Tuesday 25 January 2011

Blogging Again

I've been back playing WAR again now since mid December after (another) 6 month break. I've been meaninig to start blogging again for a while now but found it hard to get started, other than a random out-of-the blue bunch of suggestions for making Skaven more meaningful to WAR and RvR.

So I have decided to give myself some focus by listing what I have been thinking about and what I want to blog about.

  • Why I stopped playing back in June and why I am back
  • My experiences since returning
  • Power Gap
  • Keep Sieges - my likes and dislikes
  • WAR Stats: new analysis of WAR's numbers and the combat log.
  • WAR Stats: Anatomy of a Fight, an in-depth look at what happens during a fight.
  • Swordmaster Specs & Builds

That'll do me for now.

As a quick starter for ten, I am enjoying my time playing WAR. I totally get the concerns that are doing the rounds but right now I am enjoying my playtime a great deal. I cannot get enough of it. Lack of communication from Mythic is my biggest concern.

Thursday 13 January 2011

Skaven Warbands Roaming the Lakes

Here’s some new ideas to make the introduction of Skaven into WAR have a point.

This would not require much effort from a dev point of view in my opinion (a gamer). Everything is in game already. Just a slight rehash of the skaven classes and a small and very generic new zone.

Skaven vs Skaven

When Thanquol’s opens up players/groups/warbands queue for it jus like a City Instance or Sc and when it pops for your group or warband you get ported in. No RR restriction. You all get turned to Skaven. You can choose which class. A menu pops up and you can choose which Skaven class you went to play. The classes will need some tweaking from how they are now, but not much. Nothing “original” is required, they could just copy ideas from the current classes.

And then you have a big skaven fight against the opposing faction’s skaven over some kind of scenario/City style objective.

Skaven Warbands Roaming the Lakes

On top of loot and shit, whoever wins the encounter gets to continue playing as Skaven out in the lakes. So the winning warbands from both sides get ported into RvR as Skaven.

Skaven should be made overpowered but have drawbacks – no res allowed, no heals from non-skaven. If you die as a Skaven you do not respawn as a skaven. OR perhaps have stats or damage/healing decreases slowly over time up to the point where they are actually weaker than the normal players. They start with a 200% buff to damage which fades to 50% after 30 mins.

Level Up Your Skaven – Bonus at Low RR
This would be my favourite bit. When you kill players as a Skaven you earn RP as usual but you earn SP too (Skaven Points!). You get to spend these on levelling up your Skaven, something like renown abilities, even exactly like RA. You still get to choose which skaven class every time Thanquol’s pops so you don’t level up a single skaven character per se, you just increase your pool of points to spend each time.

Players with low RR will earn Skaven Points quicker than high RR in the same way that they do now with RP after the Progression Pack. This will help new and low RR players get the chance to be more powerful.

Skaven Tunnels
Skaven could be not be allowed out of the RvR zones but instead use tunnels to get between zones. This could actually be a new zone – just a simple generic series of tunnels that meet up and wind about leading to different ports, with plenty of opportunity for rival Skaven warbands to meet up and duke it out. Controlling access to these tunnels could be controlled by capping BOs out in the “real world”.

P.S. I'm playing again