WAR NDA officially lifted. Post pics and info!

[daishinzo]

Do none of you have friends or guild mates? Almost my entire game experience is made better by playing with others. I do solo a lot. I in fact prefer to do so but I know it's a group based game and that is where having friends and good guild mates make this game a blast regardless of straight mob grinding, PQs, instances, Scens, RvR etc.

WoW sucked dick after a couple months too but I played it for a long time simply due to friends and guild mates.

And give me a break at leveling speed ffs. There is so much unused world out there because people don't explore shit and try and grind out so quickly.

Take some time to enjoy the game in all tiers, level with people you know and stop being such wankers. It's no wonder why every MMO will "fail" with all the crybabies who want their cake and to eat it too due to how the big dog MMO gives everything to everyone and if they don't get it eventually caves in after enough people bitch.

And no one is going to quit a game based on one scenario (bg). FFS AV was/is broken for years and I didn't see anyone do anything but bitch, bitch, bitch about the rest of them too and they still aren't "fixed" or balanced around class stacking, premades et al.

And on 11/13/08 I hope everyone leaves WAR to go back to WoW. I'd rather there be a tight knit PVP community again and merge some servers then listen to people wah about not being given this and my class isn't OP 1v1.

Deflate your e-peenors and roll to a less shitty server if you hate how yours is balanced or quit the game.

And wth at bandaging skill? Shit I play without a healer all the time and my game isn't made less enjoyable at all. If I die, I respawn. If I live at low health I move out of the thick untill I regen as soon as I drop combat in like 10 seconds.

[painbringer]

Originally Posted by daishinzo

And wth at bandaging skill? Shit I play without a healer all the time and my game isn't made less enjoyable at all. If I die, I respawn. If I live at low health I move out of the thick untill I regen as soon as I drop combat in like 10 seconds.

In pvp you are locked in combat = no regen.

I get more kills on me, than anybody else does.

Good fuckin riddance with finding a healer, if you play a sorcerer. Only reason i play one is because magus is worse, and i wanted a caster.

PS: It'd also be kinda fun if our spells were better and instant cast (Read like bright wizards)

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Tullaeniel

unlike other games this one doesn't start at 40

Wrong. T3 could have been an enjoyable diversion on the way to 40 if it weren't for fucking Tor Anroc, but it still would never have been more than a diversion.

[daishinzo]

Originally Posted by painbringer

In pvp you are locked in combat = no regen.

I get more kills on me, than anybody else does.

Good fuckin riddance with finding a healer, if you play a sorcerer. Only reason i play one is because magus is worse, and i wanted a caster.

PS: It'd also be kinda fun if our spells were better and instant cast (Read like bright wizards)

And what's the problem with that? If I go into groups of people solo I expect to die. If I get assist trained I expect to die. If I'm fighting 1v1 and don't think I can take them I pop one of the hundreds of pots that drop in PVE and PVP combat.

But when and if I live after taking out one or two people I just flee away off to wherever there aren't the "bad" guys and I get out of combat.

Yes I understand you play a class that with a healer would shine much harder but the same can be said when I have a healer.

And sorcerers are amazing for groups and I bet they become even more valuable in large scale fights.

Just wait till the majority is 40 before wreaking havoc with classes ;[

[x1hundredregrets]

Originally Posted by Vorph

Wrong. T3 could have been an enjoyable diversion on the way to 40 if it weren't for fucking Tor Anroc, but it still would never have been more than a diversion.

If Order stopped queuing for it, we (Destruction) couldn't play it either. Order could solve their own problem if they just boycotted.

[Necrolyte]

Originally Posted by Vorph

For a Marauder, you might be right. Try playing a class that takes three times as long to kill a mob, on a server with 30 minute T3 queues (and only Tor Anroc ever pops so you feel like logging off in disgust after one game), and get back to me.

You don't have guildies to go AE grind/PQ yet? That is the only saving grace for healers leveling outside of scenarios.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by daishinzo

Do none of you have friends or guild mates? Almost my entire game experience is made better by playing with others. I do solo a lot. I in fact prefer to do so but I know it's a group based game and that is where having friends and good guild mates make this game a blast regardless of straight mob grinding, PQs, instances, Scens, RvR etc.

WoW sucked dick after a couple months too but I played it for a long time simply due to friends and guild mates.

And give me a break at leveling speed ffs. There is so much unused world out there because people don't explore shit and try and grind out so quickly.

Take some time to enjoy the game in all tiers, level with people you know and stop being such wankers. It's no wonder why every MMO will "fail" with all the crybabies who want their cake and to eat it too due to how the big dog MMO gives everything to everyone and if they don't get it eventually caves in after enough people bitch.

And no one is going to quit a game based on one scenario (bg). FFS AV was/is broken for years and I didn't see anyone do anything but bitch, bitch, bitch about the rest of them too and they still aren't "fixed" or balanced around class stacking, premades et al.

And on 11/13/08 I hope everyone leaves WAR to go back to WoW. I'd rather there be a tight knit PVP community again and merge some servers then listen to people wah about not being given this and my class isn't OP 1v1.

Deflate your e-peenors and roll to a less shitty server if you hate how yours is balanced or quit the game.

And wth at bandaging skill? Shit I play without a healer all the time and my game isn't made less enjoyable at all. If I die, I respawn. If I live at low health I move out of the thick untill I regen as soon as I drop combat in like 10 seconds.

Yeah, forced grouping and "If you don't like it, quit!" worked so well for all the previous MMOGs that went that route.

Fuck's sake, don't people ever sodding learn?

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Necrolyte

You don't have guildies to go AE grind/PQ yet? That is the only saving grace for healers leveling outside of scenarios.

I do it whenever I can, but I'm lagging way behind the sorcs in level now. I think things will become more or less bearable again at 30/31, but 25-30 is fucking killing me. We have a lot of anti-PVE people too, otherwise I'd do nothing but AE grind until I was 40. I couldn't care less about doing another scenario until I'm max rank.

[Tullaeniel]

Originally Posted by Grumpy Old Fart

I think you missed my point above, so I'll post it again:

With the current stupidly low leveling rate in WAR, almost all of their "casual" players aren't going to be level 40 by 11/13/08 and might not be too terribly attached to the game. Everybody here knows what happens on 11/13/08. Mythic needs to fix the XP immediately, especially for healers in scenarios since it's so stupidly balanced there that you're better off doing PvE (as highest Healing Done, I usually get one-third the XP that Highest Damage gets).


If most people haven't gotten into the level 40 game by 11/13/08, I foresee 80%+ of them going back to WoW (and many have already left WAR: "Age of Crowd Control"). Mythic can fix this shit pretty fast by getting one of their more competent programmers (i.e., *NOT* the tools programmer retards who can't parse "www.ignmax.com" from their chat server and auto-alert CS) to move a decimal point in the XP tables (and cutting 90% of the fucking ridiculous CC from the game while at it).

You have got be kidding me you stupid mother fucker. First you say I am nerd raging since I called you out on your bullshit which I am about to do again. So far you have posted on here you have rerolled what 2-3 fucking times? And then you want to turn around and bitch about leveling speed, this game hasn't been out a month yet and people have already been sitting at max level for a week or so. Quite a few more will hit 40 before the end of the month without grinding out or rushing straight there, so give me a fucking break you piece of shit cry baby.

What the fuck makes you think that an XP bonus would get people to stay here over WoTLK. Look either you fucking like the game or you don't, and no artificial XP increase is going to magically make you change your mind. If you believe that truly then you are retarded. Apparently, this game isn't living up to your very specific expectations and thats ok but don't try and bullshit yourself into thinking you were going to leave for WoTLK. Pretty much everyone who wanted to play WoTLK was going to buy it regardless of if WAR was a hit or not. While I know as well as anyone else there will be people who will play WoTLK instead or the few that will play both I was a little surprised by this article on gamerdna.com

Every time a new MMO launches, it’s an event like, say, a really big meteor creating the Gulf of Mexico. It takes a few weeks for the dust to precipitate from the air before anyone can see what the new landscape looks like. And because no one’s really sat down and compared the numbers (not in public, anyway), it’s hard to predict future performance with any accuracy. We want to change that.

Part of the problem with making predictive posts, of course, is that with MMOs there are too many variables. The smoothness of the launch is a big factor in the early weeks, but hardly a reliable indicator if the company has a solid product and takes immediate corrective action. (For example, WoW had a really stupendously crappy launch. Crashing servers, overloaded and laggy servers, long queues, the works. However, everyone got over it. As everyone can tell you. Anarchy Online’s launch looked much the same, but the forgiveness never flowed quite so abundantly.) The first patch is a big milestone, as all of the issues that really couldn’t be tested on a large scale can now be addressed. How a company handles that is a big indicator of their ability.

It’s also very difficult to predict what other titles will be affected in the long term by any given launch. MMO players are by and large fascinated by the genre, and will try anything. “Promiscuous” is one word for the behavior. However, WOW is a success in part because they brought a lot of new people to the table. Their customers are not necessarily MMO players, but specifically WOW players.

We here at GamerDNA are keeping a very close eye on the numbers over the next few weeks. AOC created almost no long term disruption to the market leader except among PVP fans who don’t feel fulfilled (or even addressed) by the PVP action in WOW. But the opening numbers for AOC indicate that there is a significant subset of WOW users who are looking for something new, even if they are still sufficiently satisfied by WOW to return should the new experience not meet their needs.

We’ll go back to this theme in the coming months. For now, here’s the opening data.

We specifically looked at a sample of people who told us they intended to play WAR, so bear in mind, this is a group that was never NOT going to try the new game. These were the people anticipating the title, not people who just sort of randomly tried it out. Our sample has 250 people in it, and the number on the Y axis is “days logged in.”

Please note: To an MMO vet, “days played” literally means the number of 24 hour units have elapsed since creation. That is not what this chart is saying. We simply tracked the number of days in which our targets logged in at least once. So, five hundred days logged in would simply mean that each one of the players in our sample logged in twice over two and a half weeks.

First, let’s look at the first half of September.

http://chartgizmo.com/GenerateChart?id=1782

People in the beta were playing it, but generally, it looks like the people most looking forward to WAR weren’t playing much of… anything. The beta saw some heavy action, as did Spore, and 316 logins to WOW isn’t too shabby, but still, for the most part our sample group was not really enthusiastic about any of the available toys in the toy box.

Now let’s take a gander at launch day through this morning:

http://chartgizmo.com/GenerateChart?id=1784

The WAR beta still appears on the chart, even though it was launch day, because putting forth a very minimal effort got you access to the beta a few days before launch – and it’s very likely that a large number of our sample members logged in using that client on launch day before the ribbon was officially snipped. But that little odd byproduct of the soft launch phenomenon aside, check out the interesting factoids:

- All of our sample players logged in to play WAR, or they wouldn’t be in the sample. They’ve each logged in to WAR an average of just over seven times in the last two and a half weeks.

- WOW took only the tiniest of hits. WAR players logged into WOW just 2% less than they did before WAR’s launch.

- WAR players played a lot less Team Fortress (down 41%) and Spore (down 38%), and just a hair less of Warcraft III, Combat Arms, SWG, Guild Wars, and Counter Strike.

- Now for the crazy part. Getting on the computer to play WAR apparently reminded the WAR fanatics that they had a computer, because overall, their gameplay went UP as a whole. They logged in more often to titles like COD4, Oblivion, and even AOC. But the MMO bug bit hard, and logins to LOTRO and EVE more than doubled after the launch of WAR.

This isn’t actually that big a shock. Once you’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting at the computer, it’s easy to not log in. But hey, as long as you’re sitting there, it doesn’t hurt to say, check in on games you hadn’t looked at in awhile. In fact, the raw number of titles that our WAR player sample logged into since the launch of WAR is more than double the number they poked at in the weeks leading up to launch, and the number of log ins total was almost doubled.

But that’s self-identified WAR fanatics. What was the impact of WAR’s launch on the market leader and AOC? Let’s look at a snapshot of users. This is the number of gamer DNA members who logged in at a particular point on three successive Mondays:

http://chartgizmo.com/GenerateChart?id=1785

As you can see, WOW was not impacted by the launch of WAR. Neither was Age of Conan. It could be that the people who wanted to play WAR had already quit playing the other titles. I suppose it’s possible that people are logging in to more than one MMO in a single day, although my experience tells me such a scenario is highly unlikely.

Could it be that WAR has grown the market? Has the pie expanded, giving hope to all the MMOs in the pipeline? Did the world actually need another fantasy MMO in spite of the various gloomy predictions?

We’ll be coming back to this topic in the coming months. WAR is off to a great start, without gutting anyone else. As our data pile grows, our ability to make predictions of the success or failure of future titles will also grow. Stay tuned!

Looks like WAR is getting a different base of players than WoW so maybe you're doom and gloom bullshit about 11/13/08 like it's some sort of impending apocalypse is way the fuck off base.

Originally Posted by Vorph

Wrong. T3 could have been an enjoyable diversion on the way to 40 if it weren't for fucking Tor Anroc, but it still would never have been more than a diversion.

I agree that's why I said

Teir 3 seems shitty but that is fully do to that fact that Tor Anroc blows dick and everyone thinks they should be in a scenario 24/7 when online. If you are in your 20's and mix up the quests, scenarios, RvR areas, and fuck around in Gunbad a bit it doesn't feel tedious at all.

The fact that Tor Anroc is a massive fucking failure doesn't negate the fact that

1. You can solo from 1-40 in this game

2. It's not that fucking long to do you're talking about 1 month at a casual pace of a few hours a week to hit 40.

3. Grumpy is a fucking pansy.

4. If you are buying WoTLK chances are you were going to play that shit anyways and it makes you feel special to pretend like it's WAR's fault you are going back to WoW. WAR still needs polish but it's as solid a game as any MMO so far no better no worse just different.

[Necrolyte]

Originally Posted by Grumpy Old Fart

Ostermark/Order sure did go down the shitter fast. There are one or none of the T1 and T2 scenario instances going on (on prime time Friday night and Saturday), and T3 is a half hour wait for Tor Anroc and that's it (and TA always has the same Destruction pre-made consisting of a non-RP "kill teh lolrpers!1" guild). Since I refuse to do Tor Anroc again (definitely the shittiest PvP playfield in any MMORPG ever made, and about a hundred times worse considering the ridiculous CC in WAR), that leaves PvE until T4, which looks to be about two more weeks of "work" (AKA, not "fun").

So, what's this new PvP area I keep hearing about in WotLK like? Maybe I could finally finish all of Icewind Dale before 11/13/08.

Ironfist has one of the better populations, the scenarios in T1/T2/T3 are popping a lot, and you always see a ton of players in Altdorf and quest hubs. I have to say if you are on a lower population server, the game really isn't that enjoyable.

There's tons of T3 people to group with and do PQs, and even in guilds alone you never have to solo unless you are in T4 already. In the T3 scenarios Order still has tons of healers... whether they heal or not is a lottery draw.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Tullaeniel

If you are in your 20's and mix up the quests, scenarios, RvR areas, and fuck around in Gunbad a bit it doesn't feel tedious at all.

Well, to address that part in particular then, the problem is that you can do all that stuff and still be nowhere near T4, unless you head there early to get stomped in PVP and fight yellow con mobs in PVE.

I have to agree with the others who say that ramping up the xp curve just before release coupled with the shitty xp you get for quests really hurt the game in the late 20's. It just seems like the game was designed around the beta curve, and now that it changed there's this huge gap you can only cross by grinding PVE (sucks ass for a healer) or grinding Tor-fucking-Anroc (sucks ass for everyone).

I will admit though, if they simply deleted Tor Anroc from the game it would solve most of the problem (as long as Black Fire Basin or Talabec Dam didn't replace it as the only one that pops, that is). I'd be much more inclined to put up with slow leveling if I could play Doomfire or Isha all night. Highpass is ok too, as long as the other six people in there with you aren't retards.

[Axire]

Finding some real flaws with witch hunters, no melee range snare + server lag means you are constantly 1 step behind people, especially if they are blocked then they disapear.

Die so fast as well, never known such a frail class before, the damage needs to be seriously looked at, unless you get the drop on someone with sudden accusations you usually cant kill them before you die due to paper armor. Pretty much a free kill in mass rvr as well.

[lost]

Originally Posted by Necrolyte

You don't have guildies to go AE grind/PQ yet? That is the only saving grace for healers leveling outside of scenarios.

thank god, as a shaman I thought I was alone here, was beginning to use closetgoblin to get full intelligence suits, but there wasnt much intel suits out there, can only get like 480 intel atm where as I can get like 600 willpower with my willpower suit, even then soloing killing n my shaman sucks balls.. hmmph, definately making a maurader next. I dont know if respeccing to damage line would help my damage much, the spells didnt seem that great, specially since most people use me to heal not dps.

I totally hate tor anroc by now, except when my guild gets 2 FG to queue the same game, then its uber xp.. gunbad was fun at 20, now seems like waste of time cause xp isnt as good, rather ae pq and shit like that.. ontop of that I heard they nerfed the drop rate or something in gunbad for the loot..

As far as the witch hunter comment, thats the chance you take playing those, thats why I went shaman instead of witch elf, yes you do rape face but die fast, even then a witch hunter dissapears and ends up on my ass usually kills me before i can get away. Maybe you should go for the healers, not the tanks.

[Axire]

Even if you go for the healers chances are you wont drop them, Zealots are tough as fuck and unless you can get Sudden Accusations on them then you wont be dropping them at all, Shamans are much easier sure but when they are in the middle of 5-6 people you arent doing shit without being rooted then dying in 2 seconds.

[Shots]

Originally Posted by Necrolyte

In the T3 scenarios Order still has tons of healers... whether they heal or not is a lottery draw.

That's because we all learned that "HOLY SHIT I CAN STACK A TON OF +INT!". I must say, after level 20 my RP has been mowing down the mobs (when I started to get some nice +int gear from PQs and drops). I carry two sets of gear so I can swap when I get into a scenario or just before the last stage of a scenario. In my +toughness/+will set, it takes about a minute and a half to kill a monster (white con). In my +int set, it takes about 30 seconds. It's still a longer time than a DPS class, but considering that the only thing slowing me down is Action Points and not waiting between kills for health regen, I'd say it evens out.

I'm currently level 24 and I've solo'd the whole way (2nd character, I rerolled off a Medium/Medium server to Ironfist and I must say that it was the right thing to do).