Questing in World of Warcraft is boring and really does not tell a story until much later in the game. All of this is gone in Warhammer: the quests smash the lore into your brain and before you know it, you’re starting to resemble your character out of game. Maybe not that drastic, but you definitely get a better feel of the story through even the first WAR quests. My little Dwarf that could, Engie, picked up his first quest and was directed to run down and kill some squigs. Those pesky two-legged creatures are always causing problems. On the way down, I also picked up a quest to blow up a mine shaft and trap the greenskins inside. I killed my four squigs easily with a few ranged shots and smacking them with my wrench and proceeded into the mine to blow up the shaft. I found the trigger to drop the shaft on some goblins and I had completed my first two quests ever as a Dwarf.

If the questing alone has you excited to jump into WAR and smash some skulls, public questing should have your squirming in your chair. Public questing is currently unique to only Warhammer Online, but it is definitely something that every developer will be including in their future MMOs. PQ’s are just simply areas on the map that have objectives. The first objective is usually something easy, like gathering supplies or killing easy NPCs. After the first objective, the group aspect begins and you are asked to kill a set number of harder NPCs and finally down a boss NPC in the last phase. After the boss is downed, a window pops up showing everyone’s contribution in the public quest. Loot is distributed by random rolling and the top contributers gain a scaling bonus to their rolls. While it’s more likely that a higher contributor will win the roll, it is still possible that the last place contributer gets first place in the loot. Public quests vary in their difficulty and the loot from each public quest changes based on that difficulty.

Completing objectives and public quest phases earn your character influence points. Influence is earned in three tiers and opening each tier allows your character to select loot. I found myself farming these public quests with groups of people for the loot and influence.

Grouping is similar in ways to WoW, but differs in a few major areas that I noticed. First, group sizes are six and not five like World of Warcraft. Open grouping was the first major difference someone will notice. When your character is not grouped, there is always an icon located below your character’s healthbar. Clicking the open group icon will open up a list of all open groups in your area and anyone can click the button to join. This is great for those that don’t like to spend time finding a group or trying to start one, letting the group form itself. Private groups can be set in the group options, as well. The other major thing about grouping that I noticed was there is not a penalty for questing in a warband. Warbands are larger groups of groups of players. Many public quests start out with a few people and grow into a nearly full warband by the time it’s completed.

The loot system in World of Warcraft can bring a grown man to tears. Hours and hours spent in raids and groups, farming the same thing over and over, only to get beat on the roll by someone who doesn’t even need the item. Don’t forget that quest that took you three weeks to complete and only to find out that the item rewards are for a class that isn’t yours. Warhammer Online does all it can to squash these annoyances. Your quest loot is catered to your character; Chaos Marauder quest loot is for a Chaos Marauder. This also holds true for all loot from public questing. Don’t worry, though, there is still plenty of rare loot that drops off players and monsters that can be traded and sold to other classes.