Warhammer Online, the Not-So-Good

Well the servers are down. I apologize for the lack of posts recently, but with the recent launch of the game I've it very hard to pull myself away from killing Order just to write about it. Alas, here I am.

 

There's plenty good about Warhammer, and we've been discussing it for quite some time now. Everything that was great in open beta is still great, with a number of other improvements across the board, such as no more crashing to desktop, at least for me.

 

I feel I've stroked the collective **** of Mythic  long enough now, and it's time to talk to about the BAD. I guess this is nearly an exercise in futility seeing as the bad is so few and far between and it just makes everything look good again. But I digress. So here we go in nice little point form with shiny bolded titles for the TLDR crowd to skip to:

 

Mobs and their infinite love

The aggro range on mobs in this game is fairly reasonable, I really can't complain. You can usually get around crowded areas without pulling anything if you try a little. The problem comes when you actually do pull a mob, or heaven forbid a couple of champions. I've ran across entire zones trying to shake enemies on my tail, and they just wouldn't give. I hadn't even done any damage, it was just an accidental proxy pull; apparently my presence alone is enough to enrage these high elves beyond possible consolation.

Line of Sight (LOS) and Spell Distance

This probably isn't too big of an issue if you play a melee class, but damn, this annoys me to no end. My main nuke as a sorceress is a 3 second cast Doombolt, with 100ft range. 100 ft isn't as far as it sounds when you're squaring off against multiple enemies, in fact most classes can get into melee range of me before I'm finished cast the first spell. Naturally I stay at max range as much as possible. This causes the following problems:

•1.       Line of Sight - Apparently Dark Elves have trouble seeing during the day time because my Sorceress can't hit anything if there's so much as a small shrub in the way. There are plenty of rocks and tree to hide behind, and certain players really use this to their advantage when it comes to avoiding damage, and I commend them. However, I've had my spells cancel because my target ran behind a bush, one that you can WALK THROUGH, or because they moved to ground that was slightly elevated. I'm not talking about a ledge either, just flat ground, that was slightly higher than where I was standing. Fix this please.

•2.       Distance - As mentioned before, I have to stay at max range if I want to avoid getting caught in the flurry of swords and axes that is the melee frontline. If my target takes so much as a step back, I get the ‘target is out of range' message and my Sorceress stands there confused. However, this only happens about half the time, because sometimes I will finish the cast on a running a target that is well out of range. I'm not sure what's going on here.

•3.       I'll finish casting anyway - This happens with both of the above issues. Whether or not there's a line of sight or distance problem, my character will finish casting the goddamn spell anyway. If a player is somewhere I cannot reach them, say, behind a single blade of grass, my Doombolt still finishes the 3 second long cast and THEN tells me: "Hey, yeah, turns out you CAN'T see that guy." That's time I could've used to reposition myself!

Casting Animations and Spell Pushback

Since we're on the topic of spells, let's get this little tidbit out there. When you cast a long spell, and you're getting beat on, the castbar gets pushed back, this results in an overall longer cast time of the spell. The problem is that while the spell takes longer to finish, the animation for the spell is still the base time required to cast. This results in me finishing a cast animation while still having 1 second worth of casting to do while my character just stands there blindly. It's really hard trying to gauge when to start running after a cast when the visual cues are all kinds of ****** up.

Buggy Morale Lag

Sometimes (often) when your morale ability is ready, both on cooldown and morale amount, and you hit it, the animation goes off, but there is no resulting effect and it doesn't drain your morale or put the skill on cooldown. It's gotten pretty ridiculous at times. I had to fire off my Morale 1 Magebolt ability 8 times in a row before it finally connected. I've also died a number of times because my healers instant morale heal just didn't work.

 

 

No Item Linking

Why the hell is this not in the game. I got some rad epix and I can't show them off to my friends? C'mon.

Memory Leak?

There's a good chance there's  a memory leak in Warhammer Online. A number of my friends have reported that after a few hours of play everything takes longer to load and they are more prone to crashes and lockups. Just a heads up there Mythic. It's nothing major, and a relog will fix it, but nobody wants to do that when you have to wait in the server queues.

Server Queues

Mythic is trying to balance out the server population by capping all the server population limits at 1/3 of the maximum supported population, and then raising said cap as it becomes necessary. Hey guess what, it's necessary NOW. I'm not even on one of the more populated servers and I've already got queues of 200+ people and 25+ minutes to get on. Just raise the damn caps already. This is especially annoying with the game still crashing...

Game still crashing

I'm going to chalk this one up to server stress, but a number of my fellow players seem to crash quite regularly still.

 

No Official Forums

This sucks. A lot of people, we'll call them fanboys, claim that Mythic did the right thing by not making an official game forum because it just promotes whining and complaining. Guess what, just because you're not aware of the whining and complaining, doesn't mean it ain't there. I actually thought the WoW forums were one of the better aspects of the game, they way they were set up I mean, not the community.

Number of Quests at a Time

Please raise this. I never had an issue with the number of quests I could have at a time until I started flying to other pairing zones to quest/PQ with friends. While I can hold all the quests available in one zone, I have to drop them all if I want to venture into another.

Flight Masters

Need more. Maybe this gets easier when we get a mount, but walking everywhere sucks big time.

PQ Contribution Seems Inconsistant

I was farming some PQ's for influence with a healer and a tank friend of mine, and anyone else who was interested. Each time the three of us did nearly the same amount of work, whether it was tanking, healing, or DPSing, and the contribution each of got at the end of the PQ vastly differed from attempt to attempt. It's good to see that tanking and healing gives you a significant contribution bonus though.

NO SCENARIO QUEUEING AS A WARBAND

This is the big one. What, the hell? I'm sorry Mythic, but I have more than 5 friends I play this game with. I understand that there's a need to quell the cries of ‘omg pre-mades are unfair' that were so rampant in WoW, but I don't think it's applicable here. This is a PvP game first and foremost, and if people don't have the initiative to get organized and go in with a solid team, they deserve to get stomped. There's plenty of solo content out there. From day one Mythic has said the PvP and RvR will be group oriented, based, and focused, yet the only people benefitting from not being able to queue as a warband are solo players.

My group of 6 has successfully defeating guild groups of 10+ already, and we're only level 15-ish. Numbers don't mean as much in PvP in this game as they did in certain others, and since the scenarios already have player caps, I don't see why the need to disable warband queuing is necessary. I really hope Mythic reconsiders this, even though it seems they're pretty certain they want this to be a long term thing.

Renown Gear is CRAP

I've heard that Mythic is planning to improve the Renown Reward Gear, and they need to do it soon. After the initial rank 4 gearsets, I stopped checking the renown vendors for upgrades, because there are none. The drops you get in the world and RvR scenarios, and more-so the influence/drops in PQ's are vastly superior to anything I've seen from Renown Vendors, even in the highest ranks. I was planning on mostly PvPing in this game to level up, and this would've been a much greater issue, but I have plenty of time to do PQ's because...

Scenario Queues Take Forever, and are BUGGED.

RAGE. Tier 1 we were getting scenario queues near-instantly. In tier 2 it sometimes takes 20 minutes to get a queue to pop, but most of the time it takes 40 minutes to an hour. I'm doing a lot more PvE than initially intended because of this. I know the game JUST released and there a population/level/faction imbalanced, but this is just something to keep in mind.

Also, queues are bugged somehow. Whenever we do get a queue to pop, only half of our team seems to get it. We queue as a group, but on the rare occasion it does pop, half of our group gets the queue, and the other half does not.

Those are my major gripes with the game as of late. None of it is really gamebreaking, and it's mostly just little annoyances than things I would quit a game over. Most of this will probably get fixed very soon. I still love this game and am having a blast. Check back soon for more.

- thewarjournal

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