Grab Bag of Playing

I'm keeping my Archmage on ice until the next patch so that I can try the Tier 3 Gates of Ekrund. I'm not in the mood to play another character, and Tier 4 is a back and forth keep game, so nothing huge to report. So how about some random screenshots from the ol'screenshot folder? Yeah? Yeah!

This made me laugh entirely too much:


Ooh, pretty trees in Empire Tier 3:


Killed this guy on the way up to an Avelorn warcamp, finally got the unlock for the Moldy Coin Purse. No wonder nearly everyone has this pocket item, yet I've never seen it (it's a high traffic area):


Last but not least, the view from a Keep, as Monolith's Order pushes back Destruction:

Oh no! They killed Karl!

But bloody hell, congratulations to Destruction on Karak Eight Peaks! They killed Karl Franz! I've not been playing much this weeks (Sims 2 has been pulling me into it's black hole) but I've been keeping an eye on Monolith's Realm War page, and we're inching closer and closer to Tchar'zanek. It's just a matter of time...

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?

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.

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.

Kipling hits 40

Hooray! A shot of my tome, because everyone does it.

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!

What Now?

I seem to hit a wall in every game without fail. Back in the day (um, 1997-8), I resorted to ringing the Nintendo hotline because I couldn't work out how to get past the second dungeon in Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (to date, one of the only decent game I've ever completed). I like Warhammer and I've just renewed my subs, so I'm not going to up and quit, but I need to find a solution to the corner I'm stuck in.

Basically:

• Kipling (nearly level 37) seems to be surrounded by quests that are too hard - too many sensitive mobs that respawn too quickly. ORVR is a killer because I'm running on ghetto specs, so until I get my new desktop (post-emigration, but very soon!) I can't join in there. I did complete some quests in the Dwarfland, but I'm reluctant to zone jump too much, in case it makes questing on my alts boring. I could happily ding via grinding Serpent's Passage, it's a brilliant scenario, but it doesn't pop enough to keep me busy.
  

• Icepick does not like RVR. No one seems to heal her, so it's an exercise in frustration. I'm one of those crazy people that likes to run facefirst into a group of the opposing team (quote from /sc "WTF is that chick DOING?"), but it's a shortlived joy if the healing is nonexistent*. Questing is more than easy, especially when Knights can easily solo champions. But when your renown is affected by your level, it makes more sense to keep them as even as possible. And all the fun ORVR is still in Tier 3.
  

• Petroleum wants scenarios. Scenarios refuse to pop. Pop scenarios, pop! Aside from that, I'm loving Archmages. I especially love that one move that's a *zzzzzapp!* lightning bolt from the sky. I'm aiming to play her all the way to Tier 4, so hopefully the scenario popping won't be a massive inconvenience and I can keep moving forward in a fluid motion.
  

So in short, Tier 4 has questing problems, and Tier 1/2 has scenario popping problems. I'm not sure much can be done about the scenarios... maybe try and boost server population? But they could definitely improve the ease of Elfland quests - after Saphery, there just don't seem to be a good distribution of achievable quests. Kadrin Valley onwards has a far superior layout.

*Healing in Tier 4 is amazing. I love you guys.

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.

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.