Awesome Sauce....Changes inc!
Wow, just wow. What a great day for some positives for the Warhammer community.
Two HUGE notifications on the herald today. One being the Keep Upgrades, and the other being patch 1.2.1. Both of which could seemingly have an enormous impact on the game.
First, the keep upgrades. My initial thoughts.......perfect. What better way to promote open RvR than to make keeps much more difficult to take? If it is taking people much longer to take keeps, the more apt they are to be just running around looking for fights. Being able to increase door hp, add guards, bump up guards to champion levels, have HEALING guards (Finally), and the ultimate Divine Favor Altar could potentially be game breaking as far as T4 goes. The only way I see this as being bad, is if it is poorly implemented making keeps just entirely to difficult to take at all.
As far as 1.2.1....Finally:
Combat Responsiveness Improvements – This subject has been an object of much discussion, both internally at Mythic, and externally among the community over the past few months and the team has been focusing especially heavily on this issue over the past few weeks. The result is that we have made a number of important improvements to this aspect of the game. In V1.2.1, casting times have become more accurate under normal play conditions, and players should no longer see a significant “stretch” or “pause” when casting spells while playing in “normal” conditions. We have also changed the UI display so increments of ½ second will be shown to give the player a more accurate and correct representation of time, and in high-lag situations, there will be a slight pause after the bar has filled up instead of the current “stretching” system. We have also made improvements to the animations and special effects-systems, which will result in better transitions especially when players are “chain-casting.”
Will we actually see little to no "cast lag"? Will I not have a cast bar when using an insta cast ability? Hopefully this goes in perfectly.
RvR Zone Control Rewards- We have made a number of improvements to reward players receive for capturing an entire zone as opposed to individual Objective and Keep captures. Battlefield Objectives will also buff players in the zone, and the players who have captured a Keep or Battlefield Objective will also see a doubling in the amount of Renown gained when the zone is captured.
Also probably a good thing. Now that it will be more difficult to take upgraded keeps, people should be rewarded as such. Nothing like doubling your Renown earned.
The Battle for the Gates of Ekrund Expands! – We have added a special 6-on-6 version of the Gates of Ekrund for players between the Ranks of 19-24. This will help players at these Ranks gain experience faster while the team continues to work on other improvements to the experience-gain pace for those Ranks. Of course, this new Scenario “Broken Gates of Ekrund” is also accompanied by its own quest.
This to me seems like something more geard for future patches. A lot of players are wanting more skirmish fights (myself included) What better way to test that out than with a 6v6 instance? Not sure if this is getting to close to WoW Arenas though....we'll see where it goes I guess.
With all of those changes not to mention bug fixes, career balancing, and Beyond the Sands, the next few months for the Warhammer Online community are seemingly going to be great!
