WARDojo - Warhammer Online Blog

The latest patch for Warhammer Online goes live today as patch 1.04b. Patch 1.05 is up on the test server but I imagine we’ll be getting at least a few more patches before we migrate to 1.05 since they want to test the hell out of it first.

Let’s go through the patch notes quickly and see what’s up:

“1.0.5 is cooking away on the Public Test Server! In the meantime we had a few changes we wanted to patch to all live servers to continue improving your game experience.

Tomorrow morning (11/11/08), starting at 7AM EST all North American servers will be brought offline to begin updating to 1.0.4b. Oceanic servers will follow at 9AM EST and we anticipate all servers to be back online by 1PM EDT.”

One thing to note here. The servers have a track record of coming up sometimes hours before the patch notes say. Mythic will tell us the servers will be back online at 1PM EDT, but I’m in game and playing by like 11AM EDT. So if you’re not sure, check the server status page for yourself rather then just waiting until 1PM.

“When conquered, Keeps will always provide three gold loot bags and Fortresses will now offer six guaranteed gold loot bags as part of the chest loot.”

Initially I was getting kinda po’d at this note. My first thought was more loot drops in keeps/fortresses will mean armies will have even more reason to go after the unguarded keeps rather then a defended keep. But as I think it through I think this will actually cause more large scale wars. As more keeps are attacked for the loot, the alarm text messages telling everyone in the Tier 4 zone about it will become more and more frequent, encouraging everyone to go fight and defend. I hope that’s how that plays out.

“Rally Masters have been added to all warcamps. Now, players can set their rally point in a warcamp in the same manner as binding in a chapter hub. ”

When you login today don’t forget to set your Rally Point at your favorite Warcamp.

“To promote population balance among the various scenarios, we have added a feature that reduces the number of times a specific scenario can launch in a short period of time. This will give scenarios which are launched less frequently an opportunity to catch up in the queue population and launch more often.”

I will be queuing up into scenarios more now, it will be fun to try out some of the other Tier 4 maps.

“Electromagnet / Chaotic Rift: This ability has undergone significant changes. The cost of the ability has been significantly reduced and its cooldown has been increased. In addition, the build time has been increased. The ability can no longer be cast on the move, the maximum number of targets affected by this ability has been decreased, and it can now be defended against. Lastly, this ability will also grant immunity to knockback effects. ”

Engineers and Magus got nerfed.

“In addition to reducing the amount of damage received from high-level encounter NPCs, each Ward on high-level armor set pieces worn will now affect the amount of damage players are able to do to those NPCs. Players not wearing any pieces of the appropriate armor set will see their damage greatly reduced. For each piece of the appropriate armor a player wears, their damage against the boss monster will increase. ”

The more you PvE, the better you are at PvE. So if I don’t do much PvE, then I’m not going to be geared well enough to do more PvE versus someone who’s been gearing up PvE style. This doesn’t make me want to PvE, it actually makes me want to PvE a lot less. As long as I can get comparable gear from PvP/RvR loot then I think I’ll stick to my renown gear instead.