Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning: A Look at the Shadow Warrior

Stradden

MMORPG.com Warhammer Online Correspondent Louis Rossi writes this overview of the Shadow Warrior Career in Mythic Entertainment's newest RvR game. In the overview, Rossi looks at the effectiveness of a number of the career's damaging abilities.

The High-Elf Shadow Warrior is your classic ranged DPS class, or is it? Upon playing a shadow warrior a while, you’ll discover a few things differ between yourself and the traditional ranged, non-magic damage dealing classes plaguing so many other MMOs these days.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and write about how it’s perfectly ok for you to throw your Shadow Warrior into assault stance 100% of the time and laugh as you mow through enemies with your melee prowess – mostly because I’d be lying to you. It’s not ok to do that 100% of the time. However, if you plan it just right, you’ll find yourself walking away after combat instead of clicking a button and appearing in some arbitrary position a ways away.

Read about the Shadow Warrior

Samhael

A good read -- thanks for posting.  I may have to pull my shadow warrior out of the mothballs and give him another try. Thanks!

SabbathSMC

Yep good read although i do like my rain of steel when we force them into thier spawn.

Elmoren

Thanks guys!  While I'm a fan of my Shadow Warrior, I can't seem to keep myself from playing a heavily armored class, or a healer type (WP or DOK), the surviveability is unfortunately just not abundant for non tanks or healers in WAR

Sad but true.  A good song as well. :P

Suraknar

Combat in WAR is based around Class Synergy and Interdependency.

As a rule of thumb,

Tanks kill MDPS, MDPS kill RDPS, and RDPS kill Tanks.

The Shadow Warrior is a somewhat misunderstood class, because, according to the above, it is an RDPS Archtype, yet a Sole SW will almost always not be able to kill a Tank.

The reason is the fun part of the game, there are sub-roles within each archtype, that work together in different capacity but for the same overall goal.

When saying RDPS kills Tanks, it does not mean that every class in that category will be killing tanks but rather that all the classes of the catergory working together will be killing Tanks.

In my experience the sub-roles consist of:

- Bright Wizzards, offensive RDPS, the glass cannons, the Tank killers.

- Engineers, defensive RDPS, protecting the Cannons and the Support Line.

- Archmages/Rune Priests, the Support, Healing and Damage

- Shadow Warriors, the Skirmishes, Harassers, Tactical Finishers and Damage Boosters.

Hence, all that being said,

I really really enjoyed this review because it succeeded in putting the game play and involved game mechanics of playing a Shadow Warrior in to the context and give it perspective.

I play one and, while reading this review, I had images on myself in Combat, related to many examples you gave and also learned a couple of things that I haven't thought about.

Cheers!

afoaa

One of the big problems with the SW is that you have to play really well before you are worth anything. Other classes can just be played by poor or average players and then contribute just as much to a fight.

This has the effect that all SWs are looked uppon at 5th wheels and in most cases its sadly true.

Even if you play well, then no one will notice it because other people cannot see your arrow shots as they are flying far overhead in balistic banes and your debuffs and CC effects have no graphic effect other people can see, I had to shout  in ventrillo who I had knocked down or that a tank train had been rootet when they chased a healer because else no one would notice and break the root or knockdown.

In the end I gave up on my SW and rolled a WP instead. The WP dish our more damage than the SW while being really really tough to kill and he can heal and buff his party while doing it. The SW is regulated to keep defenses now and only if my WP dont get into the main warbands.