Overly Positive

Well – Zemanta couldn’t find me a good cannonball splash picture, but a human cannonball will be just as attention-grabbing, I think, right?

Over at Warhammer Alliance, I’ve posted an interesting interview with Jeff Skalski that talks about the WAR one-year retrospective. But there’s also stuff about patch 1.3.2 in the interview, a bonus to what I was honestly asking about when I crafter the questions. If patch 1.3.1 was the bugfixing patch, this is the cannonball splash patch, perhaps meant to draw a little bit of attention away from upcoming releases and show players that even if they are choosing to take time off from WAR, that progress is still being made.

The highlights revealed include:

• Removal of stun from the game entirely, to be replaced by a break-on-damage mez called “stagger”.
• Surgical look at several Destruction classes, including Magus, Witch Elf, and Black Guard
• A possible Underdog system to assist the faction being dominated on a server

While these things are tentative and not final, this is definitely a splash in the pool for WAR fans everywhere. With AoE and CC being the main issues being worked on, the removal of a single form of CC is going to be huge in and of itself. The scalpel is finally being taken to classes that need it, as much of an admission of not giving as much love to some classes as you’re going to get. Population imbalance also has a chance of being helped along as well. Coupled with the other things that have been teased already, like a hireling/sidekicking system and the reworking of fortresses in T4 RvR, this seems to be the patch to watch for and see what happens.

It is probably not a long stretch to assume that Mythic has adopted a sort of all-out attitude with patching and fixing. With them arguably being out of the spotlight for a couple months, it will be WAR’s time to fix issues, gain their reputation back, and be ready for those curious enough to return to another stab at the campaign. To be perfectly honest, they have nothing to lose, so if they’re bleeding chips and betting on a couple good hands, all the more power to them. I personally like them very much, and hope that WAR can and will be a viable player in the MMO market. Some may not believe that – but patches like this show they aren’t giving up any time soon.