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.

More questing in Chaos Wastes!

...and not only did Kipling end up with a massive 80% towards level 38 via questing alone yesterday, but I got my very first bestial unlock! I was having a poke along the foot of a mountain range and found a named Bray Shaman that naturally, I had to kill, and resulted in the unlocking of said tome. This is the easiest way that I've found to get a bestial trophy in the game, short of going back to the lower level areas and killing champions. But your mileage may vary.

(When I went to the Library to pick my trophy, I chose the Ceremonial Dagger and was instantly disappointed that it was so tiny. They could have made it at least half the size of a regular dagger! Meh. Maybe I can pick my teeth with it or something.)

I unlocked a lot of tomes while I was running around yesterday, as well as meeting Dragon Ogres for the first time:


Talk about a beast! I don't want to know how they came into this world.

In conclusion: I like Chaos Wastes a lot - creepy landscape, new types of mobs, more space to move. I hope Mythic does something to make the mobs less clustered in the Tier 4 Elf lands, because I just can't be bothered with the level of difficulty there at the moment.

Things to do next: work on Kipling's renown level. While it's not pitifully low, I'd like to see the gap close between rank and renown before 40 for efficiency's sake.

Time to Get the Book Out

So if there's one thing I'm good at in MMOs, it's getting lost. If there's another, it's falling off or getting stuck in things, but that's another story for another day. Having dinged level 37 today via Keep taking (1) and a scenario, I was a little stuck. Another level to churn out. So I took myself to Praag - I had a few "I'm tired of looking at you, go and annoy this NPC in this camp" quests. Riding around there is straightforward, despite the clustered landscape - which may I say, I love, it's so dense and realistic. It reminded me a lot of the ruins of Eastern Plaguelands, only far more advanced.

But then I got to the south of the Chaos Wastes and nothing seemed to make sense... the maps showed a path that didn't exist. Was there a tunnel? Was the path a lie? After having a poke around for a few minutes, I gave up, not wanting to risk being the next snack for the nearby Champion, and booked it back to Dragonwake. Sometimes things aren't what they seem.

Once I did get back to the Chaos Wastes, I found a nice selection of quests - one LOLworthy chain taking me into the RVR zone - accidentally found Bastion Stair (thus clearing two spaces in my quest log!) fell off a cliff and logged out at the camp in the middle.



It seems to be quite a small zone, so I'm going to have more of a poke around in the next few days. That is if I get a chance - I'm emigrating to the US next Wednesday, so I have plenty of packing to get on with!