Observations from a returning [NewISH] player, Any advice? Does this need to go into the suggestion forum?

[ArcturianPrime]

So I returned to the game a few weeks ago. I had an old Shadow Warrior and a Black Orc that I had love hate relationships with. I lost the account info anyway and they weren't 40 so I figured I would just start over and make a new account and level up different characters that would fit the current meta. I know you guys are in the middle of a MASSIVE overhaul to the game (I read all of your March Update and loved it) so I don't know if the things I am going to list are being fixed or not. Please let me know or direct me to active threads that solve the question. Currently there is a enormous barrier to entry for any new player coming here and not understanding what to do or how to progress without getting hammered. Thank you for reading my wall of text. There is so much here I am bound to have missed something but I want to try anyway. Here goes.

So I'll list what I have come across. Maybe some of these things are being addressed or have been and there just isn't any info on it. I know the rework is the focus and that may address a good chunk of what I am posting here. I am posting this in the perspective of the new or returning player and not a veteran that has been here awhile, knows all the ins and outs, and has a supportive and active guild. I dislike complaining without offering possible solutions so that is what I have tried to do after listing each one. I try to take into account how it would affect the community as a whole and not just (ER MAH GERD you nerfed my class, undo it please, I need to feel good about myself again, kkthksbai)

T1 is its own special bundlle of joy. It has its fun moments and its moments of rage, like healers trying to kill a tank and not... you know.. healing, but I digress. So this post post is mainly dedicated to life AFTER t1 and trying to catch up to the rest of the community. T4 is where its at and its the most fun in my opinion. The best fights i have ever had were full, MASSIVE warbands, fighting over the various locations in the different tiers. Nothing like coming over a hill and watching two or more full warbands clashing with an enemy team with the same amount of players.

My Observations and Concerns

#1. The biggest problem for me at the moment (and I assume other players) is the mount situation and moving across the map. So I have played Warhammer Online from beta and release to this new server off and on. The entire time it was always suggested as to keep your RR above your CR while leveling. Obviously because most gear is tied to your RR and if your CR is too high you are in serious trouble when you hit 40 and can't get your gear. Well the thing is the server has progressed to where everyone has the 60% mount and is at least in full Conqueror. I noticed people are very grumpy and most WBs stick to themselves so you are on your own if you are new and don't know the guilds (there may be ONE warband pug open if you are lucky outside of t1).

The few that have let me tag along are nearly impossible to keep up with because I can't get that mount till 38 even if I have the gold. I can't stay with the WB as they are faster than me. I can't get away from the enemy team who act like blood crazed maniacs when seeing a mid RR20 character
(no you are not winning the game farming a solo mid 20sRR while you are in full Conq or even Sov with your half a dozen heal buddies in tow - stop it, get some help) because they are also faster than me. They catch me and kill me everytime. I'm not strong enough yet to defend myself against any class.

#2 SCs, when they do pop, are full of people in high level gear while working together (aka premade) so I am getting nothing from running them ,but they produce alot of exp so its not a good source of renown anymore. I am basically reduced to running boxes in lower priority zones (Praag is death zone for new players. I try to avoid it all costs) or getting into and following the big pug WBs (as a new player you are not getting into any regular warbands). The level and stat boost is not enough to be viable either. I am getting nearly one shotted. I can only imagine the frustration of healers in warbands I am tagging along with. Enemy teams will go out of their way to kill me and ignore my warband. The best renown I have ever received was while dead lol. Scenarios do not come up at all anymore and if they do its a premade in full gear and I am not getting anything. No point in doing scenarios whatsoever after t1. Its much easier to run boxes or cap points, which everyone does... solo.... because they get more points >.<. Without the faster mount I cant even compete with my own team let alone the enemy.

Both solutions of either running boxes, capping points or running with a warband barely work because I can't compete with the playerbase. The old advice of keeping your RR above your CR seems useless because I can't keep up with anyone unless I come across someone that is new like me but they usually have someone leveling them. So getting crests and renown has slowed to a barely a crawl to nonexistent. With the lower speed mount (the level 16 one I believe, not the mare everyone gets on both sides) I miss caps, box turn ins and get picked off by players looking for stragglers. I have researched and researched but all the data looks out of date and not viable anymore (maybe 30% of it is).

The only thing I have come up with is to PQ grind to get my ruin set (I found a t3 easy PQ that drops about 30 tokens on average that I can do very quickly repeatedly - should only take me a few hours to half a day to get enough exp, tokens, and gold, for a full ruin set, mount, and talis +pots), weapon and jewelry, and my 38, 100gold mount, then do Gunbad and Bastian Stair. I do this anyway so that I get the PvE sets to unlock the wards so that I can just roll into Conqueror or Annihilator. Doing this I will have have enough money to buy the proper talismans off the AH as a new player. I know its not the best solution but it seems to be the only way. It allows me to get all my abilities unlocked and a decent set of gear and mount to be viable in a quickly and timely manner. Grinding RR is brutal but CR is not. In fact Im willing to bet that I could make several level 40 characters within a month if I focused. Many times a tank or healer is needed and their aren't any because they are off assisting the main guilds. Amazingly enough I see active chat spam for dungeons like city dungeons and Gunbad/BS. New players can't afford 20+ gold per talisman on the AH so the PvE option allows me enough cash to get very important talismans.

Because the last three tiers are merged into one, would it be possible to allow us to buy the 100 gold mount at like level 20? This way new players can keep up with WBs and actually be able to evade, reposition, and be effective for their side even if their gear is lacking. At this point in time as soon as I step into an RvR lake I am good as dead without a WB but I can't keep up with the WBs. From what I see most players either quit or they just roll new characters and stay forever T1. I can't do that, its just too boring to roll t1 forever. Before I could just power through and press on but now that option is not working very well if at all. The other side sure is loving the free crests and renown though.

One more thing before I get into my solutions. City Sieges. Man is it depressing to hear veteran players gripe and complain about City Sieges. They get in there wipe once then wait for 15 minutes to get their crests. That is absolute bs. Listening to them talk about it they don't want to feed the other side and they have done it so many times that it just does not excite them anymore but its a huge source of crests for them that they need to compete in ranked or get one of the many pieces of gear that require THOUSANDS of crests. With the length of fights and the enormous amount of healing I see going on I can see why they stick around as its a major source of crests for them.

I don't know how to solve City Sieges. Maybe break it up into smaller groups? Have multiple instances where its 6v6 and a ton of bots? Maybe remove enemy players all together and just let the attacking team ransack I dunno. Maybe do a poll on the community and see what they think.

My Suggestions: (just opinions dont get mad if you dont like it)
1. Reduce endgame mount level requirement from 38 to 20, maybe lower the cost to 50 gold or less. The basic 38 mount to keep up with warbands and evade enemy players. You still have your normal event reward 30 day mounts that you can work towards. This is just for keeping up with your warband and evading tryhard enemy players.

2. Have players drop money as well. Not much, some silver for each in the group, but just like they drop crests and items to allow people to get talismans or gear from the AH easier. I like PvE and I love that you are working on it in your updates but from what I get the majority of the current player base doesn't like it. Literally they say "EWWWW PvE" in chat. It sounds like players would like a way to get money to get items they need from the AH besides PvE. The talisman and apothecary skills are cool but they are so complicated it took a day of me researching to figure it out and you still have to do PQs to get the higher level mats to make stuff. Once I figured it out I thought the system was neat but digging to find the skill in my actions list and then putting it on my hotbar so it would work... was the first challenge lol.

3. The game has progressed. People are running ranked or premades and most are at minimum in full Conqueror if not full Sovereign. Allow players, if they choose to do so, to do a quest that allows them to progress their character to a late 30s CR/RR character and give them full Annihilator. For instance, they have to do Sewers or Sacellum and get their full keeper set plus the ward unlock. This allows them to finish an easy PQ that will send them a message in their mailbox. In the box will have tokens to redeem at a vendor in Altdorf or Inevitable City, that levels you to 38 CR and maybe 38 RR too, and you can redeem a basic Annihilator set and talismans. You still have to progress to get RR44 to get full Conqueror and beyond. New players simply cannot compete at all in the game anymore. The gap between t1 and t2-t4 is too high now. Its much easier to quit and either stay in t1 or quit the game entirely, which is what I have experienced other players do. I refuse to give up. I will find a way to RR44 without being farmed for a year.

4. Those that choose not to do the quest to get to 38 and full Annihilator and level normally will be rewarded with unique cosmetics like you get out of a lair boss.

5. Have a team of dedicated players update info and guides for new players that allow them to quickly progress and play with everyone else and update it once a year or every 6 months IF possible. People come and go in waves and I think there could be alot more players if info was up to date. There is so much new stuff in RoR that even I don't know about, that you have created or modified over the years. Post this to the main page that players have to see before they can download.I can only imagine how someone new would be overwhelmed. World chat is grumpy and not always helpful.

Most of the info seems good but is several years outdated. It is very obvious a new meta has come on to the scene and its still changing as you do your rework. Maybe have some dedicated volunteers to recreate info for new players and post that on the main page that shows up when you download the game here after creating an account. I have dug through the forums and read a ton of stuff only to realize in game that its wrong and the advice channel is like oh yeah we do it this way now, after spending days doing it the wrong way (leveling, gearing, not getting t1 jewelry, builds both renown and stats, etc).

I just want to say that I read all of your March update and I love it. I actually like the PvE in this game too but I feel like I am in the minority here. When you finish your updates you are going to attract alot of new players and they are going to hit the same wall that I did. Thank you for reading my wall of text.

[Rotgut]

Appreciate the time you put into writing this, i think feedback from new players is very valid. I'm sure the Devs are concerned about this too, and there are players within the community that do their part to help - but there are problems, of course. The Dev team is small, a lot of class guides are "hidden" in various Guild Discords, and the public ones (like Uchoo's) isn't really advertised on the main Website as it should be.


"(there may be ONE warband pug open if you are lucky outside of t1)."

This is one of the biggest issues imo. ALL oRvR content is expected to be created by players, and the "Open Warband" feature isn't enough to help due to the simple fact that a Warband with random composition will melt on contact against anything with a proper 2/2/2 spread. It takes participating in one random pugband to find that out, so people don't join anymore, and experienced players leveling alts will limit themselves to Guild WBs.

There is an easy solution tho, improve Open Warbands. Make them to be 2/2/2s and auto organize parties by default, like some addons already do, and you remove the "spam chat and manage parties" part of the job of being a Pug Leader. That and increasing rewards in some way for being a Leader is the only thing the game can do on its end to incentivize this very important, content creating, expected behaviour from the players.

"SCs, when they do pop, are full of people in high level gear while working together (aka premade)"

Devs have mentioned they want to change the Matchmaker but it boils down to the same problem plaguing everything in this game. Its a small Dev team volunteering for the job, and they are in the middle of a whole Ability Rework. They need more programmers.

"One more thing before I get into my solutions. City Sieges."

A MMR system would be a clear solution. Atm there is a very, very small group of players from multiple guilds that try to organize competitive Cities, but that create problems on its own. The same people having to deal with each other for years create ego problems sometimes, and the skill level between players that have been doing City for years and newcomers can be daunting, discouraging them from even trying. MMR and changing the rewards (cuz clearly Crests and Renown isn't enough to incentivize people) could help.


Your points about gold and mount speed i don't agree with but its because i haven't had that particular issue. I can only assume your experience is valid, but since i can't add or argue anything, i won't talk about it.

[Uchoo]

You're struggling to keep up while on a 50% mount vs 60%? I can kind of understand that but I never thought it was a big deal.

I have a pretty large guide on RoR classes and many things RoR, check my signature below.

Other things you talk about like slower crest gain, city sieges, etc: You generally get a lot more crests by killing things and winning, so the known warbands who do that well are typically led by the same people, and they typically have 18-20 regular followers, leaving only a few open spots. Yeah, I can imagine it being hard to get into those. The typical pug warband leaders are pretty good, too. A good player on the right class can really push those groups to get a lot more kills and they typically are easier to get into. You can also try leading yourself but I can understand why a new player might not want to do that.

As far as cities, don't have high expectations for the solo queue cities. There are fun and competitive cities but that occurs when 24 people get a group together with a specific comp, are on Discord, etc. Could solo queue city be improved? Oh absolutely but it's also not really the city experience.

This segways into the last thing you brought up that I'd like to address: Premades. They're very good. The players who want to achieve success notice this and usually try to join or form premades. There is a solo queue only scenario called Discordant Skirmish for those who wish to avoid it.

All that to say: Consider joining a guild or at least a social circle, you'll likely have a lot more fun.

[Phantasm]

On every realm there is a big organized guild that help a lot new players and address issues that new people meet every day - pve runs, talismans and pots, scenario premades, up to date guides for their members. The thing is, teaching and sharing knowledge with other people is time consuming, so its a lot more effective to do it with own guild members then strange people around game.
So ask in /5 for a very active guild, check how many members they have in their primetime, 20+ is a decent factor. Socialise, play, chat, do stuff together. Solos in RoR are people who either dont like other people or running alone by choice - they prefer to rely on themselves then the others.