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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Wrath of Heroes: The addition of Felicia

As I'm talking to you, the first phase of the open Beta for Wrath of Heroes is concluded. The outcome of the Beta is truly average, all in all people have noticed several bad points the game currently has, they also had to endure a very unfun play experience through teams filled with burst ranged dps, "1-pull you are dead" Volrik, and a scarcity of healers. In the middle of all that, Mythic announce the future comeback of another hero, Felicia!


 

 
For those of you who have been around for a long time, you without a doubt remember Felicia. And you also remember the carnage she used to wrought down on the battlefield. Shortly after, after much whining, she was removed and the developers said she would come back in a better, improved form. Well, as you can see, she is the exact same. From the first look, nothing in her has changed. But hey who knows.

Although I can commend the addition of new heroes in a Beta that is suffering from the low number of heroes, I regret that among all the ones they had they chose Felicia, a ranged DPS, and by that one of the most obnoxious there is.

Why? Simply because the game is full of people stacking Ilyana. Why would they? Because she is the character with the most burst, thanks to her abilities favoring crits, and has a passive that increases her damage by +5% per other Dark Elf like her in your group. To put it simply, alone she has good damage, with 3 others like her, she has +15% more good damage. And to boot the other Ilyana get the bonus too. Pretty big boost for a team if I may say.

This has led to lots of Ilyana swarming the game. Not only can you get kills easily with her (which is important in this game), but you have the range advantage. This with the fact that the only healer in the game is better away from melee, Ilyana is set to dominate.

What could counter her?

First, what is the eternal enemy of a ranged "cloth" DPS? A pure "tank" melee DPS of course. Aessa being THE melee DPS of the game right now, she is bound to be a good character to counter Aessa? Well 1v1, sure! If you have the intelligence of faking a pounce and make them waste their 4th ability then use it to close the gap, you can bash her good. However ,even then it will be a close match because she can just burst you down.
Now let's put this in a more "realist" context, 6v6. Since this game is hardly a game where individual skill alone matters (since some heroes are made to dominate some others in the easiest/scrubbiest way possible), you have to judge a character in how he will interact among and against a group.
Aessa when facing a group of Ilyana will get slaughtered right now. That simple. Her only hope is if the warband is fully dedicated to melee, which would mean at least 1 Glowgob, 2 Volrik to pull people in melee at a reasonable rate, and the rest being Aessa. Using that you can all use the 5th ability of Aessa to survive the gap between you and the enemy team. I tried this strat with a player (Grakulen) that was streaming for MMORPG.com, and we lost 2 matches, each struggling to survive. Unfortunately this spec is not the best for dps since Volrik dps is far from optimal, which lead to a lack of kill points, However you have a good chance of surviving if your Aessa use their 5th ability well!
In the last match we did, we decided to just go for a full Ilyana team, and guess what? We won.

Ilyana is a problem right now, one that is exacerbated by the lack of melee heals, and heals in general.

Now you can really question the motivation behind adding another ranged dps to this mix. With Ilyana already dealing massive damage from afar, now you are going to have solid CC in the ranged field! Felicia, with Conflagration of Doom, Rain of Fire, and Fiery Blast, will bring solid CC and make it even more difficult for the rare people trying to rock melee!

Either the developers are massively unaware of the situation in the game right now. Or they have more heroes coming for the next session, which would be most welcomed. Or worse they are just capitalizing on the 'selling' factor of Felicia, after all she is a chick and seems to have less daddy issues than Ilyana!

In either case, we can only hope for Mythic to realize that the situation is dire, the ranged problem and the gold problem are showing a pretty bad picture of the game and its starting to get some media attention. If the game is branded as a bad that early (which will happen really fast if the game is deemed as devoid of depth or Pay2Win), it will die in the egg.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Wrath of Heroes: Not much hope!

The Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes Beta started. As one who has followed this game since the very first Beta, and even invested some important amount of time trying to better understand or promote this game I have to say, I have now few hopes for the future of this game.

This game is riddled with problems from the ground up. But more importantly, the team behind the game is severely lacking:

1. The team doesn't understand what Free2Play really means, they basically just saw an opportunity to milk people out of their money, the ridiculous prices are a good indication of that. They -want- you to feel obliged to buy characters.

2. The gameplay is not the team's priority. They are more busy taking care of superficial aspect of the game instead of focusing on the REAL aspects that will get people to play. The fact that the game is zerg'y and simplistic is a good indication of that. They -want- people to feel like 'winners' when all they are doing is farm kills in group and counting on their friends. (I can't wait until they realize people who don't/can't find good warbands won't stick with the game).

3. The game design is an afterthought. The fact that tactics/masteries introduce a Pay2Win element, the wasted/broken perks that could have saved the game from the 5 abilities boredom. The fact that they can't realize that the variety in heroes was their advantage and decided to start a Open Beta with only 5 heroes! Those guys have no clue what they are doing, they are too busy thinking of all the money they will get from those addicted MMO PvPers.

This game has a long road ahead, even if they introduce more characters. It will just become a giant zerg farm where time and who you know is more valued than skills.

Friday, January 20, 2012

The Real Potential of the Mists of Pandaria Talent System


An interesting discussion started on the MMO-Champion forums about Blizzard's next expansion for World of Warcraft, Mists of Pandaria.
This discussion presented the idea of giving all WoW classes a 4th spec: Fourth Spec for More than Druids.
Although this discussion is far from anything new, this time people are actually getting comfortable with the idea. My opinion about that? It's about damn time someone realized how great of an idea this is.

The first thing I thought when I saw the Mists Of Pandaria Talent Panel (you can see a recap of it here) was "Wow, now they can create any spec they want for each classes". And indeed with this system Blizzard does throw the customization through talents aspect out of the window, but gains the ability to finally have classes with more than 3 specs.

For Blizzard, this is a good idea for one simple reason: they will be able to sell specs! More after the jump!

The asian themed continent of Pandaria.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Wrath of Heroes: Update Before the First Beta Phase of 2012!

Hey everyone!

Hope you had a great start at 2012. This post is mainly to give you all an update on the character breakdown series and my future posts covering Wrath of Heroes. First off, the last few days have been hectic for me with the holidays and some other stuffs, so I haven't been able to do all the character breakdowns I planned to do. Two articles on Conrad and Tobias are close to be done, but since the next phase of Beta is starting soon (in 2 days, January 12 2012) and we have no idea what it might bring to the game I decided to wait and see. So for the moment those articles will only be released after this coming Beta IF nothing easily need coverage.

And now what I really want to do in future posts is an analysis of the video Total Biscuit made about WoH. Here is the video but be warned this is sensitive stuff, especially if you like the game:


 Through the examination of this video, I plan on giving an accurate picture of the state of the game, what are its current strengths, what might be its weaknesses, and what it might need t succeed. I have high hopes for this game, but unfortunately high hopes are not enough in real life.

So here it is, for now I will wait for whatever January 12 is bringing to the game. And then I will have the time and material to finish the planned character breakdowns and then bring you an analysis of the WTF is of Total Biscuit. As always follow me on twitter @ControlBlue if you would be interested in discussing WoH or know when the next articles will be released! Stay Classy!