Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Q&A

The folks over at WarCry had the chance to sit down with EA Mythic's Joshua Drescher, Adam Gershowitz, and James Nichols for another Q&A session about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Q: With the three branches of mastery in game, could you describe how that works? IE Will a caster choose between Fire, Ice, and Earth magic, or are they radically different?

A: The Mastery system is not intended to focus on things such as resistance types. We try to keep resistances evenly mixed throughout most of the lines in order to give casters alternative spells to use in situations where they face an opponent with high resists against their primary magic type.

Mastery is more of a way to further define your role. For example, a Sorceress' or Bright Wizard's role is to unleash the pain via magic from a distance. Therefore their mastery paths allow a player to drill down on how they want to do this. For example, they may have lines that represent the following:

Direct Damage - Focuses on really high, single-target damage
DoT/Debuffs - Focuses on dealing damage over time & reducing enemies resistance to attack
Area Effect - Focuses on dealing lower damage over a larger area & number of enemies

Each of these choices offers the player a different type of game play specialization without changing their role as a primary nuker. Most of the Mastery lines fall in line with this general concept, although the exact functionality varies on a class by class basis.