After reading about Warhammer Online and trying to get my hands on any little bit of information about the PvP that I could, I finally had a chance to try it yesterday via the free Preview Weekend. It’s not quite beta yet, with a Rank Cap of 21, and only the first 2 tiers of zones open, but I definitely got a feel for how this game is going to play out. Needless to say, the last couple days of play have solidified my decision to buy the game and play it when it goes live on September the 18th, along with the rest of guild.

The obvious comparison here is to that of World of Warcraft, it’s leading the MMO genre, it’s well known and easy to put side-by-side with WAR. While most Warhammer Online fans tend to hate it when anyone even tries to draw comparisons between the two games, it’s clear that there are similarities, but I feel that the reason Warhammer Online is so much fun to play is because of the glaring differences. While most of the people I know defending WoW as the ultimate PvP game, they seem to know nothing about how PvP works in WAR. A note to the Warhammer players; I will be referring to PvP as ‘PvP’ in this article, not ‘RvR,’ so don’t get your panties in a twist Let me break down the reasons I think make WAR an all around better PvP game than World of Warcraft.

1. PvP From the Start

As soon as you load into the game, you’re given the option to queue up for a Scenario (battleground, essentially). You don’t even have to do your first PvE quest, read anything, or go anywhere. There’s an icon in the top-right-hand corner of your UI that you can click to queue you, or your group, for the tier1 scenario. Why would you want to just sit in a scenario and PvP when everyone else is busy leveling? Nobody wants to get left behind right? Right. You gain experience from killing players, winning scenarios, capturing open world objectives, everything. You wouldn’t think it’d be enough to level you up, but I’ve got roughly 90% of my characters experience just from PvP. There’s also a lot of repeatable PvP-oriented quests you can pick up to further boost the experience you gain, such as ‘Kill 5 enemy players,’ or ‘Win a Nordenwatch Scenario.’

How do you deal with the level discrepancy though? If I’m rank 1, and there’s rank 10 players in the same Scenario/RvR battle, I won’t stand a chance right? Wrong. Anytime you enter a PvP scenario, you’re automatically boosted to a higher rank so that you can be competitive. Now, this boost affects your base stats and health, but not your gear. It also boosts your abilities to the corresponding rank so they do more, but it doesn’t grant you the extra abilities you would have learned had you gotten to that rank without the boost. As soon as you leave/deflag, you are returned to your normal rank.

2. Renown > Honor

My first point leads me right into my second. While you’re off PvPing, gaining experience for your character ranks, you also get a special kind of PvP-only experience know as ‘Renown.’ The similarities between renown and honor are hard to ignore, but again, the subtle differences make it a much better system. Renown works just like experience stored in a separate pool, you rank up and increase your renown rank, which grants you special abilities, tactics, trophies, character titles, and most importantly: Gear. The first set of renown gear becomes available at Rank 10/Renown Rank 6, once these two ranks are achieved, you can head to the closest keep and purchase a full set of Renown Gear for your class. This set of gear (including all accessory slots, rings, cloak, weapons, and armor pieces) is tailored specifically for RvR. There are over 40 armor sets ingame currently for every class, most of which come from Renown Rank. You unlock a new set of gear every few renown ranks, as well as other goodies such as extra armor-dye colors. There are a total of 40 player ranks, and 80 Renown Ranks.

3.Balanced for PvP from the Start

I think this is one of the biggest advantages Warhammer Online PvP has over WoW PvP. PvP is what this game was designed for. WoW PvP was an afterthought, and it’s very apparent when you look at late-added stats such as spellpower/spellhealing and resilience, which are just quick-fixes desguised as ‘game mechanic changes’ to tone down the incredibly uneven scaling of damage and healing. WAR PvP has all these things factored into the base stats that each class starts out with. There are stats that reduce all incoming damage, Armor reduces melee damage, and Resists reduce magic damage (a % of magic damage taken, like armor, not a chance to resist a spell). Crit reduction, spelldamage, and healing are all factored in and balanced from the very start. I expect all damage and healing from rank 1 to rank 40 to scale VERY equally, it has so far, and there’s no reason for it not to.

Another thing is the abilities. You gain a new ability at every rank, however, these abilities rank up with you. I started the game with ‘Doombolt,’ a rank 1 nuke. This is still my main nuke at rank 11, and I have not upgraded it manually at all. Spells, heals, buffs, nukes, melee abilities… they all rank up with you and increase in potency relative to your character rank. There are no useless abilities that you’ll outgrow. Everything you learn on your way to rank 40, will still be effective AT rank 40.

4. Virtually No Crowd Control

I have never felt like I could not do anything to survive. The most powerful crowd control abilities in this game only last a few seconds, with long cooldowns, and diminishing returns to boot. Tanks are really the only exception in this case, since their job in a group PvP encounter is to.. well.. control the crowds. Even then, tanks just get a variety of crowd control abilities rather than a few with long durations or effects. 5 seconds is pretty standard for any roots/snares, I have not seen a stun over 3 seconds.

5. Collision Detection

No more running through players. Collision Detection really adds another level to thinking to the game; blocking chokepoints, blocking a player from reaching your healer, or losing someone that’s chasing you by getting them to run into your groupmates. I’ve managed to escape a many players by running dangerously close to an ongoing battle and positioning myself on the opposite of side of it. It’s sort of a pseudo-pillar-humping strategy, except it only works against melee classes, and you use players instead of pillars… but I’d prefer not calling it player-humping. Collision Detection is a very strong tool for tanks, they literally block enemies from getting to the squishies in the back or stop a low-health player from running away.

6. Tanking in PvP

Keeping in the tradition of segwaying nicely from one point to the next, collision detection brings us to Tanking in PvP. That’s right tanks, you don’t have to drop your shield and respec to be effective in PvP, in fact, keeping your shield on makes you one of the most effective tools on the battlefield. The amount of damage a tank class can soak up in this game is ridiculous; they have so much more armor/resist/health than anyone else. The high survivability is only the beginning; tanks are here to protect you. With the amazing ‘Guard’ ability making you take 50% of your defensive targets incoming damage, lots of ways to disable attacking players (read: snares), the ability to taunt players (if you taunt a player, your damage is increased 20% vs them until they hit you 3 times), and being the guild standard bearer (carry a guild standard to give area-wide buffs until you are killed), there’s plenty for you do. In my honest opinion, the single most important class archetype on the battlefield at any time, along with your healers.

7. TTK (Time to Kill)

You may never have heard of this term before, don’t worry, I just recently found about it too. TTK is a term the WAR development team uses to gauge the average survivability of a player in a group PvP situation. The very fact they have a term for something like this is immensely encouraging. This exists to ensure that nobody is going down to quickly, or staying up too long. Nobody likes getting insta-gibbed.

8. World PvP Happens, Very Beneficial

At rank 10 I was already seeing massive battles for World PvP Objectives, Keeps, and just skirmishes in completely arbitrary zones. Capturing a World Objective not only gets your renown, but also experience. Winning Scenarios, capturing world objects, and owning keeps also gives your a zone-wide buff to encourage World PvP, much like WoW. The difference here is that WoW’s buff give you a measly 5% damage increase, while the WAR buffs gives you a whopping 20% increase in Renown Gain! That’s huge. An organized group in World PvP can clean house and definitely gain more renown than you would in a scenario. No Mercy.

9. Player Input > Auto Attack

If you play a melee class, you most likely have noticed that your auto-attack is very slow. If you play a caster, you most likely have noticed that you have no auto-attack. There’s a very apparent focus on what the player does, rather than just being in range of your enemy for the auto-attack damage to build up. This is never a bad thing.

10. Action Points Keep PvP Going

Casters don’t run out of mana, melee don’t need to build rage. Every class works off the ever-restoring Action Point system. You gain action points very quickly, even quicker when you’re out of combat. There is no food and water, because there’s no reason to eat and drink. There will be no ‘outlasting’ of your opponent; kill or be killed. Sure if you spam your abilities you will run out of said AP, and yes there are abilities that drain it, but rest assured; it will come back soon. Action Points loves you. This is a great mechanic. I’ve often stayed away from playing casters because I hate only being useful in a fight until my mana runs out. Not a problem here. This also takes me back to my point about TTK; not creating a limit on how long certain classes can be effective in a fight also increases how long everyone can stay in said fight.

11. RNG Can Go to Hell

RNG. Random Number Generation. RNG refers to anything that has a % chance of happening, and is essentially a roll of the dice rather than a player causing effect. This is possibly the single worst thing about WoW PvP, and the competitive players are fairly vocal about it. Blizzard is slowly trying to fix this, but it’s hard to do when your entire game is based on it. Don’t get me wrong, RNG does exist in Warhammer Online; there are crits, and resists, and CC has a chance to break on damage. However, the PvP is not designed around it. If a class is meant to crit (Sorceress/Bright Wizard) it’s very apparent (50% crit chance at full dark magic), if something is meant to be risky, it is (snares/roots 50% chance to break on damage), and since magic resists give a set damage mitigation % like Armor does for melee, spell resists are less common and rarely determine the outcome of a battle.

12. PvP Gear

Like I mentioned earlier, you get your gear upgrades at certain renown ranks. I already have my first full set of Renown Gear, and I can tell you that it helps. Gear does affect your survivability and damage/healing output, but it’s not enough of an advantage to decide a fight. I’ve still been killed by player in terrible gear, and I was killing renown gear players before I had my set. Reports from the Closed Beta, where players got max rank characters with full renown gear seem to echo this: Gear plays a role in PvP, but it doesn’t decide fights. Sorry rogues, you can’t be #1 just because you picked up some Twin Blades of Azzinoth.



There’s a lot more then just this. These are the big things that stand out in my mind, and my whole guild praises. Bottom line: This game is fun, this game is balanced, it does not feel like a grind. For the first time in a long time, I’m having fun in an MMO. I remember back when World of Warcraft first came out and what my hopes for that game were, it only took me a couple days of playing Warhammer Online that the PvP here is everything I wanted from WoW.