What's this? Nordenwatch Weekend?

"Along the rain-scoured coast of Nordland, spring is not a blessing. For while the end of winter signals a return of the growing season, it also heralds the thawing of the Sea of Claws. Now all eyes turn to the white foamed waves, searching for the first sign of invaders. It doesn't take long.

A sharp shout goes up from the watchtower moments before a harsh bell begins to toll. Norse sails have been spotted on the horizon. War is coming, and the only hope that the people of Nordland have is that their defenders are well prepared."

Great writers. And a whole weekend of Nordenwatch for all tiers? :D A title at the end if you complete quests? Isn't that a mini-live event? Isn't that AWESOMENESS IN A BUCKET? Why yes. Yes it is.

Now all you guys need to do is create something like this for PQs and PvE. It will round out the game a lot.

Beyond the Sands

As you can see from the picture above, today I got the Aviator Goggles from the current Live Event. What's made this particular event interesting is that despite it being a list of quest chains and kill/object counts, there's been a fair bit of organic RVR in the midst of it all. Destruction took to camping/swarming the event area, and Order didn't back down, resulting in pretty realistic clashes, wipes and comeback surges.

Not to mention the fact that there are epic rewards for the three quest chains. I can't link it, as it doesn't seem to be mentioned on any of the Warhammer Wiki's, but look out for the quest reward called the Bone Ward... it's fairly useful and interesting. Not to mention a Pocket item!

Serpent's Passage #4

It's that time again.


Hugely successful, mostly thanks to the help of my almighty guild leader Aedenwe, who herded and bashed healers down so that I could pick them off. Pick pick pick, I love Fell the Weak.

Russenscheller Graveyard

Something I noticed today - the graves in Russenscheller Graveyard in Praag's ORVR lake have names on them. I guessed they'd be real people, perhaps the dev team, and I was right:



I can only presume that Mythic resurrected Pete Lipman to walk their halls as a zombie Deputy Art Director.



Can't make this one out, but it's a beautiful design.



Someone left flowers for terrain artist Brian Clarke.

There are plenty more. While you're waiting for a BO to tick over, why not check them out?

ORVR is your new bicycle

"Without any apparent resistance the gate broke down quickly and stunties came pouring in, rushing towards the top floor. On top of the stairs we already had a solid wall of tanks, with countless Choppas lining the side, and ranged covering from above. A few of the Order stopped when they saw us, but quite a lot rushed headlong into our ambush, only at the last moment realizing that there were a lot of defenders here (we had a full warband). Then seemingly on an unspoken command all Choppas rushed down and began chopping like madmen true Orcs. Anyone who think keeps are only a ranged fight have never witnessed a horde of angry Choppas running down into a tightly packed bunch of Order and spamming AoE."

- Wizards & Wenches

And that ladies and gentlemen, is why I am still playing. I'm predominantly playing Petroleum this week, and I'm doing 10x the amount of ORVR I did on Kipling (mostly because it just wasn't there in the very early days of the game). Each encounter with my fellow players and Destruction never fails to be different. When you find yourself laughing even though you're losing, you know it's a good game.

State of My Game

Well, I thought I had a screenshot to upload to break my silence, but alas: it seems to have disappeared. I've been quiet because I'm basically running through the same quests on Petroleum as I did on Kipling, which doesn't make for great excitement in blog content. But I'm enjoying playing a healer, and inched my Archmage into Tier 3 this week - with rank 20 came an absolutely fabulous and useful group heal (*stabs stick into ground repeatedly*), and with rank 21 came uh... nothing useful really! But it's nice to be a level higher!

Sitting on the cusp of Tier 2 and 3, I've been trying to decide whether I should concentrate on raising my renown rank another level or so, spend more time in the ORVR lakes (which I tried for the first time, and ended up with less than fun company) or fully explore the lush greens of Avelorn. Or perhaps all of it! The problem is that this month has proved to be busy in real life, so I'm not investing as much time ingame as I'd like.

PS Mythic: your character profiles seem to be broken at the moment.

PPS: good job on the realm mergers, more scenarios make everyone happy.

Mortal Enemy

I won't mention this character's name, because I refuse to give him undue praise or hatred, but here Kipling lies in the Twisted Tower... having killed her goblin foe, the DoTs unexpectedly kill her moments afterwards. Blah.

On Rally Calls

Patch 1.2 held many bountiful gifts, but the addition of the Rally Call button was a silent beast,. Like everyone else my boyfriend and I rolled a Slayer, and while we were questing, suddenly got issued a rally call. We clicked the blue button, and were transported (without a loading page, if I remember rightly) to the Tier 1 Dwarf warcamp, along with a handful of others, and ran straight into battle.

Awesome. But how it works is still confusing.

Here's what the patch notes say:

"We are introducing the new Rally Call system. At various intervals, players will be called to join the battle in the Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 RvR lakes. A button will appear near the mini-map, enabling willing participants to jump right into the action.

Basically, when a Rally Call is issued, you get an on-screen notification and the blue button lights up. Push the button and you’re automatically teleported to the appropriate warcamp. The idea is that this should provide easier access to RvR for those who want it.

Everyone seems to be under the impression that this was something a warband leader could issue, so the requests for it to go off again kept flying in Warband chat. The reality SEEMS to be that when activity in the ORVR lakes hits a certain point, the game issues it independently. And it's not available in Tier 4. Why isn't there a rally call option for Tier 4, where it's just as useful? Tier 4 is huge in terms of levelling, and lower levels are still in the PvE areas.

One of the major flaws that Mythic keep repeating is that they give us great features... but we don't know how to use them! Thankfully, as soon as we tell them, they nearly always respond quickly. So I'm expecting this to be addressed on The Herald soon enough.

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A quick side note: another thing I would like to see is a more efficient warning before subscriptions run out. This might be more critical of the EA-Mythic side of the game, but I don't like suddenly being informed that my subscription has ended. And even worse, getting an email a day or two after I've renewed telling me that my subscription is close to ending blah blah blah.

But I did resubscribe!

In which Kipling sees the Inevitable City

I spent 2pm until 10:30pm of yesterday playing WAR. Not for the Bitter Rivals Live Event (which is fun, I might write another post about this soon, but for now I'll say that the new scenario is, as another Monolith-er wrote "awesomely confusing"), but because Order were extremely busy locking down zones before besieging the Inevitable City.


Looks peaceful. Aaaah. However, for most of the time, the sands were strewn with broken corpses and towards the end of the zone lock out, groups of Order huddled tensely on BOs, waiting for the inevitable zerg o'Blades (which happened at 1 minute to lock out. They failed).


But I got my first ever gold bag from the south keep! And I got my Annihilator Maskhelm! Woohoo! (You can see the rest of my gear if you click on my name in the sidebar of this blog)


I also caught sight of Gorefang out there! Very brave of him to be out there at level 32, and I did wave. Unfortunately he fell to the ground shortly after and died a bloody death. I saw Codpeace, but I was dead and couldn't wave.


Hours later, we'd locked out Chaos Wastes and Black Crag, and it was time! Time to siege the city! And then the game failed. If you're in a warband, and your warband is in a full instance, you're forced to queue. What it took other players to tell me, was that you need to leave your warband, log out and log back in, rush the door and only then are you given the option to pick the PQ of your choosing. It's broken Mythic, fix that ASAP.


This was really the high point after we got to the city. I didn't think it was visually impressive (unlike Altdorf!), and I felt the pressure to join in the PQ rather than explore, in case of epic loot. I wanted epic loot. My name is Kipling, and I am a LOOT WHORE. The best I got was 10th place, and the green loot bag still sits in my bag because the green gear is not as awesome as it should be and I can't pick between the rest of the rewards. I'll probably choose the Apothecary item, because patch 1.2 broke the last two vials I had in my bank.

So at the moment, once the zones lock out, the game loses any kind of allure. The PQs are boring (repetitive, grindy, your chance at loot is low thanks to the distribution of abilities between characters) and the process of actually getting into cities is far from clear. And where's the option to just run riot through the streets? Next time I am going to forgo the loot, and explore the city properly, because the small chunk I saw was not as visually impressive as I would have liked!

But criticism aside: the process to get zones locked out is fantastic: exciting, rich with renown and if you want it to be, extremely satisfying when it comes to strategy and tactics. Will play again.

Serpent's Passage Stats

Some guildies kindly reminded me about the self-buffs Shadow Warriors have (instead of calling me a lolnoob and /guildkicking me for being a fool) and gave me a few combinations of moves I could use to up my damage in scenarios. They gave me this information during this scenario, and for the first time I did more than 100k damage. OK so we lost (we were being steamrolled by pre-mades), but hah! Look at Kipling go! So proud. Thanks for the help chaps, you know who you are.

When Bloggers Meet on the Battlefield

Finally managed to meet Syncaine of Hardcore Casual on the battlefield - this evening was mostly spent running around Praag taking/defending keeps and BOs. I doubt he saw me, and I doubt I even got an arrow in his face before he got swamped by Order tanks, but it made me really happy to see another blogger out there. Destruction were pulling mighty feats and planting terror deep into my heart (damn Blades. Damn you to hell.) and it was a good night of pushing and pulling objectives.

In terms of levelling, I'm about 20% away from level 40 now. Thankfully I dinged renown level 37 last night, which might be as close as I get before the big 4 0, but I feel like I've put in as much as I could. Petroleum is not having a good time in Tier 2 - as someone pointed out, everyone is now rushing to Tier 4 to get in on the epic battles. Which isn't GOOD people. The lower tiers all contribute to the success of the uppers. Let's get Tiers 1-3 swinging on Monolith again.

What a way to go

My new computer arrived yesterday, so I threw myself into the one thing that had been previously awkward: ORVR. Destro were dominating most areas last night, thanks to (allegedly) 4 warbands rolling around together.

How I came to the screenshot above: I was following a group from the warcamp out into the lakes, just for shits and giggles, and we focused on taking a BO. With a Bright Wizard (!?) tanking, we got to the Hero when I saw a Destro player come from the corner of my screen. No problem I thought, we can cope.

Unfortunately, what followed her was more of a Braveheart moment, as this entire group rose over the hill like a tidal wave. "Fuck me!" might have crossed my lips in real life. We had less than zero chance of surviving. But what an epic fate to suffer. I love this game.

My Wishlist

Inevitably nearly everyone is going to have their own personal wishlist for Warhammer - it's a young game, and is far from perfect, especially thanks to the powers that be rushing the Beta stage. Instead of talking at my boyfriend, I decided to write down some ideas I had:

• Let players duel each other in a designated area of the city - I am not a duelling person, I don't think I ever took part in one in my 2 years of WoW but while in game or reading blogs you'll hear a low whine of people who miss that feature. Duelling your friends is a great way of fine tuning your reaction times and skills without a penalty. And every time I'm near the War Quarter, I see that massive expanse of NPCs fighting each other and wonder - why can't that be enacted for real players? Or at least contain a portal to mini-instances for two people? By itself, it's an unused, wasted piece of the city and dammit, I don't like that.

• Come out with a low-spec version of the game - another "if Blizzard can do this, why can't Mythic?" wish. My laptop is very very low spec but somehow makes it possible to play the game. If there was a way of turning off even more of the graphics, Mythic would be opening up the potential userbase even further. And more players = more money.

• Hotkey for zooming in and out - every once in a while I'll get lazy and take my laptop to bed to do some crafting, or maybe a scenario, but with no mouse scrollwheel, it makes playing awkward. I went into the hotkey section to discover there was no keyboard button that controls the camera zoom function. Am I blind or is this silly?
  

• Improve the ORVR notification system - when I log in I want to know if I'm missing anything in the other zones, where the warband and fighting is, and how many Order are in the ORVR lakes. Kill markers on the map and messages to tell me when something has already happened feels like too little too late. I want to see a swarm of action and dive in headfirst, not type /1 and hope someone out there will update me.

• OPEN THE OTHER CITIES GOD DAMN YOU - come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come onnnnnnnn what are we waiting for here? I am dying to see the Elf city, learn my racial lore, do quests. The Phoenix King should not be holed up in Karl Franz's bloody office! If absolutely necessary, send me in and I'll find all the bugs to help the developers stablise it. I'm pretty good at breaking the game.

• If you're going to make things easier, make it optional - I love Syp but his constant requests for easier XP gain and tome unlocks are frustrating. Yes, levelling after 20 takes time and effort, and yes it's hard to find tome unlocks but that's the game. I don't want to have someone hold my hand and lead me through the game, it ruins the thrill of seeing my hard work pay off. I can't do much about the XP change, but if you're going to change tome unlocks easier, I want to be able to turn it off so it's not readily accessible.
  

• Renown sellers = le suck - I'm getting tired of having to click on every renown gear seller in Altdorf because I can't remember which one has the latest gear for me. Giving them titles (ie: Apprentice -> Artisan) would help. A lot.

• Customised mounts - OK, so we can't have faster mounts, but could we customise them? Saddles, bridles, trophy slots? Can I have a pink pony? Please? Perhaps this could be accessible at renown level 80? :D And while we're here, non combat pets? Pleeeeeeease?
  

• NERF WITCH ELVES - because they make me cry in scenarios. Odogg and the infamous Blades (now renown level 77! Aargh!), I'm looking at both of you. Odogg in particular seems to hate me, I wonder if she's a stolen relative of Kipling...

So not really huge complaints. I'm excited that Live Events have become a consistent part of the game, that gold selling isn't an issue, that people are organised and motivated to play as a team and that bitching is still a dull murmur in the hum of people getting on with their own shit. I can almost guarantee that I'll be subscribing until the end of 2009 if the devs keep the customer service & patches up to scratch. It's a great feeling to be this positive about a game and yet not be addicted. Hooray!

Mother, What's WAR?

So proud of Monolith's Order last night. I logged in expecting to see Dragonwake locked out by Destruction, only to see the exact opposite and Region Chat buzzing with people giving directions and updates. Not one but three warbands were roaming the Elflands looking for Destruction blood, blitzing the Battle Objectives, dodging zergs, planning a defence of Reikland. It was fantastic. So so proud that we're finally turning around, organising ourselves and pwning as we should. After giving up - my poor laptop could not handle the action, and turned the game into more of a slideshow - trying to help in Caledor, I took Kipling back to Dragonwake to quest and do Serpent's Passage* et al to make sure we kept the zone. Because it started trying to turn back on us very quickly... as this game tends to do. In a month or so I should have a better computer and thus will be diving into the fray.

*re: SP, I am still chasing the elusive 100k final damage score. My closest has been 99k.

Serpent's Passage Sample Stats

Am I the only one that absolutely loves reading the stats at the end of each scenario? I love it! I love seeing how everyone else has played in relation to me, why x person didn't do as well (usually because they've died a lot), why y person pwnd. Screenshots also give me a good measure of how I'm progressing on my characters and an idea of what I should expect from others. As usual, click the images for readability:

Can't Keep Control

Spent the last handful of hours trying to exert some influence over the Order/Destruction Dragonwake bar. Talking to a guildie while I was knocking off some awkward quests opened my eyes to the fact that not many players seem to realise that it's not just oRVR that determines the area control. And to be fair, I didn't realise this myself until a few weeks ago. Swivel thy eyes to the image on the right.

So oRVR obviously has the biggest influence over which way the colours go, but if Destruction have 20 players running around completing their quests and Order only have 2, it's not much help either. I might have been imagining this but I swear I saw the Order bar go up a notch when I completed a quest today! It shows that every player in this game matters, even if they never get a single point on their renown bar. Instead of standing around at the warcamp waiting for scenarios to pop, it might make more sense to go finish any leftover quests you have lying around (in return for this, I will lobby for non-combat pets in the near future).

(And even now, reading the bottom part of the text properly, it sinks into my brain that BOs = a boost to your renown. Want more renown in scenarios? Make sure you grab a BO first! One of the major flaws in playing WAR is that half of us are just not reading the content properly. It's a fantastically designed MMO if you're conscious.)

Highest Renown...

...from a single player kill during a scenario so far. Nice huh! I am guessing a certain someone has been ploughing the post-40 renown fields and must be pretty high by now. Which works great for me, the lower level you are in a scenario, the more renown you get. But still, I look at the number "598" and can't quite believe that one player kill could net so much. End game scenarios are now looking quite promising.

PS - had some real life stuff to tackle recently, hence the lack of posts. I'm intending to get stuck in this week.

So Shamans are AWESOME, huh?

Playing as Icepick yesterday I came across not one but two RVR flagged Destruction players in Ostland. No idea why they were running that way, they were quite close to what I think is their warcamp, but this is the first time I've seen anyone flagged in such an obvious enemy area. So, being a good slave to Order, I attacked them both. One was level 13 and went down too fast (I needed Marauders for a quest) to comment on, but Boomsok was another matter. The little bugger managed to get me down to half health (!) before I managed to murder him in cold blood amidst the trees. His self-heals were epic and I'll definitely think twice about jumping a Shaman in the future.

And obviously, when a scenario popped for both of us 2 minutes later, I was absolutely spit roasted by the Destruction team in revenge. D'oh.

Through a door, down some stairs...

...hit some red-level Destro NPCs, turn around and run for your life. But stop to take screenshots, because it's a beautiful game. All in the Troll Country oRVR area.

How Tier 4 RVR feels for Order right now

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