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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*"
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.
