an evaded mob that is immune but can still attack you... about, oh, every 5th mob... better run away, reset, hope you don't aggro other mobs, and that said mob isn't still bugged!)

the UI responds a bit sluggishly

and of course balance is a long way off


good things:

questing is fun and painless as far as "uh where do i go, wtf? guess i open up wowhead. again" moments go as well as "ok, cmon just one more quest drop" moments (quest drops are awarded automatically when you kill something, they are not looted or RND affected)

public questing is fun and refreshing way to get gear but... some public quests will suffer from not enough people there at the time to complete all the stages or you'll be in an area that has like 1 tank if that and you can't complete the later stages without a tank or 4 so... so much for that gear!

you can queue for pvp from anywhere and when you enter the pvp zone and it finishes you are teleported back to where you accepted the queue

leveling is not a grind in any real sense

great graphics


in sum:

war will be great but uh.... expect it to take many months for things to get sorted out so it's actually as fun as it can be. right now it is very unpolished and the Head Start is only a week away or so. frankly things will be a bit stupid for awhile.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...79751605&sid=1

[Ðeceased]

Ive played for a good while now... seems a lot like wow but missing something somehow, cant really put my finger on what tho.

I'm not in Beta sadly :S but whenever i see a vid i get that feeling too. But i think i may know where that feeling comes from :S

the first thing is movement..

If they increased everyone's walking speed by say ~10-15% it would make a huge difference and greatly speed up combat. currently movement seems somewhat sluggish :S

then it's all about numbers.. WoW actually hit the nail on the head in the way they have the damage displayed on opponents (especially the crits).. watch those movies where ppl use SCT exclusively scrolling slowly at the side of the screen.. to me it just seems a little boring :S now i know, it shouldn't be about numbers.. but it definitely has it's appeal.

there's also the fact that every vid i've seen from WAR has ppl keyboardturning which makes my brain hurt :P (that's ofc different for Mboxers)

then there is an issue with spells to my mind.. whilst I've been reading though them intently and love the balance they have been given, there is a slight discrepancy between the visual effects and the damage done. I sometimes got the feeling that half the group should have been wiped out by a huge explosion (by one of those crazy pyros >.<) and yet everyone took just a little bit of damage. Whilst I'd hate for them to mess with the damage, as the balance seems quite good, I would even go as far as tone down the graphics on some spells (the lesser ones) and increase it on others.

I dunno, I just can't wait to try it out

[kadaan]

I got a Disciple of Khaine to rank 8 before the server I was on (Forest of Shadows I think) crashed Friday night and never came back up before the open beta ended. I played a few other classes to 3 or 4. My impressions from about 12h of playing:

- Don't use Octopus. Any time I click either mouse button with Octopus running it snaps the camera into top-down view. After closing Octopus it worked fine.
- Classes seem very generic. Disciple of Khaine and Warrior Priest were exact clones with different ability names. The ranged 15dmg ability, the melee 25dmg 25AP ability, the same 250pt 'heal' pool (one was blood, one was spirit,) the same buff that gives you a 20% 22heal proc, etc.
- Public quests are fun, but I hope they add a bunch of instances eventually. Also being #1 in contribution and rolling a 1 making you last for loot sucks.
- The RvR instances are nice and quick. I played the one where you get points for capturing both nodes then it resets, and the one like AB with three nodes you fight for constantly.
- Crafting is... lame and feels like a late addition. Only three gathering professions and two production ones. Cultivating (plant seeds to grow weeds/fungi,) scavenging (all npcs drop 'broken' gear you can salvage/repair, kinda like disenchanting I guess,) and scavenging/butchering (getting meat from animals and random pick-pocket like items from humanoids,) Apothecary (like an Alchemy,) and Talisman Making (like enchanting/jewelcrafting.) There's no world-node gathering, and no way to craft armor/weapons.
- The interface feels bloated. The on-screen messages are irritating, the chat window feels klunky, every now and then I'd have messages overlap (a lot of stuff by the minimap would overlap, even after I lowered the UI scale.)
- Movement just feels... off. It doesn't feel smooth, but when I think about it and watch it the animations _are_ smooth, so I'm not sure what about it bugs me exactly.
- 'Evade' bugs. I've had a lot of npcs give me an out of range error when I attack with melee, even though they're right next to me beating on me. You just have to run away till they reset and try again. This happened a LOT on one of the public quests in the Dark Elf area, the one where you kill 75 little tree guys, then 8 dryads, then the boss. I did the PQ 4 times and all 4 times the final boss had this bug.
- There's no official forum. No one-spot to go for tech support issues and to read about known issues. I'm not too excited about searching through a dozen different forums to research problems I'm having.

On a scale of 1-10 I'd give it a 7. It's fun and I'll probably play it till Wrath when I'm not raiding, but I haven't seen a single thing that would make me want to switch over from WoW.

[daddyd302]

Does anyone know if open beta is closed or the servers are down or something? I can't seem to log on. I'm liking this game and mostly likely gonna buy it. I'm not too sure on dual boxing as pvp is not good when your own realm mates can block you as you try to chase someone down. I don't mind not being able to run through the enemy, but not being able to run through your own realm mates is kinda dumb in my book. That will make it hard for me to dual box.


Edit, nevermine open beta is done, I'm in the game as a pre-order now.