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!

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.)

Icepick: Still in Troll Country

I'm still playing a maximum of 2 hours a day at the moment, which sounds like a lot, but isn't really - it's enough for a few scenarios, INF gathering, quests, crash to desktops and a trip to Altdorf to unload my bags in the bank/auction house. The above picture is from the first stage of Chapter 6's Public Quest The Blighted Farm.

Thanks to all the zombies you can pick up a lot of Apothecary water* while you're grinding out INF/doing the three or four quests available in this area. For people who have yet to get this far into the zone: if you've got a group of around 3/4 people, head south a little further, there's an easier PQ there. Why not just do this one? Because at the end, the Hero comes with a Champion and adds that are easily pulled along with him, and it's just a massive headache unless you have two tanks and a decent healer. The recommended number of players is nine, but I think you could do it with six.

[Oh, and while we're here, I need to give a massive shout out to Kyris, who orchestrated some of the finest healing in one of the PQs the other day - if you're on Monolith, watch out for him and feed him treats, his heals are worth more than gold can buy.]

I'm almost ready to move into Ostland, I have to scout around the oRVR area and finish off a quest, but I dinged level 14 so (as with Kipling) I am well on track for levelling. Scenarios don't pop often in the afternoon (which is morning on the East coast), but I was happy to see Pheonix Gate twice today. I think I might spend some time in there + filling my bags with loot to sell before I actively do some more questing. If you're not careful, you can level too fast in this game.

*One of my impossible aims at the moment is to force down the price of water/soil on the auction house, as it's ridiculously high. I don't think I'll be able to do it, but at least undercutting others by several pieces of silver/gold means that I'm guaranteed sales.

Procrastinating

I now have quests in the Isle of the Dead.

I'm scared to go back.

It's creepy.

Procrastination takes the form of hanging out in Dragonwake, where its safe and everyone knows your name. Like Cheers, but with more crossbows.

Cow Tipping Across the Universe

Came across this quest in the Empire Tier 4 zone just now. I won't ruin the ending, but it caused a severe LOL reaction...