Choose My Adventure: Battleground PvP in Warhammer Return of Reckoning is unexpectedly fun

I was not anticipating this.

I came to this week’s assignment with not an inconsiderable level of dread. My previous experiences in PvPing were coloring every expectation and causing my guts to roil a bit as nerves started to fray. It wasn’t helped that hitting the button to enter a PvP battleground queue wasn’t instantaneous. It also didn’t help that picking only one battleground seemed to make that wait longer, forcing me to select “Join All.”

But you know what? PvP in Warhammer: Return of Reckoning is hugely fun.

It’s possible that I feel this way because of the generally low stakes of the battlegrounds I was fighting in. These were, after all, self-contained things that didn’t appear to have a greater impact on the wider world of the game as I was experiencing it up to this point. It’s also possible that the small zerg nature of the fights made it easier for me to hide my terrible performance. Or maybe it’s because the Disciple of Khaine class really is a brilliant choice for me, mixing your usual DPSer with some healing support to combine into a fun class to play.

But I had fun. Fight after fight, win or lose, I was enjoying myself. I was eagerly joining the queue shortly after I left. I was beginning to get annoyed at how I couldn’t immediately join into a battleground once my number was called because I was in the middle of another routine PvE objective. I was looking forward to getting into fights.

The battlegrounds I’d experienced, to be fair, weren’t what I’d call remarkable, most of them involving controlling points along a map of varying number, though there was one match that was a CTF fight. Still, keeping things simple worked to my benefit, leaving me to focus on fighting.

And I feel like I was even improving as I went along, too. At one point during a fight in the Highpass Cemetery scenario I was able to bring a few of my teammates back from the brink of death and was making enough of an impact that it seemed like the opposing team was targeting me entirely, though that may have been simply because logic dictates that healers have to die first, more likely. Still, it felt good to feel like I was contributing. Even in matches where we lost handily, I still had a sense of doing well and getting used to my character.

Of course, it’s still pretty low-level as far as PvP goes, and there are still some things I need to work on. I still fall apart in putting out my proper rotation once I find myself face-to-face with one or more opponents, and I am having an absolutely awful time targeting friendlies in the chaos of battle, but even with that in mind, the scenario queue has been extremely good fun. Far more fun than the PvEing aspect. By leaps and bounds.

The only thing that kind of feels missing is a sense of progression. I’m starting to just now notice there’s a Renown bar beneath my XP bar that’s filling up, and I’ve just recently learned that I have a couple of abilities that engage using Morale, which I don’t think I had before I started doing PvP battlegrounds. Still, there doesn’t seem to be any overall sense of accomplishment or progression.

Perhaps that’s just me missing the point, though, or ignoring the fact that this stuff is genuinely fun. I’m not sure this is the game that changes my mind about PvP overall, but I also have to admit that I have not had this much fun in PvP anything since I tried to run a couple of battlegrounds in WildStar as my healslinger.

Unfortunately, the PvE level grinding hasn’t really moved along too well as a result. I’ve only gotten a few more levels since last time I reported in. That wouldn’t be a problem normally except for the fact that it was suggested that I try to get to level 16 to get into the more open world warband stuff. And these battlegrounds have actually made me want to chase that.

But should I? That’s poll question one, actually:

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The second poll circles back around to the winning game to move on to next, Darkfall: Rise of Agon. Admittedly, I’m very likely not going to have a whole lot of time in this one, especially if the results of poll #1 go the way I think they’ll go, but once again I still think having a bit of foreplanning is not a bad idea. And since Darkfall is a skill-based game, I suppose it’s prudent to ask about what kinds of skills to follow up on.

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As usual, polling closes at 1:00 p.m. EST on this upcoming Friday, February 12th. I’m going to try my best to sit on my hands here, but I really, really am itching to get into some more battlegrounds before polling wraps up.

…hell with it, here I go into the queue again.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.