Even though it was kind of a piece of shit Warhammer was rough in the right places for me to still look back on my time playing with fondness. It was full of cracks to poke around in and some of those cracks were big enough that you could shove in a pry bar and really muck things up. Leveling in battlegrounds was pretty good but anyone in your little preassigned group that wasn't doing as much as you was a leech. Why group with them at all then? A friend and I would form our own two-person group of Sorc/Shaman and run up the score. Even in a match we lost our exp/renown were pretty good. Playing the Shaman solo was huge renown as all the healing I did was mine and mine alone. Combined with what meager AE damage I had it was pretty good. I was towards the top of the leaderboards most of the time.
By then everyone had figured out how bananas AE was in Warhammer. I started hunting around to see if there were any classes that could do what I was trying to do but better. I settled on the Archmage. The Archmage was the Shaman mirror but what really set them apart was Golden Gaze. Golden Gaze was a trait that turned one of their short duration dots, Radiant Gaze, into an AE dot. From the start of the match to the end, every nine seconds, I was hosing down the entire enemy team with this fucking thing. It also reduced damage and chance to crit by some percent. Throw in some miscellaneous healing/buffing and a little extra AE from Radiant Lance and I getting results like these -
Most damage, most renown, most exp in a match that was a blowout loss and done with a support class. I didn't even bother leveling the character to 40 either. Every tier Witch Elves got harder and harder to deal with until I was dying before getting to use two abilities. I had a pocket Engineer that turned out even more absurd than the Archmage. I played mine to max level and then started leveling a friend's Engineer I liked the class so much. Their constant rain of low risk long range AE combined with close quarters CC was top notch. Unlike the BWs and Sorcs they were self contained enough to be ran solo for big numbers.
Aside from cheesing battlegrounds the other thing I got a lot of mileage out of was crossing into enemy territory and exploiting encounters that were never created/balanced with that in mind. It was tricky to get to the enemy side of the map without being deathtouched by an enemy guard but once you pulled it off the entire game fell apart. If you were Order all of the Chaos NPCs on the Chaos side were fair game and vice versa. You could attack enemy siege equipment for loot and exp and it would never fight back. There were quest mobs that stood around at one hit point that could be murdered for full value. Numerous scripted quests had NPCs that did nothing when attacked. I eventually got a well earned vacation for AFK leveling but I was out of characters I wanted to try by the time I got caught.
The big AE nerf patch changed the Archmage enough to keep me from ever resubbing to finish leveling the character but what got me to quit in the first place was how the Realm vs Realm stuff worked. With T4 the graveyards were really fucking far away from the keeps so if you died and didn't get a rez it was this long ass fucking run back over and over. Once you broke through the keep's defenses the only thing that mattered with regards to contribution was damage dealt to the boss and healing done to the guy tanking the boss. You could set up siege equipment, kill defenders, heal allies, rez/buff, break down doors, and if you didn't get to punch the boss before he exploded you got
nothing. You could have been there for an hour doing shit and not even get a roll. My computer was a turnip so the end game city raid stuff was out. The game was over.
I had a good time though.
edit - Tradeskills were really good. They let you double/triple dip. Queue for a BG, advance a public quest with plant monsters for bonus exp and drops while in the queue, turn their drops into AE grenade potions, butcher them for fertilizer/gore, mail the gore to a friend that did horticulture, get back stabilizer, use that on big health pots, etc. That same friend actually quit the game over the tradeskill patch that went through. He liked the horticulture stuff a great deal and had a system that made a ton of sense in hindsight. While playing he'd just have every plot of soil going with whatever seeds he found, use no dirt, use no fertilizer, and then wait for the crap seeds to have a critical. When there was a critical it would sometimes give you rare seeds. Those rare seeds he would then pamper with all of the best dirt/water/gore to give them the best chance possible for max rewards. He had a bank full of top tier seeds and mailed out all kinds of cool tradeskill shit.
Then the tradeskill simplification patch turned all his seeds into Chaos Black dye. He quit and never came back. He may have been the only person that actual liked the garden mini-game and it was a deal-breaker for him when it got changed.
