After a run in the Warpblade Tunnels with some guildies the other night, I got a little curious about Tome tactics. One of our officers was reminding everyone to swap to their Skaven tactic as we zoned in, and I piped up (as usual) and mentioned that I still didn’t have any Tome tactics. Well, I had run the Tunnels successfully several times byt that point, and wasn’t really feeling the need to go and figure out exactly how Tome tactics worked, until I realized everyone else in the group had them… except me. Oops.
As a refresher to those of you in my boat, Tome tactics are PvE-only tactics. You can have one up at a time, and each one is targetted specifically at a racial group of some kind; be it Undead, Greenskins, Skaven, Humanoids, etc. I believe there are nine different types, with three ranks of power to each tactic. The first is generally pretty weak, the second middling-to-useful, and the third often quite useful to have.
Of course, I’d heard of these elusive tactics, but I hadn’t really figured out specifically how they worked until today. After a little digging around the internetz, I came across this handy Tome tactics/unlocks list over at some kind of pay-to-play site. Thankfully, the list itself is publicly available, so no worries there. I did find it handy as I had no idea what was involved in acquiring them.
Something I discovered there was that not all types of Tome tactics are acquired equally. Some require thousands of kills to even get the first tactic, and some only require a single mob (usually a champion or hero of some sort, but there are non-combat unlocks as well.)
The Skaven tactics, for instance, are pretty interesting. There are only three possible unlocks, and each unlock grants a new tactic. The first two tactics can be acquired very easily at rank 40, something which I accomplished within a half-hour earlier this afternoon. The third tactic (which is the best of the bunch), requires you to kill 1000 Rat Ogres. Not the quickest thing to do, though altogether possible if you find a good spawn of greys to AoE farm in a group.
Getting the first two Skaven tactics was a snap, following the instructions in the guide I linked above (with a little help from the comments on WARDB.) First I had to run through the Altdorf Sewers and get to Master Moulder Vitchek, a rank 19 Skaven Hero boss at the end of the tunnels. This was pretty straightforward with my 40 Warrior Priest, as I could run straight through to the end of the required tunnel without aggroing any of the mobs around. I killed him, then zoned out and picked up Cunning Evasion from the Tome Tactic Librarian in the Altdorf Library. The second tactic required me to run to the top of the Horned Tower in Talabecland and grab a banner hanging at the very top, again quite a simple task. That unlocked the second Skaven tactic, Cunning Assault. That should do me for the time being, and will definitely help out the next time I have to do a guild run through the Altdorf’s pair of Tunnels instances. The third tactic, Cunning Strategem, will likely have to wait a while… maybe forever, since I don’t need XP anymore at rank 40 — so what good is it to me, anyway?
Now the Undead tactics, however, are much more of a challenge to acquire (at least from what I’ve read.) Not only are there 12 different unlocks, but each tactic (of which there are also three) requires four separate unlocks (each of which grants a Tome tactic fragment) to acquire. That’s not a quick progression, although you can probably pick up the first tactic, Benediction of Morr, without a massive time investment. Of course, as a healer, that one’s not really a whole lot of use to me in dungeon groups, but it’s worth getting nonetheless, and only requires a few individual mob kills. Unfortunately, once you get started on the second Undead tactic, Benediction of Winters, you’re in for some difficulty. Six of the possible 12 unlocks require you to kill 1,000 mobs of a certain type — Banshees, Wights, Bone Giants, etc. Some of them I’ve never even encountered (Walkers?), so farming 1,000 of them may be a challenge. Either way, I’ll try and pick up the first few unlocks just to say I have that first tactic. Sadly, the second Undead tactic is of much more use to me, especially in the Sigmar Crypts, from which I still need a single piece to complete my greater ward armor set, the Sentinel Mantle.
It strikes me as odd that there’s such a variance between the requirements to obtain each different Tome tactic type, not to mention the differences in difficulty between the steps required for one type versus another. The lack of available information and documentation seems to be a major hindrance here; similarly to the way Mythic doesn’t give players any information about wards in-game. I don’t know if going with a little more informative, transparent achievement system like the one utilized by World of Warcraft would be any better (although sometimes being provided with too much information can be a bit of a turn-off, too.)
Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of farming 1,000 mobs of a certain variety (and does anyone out there enjoy a grind, especially if you have to do it six times over?), tome unlocks required killing Lair bosses (yet another under-documented feature of WAR), or let some of the unlocks be done in dungeons where the mobs are mostly of that type? Better yet, why couldn’t some be acquired via quests or as rewards from under-utilized Public Quests?
It seems to me that undocumented, lengthy grinds are just going to put most people off from even bothering with acquiring certain tactics. And considering this is a PvP/RvR game, I’d assume that many people aren’t even going to bother with PvE-only tactics. Making their acquisition a little more enticing or interesting would probably encourage more people to try for them. Adding alternate methods to getting the necessary unlocks would probably also be a nice way to funnel people into under-utilized and under-populated areas of the game.
