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Waging WAR: The Nagaryth Chronicles, supplemental
During the last three weeks, Waging WAR took a look at the shadow warrior career in Warhammer Online, in an attempt to gain personal experience and insight into the complaints that most players have with the class. Due to popular demand, this week we return (albeit briefly) to the shadow warrior class to touch up a few frayed ends. We also set our sights forward and look ahead to future issues of Waging WAR. I felt that my review of the career was based on solid ground, given the scope, and taking the setting and focus into consideration, and considering the fact that I had to grind the levels relatively quickly in order to stay on-time and deliver the column promptly. Despite my original intention to simply gain personal insight and experience with the class in an effort to have greater understanding of its hot-button issues, many of the Waging WAR readers who left comments were disappointed with my experiment, as I didn't have time or space to have a serious look at the skirmish and assault trees. So, throughout the last week, I felt obliged to play my shadow warrior, focusing all of my mastery points in either skirmish or assault (starting at rank 30, there are more than enough points available to explore an entire tree, and even a few inter-tree synergies). Follow along after the break to find out how things went for me.
Greg Waller07.17.2010
Waging WAR: The Nagaryth Chronicles, part three
This week bears with it the final installment to Waging WAR's Nagaryth Chronicles, which took a long-term, in-depth look at the Path of the Scout mastery tree available to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning's shadow warrior. Admittedly, Greg didn't have time to take his character all the way through to rank 40/40, but this past July 4th weekend's double XP and renown bonuses allowed him to level through Tier 3 relatively quickly. He's also promised us that he'll continue to play her casually as a break from his Archmage main, from time to time. Again, I would like to take a moment to respond to some feedback left as reader comments to last week's column: @Taawa -- According to my experience, festerbombs are absolutely deadly (think: "BOOM Headshot!"), possibly even moreso than any sort of infiltration attack by stealth-class melee-damage-per-second (MDPS) careers. If you're the type who enjoys sneaking around terrain and quietly selecting a target while taking time to prepare a guaranteed kill, you'll enjoy this build. I'll explain more after the break. @Kyelthis -- Again with excellent feedback: the Steady Aim (SA) - Replenishing Strikes (RS) - Rapid Fire (RF) combination (a combination that had never occured to me until you pointed it out) is almost always as effective as Lileath's Forgiveness (LF). However, I feel that my use of SA is slightly more productive. I'll explain why after the break. @Hal900x -- I'm pretty sure you're mistaking Unshakeable Focus with SA. Also, Shadow Sting (SS) is extremely short-range (45'). My ideal build (complete by rank 35) was focusing on extremely long-range, high-burst, sniping -- which is why I opted for Fell the Weak (FTW, 100') instead, since it has the same effect except instead of requiring an ailment, the "mortal strike" component requires Vengeance of Nagarythe (VoN, and is one second longer in duration to boot!). Finally, SA applies a 50% increased critical chance to damaging attacks, not to the overall critical chance of the character; thus, any attack during those six seconds has its critical chance treated like a coin flip: heads for a critical, tails for a normal hit. So, why do I think that shadow warriors are fine and don't need the attention that everyone seems to claim they need? I'll discuss my side of the issue after the break.
Greg Waller07.10.2010
Waging WAR: The Nagaryth Chronicles, part two
Waging WAR continues this week with the second installment of the Nagaryth Chronicles -- an in-depth look at the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning's shadow warrior. We'll talk about how the career performs through tier two, identify key abilities, and open the floor to discussion about how we might begin to remedy some of the most basic issues with the career. So nock another arrow and let's get started. First things first. I want to quickly respond to a few of the reader comments left on last week's column. @MiloMenderBender: After you pointed out my target selection could be wrong, I started paying attention to my damage vs. the varying enemy careers. Your suggestion to pay closer attention to damage-per-kill rather than overall made perfect sense, and I'm now making more careful and efficient targeting decisions -- with satisfying results. @Kyelthis: Your keybinding suggestions were excellent and definitely worth trying out. @ShadowWAR: After reading your comment, it took only a moment to pay closer attention and confirm that the stances are not on the global cooldown (GCD) and skirmish stance does indeed return 1:1 ballistics to strength from items only. @ the rest: Thank you for your contributions, and, although I'm hesitant to have this series turn into a conversation about mirrors, issues with the game in general or concerns with other careers, I want you to know that I read all of your comments and appreciate your feedback. Moving on, let's continue with my impressions and issues with the shadow warrior through tier two after the break.
Greg Waller07.03.2010
Nate Levy explains WAR's action point fix
Mythic developers just fixed a major bug that has been in Warhammer Online since launch and it's having a big impact on players. Action points (AP) are the one-size-fits-all resource used to cast spells, perform damage attacks, and tank. Suffice to say, a change to the way AP works affects every class in the game. This bug fix makes it take a little longer for AP to regenerate as originally intended. Many players claim that the time-to-kill in beta was much higher than it turned out at release, and while a dozen or more variables play a part in this (e.g., better gear, higher crit rates, newer strategies, etc.), AP regen can be counted among them. You see, after the game released game update 1.3.1 came out, players had a nearly limitless AP pool. In fact, AP regen potions were useless aside from getting a quick boost after sprinting. This led to many players getting in the habit of button-mashing their abilities without fearing a complete AP drain. Now that the issue has been corrected, there's been a bit of an outcry from players who have become accustomed to playing WAR not as intended for over a year. Mythic stresses that this change is for the better but will continue to monitor the situation and adjust accordingly. Check out Nate Levy's developer diary for all the details. Update: This bug was discovered in 1.3.1 but we are unsure of when it originally made its way into the game. We apologize for jumping to conclusions based on our own experiences.
Brooke Pilley10.27.2009