Shadow Warriors!! Yeesh…

Since hearing about “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning” I have known what type of class I wanted to play… Ranged DPS. And not a mage, mind you, but some sort of ranger type. Something that was designed to fight from a distance, yet still sturdy enough to survive if forced to engage in melee.

This was admittedly strange since I don’t normally play ranged DPS. What did it for me was playing old-school Alterac Valley on my hunter alt in World of Warcraft. I was used to healing, tanking, and melee dps, so to stand behind the line picking people off was new and great fun.

“I’ve got to make this my primary class in WAR!”, I thought, and so, on a lark the other night, I decided to do some reading and figure out what exactly I was going to play. Human ranged DPS? Dwarf? What was out there?

Within Warhammer, each race has 4 classes: Tank, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, and Support.

It looks like my friends are going to play on the “Order” side of the war, so what does the “Order” have? Dwarfs, Empire, and High Elves. Alright, let’s take a look.

The Dwarfs’ ranged DPS is the engineer. Guns, bombs… okay. Thing is, I’m not a fan of playing dwarfs. I prefer a character who appears agile, and if I’m not going to be agile then I want to be BIG. So that wasn’t for me (although viably a second choice).

Within the Empire we have bright wizards: mages who use fire. Not for me… I want something that uses a gun or a bow, and isn’t dog food if forced to engage in melee.

So that leaves us with one last race, the High Elves. Unfortunately the ranged dps for the High Elves has yet to be announced.

But I’m not one to be so easily dissuaded, so I hit the holy of holies… the fan sites.

I should also note that Mythic, the creator of Warhammer, does not have its own forum. As with “Dark Age of Camelot” they rely on the fans to generate forums and such. Because of this, you tend to have a lot more of the publishers posting on these fan forums than you would in other games.

My favorite thus far is Warhammer Alliance.

So what is the likely High Elf ranged DPS class? If you read the title of this post then you already know. That’s right, “SHADOW WARRIORS!!”

Yeesh.

It’s already a given fact that half of the people who play an MMO’s want to be Legolas. So to find myself looking at playing a High Elf ranged DPS I can already safely assume I will be one of MANY.

But now, just to seal the deal… Just to ensure that

every

fanboy will play this class, Mythic took Legolas and labelled him a SHADOW WARRIOR! YEAH!! You can almost hear the kids scream as they play, “Your Magus is no match for my SHADOW WARRIOR!!”

There are certain adjectives in MMO’s that just scream “Young, Newbie, Fanboy”… and “SHADOW” is definitely one of them alongside “DARK” and “NIGHT”. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, although I should point out that you’ll have to change your name eventually, because it’s tough to be 30 years old with a name like one of these and not look like a tool.

And I’m not necessarily complaining here, more laughing at the sheer perfect storm with the lore Mythic seems to be forming out there in Virginia.

Is it an elf? CHECK
Fight with a bow? CHECK
Does it sound over-the-top cool thanks to an uber-awesome adjective? CHECK, CHECK, CHECK!

There will be thousands of them. But you know what? I don’t care.

So sign me up, and when you visit the High Elf Land of Ulthuan, be sure to look me up. I’ll be the one in the back waving at you.

-C-