Leveling Down

Why does everyone like being elves?

I recently decided to give Warhammer Online a try since I needed something to do while grinding the 56,000 kills or whatever in Left 4 Dead. I didn’t think I’d get back into the MMORPG scene after World of Warcraft, but figured the $10 price I paid for the game was not too big of a deal as long as I didn’t continue the subscription after the first free month. Granted, I only leveled up to rank 6 and never saw the end game but if you’re curious how it is, check out my impressions. In many cases I will be using World of Warcraft as a comparison, since they’re actually quite similar.

The first thing that sort of confused me was the number of classes in the game. There seems to be a lot more than in WoW, and I had no idea what was up. There are six races, and 3-4 classes per race. The classes do fall under four particular types: tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, and healer, but it seems that each race’s classes had different skills. For example, the dwarves’ ranged DPS class is the Engineer, while the humans’ is the wizard. I guess there’s no differentiation between magic damage and physical projectile damage.

The races on the Order side include the Dwarves, the Empire (good humans), and High Elves. Destruction side has the Greenskins (orcs/goblins), Chaos (evil humans), and Dark Elves. Having a 60 female mage in WoW as my main, I figured I’d roll the same class in Warhammer Online just to make easier comparisons. While WoW’s graphics were a little more cartoony and comical, Warhammer Online’s classes seemed to be more gritty and realistic. The Destruction side was definitely more evil, so I figured I’d go with the evil Dark Elf Sorceress. After all, it looked like many of the servers in the game were imbalanced in favor of the Destruction side, so I might as well follow the flock since I don’t expect to be here long.

My computer is pretty old. It’s a P4 with one gig of RAM and a GeForce 6800 (256 megs of RAM). I had no problem playing WoW but it seems that it chugs a bit with Warhammer Online. I can’t run WO in a windowed mode since it stutters far too much but WoW was fine in a window for me. The thing is, it doesn’t look that much better than WoW did. Maybe because many of the settings were turned to the low end to accomodate my rig, but I actually preferred both the look and speed of WoW to WO. If I had a better system, I’m guessing WO could have looked nicer.But I’ve never really cared too much for graphics, or else I’d have already bought the next $500 video card.

After getting started and accepting the first few quests, here is what I discovered. The first thing I thought was pretty neat was all of the hand-holding for each quest assigned to you. I’ve been skipping quest texts since WoW, so I wasn’t going to stop now with WO. There have been times in WoW when I would still have to go back and read quests though, just because not everything would be clear when I skipped through everything. But in WO, everything is quite skippable. This is because when you open the map, the region the quest is in is highlighted for you, so you know exactly where to go. And I’m not talking about the huge zones like in WoW, but just a region of the map that’s maybe the size of Goldshire in WoW. It’s even better when you have like 5-6 quests at a time, because then you can see when multiple quests overlap in an area, and you can be more efficient in your questing.

The questing itself, at least on the low levels, was ultimately no different than WoW. You pull mobs to fight you and if you get a couple guys on you, it’s certainly possible to get killed. I guess I’ve gotten used to action games as of late where I would be able to take on several enemies at once, but in WO, when 3 enemies are attacking you of equal level, you’re basically dead. If you die, you come back to life right away but have a rez sickness similar to WoW but you actually spawn. There’s no ghost form like in WoW where you can run back to your corpse – you’re automatically resurrected with the rez sickness but are able to pay a healer to get rid of it.

One of the reasons I liked being a mage in WoW was more in response to all the downtime – you’d have to eat and drink after every fight to restore your health and mana, and it was handy to be a mage since you could make your own food and water. In WO, this isn’t necessary as it seems that all classes automatically regenerate health and mana when not fighting. It’s much more convenient, as it seems like everyone is basically regaining health/mana between fights in WO without having to sit and eat/drink.

Also new to WO that I didn’t see in WoW was public quests. These were simply optional zones where everyone in the area could participate. One quest may be to have 100 High Elves killed, and anyone in the area killing them would count towards the total. Once the 100 are reached, the top 3 contributers to the kills would get a random probability to get the top rewards with the higher spots having a higher chance. I didn’t even know where the treasure was the first time, since I was the top contributor of a public quest and it said I won but I was back in town. Apparently the chest was at the public quest zone, and I couldn’t make it back to claim my top prize (it was another bag to carry items) before it despawned and the public quest reset for the next people.

This may have already been implemented in the current version of WoW with Achievements and all, but WO has a pretty extensive list of Titles you can unlock for your character. If you kill a certain number of a particular enemy, you are awarded the ability to give yourself that title so it prominently displays with your name when others look at you. There are even Titles that get unlocked that are more shameful, like when you get killed by enemies and the like.

Finally, I also got to experience the PvP a little bit in my time too. It’s basically the same as in WoW – you queue up for a battleground and you just go about questing on your own until enough players are collected on both sides and the match starts. The battleground I played was a simple domination gametype where there were two nodes that had to be captured and held by either side to score points (with 10 players per side). Once one side captures both, they get points and the two nodes go back to neutral and both teams battle again to get them. To me it seemed like a big zerg-fest (but I guess that’s how it was in WoW’s Alterac Valley also) where people would just run in and I wasn’t having too much fun. I think I was level 6 and the range went up to maybe level 11 or something, and obviously I couldn’t take on those guys. I went after the level 2 guys heh. My team completely dominated the Order side, and I think that it’s usually like that on every server since the Destruction outnumber the Order. What’s neat though is that I think you gain experience playing the battlegrounds too, so it’s entirely possible to level up to max by simply playing battlegrounds all day and skipping the questing.

The game was actually not bad. It was a little rough graphically (moreso because my machine is old) and the world doesn’t seem as charming as it did in WoW but it’s still much easier to get into than say, Everquest or Final Fantasy XI. I liked that there was even more handholding in this game than in WoW, and that game already panders a lot to casuals. The biggest problem with WO though is that it didn’t differentiate itself enough from WoW for me. I played it for several hours, and then actually had an urge to go back to WoW. With the Lich King expansion out now, that’s obviously not a good thing for Warhammer Online if it’s getting people to go play the competitor’s MMORPG. Maybe the only thing that can stop WoW now is another MMORPG by Blizzard…

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