As I mentioned, I haven’t been *playing* the Warhammer Online beta for quite some time. I’d jump in and do testing as directed by the devs, but it’s been a long time since I just logged in and played the game as if it was in release and I was just playing for my own pleasure.
It’d been a rough week this past week, though, with very little gaming time to be found, aside from the odd quick Pixel Junk Eden fix (wonderful game, btw). So last night when I finally had some time, rather than playing LOTRO and being social with the semi-new guild (they probably think I’m dead by this point) I rolled a level 1 Warhammer Character and started playing.
I’ve mentioned ‘beta burnout’ and this is a good time to explain what I mean. With any MMO, if you’re an alt-aholic, you know the feeling you get with those first 5-10 levels after a while, where every class plays pretty similarly and every quest is burned into your brain and requires no thought and really it just becomes drudgery to get through them. I *really* don’t want to be feeling like that when War launches. The nature of beta (particularly one as long as the War beta; it was going strong when I got in it and I’ve been in it for 6 months) is that you get your characters wiped pretty often and that kind of forces the alt-aholic lifestyle on you. I absolutely love the game and really want it to feel as ‘fresh’ as possible on launch day.
The point of all that is, I decided to pick the 1 race/class profession that appealed to me that absolute least, because I figured there’s no way I’ll be playing that combo in release. I plan on my release main being Order, so I’d roll Destruction. I never like playing small races, so I figured one of the Goblin classes. Healers are always pretty helpful so there’s an outside chance I’ll roll one of those in release, so didn’t want to go that route, which left Squig Herder.
Here the gag of NDA starts to cut off what I can say. I’ve linked to the official page and its a bit out of date. I’ll add my cry to all the “Mythic, please drop the NDA!” pleas I’ve been reading.
Anyway this turned out to be an excellent acid test of the game for me. So I picked the single least appealing class/race combo I could find and started playing, and it was about 3 am by the time I finally pulled myself away. I did traditional quests, of course. I unlocked Achievements. I played through Public Quests and won shiny loot in various ways. Inspired by Rick I jumped into RvR scenarios, something I’ve quite frankly avoided (I’ve done ‘open world’ RvR but the scenarios have always felt a bit intimidating to me). I had an absolute blast, never really hit a ‘boring’ spot, found a few bugs to report (nothing major, the game is in great shape, but finding them made me feel like I was ‘doing my job’) and now the only problem I have is that I *really* enjoyed the Squig Herder. Dammit, another Alt in my future!
It’s going to be a long month, waiting for release… 🙂
