Sunday, October 5, 2008

Archmages are leet

After reading a couple of articles about the Archmage class (Awesomeness of the Archmage, So you think you can Heal), I decided to give one a go for myself. I rolled a female High Elf named 'Bloodfire' (feel free to laugh at my lame name choices, Melf does), and leveled her to Tier 2 almost entirely via Scenarios. The Scenario queue time is minimal on a Saturday for people playing Order, so I leveled her extremely fast.

One thing that amazed me was how easy it is for a healer to gain renown. I was almost always at max renown rank, as you cannot take it higher than your level rank. After a while, I started to notice a bit of a pattern. DPS type classes tend to finish with a high amount of XP, while healers finish with a high amount of renown. Here is a screen shot I took after playing Mourkain Temple (click to enlarge):


Another interesting point was that I can gain 2500+ RP for less than 10 minutes work in a Scenario, so why would I want to spend over an hour doing RvR and gain less than 500 RP? I also thought it was odd that Order lost the match, yet I gained over twice the renown of the best Destruction player?? I have no idea how the contribution system works, but I think Mythic need to re-visit it and make RvR more appealing in the process.

I definately enjoyed playing the Archmage a lot more than my Warrior Priest. They can heal close to that of a Rune Priest and still deal a large amount of damage in the process. At rank 14 I was able to heal 70K+ in a Scenario and still get 2 kills to my name. The coolest part about being a healer is getting +8 RP every time a HoT triggers. All I had to do was keep Lambent Aura up constantly on all nine other team mates and then cash in on the renown. The game rewards you for playing like a robot: tab, cast, tab, cast, tab, cast... seems a bit broken in my books. For now the Archmage seems like the most efficient class for gaining renown whilst still holding their own in combat. I recommend it to all the hardcore PvPers out there, especially if you want to gain large amounts of renown for your guild.

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