Warhammer Online Hands On

Feb 19, 2009

Those of you who remember the original marketing materials for Warhammer Online will recall that the original poster for the game actually had a Slayer on it. You know the one; the dwarf with the bright red Mohawk and all the piercings? It's such an iconic figure in the Warhammer universe, that it seemed impossible that the game would be built without them. But, of course, that's exactly what happened.

From a game design perspective, there are two big problems with the basic Slayer concept. First, their whole purpose is an honorable death in battle, which runs counter to the protective instincts of most gamers. Second, their "live to die" attitude means that they don't really care about acquiring gold or items, which essentially removes one of the primary rewards of the MMO experience. With those two issues looming large through the early stages of development, the team at Mythic decided to focus on other careers and let the idea for the Slayer lie dormant for a while.

Now, with the big Bitter Rivals update heading our way, we're finally getting the chance to play as the dedicated, dour, death-seeking dwarves known as Slayers. These warriors have rebounded from profound shame and dishonor by committing themselves to a glorious death in battle. We had the chance to play through a bit of the Slayer career on the beta servers and then chatted with Mythic's Adam Gershowitz about some of the overall design decisions.

You can check out the Slayer's Chaotic counterpart by reading Gamespy's Choppa preview.

The first thing to know about the Slayer, from a game design perspective, is that he fills in that missing melee DPS role among the dwarf careers. By adding this final missing melee class to the Order side, Mythic hopes to correct an imbalance in melee DPS characters in RVR. In terms of overall balance, the Slayer is somewhere between the solo DPS careers of the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf and the crowd-focused DPS careers of the White Lion and the Marauder. The Slayer is actually built with a variety of skills that let them move between solo and crowd situations more easily.

Most of the careers in Warhammer Online involve a unique gameplay mechanic, and the Slayer is no exception. In this case, the Slayer builds up a special Rage meter while in combat. There's a small dial just above the hotbar that shows the Slayer's Rage level. It starts building up the instant a Slayer enters combat. Once it reaches the Furious level, the Slayer will gain a slight bonus to all attacks, and can even trade in the Rage to launch special finishing attacks that do large amounts of damage all at once. At that point, the Rage meter will begin filling up again.

What you really want, though, is to let the meter climb all the way into the red. This triggers a Berserk state with massive damage bonuses. While the Slayer does tremendous damage in Berserk state, there are some substantial reductions in armor and other resistances that make him more vulnerable to enemy attacks. The Berserk state lacks some of the massive finishers you get at the more controlled Furious level, but there are some compelling Mastery Paths that give Slayers a bit of flexibility in terms of finishing moves.

The Giant Slayer path relies on lots and lots of finishers, so it's great against enemies with low defenses or healers who can't counteract large damage spikes. The Trollslayer path is less concerned with damage from single attacks, preferring instead to offer small bonuses to all attacks and rely on the cumulative effect to take down large enemies. Not surprisingly, it's more geared towards dealing with solo enemies. The Skaven Slayer path takes a little from both styles, giving players the option to retain their high damage bonus while in Berserk mode, or trade in some of their Rage for special crowd control effects like Snare.

With all these options, it's pretty clear that there are at least a couple of different ways you can play your Slayer, and even a fair bit of flexibility within each of the mastery paths, so you can adapt to changing combat situations without too much fuss. We weren't able to explore how this works at the higher levels with the Slayer, but our experience of the lower levels definitely has us interested to see more.

As far as the original objections to the Slayer's inclusion go, now that the team at Mythic has a better handle on their gameplay systems, they've been able to work around the Slayer's unique problems with items and death. By rendering their various pieces of armor as trophy racks instead of traditional helmets and greaves, the designers have adapted the overall MMO conventions to meet the Slayer's unique temperament. And since dwarves are known for inscribing powerful runes on their items, it's no great stretch to imagine that a Slayer's simple arm band can carry the protective power that's appropriate to a high level character.

Death presents a slightly different matter because a lot of the aversion is in the player's own mind. The team, of course, can rely on the quick respawns in some of the instanced areas to encourage players to approach the Slayer as a sort of kamikaze but they've also included a new Retribution power to make it more appealing to fight to the death. This eye-for-an-eye ability essentially gives the Slayer a free attack on any enemy that damages him. So if a Slayer can get a lot of enemies attacking him at once, he'll be able to deal lots of damage to large groups. The trick, of course, is staying alive long enough for it to matter.