printscreengg

Bringing My Witch Elf out of Hiding

2009-02-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

Murder Night has inspired me to dig out my WE and play around in RvR again.

Alot of people come to WE's expecting them to be the equivalent of WoW's rogue. Sneaking around looking for target to take down behind enemy lines.

The reality is the witchy classes are ill equipped for this role. Specifically they are ill equipped to survive.

I have found that where i find myself most comfortable is operating slightly behind the tanks using stealth to close the gap to any caster who the eb & flow of combat leave isolated before retreating back to my own lines and then attacking any tanks or meele dps behind the tank line until my stealth cooldown is up.

Witchys lack the sort of ability rogues have to escape after their initial burst. Two in particular are sorely missed:
A in combat instant stealth ability (vanish)
A temporary near invulnerability to most ranged dps (cloak of shadows)

The other problem is WaRs battlefields.....
and the problem is exactly that, they are often open fields with very little cover. Scenarios are equally bad at this & sadly 2 of the most often launched ones (Tor Anroc in t3 & Serpents Passage in t4) are bare wastelands.

WoW pvp has alot of problems but they are never short on areas to break LoS.

Rainbow MMO has a nice concise article about the experiences he is having with his own WH in & around keep sieges, and I'm wholly in agreement that they can be a bore. But i feel the situation isn't much better for any of the meele DPS classes.

With the arrival of 2 more medium armored melee classes with he slayer & choppa the situation is only going to get worse.

I feel mythic has 3 options:
1. Fix the Pick Lock ability's.
2. Introduce seige engines beneficial to melee (Siege Towers are my particular choice for this).
3. Give them a AoE mitigation ability.

Id be happy with any of these for my witchy but i wonder which people playing the Ranged DPS classes think is the most reasonable.

This is a crucial issue to fix becuase until mythic do they cannot fix contribution either. The current system as reported by Witches and Wenches although broken is however equal in its unfairness. If contribution was fixed without also fixing the issues melee has in finding a role to play the likelihood is it would be almost impossible for any meele dps to get loot.

Happy L2Focus fire day (formally known as Death Night)

2009-02-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Learning to focus fire is one of the most important thing to learn in any PvP game, and its amazing how often people don't seem to be able to work together.

Fortunately for everyone mythic has made a holiday where people are marked with big glowing red skulls and prizes are given for killing them.

So far Death Night Holiday event has been satisfying and quite fun. Its nice to play a holiday in WaR where the holiday objectives encourage RvR.
The rewards are easily obtainable and the final trinkets with their + renown bonus are particularly nice. Its nice that its bug free as well.

A Kick in the Nadz: Mythic Job Losses

2009-02-05T06:59:00.000-08:00

The economic downturn has sadly turned Mythics way today

Syp is very upset by the job cuts at mythic and has pledged not to blog for a week as a mark of respect. While i agree with his sentiment i don't think his method helps.

Allot of the responses to this on the net seem surprised that it's well known members of the design team who are loosing their jobs. But to me its not a big surprise, because not all that long ago i went through something similar myself.

Currently i work part time as a library assistant.
I used to work as a freelance print designer.

I would take a brief from clients, design their poster/leaflet/cards/ect, and after a design was approved i would send it onto a printer.

The Problem was as the economic downturn hit the people who were giving me work they started getting less work themselves and it became harder and harder for business to get the credit they relied on, so instead of commissioning a new item they would try and use up every last copy of the last one they had made, get very small amendments made to a old one made, or just go direct to the printers behind my back and get new copies made of their old.

When funds are tight any business will look at what it has got planned for production and ask itself "How long can we survive on what we have already got".

My Guess is the announcement of job losses has as much to do with the call to arms announcement than it does with the subscriber figures (although 100% not helped by them).

Look at it this way, most likely the higher level conceptual design for everything announced on the 29th is probably done. Assuming that they have passed the 'conceptual' stage and are now entering the implementation stage for that content, they effectively have enough content to keep the people who produce the bricks and mortar of WarR occupied till July (assuming they stick to their release schedule and adding 1 month of immediate bug fixed when lotd goes live).

Its a sad way for something to happen "Thank for designing this really cool land of the dead and new classes for us.... now goodbye" but somewhere someone had to ask the question, "can the company sustain its current wage bill?"

Did the right people get fired?

Could other people have took pay cuts to allow more to retain there jobs?

Could the people who lost their jobs have instead be reassigned to other roles?

Which in turn brings up the question of could/would they have accepted the wage cuts which would have come with it(to use my example i obviously couldn't charge someone the same to make amendments as i could if i was doing a new piece of work).That's assuming they had directly transferable skills(i for instance have no idea how the hell to operate a industrial printing press).

These are the questions id like to know the answer to but due to NDA's i really doubt we ever will.

Anyways this is allot on conjecture on my part, i don't work in the game industry so my guess's are probably quite far off. But i think people should look at the wider picture before too heavily criticizing mythic as a whole, especially when we don't know how much choice they were given by EA.

What allot of people will find shocking is that after these cuts EA's stock market price went up.

I hope those who have lost their jobs at mythic (and indeed those still working there) are able to find a way to ride through the worst of this because with Warhammer they produced a game they should be proud of.

So Close (and yet so far)

2009-02-04T09:01:00.000-08:00

Black Orc: Ere boss, i killed those 25 stunties you wanted!

Keep Lord: Gud Job, erez some spare teef for your trouble

Black Orc: Iz dat all?

Keep Lord: yer

Black Orc: Right im off

Keep Lord: So you killed all of dem stunties then?

Black Orc: Nah

A loud crashing sound is herd

Keep Lord: Zoggin Heck they've broken the doorz!

Black Orc: Yeah sorry about that boss. But you said to come back here and tell you when id killed those stunties.

Keep Lord: Youz little grunt! I'll Feed ya to the snotlings........

The Keep Lord Raises his axe menacingly and turns to the Black Orc, at that moment a tide of Order players erupts from the stair well and swamp the lord his cries of rage lost amongst their victorious cheers..

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Mythic have a horrible tendancy of producing things which come so very very close to genius but fail on the final hurdle.

Todays patch introduced Kill quests which are given out by Keep Lords and BO sergeants.

Done rightly this was the solution to the long standing problem of the game offering no incentive defend.

Sadly this isnt going to happen for two reasons:

The Rewards:
Gold & Xp
Lvl 40 players have very little need for either.
I just don't understand this choice of rewards. Somewhere they seem to be fundamentally missing the wants of lvl 40 players.
If they had given RR & Zone Influence it would be another stroy,since these are both valued. XP & gold however are basically on little to no worth to any endgame player.

The Hand in Mechanic:
The little conversation at the start is what my imagination says goes on thanks to mythics decision on how this would work.
Having Keep Lords Give out the quest is fine, but having to go back to him to hand it in is just plain stupid.
Mythic pioneered the idea of using quest items instead of npcs as part of quest chains, and this would have been be a idea opportunity.

Great expectations

2009-02-03T21:14:00.000-08:00

I found myself with very hesitant to write any posts atm, there's allot i want to write about the problem is it all up in the air.

It appears from the patch notes for 1.1.1 that fortress's are being made significantly more accessible and that mythic expect this to open up capital sieges allot more.

generally i'm in favor of this but the problem is Zone Domination was announced a long time ago, but no significant information on how it will operate has emerged since it was first announced.

Without the changes to zone locks being made it unlikely that the keep changes will have a chance to be experienced because zones are still to difficult to lock.

The new careers and associated live events are very unclear too.
As for the 'live expansion' there is no info outside mythic's very tightly controlled press release.

The Zone domination system has to be done just right, in particular it important that the difficulty of preventing a lock increases as time passes to encourage people to fight early and not just wait until the last moment and swoop in and ninja 1 thing.

There are a couple of methods mythic could use but as yet no indication has been given as to which one will be used.

Its unsure as yet is if mythic want to make zone domination the primary way of capturing a zone or if SC's and PQ's are still going to be the primary method.

Im hoping for a bit of both The way id like it to work is:

Keeps Contribute a static amount

BO's contribute a static amount on initial capture and then a constant stream of VP's as long as both keeps are held.

PQ's & SC's both still contribute VP's which decay over time.

anyways this is still all pie in the sky, but i hope mythic's tight lipness & the amount of time they have spent on it means that whatever changes are being made are significant

On a final note there's one line on the patch notes which is making me very hopeful
'New Quests: New quests are available from Keep Lords and Battlefield Objective Sergeants' i wrote here about my hope for quest with decent rewards for zone caps so im gonna cross my fingers and hope, but equally its possible the quest could be timed quests which give a bonus if the objective is held for the duration which would certainly give a better incentive to defence.

Another beer based event?

2009-01-29T08:58:00.000-08:00

allot of people seem to be assuming that bitter rivals is just a very literal title for the patch but i reckon its a bit of word play which signals yet more beer themed tomfoolery
from the wiki definition of bitter

Bitter is a British term for a style of beer or pale ale. The expression first appeared in the UK in the early 19th century as part of the development and spread of pale ale.

considering the berserk nature of both classes a big piss up followed by a fight seems 100% appropriate.

Just not feeling it

2009-01-28T08:50:00.000-08:00

With all the fuss doing the rounds currently as mythic prepare for the slayer/choppa event + whatever gonna go on on valentines day i find myself oddly uninterested.

I can't explain it, I really should be interested, im a life long meele dps player and the valentines day event looks like it may be based on the lore of the two classes i play in WaR.

But for whatever reason its all a bit 'Meh' atm.

perhaps my enthusiasm will pick up when whatever it is goes live

Lich King Frozen

2009-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

Today i froze my WoW account. Which after playing steadily since its European release means i find myself surprised to be doing so.

This made me think about what fundamentally has changed about wow which would make me want to stop playing.
As far as i can tell its all about the story.
Two types of storytelling happen in WoW the story the game tells you, and the story you create for yourself.
From 70-80 WoW excelled at telling you a story, the us of phasing really made the quests stick with you, what Syp says here i think amounts to pretty much exactly what phasing brings to the table a constant visual reminder of the quest progress .
Sadly all good things must end and after you hit 80 they pretty much do. To give them credit Blizzard tried hard producing some of the best storylines in the game in the final zone (icecrown), the problem is that these last 2-3 evenings in total at best and then the grind begins in earnest and the game stops telling you stories.

This is where in WoW the players own experiences used to take over, Raiding used to be about creating your own mythology, your own heros and villians. I can talk for hours to guildys about our raids in WoW and tbc but when i comes to Wotlk conversation dries up.

Its not that the dungeons are badly designed and i think for a 'entry level' raid they are very well tuned.
the problem is we are stuck at reception and not allowed into the rest of the building. Easy difficulty is fine if once you got past that there something else to do, but in wow atm the only thing to do is farm more gear, or try for achievements.

It was the challenge of defeating bosses which gave meaning to the my pre wotlk play in wow. We wern't the elite and we certainly didn't put in as many hours as many guilds did but that made us all the prouder when we got somewhere.
Making WoW casual friendly is fine imo, but what should go are gear check fights like Brutallus.

If Uldar had been in game when wrath launched i doubt id still be writing this.

Im sure i will go back to wow at some point(which is why the accounts frozen not canceled) but not until the endgame offers a real challenge again.

GIVE ME A ZONE CAP QUEST OR GIVE ME DEATH!!!!!

2009-01-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

OK perhaps not death,ill take cake instead. but if we dont get a change to the RvR system as it is i expect some sort of compensation.

Paul Barnet i know that you and your swarm of underlings are out there somewhere in the great ocean of the internet swimming from site to site like some giant over enthusiastic tyranid fleet devouring all that the blogging community has to say, so hear my call!

Here's a idea for WaR which fits your famous “It’s so obvious that I should have thought of that!” criteria (although it 100% not genius).
You can solve the current keep trading problem, and encourage more fortress sieges with one incredibly simple change.

Add a quest which gives a significant amount of XP, RR and RvR influence for the capture of a zone.

The fine details don't matter much, but here they are anywaysClick to read more

Im not sure what the appropriate amount of XP or Influence would be but lets say you gave 15,000 Renown points for a zone cap.

"woooo there" i here people say "that's a helluva lot of Renown" but you can easily earn 2-3k in a SC so i think that this is a fair amount for capturing a zone.

Id also say that the quest should scale

lets say use the chaos/empire paring as a example
for destro:
Chaos wastes: 10,00 Renown
Pragg: 15,000
Reikland 20,000

with fortress current problems i feel quest to cap them would be wrong because people would be excluded. But if mythic can stop that there would be no reason not to introduce them in the future.

also a quest to 'breech the walls of aldorf' or similar would be nice but not essential.

There! Isn't that almost sickeningly simple!

I know this is far from a subtle or nuanced idea but it is 'actionable' if myhtic wanted to they could have this in place in days. most changes ive seen would take a while to bring in.

& i know i can think of 1 shockingly simple flaw >_< but since its a problem with mythics overall RvR system rather than this specific idea, so im gonna ignore it.

Note: I tried to use 'a idea' rather than my idea here because im sure someone somewhere has though of this before, its just so obvious. Nevertheless i think its a idea worth trying to champion.
(bonus points for those who spot the reference from the 1st line)

The Battle for Battle Objectives.

2009-01-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

Regis arbitrary and Syp have all been writing about about the future of battle objectives recently, and Regis and Arbitary have both come out as strong advocates that villages may be the answer.

Now while these are all great bloggers i have to say that this time i feel in the words of Ned Flanders they are "wrong didley wrong"

There are to me at least allot of reason why this wont work but im going to stick to what i think are the two biggest( mainly since these are the ones which need the most explanation otherwise id just but a quick note on them in a comment).
Click to read more

The flow of the campaign.
One of the great strengths of mythics RvR system is that it has a clear end objective and that flow that encourages more and more RvR.
Your aim is to take the other realms capital everything between that is just a speed bump to be overcome.
Once a army looses it sense of common purpose it will start to fragment.
Currently the biggest interruption of this flow is the time it takes to turn over a zone, but i would suggest that the new zone domination mechanic should end this.
This sort of fast paced war with constantly moving fronts makes for a interesting meta game. One problem the current slow state of RvR doesn't lead people to consider is that while maintaining the flow of a 'offensive' is good allowing a blitzkrieg is bad (at least in terms of making a fun game).

The reason allot of people dislike BO's currently is that they feel they discourage actual RvR fighting. There really is no reason to defend a BO unless you are very close to locking a zone.
What will often happen is that outnumbered side will typically take up residence in one keep while to offensive force captures the undefended Bo's(On Karak-Hirn the most commonly used capture sequence ive seen is Keep BO BO BO Keep BO).

One way of looking at BO's real function is took consider what would happen if they didn't exist.
Currently BO's act as time sinks, they buy defenders time to get into a keep or to return to a zone before it is locked. remove that and the meta RvR just becomes a case of who can get the biggest zerg up and destroy keeps the fastest before someone can react.
Because of their simplicity there is really no difference between a 6man group or a warband group in the overall speed that a BO is taken.

I guess what im trying to say is that defenders need the breaks in fighting that capping a BO provides in order to mount a proper defense.

Arbitary talks about how RvR doesn't currently teach people the skills needed, but essential capital cities in a contested state rely upon the exact same things (BO 's and SC's) to quote the herald

"You fight for control over the City just like regular open world zones. A City Scenario is available to join from anywhere in tier 4 as well as within the City. Capture the Objectives in the City to earn Victory points over time and remember to always kill the enemy players you come across as it all contributes to Zone Control in the City."

the only difference is the chronology of when public quests play a part.

Tactical Justification?
To pick off where i started on a comment on W&W
Keeps are built to protect villages, villages don't protect keeps.
It really is that simple.If a village was attacked its populace would typically retreat to the keep. In fact allot of medieval villages were built just outside castle walls.
If you look at real medieval warfare forces would basically never fight in the open unless there numbers were roughly even. In some cases if there was a area with good natural defensive quality's (like a valley or hill) sometimes a force would make a stand but generally the simple rule was castle and keeps exist for one reason and one reason alone: Somewhere to retreat to when you can't win a open battle.

So is wrong to pillage a village?
Well people want to pillage and that's understandable and to me at least a good thing to be aiming for in your game design. Anyone who has play WoWs Wrath of the Lich King expansion will tell you that the one great innovation blizzard introduced has been phasing. They way that the world changed about you anchored you in the narrative in ways that most mmos including WAR fail at miserably.I think the desire for villages is at heart a desire for this sort of feeling of impacting the world which is atm lacking from war before the city siege stage.
What i would dearly love on one level is the same to happen as when a city is locked down, that when a zone becomes locked the entire opposing factions half of the map is taken by the victors and new variation on the public quest which had been active in that area spawn as players of the defeated faction being unable to enter or respawn in it.the problem with this is that it just doesn't work with the way fortress battles are fought. What use is this sort of transformation if it can be reversed less than 1hr, equally the 24 hour duration of the capital siege is completely unusable.

But there is one area which had no use outside RvR
that generally have a unique look and which could easily be made into a interesting fight.

and that is warcamps.

Let say when u cap a zone the defeated realms warcamp becomes a PQ with a 15-20min timer on it. There is a 3 min timer on the flight master before he despawns. Player from the defeated realm cannot enter the RVR area, and if they die do not respawn.

This would work as a reward for the winners in the form of getting to loot & burn the opponents base, and at the same time allow the defenders some time to regroup before the next zone is assaulted. Participation in the PQ could contribute influence to players RvR influence pool. And since there would only be 1 PQ it would lead to far less fragmentation than happens currently.

Soooo long story short. Regis you had it right 1st time. Warcamps good. Villages bad. At least in my opinion anyways :D

Imagine If.... Wards were Talismans

2009-01-21T05:42:00.001-08:00

Imagine If.. will be a weekly series of posts written in the style of a WaR herald post introducing a new fictional feature to the game.
Wards are here to stay like it or not. But lets look at a different way they could be implemented (which Syp quickly touched upon).

Patch IF1.0 New features: Talismans of Warding
Due to customer feedback on the ward system and the success of the introduction of RvR influence pools we have decided to introduce a new system which will allow more players access to higher levels of content.

Changes to current sets
The Superior Ward and The Excelsior Ward have been partially merged, both will reduce damage in Sub-Boss encounters and King Fights by 10% and can stack up to 5 times.
In addition The Excelsior armor sets will increase damage and healing in King encounters by 2% and can stack up to 5 times.

Talismans of Warding
From IF1.0 onwards you will be able to supplement the wards offered by Tier RvR & Dungeon set with Warding Talismans which can be slotted into any gear of your choice. All warding talismans are classed as Semi-Unique, meaning you can have maximum of 2 of the same talisman equipped in your gear at once

Ward Talismans come in 3 levels, each level is unlocked upon reaching the required renown rank. The wards are available from different vendors depending on the power level of the ward read below to find out about their locations.
Click to read more

Lesser Talisman of Warding:
Provide the lesser ward effect which will reduce damage in High Level City Dungeon and Fortress encounters by 10% and can stack up to 5 times.
Sold By: Keep Provisoner.
Keep Provioners will spawn in The Keeps of any of the Pre-Fortress Zones (ie: Chaos wastes is the order pre fortress zone for order in the empire/chaos pairing) after the zone has been locked.
Requirements:Rank 35-40 and Renown Rank 30

Greater Talisman of Warding:
Provides the Greater ward effect which will reduce damage in The Lost Vale and City Invasion PQ encounters by 10% and can stack up to 5 times. The Greater Ward effect also includes the Lesser Ward effect
Sold By: Fortress Provisoner.
Fortess Provisioners will spawn inside a enemy fortress once they have become captured.
Requirements:Rank 40 and Renown Rank 40

Superior Talisman of Warding:
Provides the Superior Ward effect will reduce damage in Sub-Boss and King encounters by 10% and can stack up to 5 times. The Superior Ward effect also includes the Lesser Ward and Greater Ward effects.
Sold By: Siege Camp Provisioner.
Siege Camp Provisioners will spawn inside Capital city Battle Objectives once they become captured.
Requirements:Rank 40 and Renown Rank 50

The importance of staying connected

2009-01-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

Like many WaR players i'm taking this evening off to watch Obama's inauguration on the news.

1stly a quick clarification i'm a Brit and so i have a wide blue expanse of distance both physically and emotional from these events.

I'll refrain from any political comments but suffice to say i think it was a pretty damn good speech.Instead i'll just take 2 things which perhaps our community can take to heart:

1st: "greatness is not a given it must be earned"
Forum's and blogs have a reputation for at their worst being whine fests. To often people see something they want and if they can't achieve it easily the whine begins.
People need to remember that nothing in any MMO has any intrinsic value. Even the most awesome item is nothing more than a collection of pixels and data. People need to start valuing the journey not just the destination.

2ndly "people will judge you on what you can build not what you destroy"
In a recent interview on Fires of War Paul Barnett stressed the importance of constructive criticism, as a community we need to focus not just on the bad but on the good. That when we do talk about the bad we should try and understand why these decisions have been made, that they have not been made lightly, that hindsight is a wonderful thing, and that its not always easy to fix them.

Anyways the ceremony is over im off to play a bit of WaR.

Finally Jospeh Lowery speech was great and showed one last thing, that even at the most serious of times a sense of humor is a great thing.

Just One Question

2009-01-19T10:35:00.000-08:00

i don't know about you but i always find my mind completely blank every Monday.
but i've set myself a target of posting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and gawd dang it i'm gonna stick to it.

Thankfully occasionally inspiration sometimes arrives out of the blue or in this case the comments box.

Barnett here, always gud to know who the Orc heads are :)

The comment slightly confuses me on many levels, and have no idea if it is that Barnett bloke or not.
1. If it is him, what on gods earth is he doing looking at my little blog
2. If not him, there are better places to pretend to be him than my little blog

but for the purpose of this it matters not. Thank you whoever you are.
the topic for today shall be
"If you could ask Paul Barnett one question what would it be?"

Question:
Would you consider releasing a expansion which did not increase the level cap?
Click to read more

Why ask:
The traditional MMO model has been to expand vertically adding more and more levels and more skills. The disadvantage of this is that the older areas become more and more deserted and the skill pools become more and more bloated.
From a simple financial perspective it allows the manufacturer to sell the original game plus Xpac to anyone new who wishes to play.
The carrot & stick of leveling is such a staple of the genre to not do it would be suicide for a PvE game to release a Xpac without them.

But WaR is a RvR game what your opponents will always be humans not scripted encounters.
To me at least what will keep me interested is not 10 more levels of PvE but my increasing the variety & challenge of RvR.

Instead of 10 more levels the effort was instead put into things like a greater variety of siege weapons and destructible walls. There is also scope for work on the inner keeps and fortress's to make them more visually interesting and tactically varied.
Increasing the Renown rank cap and opening up extra skills & tactics is to me a better way than just boosting everyone's stats 10 levels.

Id personally love a system which when you captured a zone allowed you to enter the opposing player PvE areas and loot & burn there towns or similar. WoW made amazing use of the phasing system and there's no reason why it couldn't be put to work here.

Also while it didn't matter that Onyxia became Soloable in WoW but if Karl Franz becomes soloable its a whole different kettle of fish.

anyways that's my post for today now i just need to find something to write about for Wednesday >_< . Im off to get rank 30 on my DoK

Savage Justice

2009-01-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

While doing the rounds of the new blogs posted on Wizards & Wenches i came across this post on the possibility of Slayer coming to WaR. With this package arriving at keen and graev that possibility seems to have become a certainty.

What hasn't been given much attention is the fate of the orcs counterpart to the old hammerer class. The same exact same problems face the Choppa's that faced the hammerers. When you compare a choppa to a Black Orc basically the only real difference is weapons. Every class needs something to distinguish itself from it brethren & choppas have nothing which marks them out as cool. They are basically the more weedy less heavily armed brethren of black orcs. I honestly can't imagine anyone wanting to play them.
Click to read more

Now i know Mythic are trying to give order more appeal but i honestly feel giving one faction a class with a huge amount of interesting and evocative lore and the other is a pale imitation of existing class both lore visual style & play mechanics.

My personal opinion, hope, & hunch is that mythic wouldn't short change destruction like that.
What im hoping is that we get a class who are a true match for slayers.
What im hoping for is Savage Orcs

Mad, Covered head to toe in warpaint, with no fear. They are the perfect mirror to the Slayer.

The advantages of Savage orcs are:
-A more interesting visual style and distinct silhouette
-They originate in the area in which WaR takes place (Badlands and the southlands of the Marshes of Madness)
-There is a large amount of lore behind them.
and most importantly
-The mechanics used for slayers could be easily transferred (with a few modifications) helping maintain the balance of RvR

Also if implemented Choppas would be the only class in game based on a standard grunt infantryman. No one want to play a grunt can you imagine if Orders new class was a Empire Halberder's, High Elf Citizen Militia, (or Dwarf Hammerers for that matter >_<). The closest thing we have in the game currently is the Chaos Marauder but his mutations give him the distinctiveness needed to set him apart from a Chosen.

the only major downside is that ofc more work has to go into creating two classes than one, but due to savage orcs minimal clothing this isn't as much of a disadvantage as it could be otherwise.

I honestly think if they introduce a class like Choppas which would be a lame duck from day one it would have bad implications for the game in the long term.
anyhow ill keep my fingers crossed that come Jan the 29th mythic will do the game justice. And if i receive a can of blue paint & some bones in the mail ill let you know >_<

A question of WaR

2009-01-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

Okies i'm a bit puzzled

lets say your playing a Seprpent's Passage SC there are 2 groups:

1st group:
3 meele dps
2 Tanks
1 single target healer

2nd group:
3 aoe healer hybrids
1 tank
2 ranged dps

one of the aoe healers offers to drop from group 2 and move to group 1 to spread the healing out.

To me there isn't i cant see any way where the 1st group would not benefit from having a aoe healer in there, and whichever player left the 1st group for the 2nd one would still be in a better situation than he was.

As you can guess this was the situation i found myself in today & my suggestions that we rearrange the groups were met with a stony silence.

Laziness, selfishness, ignorance, i don't know, it just frustrates me sometimes.
I just can't understand why

and so it begins

2009-01-16T17:30:00.001-08:00

well we did loose but i feel i did a damn good job there, so far my experience of t4 scenarios as a low lvl healer can be summed up thus: If you play to your strengths (in my case find a full group to aoe heal)find yourself a ranged dpser to hang around to fend off WH's(or WE's if your order)and choose a full healing spec you can be more than a little useful.

The introduction of Fortress Player caps and the attendant low level bashing "all they dos is leech" has got me thinking about how the way WaR lets you enter the end tier of open RvR at barely past 60% the way to max level affects the game. I'm working on a little longer & more in depth post on this called "is 28 the new 40" which ill post in a couple of days

The Clearout

2009-01-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

it seems i wasn't the only one who took a hiatus from WaR & blogging, today i did what i used to do daily a opened all the links on my blogroll in a blaze of firefox tabs only to find a good60% or so have gone quiet.

I was particularly sad to find Book of Grudges had gone quite, it was one of the 1st warhammer blogs i read and they always had something interesting to say

Another i was sad to see go was Archmagery who has moved onto the world of zombies valve has created in L4D, which imo is the shape of the sort of future game which will finally take wow crown as king of PvE(but that another post entirely)

a few have quit WaR but have kept blogging like walloftext, wingednazgul, Potshot,and The Ancient Gaming N00b

looking at how much we lost i feel like i have to say a quick thanks to all the blogs who did keep active even after many of us went quiet.

so thank you:
echoesofnonsense
Harcore Casual
Keen and Grev
Stunty Stomper
Stylish Corpse
Way of the Chosen
The Greenskin

and in particular a big 'Kudos to you guys' shout to
Syp and Regis for the Blog Warhammer initiative which should be providing me with many new blogs to replace those who's time has sadly gone

Back to WaR: Part 3 Return of the Healer

2009-01-13T11:09:00.000-08:00

So story so far...
My WaR career died a death of 1000 cuts (from bad customer service and a mass of annoying bugs)
Which sent me back to WoW which wowed me with a narrative based leveling experience which sadly came to a end on reaching the end game.
Now tempted by tales of mass bug exterminations and a rejuvenated player base i head back to WaR.

The need for Server merges, boosted leveling speeds, & greater rewards from RvR were all so obvious that its a mystery to me why they were not implemented sooner after release (or even before release).WaR's launch was reasonably smooth but if everything had been at launch as it is now perhaps percentage of those who tried out the game could have been retained.
But there no point swelling on this too much, the game seems stable now & i feel hopeful we can look forward to long term growth.

Looking at the state of the end game there are encouraging signs but also worrying ones.
The two most worrying issues are the issues surrounding fortress capture which as so succinctly another blogger put seems allot like a bad case of make do & mend.
The most promising sign overall is that there is very little sign of overall class imbalance now, both tanks & healers are well represented now. And unlike wow there is very little sign of the 'i want to be dps but ill heal for a raid spot' philosophy which ultimately leads to a huge amount of burnouts.

I've chosen to roll a Disciple of Khaine and so far the experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

Back to WaR: Part 2 Azeroth Strikes Back

2009-01-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Once i started writing this i realized there is going to have to be a multi-part story (although god knows how many parts in total). Anyways let us move onto part two dear reader, when i last left you a bugged career combined with lackluster customer support had driven me into the arm of my old lover WoW.

My experience of the initial release of wrath was decidedly mixed. Magetheridon EU has been my home now for almost 4 years, the last 3 of which have been spent in the same guild. Magetheridon has a few very successful PvE guilds and so attracts ALOT of wannabe's so the starting zones were hideously swamped at launch so after a day or 2 of putting up with ques of people camping spawn point for NPC's i decided to try out the new class since the feedback id been hearing from people was overwhelmingly positive.

Allot has been made of the Death Knight starting area, on paper phasing sounded pretty underwhelming but in practice it is anything but. The unchanging nature of most mmo's is always a immersion breaker, and phasing while not completely solving that problem takes a giant leap from most previous attempts. Playing through a proper storyline builds far stronger bonds with your character than doing 100's of "Kill X", "Escort Y from A to B" quests, by level 58 i was hooked. My Shaman is still 71 almost untouched since i first rolled my Death Knight.

Playing a Death Knights also help deal with the over analyzed nature fo much of WoW's PvE & PvP environments. Although many forums have started deconstructing the class in earnest it still remains a aura of mystery.

But this post is titled "Back to War" so the astute can guess that paradise could not & did not last. The Spell WoW had cast on me began to break once i hit 80 and slowly but surely the flow of new stories to explore began to dry up and the familiar grind of gearing for raiding began again. The Dungeons as always were well crafted but after one play through even the extra challenge of achievements couldn't enliven a badge grind.

Arena season didn't start until recently but long before then PvP in WoW was dead to me. Magethrion EU is unique as far as i know in that it is the only server where faction imbalance was that bad they only opened transfers away fromt he server for the horde & to the server for the alliance. For those of you who experienced the populations imbalances on some WaR servers after launch believe me this was on another scale altogether. During Leveling my Death Knight i don't think i came into contact with only 2 alliance players between 58 & 80, one lonely Dwarf Hunter in Zangarmarsh and a lone Death Knight.
So with on my server WoW attempt at RvR dead in the water the weight of expectation fall on scenario's. Vehicles are interesting novelty items at present but don't offer anything tactically. Combat itself still lack that extra little something it does in WaR.

And so just as WotLK arrived perfectly timed to take advantage of my disillusionment, so news of the implementation of Server transfers and open RvR influence lakes along with XP bonus's for leveling began to reach my ears.

Back to WaR: Part 1

2009-01-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

So after quiting the game for a while i'm back, so it only appropriate that I cover what caused me & many others to stop(part1) & some of the reason i and other came back (part2) .

So why did I quit? I think like a lot of people there was a lot I was still enjoying about WaR but a lot of minor niggles which were making the experience a lot less enjoyable.

Witch Elves had & still have a lot of endgame issues, many people learned to play around some of the bigger issues like the continuing bugged state of pick lock by just becoming war machine operators or postern guards, but it is still a class which feels out of place in many of the bigger RvR skirmishes.
The state of RvR wasn't great either, a lot of the time id watch with despair as warbands played a strange came of keep trading.

But what tipped me over the edge was GOA handling of guild relations. I was part of a small guild which lost members after the free trial period was over one of which was our GM. GOA will not pass control of a guild until a character have been inactive for 6 weeks, so we had to endure weeks of uncertainty, slowly more people drifted away with the guild unable to form alliances or promote new officers. During that time more officers left & I ended up trying to keep people motivated best I could. I had Veteran rank so I sent a email to customer service asking if whether when the GM's account went inactive, the leadership would skip the inactive people & pass to someone active (either myself or another vet) I was reassured that it would do so.
Eventually the day arrived when the guild was due to pass from our absentee GM, and it did, to one who had been absent for 3 weeks meaning, we would have to wait again for it to pass on, which it did, to another inactive character.
At this point I was just fed up & demoralized, and there like a old friend along came Wotlk which offered me the security of my WoW guild (which I've been in for 3 years) and new content.

Daggers are a girls best friend

2008-11-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

You see above a very happy witch elf, which she should be as she now posses after a evening hard work the two best daggers (untill a patch nerfs the hell out of them ) in WaR.Unlike WoW there has been relatively little theory work done for war so i thought id spend a little while discussing witch elf weapon choices.
Our Lesson plan for today is
1.Stats
2.Speed:
3.Hidden extras:

Stats:
Before delving in too much id like to direct you to Cerberias’ guide to rank 40 witch elf smackdown this is a excellent primer to WE stats & tactics, and can really help you get a feel for how the class works, & also to WaRdb's excellent Career Builder
& fianly if u want ur brain really hurt to the godly Disquette
There are only 2 stats we really care about for dps
Weapon Skill & Strength:
Picking between these is all about mitigation, roughly put Str will give better results when your target has less than 50% base mitigation, more than this & WS will give better results.
Lvl40 squishy Base Armor (using annihilator set values) = 970 Armor Total
Lvl 40 Medium Armor 1915
Lvl 40 Heavy Armor 2917 (assuming the fucker dont use a shield)
lets save me a headache or 2 & round that up to 1000, 2000 & 3000. So
So Looking at the different paths main attacks we can see how much mitigation they have
Carnage
Slice
0% on all
Pierce Armor up
100%light 50% med 33%heavy
Suffering
Envenomed Blade
75% (that's the % of damage done by the dot) on all
Treachery
Agonizing Wound
100% on all
Finishers
None of the finishing move have a built in ignore armor affect however for 4 point in carnage u can get Sharpened Edge.
As you see obviously if you are carnage then WS become allot more important than it is for treachery or suffering. I tend to aim to have around a 25% armor ignore value from WS when carnage spec but i like to use Whirling Blades to build fast combo points so allot of my dps comes from finishers.

Speed
I'm gonna take a excellent summary from WA forums here by Blind Muse
"Essentially, a faster weapon in the main hand is better, for offhand, its not a big deal, fast or slow, it will still attack the same amount of times. Offhand swings are based on a proc off the mainhand, its a fairly high chance, so nothing to worry about there.
All skills are set to a 1.5 Co-efficient(instant skills are all set as having a 1.5 cast speed for co-efficient purposes.) so weapon speed becomes irrelevant there.
All procs are set to a % chance, and unlike WoW are not on a PPM system, and are not 'normalized' So faster weapons will cause more procs to happen.
"
So Basically you want a fast MH to proc OH attacks, similarly fast weapons are more likely to proc kisses &/or talents.

Hidden Extras (Procs)
speaking of procs some t4 level weapons have built in procs, due to some wisdom i can't decipher mythic feel it unnecessary to make any not of this on the item tooltips
There are 3 quest & 6 daggers in total
Time to Waagh!
Merciless
Seeping Blade
The Ebon Flame
Nightfall
Spite
Annihilation
Frenzy
Brutality
Nightfall & Frenzy are considered to be the best because the procs appear to frequent & provide a very high amount of burst potential.
Note: due to a bug if you die u need to unequip & reequip the items to get the procs
So in summary, look for high weapon dps, then fast speed, a decent amount of str , then for any hidden procs. if a weapon has all of these your onto a winner.

Personal Best

2008-11-08T17:23:00.000-08:00

that i think must be my all time best score in a scenario & quite frankly i have no goddamn idea how it got so high, dps was 6th on the destro side, 3rd from bottom on kills, died 3 times, got 2 solo kills (although that's no big total), also ran the parts 3 times. now i was over rank 36 so bolster doesn't explain it, so really i'm at a bit of a loss.

/AFK

2008-11-06T11:25:00.000-08:00

Been a really busy week what with Witching night(and the frantic dash to farm rewards)IRL Halloween & 2 family birthdays, but im back. Pacth 1.05 is on the horizon & id like to echo the feeling of Exsequien on the EU Forums
"• To promote population balance among the various scenarios, we have added a feature that reduces the number of times a scenario can launch in a short period of time. This will give scenarios which are launched less frequently an opportunity to catch up in the queue population and launch more often.

YES YES YES *orgasms*"

Enraged

2008-10-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

I started blogging to be part of the ongoing discussion about the games i love to play & generally I've found that WaR & WoW both have great blogging communities which inspire me to think harder & more thoughtfully about the issues involved.
Occasionally though someone goes & says something which makes me really gawd darn frikkin mad!
and like anything. its worse when it comes from someone you otherwise respect. There i was doing my daily trawl of my blog roll when i came across this post by Tolbold called War introduces auto win for bigger realm.
This left me a little slightly peeved until i read More on wow zombies after which i was just pure pissed off.
How can someone write in one post that people should stop complaining about event which ultimately inconvenience them & at the same time complain about a change which will produce more RvR but at the cost of possible inconvenience.
I think it probably the hypocrisy of the 2 post which got my good & angry rather than the opposition to the changes because when reading Arkenor post on the subject i feel he makes a much more reasoned argument. I still think hes wrong becuase ultimately what the problem is his servers population not the change itself. Im hopefull after Wotlk has hit & taken it toll Myhtic will introduce the server transfers they have disscussed and we will end up with a far more concentrated player base, which will render most of the concerns over this null & void.

a step in the right direction?

2008-10-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

so patch 1.04 is here and there's some minor changes to RvR full notes can be found at the US herald
Ive highlighted the important parts of this for easy reference

"Campaign Adjustments
Tier 4 zones now require fewer scenario victory points to be captured. The mechanics of capturing a zone have not changed however. Zones which have no scenario opposition can still be captured if players join the queue for scenarios based on that Zone. Victory points towards zone control will be granted if a realm has enough players in the queue to launch the scenario and the other realm doesn't.If players in those queues join a launched scenario or leave the queue, the victory points towards zone control will be forfeit.
In other words, using "Join All" to queue for all available scenarios is still the fastest way to get into a scenario, but joining the scenarios in a specific zone will have the greatest impact on control of that zone, and by extension the greatest impact on the campaign in that pairing."

So whats the likely affect of these changes? Obviously this should make zone control quicker but will it be quick enough. PuG Warbands quickly run out of steam when there's nothing to do, sure PQ's can be farmed but that's about it if you side controls all the keeps. From personal experience id say 30-45 mins is the max length of time a warband will stay together once all keeps are controlled, before everyone slowly ebbs away. This is a step in the right direction hopefully resulting in zones being capped & the battlefront moving more often, & hopefully towards solving the 'Ive run out of people to fight' problem.

But I'm worried that again the cure may turn out to be worse than the disease. There is little incentive to defend anything atm, coupled with a greater ease of attack, & the still uneven realm pops may lead to a steamroller affect on many servers as one side dominates.

The change to affect of queuing is a good one overall, & hopefully will lead to a greater variety of scenarios launching. But it still lacks anything to really link the RvR & Scenario content. The possibility of faster launch time may attract more people to que for the zones where there are large number of RvR players queing but theres still nothing which really makes them any more likely to que for one scenario than another(ie: no reason to que riekland rather than dragonwake even if it would help their realm attack a Fortress.

Be carefull what you wish for (how players told mythic to kill RvR)

2008-10-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

RvR & how to re-invigorate it has been the weekends big hot topic. With Mythics announcement last week that they would be introducing RvR influence lakes many people took this as a admission of guilt on mythic part are so the great debate as to how we should set this right began.
Lots of people have made some interesting posts hardcore casual, Jobildo,WallofText & Potshot have some interesting things to stay & the hubbub even waken the mighty Tobold.
My favorite post on the subject was by Keen and Graev who have written a excellent article on open RvR stuttering attempts to take off, asking the question 'is it the players' fault this time?'
The cut & thrust of the argument is should players be prepared to forgo instant gratification offered by scenarios or should it be considered their fault that they are not prepared to show some patience in order to get open RvR rolling. Keen seems very impassioned & makes allot of good points the problem is i think i blaming the players hes wrong(well Partially). I personally trace the current RvR problems all back to one decision by Mythic, which although it did come at the request of players is ultimately Mythics fault.

Scenario Sickness

The Diagnosis:
back in the day you could only que for the scenarios of the zone you were in, this combined with some bugs & a player base divided unevenly between the zones & factions, meant scenario launches were less than frequent.
Its a valid question to ask if this problem would have occurred if all the factions had all their classes, & if mythic had sold the concept of the order races as strongly as they did the destruction ones. But those changes aren't something Mythic could fix overnight & the forums & the WaR blogsphere were beginning to resound to the clamor of aggrieved players.
I think just about everyone in the WaR community was unhappy about the early ques, and so Mythic desperate to have as a successful launch as possible responded.

The Treatment:
Cross Pairing Queuing
"Your feedback is very important to us and it’s always our goal to make your play experience an even more enjoyable one.
In response to popular demand, you’ll now be able to queue for all of the scenarios available in your current tier, across all three pairings. For instance, if you’re in Nordland, you can queue for the Nordenwatch scenario as usual. You can also queue up for Khaine’s Embrace (the Tier 1 scenario in the High Elf vs. Dark Elf pairing) and the Gates of Ekrund (the Tier 1 scenario on the Dwarf vs. Greenskin pairing), all without leaving Nordland. No travel is required at all; just click the WAR symbol on your interface as you normally would, and use the arrows at the top of the window to scroll through the different scenarios.
We know many have been waiting for this feature and we have a lot more great additions coming on the horizon. We look forward to your continued feedback as we work to take WAR to the next level…WAAAGH!!!"
Click to read about the side affects of the treatment & the radical surgery needed to really fix the problem

The Unforeseen Side Affects:
This is the point that RvR died, no-one noticed yet. The gamers were to busy trying out the new scenarios & leveling up, Mythic were to busy trying to fix everything else to notice what they had done.
No one noticed until now when the dust had settled & the population had settled and when its too late, far too late to do anything about it.
"So what is this problem exactly?" i here u say"your being pretty vauge so far, we know its something to do with scenarios just go ahead & spit it out!"The problem isn't scenarios themselves or even players desire to max min.The problem is that mythic in trying to fix part of the system split it into two systems. At release although buggy WaR's RvR system was in place & ready to go. Scenarios were part of that system, they could only be qued in the zone a player was in. The quest for the scenarios could only be obtained from warcamps in turn were situated right next to the RvR pools. The warcamps even had quest which encouraged players to go into the RvR areas to scout them.Everything was connected , the system was so good in fact that if Sir Elton John had seen it he would have been tempted to re-write Circle of Life as Circle of War.
But because of the imbalances brought about in the short term by class, faction, & leveling speed differences, it seemed as if it wasn't working. We will never know if left as it was how it would have turned out, but what is clear now is that when you remove what interconnected the two aspects of the game people are always going to pick one aspect over another.

RvR autopsy
RvR died at 00:13:41 EST on 30th September 2008
It is thought that the subject injected the victim with a lethal overdoes of the highly addictive drug S.C.E.A.R.I.O
It is thought that the injection was carried out by mythic entertainment at the request of RvR's lover the WaR community

So how the hell do we get out of this mess.

Short Version:
Reconnect RvR & Scenarios so one affects the other & people are encouraged to do BOTH.

Long Version:
Patch 1.04
1.Cooldown on recapping Battle Objectives reduced to 10minutes.
2.The Amount of Victory Points require to capture a Zone has been reduced slightly.
3.Keeps & Battle Objectives capture Victory Points have been increased & they will contribute a constant stream of victory points while controlled.
4.RvR actions within the immediate vicinity of keeps & BO's now contribute towards influence pools available at quartermasters in keeps.
5.T4 Scenarios Victory bonus will increase for attackers by 10% & decrease for defenders by 10% depending on the proximity of the contested zone to a fortress.
ie: If Reikland is contested victory for destruction will ofter almost 20% more to renown to destruction than it will to order.

So what have we done here
1.BO's are now more vulnerable controlling a zone now requires a active watch on the RvR area.
2&3. Zone change over has been made quicker, no more 'all keeps are locked down, there no more RvR to do I'm logging for the night' this is counteracted by the greater vulnerability of BO's.
4.Influence pools give a good reason to take part in RvR even if your on the loosing side.
5.Scenario players now have a genuine reason to want to advance the RvR endgame, currently this doesn't matter to a scenario player, whatever he ques for returns the same XP/Renown return by reconecting indivdual succes to collective succes they immediately have a reason for people to take part in RvR.

im not saying this is perfect but i think it would take changes like this to create a truely active & rewarding RvR experience where battles eb & flow & there is as much a reason to defend as there is to attack.

I Rolled a Orc (& i liked it)

2008-10-25T01:53:00.001-07:00

I felt it was about time i rolled a alt & thus my Black Orc Ardcase was born.
I'm a Big fan of the Visual feel of Games Workshops Orcs but for a long while i was put off rolling a BO due to the bad experiences Ive had playing a tank class in WoW.
To me tanking in WoW was a high stress/ low reward occupation, sure at first it felt cool to be the guy everyone relied on but as soon as it began to dawn how much your perceived performance relied on other people the thrill quickly ebbed away. John Walker at
Rock Paper Shotgun feels that Responsibility is one of the things which act as the biggest killjoys to his MMO experience, & reading it although i didn't agree with everything allot of what he said resonated with me.
I like playing with other people & one of WoW's greatest success is the feeling of euphoria which you got when things went right & you finally got that boss down & Ive made some great friends through the game. But when thing did go wrong however WoW can very quickly developed into a blame game, as John says "if you don't play like they would have done it, you've failed them, you've let them down, you've spoiled their game'. I think this feeling is felt at its strongest in WoW because the class roles are written in stone, this causes players to see others as just a necessity, just a means to a end. Interaction between players is strangely disconnected too with everyone operating inside a little bubble rarely do you co-operate with someone, instead players have a list of actions they are expected to perform which are dictated by the environment or opposing players actions. Overall in tanks in WoW always felt like as just a cog in the machine, & just as useless when the rest of the machine was removed.

I am overjoyed to report that tanking in WaR is a very different far more satisfying experience so far.
Click for details on how i rediscovered tanking could be fun
Not that WaR re-invents the wheel or anything, just it adds some suspension which makes the ride allot more comfortable.
Tanking in Both RvR & PvE feels far more about you & far less about everyone else. WaR's primarily RvR is the prime driving force behind this because humans opponents bring a degree of uncertainty which scripted encounters lack.
To illustrate my point im gonna talk more about 3 skills, which respectively:
1.Encourages Team work between Healers & Tanks.
2.Bring the Taunt mechanic to PvP
3.Makes tanks viable for Solo Pve (& encourages them to act more tank like in RvR)

1. Save Da Runts
"You defend one of your allies and try to take attacks meant for them. As long as you are within 30 feet of them, any damage that they suffer and all hate that they cause will be split evenly between the two of you."
Very simple & yet very effective this sends out a clear but unmistakable signal to any target its used on in RvR, 'Whats good for me is good for you'. Equally in PvE this it offers benefits to both sides, to put it in wow terms 'you take 50% of the damage received by one target, & 50% of the threat generated by them is transferred to you. It can be applied to a healer or dps depending on the situation, got a DPser a few lvls high than you who's always over agroing? Pop this on them & they will increase your threat. Similarly this works great when healers have to use AoE heals.

2.Taunt
I just love this skill, it really knocks the socks of its WoW equivalent
"You enrage your opponent, interrupting any currently building abilities and forcing monsters to attack you. While taunted your opponent will take 30% more damage from your attacks. This effect will fade after 15 seconds or after your opponent has hit you 3 times"
Bullet point comparison time!!!

WoW taunts:

Doesn't Do any Damage
Temporary increases threat
Only usefull as a Panic Button
Useless in PvP

WaR taunt:

Increase damage for its Duration
The damage component also help increase overall threat which means...
Its Beneficial to use even if things are doing well for a nice boost of threat
Very Useful in PvP (target a dpser who's trying to nuke your healer & throw in save the runts, & the poor dpser is left between a rock & a hard place).

What i like about this is that they didn't go down the road of 'forcing' players to attack other players, they just made it so they have a very good reason to do so.

3.Da Toughest
"A grand war cry to proclaim yourself da toughest! All your attacks gain a 25% chance to increase your wounds by 30 for 10 seconds. You will be healed by the amount increased"
A nice enough skill 1v1 but nothing ground breaking where this shines is when you are using a Aoe attack to hit 4 or more targets at the smae time almost guaranteeing a proc. What mythic have achieved with this skill is something which is, A: not overpowered 1v1 B. Allows PvE soloing for a tank class & C. to find the biggest group of enemies & get stuck in RvR.

In the end quite simply if tanks in WoW were given these abilities they would cry for joy.

for further reading on black orc check out Save Da Runtz or Stunty Stomper

3 Tips To Fast WaR Leveling

2008-10-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

WaR is a game which gives you far more to do as you level up then any mmo i have played, but there are time when you just want to get that extra level so you can play with your friends or feel competitive in RvR.

The WaR community has expressed some concern of the speed after lvl 20 & the over reliance on Scenarios. The were rumblings a week or so ago, as the greenskin commented on the slow pace & other blogs like Winged Nazgul responded & recently has resurfaced as The Book Of Grudges threw its hat into the ring.
With that in mind i present my Top 3 fundamentals of efficient leveling in WaR.

1.Mix & Match
Perhaps the biggest bone of contention has been which is the fastest method, PvE, Open RvR, or Scenarios. The truth is that under certain circumstances they can all be very effeicent but equally they call all be appalingly unefficent.
The solution is to make use opportunities as & when they present themselves.
Keep a eye on the RVR map:
If you are near a RvR lake & you see all 4 BO's & a keep or 2 controled by the oposing faction keep checking the open party window for a decent size warband forming while also watching the map for BO's being capped, as soon as the action get started get yourself over there asap. A couple of fast BO's followed by a keep capture can give good Xp & R as well as being alot of fun.
Always be qued for scenarios:
"But i dont want to always do scenarios!" i hear you cry. Well i never said anything about always doing the important thing is to be qued. Sometime they will pop at awkward times if they do simply ingnore it. Other time you will be half the zone away from your quest giver with 14mins left on you librum cooldown & that Tor Anroc will be like mana from heavan.

Click to read the rest of a guide more enjoyable than swimming in molten lava

2.Get ahead of the Quest curve.
Quest & Mob Kill Xp increase significantly (almost 100%) if they are either equal or above your current level, & overall their difficulty does not.
Chapter Hop:
To go from tier to tier you will typically need to do quest from a mix of quest racial pairings. The best way of doing this is to Complete the 1st chapter in one zone & then go do the equivalent chapter in another racial pairing. This is one area where rule No1 is broke & traveling does increase your Xp per hour rate. The traveling is counterbalanced by the the extra XP you get from killing these mobs while they are above your level, instead of clearing one racial pairing before going to another where the chapter may be beneath you level. This also produces a high quality and amount of gear(better gear = faster leveling.
Make best use of PQ's:
Always grind Every PQ chapter to 2/3rd influence for the quest chain it unlocks i tend to do this in a PQ which i pass through or near during a quest loop on my way back to the quest givers after the intial bunch of quests at any new hub

1.Walk Don't Run
This Is The No1, Numero Uno, absolute most important thing you have to remember. Its simple its easy to do, but so many people ignore it based on bad logic.
Never avoid killing something.
Leave a trail of corpses whenever you go,don't mount up & run back to you quest givers, cut a bloody path from A-B. Any moment you are out of combat is a moment you aren't gaining xp.
People are goal orientated, killing a mob for no obvious reason lacks the immediate positive reinforcement provided when a quest ticks off another mob. WaR's questmap has incresed the affect this has on people by providing a even clearer path from goal to goal. But the fact remains just because a mob doesn't feel important doesn't mean the XP it gives isn't.

Who need friends when you have enemies

2008-10-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

At first you may feel that a keep defended by a good number of well organised and geared Order players is the last thing any Destro player want to see, but you would be wrong.

When open RvR is at its best it blows anything done before out of the water. The collision detection creates a very real feeling of a flow in battle as opposing lines of tanks push each other back & forth trying to break the others organisation & allow their melee dps to rush the healers & ranged dps.
There are plenty of incentives to attack, the game offers bonus renown & high quality loot bags for assaulting a keep. Problems however begin to occur because the game doesn't provide sufficient motivation for players to defend. So as i wonder around deserted RvR areas i find myself thinking "I wish order would get their ass into gear & take our keeps again".

Many Destro player find their RvR experience is dictated not by his own guild or friends, but by whether or not Order on his realm is well organised & determined.
Click to Read more about RvR's Achilles heel
In T3 RvR the consequences of this are clear.Most T3 scraps begin in Avalon/Saphery due to the advantage Tor Anroc gives Order on the regions influence. Knowing they are outnumbered Order commonly has to rely upon a fast decisive strike to capture one (or both) of the keep before the Destro zerg arrives. The over sensitive warning system on the zone maps doesn't help either, too many times i have rushed to a keep only to find that the game had been crying wolf & the area was deserted.

Once a keep is under seige initially a organised defense can cause havoc in attacking force with the mass use of siege weapons & well timed sorties from the keep to destroy the attackers own seige machine(attack from behind enemy lines are particularly affective at this).

This is the make or break stage for keep defense if the defenders can break the momentum of of the attackers the zerg will gradually fall apart. Even very large zergs can be broken up this way, and the defenders can earn good Xp & RR while suffering few casualties themselves. However if the attackers break through to the inner gate and still have a significant numbers advantage the lack of mass numbers of siege weapon means the the keep is pretty much lost. While it is possible to wipe a zerg on the Keep Lord the only times i have observed this working as anything more than a holding tactic it has been due to the incompetence of the offense.

Any smart group will cut their losses & run as soon as the outer gate goes down, there just isn't any incentive to defend to the last man. A typical tactic is that when a defender dies & respawns at the warcamp instead of running to try & help continue the defense they immediately use the camps flight path to move to another zone & begin to start a siege of a undefended keep. Often the warband will send the majority to one but use a few of its members to make a diversionary attack at another keep.

All this is aimed at saping the zerg of as many people & impetus as possible, and will often lead to the battle hoping from keep to keep, as a battle of attrition develops. If they are lucky the defenders can outlast the zerg & begin to counterattack & cap more keeps.

People enjoy RvR & this can produce a enjoyable RvR experience, but is that with no incentive to defend any gains the less populous faction makes on a server are inevitably wiped out. This leads to a sea of Red(or less often blue) across a tier. Total dominance is in some ways is worse for the dominated than the dominant, with nothing to attack the faction in control are left helpless to initiate RvR. Whether they get to enjoy any sort RvR is entirely in the hands of the other faction.
In almost any situation taking control away from someone will cause anger frustration & unhappiness & this is no different.

Myhtic have done their best to remedy the population imbalance aspect of these problems but the lack of incentives to defend has been left untouched as yet.

However there is hope on the horizon as part of patch 1.1 coming in December mention has been made to
“implementing an RvR-influence system to compliment the current PvE-influence system."
my personal hope is that this is used to make keep defenses more rewarding if a influence zone was created around a keep & all RvR actions (damaging enemy players, healing ect) within that led to the gaining of influence for the defenders. The would be a strong reason for anyone who was able to defend a keep under attack.

So i remain hopeful for the future but these changes need to come sooner rather than later because good enemies are hard to find.

Enh Shamans in 3.02

2008-10-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Is it a Elf! is it a plane! Nooo it a enhancement shaman in 3.02 (after a minor transporter accident).

I still have no intention of playing WoW any great amount of time until new PvE content opens up.But the recent patch has me intrigued enough to fire up the orc & log on.
The enh tree has seen allot of its more useless talent from the day when it was a offtank spec slowly pruned away & i think 3.02 is finally the day where all the deadwood is gone, but as always the most important talent in our spec isn't even in the same tree.
For Enhancement Shamans this patch is about two things:
1. The unification of spell & melee crit rating & the affect this has on elemental devastation
2. The move to towards sharing gear (& stat weights with hunters)
These changes have transformed Enh Shamans into perhaps the closest thing wow has to a true caster/melee hybrid, & finally made the way the class plays feel closer to Badass masters of the elements that they are in WoW's Lore.
Click to Read how 3.02 has brought more PewPew & less QQ
Pre 3.02 a Enh shaman would typically have around 5% spell crit at maximum, which made the talent close to useless. After the patch 25% or so will probably be the norm for a well geared shaman which makes it into a essential.

The enh Dps rotation has changed completely as well, with totem twisting gone things were looking pretty unexciting, Maelstrom weapons & Lava lash however have achieved a nice balance of increased versatility & performance.

Static shock has so far decidedly been decidedly unimpressive for me, when i've tried it, in particular since water shield becomes far more vital with the vastly increased hunger of the spec for mana.

This is my current spec
PvE dps Enhancement

3.02 also introduced target dummies, hapless sacks of digital straw for player to shock, chop & zap to their hearts content.
But to get a true like for like test apart from dragging myself off to Brut or Terron (which ain't gonna happen) the only thing usable are good old Servants of Razelikh.So off i wonder to pound one of the immortal little guys until he wished he really could just die

Note: All tests done self buffed pre 3.02 best on these mobs 1450-1500

well as you can see that's quite a increase, this wasn't unexpected but its still nice to see.
However what is the most significant change is how the damage is done:

Before the patch a Enh Shaman would likely run a Flame shock, Earth shock rotation & between them they would add 6-10% of his dmg. Now more dps comes from spell dmg attack than there does from Windfury & Stormstrike.
The main change this requires from enh shamans is that we need to start thinking of ourselves as true hybrids when it come to stat stacking. The unification of +crit & +hit spell & has more impact on us than perhaps any other class, in particular the loss of natures guidence means + hit from gear is now far more desirable.
Its not just + hit however, basically any stat which affects both spell & physical dmg is good.

Exact weights are hard to calculate atm & tbh quite pointless until we hit 80
but roughly id say the stats a Enh Shaman will want to stack now are (in order of priority), expertise, hit, agility, crit, attackpower.Intellect is a good stat too but as far as item budgets are concerned its better to go with the others.

Overall this has been a great patch for PvE Enhancement Shamans future although i have some serious worries about our DPS being threat capped now that even more of our DPS is not affected by spirit weapons 30% threat reduction to melee attacks.

It still isn't enough to get me playing the game again until wrath especially as PvP in WoW has basically been totally screwed over by the huge boost to DPS but lack of equivalent boost to survivability(insta gibbing is the order of the day), but it bodes well for Wotlk that allot of shamans fundamental problems with the Enh spec have been fixed.

If a tree falls in a forest....

2008-10-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

The interweb has been ablaze with tales on the looting of Altdorf for a 2nd time.
I don't see the point in midnight raids. To quote the governator himself
What is best in life? "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women"
What this so elegantly express is that in any war between two factions the only real victory is archived when your enemies feel their defeat.
So then what is a point in a triumph when you never even see your enemies.I'm not taking anything away from the people who pulled this off. Its not Retribution's fault they were organized and committed and the defenders were not. what the game need to do is to offer incentives for attack to be made at busy times & for the to be incentives for players to defend.When all is said & done WaR is about beating other players, not about beating the game.

No Capes!

2008-10-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

The incredibles had a point
As i mentioned before i'm not a fan of mythics decision to give us all whiter that white cloaks at early levels. The obvious answer to this was 'just hide the damn thing then!' which although a fine idea in principle is destroyed by a bug which resets your cloak & head settings whenever you zone in.
Thankfully help it is at hand, i came across stickygearsettings
while browsing curses selection of addons for WaR.
Read more!
The WaR addon community is very much still in it infancy mythic made a smart move by using the same LUA programming language as wow does for it addons allowing 'relatviely' easy ports of many of the most popular WoW addons such as greyhoof's Scrolling Combat Text.
The problem this has produced is that alot of the addons deal with issues which were a problem in WoW but that the default UI deals with well in WaR, while at the same time alot of WaRs biggest Ui problems are seeing very little attention.
with that in mind pop pickers heres my:

Top 5 most wanted addons:

5: HuD Display
just a nice simple curved HuD with a combo point(action point, waarg, balance ect) measure. There are a few HuD addons already available but quite frankly even the best of the (a conversion of wow's metahud) are all Fugly as hell. WaR ui allthough similar to WoWs lacks much of its chunkyness, so a Nive Hud with perhaps a theme for every race would be golden. I know working with a HuD helped me alot while playing pvp while playing pvp in wow since your eyes stay centered on whats happening. This is especially important in war with the lack of casting bar for your opponents.

4:Threat Meter
Yes this is mainly a RvR game but it is not EXCLUSIVELY a rvr game, my experiences in the dungeons so far have been pretty brutal, & its equally relevant when dealing with something like a keep lord. It doesn't need to be even 1/10th the complexity of something like omen, just a % of threat.

3:Target-of-target display
When doing the dungeon elements of WaR often it is very difficult to tell who a tank it hitting. I assume this is not in the default UI to try & avoid assist trains of casters in open RvR but that doesn't make it anymore less of a nuisance.

2:Cooldown Timers
The addon Cooldowntimers2 was perhaps my no1 PvP addon in wow, there is nothing worse than having to watch your action bars constantly.

1:Chat window replacement
The Default Chat window in WaR is to me by far the worst part of the default UI. Its crimes are numerous. The worst of them being not able to click select a name & send a tell directly to them, which to me is almost criminal in what is a very social game.

Paint it.... White?

2008-10-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

One of the minor annoyances of the early level of WaR is the fact that just about any cloak you pick up is going to be white. Now while white may be perfect for a high elf or warrior priest it feels distinctly out of place on any of the destruction classes.
Mythic have offered a partial solution by allowing players to dye cloaks the problem is not all cloaks allow you to. It only seems to be Renown reward cloaks which you can be customize, the rest of us have to wait until our guilds reach the lofty heights of rank 14 and we slap the guild design on there (this is the moment which will no doubt come back & haunt many ill advised selections of guild colour schemes as after the Xth 1000th hour of looking at pink & illuminious green creation a player is forced to tear his own eyes out).
My personal solution was when finding i couldnt dye my cloak, was to instead dye everything else white.
Not all areas are changeable through the NPC dying system, but nearly all are through dropped & player made dyes. Thus is quite possible that dyes will be high value but very volitile trade at lvl 40.

Full Scale War

2008-10-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

Most of the Reviews of Warhammer Age of Reckoning (or WaR as it shall forever be known thanks to some clever marketer with a gift for acronyms) have focused on its public quest system & the RvR.
But to me the game differentiates itself most starkly from its peers is the way its environments start big & get bigger. From the very 1st step your character takes its clear that you are contributing & actively taking part in something larger than yourself.
In the Dark Elf starting area the 1st thing you are greeted by is the looming bulk of one of the Black Ark's ( a city sized ship)

From The Architecture of WaR

Read more!
As the into music fades the sights & sounds of conflict surround you. The attitude of not treating its players as helpless children in need of a glorified creche as a starting area is something which should be praised, it permeates every aspect of the starting zones everything from the quests, the music, and both the regularity and speed at which new skills are earned. The game doesn’t hold back on the good stuff unlike many other mmo’s only a few minutes of starting the game you can use a siege weapon(to take pot shots at invading elf's) something which has taken WoW 80 levels.
The early Dark elf levels mainly consist of the former glories of the High Elf empire which have fallen into disuse or have been destroyed by their centuries old civil war so the 1st real 'ZOMG ITS GAWD DARN MUTHER FRIKKIN UGE!' moment has to wait a few more levels until the Griffon & Unicorn Gates of Ellyrion comes into sight.

From The Architecture of WaR

The entire Elven campaign is littered with similarly immense structures ‘you can never have enough spires’ and ‘make it taller’ seem to have been the order of the day when the high elf planning committee met with. The city of Tor Elyr, is the epitome of this philosophy.

From The Architecture of WaR

I reckon this city is perhaps the roughly same size as the entirety of Silvermoon in WoW, and although the two share some architectural styling (note to WoW fanbois: the classic GW high elf look has been around since 1992) Tor Elyr somehow feels the more ‘solid’ of the two. I’m at a loss to explain quite how it does this, as its is basically a quest area where your main interaction with the NPC’s if through the sharp end of a sword & the buildings are almost all non accessible. Perhaps indeed it is because it is the kind of area where interaction is not expected that this feels correct (of course all high elf doors are going to be locked to a dark elf).
For me a true test of a games immersion is whether or not it triggers my vertigo, Half life 2 did this with the railway bridge section & again at the citadel, but never in my time playing wow did any of various structures I scaled (or flew to the top of) did that feeling reemerge, so although i'm not sure sure I exactly was thrilled to find that the White Tower of Hoeth brought the same reaction to me, its still noteworthy it did produce a reaction.

From The Architecture of WaR

I can only find myself looking forward to seeing what the higher lvls of the game offer up.

Redsign = Done

2008-10-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

Finally i think I've got something which isn't too shameful a start, and look nice while remaining readable and I must admit being quite happy with the way the banner turned out.
My one gripe is not being able to center my picture in the side bar using the automated controls. No doubt it can be done but all that html is looking scary atm so it will do for a while.

Started adding all the relevant blog i read regularly, though i'm unsure of blogging etiquette as far as whether i should tell them before i link to them as a courtesy, or if its fine if your a fan of someones work to just slap a link down on your site.

I think at 1st im gonna just concentrate on writing some stuff worth reading & once im happy i have ill get around to the demonic business of actually getting some people to read this.

Got a few subjects in mind for the '1st real post' which ill probably do this evening or tomorrow lunchtime.

Restart

2008-10-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

For a long while i basically used this blog as just a place for putting a few Screenshots online as a kinda mini diary of one of my characters in Warcraft.
Since then i have decided to use this blog as outlet for my thoughts on the games i play & to help brush up some of my web design skills (fancy banners ect inc).