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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Combat Mechanics

Combat is very similar to just about every contemporary MMO - you fill your quickbars with abilities, target an enemy and hit some buttons to perform attacks or target a friendly and hit some buttons to perform defensive abilities. Nothing revolutionary here, just same old comfortable and proven system.

A notable addition is the inclusion of tactics - several slots on your character for permanent buffs. Career tactic slots (one at start, additional slots unlock as you level) for tactics gained from the trainer, Renown tactic slots (one, with second unlockable later) for tactics gained from renown ranks via PvP and finally a Tome tactic slot for tactics obtainable via tome unlocks. You can also switch between several pre-set tactic configurations when out of combat - for example, to quickly switching between a more offensive or a more defensive set. Tactics are something new, but most of the tactics I've tried feel weak. It's easy to forget that the whole tactic bar is there.

Actual fighting in Warhammer Online does differ slightly - there is virtually no downtime in combat. Action Points, the universal "energy" used by all abilities regenerates at a massive rate, and while you can run out, it only marginally slows down your damage or healing output. While it may sound great, allowing non-stop combat without annoying downtime, it unfortunately also removes many tactical elements from combat. There is no need to find optimized rotations with best damage/AP use that you can sustain for PvE combat, as you can sustain just about everything. Yes, you may have to take a few 2-3 second breaks in your rotation to allow the AP pool to refresh, but these pauses feel insignificant.

This also means there is no "burstability" available to you - you can't temporarily boost your damage by choosing high damage and high cost abilities that would kill something quickly, yet leave you dry afterwards for a period of time. The potential for such tradeoff just isn't available. There are also almost no "panic button" abilities with long cooldowns that would serve a similar purpose. Most cooldowns are between 10-20 seconds, and just need to be spaced apart in your "optimal rotation". There are fairly few spells and abilities available to each class, and you learn most of the important ones by level 15. Some abilities are simply not worth even the 1.5 second global cooldown they trigger, further diminishing your options.

This leads to somewhat boring and repetitive combat with very few tactical choices. All your character is capable of doing "in a pinch" is pretty much what any smart player would already be doing part of his ability rotation to maximize damage output. The only real panic button is the universal "Flee" which temporarily zeroes your AP pool and allows you to dash away with a short speed boost. And for all the nit-pickers, yes there are a small handful of abilities on longer cooldowns but there are very few of them, the vast majority of them are on a 60 second CD and almost none actually act as emergency buttons or burst buttons - you still stick them to your rotation either as an opener or as a finisher and they are available for every fight.

Some classes add special resource mechanics to mix things up slightly. For example, Bright Wizards and Sorcerers continuously build up energy when they cast their main damage spells. Higher the energy, more damage they do while risking a blacklash of self-inflicted damage. They always have the option of dumping the energy pool, or spacing out the casts to keep the energy at a medium level, but in practice this mechanic just means that the damage output of these classes for soloing is somewhat diminished, and for optimal results, they need a healer to take care of any backlash damage in groups.

PvP Implications

In a way I can understand why Warhammer Online was designed this way. It greatly simplifies PvP class balancing, as every class can be defined as the total damage-per-second or healing-per-second output of it's obvious "optimal" rotation, and there are far less deaths perceived as unfair in PvP combat - your opponents can't burn you away in a flash using a combination of special abilities available on a long cooldown. Yet in a way the rock-paper-scissors of limited special abilities is what makes PvP combat in MMO interesting - baiting people to "blow their cooldowns", then neutralizing them until the ability has expired, only to retaliate with your own. All this is completely missing from Warhammer Online combat. Crowd control options are also limited mostly to roots and snares. All that is left is target selection and positioning in large scale encounters - beyond that, you just tend to spam your optimal rotation and hope that your target croaks. It's definitely different than the competition, but I'm not convinced it's better.

At the moment, it appears that the whole strategy to PvP battles in Warhammer Online is to optimize target selection and focus firing. Nothing can save a player that gets focused on by 5+ opponents at once (remember, no burstability is true for healers as well). In fact, there are already UI addons that simplify focus firing, and I predict that this will be a big issue for Mythic to resolve as no manual target selection can compete if large groups begin focus firing using addons.

In Dark Age of Camelot RvR used to be all about "assist trains", and once people learn to play properly, Warhammer Online will likely degenerate to the same thing. One person calling enemies one by one while the whole team turns them into mush one by one as the healers take care of any non-focused damage flying around. Sure, there is some strategy to picking out the biggest threats first, but even that brings a problem; at least in DAOC those classes perceived to be biggest threats quickly grew tired of dying first in every encounter where a pick up team encountered a proper group. Dark times ahead for unguilded Bright Wizards and Sorcerers...

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: War!Page 3: GameplayPage 4: CombatPage 5: Dungeons, Open RvRPage 6: Visuals, PerformancePage 7: The Annoying BitsPage 8: The Annoying Bits, cont.Page 9: Summary, Scores

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