There are plenty of MMO blogs out there that have reviewed the various classes available to new players when they take their first tentative steps into the World of Warhammer. Online. Craft. There isn’t much coverage, however, of the classes that Mythic left out of the game; I’m not talking about those classes, such as the Hammerer or Choppa, that were extracted with a precision scalpel, expertly carved out in such a way as to cause maximum outrage on all the Warhammer forums of which, I should note, Mythic has to police and support precisely none.

The person at Mythic who said “Hey, why don’t we not have any official forums, because fans are bound to run their own anyway, and then we can just piggyback off of them for free” has now been set up in their very own room at Mythic HQ, a room made of solid gold, with a golden throne at the centre, where gold fountains routinely shower said person in chocolate and liqueur. And gold.

No, I’m talking about the secret classes that were in the very early alpha release of the game but were quickly removed after initial feedback from testers. So here’s a brief description of some of the lost classes of Warhammer Online:

The Scion of Slaanesh – The Scion was an interesting class, being a representative of the god of seduction, depravity and hedonism they were armed with nothing more than a main-hand whip and a large vibrator in the off-hand. Death at the hands of a Scion was an absolute pleasure and at the same time absolute agony. Alpha testers complained that there was a lack of armour options, which was not strictly true, because since the Scion didn’t wear any armour, or clothing at all, there weren’t many options to be had. The developers pointed out that they had been quite generous with the various body customisation options for the class in compensation for the lack of attire, but testers pointed out in response that there was a bug where the male and female characters had every combination of body options, male and female, all at the same time. The developers said that this wasn’t a bug it was a feature, but nobody was buying it, and the class fell into disuse.

The Dwarf Beer Master – The Beer Master was meant to be a pet class, but it had a twist, the twist being that it didn’t have any pets to speak of. The idea was that the Master would carry around flagons of ale which would act as pets and aid him in combat. Of course, beer isn’t actually sentient or mobile in any way, and the developers had trouble resolving that fact. When he tried to command his pets to attack, the flagons of ale would simply sit at his feet and not move, and with the character being too drunk to realise the problem, he would simply repeatedly yell at the beer mugs to attack until the player was forced to turn the sound off to protect their speakers. The only mobility the pets had was when the Beer Master flung them at his enemies in a fit of inebriated rage, at which point he would realise that the flagon still had precious beer in it and he would charge after it into the midst of the enemy, where he was quickly cut to ribbons because he’d forgotten to put his armour back on after taking a leak behind a nearby Swordmaster earlier in the day.

The Orc Negotiator – A diplomacy-based class, the Negotiator didn’t last too long. Orcs aren’t given much to diplomacy, and thus this class kept chopping the heads off of the other diplomats and then using them as glove puppets in order to conclude negotiations quickly and get back to the fighting.

The High Elf Conscientious Objector – Another diplomacy-based class and the mirror to the Orc Negotiator. Alpha testers complained that the Objector spent far too much time with its head being used as a glove puppet.

The Dark Elf Emolator – A suicide attack class, they charged-up their Emo power bar by contemplating their pale skin and black hair in hand mirrors that they carried around with them, and by singing powerful dirges by The Cure and Jimmy Eat World until they were suicidal enough to attack the enemy head-on. Alpha testers complained about the lack of variation in the black cloth armour, and the fact that there was no character run animation, instead they had to go everywhere at a shambling walk with their head down on their chest.

The Human Bloggerer – A very unusual class, they were armed with nothing more than a quill and a sheaf of vellum. They protected their allies by generating huge walls of text that the enemy could not bypass without siege engines, and they attacked by writing scathing reviews of the other classes’ prowess in combat and the bedroom. They also had a powerful debuff where they would speculate on a specific class being nerfed soon by the developers. Alpha testers complained that the class was a lot of fun to start off with, but soon became too much effort for most players to be bothered with. Mythic suggested a skald-like class instead, the Podcasterer, but it was quickly shelved when they realised that it had balance issues; you could only hear it in one ear.

So there you have it, a few of the lost classes of Warhammer. Remember them well, for their existence was brief, broken and bizarre.

I can’t believe the sheer audacity of this post. If any class in any game was ever in need of nerfing, it’s whichever one Zubon decides to play in WAR. Zubon’s class is a slap in the face to anyone who might be playing a class that has to oppose it in RvR. It’s an overpowered outrage I tell you. However, the class I choose to play in WAR, now that’s underpowered and in need of some serious buffing.

My class is so underpowered that I weaken other classes when in the same group as them.

My class is so underpowered that when I hit a mob I increase its hit points.

My class is so underpowered that it is always crtically hit by damaging spells cast nearby, even if it’s from someone on my own side.

My class is so underpowered that it takes damage whenever it tries to open the Tome of Knowledge.

My class is so underpowered that it gets one-shot all the time. By small children. With one arm. In pyjamas. Who are dead.

My class is so underpowered that in the time other classes have gained five levels, my class has gone down one level.

My class is so underpowered that whenever I enter a Realm vs Realm battle the other side is instantly declared the winner.

My class is so underpowered that my Renown Rank armour and weapon upgrades were a coffin and a shovel.

My class is so underpowered that NPC farmers kick me as I run past.

My class is so underpowered that killing ten rats requires a war group of twenty of us to achieve.

As those of you who follow the MMO scene may have heard, I think it has been mentioned once or twice in the blogosphere, Warhammer Online is fast approaching and the song of the Hype Harpy is reaching a fever pitch, and with her siren melody she has driven many bloggers mad in a frothing frenzy of fanboyism

To me WAR is looking like it might be some form of game, one that could be played for some measure of time, and that will perhaps involve a modicum or more of entertainment. Anything else would be fancy and speculation, even with beta experience, because no beta that I’ve ever been involved in has ever represented or accurately reflected the experience that Joe and Jane Normalplayer will see when they enter the game on its official launch, much less a beta buried beneath such a writhing groping horde of intertwined fanboys, like some sort of bastard chaos child of Tzeentch’s hope, ambition, scheming and lies, and Slaanesh’s self-indulgence and excess, all arms and legs and salivating biting groaning heads.

Having said all that, I don’t think it hurts for normal people to get somewhat interested in events per se, and a little forward planning avoids hasty decisions come launch day and the inevitable regret and re-rolling that shortly follows; well, it avoids it for most people, alas I am a lost cause and I expect several character re-rolls have already been soothsaid for me by the Oracle of Delphi.

It appears that some very organised souls on the colonial side of the pond have already started on the initial formation of a guild, and I suppose it is worth staking an initial flag (Do you have a flag? No flag, no country.) in the ground atop Mount OrganisationalShambles and seeing if there are any EU bloggers or blog readers who are interested in forming a guild. We’ll need a name and a flag, I shall offer forward ‘The Sodality of the Tankard-and-Sword’, ‘The Gentlemen Scoundrels’ or ‘Guardians of the Golden Gourd’ as an initial salvo for a guild name, and let counter offers, abuse or just plain ambivalence follow.

Other than pondering on the shape and form of a guild, I’ve been trying to work out which class I’m going to play at launch. I mentioned before that I’d narrowed it down to either the Ironbreaker or the Warrior Priest, but was very much torn between the two. I usually play healer to the merry band of adventurers (consisting of Zoso, Elf, another of our friends who is a blog abstainer, and anyone else who happens to want to tag along) and it’s a role that I enjoy and one where I can often be found ‘rocking the socks’, as I believe they say on the street. However, I loves me a good dwarf, if you know what I mean (and I think you do), but they never seem to be of a class that I fancy playing; that is, they never usually have an appealing healer class.

So what is it with race/class restrictions in MMOs these days, why does there have to be this somewhat arbitrary ruling that dwarves, picking an example entirely at random of course, can’t be Warrior Priests. I mean, of all the types of healing classes that I would see as fitting with the concept of a dwarf, a plate-wearing, hammer-wielding religious nutter in the midst of battle would pretty much sum it up perfectly. I know that Lore (Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again now…) is often cited as the reason that, say, Gnomes can’t be Druids, and Dwarves can’t be Shaman in WoW, for example, but then the developers will throw all Lore (Huh. What is it good for? Etc.) to the four corners of the world when it suits them. Death Knights and Blood Knights and retcons, oh my. So Lore (Huh. What… stop that!) is a fairly weak excuse, and other than that, it seems to be nothing more than a way to differentiate races a little. And this is ‘the suck’, as I believe they say in the brothels.

Isn’t it time we dropped these arbitrary restrictions that force players to make choices that have no worth in terms of game-play or balance, and could otherwise allow them the freedom to play the race and class of their choosing?

Anyway, bearing in mind that I’ve no beta experience so only have the website information and various YouTube beta videos of game-play to go on, I was generally resigned to the fact that I’d roll one of each of the classes I’d decided on and try them for a few levels and see which one took my fancy the most. And the Oracle of Delphi laughed maniacally as the Prophecy of Alts came to pass.

Or so it thought.

However, Fate decided to poke the Oracle in the eye with a spoon or something, because I read some information the other day on the ever informative, if not entirely accurate at all times, Warhammer Online Wiki. It was whilst browsing around the site that I stumbled across the page pertaining to mounts, and more specifically the page for the dwarf mount.

Let me express to you, in one syllable, my hatred for cutesy faux-steampunk impossible-to-build machines of utterly stupid design that are crammed into fantasy settings because the designers and artists couldn’t bothered to try to create and animate a bear, or wolf, or ram or any other decent bloody animal mount that they could have picked:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRGHHH.

Sorry, that was more than one syllable, I sort of choked on my own bile at the end there.

I know that Paul Barnett apparently didn’t want WAR’s designers ripping-off WoW, but did they at least investigate mounts and their popularity? Do you know how many pages there are out on that wide web o’ the world that are dedicated to getting a different racial mount for a Gnome in WoW, so as to avoid the embarrassment of riding around on an metal ostrich that has second stage heroin withdrawal symptoms. Let me tell you, it’s a lot of pages, there’re probably more pages than you can see stars in the sky at night. Those hideously naff motorised mounts, and yes I acknowledge that there are three of you out there that do actually like them, are just the most stupid, the most ridiculous, the most obviously contrived attempt at being cute outside of the dancing murloc with the top hat.

I’ve got nothing against Steampunk you understand, when crafted with care it’s a fantastic genre and an acceptable addition to a straight-laced fantasy world, but by the seven gods these wibble-wobbling, smoke-puffing, clattering contrivances are not Steampunk.

Is Arsepunk a genre yet? Because I think these mounts would fight right in.

It’s a fickle decision I know, but it at least leaves me free to pick my initial choice, the Warrior Priest without too much regret, and although a horse is utterly boring as a mount, it’s a thousand fold better than a moronic deity-damned helicopter bloody backpack thing. Graaarrrgh!

And relax.

I do regret that I can’t play a dwarf warrior priest with an armoured bear mount, but MMOs aren’t about what the players want, they’re about what the developers are willing to let them have.

I have to wonder, though, if there are many other people like me (with regards to MMO decisions like this, not whether there are other moderately insane people blathering to themselves on a public blog), or are the majority of players like Zoso, who tends to pick a race and class that they think they’ll get on ok with, and then settle into it regardless of whether certain aspects of the race/class might not appeal quite as much as those from another race/class later on. Whether I’m in the minority or the majority, I have to confess that I envy the easy commitment that those on the other side of the picket fence of character creation enjoy.

So this time I’m determined to follow in the committed footsteps of those others, and it’s the Warrior Priest and no alts for me.

Why do I hear the Oracle of Delphi laughing so?

Dear Warhammer Online developers,

I know that you’re kind of busy at the moment what with having to, according to the more dramatic bloggers out there, remove three hundred and fifty billion percent of your game because you felt it wasn’t up to scratch. I understand that you’re trying to make your game feature and content rich, and that you’ve perhaps bitten off slightly more than you had budgeted mastication resources for, but here are a couple of ideas that I had this morning that might be fun to add (if you haven’t done so already, I’m not in the beta so I wouldn’t know):

If you’re going to have a copy of World of Warcraft’s armoury for your players, and I imagine you are because one would think that in a PvP-centric game, bragging to others is basically the core philosophy behind the design, could you go one step further and have a little Flash plug-in that people could stick on their website? This plug-in that I’m picturing would display a nice 3D-model of whatever character the player decides to show, rotatable through three hundred and sixty degrees, perhaps with a slightly tweaked renderer to make the character look like the classic Games Workshop lead models that we all know, love and have chewed upon in our youth more than is probably healthy. I imagine this character model could even be displayed complete with the little 30mm circular base with slightly dodgy looking foam grass.

Even better (and I’m sure you can slot this in too because you’re not very busy at the moment right?) have an interface to allow the player to paint their figure; I mean, half the fun of the miniatures game was painting your troops in custom colours, so why not continue the hobby with the online game. One of the things I find most depressing about many of the current stock of MMOs is the general lack of character customisation, the fact that there are very few options where the player can express their creativity and originality through their character; the reason I’ve stayed subscribed to City of Heroes for so long is the fact that if the generally grindy game-play becomes too dull, I can always flex my creativity muscle, give my muse a prod and create a bizarre new manifestation from my brain spasms.

Secondly, and along the same lines, have the plug-in also give access to the player’s Tome of Knowledge for that character, such that people can see their achievements easily but in the context of the game interface, thus making it easy for players of the game to navigate. Assuming you’ve got a suitably Hemlokian Nifty! feature in the Tome for it to capture screenshots and store them like a photo album, this would provide bloggers with an easy way to share their character’s adventures without having to constantly crop/thumbnail/rotate/gamma correct/frame in oak their own screenshots.

I’m confidant that this would all be easy to do, probably only a couple of lines of code, and so I’m sure you can fit it in during a lunch break or something.

Love and kisses,

Melmoth.

WAR is, as they say, coming.

We can take that in its literal sense of course, or as I like to do, interpret it as some sort of new kiddie street slang for ‘fantastic’ as in “Man, have you heard that coming new CSS track?”; “This new Apple gadget is totally coming!”; “That was the most coming race I’ve ever seen” and onwards to the slightly more abstruse “We’re going out, are you coming?” and “Oh God! I’m coming! I’m coming!”.

Nevertheless, it’s comi… on its way, and this was reinforced a few days ago by the pre-purchase codes for the collector’s edition turning up. Brilliantly packaged it was too, an entire (albeit slim-line) DVD box for essentially a single sheet of paper folded in half.

Tell me, human, of this Earth device that you call email.

Despite the ludicrous packaging, the codes were all there: there’s the one for beta access, the one for the in-game bonus XP item and the one for something else, which I must confess I’ve entirely forgotten in the staggering excitement of having several strings of alphanumeric characters and nowhere to use them. It’s a dangerous item to have around though, because every time I catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye I feel the hype clawing at me, like the cold hard feeling of a general anaesthetic slowly crawling up your arm, and the irresistible wave of blackness sweeping over you as it quickly claims your consciousness. “I’ll just have a quick look at the website, what harm could it do?”; “I guess… I guess I should probably register, you know, just in case there’s a mad rush later.”; “Oh, there’s a screenshots section, is there? I’ll just have a quick peak… oh, shiny!”; “It’s probably a good idea to research the races and classes ahead of time. I mean, all the information is there, it would be rude not to.”

And then it’s two o’clock in the morning, and you struggle out from under a pile of papers of character sketches, and skill trees, and maps of the starter zones replete with quest objectives and optimised pathing routes for levelling. And you gaze in stark horror at what you’ve done, the monster you’ve created, and from beneath the corner of a pile of paper you see the pre-purchase box looking at you. And it laughs a deep, booming, maniacal laugh of victory. And you hold your hands to your head and scream.

And then you wake-up. And it’s morning. You’re in bed. You let out the calming, shaky sigh of the dream-waker, as you smile sheepishly to yourself at the foolish faux horror. But as you open your sleepy eyes in order to greet the day you find yourself staring into a papier-mâché face. And the camera quickly pans away to the ceiling to show you curled naked around a life-size recreation of your newly planned character. And you hold your hands to your head and scream.

Of course your experience might differ, I’m just saying that that’s what usually happens to… someone. Else. Who’s not me. No.

I am, unfortunately, getting the first twinges of excitement now. I say unfortunately because, as soon as the excitement gets a hold, as soon as it manages to find that first footing in the rock face of your resolve, it begins its gecko-swift ascent and plants the Flag of Fleeting Fanboyism in the summit of your mind. I’m trying to resist, trying not to get too interested in it because it’s a long way off; it’ll probably be disappointing at launch, either because it’s rubbish, or because it’s so good that the servers crash from the player load; it’ll be full of PvPwits for at least a few hours, until they’ve all buggered off and reached the level cap, and it will almost certainly not live up to the ludicrous amount of hype that the company is putting out, let alone those fanboy bloggers who orbit through the hyposphere above us in their Delusion Balloons, at the insane heights that only the most pumped-up, unrealistic, wholly conjecture-based analysis can reach.

However, having explained that I’m trying not to get excited, the gecko of excitement has indeed begun his ascent, and I’ve had a look at the various races and classes in order to get an idea as to what I’d like to play, and hopefully I’ll be able to provide a brief Melmothising of them in the near future.

In short though: War Priests and Ironbreakers are totally coming.