Ready Check: Professor Putricide

Professor Putricide is the final boss in the Plagueworks. He's kind of the R&D guy for the Lich King's slime armies. If you recall from fighting Rotface, Putricide is the guy who's constantly screaming about what good news it is that the slime is working again. Frankly, I'm mostly motivated to kill the guy to get him to shut up about the slime.

Putricide is a movement fight. There's a lot of mechanics that will require your raid to rapidly swap targets (to kill adds), and then not-stand-in-stuff. (Most of the stuff you'll not be standing in is one variety of slime or another.) It's not really much of a coordination fight, per se, because your tanks are probably pretty well-versed in swapping aggro back and forth. However, Putricide is going to put to the test your raid's ability to get on an add quickly. And not stand in stuff.

Let's take a look behind the jump and talk about the fight in more detail.

For your 10-man raid makeup, you'll be aiming for two tanks. You'll want either two or three healers, with the rest of your raid being DPS characters. Whether you need two or three healers will depend on how sturdy your tanks are, as well as how awesome your raid healing is -- use your best judgement here. In 25-man, you'll need 2 off-tanks, and about twice as many healers. One of your off-tanks are going to have a special challenge in this fight, as he or she will have to pilot an abomination.

There are three basic phases to the Putricide fight. You get into the second phase when the Professor is at 80% health. The third phase begins at 35%. When the phases turn over, you'll get hit with Tear Gas, which will stun your entire raid while Putricide makes a dive for his chemical table.

As soon as the first phase starts, have your off-tank run directly for the table and immediately take over the Mutated Abomination. You do that by right clicking the table. The abomination is going to put out constant damage to the raid via Mutated Transformation, but the Abomination's ability to eat slime will make up for that detriment.

Throughout the fight, Putricide will lob ooze out to the raid. The Slime Puddles are bad news, doing significant damage to anyone who has the misfortune of standing in them. (So, don't stand in the ooze.) The Abomination has the ability to eat the slime puddles, which will both provide power to the Abomination and decrease the size of the puddles. If the puddles grow too large, then your raid won't have anywhere to safely stand. Every time the Mutated Abomination eats a slime, it'll pick up the Energy required to fuel Regurgitate Ooze, which will slow down the two adds that appear.

While in first two phases, Professor Putricide will summon two different types of adds. The raid warning will call out an Unstable Experiment when it's time for the add to appear. This happens about once every 40 seconds. The two types of adds are Volatile Ooze and Gas Cloud. The Oozes appear in the north portion of the room, where they leak from the ooze tank. Gas Clouds appear on the opposite side in the south. Both adds will choose a target and crawl towards it. They each have different special affects they place on their victim, and then an explosion they do if they reach that victim. If they're not killed before they explode, they will choose another target and start their attack routine all over again.

Volatile Oozes will spawn, focusing on a target and rooting that raid member in place. (The root effect is called Volatile Ooze Adhesive, and isn't just a clever name.) If the Volatile Ooze reaches the raid member, it will explode in a Ooze Eruption. The eruption will not only deal massive damage to anyone standing near it, but it will also knock everyone around the room. That includes knocking some folks into the Slime Puddles. So, it's important to burn Volatile Oozes down as soon as they appear, long before they manage to reach their target. If the Ooze does reach its target, however, the explosion is split evenly between everyone within range. If you're not getting the Ooze down in time, try and have the raid stack on the target instead, so as to evenly spread out the damage.

Gas Clouds will also focus on a single target, but they don't root like the Volatile Ooze. Instead, Gas Clouds put a 10-stack of Gaseous Bloat on its target. The Bloat will inflict damage on the target, while steadily dropping off on of its stacks every few seconds. If it reaches its target, the Gas Cloud will explode to deal damage to the entire raid. Obviously, it's best to burn down the Gas Cloud just as quickly as you burn down the Volatile ooze.

When Putricide hits 80%, he will drop that Tear Gas we talked about and enter Phase Two. He runs back to his desk and grows two tentacles. (I feel like I should make an anime joke here, but I'll skip it.) Putricide will start shooting Malleable Goo at random raid members. Anyone who stands in the area where the Malleable Goo lands will take huge damage, and receives a slowing debuff which will increase their casting and attack time by 200%. Goo will generally attack ranged targets first, but will target melee if there is no ranged target to affect. This is really the only completely new trick for the second phase, but everything from phase one will continue.

He'll also drop a Choking Gas bomb in between Malleable Goo attempts. They explode for truly massive damage, and should be avoided when you see them land. The tank should kite Putricide away from the area they land in, and melee should be careful not to stand in them.

When Putricide hits 35%, he'll hit your raid with Tear Gas, and then go mutate again. The third phases grants Professor Putricide Mutated Strength, which increases his damage and attack speed by 50%. When you attack Putricide, he'll put Mutated Plague on your tank. This plague inflict damage to everyone in your raid. At this point, your tanks will have to taunt-swap Putricide so that the Mutated Plague stacks never get too high that your healers can't handle the raid damage. You don't want to swap too often, however, because Putricide is healed every time the Mutated Plague drops off a tank. (For about 3% of his damage.) For 25 man, you'll need three tanks to make sure the plague doesn't get out of control, while you'll only need 2 for 10 man.

Phase three continues with the Gas Bombs and Malleable Goo, but no more Volatile Oozes or Gas Clouds will spawn. You won't have the abomination in the third phase, which is where you get the extra tank to handle swapping Putricide around. The Slime Puddles will still continue to grow, however, so you want to lean on the DPS in this third phase. Without the Mutated Abomination, the growing Slime Puddle will eventually overrun your raid.

In summary, here is the flow of the fight. Your main tank pulls Putricide, while one of your off tanks pilots an abomination. When adds appear, kill the adds. The abomination should be eating slime off the floor to give your raid safe places to stand, and placing its slowing effect on the adds. When you get to the second phase, don't stand where Malleable Goo is going to land. Continue to burn, steady like the beating drum. When the third phase happens, blow all your cooldowns, and burn him down as quickly as possible. If you stay too long in phase three, you'll have no place safe to stand. Good hunting!

Warhammer Tradeskills Feature: Part 1

Welcome to the first installment of an in-depth look at WAR 's Tradeskills, featuring Apothecary, Cultivation, and Butchering. Read on for all the juicy details!

Special thanks to Gary Astleford and Phillip Chan for writing this piece!

“Oooh, that's a nice one! Clear as crystal, and not a bubble to be seen in it! Where'd you say these came from, again? Tilea? How impressive! Fine, then, I'll take the lot of them. Best not be any broken ones! The last lot was half shards by the time it was delivered!”

– Gertrude Weiss, Apothecary (overheard in Altdorf's market)
Apothecary
Apothecary is a crafting production skill that allows you to create potions that apply various temporary augmentations to your characters. A secondary feature in Apothecary is the crafting of dyes. By finding a pigment and grinding it down with a mortar and pestle, anyone can create a substance which is capable of dyeing cloth, leather, or even metal! Whether a Swordmaster or a Witch Elf, all players can benefit from the abundant selection of concoctions available.

The central item of the Apothecary craft is the vial. Vials are rated depending on their quality, which ranges from Apprentice to Master Apothecary. A vial provides the necessary container for the completed potion. Any merchant or vendor in the Age of Reckoning would quickly be put out of business without an unlimited supply of such vials.

“It's not all about black cauldrons, newt eyes, or ghoul essences! Which isn't to say those bits don't have their place in the profession, mind you, but these rumors make us sound like common witches!”

– Vander “The Warlock” Kohl, prior to his arrest and execution

An empty vial doesn't make for much of a potion, so you must place a main ingredient, culled from Cultivation or Butchering, into the waiting container. There are other ingredients too: some that increase the number of potions you can create with a single vial, some that extend the duration of the potion's effects, and even some that make it possible to create something better than what you originally planned. Finally, the concoction must be stabilized. Throwing too many ingredients into a single brew makes it volatile and more difficult to concoct.

With all your ingredients in place, you can combine them together in a frenzy of maniacal whimsy, creating wondrous potions that do anything from enhancing your character to gluing your victims to the ground. So grab a vial, a main ingredient, and brew away! Be sure to experiment with different combinations, and share your homebrewed recipes with others!

“All the horrors of tomorrow are hidden in the seeds of today.”

– Chaos Proverb

Cultivation

Cultivation is a gathering skill that feeds ingredients to Apothecary. You can learn this valuable skill from specific trainers in the world. Cultivation has undergone some very interesting changes lately. For example, the merchants have tapped the market and are now hoarding seeds to sell to hapless players. How opportunistic!

Don't despair! The beauty of plants is their ability to generate seeds, thereby propagating their species. If a burgeoning grower is careful, he only needs one seed to populate an entire garden of plants that will sustain him indefinitely.

“That which grows from the soil represents a miracle from the bosom of Rhya, yet even it will sit idle and rotten if not for the gifts of Taal.”

– Father Eichmann, Priest of Taal and Rhya

Merchants in the Age of Reckoning are a shrewd bunch, and have hedged the market on the various plant-growing necessities: soil, watering equipment, and fertilizers are bought and sold across the world. Luckily, all their proceeds go to the war effort. Waaagh!

Recent reports from the front indicate that new types of plants are being discovered on a daily basis. Some are so powerful that they might become attuned to only one cultivator! How bizarre!

“A sharp knife's the most important tool a butcher can have. Fine steel is the best choice, but beware of rust. Treat the edge like a delicate flower, and oil your whetstone between each stroke. After all, it's always less painful to slice off your thumb with a keen blade than to carve out a pound of flesh with a dull one.”

– Gerard Fleischer, Journeyman Butcher

Butchering
Another gathering skill is Butchering. The Butcher's craft feeds ingredients to Apothecaries. Rather than spend time nursing seeds, a Butcher can exert his unfettered dominance over beasts in the Age of Reckoning. Kill for sport! Kill for purpose! Or kill because you want a Rhinox Horn for the rarest of brews! From the claws of the noble griffon, to the bile from the liver of a lowly boar, all beasts in the Age of Reckoning conceal some medicinal use.

“I met the most curious little man on the road to Talabheim. His cart was laden with all manner of goods: jars of tripe steeped in scented oils, unborn calves baked in clay, even the tender portions of a lion preserved in brine that was taken from the Great Ocean.

“The latter, he said, would make me irresistible once I'd imbibed it.

“Of course I bought one! It hasn't made me irresistible yet, but it did give me the bloody flux. If I ever find that filthy Halfling, I'll see his tender portions preserved in brine …”

– Overheard in the Ten Tailed Cat

Do you feel like drinking some strange animal's blood, or devouring the organs of your feral prey? You can also harness the multiplicative power of Squigs or the adamantine quality of insect chitin in your potions today!

The beasts of the Old World are fierce, but you are fiercer. Butcher them all, I say, and harvest the best bits for your own diabolical concoctions. Anything to make you meaner, leaner, and harder to kill!

Warhammer 1.2 Rare Hybrid Potions

With warhammer patch 1.2 going live on the EU servers today, i spend most of the day organizing stuff and training crafting skills, etc. Thulf is now switched to 200 cultivating. Its not that hard to do. The increased critical failure rate is a tad annoying and additives are rather costly at the vendors, have to keep that in mind when pricing potions i guess. A major part of the day me and others spend on trying to get our hands on as many rare BoP seeds as possible. I created a large screenshot collage with the 12 new hybrid seeds, plants and potions known to me, check them out... some really cool potions there. One thing i noticed: Special moments with the rare seeds don't yield any dye pigments like the patch notes state. Ah well, maybe they'll be added later. I don't have any reports about special seeds dropping from bosses inside the instances or something like that. If you find/see seeds or potions that are missing in my list please poke me.

HAHA... many contacted me today because of the first live event title you can gain: Stuntie Stompa! Thanks guys, i did not miss it and had a gazillion people tell me they had to think of me when they got their title. funny. =)

TIP of the day: Since i wanted to give Irinia data for her Crafting Info Tooltip about the new seeds, i was researching the WAR chatlog. Some time back Mythic disabled the logging to disc and if you want to switch it back on you need to manually edit the UserSettings.xml file and change Logging logAllToDisk="false" to "true".

Warhammer 1.2 Crafting PTS, Mounts and more

The character copy works now on the Warhammer EU PTS. So i was able to transfer Thulf over and check some stuff. To my surprise the model for the Sentinel helmet changed. O.o You can dye the helmet now, but tbh i liked the old helmet better... wtf? It's still not possible to dye Black Orc Sentinel properly on the PTS. The Vomitous Choppa got a new model and looks very cool now. Many of the higher level Choppa weapons got a new (all the same) model as well. The rest of my items looked the same from what i can remember.

I toyed around with Warhammer 1.2 Crafting some on the PTS . Apothecary, Cultivating and Butchering are much better now. I can only assume (did not test the other professions), it's similar with the rest. They fixed a lot and streamlined the process, which makes it much easier for people to understand. Cultivating is finally a useful profession and its rather easy to level now that you don't have to grind for seeds. Basicly you buy lvl 1 seeds from a vendor and use plant reaping (Ctrl-Right-Click) to produce 2-4 seeds from it - this process will also yield resins (stabilizers). Usually Cultivating will yield you 2-3 plants from that seed, a super-critical success will also grant you one plant from the next higher tier plus dye pigments. You then convert that higher lvl plant into seeds and start over from there. It's much faster to train then right now on live. Stimulant ingredients seem to be bugged right now, at least i could not make any use of them during my quick test. Seeds & Plants will stack up to 50 now. yay! It looks like there will be some cool/weird potions you can brew with 1.2, like resurrection potions, increased crafting skill potions, +morale and a few others. From the looks of it all apothecary potions will have proper "rare" tiers. The ingredients to multiply or enhance potions work out of the box. Don't bother to much with crafting before the patch, some eg. existing healing potions were downgraded through the patch.

In the capitol cities you can visit your scavenging/butchering trainer and pick up a quest to convert into the other skill with your same skill level. Crafting mats that are not ingame anymore can either be converted into the same skill level "new" ingredient or will convert into some rotten parts, 20 of those can be converted into Chaos Black Dye. Because of this and the other changes to loot tables, dyes will be much more accessable after the 1.2 patch. I already heard about the first new dye from crafting , liche purple.

With the funds Thulf brought to the PTS i was at least able to buy the new "standard" mounts. To check out the other ones you need guild rank, which does not transfer over. The old boar is the Light Brown Ridin' Boar and the two new ones i post a screenshot below:



My Choppa is rank 10 and still a lot of fun to play, I'll definately stick to my plan and create an alt Choppa. Thulf being a tank will still stay my main, the new changes to the Black Orc are mostly great, the Da'Toughest selfhealing was nerfed rather much tho. I did not play around with the Black Orc much on the PTS, was thinking about maybe checking out Lost Vale on the PTS if i get the peeps. But then again, Darkpromise is still nice to gain on live.

Warhammer crafting system

Many of the systems developed for Warhammer Online focus around the art of war itself. Realm vs. Realm combat, Keeps, sieges ... the bread and butter of the game is combat, adventuring, and excitement. Which is not to say that a few moments of quiet time aren't appropriate even in the harsh world of WAR. The most recent newsletter unveiled a new production video from none other than Mark Jacobs himself, talking all about warhammer crafting.

Mark Jacobs did a very nice little video that came out in the newsletter that covers pretty much all of the stuff I would be talking to you about, so I'm going to try and see whether we can find some other little things to talk about that he just mentioned in broader terms. I think the best way to talk about crafting is first of all to admit that there's gathering, and then there's crafting. There is how you get your stuff, and that's how you turn your stuff into other things. The skills that we're talking about at the moment, we have four gathering and two crafting. The two crafting are Apothecary and Talisman-making, and the four gathering are Butchering, Scavenging, Cultivating and Salvaging. Some of them function like skills you might have seen in other games, like Butchering, and Scavenging is extracting stuff from corpses.


Warhammer Cultivating is a pretty new idea for an MMO. Essentially you start off with something useless and spend some time and attention, nurture with love, and water. Eventually your seeds can grow into something that is much more useful and someone else will want to buy off you and use to make potions. You can, of course, use your own materials. Salvaging is taking something that you have, that maybe you don't want, hitting it with a hammer lots of times so it breaks apart. Then you have some stuff left over. Apothecary is potions lotions and powders, it's essentially our combat consumable creation system. Talisman-making is making stuff that goes into slots, where those slots are on weapons and amour. I don't think Mark touched too much on how those skills basically interact with one another, I've seen a few people asking questions about that.

Just as an example of how resource gathering works. Butchering is where I go out into the wilderness and see a wolf or a boar, and I kill it and some flies start buzzing around it, and I interact with it. Then I get some loot! And the kind of loot you get from Butchering is - mostly - going to help you out with the Warhammer apothecary system. So ingredients you might get to make potions are like guts and blood, and goo and all kinds of disgusting things. Scavenging on the other hand feels basically like the same kind of skill except that you're doing it on predominantly player races. Anything sentient, like Mark said "anything with pockets". When you Scavenge from them you get things that are slightly less disgusting, things like gold teeth, you might get fleas and ticks, that sort of stuff that's stuck to their body. Generally, the stuff you get from Scavenging will help you out in Talisman-making.

There is a bit of crossover, if you do Scavenging there are some things you use in apothecary that aren't available elsewhere, aren't as easily available elsewhere. The same thing with the other two resource skills. Cultivating is growing stuff, and stuff you grow in Warhammer Cultivating generally ties in to apothecary too. Salvaging - that stuff generally ties in to Talisman-making. So we give players a choice, they can have one gathering, one crafting. At very low levels there's enough to just get started at your local crafting vendor. Once you get above that, you need to go and do stuff on your own. With your one gathering skill you can pretty much get just about everything you need, but there are going to be some times where you need to trade with other players.

You only have the option of choosing one gathering and one crafting? You can't do two gatherings?

No. Definitely one and one, Mark replied to someone asking that question on one of the boards today. The primary reason is just that we don't have that many skills at the moment. The other thing we've tried to do with all of these skills is - I'm not a big fan of chasing yellow dots on a radar screen. When I play our game I want to get into a scenario, I want to get into a keep siege and I want to kill people! I don't want to be doing rings around the edge of the zone or looking for yellow dots on my radar to go and interact with not-people. I want to get in to RvR and kill people. So - developing the entire crafting system, which is based on Mark's design, we tried very hard to make sure that if you want to do crafting, it's not going to impact your ability to do RvR. It's not going to soak up time, you're not going to have to go to specific places and do it. If you want to do it, you can just do it. If you've got 10 seconds downtime? Make a potion, or start something growing, while you're waiting for the scenario timer to kick off so you can get in and start killing people. That's been a very important, conscious choice for us. I think we've pretty much hit it on just about everything you do in the game to do with crafting.

So if we're talking about how they feel to use ... Butchering and Scavenging, the way they play out is very reminiscent of World of Warcraft's skinning. Salvaging shares some similarities to WoW's disenchanting, some of the things you can do in Salvaging. Let's say I have my staff, I don't want it any more, or it dropped and I don't use it, and so it's got Wisdom and Intelligence on it. When you go to salvage it, it'll give you the option to choose which one of the bonuses you'd like to extract. Once you've made that choice, the end result, the stuff you get will actually be different depending on your choice. Then, you take one of those things and plug it into your Talisman-making. Let's say you chose intelligence, if you use that as your core ingredient for Talisman-making, you'll make a talisman that boosts intelligence.

Mark in the podcast was emphasizing the exploratory nature of the system, and that's the sort of thing we've been trying to ensure all the way through. We don't want the system to be as simple as in some games, where if you find a recipe or unlock a recipe then it's the same set of four items you need to make it. In our system, there are many different ways to arrive at an end product. The interesting choice we give to the players is to kind of figure out the best way to get the ingredients they need to make that, based on their own play-style.

I've artificially given myself 100 skill at Cultivating, which has opened up three of my four plots already. The first thing you do when you get the cultivate window to open is you stick a seed in a plot. The low-level stuff grows pretty quickly, and you can have multiple things growing at the same time. When you back out, it shows you which state which ones are - all of these are at the beginning stage at the moment. There's an overall time, there's a time per stage. What we can also do is input additives that will reduce the time taken as well.

You can use one additive per stage?

Yes, at specific times. Basically what happens in Cultivating is, you're growing stuff. We'll also fill in some little surprise things in, like you can have criticals and supercriticals, and the chance of those happening can be modified by the additives that you use. If you find a special sort of soil, maybe that makes criticals happen more often, or maybe it makes supercriticals happen more often. We're also trying to do things like hybridization. Essentially most of the seeds you grow give you ingredients that you're going to use to make something. We are reducing the amount of types that you can immediately get, and make them happen as a result of say a supercritical in cultivation. So you might say "oh, let's grow a respiration plant" and then grow ten of them, and one's a supercritical and suddenly it gives you a healing seed. You haven't been able to make healing potions before, and you can't find them anywhere.

You've created the healing seed as a hybridization byproduct of the respiration seeds. Cultivation's also going to be a way that we can put in more weird stuff. You might be growing some particular plants and you might get an insect at the end of one of the products, which you can grind down and use as a pigment, Or, you get a sap or some goo that you can use as an ingredient for something else. Once it's fully grown, at the end you can harvest it. Oh, I got one of those back. I'll try to see if it's in a stack ... I got a failure! There's a common mushroom there, which ultimately will get sold to a vendor.

Some of the seeds can also come from Scavenging, some of them come from just killing particular types of animals. Usually ones that have hair, because thematically, it's stuck in their hair. We have the starter stores mostly as a customer service for our players. Once they get into they game, they can start out and get their first few skill levels in a particular skill, at no risks, the guy in the store will just sell you as many of the skill level 1 stuff as you want. Then when you outlevel that, you're on your own, and you have to go find stuff. So particularly potent or rare seeds, find more PQ bosses, any particularly hard piece of content, as well as regular drops and Scavenging.

So not only do the gathering skills work with the crafting skills, but they also overlap with each other?

Yeah - there's a little bit of overlap all over the place. Like earlier on, when I was saying Scavenging mostly helps you out with Talisman-making; there are edge conditions and all sorts of weirdness that we put in. Hopefully players will find it interesting, particularly like killing someone and finding they had a leech on them. Then you loot the leech and you say "Oh, this can be used to make healing potions, because it's a leech!" Stuff like that. So apothecary is a potion-making system. As a skill level one player I learn this skill from a trainer, and then I go to this guy here and he can give me some stuff. First thing I need to do is put it in a container, and then put in my main ingredient, and then there's a little thing that tells me whether the mixture is stable or not.

So it's completely stable with these new additives. I press 'Brew', and we get a potion out at the end. It's real quick to make something as an Apothecary. Now the really cool thing about the system is we have a main ingredient which goes in that slot, which basically can determine what kind of potion we're making. In this case, you can check on the tooltip and know that this guy always makes intelligence potions. However the problem with the main ingredients is that they're very, very unstable. So as soon as you put them into a container, you are going to have a battle to make sure the overall stability of the concoction is positive. So, to do that, I've just used the three basic ingredients that I know have good stability. Other ingredients can also do other things, like the two basic other types which I'm going to show you today can increase the length of an effect on a potion, and increase the number made. It's a little bit difficult to be designing potions early on. Once you get into the swing of it, and you are starting to find more gatherables and you also have more money, you can buy stuff and you can can trade from players. It enables you to start designing the sort of potions that you want. Mark used a really good example in his podcast where he said "I'm going to make some potions for my guildmates ...

What are we doing tonight?" "Well, we're just going to run a bunch of scenarios. We're going to be doing RvR." In RvR, you don't survive very long, it's just a fact of life. You die every five minutes. It's fun, but you die every five minutes! So, it would be pointless for me to use my ingredients that lengthen the effect. Every time I revive, I take another potion. So, instead I'm going to concentrate on adding extra potency in, or maybe, concentrate on adding ingredients that will make more potions. Conversely if I'm going to solo, if I'm going to try and get a couple of levels tonight, do a couple of quests, maybe join some other people in PQ. I'm not really expecting to die all that often - it's PvE! So, I might concentrate on my ingredients that super-lengthen the length of the effect. Instead of making intelligence by ten, for ten minutes, I might make intelligence for ten, for two hours. In which case, I only need to drink one, and I can save all my ingredients for when we go RvRing and make the short powerful ones.

Is there a similar mechanic on the Talisman-making side? You mentioned breaking down materials based on their item bonuses, but is there any sort of balancing that goes on there?


It's similar, but it's... it's the same system, but there are some differences. For example, for apothecary - apothecary is all about managing your stability, making sure your overall stuff is stable, and we give the players a little bar on the side. For Talisman-making, it's all about making this minor object of power as potent and powerful as they can possibly make it. So there's no real stability involved in that, it's just brute force power. Conceptually it's very similar, you're sticking four things into a container, pressing a button and hopefully awesome pops out the end. The types of things you need to make a talisman is a fragment, which is the thing you get from Magical Salvaging. Presumably as a player you've already made the choice about which bonus you're trying to make. Then you need some gold essence, gold in Warhammer is traditionally the color of hedge-wizardry, talisman, magic, that kind of stuff.

We're going to require you need some gold essence. Gold essence is the thing that is created by apothecary people. We'll allow you to have some really crappy gold essence probably from the store or from some early on PQs. That said, to get the superpowerful talismans, you're going to want to have a friend that's into apothecary. Talismans thematically are kinda like good luck charms. It's funny ... in the Warhammer world, they're not necessarily inherently magical themselves. They're magical because you believe they're magical - which is kind of a weird concept to get your head around initially. The Empire soldiers will nail two brass pennies to the front of their shield as a good luck charm. Are the pennies actually magical? No, they're not, but because they think they are, they become magical. It's like a lot of trust and belief and all kinds of nonsense.

So talismans work a bit like - thematically they're a bit like that. If you believe all this stuff's going to be magical, you can make something cool. So the third things you need, we call them curios, they're things you get from Scavenging. Like you Scavenge some player races, they might have in their pocket a lucky charm - a rabbit's foot pendant or a four-leaf clover. The third ingredient for making a talisman is something that someone considered to inherently have some power to it. Then the fourth thing is another magical type of essence that predominantly occurs as a byproduct of Salvaging. Take all this stuff, squish it together, and if you have the best versions of each one of those four things, you get a really good talisman at the end of it. If not, you get a crappy one.

What kind of support does the Auction House offer for people who want to offer their goods and services from these kind of products? Is there an easy way to run down a potion based on the length of time?

Yes. Our Auction House functions like you think it would. However, we have extra levels of filtering available that you can use to search for. There's not just a pulldown that says "Potions" and it will show you all the potions in the Auction House. You can actually get down to the level of clarity that you would need, given that the crafting systems themselves can create stuff of that level of granularity.

This is obviously a question looking out a bit ... do you guys see adding in more crafting elements as the years go by?

I think we would be foolish not to!

It seems like you're aiming to launch with a very tight, very core element...

We wanted to concentrate on - I don't want to use the word 'consumable', it's not an all-encompassing term - wanted to focus on the things that are the most going to help players out in RvR. Viscerally. Like - drink a potion, and suddenly you become stronger on the battlefield. That's the kind of effect you want to have. One thing about talismans is I'm not sure if it's been mentioned - is while some of them last forever, some of them don't - and that enables us to put better abilities in them because we know they're not going to last. They're not going to stick around for that long. So, with that respect, they're also consumables. We want to give players as much ammunition for augmenting and specializing their characters for RvR.

The choice to not include a weaponsmith or armorsmith is interesting. Was that based on just how the designers wanted to itemize the game, or was it so you didn't have people doing really passive activities in the game?

I think every game I've ever played, I've always been a little bit upset with how blacksmithing / weaponsmithing works, in that they never give me the end results that I really want. A lot of games there'll be the discussion whether crafted stuff should be better than the stuff I get elsewhere. Not necessarily even high-end content, but just my normal, going about my business doing quests kind of thing. I don't remember ever playing a game where I thought that mix was "right". Personally, I'd love to put in a system where you could do crafting and that was the pinnacle of stuff in the game - but there are other aspects to take into account. I'm not sure the main reason why we didn't do it. From my point of view, being in charge of the team that had to do it, we know we have this awesome exploratory system of apothecary and Talisman-making. We have the associated gathering skills, and we just want to knock those out the park first. We'll give you the tools that impact your initial RvR experience the most, early on in your lifetime in the game. After that, we'll see what happens. We're probably going to be around for ten years, it's going to be five or six expansions ... we've got to hold something back!

Warhammer Tradeskills Information

Warhammer Online is retaining a very similar warhammer tradeskill profession such as the older massively multiplayer online role playing games. In World of Warcraft, gathering professions were first introduced but now Warhammer now currently has more gathering tradeskills than crafting. There are currently 4 gathering skills and only 2 crafting skills. The 4 gathering skill consists of cultivating, magical salvaging, butchering and scavenging. The 2 crafting profession currently available is apothecary and talisman making.

The Warhammer cultivating tradeskill in WAR allows the player to grow their own weeds and fungi which are used by the apothecary for ingredients. Cultivating requires seeds and spores that can be otained from monsters, scavenging and from most merchants in cities and towns. A pot is needed as well obviously. To get better results from cultivating, you can add soil, water and nutrients. The better you treat your plant, the better your plant will treat you.

The Warhammer magical salvaging tradeskill in WAR is the ability to break magical items into small magical fragments. These magical items can be obtained from PvE, RvR, quests and variety of other places. When salvaging an item, you can choose the type of stats to extract from that item. Along with the fragments you will also get what is known as essences. Both fragments and essences are used to make Talismans.

The last 2 gathering trade skills in WAR is butchering and scavenging. They are very similar in many ways, both skills are used to gather resources from a dead mob that has already been completely looted. Butchering is used on non-sentient mobs while scavenging for the more socially active mob, in another words, beast or humanoids.

The Warhammer apothecary trade skill uses ingredients found through cultivating and can turn them into potions, powders or lotions. It would be wise to be able to pair your characters or friends with different professions to gain the maximum benefits off each profession. There are many different type of potions and can provide various abilities. Some can add very low stats but have long durations while another of the equivalent level have higher stats but shorter duration.

The Warhammer talisman making profession hasn't been fully released yet but it allows you to create talismans. Talismans are known as the minor items of power which can be attacked to certain armors, weapons and grants permanent bonuses to that item. Only rate and powerful items are able to have talismans placed onto them. To create a talisman, you will need a contain along with the magical fragments and essences received from a player with the magical salvaging profession.

Every profession will yield its benefits. Gathering professions are better during the beginning of the game since you do not have any resources to craft nor yet may want to spend that gold to level up your crafting. A gathering profession can definitely reap its reward early. The crafting skill may be what you prefer mid to end game when you have all the resources at your hand. Whichever profession you should decide to go with, it's always best to pick one up early on the game. You can learn these trade skills from a trainer as early as the second Chapter of each faction.

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