Although I had about a million things to do yesterday, including shave and bathe my fluffy white dog (don’t ask…), I managed to sneak in a couple of hours to level my shiny new Knight of the Blazing Sun, Halfbane, up to rank 11 and renown rank 9. I was a little discouraged to see how far I’d fallen behind my guild-mates, whose Knights are already into Tier 3, but my gameplay time is limited, so I have to make do. Before crashing (into my bed) last night, I managed to hop over to Ekrund in the Greenskin Tier 1 area and cap two battlefield objectives solo, without stressing my Knight out too badly. Boom, I dinged RR9 and made some decent renown gains solo, since no scenarios were popping (at least, not quickly) at 2am Pacific. :)
Now, I was able to do this with my Disciple of Khaine over on Monolith without any trouble, and I expect I could have done it on my Warrior Priest as well, although I never tried. Likely with my Swordmaster, too. In any case, since my Knight is only rank 11, I twisted his toughness and strength auras and used Shield Rush to pad my +block percentage in order to give myself a little bit of a cushion while tanking the BO champions. Aside from that, I finished the champion fights with 40-50% health, and never really got into trouble. Nice, but I’m not quite feeling overpowered yet. We’ll see if that changes in Tier 2 once I pick up On Your Guard! at rank 12…
Thankfully, with all the DOTs (damage-over-time abilities) and debuffs that Knights have right off the bat, combined with the initial Rank 1 Morale ability, Demolishing Strike, that reduces armour along with a heavy DOT, it makes killing champions (and, I assume, heroes) a bit less of a hassle. Dropping and refreshing multiple stacking DOTs (along with a melee attack that ignores 25% of your target’s armour) on a champion means that you don’t have to worry about their armour mitigation as much. The potent combination of self buffs (from battle commands — potentially twisted — and from melee skills) definitely increases one’s survivability over that of a standard Order tank class. Also, having that first tactic, Emperor’s Ward, helps mitigate even more damage, though it’s not quite as dependable as your active abilities.
The funny thing I’ve noticed is that my winning percentage in scenarios has gone up tremendously since I started playing the Knight. Even more curious is that the last couple of days I’ve played the Knight in scenarios, there have only been one or two Knights in each instance, and yet we were still winning pretty regularly. Maybe it’s that the balance of power has shifted a bit back towards Order since we’re now fielding many more tanks than the usual mish-mash of RDPS, MDPS, and the odd healer, and Destruction hasn’t quite figured out what to make of it. I don’t think the Knight alone is the difference maker; I think it’s just that Destruction, at least in the lower tiers on Skull Throne, has had it pretty easy since their population is significantly higher than Order, and they generally field many more tanks in the average scenario. This tends to mean that they can roll over our back line without anyone standing in their way; having more tanks on our side gives our healers more of a barrier and threatens the Destruction back lines in ways they’re not used to coping with. As the old Chinese proverb says, may you live in interesting times…
On that note, a new Warhammer Online blog I just recently came across, Lucky Number 2D6, has some great coverage of the lower levels of the Knight, too. If you’re looking for further gameplay coverage, I’d suggest you go check it out.
Either way, I’m really enjoying the Knight so far. Aside from figuring out whether I have the energy to twist battle commands or not, the main problems I’m facing now are which tank to play as my primary alt (I also have a 23 Swordmaster and a 10 Ironbreaker), and how to find the time to level one of them in addition to getting my Warrior Priest to 40! Decisions, decisions. I think I’ll save that comparison for a future blog post. :)
