By level 20 you will be able to acquire your first tactic from your mastery path. Of the three that will be available to you, Conquest gives you a tactic (Slice Through) that makes one of your attacks capable of striking two extra targets, Vigilance gives you a tactic that adds a 30% parry buff to your Shield Rush attack (+10% block/10s CD) called Coordination, and Glory provides you with the Sunfury tactic which buffs the Shield of the Sun ability by a significant amount.
By this point I found the most useful of these three to be Coordination and went for a standard tank-y, sword and board Knight of the Blazing Sun. I was able to create some interesting synergy and awesome survivability at this level with Shield Rush (netting me a 40% parry rate) and the Vigilance-line ability Perseverance, which provides a hefty armor buff along with an AP restore whenever you are struck in melee. At the time of testing, the battle command On Your Guard! reactively dealt damage when you or your group defended an attack. I’m sure you can see the advantage here, My block rate was incredibly high due to Shield Rush and the use of a shield, and my parry was also incredibly high due to Coordination. I defended, a lot, and that made me a pretty spiky and hardy tank.
Just a few days later we were provided with Rank 35 templates for all careers in the game. This would allow for more comprehensive late game testing, as Knights vs. Black Guards didn’t really tell us much about how the class would perform in RvR
The class really shined here (excuse the pun).
I’m going to preface this next part pretty boldly, as of this writing, the late-game Knight is overpowered. Oh yes, I used that word. I don’t throw it around willy nilly, but I honestly feel it is so and I’ll tell you why. For one, and I’m sure this is an oversight, but the Well Trained tactic allows for three abilities, Shield Rush, Smashing Counter and Blazing Blade to cost 0 AP. This is fine for two of the three mentioned, and was even fine for Blazing Blade about a patch ago, but Blazing Blade is now a triple stackable DoT and main “spammable” attack for the Glory line. Considering the game is balanced around every classes “burst period” which is how much damage they can deal from 100% AP to 0% AP, this really breaks the class. There is no 0% AP when you spam this attack, and when specialized in the Glory tree, you don’t even need to do that!
The Glory tree is my tree of choice at the moment. I’m not much of a sword and boarder and even with the effectiveness of the Vigilance ability I feel the Glory tree outpaces the Vigilance tree offensively, even when you discount the Well Trained tactic. The Glory tree also happens to be the “buffing” tree which means you get all the offense you could want and don’t pay for it with a lack of group utility. Every group will love you, and you will have fun on your own as well. This really paints the Conquest line as completely lackluster and unnecessary.
A Knight specialized in the Glory line is a spiky tank like no other. The ability Shield of the Sun is what truly makes the line overpowered. There are two tactics available associated with this ability, one reduces its cooldown by 50% (Sun’s Blessing) giving the ability a five second down time, and the second (Sunfury) buffs its damage by 70 points. Did I mention all this damage is unmitigated? To be fair though, it is also unbuffed by stats or resistance debuffs.
So what does this lovely ability do? Shield of the Sun makes the Knight of the Blazing Sun the games premier “spiky” or “thorny” tank, whenever struck in combat, you reflect a significant amount of damage back at your attacker. This isn’t limited to melee either; as you will hit people who target you from afar as well! With the appropriate tactics slotted, you can keep the thing going almost indefinitely, with only a five second gap in between cool-downs. This ability alone let me grab a bunch of aggro, eat a sandwich and let everything around bounce off me and die like a bird into a window. To make matters worse I also stacked the aforementioned On Your Guard! battle command along with it for another extra 70 damage (unspecialized, it’s a Vigilance command). The Glory tree also provides you with an anti-healing aura, an AOE 3 second ranged knockdown, an AP burn ability, and an ability interrupt. For Glory, indeed!
The Knight of the Blazing Sun also possesses an unprecedented amount of AP restorative capability, the Conquest battle command, ironically named, “To Glory!” as if to point you away from the tree (other than the lovely ability itself) provides 15 AP every five seconds to you and your group. There is also separate command, oddly enough, in the Glory tree (whoddathunkit?) that provides 36 AP and HP every three seconds any time you or your group defends themselves against an attack. The Knight can keep himself and his group going like an Energizer bunny.
Knights are also incredible force multipliers, which ties in well with the lore mentioned earlier. A single Knight brings a lot to the battle for himself and his group, but several together are a terror.
Enough about that though, I’m vain, naturally, as I’m primarily a prissy High Elf player, so how do the Knights look? Well, it’s a mixed bag. Obviously you’re going to have to appreciate the whole Knight in shining armor look first or it’s going to turn you off completely, but aside from that, the class looks pretty good. I will say the weaponry looks great from the get go, especially the two-handed greatswords.
The armor progression is kind of boring though, I found the contrast between the visual of the Black Guard and the Knight to be pretty sharp in Tiers One and Two, and the level 20 template armor was pretty goofy looking. The class does look a lot more interesting in Tier Four though, especially the female Knight. I can’t really bring myself to play a male Knight for one reason: the dreaded codpiece. Everyone’s seen it by now, I know it’s realistic, but I’d rather absorb a full kick in the virtual nuts than the retina stab I get whenever I have to look at my male Knight from a frontal angle.
I think I can confidently speak for most of the WAR community here: Mythic, ditch the codpiece!
The animations for the Knight are hit and miss. I like the visual effects on some of the attacks, but it’s hard to say on the two-hander attacks as they are actually broken and only partially fire as of this writing. With the class poppin’ out of the oven next week I hope they can address this in time.
Order has a reason to be excited next week. Don’t let the naysaying theorycrafters get you depressed over the Black Guard. The Knight is a truly formidable tank, even if toned down some, it possesses a wealth of options to wreak havoc on the battle field, is capable of incredible synergy with its own abilities and the those of their team, and you’ll be welcome in any group. For Glory! (Or Vigilance!)
Every Friday, Michael Bitton will return with a new Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning editorial in this weekly column.
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