Since 2007 it has been a great time to be a gamer with some of the best titles in almost every genre have been pounded out by developers. All except the MMO space. If you are looking for a complete experience in a polished format you are looking at WoW, LotRO, and Eve. The rest of the space is full of either buggy pieces of crap, azn grindfests, or microtransactional dollar sinks.

I am amazed at the innovations you see month after month and title after title in every other genre of games. Yet in MMOs you see buggy pile after buggy pile getting pushed out to gold before they are ready.

We saw Age of Conan take a stab at originality by providing you a single player RPG story in the MMO format but that abruptly ended after the first 20 levels after that you were dropped in a full and rich world that just happened to be the biggest, most broken piece of donkey shit that gamers have seen in a long time.

Mythic when making Warhammer online took arguably the setting with the most lore and ideal settings and crammed it in the smallest world I have seen in an MMO in a long time. They took all the negatives from WoW and through them out the window but in turn loosing what made DAoC a fun experience. Also they had some of the most visually stunning classes I have seen yet they paled in experience when compared to the boring counterparts.

Compare this to a brief list of the ground breaking titles of the other genres.
Team Fortress 2
BioShock
Portal
Arma II
Assassins Creed
GTA 4
Left 4 Dead
Street Fighter 4
X3 Terrain conflict.
Rockband 2
Guitar hero world tour
Gears 2
Halo 3
Crack Down
Farcry 2
I could go on and on listing the amazing choices you have when looking for any other genre but for those who enjoy MMOs suck it we are stuck with WoW.

Now here I sit filling out the account recovery paperwork to try and get my account and my characters back. I hate myself for doing it but lets see if I bite the bullet enough to log in to the game.

So last week in my flurry of posts I realized real quickly that I am what I hate. For a long time when reading or listening to people on the web talk about WoW authoritatively I would be annoyed at the level of inexperience they would have in the game. When I was pushing hard at the arena people rocking a 1400/1500 rating commenting on anything would annoy me. Same for PVE content people who have never raided anything save Nax pugs in my opinion had no right to comment about WoW and the state of the game.

 

So here I am with a handful of low level characters not ever having experience at the end game commenting on my opinions on WAR. My opinion is not worth shit people. So I made a commitment to myself that I would take the marauder to 40 and get in to some big time RvR with him to really feel comfortable making comments on the state of the game.

 

Well I hit a road block. Ok a couple road blocks. I really can not get past how freaking cool the Magus is. I know they are pretty weak in terms of balance but come on they are the most aesthetically pleasing MMO character I have seen in a long time.

 

The other major road block for me right now is no matter how visceral and fun melee combat is. Right now I can not help but feel so ineffective in large scale RvR. I am often nuked from afar before I am able to get to the combat. As a melee combatant I am more heavily reliant on healers then a ranged character who has more tools to keep themselves alive.

 

I was able to bring him to 20 in a couple days of grinding out some PQs, but my renown level has stagnated behind significantly. Attempts to raise this have lead to frustration with large scale RvR as the melee.

 

This leaves me with a dilemma, do I push forward with the Marauder letting my Renown slip further behind (I can really power level through content with his aoe) or do I grab another character on my bench.

 

My fear here is that I am quickly going down a road that won’t end well. Because of my power gamer nature I am always looking for the most effective build, strat, race/class combination. The issue ends up being that with MMOs so much of the balance can change from week to week depending on the latest patched version.  So now I need to decide what I am taking to 40 to put my money where my mouth is.

 

Just writing this out has helped me make up my mind. With oRvR being a pain to live through as melee in Tier 2 and Tier 3 it can only get worse as I progress right?

I have compiled about 10 hours of RVR footage from the Squig herder over the past week. I started to make a pvp movie but I could not make it look fun or interesting. Even in scenarios where I was top damage and kills so I know I was doing it right. I just could not get anything action orientated out of it.
You see me creeping along the rocks/walls popping shots and burning people down. Then retreating and doing it again. By definition a well played ranged class is pretty boring IMHO. Any attention you get from the opposition is horrible and will end quickly for you.

I am this “ “ close to making a Marauder tonight and leveling that up to T3

So Warhammer of shit from time to time from mainly wow players because well, it isn’t wow. War is my game of choice but that doesn’t mean I am unable to take a critical look at the game and evaluate it fairly, and talk about its flaws.

 

When I quit WAR a few months after launch I had said it was the classes, that they felt bland and uninspired. I have come to the conclusion that, it was not a fair statement. War has some of the most original classes they are truly unique and play different from the standard MMO fair. The issue was I was playing order and everything I was playing looked horrible.

 

Part of the appeal for an MMO to me is looking cool. It is easier to get into your character if you are excited by the look. Just as I am a graphics whore. I want to look cool while playing an MMO. Cool maybe a relative term as none of the order classes are appealing aesthetically to my eye. This is really why I quit. I was playing order with some friends and I could not get in to any character as the ascetics kept me out.

 

This time around I am playing destruction and it is truly much easier to get in to a Chosen, a Marauder or even a Squig Herder then just another Elf in a dress or a Human in a puffy shirt.  

 

But the look of the characters only slightly plays into what I see as WAR’s biggest flaw. The biggest flaw in WAR is balance. Not so much racial or faction but Range vs. Melee.

 

I love melee I have played melee in every MMO I have played. I love my rogue in WoW my Barb and HoX in AoC. But really I WAR as a melee I can not live long enough to be a serious threat. Perhaps this changes in later tiers, but in every run I have made with War I have given up the Melee just as soon as I hit real keep/fort sieges. On offense you are pretty useless until the doors come down. And the same can be said while on D. The ranged are active the entire time. Slinging blots and spells up the walls at the door, safe from the oil while tanks and mDPS sit around waiting.

 

Same is true for this iteration of playing WAR. I left my chosen at 20 in favor of a Squig Herder. I have been on a bunch of keep battles already and it is active and fun through out the encounter not just the last 45 seconds. The trade off is twofold, one in that it is hard to give a goblin that badass look that one can give the Chaos race. And two no game has ever been able to capture the visceral feeling of melee combat in ranged combat.

 

Warhammer has done such a good job making the entire Chaos race so aesthetically appealing. Just none of the careers fit my play style with the way the game is currently balance.

 

I may roll up a Marauder as I really love the idea of that class. I am just concerned the same thing will happen again once I get into T2.

War Hammer Online not only happens to be my MMO of choice right now it really is the strongest MMO on the market today. Not in terms of subscribers or profits but in terms of fun. 

 

War is able to separate itself from the pack not because of the RVR(PVP) focus but because the game is just as much about the journey as it is the end. You can not talk about MMOs these days with out a reference to WoW but I will try and keep it brief. Warcraft does what it does very well. It is the accessible PVE focused MMO. Its profits rival the GDP of small countries for a reason; it is a good game. But WoW is all about the end game. WoW is the power gamer/raider’s fantasy but ultimately this is where it breaks down for me. I do not have fun raiding all the time and that is all there is to do. PVP in wow is pretty bland with a side of FoTM (flavor of the month). The biggest flaw is that the game does not start until end game. One could say that this is the players fault i.e. me. But really all the coolest things and the focus of the game is on the newest raid dungeon.

 

This is where WAR excels. So much about WAR is the journey while the endgame is just as focused and important. The leveling is not rushed or hurried along just to get to the cool stuff. Tier 1 levels 1-11 are a bit rough around the edges but the focus seems heavily around getting you in to the game showing you the mechanics and introducing the lore and setting the scene. This tier has 1 of my favorite scenarios as a battle ground of any MMO I have ever played. Norden Watch is so much fun it is a fast to action map and the battles are really just fun.

 

Once you get in to tier 2 the open world fights really start to shine. You see warbands moving to keeps most nights. And if you are lucky you get some really cool fights. PVE content is really lacking. The system is designed to get you in and out of quests as fast as possible I am sure there is some really good stuff there but lets face it. Smashing 100 trolls in the face is not even close to as much fun as fighting other players. Mythic knows this and they have designed the game around it. Outside of grinding 1 Public Quest over and over, fighting real people is still the most effective way to level. And this is good. You do not get that grind feel nor the burned out feeling that you have in other games.

 

Tier 3 I have not gotten to tier 3 this time around so I will not comment on it as I still have nightmares about what T3 was like at launch. I am told it is better.

Even though WAR has some faults (I will get to in another post) it really is the most FUN MMO out on the market today, Hence why I am calling WAR home for my gaming time.

 

For the record the most fun game out there today is Plants vs. Zombies. But that is a different story all together.

Internet, I have a problem. I might just be a little bit. This is a confession I should be truthful. OK I am really impulsive when it comes to video games.  Wait you think you are impulsive let me tell you a little story about the past year.

AoC was one of the more hyped MMO launches of 2008. I was right in the epicenter of that hype. When they had the PVP beta weekend, I took Friday and Monday off of work to play. I took a day off of work the day I got my regular beta invite.  And when the game finally launched I used an entire week of vacation time to play the game. 5 months later I was burned out and sick of it.

Gears of War2 had a midnight release on Thursday/Friday I was inline at 10pm by MYSELF didn’t go to the office on Friday and played from 1214am Friday until 630am on Saturday 30 hours strait. Then slept for a few hours and got up and played again for another 9 hours. A week later I never touched the game again.

WAR came out took another 3 days off for the launch, played nonstop then almost every weeknight for a few months until.

WoTLK came out only 1 day out of the office for this one but made my DK and had him at 80 in no more then 3 weeks (it is a bit of blur) I played this up until a few weeks ago where 3.1 raiding 5 or 6 nights a week shockingly burned me out.

It is funny a few weeks ago when I came out of my WoW coma I met some one very interesting. A woman! She lives in my house. Turns out we have been married for over 2 years now.

Well what does all this mean? I need to get another Hobby. Oh yeah I am hooked on WAR hard again. And it is time to start a website. It was lovely meeting you wife