Official Shadow Warrior Suggestions

Official Massively Multiverse Shadow Warrior suggestions:

1.  Glass Arrow: add a 3 second stun to the aoe, increase cooldown to 30 seconds

2.  No Respite: Increases chance to parry, dodge, and disrupt by 10%  (crit bonus removed)

3.  Barrage: each time this ability crits it will increase shadow warrior run speed by 20 for 10 seconds (may not trigger more than once a minute)

Just to clarify, this is all coming from an CR 40 RR 45 Shadow Warrior.  The only people I seem to find who think Shadow Warriors are just fine and dandy seem to be RR 50 and up…which says a lot about how important gear is in the game.  But that’s no surprise really, and I will update my Shadow Warrior thoughts once I get higher renown and obtain better gear.

I still believe strongly that Shadow Warriors do need some tweaks to ratchet up the fun factor.  But as with all things, this is just my opinion and you can take it or leave it. 

Round 2: Making the complicated simple – SW Fixes

For those who stop by here and don’t regularly check the Official Warhammer Online forums, a discussion on my previous Shadow Warrior blog post has been raging with many and varied opinions.  So I’ll throw up a link to that thread and then make a few more comments.

http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=archetype_ranged&thread.id=6449

The thing I would like to mention here is partly what I talked about in that thread.  Shadow Warriors are NOT completely helpless, nor are they incapable of killing enemies or dishing out respectable damage.  The fault of the Shadow Warrior class has more to do with the survivability and cohesion between the three stances.  The stance mechanic itself is flawed and clumsy, as many have said previously.

The 5 second timer just makes things awkward as well, as does the ability to go stance-less.  But the point here is simple despite continued attempts to make it more complicated.  Play a Shadow Warrior from levels 1 to 40 and then tell me that you think the class is just fine the way it is, needing no tweaks or changes whatsoever.  If you honestly think that then I respect your opinion.

But the opinion of many Warhammer players is that Shadow Warriors could use a little bit of love to make them more accessible.  SWs do not have that “pop” feeling you get when you are playing a class that is concisely built to achieve a specific purpose and fill a particular role within a game.  Shadow Warriors are a class meant to personify the ability to drift fluidly between the various stages of battle.

They cripple their enemies from a distance, swiftly move to skirmish mode when things get tight so they can continue to fire their bows while moving, and then unsheathe their swords in melee range to finish things off.  The problem with all this is that Shadow Warriors are very squishy and die quite often.  Yes, I am well aware that the CR 40 experience improves greatly once your RR gets higher and you get some good gear.

But an MMO class should not only thrive once it hits the cap and gets nice gear.  An MMO class should feel adept at its purpose throughout the leveling experience.  This is difficult to achieve and most certainly speaks as to why MMO classes are always being adjusted and tweaked over the life of an MMO.  My point is that Shadow Warriors need to be able to survive just a little bit longer in a fight, as well as being able to switch between their stances with greater ease.

I would honestly vote to dump the whole stance mechanic for Shadow Warriors altogether, but that won’t be happening so I will focus on what we can do to make the experience more enjoyable.  We can either buff up the defensive capabilities of the Shadow Warrior, such as attaching some new dodge/parry/disrupt boosts to each stance.  Or we can give Shadow Warriors a little more utility to help them maintain distance from their enemies, such as the Glass Arrow buff I suggested or the VON enhancements.

I am not asking that Shadow Warriors receive a massive amount of buffs.  I like that Shadow Warriors are complicated and require a great deal of thought in order to play well.  What they need is to have their overall fun factor buffed through allowing them to serve their purpose better.  They are a class that shifts through the battlefield like water, utilizing their tactics to best suit the situation.

Adjusting Shadow Warrior survivability would certainly permit them to fill their niche more efficiently.  It would also give players a greater sense of fulfillment when they choose to join up with the ranks of Nagarythe’s elite, the guerilla warriors of the Elf kin and the arm of Ulthuan’s vengeance.

Identity Theft

Back in the early days of MMOs, the collective thinking regarding class design was to have most classes excel in one area.  Much like the D&D that inspired MMOs, every class was to have its own carved-out section of territory that revolved around the theme of tank, melee/ranged dps, caster, hybrid, and healer.  When Everquest launched in 1999, the foundation for future MMO class design was cemented into stone.

You had Warriors, Shadow Knights, and Paladins to fulfill your tanking needs…

Beastlords, Berserkers, Monks, Rangers, and Rogues to provide your melee/ranged damage…

Wizards, Necromancers, Magicians, and Enchanters to provide your casting needs…

Druids, Bards, and Shamans were versatile hybrid classes that could do a little bit of everything…

Clerics were your primary healers.

This kind of class design has been in place for a long time.  But there is a recent trend in current MMOs that I find troubling, particularly with regards to PvP.  We have become a society that wants it all in recent years.  We believe that everyone has to be good at everything and no one should be deficient in any area.  We see this when high schools eliminate AP courses so some students don’t feel neglected, and we also see it in current MMO class design…where developers now feel that every class should be able to fill more than one niche.

In cases such as World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, this phenomenon has deep and widespread effects on class balance and cohesion…muddying the waters of strategy and throwing a wrench in your plans when you discover that the Archmage or Priest who just joined your group is specced for damage instead of healing.  Now, things like World of Warcraft’s Dual Specialization do help to alleviate this problem, but the faults in class balance are still a major concern.

What this leads to are situations where you see healing and tanking classes out-damaging dps classes, thus making the dps classes feel useless and wondering why they bothered to show up at all.  I have seen this example many times in both WoW and WAR, as Warlocks who do nothing but dps and some crowd control are blown out of the water in dps by Paladins and Shamans…the same goes for Warhammer Online where Ironbreakers and Archmages out-damage Shadow Warriors and Engineers regularly.

In short…classes have lost their identity.

Now, I’m not trying to insinuate the Everquest was some celestial beacon of class balance.  It was nothing of the kind.  But each class had a role to play and for the most part, they filled those roles very well.  I have no problem with branching out class design and allowing each class to be capable of a few more things.  But when I regularly see such warped numbers in PvP as I do in WoW and WAR, it starts to make me wonder if we have ventured off the beaten path a bit too far.

It’s not news to anyone that many people feel that WAR lacks proper class balance.  I would argue that the same goes for World of Warcraft, particularly when I see charts like this…

If you don’t play WoW then this will be confusing to you.  What it shows are the various specs of classes in the game and how they faired in dps against a raid mob.  What’s important to remember is that many other factors can skew the results of these charts.  But even given that fact, I would say that there are some worrisome results there.  Look at Warlocks (Demonology, Destruction, Affliction) and Mages (Fire, Arcane)…these are two primary dps classes trailing way behind Death Knights, Paladins, Druids, and Warriors.  It’s not a pretty picture.

I have seen first-hand what happens when everyone can do dps, and that’s watching the classes who can only do dps become second-rate.  Classes no longer have niches anymore, they have all become hybrids, they have all become healers or tanks, and they sure as hell have all become dps.  This turns PvP balance into a clusterf*** of epic proportions and typically leaves a player base feeling dejected.

Warhammer Online has seen this problem of “everyone can do dps” in spades, not to mention the frustration that sets in when we keep seeing patches that nerf  Bright Wizards and Sorceres…and yet they still manage to out-dps everyone else even with the nerfs.  I have watched tanks and healers blow my Shadow Warrior out of the water in damage.  This is exactly what happens when you steal the primary function of a class and give it to everyone else.  Of course all classes should be viable and fun, I’m not arguing against that.

But it is my firm belief that we see so many radical class imbalances these days because developers have allowed the class identities to be stolen.  It’s OK to only be good at a few things.  As long as you have something you enjoy and you do it well then more power to you!  The same goes for MMOs and their classes, which is a lesson more developers should take to heart.