I had a chance to look through the Warhammer patch notes today, and the changes they’re promising are…severe. In a good way.

Highlights include

• Massive AoE CC nerfs. Bomb groups look to be a thing of the past. While it’s likely a number of Bright Wizards will find fault with this, for the most part it’s a good thing for the game. When a class or combination of classes can disable half an enemy warband, even if for a few seconds, that’s bad for the health of the game, particularly a PVP game. While I believe some CC is needed, it should be an individual,targeted thing.
• New User Journey. This looks to be a page from the EVE book. Not that WAR is hard, but it can be a little confusing to new players. The New User Journey will funnel all new characters in Tier 1 into the Chaos vs Empire setting (although the other settings will still be available, you’ll just have to travel to them), and will include a new voiceover tutorial. Quests in Tier 1 will be revamped and linked/chained together better. And lastly, all new toons will join a new player startup guild. Sounds quite a bit like EVE’s New Player Experience indeed, which I heartily welcome.
• Apprenticeship! This is groovy. Stuck in Tier 2 with friends in Tier 4? You’ll be able to join their warband and be temporarily scaled up(or down) to their level. This pretty much completely removes the Tier player-population-gating limitation, with Tier 1 players able to join in on Tier 4 City Sieges, or Tier 3 buddies to scale down to help their Tier 2 friends complete a PQ. I’m curious to see how they implement this. Will you gain the core abilities temporarily if you scale up? Or lose some when you scale down? What about your spec? Developing…
• Performance and stability changes. Normally I wouldn’t get too excited about this, Mythic promises performance improvements with every patch. This time they’ve provided some specifics, though, mentioning a change in the way the engine handles texturing and possibly polygon count when a large number of characters are on screen. Interesting.
• Fortresses removed. This is a doozy. Fortresses were broken and the teleport-’fix’ was a bandaid solution. Deleting them was a hard call but one I feel was necessary. To enable city siege, all that Order or Destruction has to do is control 2 out of the 3 Tier 4 pairings. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more city sieges as a result, possibly switching back and forth between Altdorf and Inevitable City within the space of 24 hours. Crazy!

And a number of careers changes including buffs to my Black Orc and most other tanks/melee dps. Yey! All in all this looks to be another patch bringing some pretty severe changes to the game. I’m eagerly awaiting patch day to see if I can get my Tier 3 BO apprenticed-up to some Tier 4 so I can go explore Land of the Dead.