Thoughts on Scenarios

The Warhammer Alliance forums have a nice thread going that is seeking feedback on how people feel about scenarios. I know there is a lot of opinion getting around the blogosphere about how scenarios can be improved (e.g. Chappo, Word of Shadow) so I encourage you to all pop over and voice your opinion there as well (if you haven’t already).

I was going to do a whole write up on my thoughts for each scenario but it was going to be way too long so here are some general comments and I will follow up later with my other thoughts on specific scenarios.

I think Mythic need to look at the points per time of all scenarios and balance them out. People favour Mourkain and Tor Anroc because someone will hit 500 around the 7 minute mark no matter how long they hold the thing. A lot of the other scenarios you will be lucky to hit 300 before the 15 minute timer is up. In some scenarios like Black Fire Basin you will be lucky to get to 100. I would like to see the situation where a balanced game has both sides in the 400-500 points range at the 15 minute mark.

I like the mechanic in Temple of Isha where you get something to increase your points gain for killing the enemy when they hold the flag. This helps balance out the match and means that you get some benefit from attacking instead of just giving up when the other side turtles. It also works like the catch up method mentioned over at Word of Shadow as it is only available to the side who doesn’t hold the flag. Doomfist Crater has a similar item in the Doomfist Ore, however it is available to both sides so if one side is totally dominating they can control both the flag and the ore which isn’t quite as balanced as the Temple of Isha mechanic.

I think Mythic need to look at how tanks get rewarded for their role in scenarios and either boost their XP/RP gains or just make them aware of how it works. I know a few tanks who feel quite cheated when they run scenarios because they see the healers and DPS getting way more XP/RP than they could ever hope for. Related to this, I think Mythic should prevent people from dropping group in order to get more XP/RP for themselves. Also, something needs to be done about the way XP/RP is split between the groups because I have seen some occasions where 3 healers and 3 tanks end up in one group and then all the DPS are in the other group and the tanks and healers get next to no XP/RP for the scenario because they are getting the kills, meanwhile the kills achieved by the DPS are only possible because of the tanks and healers.

I also don’t feel the link between scenarios and the war effort. I think Mythic need to give us better feedback on how our scenario performance is affecting zone control so there is more emphasis on its importance. Currently scenarios are a whole different world totally removed from the rest of the game aside from the fact they give you XP and RP. I think there are big issues with zone control across the board but I will leave that as a topic for another post.