Wrath of Heroes – Beta Review

Wrath of Heroes is a F2P game created by BioWare Mythic. The game takes place in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, the same as Warhammer Online did. However, the location is the only similarity WoH has with its older brother as when it comes to gameplay it is a weird hybrid of arena and MOBA. Currently the game is in open beta, so many things may change until final release and I certainly hope they will. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer.

Team vs Team vs Team

You may queue for a game as a solo player or in a premade warband (party). The main objective is a competition for different goals (map dependent) against 2 enemy teams. Each game lasts until one team gathers 250 points or if the time limit of 15 minutes has been reached. If your character should die during battle you might swap it for any other hero that you think will benefit your team composition more. On each map, points are given for different objectives. Currently WoH offers the following maps:

Team vs team vs team is main issue I have about this game. Fighting against 2 opposing team might seem original and unique, however it is unbalanced (if you are winning, both of them will gang up on you) and hardly viable from e-sport perspective. Even when it comes to casual or fun aspect I could hardly find it entertaining. However game is still in beta and new maps are released so I hope we will see team vs team maps in the future.

Champion design

Champions are unbalanced, but not when it comes to their power, rather the amount of unique and helpful abilities they possess. Each hero has 5 skills, some of them can be changed if you dig deeper into mastery trees and unlock them, so there is a room for variety, but the problem is this variety is very much limited. Also some champions are designed to have incredibly boring gameplay, let’s take a look at Luchian for example:

Ability
	Hack	Deals damage
	Practiced Attack	Deals greater damage
	Double Swing	Deals damage twice
	Wounding Slash	Deals damage over time
	Powerful Swing	Deals damage, and increases your damage

Are you guys serious?!?!?! DK players this champion is for you.

Since we are on topic of DKs, for a comparison let’s examine Volrik, the Chaos Marauder.

Abilities
	Flail	Deals damage
	Concussive Jolt	Damage and Snare
	Unstable Blast	Root and damage over time
	Flames of Fate	Blocks healing on target.
	Terrible Embrace	Damage, and pulls target to you

As you can see except for his Flail (which is a basic attack really, every champion has it) every one of his abilities differ from each other and offer an interesting toolkit for dispatching enemies. I hope Luchian and every other less interesting hero will receive an overhaul, because 5 skills is not much, even for beginner players to handle. Also not having any charge/sprint/snare ability makes any melee fighter next to worthless.

User Interface and Free to Play

Thus far you can’t customize your UI at all, which is not optimal as everyone likes to do so and optimize it for their own needs. However cooldowns and debuffs are clearly visible, so it’s not worst thing in the world. On the other hand the minimap is next to useless, because you can only track your teammates on it. To make it worse, if you are grouped up in a warband with your friend, there is absolutely no distinction between him and other team members on the minimap.

The graphics quality and style reminds me of Warhammer Online, in fact it uses the same models, which bring back nostalgia for glorious world PvP in the Warhammer universe.

WoH follows the most common and successful model of free to play games. Champions can be unlocked via real life money or in-game gold. Same goes for cosmetic skins and variety of experience or gold boosts. This system works well in most of free to play titles and WoH is no different.