As I had expected, Warhammer has begun to get a bit tiresome in it’s post 40 end game. I’ve been trying to play… trying to push myself to grind renown so I can wear that great Conqueror set I’ve started collecting, but I’ve got to be honest: it’s getting boring. After you hit the final level, there just isn’t much to look forward to. If you’re like me, you’ve exhausted your race’s entire quest line from Tier 1 forward… and even if you haven’t, the experience points you’d earn don’t go towards anything (except your guild’s level to a small degree.) All you have to look forward to is more scenario grinding, more ORVR grinding, or the painful and frankly terribly thought out end game dungeon raids.
Let’s go through the level 40 content problems play-by-play.
First, scenario grinding isn’t fun. I don’t know of a single tier 4 player who enjoys it after they’ve hit the adventuring cap. The renown you earn per match averages out to be somewhere in the 600 range, and in some rare cases in the 1-2k range. That’s great when you’re earning XP on the side, but after that side of things has melted away you realize just how slowly renown comes in with this method. It’s easy, yes, but not rewarding. One solution to this problem would be to take the experience you’d otherwise gain after level 40 and convert it directly into renown points, or at the very least give 100% of that experience to your guild.
Next, ORVR was new and fun for the first 3 tiers, but we need something more exciting for tier 4. There isn’t much point in raiding keeps, let alone holding them. The renown reward you get is light, and the odds of you winning a loot bag are slim. As such, most folks just spend their days flipping battlefield objectives instead, which offer little resistance and deliver a total of 1000 renown for about 5 minutes work. Great, that’s one way to grind renown, except that it’s boring. You rarely meet resistance because it’s in the enemy faction’s best interest to let you flip it, then flip it themselves for the same renown bonus. What you end up having is a battlefield of objectives getting flipped back and forth over and over again all day, with the keeps themselves getting little to no attention.
Finally, the PvE end game is a joke. While every player had the option of soloing their way from level 1 through 40 on quested or public quested greens and blues just fine, you suddenly hit a brick wall on level 40. There is no soloable content, and the raiding content there is requires you to be wearing a series of “warding” gear sets to survive it’s enemies, with each dungeon requiring a new set you’ll earn in the previous. This may sound like a neat idea in principal and provide a clear and linear path of progression through end game content, but the real world effect is quite the opposite: the gear drop rates are garbage, and in return few players are progressing through the content. What’s worse, this system alienates the very players you won over with your fantastic and compelling PvE content those 40 levels. It’s like you had a group of designers who conceptualized and built everything from level 1 through 40, then had a handful of guys design your end game without any understanding of how the rest of the content worked.
Now, don’t get my criticism wrong here. I really do love this game. I want to see it succeed, to thrive, and to live on for many years to come… but there are serious, fundamental design problems here that need to be addressed, and soon. The game has already dropped off the retail sales charts, and while I haven’t seen any hard statistics on it, the amount of players from my own guild who have announced they’re unsubscribing is startling. There are some serious issues here that need to be addressed, and they are far deeper than just the class balancing issues you appear to be focusing on right now. You should be legitimately worried about keeping the players you’ve got now, nevermind winning over new ones.
We demand content. We demand fun. We demand a game worthy of the monthly subscription. WAR is very young, I understand, and like all MMOs it needs time to grow and mature… but we need to kick it into overdrive here, guys. We need solutions to these problems so we can all continue to play together and see WAR live on to become the game we all know it will be… so we, the players, can continue to justify our subscriptions.
Tags: warhammer online
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agreed with the last part, don’t know anything about the endgame since I’ve never been there myself, although I’m enjoying the game so far as a level 30 witch hunter