Van Hemlock

The Change of Mode...

Van Hemlock — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:01:52 GMT

Classes irritate me a bit. Of course you learn to get on with it soon enough, but there's always the nagging worry that someone else might be having more fun, or and easier time of it, than you.

You know the kind of thing; you install, sign up, fire the game up and then are presented with a big old list of what 'job' you'd like to choose. Often you've no idea what a Jedi, or Bureaucrat or Shaman or Herald of Xotli actually is. You might have notions of what they might be historically, or mythologically, but what they are actually for, is a often less clear.

After a few of these games you start to see patterns, see the archetypes, and it becomes a matter of working out what the healer, tank, crowd control and such are called in this particular milieu. But you'll generally be assured of having one particular job in a group, and one particular way to play. Which is helpful in general, but can become a bit repetitive, and often, the needs of a group and the needs of, well, your solo self, can become at odds, in basic function. A class can be such a thing as too useful in a group. What if you could switch between different modes of your class, as the occasion demands?

Nifty! #9: World of Warcraft's Warrior Stances

I'm sure regular readers will have noticed that I'm looking for something Nifty! in every game I've played, but when it came to WoW, I did have some troubles. Successful, and indeed, good, as it is WoW isn't especially renowned for bringing anything startlingly original to the genre, per se. It does a astonishing job of presenting a lot of the older ideas in a highly-polished and well-put-together way, on the whole, and this is it's own main strength.

The Warrior Stances did strike me as a particularly clever idea though. The Warrior, over time, eventually ends up with three Stances; Battle Stance, Defensive Stance and Berserker Stance.

These aren't just buffs or special attacks, but are something qualitatively different. Choosing to be in one of these stances alters a Warrior's entire mode, opening access to some skills and closing off access to others, and each confers its own bonuses and penalties, simply by being in it in the first place.

Battle Stance is the middle ground, a flexible footing for general combat, with moderate Threat (WoW's hate list mechanic) reduction. Defensive Stance offers damage reduction and increased hate list visibility, making it perfect for being a group's main tank - making it more likely the monster will focus on you, and reducing incoming damage to help survive that. Berserker Stance is an all-out DPS type of mode, increasing critical hit chance and reducing Threat, but at the cost of increased damage taken.

The various other Warrior abilities tend to work best (or indeed, at all) with one or two of these modes, further helping to specialise a given Warrior in a group role. What happens if you have two Warriors in a group? You can't both be main tank, and usually, the second tank just has to stand about hitting the monster, but not so hard that the healer now has two patients to worry about. The stances allow two similar Warriors to take on two entirely different roles, and not to get in each other's way, with aggro and such. A Defensive Stance Warrior takes on the mantle of traditional meat-shield, usually supported by a dedicated healer. The Berserker Stance Warrior then becomes an almost Rogue-like figure, trying to avoid notice and dish out huge amounts of DPS at the same time. And for soloing, either can drop back into Battle Stance, which offers moderate amounts of both survivability and damage, and if they both get bored, they can even swap over entirely, taking it in turns to be Main Tank - often in the same instance!

Having done my time as an Everquest 1 Warrior, this sudden versatility came as quite a liberation. I don't have to find a group (with no other warriors in it) to get on with my life? Shocking! Having gotten a WoW Warrior to 60 in my time, the correct and thoughtful use of these stances made my life a much more enjoyable thing than it might have been, with far greater flexibility than might otherwise have been the case, and most crucially, didn't leave me trapped in a class that has only one very specific purpose.

It isn't perfect, of course, and I never made it to the Raiding Endgame. Much of Tobold's ongoing analysis of the Warrior, (and to a lesser extent, Priest), shows that at the top-end, certainly, the switching of modes is not enough on it's own, and having different sets of equipment, and paying for frequent and pricey Talent Respecs becomes increasingly more important, if a member of a given class is to carry out more than one job at a time, which is a shame.

But the journey there at least, is a much more enjoyable thing with this innate flexibility, and something I'd like to see become standard in all future MMOs, for all classes! Other classes in WoW get something a similar - the Druid's shapechanging alters the way they play on a situational basis, and to a lesser extent, Priest Shadowform, and Rogue Stealth.

I'd be hard pressed to find anything comparable in other MMOs though, past or present - the idea that you can just hit a toggle and almost become a different class entirely. Guild Wars' ultimate flexibility in skillbar selection, and continually rechooseable secondary class is something akin to the above, perhaps, but the game itself requires much less in the way of defined 'roles' anyway. If you know of others, do let me know!

So for only making me be a Tank when I deem it necessary, and for bundling three classes into one, World of Warcraft's Warrior Stances; Nifty!

Hell, you don't need me to tell you where WoW is! The Warrior's Stances however, are dished out over quite a large span of levels. You get Battle stance at start, Defensive Stance at Lv10, which isn't too big a slog, and Berserker Stance is given out at Lv30, which takes a bit longer.

Just having the Battle and Defensive Stances should be easily enough to see how they work, and what that means to the adventuring Warrior, both in a group, and alone.

The Request for Help...

Van Hemlock — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:14:07 GMT

Hello all! I don't tend to do this a lot, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Over the last few months, I've been having increasing troubles being booted out of my online games. Mostly this had been happening in Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa, so I initially assumed it was some problem with NCSoft - perhaps those titles in particular are more finicky than most with dropped packets and suchlike.

The trouble with this kind of troubleshooting exercise though, is that there are just so many links in the chain, between me and my Mesmer and/or Grenadier, and in my freshly-disconnected fury, I'd never sat down and tried to work out what exactly was going wrong.

Anyway, it wasn't until my Troubles during the recording of Shut Up We're Talking, that I started to think the problem might be closer to home - Skype can't hack it either, which is ridiculous!

So anyway, the long and the short of it, is that I am in the market for a new ISP, my current provider, Demon Internet, having gone severely downhill in my estimation. So I throw myself on the mercy of my UK readers. Please do chip in with any recommendations for a replacement ISP, below! I'm looking for an ADSL Broadband package, and I think I'm capable of 2Mbps, possibly 8... not sure. Obviously, I'm mostly using it for MMO gaming, and tend to have email and website stuff done independently of the ISP anyway. Speed isn't as important to me as 100% Ironclad Reliability, re disconnects, and I don't mind paying a bit extra for quality, what with this nonsense being, well, my entire life and all.

(I appreciate do appreciate sympathy from any Overseas readers, but I'm not sure you'll be able to help me I'm afraid!)

The Podcast of Percussion...

Van Hemlock — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:21:57 GMT

Here we go again, and despite the unseasonal UK variable and fortnight-long sudden summer, and and complete lack of air-conditioning, we managed yet another podcast thingie. We'd forgot about Summer when we started in on this, but hopefully the heat-delirium isn't too apparent. Stick with us for another three shows and you will likely get to hear us expire...on air!

Van Hemlock & The Vandellas; Ep 6: In which more news is treated in an Extremely Irreverent Manner, a blogger demonstrates an enormous amount of Hypocrisy concerning Planetside, and because playing music is Much Easier than thinking up Interesting Things to Say, a Large Musical Segment ensues!

Apologies for the somewhat fractious edit-trample there, but no great loss, as we were mostly just deliberately confusing 'Hoth' (The Ice Planet from Empire Strikes Back), with 'Hoff', (The Eighties super-car driving action hero turned 'pop star', popular in Germany), for hilarious effect! Never the less, just as soon as I can find a burlap sack large enough, I shall be getting the Producer to climb inside it, and then shall be beating it with a large stick until he learns a jolly good lesson about Timing!

Some useful links:

World IV: The (virtual) hills are alive ... with the sound of music.

err, the previous few posts here about Planetside

The Van Hemlock Podcast GAX Online Group Thing

And pretty much everyone else on the sidebar, about Age of Conan Beta Experiences!