First Impressions – Chosen
September 4, 2008
If there’s one thing you gotta love about Chaos, it’s that they’re really into decorating. Mutated pink trees with tentacles, skulls everywhere, chaos whirlpools in the sky… man, it just doesn’t get more beautiful than this!
So as you can tell, I left the mud pits of the Greenskin starting zone for the earth-rent-asunder charm of Chaos. First on the list: the Chosen, played by my good friend Puddintame, complete with skull topknot and big beefy muttonchops.
Puddintame looked impressively severe, with a massive shield and giant axe – oh yeah, we’re heading into tank territory, people. Buckle up and keep your hands, legs and mutated appendages inside the vehicle. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. At the early levels, any promises Mythic made about tanks being above and beyond normal MMO tanks is pretty much bunk. You wear large slabs of armor, you sacrifice dps to carry a shield, and your attack order tends to be 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.
The shining grace, that I could tell, of the Chosen career was that they got the added benefit of producing “auras”, area-effect buff/debuffs which would strengthen you, weaken the enemy, and become a virtual mating call to any and all bad guys within a 50 mile radius. Seriously, with the aura on, I was like a death magnet. No, not the cool me-giving-death-to-others sort of magnet, but the type where I end up face-planting because six zombies decided to do a reenactment of Night of the Living Syp on my head. Going up a few levels, you’re able to switch between auras while leaving up a 12 second remnant of the previous aura, allowing you to potentially boast two or three auras at once. Of course, you’re not doing a lot of other special attacks in the meantime, but that could be a lot more enjoyable in a group. The Chosen is pretty much a “dark paladin” or “shadowknight” if that helps.
Puddintame (ask me again and I’ll tell you the same) found a silly Tome unlock early – I clicked on a gravestone to be awarded the “Skeleton Hunter” title. Nifty! Then I tried out the new “Bragging Rights” feature that you can access through a character tab, letting you show off ten of your biggest achievements to other players who would be supposedly so bored that they’d want to click on you and see what’s what.
I died a lot, which was weird as a tank, but probably due to the auras and the tightly-packed mobs in the newbie zone. Even so, I beefed up with a bit of armor and explored a crypt, which had suitably eerie noises and music going on (big props to the sound team!).
Although out of all the tanking classes, the Chosen does look the most conceptually interesting, I just couldn’t get much into him today. I ran through a scenario in which about 6 Destruction guys got schooled by 20 Order (how does that happen, anyway?), and with my measly protection and dps at that level, there was no way I could solo crap.
Waaagh! A Warhammer Online Blog 
I keep looking at the Chosen as a possible alternate to my desired Squiggy. I actually really want to see how well Chosen intergrates with the other classes now that the Destro-Iron Breaker(Black Guard) is removed until a later date.
Have you seen anything about the mutations that we keep reading about or seeing in cinematics?
sounds like Order is being outweighed by Destruction, opposite of the future problem we seemed to be having with more on Destruction side..
This doesn’t Chosen in a very good light.
I leveled a Chosen to rank 8 over preview weekend and my impressions were quite favorable actually. I didnt actually notice my aura’s pulling any adds, since at least the first 7 levels only netted me 3 auras and none of them caused damage. The first one is a strength debuff/buff for you. The next one affected wounds or toughness, forgot which. the last one I got was a magic resist debuff. Multiple chosen can apply their respective auras, but apparently they dont stack so you cant have 6 Chosen with the strength debuff, and have it lower strength 6xs whatever the base is.
I would concur with Syp that the basic attack order was 1-1-1-1-1-1, but you do get some varying abilities like Tooth of Tzeench, which does a modest amount of damage, but adds +40 dmg (scales later) to everyone elses attacks to the target. Might have only applied to group members but just the same I noticed it helped alot. You also get a low AP attack that works like sunder (think wow warrior) but actually did damage. All in all, I had a blast with this class and I think it should do just fine alongside the Black Orc.
The “promise” Mythic made about tanks in WAR was that they wouldn’t be like other games where you have to Sword and Board for PvE and 2h in PvP if you want to be sucessful. Both styles of play would be viable roles in both PvE and RvR, with emphasis on the fact that Sword and Board won’t be flat out useless in RvR/PvP which is what people are used to in other games.
Based on what I’ve read from beta testers they’ve kept that “promise” if you want to call it that. I didn’t try any of the tanks during PW so I can’t back up the claim myself (too busy testing out healers and RDPS).
The reason I wouldn’t even consider it a “promise” per say is that I was under the impression that this was true of tanks in DAoC and so would be more along the lines of “intended game-play design” even if it is a novel or refreshing idea to people not familiar with DAoC like myself.
So then the only question in my mind is; does it really play out that way in the game? aka do they execute that design well?
In PvE I died once, because I was unused to the spawn rates in the first tomb in the Chaos level. Gotta be careful with that, but the spawn rates nice, no waiting just gotta be careful. As for Open Beta I will be working the 2 hander vs sword and board comparison.
Alittle diseartening i feel, this is one in many posts with nothing really good or bad to say about the chosen, apart from looks it doesn’t have that ‘wow, look at me i’m exciting!’ feel to it like the black ork, maruader etc…
Since i really started looking into the game (early june) i had my heart set on a chosen as my main but now i’m losing faith and leaning towards a shaman instead.
anyone got a a good feeling about the chosen? cos they are few and far between
I really liked the Chosen. I leveled one to 13 before they took the servers down and around level 5 or so it’s definitely more than one button combat. They definitely aren’t the best soloers out there, but they can take enough damage to hold up just fine, I think. In groups they really come out, aura twisting and crippling mobs. They have a debuff that downs Toughness which can stack 5 times which is really great on PQ bosses/champion mobs.
I actually never found myself bored in combat at all while playing the Chosen. Though each to their own, I suppose.
-JRW
@Bizmarc
I also leveled a Chosen to about 8 during the preview weekend. I pretty much agree 100% with what Iazi said above. I found myself doing the 1-1-1-1-1 in the very beginning, but you quickly start to pick up some other abilities. I switched off to a 2H asap and started to enjoy that. You get some DD and DoT abilities plus your auras to play around with.
If for whatever reason you’re worried about pulling too many mobs, you do have the throwing axe ability to pull with. And even early on when I was getting bashed by a high spawn rate in the starter zones, I wouldn’t go down until I’d taken on 6ish guys in a row (granted I didn’t have more than 2 on me at at once).
Honestly, I thought the class got more and more fun as I advanced and things started to open up a little bit.