You know, it could be worse

Yesterday, I ranted about dungeon lockout timers. I was re-reading what I wrote this evening (err, morning?), and it struck me: things could be worse. Much worse. Are you despairing at how long it’s taking you to get your hands on decent gear post-rank 40? Don’t. You’re lucking out, if you think about it. Let me educate those of you who never played Dark Age of Camelot, Mythic’s previous crowning achievement.

My assumption is that many of you playing Warhammer Online are coming from other games, like World of Warcraft or elsewhere, and haven’t had any experience with Mythic before this game. Fortunately, there are many (many!) of us who played DAOC for years before WoW (or later, WAR) was released, and we’re pretty familiar with Mythic as an organization. From our perspective, WAR is a massive step ahead of where we were in the past.

In DAOC’s second expansion, Trials of Atlantis (ToA), Mythic introduced something the MMO world was unfamiliar with: artifacts. They also brought in Master Levels, which I didn’t have so much of a problem with. Now, keep in mind that I quit playing DAOC when World of Warcraft went into beta — sometime in early 2004, I think it was. At the time, there were no “classic” servers in DAOC and people were still dealing with the fallout from ToA.

Artifacts were curious beasts. Here’s a little blurb from Wikipedia that clarifies what artifacts were much better than I ever could (I can’t believe this is actually in Wikipedia…):

Artifacts, obtained by hidden encounters only become useful when the player finds the three scrolls hoarded by Atlantean monsters. Furthermore, artifacts must gain experience in order to reach their full potential.

First off, you had to have three scrolls (specific to that artifact), that were drops from various areas of the world, in order to unlock an artifact. Then it got interesting.

The key bit in the quote above is that artifacts must gain experience in order to be of any use. A level 1 artifact was pretty worthless. It had no special abilities, and granted you very little above whatever piece of armor you were replacing. To gain any sort of benefit from the artifact (aside from often unimpressive base stats), you needed to level it up. Yes, that meant more grinding. Amazing amounts of grinding, in fact. Of a specific class of mobs, too, and sometimes restricted to a certain region. It could take days upon days of grinding a selected type of monster to get a single artifact up to level 10. And of course, each artifact had a number of levels, and at each level, it would gain some interesting ability or stat bonus.

For instance, a pretty commonly sought-after artifact was the Winged Helm. It wasn’t overly difficult to get your hands on (I think, if I recall, that it was doable with less than a full group of max-level players), and it had a number of stat bonuses — and eventually, abilities — that unlocked progressively as you leveled it up, and the final bonus you got at level 10 (which took a LONG time to reach) was a speed boost that could be used every 15 minutes.

Winged Helm

BASE: Hits +40, Fatigue + 5
L1: Bonus to armor factor 10
L2: Dexterity +15
L3: Spirit 5%
L4: —
L5: Speed Enhancement
L6: Strength +15
L7: —
L8: Matter 5%
L9: —
L10: Aura of Magnanimity

Not all that impressive, now is it? Surprisingly, many of the abilities from level 10 artifacts were game-breakers. Tying those in to the master abilities I mentioned earlier, we had a good selection of options that could keep a player grinding for ages upon ages, and once they had invested inordinate amounts of time in their (soon to be worthless) artifacts, they could pwn in RvR. Until the artifact’s durability ran out, at least (and then it was garbage, and you’d have to repeat the whole proces…) And often times, an artifact or master ability was enough to turn the tide of a fight; maybe not a zerg-on-zerg battle, but definitely in the case of a 1v1 and regularly in group vs. group fights.

Sadly, most of the players at the time had multiple artifacts. Getting the artifact itself wasn’t usually that much of a problem. Sometimes it took a group, and often multiple members of your group were after the same artifact. Thankfully, if you prepared properly, the odds were good that your groupmates could all get the artifact you were after during the same run. The odd artifact actually required a raid to obtain; this was pretty rare, but it happened.

The problem was that not only were many artifacts totally imbalanced in PvP/RvR, they took massive amounts of time to level up to a reasonable level. I may have had 15 artifacts or more when I quit DAOC, but I don’t think I had more than a handful (2 or 3) to their maximum level. And even that took forever. That’s time I’ll never get back. What’s worse, players with the ToA expansion and the related Master Levels and artifacts could still fight against players who didn’t own the expansion. I guess that didn’t really affect realm-wide balance all that much, but it was definitely demoralizing for players who didn’t own the expansion.

The inevitable backlash amongst players was so harsh that Mythic actually had to institute a new “classic” server type in DAOC to appease the dissatisfied: this server didn’t include the Trials of Atlantis expansion, effectively a rollback prior to the expansion’s release for anyone who didn’t like it.

So, to my original point: as much of a bitch as it is to pick up your Sentinel or Conqueror gear right now, it could be much, much worse. I’m not telling you to settle for the flaws of the existing system, as buggered as it might be right now, but at least Mythic is learning from prior experience. The situation could be exponentially worse.

But if Mark Jacobs ever happens to post something on the Herald or in the forums about “a new artifact system” for WAR, I’d advise you to run as fast as your legs will take you in the opposite direction. :)