Messages

1

Warhammer Online / Re: Tier 1/2

« on: November 11, 2008, 06:39:16 PM »

I dislike T4 intensely. My choices seem to be:

1) do scenarios (and get farmed by a destro group with many more 40s than us);
2) do open RvR (and get farmed by a destro group with many more people and many more 40s than us);
3) be the only person in the whole tier doing PvE.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Patch 1.0.5 notes

« on: November 08, 2008, 01:02:47 AM »

Some more changes:

http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109355195/p1/?106

Looks like they might have finally seen some sense with regards to combustion/dark magic. Although the ease with which BWs/sorcs can get to 100 combustion/dark magic by spamming their AOE could really do with looking at.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Patch 1.0.5 notes

« on: November 07, 2008, 11:00:24 AM »

Very unimpressed with the patch notes. These are my thoughts about the classes I know a little about.

IBs: got a huge nerf. Moves that used large amounts of grudge were never very popular anyway, but now they'll be almost completely useless. Rising Anger is now virtually mandatory for all builds.

SMs: got some small nerf and small buffs, but they fall even further behind BOs because BOs only got buffs.

SWs: got a lot of buffs of undefined size, I guess "wait and see" is in order. The change to assault stance is very welcome.

WEs: elixir of insane power is no longer an I-Win button against tanks on a 60s cooldown. Yay.

BWs/Sorcs: no change to combustion/dark magic which anyone with half a brain can see is far too powerful.

I worry for the future of WAR.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Standard Tactics

« on: November 01, 2008, 11:12:56 AM »

Can you only have one tactic of each colour slotted?

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Warhammer Online / Re: Heraldry: Final

« on: October 21, 2008, 05:40:25 PM »

Nah, it's the assumption that they can't all be wrong all of the time .

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Warhammer Online / Re: Standard Tactics

« on: October 20, 2008, 07:32:54 PM »

Here's my take on banners.

While we have only one banner it should probably be filled with tactics that everyone can use. Endurance for toughness, Vigor for AP and Wisdom for Willpower seems like the best set-up for the whole group.

Once we have multiple banners we could obviously consider having different banners for different purposes, although I'm not sure of the practicality of having multiple banners. There are so many possibilities, I guess we won't know until we try it.

Also, I'm not sure how the different banners work, I know all of the banners are purchasable from quartermasters so I assume any standard bearer can use any standard if they have one of each in their inventory. Is this right?

Possible banner set-ups:

A Support Banner (Wisdom, Mending, Vigor) for the support and an Assault/Defence Banner (Brawn, Endurance, Magic Avoidance) for those up at the pointy end. Has the advantage that you could plant them up to 100 feet apart and retain the vast majority of the benefits. Would probably only work on defence though, where the enemy don't just have the option of going round the Assault/Defence group.

And my take on the individual tactics:

Enhanced Brawn - Increases Strength by 5%/10%/15%.
Very nice for melee classes obviously poor for everyone else.

Enhanced Endurance - Increases Toughness by 5%/10%/15%.
Good for everyone, although obviously better for people who stack toughness. As an aside toughness vs wounds is an interesting discussion we should have.

Enhanced Readiness - Increases Initiative by 5%/10%/15%.
I'm not really convinced Initiative is worth having. Being uncrittable sounds nice but it's not documented how this stacks up with bonus crit chance. I doubt anyone stacks it (which is required for percentage increases to be valuable), therefore this seems a pretty poor.

Enhanced Knowledge - Increases Intelligence by 5%/10%/15%.
Obviously very nice for offensive casters, which is not that great a portion of the population. Swings between decent and poor depending upon group make-up.

Enhanced Wisdom - Increases Willpower by 5%/10%/15%.
Increases heals and disrupt. Although even on healers stacking Willpower I think the disrupt is negligible, you'd hope everyone would benefit from better healing.

Enhanced Aim - Increases Ballistic Skill by 5%/10%/15%.
Good for classes whose skills increase with BS, useless to everyone else.

Enhanced Reflexes - Increases Weapon Skill by 5%/10%/15%.
WS is like Initiative, I'm not convinced it's a good stat. Negligible parry chance, and armour penetration which just isn't good. Melee shouldn't really be hitting tanks too often (magic is the tank killer) and it's not really worth penetrating a squishy's armour.

Forceful Weapons - Increases critical hit chance with melee by 2%.
OK for melee, but probably not as good as 5% more strength, never mind 15% more strength. From my experience as a non-strength-stacking tank I'd say more than 40% of my damage comes from strength, which (I think) is the point where 5% strength looks better than 2% crit.

Forceful Bolts - Increases critical hit chance with ranged attacks by 2%.
Same with this in comparison to BS.

Forceful Magic - Increases critical hit chance with magic by 2%.
And this versus Intelligence.

Forceful Mending - Increases critical heal chance by 2%.
And, guess what, this pales in comparison to Willpower.

Arrow Avoidance - Increases Dodge chance by 2%.
Just plain poor.

Blade Avoidance - Increases Parry chance by 2%.
Poor.

Magic Avoidance - Increases Disrupt chance by 2%.
Probably the best of the avoidance buffs due to the fact it works against *all* offensive spells, but still not great.

Weapon Deflection - Increases Armor by 5%.
Tanks don't need more armour (they should all be over the 75% cap anyway), squishies have so little armour that 5% is uselss and armour penetration skills abound. Poor.

Corporeal Deflection - Increases Corporeal resistance by 5%.
I'm not really into casters but I think BWs/Sorcs do a lot of corporeal damage, as do magi. Still, 5% against one school doesn't seem that great, 2% disrupt is more consistently useful.

Elemental Deflection - Increases Elemental resistance by 5%.
BWs/Sorcs primary damage. Decent I suppose but not as good as 2% disrupt.

Spirit Deflection - Increases Spirit resistance by 5%.
There's not that much spiritual damage flying about really. Poor.

Enhanced Training - Increases Experience gain by 3%.
Pointless, you're much better off slotting a skill that will let you kill more and reap the extra XP and renown that way.

Enhanced Glory - Increases Renown gain by 5%.
Same as above.

Enhanced Fame - Increases Influence gain by 5%.
Who uses banners in PvE? I suppose it could go into a specialist banner build.

Thornshield - Deals 10 damage back to the attacker when struck by a melee attack.
Possibly the most useless ever. Not enough damage to be meaningful and completely negated by a HoT, oh I don't know, every half hour or so.

Enhanced Vigor - Increases Action Point regain rate by 10%/20%/30%.
Absolutely fantastic, everyone needs more AP. It allows more healing, more sustained burst damage. More everything. A must on every banner I'd say, unless you're planning on overlapping banners.

Suppress Destruction - Reduces the chance that you will suffer a critical hit by 2%.
Again, poor, although as it should apply to physical and magical damage one of the better mitigation skills.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Heraldry: Final

« on: October 20, 2008, 05:43:45 PM »

Black and white go with everything. Absolutely everything.

Blue and red seems to be leading at this point but having non-neutral colours will mean that a guild cloak won't look good with many colour schemes. I think it would be a shame if it came down to a choice between wearing the guild cloak and having the colour scheme you like.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Greatweapons vs Sword 'n Board

« on: October 17, 2008, 10:52:57 AM »

I edited some of my numbers as they were wrong, but they were mainly to do with the mitigation.

Overall, the analysis stands.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Greatweapons vs Sword 'n Board

« on: October 16, 2008, 10:43:06 PM »

I don't know where Jarkko's got his numbers from, they don't tie in with mine at all.

One nice thing about WAR is that there's very little randomness in the numbers, so the quick test detailed below is quite accurate. As far as it goes, anyhow.

Attacker: Swordmaster, rank 25.
Stats (without S/S or GS): 233 Str, 189 WS, 484 W, 340 T.

Defender: Darkscale Cold One, rank 27

Weapons:
Sentry Greatsword: rank 24, 2.8 speed, 45.0 DPS, 44 Str, 32 WS.
Sentry Falcata, rank 24, 2.8 speed, 31.0 DPS, 26 Str, 12 W.
Sentry Pavise, rank 24, 224 block (18.9%@25), 12 Str, 26 T.
Note: These are all rank 24 renown items and therefore offer the fairest comparison I can give.

My most damaging cycle is Ensorcelled Blow, Intimidating Blow, Dragon's Talon. This cycle takes 5 seconds but it is unsustainable, I can go maybe 40-50 seconds on this cycle before running out of AP. However, if the fight lasts more than 50 seconds my DPS is generally completely irrelevant, I'm either hitting someone being healed or tanking in PvE.

Damage (mitigated):

Autoattack - physical
S/S 63 (34)
GS 91 (46)

Ensorcelled Blow - spiritual
S/S 100 (34)
GS 117 (35)

Intimidating Blow - physical
S/S 100 (53)
GS 116 (59)

Dragon's Talon - spiritual
S/S 71 (21) + 71 (21)
GS 80 (24) + 80 (24)

Analysis (note that these number are rounded for display here, but not in my calculations):
Autoattack DPS for S/S is 22.5 (63/2.
Autoattack DPS for GS is 32.5 (91/2.
Ability DPS for S/S is 68.4 ((100+100+71+71)/5)
Ability DPS for GS is 78.6 ((117+116+80+80)/5)
Total DPS for SS is 90.9.
Total DPS for GS is 11.1.
Autoattack for S/S is 25% of total DPS.
Autoattack for GS is 29% of total DPS.

GS DPS is 22% higher than S/S DPS.
These numbers are for actual damage (ie after mitigation) but proportionally the numbers before mitigation are very close to those after.

A couple of other things to consider.
As strength increases, the amount of DPS contributed by the autoattack reduces. I do not stack strength (my stats are quite balanced between offence and defence), but if I did, the advantage of wielding a greatsword would diminish even further. Also, I can AOE about five mobs down and still finish the fight with close to full health using S/S but have trouble with two or three when using a GS.

Overall, I feel very squishy when using a greatsword and don't really feel like I enough extra DPS to compensate.

10

Warhammer Online / Re: HELP need level 25 seeds

« on: October 16, 2008, 05:33:35 PM »

Level 1 seeds will get you all the way to 50 skill, although it will take a lot longer than level 25 seeds would. Buy a stack from the vendor and never have your field empty.

11

Warhammer Online / Re: Tome Tactics

« on: October 16, 2008, 05:32:07 PM »

I don't think they work in keep sieges.

I have the -50% aggro range on greenskins slotted (hey, it's pretty useless but the only tome tactic I have) and I noticed that the orcs defending the keep we were attacking the other day aggroed on me from a huge range, far larger than normal mobs do.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Greatweapons vs Sword 'n Board

« on: October 16, 2008, 05:29:07 PM »

Two handed weapons don't provide enough of a DPS upgrade to make it worthwhile dropping your shield.

There's not really a noticeable difference in DPS between greatweapon and one-hander-with-shield on my Swordmaster but there is a huge and noticeable difference in my survivability.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Avelorn / Saphery Keep Siege 13/10/08

« on: October 14, 2008, 10:41:46 PM »

Hey look, a very dead me on the bridge in picture three.

And also, everybody just wandering past and leaving me there .

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Warhammer Online / Re: Guild Heraldry: Evolving thread.

« on: October 13, 2008, 05:41:06 PM »

Given that so many of the symbols are in sets that differ only by colour I think you could have maybe given a much wider choice on symbols and then given us a choice of colour later.

The eagles are the nicest on offer there but there isn't much choice for people who like clean simple lines.

The eagles are probably the only ones I'd show on my cloak. Five isn't bad but it's far too dwarfy for me, and the first three are far too pernickety and literal.

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Warhammer Online / Re: Guild Heraldry: Evolving thread.

« on: October 12, 2008, 10:53:16 AM »

Personally, I like the elven symbolism most. 185, 220, 223, 224 and 232 are my favourites of those.

However, given that we have a mix of all races I think we should probably avoid anything that shouts any particular race. There are precious few of them, though.