Thursday, June 14, 2012

Let's talk 1.4.7

Now that 1.4.6 is on the live servers, it is time to start the discussion about Warhammer Online's next patch. It looks like the primary focus of 1.4.7 will be some career balancing.  Personally, I find it a boring topic overall, give me shiny new features.  It is a necessity though, especially in a PvP focused game.

Lead Developer, Keaven Freeman, posted a new Developer Discussion thread to talk about how they want to approach the balancing.  Initially, he wanted to go all out mirroring of the classes (think WoW) but eventually backed off of that approach.

To me, the variety of the classes (of which there are 24 and each has 3 mastery trees!) is part of what makes WAR interesting.  I can certainly understand the need for mirrors since they foster competitive play.  I'd be ok with either approach at this point though.

My favorite aspect of Keaven's plan is that he wants to push changes to the PTS frequently, instead of one big patch.  This lets players see what is going on and try things out.  No one wants to wait for 2 months to see results anymore.  We need them now! :)

Keaven also created a new thread to discuss city issues which arose due to the switch to 60 vs 60.   Sadly, i have yet to be on during a siege, so I cannot speak from personal experience.  The most pressing problem is probably just having too many people in Stage 3.  120 is a lot for a small space.  I'm not sure how you fix that without going back on the 1 instance plan or lowering the amount of players.