First Impressions – Sorceress

Dance your cares away / Worry’s for another day / Let the music play / Down at Fraggle Rock!

Tell me that that song couldn’t melt the heart of even the most emo, angsty, puppy-kicking Dark Elf. Tell that to my newly-dubbed Sorceress, Fragglerock. She loves to dance her cares away, baby!

It just seemed… wrong… to create a male Sorcerer, so Fragglerock got a healthy injection of estrogen, and off we went. I noticed that even for this beta version of the final product, Mythic’s thrown in a lot of facial configurations, many of which include disfigurements such as scars, missing eyes and glitter face paint. I fully expect that 90% of players on the RP servers will select “missing eye” as their facial feature of choice.

So the Sorceress is the counterpart of the Bright Wizard, except while he tosses around open flame with flagrant disregard for the fire marshal, the Sorceress gets “dark magic”. I’m assuming that “dark magic” is code word for “chocolate pudding”, because it’s both dark and delicious. Basically, it’s the same thing with different graphics – toss out some big nukes, some nasty DOTs, AOEs, and try not to blow yourself up. It’s a fine line with the glass cannon mage archtype in WAR – on one hand, you don’t want to explode or experience backlash or whatever the kids call it these days. You’re already fragile, and by hurting yourself, you’re just handing your head to your enemy even faster. On the other hand, however, the higher your dark magic rating goes (0-100), the better your chance for a crit will be, and the bigger it’ll be when it hits. Plus, you have a quick spell you can cast to drain all the dark magic for some nice damage, and the more dark magic you have stored up, the more weight it has when it lands. So it’s kind of a crapshoot, playing this class.

Sorceresses are very feared in PvP, because they can toss out ranged damage – AOEs in particular – far from the harmful effect of an enemy’s blade. I didn’t quite hate them as much as Bright Wizards, but they’re not on my friends list either.

Fragglerock and I didn’t have a particular agenda, just lazy roaming. I boarded a nearby ship and found some nautical charts, which triggered a quest (I like quests you find in the world from items). The mob AI was really wonky for the preview weekend patch, so I toughed it out to grind on some sailors and gain awesome loot like – and here I am not kidding – a “Worn Out Hairbrush”. Because that’s just how vain High Elves are, they take their hairbrushes into combat. I sincerely hope their kind is extinct by the time the game releases.

I don’t know why I ended up doing this, but for the first time since I ever got into WAR, I entered the social window. Am I that anti-social? I dunno. Anyway, while open groups are all the rage, the power of the social window can’t be denied either. You have your Friends and Ignore lists, of course. There’s LFParty and LFMore to help more dedicated groups hook up. There’s a great search list to help you find certain guilds or players. And finally is an Options tab to let you put in an AFK note, or go anonymous/hidden.

Fragglerock finally moseyed up to the PQ and just spammed DOTs all over the place, trying to get an awesome PQ contribution score. Unfortunately, there were so many people killing the mobs so incredibly fast, the DOTs never had time to tick even once. I suck.

Quick Notes:

• Don’t forget to drain your dark magic – backlash is nasty!
• Don’t forget to seek out a renown trainer whenever you hit the higher camps or warcamps. You can spend renown points to boost up certain skills or gain tactics. Very important!