Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning E3 Interview

The MMO Gamer has posted the results of an interview they did with Mythic Entertainment's Adam Gershowitz during this year's E3 Media & Business Summit.
The MMO Gamer: Let's talk about your specialty a bit: Could you tell us about some of the new classes that have been added into the game in the stead of the ones that have been cut?

Adam Gershowitz: Basically, right now we have just introduced the last two careers for the final launch candidate, the White Lion, and the Magus.

One you're actually a little more familiar with, because the Magus was in beta previously. This is a great example of when we went back and took a really hard look at each of the careers and wanted to see what was wrong with it.

In the case of the Magus, everybody thought it was pretty fun, but they basically said he wasn't Chaos-y enough. He wasn't Chaos Sorcerer. What the hell, he never summoned demons? He didn't call down storms of multicolored fireballs? He just didn't feel the way he needed to feel.

When we brought him back to the drawing board in June, we took all of that beta feedback, and all of that player feedback and rolled it back into the class to say, (How do we add in demon summoning? How do we add in a lot of that very Tzeentch flavor and bring them back out?

So now, what you have is the new and improved Magus. Basically, before he went under the hood he was just another spellcaster.

Now, he is still a very potent spellcaster, but he also has an entire demonology tree which revolves around summoning horrors, flamers, these basically insubstantial stationary pets, because what happens with them is he summons them into the world, you can't control chaos very long, they only last a very short period of time, they have to stay within the region they were summoned.

Otherwise, they'll go berserk, out of control, and honestly no player will ever want a class that just summons pets you can't actually control.

So, that was our way of working with the IP and the lore to build this emplacement turret-type class that felt very Chaos-y, but also filled a similar role to the Engineer and his stationary emplacements.