Tuesday, June 5, 2012

1.4.6 Goes live

Warhammer Online's 1.4.6 patch hits the live servers today!  This patch does not bring any major features, but instead makes some very important changes to the game.  Most importantly, the balance of RvR should now be a little nice to less experienced players.

City Siege. This one was unexpected. There will only be a single city instance allowed at a time now. The population cap has also been increased to 60 ( 60 vs 60!). When the city instance is over, another will open up. That means no more instance hopping to find an empty instance!

Tier 4 Bolster. In Tier 4 RvR lakes, all eligible players will be bolstered to rank 45 (up from 40). This will effectively eliminate the advantage of hidden levels. It will also do some interesting things to your stats, so be warned. It will hopefully bring better balance to Open RvR.

Scenario Brackets. Currently, scenarios are bracketed by levels only. In 1.4.6 there will be only 3 brackets: Level 1-15, Renown ranks 0-69 and Renown ranks 70-100. This is a tricky change since you want to provide a fair fight, but also make sure they pop frequently. We'll see how it goes.

Some other good changes?

  • The timer between uses of the WAR Report has been significantly reduced.
  • Keep doors are now vulnerable to single-target deployable siege.  This adds an alternative method of taking down a keep door. 
  • Players that die in a Keep area (enemy or friendly) will respawn in their Keep while players that die in the RVR Lake will respawn in the Warcamp.
  • The flight cinematic has been removed when traveling using the Flight Masters.