Monday, September 8, 2008

WAR Open Beta Impressions

Didn't get to play much Eve over the weekend. Just enough to switch skills and take a refresher tackling class with the Uni. So if you're only interested in the Eve bits, I suggest you hit the back button on your browser now.

Still with me? Good. I went into the Open Beta with a plan to level a character as high as I could which in this case would have to be 20 as that was the cap put in by Mythic for the beta. I wanted to go Destruction as I was planning on rolling a Warrior Priest as my main come release. But which class to go with? Since I purposefully avoided playing a tank class with my initial experience in the Preview Weekend, I opted to recreate the first character I rolled when WoW was released: an Orc Warrior named Nazghul. Currently, he's Rank 12 and RR 7.
  • Games Workshop. Again, I can't help but notice the dated look of your logo especially in 1680x1050 detail. This might have looked really cool in the 80's but haven't you guys made enough money yet to consider upgrading it?
  • Liking the look of the Black Orc but what else can you expect from the Warhammer IP? Is it sad that I like the look of the low-level gear on my Black Orc better than the gear on my level 70 Orc Warrior?
  • The Black Orc has a combo-like system where you build up to a move using previous lesser moves. It's pretty nice in PVE but was not so usable in PVP. I don't know if it was lag or my own fat-fingering that lead to every combo failing and having to start over again. There would also be times where I thought I'd be at one stage of the combo but I'd look at the action bar and discover I was at another.
  • One of the first things I did was move my Morale bar right in the middle of my screen above my action bars. This way I couldn't miss my Morale abilities lighting up like I would've had they remained at the default location. I suspect I will be doing this for all my future WAR characters.
  • I got a buff that had a 25% chance to proc on every attack. This increased my HP by a few hundred points and healed for the amount it did so. Incredibly powerful in PVE as I was able to grind non-stop with my HP bar barely budging and I'm sure it must've been annoying in PVP.
  • Tried the new Talisman making tradeskill. Was able to scavenge quite a few mats but couldn't quite get any fragments which is the key component needed. After I broke down and googled it, I found you needed the Salvaging skill to provide fragments. Salvaging is like disenchanting in WoW; you can re-use old magic gear to provide mats for new enchantments (talismans). So I went back to train Salvaging but finding a trainer proved to be troublesome. I finally had to go back to the previous tier of content and, if I was on an Open server, I would've been a chicken the whole time. Found a bug where it let me enter the previous tier's scenario as well. I was queued for a tier 2 scenario and while I went back to retrain found that the tier 1 scenario had popped up for me. Since I couldn't find any option for leaving the scenario, I decided to see what the consequences were. I found out my level made me nigh unkillable in that scenario and after some fun holding off the entire Order side for a while, I decided to just quit the game and come back in. Found out talismans you make can have a duration so I hope higher-level ones are permanent or I don't really see much use to them. I also noticed my higher level gear had a noticeable lack of talisman slots compared to lower-level gear.
  • Soloing really sucks compared to WoW. I can see this as a game where you need a guild like you need a corporation in Eve to fully enjoy every facet of the game.
  • Ran out of PVE content and wasn't too keen to take on the challenging mobs of the next Greenskin chapter just yet then I remembered a trick I used in WoW and flew out to the other race starting areas to gorge on the more level-appropriate content there.
  • Scenario queues need to be looked at and improved. There were pretty long wait times and I couldn't be sure if the problem was lack of interest or otherwise. Also, the ability to queue the other race scenarios without having to fly there every time would be nice.

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