Taking Solace in Murderous Rages

It was the best of weeks. It was the worst of weeks. And then it was a gaming week. Which then turned into a full blown gaming month.

Around the first week of March I was a very excited young woman. You may have guessed why. I was on pins and needles and everything seemed like it might turn out ok. But lo, things did not turn out so. Like so many other facets of my life things went tits up, as it were.

If you thought I might have spent March playing Mass Effect 3 you would be wrong. It was my original plan, yes but, after a few hours of gameplay, my disillusioned self concluded "well, if Shepard doesn't give a fuck, why should I?" And so no, I have not yet seen the ending. Something tells me I'm a happier person for it.

No, my solace came in a very unexpected form. I had been playing most of the beta weekends of Wrath of Heroes and suddenly, they opened the servers 24/7. I found myself logging in more and more often, relieving me from the stress of grinding in the colorful and peppy world of Aion. Every day I seem to have less and less of a reason to go back to that game and every day that I do I struggle to find a reason to stay. We all know where this is headed.

Wrath of Heroes however, has griped me tight. It's the Warhammer vibe, no doubt, with its grittiness and kill thy fellow man motto. I have become very good at this last part, if I do say so myself. However, the game is not without its faults. It is an EA game after all, farted out by Bioware Mythic to retain the Warhammer IP or so I hear.


One of the things that irked me the most was their decision to change everybody's name to match their Origin ID. I didn't even know I had an Origin ID, I'd never even thought about it. It doesn't upset me as much that they did it than it does that they gave no fair warning and no subsequent explanation. Mythic is not well known for their communication skills with their player base and this does not prelude a positive change.

The game also still currently sports just three maps, which can get a bit old when you've tried and tested almost every strategy. In its defense, the game is still in Beta and we are hoping not only for the return of the old heroes but for the introduction of some new ones, new scenario maps and distinct queues for people in different mastery tiers.

In the end, like with most online time wasters, it's the people that keeps me coming back and that make the experience terribly entertaining. So thank you all for having me in your warbands and thank you to those that let themselves fall under my gobbo stick.

Wrath of Heroes: In Need of a Gentleman Caller

Hmmm, yes I know how that sounds.

While I wait for further developments on several fronts, I've occupied some weekends playing the closed beta of BioWare Mythic's WAR inspired F2P, Wrath of Heroes.

If you're familiar with WAR but not so much WOH, so it goes that the game consists of basic scenario play with three factions, distinct from each other by color alone. You can pick from a variety of Heroes to play from, including Glowjob (I know that's not his name) the Shaman, Conrad the Warrior Priest and Korith the Shadow Warrior. For more detailed information go here. Or maybe ask me for it. But this is not what I'm here for right now.

You have the choice of pugging it out, hoping for a semi-cohesive group with people that half-know what they're doing (lol) or you can group up in a warband of six beforehand. The game actually incites you to group up as it not only reduces the time you have to wait for a pop but also awards you with more money at the end of a battle.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!

WOH has made something I used to know very clear again to me: it's all about the group as a whole. Just today (which is not actually today but more like two days ago) I was invited to a warband as soon as I logged on. I had no idea who had invited me and ended up amid strangers. Being the friendly healer that I am, I set forth to do my job, hoping that this Warband was somehow seasoned and people had pretty much figured out that the basic strategy for winning in a game where heals are restricted to AoEs is to stick together. How wrong I was. Six people spread as further as you can get in Mourkain Temple. So I facepalmed my way through a few scenarios, making what I hope were helpful suggestions but getting a lot of CAPS in reply.

Luckily for me, my effort was noticed by the leader of another Warband and I got a tell after a scenario was over praising me on my healing and asking if I needed to group up. Maker, yes. So I casually dropped the dysfunctional band I was with and accepted a new invite. And what a difference skill makes. In a game that has no gear or over-the-top skill customization, knowing what you're doing and grouping with like-minded individuals is all it takes to win.

Wrath of Heroes recently implemented something called Perks in their Heroes' mastery trees. These are skills that become available for activating once a certain criteria is met. The best thing about this is that you can buy one Hero and buy his Perk to utilize it on another Hero entirely. I say "best thing" because I haven't had to pay real money for Heroes yet. I guess that if I had it would be... not so great. But I digress.

The Skaven Hero has a Perk in his tree that allows him to turn into a Rat Ogre after a 13 assist streak. As a Skaven, assist streaks are a bit harder to get as it is a damage focused stealther. But as a healer... well... as long as your team is killing things, assist streaks are a dime a dozen. You can see where this is going, right?

Once I found a pretty decent Warband to join, things started melting like butter. Our six-man party consisted, most of the times, of three Shamans, the odd Warrior Priest, and two Engineers, sometimes a White Lion. When I got to use the Perk, the remaining healers did their best to keep me up and quite successfully. I once said I hated healers. I might have to recant that statement. The Rat Ogre has a pull on a one second cooldown (ô_Ô) and a knockdown with impressive damage on maybe a three second cooldown. It is enough to roflstomp most things without prejudice. If, added to that, you manage to find a boost that triples your damage, like I did that one time, you can knock things down for 1000 damage. 1k is the maximum hp of a  Shaman. So the Rat Ogre is fun. It is serious fun.

But I still haven't explained the title of this post, have I? Well.

Since joining an organized guild I became accustomed to a certain degree of organization in cooperative endeavors, especially when these endeavors consist of getting other things deaded. The main thing I miss about these groupings are the target callers. We'd always have one. As you would imagine, an enemy goes down faster when it has six people bashing it down than just one. A target caller, a person that can discern what enemy should go down first and says so, can be the most valuable weapon a faction has. It's the hand that guides the spear... or something equally poetic.

Managed a 15 kill streak before I died.
And since I'm horrible at staying alive, that's quite impressive.

Although we didn't have a target caller per se, WOH allows players to ping locations on the map, an easy, simple, straight forward way to get people where you want them. The main problem with this is that without a human actually yelling at them to move their fat asses, most people will take pinging more as suggestions than orders.

I've said it before and I shall say it again. Most of us players are mere sheep. Granted, some sheep provide better wool than others, but sheep. There are a few of us, though (no, I don't count myself among them) that are shepherds. (Ah, Shepard...) They'll guide the herd to safety and victory. These become your guild leaders, your warband leaders, your target callers.

And I wish I had one in real life.

Wrath of Heroes: So, My Wrath Then

"You have been asking whether you can post about your beta impressions. We asked, and here is the official statement:

At this time, we are no longer enforcing the confidentiality provisions set forth in the Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes Beta Agreement. Players in the beta are still bound by all other aspects of the Beta Agreement to which they agreed when they signed up and installed the game.  

So, it ‘s good news! We look forward to your videos, blogs, or other impressions from the beta!"

 So says the Wrath of Heroes Facebook page. So be it then.

These impressions are ALL from WELL before today and WELL before the game is released.

I was there the second time the closed Beta opened it's flood gates, me and a bunch of people I know, all of them WAR vets. Funnily enough, I haven't seen them there since. I haven't asked why, partly because it's none of my business but mostly because I don't care.

Wrath of Heroes is, in a shell casing, WAR scenarios non-stop. If you played WAR but never got much into closed oRvR then WoH isn't for you. Until I (unwillingly) gave the Beta a rest, which was roughly a month ago, there was no progression system whatsoever. There was a level indicator but there was nothing you gained from it and you couldn't rub that shameful excuse for an epeen on anybody's face. There was a Tactics screen with a "Coming Soon" over it so I'm guessing that's what you'll end up spending your money on. I sincerely hope that the first things they introduce aren't new costumes though. That would surely turn me right around shouting "go suck sick donkey cock" over my shoulder.

The lack of a progression system wasn't a problem for me, though, and it certainly didn't stop me having a blast with the game. Because I did, I had loads of fun with it. The hours would fly by as I laughed manically at the corpses of foes. Good times. As it stood, the outcome of the game depended solely on the wits and skill of the people playing it and not on how long they'd had to grind for their awesomely shaped bow and exquisitely sharp arrows.

So what's it like? Well, I never played LoL so I can't compare but I've heard say it's LoLish. Let's take Mourkain Temple as an example. At start you choose which hero you would like to start with. The choices range from Shadow Warrior and Sorcerer for ranged dps to things like Witch Elf, Slayer and "Vampire Chick" as melee dps. There are more but I'm not in the mood to get into it. Each has 5 skills to use with the most powerfull ones with longer cooldown times. There is no AP and, hence, no restriction apart from cooldown on what to use. 

The two things that took me longer to get acclimated to were there not being a friendly target and... well, targeting. It all feels a bit random at first, especially with all the closed beta subscribers eager to up their kill count and shouting at everything with less than 90% life. Healing is strictly AoE centered on your location or melee healing.

After I got tab-targeting to work properly, or me working it, everything went smoothly and my Shadow Warrior soon became a force to be reckoned with. My record is a 13 kill streak. The game is kind enough to stroke your ego by plastering on the screen how many spawns you've ended without getting spawned yourself.

Word has it that they "learned from DAoC" and decided to go for a three faction game. A lot could be said on this topic, including that they learned this not from DAoC but from WAR winging, but what's the point at this time? One could even compare them to the government: they promise, procrastinate on delivery and then congratulate themselves on a late and non-inspired response.

Now, now, I'm not getting my panties in a bunch. As stated, I quite like it. There's a scenario where the one purpose is to kill as many of the opposition as possible in the middle of the Saccelum arena. How much fun is that? Plenty.

As far as F2Ps go, I'm no expert, but I'm hoping it'll do well enough that I can play it regularly against more than just the same 20 people over and over again.