WoW Stress Test Ended

Yesterday, Sunday at 6 pm PDT, the WoW stress test ended. We all knew it would end on Sunday, but not which hour, so there were already "world ends" celebrations just before noon, with people dancing and launching fireworks. A surprisingly happy atmosphere everywhere, most people saying farewell with the words "see you in retail". A large majority of the 100,000 beta testers will buy this game, and talk positively about it until then, which is good for Blizzard.

On the last days of the stress test, I mainly tested the non-spellcasting classes: Warrior, Rogue, and Hunter, all played to at least level 10. Well, the hunter only pretends to belong to this club, in reality he is a spellcaster in disguise. He has mana, which he uses for his special shot attacks, and in melee he isn't all that good. His leather armor and axe are decent enough, but he only has one single special melee attack, and that one recycles very slowly. If he didn't already half kill the mob with his gun (I played a dwarf, other hunters use bows), he is in serious trouble in melee.

At level 10 the hunter gets the ability to charm animals, so I ran around a while with a snow leopard pet. That worked pretty well, and looked good. I didn't test it much further, but it seems that you can actually train abilities with you pet. If it dies, you revive it, you don't necessarily charm a new one. And you can stable up to two pets with a stable master, so you can have 3 pets in total to switch around. But me personally, I still don't like pets, even if they don't get lost or attack something on their own like they did in earlier games. But I just might get a non-combat pet for my characters in WoW. There is a wide choice of them, available to any character class, and they are just for the looks. You can have a cat, a parrot, or some other animals. You could even have a pet cockroach, for the stylish undead. And I've helped somebody with the engineering tradeskill to build a mechanical squirrel pet, which was also cute.

Leaving the hunter, I played the 2 classes that do NOT use mana. At first I thought the rogue, who uses energy instead of mana to power his special attacks, would be similar. But there are some big differences: Your energy does not go up with level, you always have 100 energy at the start of a combat. And unlike mana, you get a significant amount of energy back every second. The other special of the rogue is the combo points. The basic special attack of the rogue attaches 1 combo point to the target. Other special attacks, like backstab, also add 1 combo point. A target can have up to 5 combo points, which are shown next to his portrait. And when there is at least 1 of them, the rogue can perform a "finishing move", whose power depends on the number of combo points. So some strategy is required. Use not enough combo points, and the finishing move doesn't kill the target. Use too many, and the combat takes longer. 3 combo points were usually enough for a mob of the same level as my rogue.

The rogue also has some other nice strategies: He can stun an enemy for 3 seconds, run around him, and then backstab him for a good amount of damage. He has a special attack that sends a humanoid enemy to sleep for 25 seconds, or until he takes damage. You can use that one to stun one enemy in a group, while fighting the others. Some special abilities require you to be in stealth mode, where you are nearly invisible, but still not totally, so you have to sneak up on your enemies carefully. Rogue plays differently than most classes, and is an interesting addition.

Another class that is a lot more interesting than his namesakes in other games is the warrior. The warrior starts the combat usually with zero rage, and builds up rage by attacking and getting attacked. He can then spend this rage for a range of special abilities. He can also decide not to spend it, but then it slowly fades away after combat. So a good idea is to charge your rage bar on a lesser enemy, to then attack a big boss mob directly after, with your rage bar full.

As race for my warrior I had chosen undead, playing Horde now, so I can concentrate on Alliance in the retail version. After leveling him up to level 11, I decided for him to go on a long journey. He could have travelled riding a bat to a neighboring zone, or with a goblin zeppelin to other Horde territories, but I wanted to visit the Alliance lands instead. The dwarven lands are 3 zones south of the undead lands, but as those zones are of much higher level, I took the long way round, and swam most of the way along the coast. Undead don't breathe, so they can't drown, but even other races have no problems swimming long distances, they just need to keep their head over water. If you enter the ocean proper, you get a decreasing fatigue meter, which would probably kill you if it went to zero, but swimming along the coast worked well.

Of course I did manage to die several times on the trip. Most of the coast was free of mobs, but there were some swimming monsters at some places, and they were of much higher level than me. It was really fun to dive beneath the waves, and suddenly find a coral reef, complete with sunk ship, inhabited by a race of mermen. Who then proceeded to kill me. Oh, well. Dying in foreign lands gets your spirit to the closest graveyard, from where you can travel on as spirit to regain your corpse. Or you pay the xp for revival there, if the graveyard happens to be closer to your destination.

So hopping from graveyard to graveyard, I finally made it to the dwarven newbie zone, which is quite an achievement for a level 11 undead warrior. In the Alliance lands, you not only get attacked by their local monsters, but also by all the guards, and the guards range from level 30 to 75, killing you with one hit or two.

I was playing on a non-PvP server, which meant that PvP options were there, but quite limited. I was unable to attack any dwarves, and they were initially unable to attack me. I had to attack a dwarven NPC to get a PvP flag. Then the dwarves were able to attack me, and I was able to defend, but not attack any innocent bystanders. Very good system. I even chatted nicely with some of them, but we were limited to the /say channel, you can't send /tells to players of the other side, and you can't hear the local general chat channels. Fortunately as undead I did speak common, other Horde races can't communicate with Alliance members at all, speaking only orcish.

But while the trip was nice, it confirmed my judgement that PvP in a MMORPG is pointless. I got myself a PvP flag, and tried to get some Alliance players of my level to fight me, by saying things like "Booo!", or "Hands up! This is a one-man invasion." But nobody with whom the fight would have been fair wanted to fight me. The only thing that happened was that they shouted out my position on the local defence channel, and some high level players arrived some time later and killed me. The lowest level I ever got attacked by was 16, a full 5 level above me. And that was just for fun, you don't gain any xp in PvP. And you don't lose any xp in PvP either, as long as your ghost can run back to your corpse, and your corpse isn't "camped" by the person who killed you. But still nobody was interested in a duel between two players of the same level. People only participate in PvP if they are absolutely sure they can win. Which is totally boring.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:47 AM Permanent Link