At Games Day Atlanta, I got the chance to speak to Adam Gershowitz, who is currently the Design Manager in charge of Combat and Careers and used to be the Lead Character Artist. I asked him a lot of the questions submitted by the Only-WAR community. Here’s what he had to say:

O-W: The career description for the Chosen was a little bit vague in the last newsletter. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about how they play.

AG: I can’t really respond at this time, partially because we’re not done play testing. A lot of the way the Chosen will play is… he is a tank, obviously. He’s going to be very defensive-minded, very defensive-oriented. The thing to note about the Chosen is he’s not protecting you because he likes you – he’s protecting you because he wants you to die at a later time when it’s beneficial for him. So just think about that when you think about the way the class plays. In terms of how he was outlined, in terms of the Gifts, his powers and stuff like that. Those are his special abilities, those are his special attacks. They’re how he protects people, how he does damage up and beyond just swinging his sword. I can’t give you a lot of details in terms of what those exactly are because currently right now we’re just playtesting it. Outside of the blurb that you guys got, there’s not a lot of definitive answer because every day once a week we’re changing things constantly in terms of how each of the classes play.

O-W: What about Favor? Is that going to be like the Ironbreaker’s Grudge where he has a bar and it builds up?

AG: It could go any number of ways. It could be channeled abilities that power stuff, or different granted Gifts that he gets. It could be a meter like Grudge or Righteous Fury that builds as he’s hit. It could be a combo system. What we do is we run all our careers through a bunch of different mechanics and playtesting and then we kind of fit it into the one that fits them in the best way. Like I said, for the Chosen we’re still working on a bunch of things whether or not a combo system or a favor system or a metered system is the right way to play the game. It’s all feel and we’re currently working on them.

O-W: What about the Winds of Magic and the Dark Gifts? Is there anything more you can tell us about that?

AG: Winds of magic in general, what you can expect is there’s not going to be a resistance for every wind. What’ll wind up happening for the sanity of players and for ourselves in terms of balancing things. You can take all the Winds and the different families of magic, but there’s a lot more magic in the Warhammer world than just the Winds of Magic: there’s High Magic, there’s Dark Magic, there’s the Ice Magic of Kislev, there’s magic for each individual Chaos deity. They’re going to get rolled up into smaller subsets of groups, like elemental types will probably go together, spiritual types will go together, nature and corruption will go in groups, in pairs that will make sense. What’ll happen is that people will still have spells that very much tie into the Winds of Magic, but the way the resistance works will get put into the different categories.

O-W: What about the Chosen inspiring fear? How is that going to play out or what thoughts have you guys had?

AG: Fear isn’t something necessarily that is distinct. It is fear. I can tell you for a fact that the way fear works on monsters, for example, is that your morale doesn’t generate as fast. We may or may not give that to players depending on how powerful it is or isn’t in RvR. Where you get a pack of 12 Chosen running around and if they all stack all of a sudden nobody but Chosen are generating morale. What you can probably think about for fear is it could manifest itself in an aura type of situation where the Dark Gifts or the fear effect could manifest itself in debuffs, or area of effect auras etc. Once again that’s not necessarily how the Chosen is going to play, it’s just a way that we could go ahead and see them.

O-W: With the reduced emphasis on crowd control, how are ranged characters and healers going to survive against the melee?

AG: That’s like the third time today someone’s asked me that question. It must be a really interesting question. There’s reduced emphasis on area of effect crowd control. Individual crowd control is still in the game. What you won’t be able to do is lock down an entire group of 20 people. If you affect an area or group it’ll probably be 3 or 4 people and they’ll have to close to you. There are tradeoffs for crowd control, obviously. Every ranged class is going to have ways of getting out of combat, every melee class is going to have ways of keeping people in combat. What’s really going to wind up happening with these is it’s going to be dependent on the tactics that you choose, whether you want these more frequently or whether you want more damage and it’s going to change on how you approach each fight individually. For example, the goblin shaman has an ability called Eek! It’s actually working right now and if you play the game in PvP you can trigger it off. What Eek! does, it’s a long cooldown, but it’s essentially a release of Waaagh!!! Energy and he just freaks out and loses control and he goes flying back like 15 or 20 feet. And that’s how he gets out of combat, but obviously it drains all of your Waaagh!!! counters so you can’t use it all the time. The other thing that’s important is crowd control is going to be a group play situation. You as a cloth caster, you as a ranged person, you won’t have a lot of abilities to be able to get people off you but your allies, your tanks will have a lot of abilities to assist your survival. Tanks will be able to guard individual targets, buddy system type of thing. The Black Orc currently if he taunts somebody and they stay taunted and you’re ignoring them, what he can do is walk up, grab that person and *pantomimes casually picking up an enemy and tossing him aside* out of the way! Once again can’t happen very frequently but there’s situations where team play is heavily involved in making sure that your ranged people are staying out of range, melee people are staying in melee combat, and your skirmish is going alright.

O-W: So far we know scenarios have a variety of goals, like Murderball, Capture the Flag, Deathmatches, Domination. Are there others?

AG: In terms of the scenario game types I’m not an RvR developer. I’m only really familiar with the ones they’ve announced. What I can say, each of the scenarios is a custom map. As they develop maps they may reuse a game type or they may come up with a new type. You’ll see more of the scenario game types as they release more maps.

O-W: What’s Domination?

AG: As I said I’m not an RvR guy. I can’t really help you out in terms of describing what domination is. I haven’t played a lot of it, so I don’t really have a strong background on it, so instead of explaining it incorrectly, I’m going to not comment.

O-W: Do you know how armor dyes are going to work?

AG: Player customization, armor casing, hair color, face choice, etc. In terms of customizing your armor, the only thing we’ve confirmed at this time is trophies. Tinting armor, customizing your armor outside of that is not outside of the realm of possibility, however how it’s going to be done, when it’s going to be done, and who’s going to get to do it has not been determined yet.

O-W: How do the two global timers affect combat?

AG: By two global timers, I assume you mean the reuse timer and the morale timer?

O-W: Probably.

AG: The timers that exist in the game, one is the global ability timer. That’s how we balance the game. We just know that people can’t constantly go “attack 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 I’m out of AP I’ve used everything up immediately.” What that’s currently set at is one second. That’s the heartbeat of combat, the pace of combat, that’s how quickly people can get out their abilities. Nothing more than that. That also helps us with the artists balance how long animations need to take. The morale cooldown timer… Morale abilities are extraordinarily powerful. We don’t want people firing them off 1, 2, 3, 4 and everybody dying, so what winds up happening is they’re on a separate timer that is longer than a second. Currently I think we have it at 4 or 5 seconds. They’ll probably scale up and down as we tweak the game. It’s used to balance so that very powerful abilities can only be used so frequently.

O-W: GOA recently said there won’t be Bind on Equip or Bind on Pickup items. Can you confirm this?

AG: I’m not an item guy, so I wouldn’t be able to.

O-W: Paul mentioned the Knight of the Blazing Sun would use positional style attacks. Does that mean it depends on where you are in relation to your enemy, like you have to be behind your enemy?

AG: The knight is another situation just like the Chosen where it’s a class that’s in development. The things that Paul has said are ideas, things that we’re thinking of. In terms of the way positionals work in the game, they’re not positionals so to speak but what we’re calling situational attacks. There are a number of different situations where you’ll be able to use different attacks. Placement of the player is just one of them: behind, to the side, in front. There’s also how much Grudge do I have, is my target taunted, is my target on fire. Those are all situations where what we’re allowing players to do is manipulate combat and build a situation where they’ll be able to coordinate the attack. The best way to think about positionals is positionals are just one way of balancing it. Most of the classes have a variety of different attacks and strategies so they can approach a situation and take advantage in battle.

O-W: GOA reps said dwarf mount would be gyrocopter. Is this a mode of fast transportation, fast travel between zones, or something else?

AG: Basically anyone that’s talking about mounts right now is not giving out final information. Mounts have not been developed. People are not on horses, on gyrocopters, or whatever. The gyrocopter being a confirmed mount is actually probably incorrect, but I can say it is more than likely a confirmed mode of transportation Whether that’s going to be something a player can confirm or whether it’s going to be like a gryphon route in WoW… yet to be determined.

O-W: Can you give us an example of some of the things that have been reworked in the Dwarf and Greenskin zones?

AG: In terms of the dwarf and Greenskin zones that got retouched, everything has been reworked. Everything’s gotten looked at. The artwork has been redone in places, new lighting has been put in. Quests are different, interaction with objects in the zone are different, layouts of the zone are different. Everything’s been taken a second look at in terms of what worked well and what hasn’t worked well. We readjusted the zone so it’s overall more enjoyable.

O-W: Mark Jacobs has said before that he’s against Mythic-hosted voice communication, but GOA implied that this might be a possibility. Do you know if there are any plans in the works for this?

AG: Once again, that’s outside of what I work on. If you have to take one person’s word over another, I’d say Mark Jacobs is definitely the person to go with versus, say, GOA

O-W: We’ve heard before that mob loot and quest rewards would be career specific. Does that mean that if a Hammerer kills a monster and picks something up that it’s something for a Hammerer and if a Bright Wizard does it, it’s something for a Bright Wizard, or is it a little bit different from that?

AG: Once again you’re talking about systems that have not been finished yet. We’re working on developing loot tables, drop systems, and trade systems that will not guarantee necessarily that whenever I kill something I’m going to get something I can use. That makes it kind of redundant. But you should have a good chance in a situation that where you’re fighting for X amount of time that something you can use will drop. Whether it’s every monster or once in thirty minutes, once an hour, or only on really big boss encounters, has yet to be determined.

O-W: Fans keep asking about duels within your own faction. Do you know if there are any plans for something like that?

AG: Nothing we have implemented right now. Personally, I can’t see us not implementing something like that, but I also know that it’s not something that’s very high in terms of overall importance right now. I’d expect you’d hear more about that as we get closer to public beta

O-W: Speaking of public beta, what sort of hardware requirements will there be for beta?

AG: We haven’t released hardware requirements yet because we’re still tuning the game. We have a variety of different machines at the office ranging from ultra-high end to people with 9700s or 9600s. All of those will run the game at varying levels of performance, but at this early stage in the game, the game isn’t tweaked to a point where we can’t give very good hardware requirements.

O-W: With the recent announcement about the change in the release date, does that mean there will be a change in the beta dates?

AG: Obviously the change in release date means there are changes in the beta dates. I’m not a marketing person, I’m not a community person. I do know we are going into our first set of betas in the near future. Those are the friends and family types. The guild betas will probably follow after that.

O-W: We hear a lot about scenarios, but could you tell us a little bit about battlefields?

AG: I’m not an RvR person, but I do think you’re talking about the open PvP areas in the world. The things you might expect from every zone is every zone will be split up into portions. There will be PvE and RvR sections of the game. I do know that the RvR areas are not just areas where you just kill kill kill kill kill. There are things to do there, there are RvR-related quests. The public quest system ahs been used to build situations where the two sides are sent to the same location to do conflicting goals to finish their public quest, which will then, say, the public quest moves from neutral to Chaos #2 or Empire #2. So basically you get conflicting large-scale quests and zone-changing events. Outside of that, it’s really more of an RvR question. I don’t really have a lot of the answers that I can give you.

O-W: Do you know if you have to be in the same group to heal and buff other players?

AG: That I can answer. Essentially the way it stands right now you can heal everybody you’d like. There are some buffs that you can use on anybody. But the vast majority of the best buffs will be group-situation only. We’re trying to foster group and raid play over people with bots. So there are lots of situations where there are buffs in the game – auras, prayers, runic circles on the ground, dark rituals, etc. that require you to be not only in the group with the person but in close proximity with the person. So if you’re going to make a warrior priest buffbot that’s just going to be running around, you’re going to be a lot less efficient than actually having a real warrior priest there playing.

O-W: We’ve been told that there’s another pet class besides the Squig Herder. Something like the Witch Hunter with their hounds?

AG: Considering they’re unreleased classes, I can’t comment on it. The thing you should look at and think of is Mythic is all about trying to make a fair and parity game. We’re not afraid to not do something if we don’t need to, so if there’s not something that’s IP appropriate that works as a pet class, we’re not going to force another pet class. But we’re also not going to just throw it out and say “oh, we’re not going to do one either.” I think when they release the Witch Hunter information and the Dark Elf and High Elf information in the next couple months, you’ll probably get the more definitive answer there. I think you’ll find that a lot of different classes have some pet-like abilities. It’s already apparent in the Engineer who has turrets and bombs and triggerable abilities like that. Right now I can’t comment on whether there is another controlled pet class.

O-W: How many squigs can a Squig Herder control at one time? Is it only one?

AG: Currently the squig herder is a single pet class. In a lot of cases people change how they play their character based off the equipment they use. A tank might choose to use a greatsword instead of a sword and board if he wants to do more damage or he might use different tactics or use different abilities. The squigs are essentially the extension of the squig herder for how he deals with different situations. He has one squig out at a time right now. The squigs come in a variety of different types. There will be four or five different versions, acquirable at different tiers. Currently because of the stage of the game we’re in, they’re abilities so you get and train them like everything else. Whether or not those change into I pick them up in the world or I have to quest for it, that’s something that we’re going to look at when we’re happy with how the class plays and how many squigs we’re going to have. I would say more than likely he will get access to all of his pets without having to do crazy questing inside the world.

O-W: Do you know how a character will display their regiment? In DAoC we had the emblem on the cloak and shield. Will there be anything similar to that?

AG: That’s not something I can comment on right now. I know we are working on everything. Guilds are important. Guilds are going to have a lot of really interesting options that affect both character appearance and some game play elements. You will be able to show your regimental colors and design. They can potentially change based on the level your guild might be or the types of things your guild does. What those items are specifically, I can’t say. But you will have a couple of choices, that I can say.

O-W: What features are in mind for guild communication and guild management?

AG: Once again, I’m not a guild person. I can’t comment on that. I do know they’re talking about various different options for guild communication both inside and outside the game and for the Herald and web site and everything else. Those types of systems are still very much in development right now. Those types of systems you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months.

O-W: As for travel we’ve heard that dark elves might travel on subterranean boats, orcs by orcapult. Are these still planned and are there going to be other features like this?

AG: Travel, mounts, all those situations, getting from place to place, zone to zone, pairing to pairing, that’s all very organic. We’re constantly moving around where things are and how things link up together and we haven’t yet decided what the final versions are.

O-W: We know the Tome of Knowledge will track kills. Is that going to include a detailed record of PvP kills? Will there be a title system like in DAoC?

AG: This is a tough one, because we want players to be able to adventure around the world, compare metrics, see who’s vets and who’s not. What you’ll probably see is some combination of the Herald and the Tome working in conjunction to track things like player versus player kills, PvE kills. Logically, it doesn’t make sense for you to just have it in your own tome where nobody else can see it. As for whether or not other people will be able to see your tome or whether or not you can publish it, that will have to do with our community system, which is something we’re actively looking into and trying to firm up right now. I’m sure you’re going to be hearing news about how the Herald tracking and everything similar to the way Camelot works – how it’s going to work for Warhammer.

O-W: In the past, we’ve heard about four different experience bars. Is that still the system?

AG: We’ve streamlined the experience system to make it a little bit easier. We still haven’t come up with our final advancement system. The way experience currently is working it’s not a four-bar system. There will be multiple experience pools. How these pools tie in together. Obviously, the two that will never change is that there will be your Renown (your RvR experience) and there will be your XP (your PvE experience). What will drive getting what ability, we’re currently horse trading between the various development teams to figure out who wants to get what and how we’re going to get it. There are going to be multiple ways of progressing through the game. There’s very difintely two definitve paths. There is the PvE path and the RvR path. It’s very important to note that we’re trying very very hard to ensure that people that want to go down the RvR path and want to progress RvR can do so without affecting PvE and vice versa.

O-W: Do you have any idea how siege weapons will work when they hit players?

AG: Siege weapons is another one of those systems that is very much tied in with the scenario. Whether or not players will be able to activate and fire cannons at other players and whether or not they will be able to carry them around and use them in open-field combat… Those are all things that we’re still working on. I wouldn’t put it out of the realm of possibility that you might play in an RvR scenario where you’re firing cannons at somebody. Obviously, there are lots of situations in the world and PvE where you will go up on top of a ledge, fire cannons down at NPCs, and kill bunches of NPCs. That is a choice that the scenario designers make as they design the scenarios and RvR systems, so until you get more information on what the scenarios are I really don’t have specific stuff on that.

Thanks go out to Adam Gershowitz for the interview!