Enraged

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?

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)

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)

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

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

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

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....

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!

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?

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

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

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

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).