First Impressions...All Over Again

[Ruvanal]

I wanted to try a priest.  Really.  But reading the changes Blizzard made to the Mage class, I HAD to play another one.  Plus, I wanted to see if I'd have a hard time like I did in Phase 1.  With the learning curve out of the way, starting out was a breeze this time.  After about 5 hours of play, I'm a level 8 undead Mage named TheBolt (please look me up to sign our guild charter this weekend!).

While not too interested in priest, I did decide to try a warrior to see what differences the new beta2 test engine was doing to the classes.

While I have only played about 30 min so far I did notice a couple of significant changes for the warriors. In the beta1, the warriors would gain rage from attacks at about a rate of 1 rage per 5 points of damge that they inflicted on enemies. This made it dificult to pump up their rage in combat if they did not aquire a good weapon. In the beta2 the rage build up looks like it is at a 1 to 1 ratio for the amount gained by the warriors attacks. No more beat on monster for 4 or 5 hits in the early game so that you can get enough rage to do 1 strike attack. I di not check to see if there was an increase in the rate of gaining rage due to being hurt in combat, but it looks like it too has been beefed up some (beta1 rate was at about 1 rage/10 damage suffered).

The second thing that I noted was that the rage did not dissapate as fast as in the beta 1 game. In the beta 1 game I had tested letting the rage build up through a fight, looting and moving onto the next MOB to see how much would remain. Typically I would loose about 50 rage in that short amount of time. Since it was rare to finish combat with more than about 25-30 rage, this meant that I usually had to start every battle with doing a series of normal attacks or using a Charge rank 2 to build up enough rage to allow the usage of the warrior attacks. In the beta 2, I noticed that I could loot the monsters and move onto the next and still have enough left over rage in many cases to start the combat off with Stike attack. This is a noticably better retention of the rage level so that every combat is not like starting at cold every time.