Been a few days now since I posted and of course a lot has happened since then. One tiny thing… The game has started! So naturally I have been busy in the game and created a runepriest on Karak Eight Peaks and got it to 10rr10 on the first day of playing. A thank you to GOA is in it’s place here since the launch went really well and there was no problems what so ever with entering head start and bonus item codes. Had a couple of crashes of the game in the first period that made me have to sit in launch in queue a few times but that is a Mythic problem and so far it has not been more than I could accept for the launch of a new mmorpg.
Now I have a lot to write and share about Warhammer Online already. The first thing is a video i captured on the first day that I hope shows how special a launch experience is with the starting areas being more active than we will ever see them be. This video is from the first public quest in the dwarf area and I doubt that we will ever see it be completed much faster than this.
With head start rapidly approaching I must say I am beginning to feel a bit more confident with GOA. Over the weekend we saw them extend their open beta so we could play quite a few hours more than we had originally been promised. Furthermore the CEO of GOA announces that everyone who has participated in the open beta will get 7 days of free subscription credited to our accounts on the 18th. However the real test comes with the head start launch. They announced the name of the head start servers late on Saturday, and when head start code registration came online at 2:10AM CEST everything seemed to be working perfectly. I myself was able to enter my code without any problems immediately after I saw it was up, and very shortly thereafter I got an email verifying I had been credited with head start on my account. Now it is also possible for us to enter our bonus item codes but I have not received any confirmation on that one yet. GOA announced that they have put priority on head start codes over bonus items and I think we can all agree that was the right choice. Everything seems to be shaping up for a good launch, we just have to wait for this afternoon to see if they will follow through to the end.
As for my choices of career and server going into the head start I will be playing a runepriest on the Karak Eight Peaks core ruleset server. I always knew I wanted to play a healer class, that is what I have always done in all the mmorpg’s I have played and I still like this archetype and saw no reason for that to change this time around. Also knew I wanted to play Order side so I read up on the three healer classes: Archmage, Runepriest and Warrior Priest. The WP seems to be similar to paladin from World of Warcraft and the Archmage needs to mix and match dps and healing equally to be most effective. Which led my focus to the runepriest. Reading up on it made me realise that this healer seemed to have a chance of being the healer class most likely to become the “primary healer”. So I tested it out in open beta and have decided to go for this career in live.
The second biggest decision, if not the biggest after all, is to choose a server. I had already decided on the type of server so when the list came in I saw one server named Axe Bite Pass and a lot of others starting with Karak something. Seeing as Axe Bite Pass is going to stand out among the others it seems to be the obvious choice so I will stay away from that one, the reasoning should be less likelihood of long queues. My tactic then was to go to WHA EU Server forums and I started looking for which server might have a good and active community. Ended up being that Karak Eight Peaks had the most posts, also the name is pronounceable and shortens down to KEP which seems nice. After GOA confirmed that KEP will be one of the head start servers I decided this is where I will go. Now when picking a server that will be one of the absolute first ones you have to be concerned with the possibility of queues. Every CE’er going to that server is bound to have at least a few friends/guildies that will join that server as well come SE start. But since I will be playing order and it has been annouced that there will be separate caps for the realms and that destruction seems to be the “popular” choice in Warhammer I figure that order will have smaller queues and going for a launch server will increase the chance of having a well populated order realm. Now here goes hoping that everything will go smothly and as planned. Next step, find a guild… anyone looking for a runepriest with alot of previous healing experience on Karak Eight Peaks?