In which I am indignant at he who must not be named.

I dislike personalising disagreements. Sometimes though, the behaviour is so outrageous that avoiding that isn’t an option. This is one of those times. There is a gentleman, a maker of games, who has been quite unpleasant to some fellow bloggers I’m somewhat fond of. If you’ve spent 5 minutes in the MMOverse, then you’ll know who it is I mean. He is an expert is personalising arguments, so it is hard to not do so in return. My life has left me with a profound dislike of bullies who throw their weight around, and the inclination to stand up to them.

It is said that if you blog his name three times he will appear. And threaten to sue you. Frankly I don’t need to have to listen to his silly self-aggrandising nonsense here.

Anyhows, by way of venting, I present a brief guide to arguing with people on the internet:

1. Make sure you point out how small and unimportant the person you are talking to is. How their blog/website/magazine isn’t read by anyone, how they never made awesome games, and that they’re a bunch of no-life nerds. Question their intelligence and integrity. The smaller you make your opponent, the mightier you’ll look in comparison, provided nobody wonders why you are wasting your time on these mosquitopeople.

2. If something bad has occurred, blame an underling. Force that underling to post an excruciating account of how everything is their fault, and how you should fire them. Make sure they point out how awesome you are. Remember, the credit is yours, but the buck stops anywhere else.

3. The best form of defense is attack! Claim the people who pointed out the bad thing you did to be the real villains, who desire nothing more than to bring down the giant of the industry that is you. Pay no heed to whether they or their colleagues have written rather generous positive posts, or even support your attacks on their fellow bloggers. Bridges are to be burned. You don’t need those nerdy gaming writers anyway. Not when you can just copy other people’s press releases.

16th of May Update:

4. If someone accuses you, with absolute proof, of plagiarising the words of Developer B, accuse Developer B of plagiarising from Developer A at location X. Make sure you insult your accuser’s journalistic integrity for not discovering this before posting. Even though Developer A was never AT location X, and has no recollection of saying it. Making stuff up about your fellow developers is just as fun as making stuff up about bloggers! (Awesome work there, n3rfed!)

Fallen Ark (And Mintball) + Fallen Earth 1.4 patch notes

In the last few days I’ve been revisiting Fallen Earth. I tried the trial for a couple of days a few months ago, but didn’t really get into it. Having scored a free month from Massively, I’ve come back to give it another try, and I’m finding it more engaging than before. Maybe I’m just in more receptive mood, or it could be something to do with all the patches that have been applied in the meantime. I’m having fun. And so is my horse.

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Fallen Earth's version of Arkenor, with his trusty steed, Mintball.

It’s a weird game, in a good way. Combat is First Person Shooter style, which makes it both exciting, and usually quite short, one way or the other. If, like me, you’re not actually terribly good at FPS any more then this might give you some problems, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it again. Being a bit rubbish at combat is not necessarily a problem anyway, as you gain xp for harvesting and crafting. Not just crafting xp that only makes you better at baking cakes. The real stuff. Technically you could hit the level cap without very much combat at all, though harvesting ingredients does lead to the occasional unpleasantness with the local mutated fauna and flora, so you’d want to at least have some rudimentary combat skills.

Crafting seems quite deep, with just about everything in the game being craftable, and so many different ingredients that my bank is set to burst. To my joy, the only thing that stops me from working every craft is time, as unlike the other skills, crafting skills improve through use rather than needing points put in them. To craft an item can take a significant amount of time, but you don’t have to stand about waiting. You just set it off, and go about your business. You can queue up to 20 crafting jobs that will trigger in order, providing you have the ingredients in your inventory. How I am managing to bake and sew while riding about shooting things I am unsure, but it beats having to watch a progress bar. You continue to work through your crafting queue when you’re offline, which is particularly handy for lengthy jobs, like the parts I am putting together for building my All Terrain Vehicle. At the moment most crafting jobs takes between 1 and 10 minutes, but I think that will increase as I move to higher level items.

The game engine is smooth and pleasant, and the UI is responsive. Inevitably, given the setting, the colour palette tends towards earth tones, with very few bright colours. It’s a dirty, rusty, decaying sort of world, but perhaps if mankind can learn its lessons it will bloom again. It’s also a big world with, so far as I’ve seen, no instant travel. You receive a basic horse early on in your career, which makes this a lot less painful. Later you can get faster horses, and a variety of mechanical vehicles. At the moment that is quite sufficient for me, though I will be interested to see exactly how long it takes to get from the furthest high level reaches of the game world back to Sector One. Maybe we could try to get the old train lines working again.

This week there was a major patch called Blood Sports. The main feature is a sort of PvP arena that you can pop in and out of as desired. I haven’t tried it yet, mostly because I suspect it would involve a lot of me being punished for being under-equipped. I’ll check it out when I feel a little less like a puny newbie.

In addition, the level cap has risen from 45 to 50, and a new world area has been opened up to support that. That obviously doesn’t affect me too much either yet. There have also been a whole swathe of skill rebalancings, which probably do affect me, but I hadn’t had time to get to used to how they were before, so I probably won’t notice. The Fallen Earth 1.4 patch notes can be read in full after the jump.

If you fancy checking this rather unique MMO out, there is a ten day trial available over on the official website.

Continue reading Fallen Ark (And Mintball) + Fallen Earth 1.4 patch notes

Games Workshop moves to shut down Warhammer Alliance

Warhammer Alliance has been serving the needs of the Warhammer Online community pretty much since the game was announced. In an astounding move today, Games Workshop has filed a lawsuit against Warhammer Alliance demanding it hand the site over to GW, and pay damages. Curiously they’re also insisting on a trial by jury, in the US state of Maryland, which is likely to be inconvenient for the defendants, and makes the whole business much more expensive.

There are some obvious flaws in the lawsuit. It claims that the domain was registered in 2009 with the intent of cybersquatting, but a whois check clearly shows that the domain was registered in 2004. Not to mention that I know the site is older than 2009 because I’ve been posting there a hell of a lot longer than that. It is a provably false claim.

In this post Mark Jacobs, producer of Warhammer Online, laid out why there would be no official forums. Oh, and he posted it ON WARHAMMER ALLIANCE. IN 2008.:

That’s why I don’t want to have official forums. Whether it was SOE, Blizzard or us, official or semi-official forums are exactly like I described above for every successful MMORPG that I have played or watched from afar (and that is *most* of them). The unsuccessful ones were even worse. The problem is that most people who read the boards are looking for information and a reasonable number of people want to cause trouble, “grief” the forums or simply get their jollies by saying and doing things that they wouldn’t do in real life. As usual, a small percentage of people make life more difficult for everyone else. Back when games had hundreds of people playing, well, no big deal. We ban those guys and life returns to normal. With millions of subs for WoW and hopefully lots and lots for WAR, well, it becomes much more complicated, difficult and soul-sucking for the devs and the community people. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what Sanya and I had to go through (and she had it worse since she is a woman and that brought out the worst in some people) in the early days of DAoC. How she and other community managers put up with the kind of name calling, insults, vulgarity, profanity without losing their minds is amazing.

So there were no official forums. Instead, fan-based ones were intended to fill the gap, and this was encouraged by Mythic, who got all the benefits of a forum without having to pay to host or staff it. Warhammer Alliance ended up being the main one of these, being used by the developers to interact with players. Games Workshop is SHOCKED that a forum for Warhammer Online might mention Warhammer in its name. If mentioning the name of the game that you are about is indictable, then just about every game-specific website is in a whole lot of trouble. Will they go after Warhammer Vault, or Warhammer Stratics? The Warhammer Online wikia? They all carry at least as many adverts as Warhammer Alliance.

Last year, in an about turn, Mythic decided it wanted to have official forums after all, but that clearly does not suddenly cause existing forums to retroactively become inappropriate.

It has been a couple of decades since I stopped liking Games Workshop terribly much. They used to be a nice little independent gaming company here in the UK that railed against the unfair practises of the big guys, such as TSR (remember them?). It didn’t take too much success before they became “the man”, and realised how high they could push their prices (I used to pay 50 pence for 3 lead miniatures), but this lawsuit is outrageous, even for them.

It is unclear at this time as to whether Warhammer Alliance will dispute the claim. Given the potentially crippling costs of defending this suit, I would not blame them for just backing down, even though it would be another victory for bullying corporations. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t be certain of the lawsuit’s legal merits, but it is certainly a disastrous bit of public relations.

The full text of the lawsuit is after the jump. The legalese will make your head spin, or at any rate it set mine into a whirl, but it is worth a read.:

Continue reading Games Workshop moves to shut down Warhammer Alliance

Mortal Online Open Beta Bonanza Part 1 : Character Creation

Mortal Online is a sandbox-style skill-based MMO developed by Swedish developers Star Vault. With the client available for download from their website at the moment, I thought I’d take a bit of a peek. I’ve not really been following it, so it’ll be a voyage of adventure.

As ever, this is still open beta, and things are subject to change. Originally due to launch last year, Mortal Online has been delayed several times with its last promised release date March 2010. No new release date will be announced until a desync issue is cleared up, giving time for any problems to be dealt with. I can only look at what is in front of me though, but I’ll try to be fair.

So let us begin.

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Mortal Online - Race Selection

First you pick your species. We have good old humans; the Alvarin, this land’s version of the elves; the Oghmir, who seem to be hairy beastmen; and the Halfbreeds, who are ostensibly half-orcs, but look rather reptilian to me. I’m going to be boring and go with a human.

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Mortal Online Character Creation - Picking your bloodline.

Next you pick your race and age. As a human I can choose up to 4 bloodlines in my ancestry, each of which will affect my cap in various stats. The first race you pick also determines what appearances you can choose from. Your age also affects the stat caps. Generally speaking, the older your character, the higher his intelligence and psyche can go, but you start losing physical attributes.

With that sorted, we move on to deciding his appearance.

Oh. Oh my.

I’m not a prude. Really I’m not. I just wasn’t expecting to suddenly be confronted by fully modelled male genitalia. It’s polite to give some warning. In the interests of keeping this blog vaguely safe for work I won’t embed the screenshot, but you can see it here. Female characters are equally unclothed. It’s not awful or anything. Just seems a bit unnecessary, and I could see it putting some folks off.

Anyhows, there’s the usual collection of sliders (though thankfully not for *that*), and hair choices, though having only ten hairstyle options seems a bit limited these days. Finding it quite difficult to create an educated looking fellow with what’s available. You can only change your face, rather than your body, so I won’t be able to be mildly overweight as I like to do when given the option. Nevermind. This slightly wild-looking beardy chap will have to do. Hopefully they’ll let me put some pants on soon.

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I notice that when I move the camera, or spin him, it takes his hair a little while to catch up with the rest of him, like an ill-mannered wig. Hopefully that doesn’t happen in the game proper. I had a bit of a problem at this point, as when I finished designing my character, the next button in the top right refused to acknowledge being clicked. Starting over from scratch and trying again had the same problem. Eventually I got it to work on the 4th try, though I’m not sure what, if anything, I did differently.

We next pick a starting profession. Mortal Online is skill-based, rather than class based, so this just decides what skills and equipment we start with. My acolyte, starting with some basic magical ability, can later learn anything the blacksmith apprentice or scout can.

Lastly, you choose your first name and surname, and your starting city. I was expecting at this point to also select my Deva name, which is a sort of shared soul between all your characters, but it appears that fascinating idea may have been dropped.

So far, I have mixed feelings. It is glitchier and has more placeholder information than I would expect at this stage. Still, there does seem to be a decent base, and character creation, while vital to get right, is less important than what you experience in the game itself.

I still have no pants, but I appear to have mugged a caveman and stolen his Flintstonesque mandress. Tune in next time, as I hit the “Play” button.

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Mortal Online's Main Menu

Everquest 2: Mounted Combat is saved after SOE listens to players.

You’ll recall that yesterday I wrote about Everquest 2’s new producer, Smokejumper, making this statement on the removal of mounted combat:

Well, I guess it’s time to stick my head in the dragon’s mouth. Here goes nuthin’.

I’ve played with the system as it is currently on Live (rather extensively). I’ve also played the system that is on Test now.

It’s basically a change about “what looks best”.

The fact is, the Live solution doesn’t look very good. Especially if you’re playing a character with radical animations, like a Monk.

Also, we already have the conceit in the game, for things like climbing and swimming, where your mount turns off/on.

Additionally, there is no way that we can add the literally hundreds of necessary anims and hunks of code to make combat look spectacular while on a mount. (At least not with our existing task load for future features.)

So, the solution is to turn off the mount while in combat. You may ask, “When does the mount off/on occur?”

1) It doesn’t happen if you’re just aggroed. It only happens if YOU attack something.

2) We’re going to massage the code a bit (soon) so that your mount doesn’t immediately pop back in until a few seconds after you destroy your current opponent. That way, if you’re not using AoEs, the mount doesn’t keep popping back in before you can switch to a new target and continue fighting.

This system allows you to continue seeing the great combat animations and makes the game more visually appealing for all players.

Regarding the “/showmount” request…that’s not something we want to do either. If you’re getting the speed boost, other players should know why that’s occuring.

Regarding a graphics option to show the mount even while you’re in combat, we’re not doing that either. This is an aesthetic decision that keeps the game more attractive for all players. The currently munged animations that occur while riding look like (well, actually “are”) a bug. Since we don’t have time to create all the extra anims required to fix that in the perfect way (which would also make it *much* harder for us to create new mounts in the future because they would need all those extra anims also), we’re going to have to go with this solution.

We fully realize this won’t please all players, but it will result in a better looking game for most players, so that’s why we’re making the change.

Things looked dark, with the idea of a /showmount command or player-controlled switch being ruled out entirely.

However, we’ve just had this second Smokejumper post:

Late-breaking news on this feature! Basically, we hear ya. Here’s the details:

1) Mounts will still be suspended while in combat…by default.

2) However, there will also be a new graphic option that lets you set your view of mounts to one of three settings:

a) Default (mount disappears during combat, reappearing 5 seconds after you are out of combat).

b) You never see mounts at all. (Useful in raid situations or for low-end machines that are trying to get better framerate.)

c) You always see mounts, even during combat. (Useful for folks that like the way things look now and want to continue seeing things that way.)

NOTE: The mount settings are client-only, so they only affect what *you* see, not what everyone else sees. Their view is affected by their own personal setting.

Make sense?

Firstly, obviously it’s fantastic that we get to keep mounted combat. More importantly though, it is encouraging that he has shown himself willing to listen to reason, and put the extra effort in to create a solution that will leave everybody happy.

Now we just have to save the Isles. Perhaps we can persuade him to take the sensible player-choice-orientated approach to that too.

Islands and Mounted Combat. Everquest 2 removes content and features.

There are two horrible decisions in the current Everquest 2 test-build that are being protested strongly by the playerbase. You’ll find them both at the top of the patch notes.

GENERAL

* Qeynos and Freeport have been disabled as starting cities.
* Mounts will now be temporarily suspended while in combat.

They’re similar, in a way, in that they both take things away from the game, instead of add new choices. We were already somewhat aware of the threat to Qeynos and Freeport, and I have discussed my opposition to that change in this post.

We have been able to fight while mounted, if I remember rightly, since the beginning of the game. Back then, Paladins even had some combat moves that could only be executed while mounted, so mounted combat was always the intention, and an important feature of EQ2. The animations if you’re on the back of a horse or other animal look fine, and if you’re standing on a flying carpet then they’re exactly the same as if you were standing on the ground, except for, you know, that you’re standing on your awesome flying carpet.

Now your mount is going to vanish every time you enter combat. Nobody was asking for this. Even the raiders, who are concerned with lag, just wanted to be able to turn mounts off for raids, not for the entire world.

Mounted combat is a feature that most MMOs would kill for. How can it be that SOE is prepared to give it up so easily? I love my mounts. I was even going to post about my very newest, the Hotwired Gnomish Hoverpad, and quite how awesome it is. Not feeling quite so enthused now, seeing as Maltheas won’t be able to do this any more:

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Everquest 2 Mounted Combat - Enjoy it while you can.

There has been a response to player unhappiness from Smokejumper. My comments are in green:

Well, I guess it’s time to stick my head in the dragon’s mouth. Here goes nuthin’.

I’ve played with the system as it is currently on Live (rather extensively). I’ve also played the system that is on Test now.

It’s basically a change about “what looks best”.

The fact is, the Live solution doesn’t look very good. Especially if you’re playing a character with radical animations, like a Monk. It looks bad in your opinion. In the opinion of the players it was working fine. Even the folks with kicks looked perfectly fine on flying carpets. Fighting on the back of your mount is cool, and makes some of us happy.

Also, we already have the conceit in the game, for things like climbing and swimming, where your mount turns off/on.

Additionally, there is no way that we can add the literally hundreds of necessary anims and hunks of code to make combat look spectacular while on a mount. (At least not with our existing task load for future features.)

So, the solution is to turn off the mount while in combat. You may ask, “When does the mount off/on occur?”

1) It doesn’t happen if you’re just aggroed. It only happens if YOU attack something.

2) We’re going to massage the code a bit (soon) so that your mount doesn’t immediately pop back in until a few seconds after you destroy your current opponent. That way, if you’re not using AoEs, the mount doesn’t keep popping back in before you can switch to a new target and continue fighting.So we get to see even less of our mounts.

This system allows you to continue seeing the great combat animations and makes the game more visually appealing for all players.If we cared so much about seeing the “great combat animations” then we’d get off our horse. We already see them when fighting in dungeons (mounts are disabled in indoor zones), so having some variety when outside was nice.

Regarding the “/showmount” request…that’s not something we want to do either. If you’re getting the speed boost, other players should know why that’s occuring.That’s an utterly spurious argument. The game is packed to the gills with items that increase run speed, such as the Earing of the Solstice and the Journeyman Boots. Other players can’t see them, so that is no argument whatsoever for not having a /showmount command. You may well have a reason not to implement the /showmount command, but it certainly can’t be that.

Regarding a graphics option to show the mount even while you’re in combat, we’re not doing that either. This is an aesthetic decision that keeps the game more attractive for all players. The currently munged animations that occur while riding look like (well, actually “are”) a bug. Since we don’t have time to create all the extra anims required to fix that in the perfect way (which would also make it *much* harder for us to create new mounts in the future because they would need all those extra anims also), we’re going to have to go with this solution. Why? Why has this suddenly become so important?

We fully realize this won’t please all players, but it will result in a better looking game for most players, so that’s why we’re making the change.. Having our mounts pinging back and forth into existence is NOT aesthetically pleasing.

Elsewhere, Cronyn had this to say about the Qeynos/Freeport issue:

Hey folks. I understand that many of you would like to see the old starting islands remain, but I’d like to explain the decision, at least so you see where we were coming from.

Primarily, the starting islands and following content, simply put, are not up to the standards of the newer starting cities. Players who start in these zones are at a disadvantage when compared to players who start in the newer zones. In the more recent starting zones, the play experience is laid out better, with improved loot and quests. From an art and design standpoint, the islands were great five years ago when the game launched, but the game has changed and improved in many ways and we don’t feel the newbie islands are as good as they should be today. Then update the loot. How long would it take to change the stats on some items?

A great positive effect of having four starting zones is that it helps focus players into areas with other people, and encourages interaction and community. The current content revamp helps players travel along a common path as they level up, so that they will more likely come across other people, and form relationships, form communities, and experience the game when it’s at its best – with friends. Making sure they have this chance by focusing them into content we feel is strong is one of the goals with turning off the islands as well.If you follow that logic, then I guess this is just the first of many zones to be removed. Anything not on this newfangled golden path had better watch out.

Finally, I’d like to say that we are not planning to abandon Freeport and Qeynos. However, we’d like to repurpose them somewhat into content destinations rather than starting points. A good deal of overarching content deals with these cities directly, and we’d like to create even more content that basically turns these into important quest and activity hubs, so to speak – I can’t go into it too much right now (although you saw some of what I mean during the destruction of Freeport live event), but there’s definitely an idea on how we’d like them to be presented going forward. The legacy content that is there (especially the racial quests) are not being removed, but we’ve been discussing ways to make this content more functional overall.

Anyway, we really appreciate all of the feedback, and we hope you can see why we felt this was a necessary change.

The other thing these changes have in common is that the solution chosen to the perceived problem has been the one that requires least effort, rather than fixing or making something new. If the newbie islands are truly lacking, than the proper thing to do would be to bring them up to speed, not to just cast them aside.

Nobody was asking for either of these changes, and we’re being utterly ignored and overruled. I am beginning to wonder why they have a feedback forum at all if we’re just going to be told that father knows best. We’re not being listened to, and it feels like many of the reasons being given have been made up after the fact to justify the decisions. It is feeling at the moment like some sort of “old is bad” ideology has crept into the thinking. Possibly because most of the people who made the original content have moved on, and people are naturally more supportive of content they were involved in making.

You can see the main forum threads pertaining to these issues at “Qeynos and Freeport have been disabled as starting cities”, and Mounts will now be temporarily suspended while in combat. Thus far, it is very clear how the majority of players feel.

This would be a good moment for our new Producer, Dave Georgeson, to make an appearance. In a recent interview, Zam asked him:

ZAM: Have you yet gone and thrown out any of the plans that were on the table as of last Wednesday?

Dave: No. I will go so far as to say that any of the short term plans are not going to be changed a bit. The farther it gets from today the more impact I’ll have on what’s actually happening. But I would expect it to be a month or two before any kind of shifts the I’m making will have any kind of difference in what we’re doing on the game.

This is your opportunity, Mr Georgeson, to show that you are willing to listen to us. It would be unfortunate for you to spend the first month of your reign standing by and letting this happen.

I would rather have written that post about how fun the new tinkered mount is. I’d like to be planning to rave about Halas. As it stands, the breezy and dubiously argued way that player feedback is being discounted is the thing I’m thinking about most when I consider EQ2 at the moment.

Update: It turns out Smokejumper IS Dave Georgeson. I find that EQ2’s producer would have said what he did in his comment on mounted combat to be deeply discouraging.

Dark Moments in Character Building: Armonica the Warforged Bard

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Armonica the Warforged Bard says Hello!

Warforged are a race specific to Eberron, the setting for Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online. Constructs built with one purpose in mind; the waging of war. Their creators were a little too clever for their own good, and in their pursuit of building walking weapons that would be able to make good decisions without direction, they accidentally managed to imbue them with sentience. For a while this wasn’t too much of a problem, as the Warforged were happy to do what they were told, which mostly involved hitting whoever they were told to.

The problem with sentience is that eventually you start wonder exactly why you’re hitting these people, and why you have to do what the shouty person tells you anyway. As the outside world realised that Warforged were indeed people, rather than simple machines, the public became uncomfortable on a number of grounds. As a result, at the end of the war, Warforged were given the same rights as any other sentient being, most importantly “self-ownership”. At the same time, the House Cannith creation forges which produced them were destroyed.

That leaves today’s Warforged in an odd position. There will never be any more of them (unless rumours of surviving forges are to be believed), but they do not age, and are fairly robust. Having known little more than war for their short lives, and having not been taught anything beyond what was of use to their masters, they are now sent out into the world, possessed with an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to become more than they have been.

So it was that Armonica the Warforged arrived on the continent of Xen’drik. Wandering for a time, seeking purpose, until one day he happened upon a musician playing in Stormreach’s marketplace. So taken with the beauty of the song was he that he decided, there and then, that he was going to be a bard, making music for all to hear!

Warforged, on the whole, are not very good musicians. Their stat modifiers are +2 Constitution, -2 Wisdom, and -2 Charisma, leaving them weak in the very stat that a Bard needs most, charisma. Nevertheless, what they lack in natural talent they make up for in enthusiasm, and before too long Armonica was playing bass lute in a local band.

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He only knows three chords so far, but he plays them well.

In DDO the great strength of the Warforged is their immunities. Poison, disease, energy draining, sleep, exhaustion, nausea, and paralysis simply do not affect them. Neither do they need to breathe, so have no fear of water. They also have enhancements and feats that will increase their damage resistance. The main downside (apart from Rust Monsters) to avoiding so many of adventuring’s nuisances is that healing spells do not affect them as strongly. Starting out, a heal will only fix 50% of what it would on a fully organic being, though there are enhancements that a Warforged can take to raise that amount. There is also a line of wizardly repair spells, mirroring the clerical cures, that do have a full affect on them, which makes a Warforged wizard or sorcerer quite an interesting proposition.

Unfortunately, their difficulty to heal has made them somewhat unpopular with the more closed-minded of Eberron’s flesh-based population. This is not really fair, as while an individual heal does fix them less than otherwise, they also require less fixing in the first place. Happily, as a bard Armonica has some healing spells, so it tends not to be an issue.

Warforged are not one of the basic races available under the Free to Play scheme, costing 595 Turbine Points at normal prices. They’re so “Eberonny” though that I could not resist splashing out, especially as I was used to having them available to me as a subscriber in Europe.

He’s actually Rogue 1, Fighter 1, Bard 1 at the moment, but the majority of his levels going forward will be bard. I find it difficult to create a character that doesn’t have the ability to deal with at least some of the traps and locks that will present themselves. The level of fighter was to unlock a wide range of weaponry, and also for the free feat, which I took glee in spending on the Exotic Weapon Proficiency of Great Crossbow, which could just as easily be called a small ballista.

He’s the only character I’ve gotten into Massively’s OnedAwesome guild so far. If you see him, give him a wave, and remember to be kind to your Warforged colleagues, as they’re the ones who’ll be dragging your life crystals back to the shrine when you all get cloudkilled.