The Elves of WAR: Meet the Shadow Warrior
Filed under: Fantasy, Classes, New titles, Previews, Warhammer Online
Massively continues its exclusive pre-NDA coverage of the Elves of Warhammer Online with this spotlight on a master of Ranged DPS for the side of Order, The High Elf Shadow Warrior. They come in three flavors, Scouts (long-range dps specialists), Assault (close-combat) and Skirmish (short-range bow specialists). Each one of these masteries has a corresponding Stance that boosts their key abilities:Scout Stance - Increases your Ballistic and Initiative scores and your maximum range
Assault Stance - Increases your Strength and Weapon skill as well as increases your Armor by 100%
Skirmish Stance - Increases your Toughness and crit chance.
This career comes with a long list of bow attacks and a fair amount of blade attacks. Shadow Warriors also get the Vengeance of Nagarythe ability. Every 3 mins you can increase your damage by 20% for 15 seconds and unlock special additional abilities on many of your exisiting attacks for the duration.
The Scout mastery focuses on long-range bow attacks. It unlocks many abilities including the Enchanted Arrows tactic which allows your Flame Arrows and Festering Arrows to ignore their targets resistances. Also you get access to Glass Arrow which does not only damages its target, but shatters to cause damage over time to all enemies within 30 yards. This is the mastery for those who want to stand far back to do the most damage.
The Assault mastery still has killer bow attacks, but mixes in blade attacks as well. The No Respite tactic in this tree increases Parry chance by 10% and temporarily raises your chance to critically hit every time you Parry. And the Swift Strikes ability unleashes a rapid series of damaging hits that does more damage if the opponent is building up an ability to unleash of their own. This is the mastery tree for versatility which may be a good idea given the chaotic nature of Realm vs Realm combat.
The Skirmish mastery harkens to the origin of the career: a class that harries its opponent with hit and run tactics. You'll get access to the Charge Forth tactic decreases the maximum range of your abilities, but increases your crit chance by 20%. You'll also get the Flanking Shot ability which does good damage if you are behind the target. The interesting aspect of this ability is it will build up even if you're moving and if you are Vengeful, it will have a 20% increased chance to critically hit.
Along with the Dwarven Engineer and the Empire's Bright Wizard, the High Elf Shadow Warrior will soon be feared by the agents of Destruction on the battlefield as one who rains down death from afar (and near!)
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Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out our other exclusive Elves of War features and all of our previous Warhammer Online features. Plus, don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR! |
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-11-2008 @ 3:38PM
Velux said...
I definitely gonna play ranger for sure ;)
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8-11-2008 @ 4:48PM
kizok said...
Very nice information, thanks
Reply
8-11-2008 @ 6:08PM
Sarieth said...
Been looking forward to your writeup on the Shadow Warrior in this Elves-of-War series, and I wasn't disappointed! Wonderful job on all of them!
Reply
8-11-2008 @ 9:45PM
Leshrac said...
I got a invite to the beta, they instructed me to go find a bitorrent client use to acquire the download. I said FU Mythic, I'll wait for the reviews now.
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8-12-2008 @ 2:42AM
silverbow said...
FU Leshrac
8-12-2008 @ 3:47AM
O-bot said...
The versatility and efficiency of bit torrent makes perfect sense for distributing stuff like this. I don't feel it is too much to ask for a prospective gamer to spend the 5 minutes online to find a bit torrent client, which we should all have anyways.
8-12-2008 @ 10:30AM
Newton said...
Not to mention it's a little unrealistic to expect these companies to have the infrastructure to support 9+ gigs downloads via HTTP, and fileplanet and others would have problem dealing with the load aswell.
Even EA outsources all of it's E-commerace stuff, so really, is using bittorrent to download the client that big of a deal? Though the speed does suck.
8-12-2008 @ 10:42AM
Leshrac said...
Its unacceptable, every beta I have been in, and I have been in many, never asked me to go and find some 3rd party app to grab their file to help THEM test their game.
EA can go F themselves, Mythic can go F themselves, Paul Barnett should STFU and Silverbow can suck on a 12-day old piece of dog sh!t.
8-12-2008 @ 12:19PM
Hailster said...
So sad that you can't see the future Leshrac. Bittorrent or some other system is the way of the future.
WoW uses bit torrent, sure it isn't third party software, but it could just as easily be. Actually I would prefer that it was because the WoW one is horrible.
Someone with your childish attitude is not the type of person I would want beta testing this game. Let's leave that to the mature adults that understand computers and the internet.
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8-13-2008 @ 6:39AM
Larry-Steve said...
Leshrac, go climb back under your rock, troll.
As for the Shadow Warrior, prepare for some fantastic diversity my fellow MMO'ers.
One of the unique things Mythic did with DAoC is make all their Archery classes Hybids out the wahzu. It seems they've stuck with their tradition.
And they DEFINITELY had RvR on the brain when they developed their paths. Long bow for keep defense/pearch fighting. Get three of these gals/guys together and have them assist the same target from the top of a wall, no amount of healing will save you!
The melee path will be a blast for those of you who take advantage of the obvious advantage. Whoever you fight knows that 2 of your 3 paths revolve around ranged attacking. Walk around with a bow out, wait for another melee to think they have an easy kill, then CRUSH them. (Greenbeans is still upset that Scouts and Rangers got to slaughter him in Molvik with this tactic!)
Lastly, what could be the most unique thing is short ranged, ranged combat. (It's so deliciously confusing!) No, it looks like it could be great. I'm looking forward to point-blank shooting someone in the face with full force.
The only question I have left is what level of armor can they wear and can they stealth? (If moderate to heavy and yes, this class is OP before the game comes out!! :P )
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8-27-2008 @ 9:52PM
Mark said...
Leshrac, it would be better for everyone if you stayed away from the game. Really. In fact, just get out of MMOGs entirely, you'd be doing everyone a huge favor.
The only thing that Mythic blew big time was to have the option to run the game straight from the downloaded files instead of forcing people to copy them to a new directory (especially since most people didn't know what it really meant when the option came up). Then when the users patched their game their seeding was essentially worthless since they were uploading bad data now. I'd say this was the case with about 90% of the users so it really messed up the swarm. Whoever decided on that option should be fired, but other than that, the bittorrent distribution would otherwise have been very nice.
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