Overly Positive

Warhammer Online has been chugging along lately, with upcoming live expansion Land of the Dead the major thing on the horizon for WAR players.

The 1.3 patch, which was supposed to be a massive patch that not only introduced this new content but fixed bugs and balance careers, has been decided cut in half faster than an Orc Choppa can spam their blade abilities at you. Seems that in doing the career changes and balancing, Mythic has found players a little, well, passionate about some of the fixes, which include an overall AoE reduction, single-target damage increase, toughness and statistical improvement on a mass scale, and other things. So to give it more time, Land of the Dead will now be the primary component of the next patch, while Combat and Career changes will be pushed back to another cycle.

I have to give kudos to Mythic for this decision. While Combat and Careers is something that someone will always have something to complain about, the bigger issue with such changes in the 1.3 patch has been their scope and widespread effect. And by effect, I mean both player perception and actual data.

I have combat logs from some of the changes, and the PTS numbers are a bit staggering – with large crits from certain spells, a toughness increase that made some toons extremely difficult to kill, and the healing reduction, there were just way too many cooks in the kitchen as far as the changes go. As a technology professional, one of the things you learn is that when you patch something, you do not add too much into the mix – because the more you add, the more likely something will break and the less likely it is you will be able to efficiently find the cause of it.

Mythic has taken some heat for shorter testing cycles that haven’t given the time to truly test and gather the feedback that is needed, so to see these changes pushed back and a more cautious approach taken is a good thing. The patch is already going to be huge with 1.3′s new Land of the Dead content, and with the launch of that needing to be as smooth as possible, removing career changes is a good step towards that.

So Mythic did good as far as I can tell with this decision. But that being said, the introduction of their “controversial” changes should really give them pause as to the scope under which they should be changing stats and dealing with existing issues. I am personally hopeful that they will take a more surgical approach to the changes, but in lieu of that, more testing of them is sufficient.