The importance of staying connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.