Grimnir's Grudge | MMO Fansites

Well, I have to say my vacation was fairly decent. Spent a lot of time drinking, made my way down to Key West for their Fantasy Fest, went snorkeling a handful of times to check out the various sea-life. I spent a lot of time out of the sun though, you can get burned pretty easily down there if you're not used to the light. Coming home to WAR was disappointing at first.

The first night I logged in guildies were absent. I think there were about 5 online. I solo'd my way through scenarios to rr55 on my Engi and finally polished off my full Invader set. Yay 10ft range bonus! Alas, no one to share it with. Monday was another disappointing day as I logged in to find 5 people yet again, which dropped of to just me and one other within minutes. Where had everyone gone? We usually field at least 20 on weekdays! This was probably when I noticed that Altdorf was sitting at two stars...

I found out some time later that City Sieges had been more than rampant, but the defenses had been solid... during prime time at least. The de-ranking of the city came from late-night/early morning sieges. Somehow, Destro is able to field 4 warbands at any given time of the day, and used this to spank Altdorf silly. I kinda understand where everyone went. The same place everyone goes when they're losing against a force they can't fight on even ground, somewhere else. Well, at least last night our glorious guild leader returned from about a week of the flu and pushed the buttons to get us into the premier alliance on Badlands.

Ah, what a fresh change of pace. Immediately we went from 5 online to about 20, and out alliance numbers changed from our guild plus one or two other members, to around 90. There was a huge RvR push as we started coordinating multiple warbands, we pushed out of Kadrin Valley and Eataine (Empire had been locked down previously to this), and even took the Elf pairing all the way up to Caledor before the Destro zerg was summoned. I found a new addon earlier called Whom. It gives a count of how many players were online for each tier and spits out the totals for you. At the height of our push, Whom was reporting 112 r40's and 34 T4 (r31-r39) players. At the same time however, the keep spam was showing 130 Destro, and they were also flipping a second zone at the same time.

What are we supposed to do at that point? When it's taking us every available player to fail at defending a single keep, and another zone is dropping almost uncontested, morale drops VERY quickly. Sure, the fights were good and hard, but there was no progress, and very little in the way of slowing down the opposing side. While Order on Badlands can show up and rock it out when we really try, it didn't take more than an hour before Destro could outzerg us and flip the tables. I believe Altdorf was under siege shortly after I logged out for the night.

So it's a mixed bag for me. New alliance, lots of people to run with on one hand, then getting outzerged and consistently losing on the other hand. It's a breath of life for our guild, and Order on the server that we settled into a much larger alliance, I just fear that that breath may be getting knocked out of us awfully fast. I don't really mind being outnumbered to be honest. Scenarios pop faster, there's always a fight waiting for you, typically the amount of bad players on the opposing side far outnumbers the good. For the sake of Order as a whole however, I get a little worried.

Highlights last night include soloing a Chosen, Sorc, and Marauder at the same time in Dragonwake with my Engi. Getting pulled off a keep and dying in mid-air to a zerg. Killing off a line of 20 Destro that were running up to defend a Keep we were attacking. Soloing multiple Witch Elves that kept trying to gank me (thank you 3s KD on self-destruct). Still racking up top damage in most of the scenarios that I run, without any specific assistance... The list goes on, I enjoy my time in WAR very much, even if we are losing as a whole. Then again, that's the real issue isn't it?

This really is a Realm v Realm kind of deal now. If your faction isn't playing up to par, no one is going to survive. You might be the biggest badass on the field (not saying that I am, plenty are better), but it's still just a drop in the bucket when facing a hoard that outnumbers you by at least 20. WAR has very little room for meaningful personal achievements, everything is overshadowed by the fact that if your realm is losing, than everyone is suffering. This is something that I really don't have an answer for, some sort of balancing for an outnumbered realm is obvious. The feeling that one man does not make a dent however is a product of design. If it were intended, it was done very well.

So a breath of life for my guild, and myself to a degree. I'll always enjoy being a wrecking ball on the open field and being crafty enough to solo classes that I probably shouldn't. There's plenty of opportunity to enjoy the game, but also enough to get tired of it. RvR isn't everyones cup of tea, at least not out on the battlefields. Too many people in one area and it just turns into a sea of bodies dying back and forth until one wave crashes over the other and victory finally rushes in. I am content. We're on a losing slide at the moment which causes more people to disappear, but at the same time, it's just another crash of the wave. The tides rise and fall, winning comes and goes. It might end up being like this for a month or two, but it won't last forever.

It never does.

I start to pray, every single time a new patch is released, that I do not have to go through all of my addons (Count is at 51 now), to disable, and enable, and update just to make my current UI usable. The next patch coming down the lines is certainly going to break more than a few, and hopefully, the good little developers are playing on PTS to figger out what updates need to be deployed on patch day. Right now, pretty much every single one of these Addons is working to full capacity, except nLootLink. I still haven't figured that one out.

Addons are a huge part of any MMO. You can load the standard UI and play the game without any issues whatsoever. Or you can massively enhance the game and play to your own tune. What I've noticed with WAR over time, and other MMO's do this for sure, is the integration of utility addons into the default UI. Another thing that I pray for during every patch, is a few of these knocked off my list in support of a WAR version. Not that I have anything against these addon developers, but at least the War developers get paid for their work, hence, update without question...

I'll even give ye a slightly bigger picture to see all the addons I'm talking about.

I've been thinking about doing an entry all about UI and addons, what's good, what's great, and the disappointments of awesome addons that simple fell off a cliff due to some patch that broke it. Instead, or as some may expect following that process, I'll simple be linking to each addon, and giving a brief sentance on its functionality.

Obviously, I wouldn't be using them if they sucked, or were not working at this time. So here we go!

Auction Stats - Adds a bit more info for the AH-Elitists. Good to know how much something should be priced for if ya can't find it at the time. What sells for how much, etc.

AutoBand - Awesome if you're frequently heading a WB, keeps Tanks, Healers, DPS, all balanced across the groups, and autokicks logged off players every 60s

AutoDismount - Oldie, still works. Very nice.

BlackBox - UI mod for the respawn timer.

BuffBegoneUltra - I should probably trash this... Supposedly broke back in October

CareerText - Takes a while to build the DB, but eventually every time you see an enemy in combat, their Career will appear in their health bar.

CaVES - Goes next to your Equipped stuff. Lists changes, in case you need details on different sets of stuff.

Compact VPs - Adds % to domination to a couple things, like WarBoard

Curse Profiler - Meh, tried getting rid of it, keeps my profile updated somehow I guess.

Dammaz Kron - Best UI addon to date. Track your kills in a very sexy manner using the ToK.

Dye Preview - Look cool all by yourself, or check out differnt dye combos. No one else will see the changes but you.

EZCraft - adds context menus to Apoth/Tali, less drag n drop. Highly recommended for crafters

Fixer - Supposedly keeps things in place when they try to default. Still having trouble with my chat boxes though.

HealAll - TALK to healers? Bah, they know what I want. One right click removes my res sickness.

Horizontal Mechanic Bar - Numerical bar instead of whatever your mechanic is. Works great for Rage and Combustion.

ItemRack - Can be used for equipment sets/tactics. I mostly use it for quickly comparing different items. Pretty powerful lil guy.

Join Selected Scenarios - Since QQueuer broke (Its been fixed a bit), I started using JSS. Haven't seen the need to switch back just yet. I probably will though.

JunkDump - Sell all that junk with one button! Careful though, among the "White" items include Standards, Mounts, and Siege Weapons. Gotta add them to the Exceptions list.

Lib, Lib, Lib - Various required libs

MapMonster - Pin cool points to yer map, or set waypoints for running to.
   Navigator - Adds a compass with said points an waypoints on it.

Minmap - Not really min, but bigger and square. Default map UI replaced. You lose buttons for various addons though.

Miracle Grow Remix - Awesome-uber-leet-sauce for Cultivating. DO NOT cultivate without it.

nLootLink - Right, still working with this one...

Numeric Influence - Der, numbers instead of a Bar, though I use both.

Phantom - removes default UI elements very well.

QuestTrackerHelper - Another Oldie, auto assigns quests depending on your zone to the map and quest list.

nRarity - Adds outlines in grey/white/green/blue/purple/gold to items.

RealmStatus - Easily track all the tiers

Reported! - Mail addon for those pesky gold-spams. Just click report at the top, then send off an auot generated report to the Banhammer crew.

ShiftWho - See a name in chat? shift-click to do an auto /who on them

SpamMeNot - blocks (not so much lately) tells from gold spammers and autoreports them (still works quite well) to the Banhammer crew.

Squared - ZOMG, required. I love Squared. I could live without all the rest if I only had this one.

TargetRing - buggers running behind rocks trying to hide? TR keeps a lock on them as long as they're in range. Handy for RDPS/Healers

Tome Titan - Yeah, well... I like my unlocks. This shows just about all of em.

TDPS Meter - For Warboard

Trakario - When an objective is picked up, this shows you who's got it Name and Career for both sides.

VerticalMorale - Yup. That means up and down.

Vertigo - I actually don't need this one anymore, but it allows you to have vertical action bars.

Warboard - UI replacer for a LOT of stuff. Minimalist design.
   TDPS - Adds TDPS to the board
   FPS - Adds FPS to the board
   GameMenu - Awesome, adds the GameMenu to the board in itty bitty icons.

Warhammer Census - Finally this is working again. A complex /who algorithm tracks all the players in the game in your faction. Kinda cool for tracking who the big/active guilds on the server are.

WSCT - Lots of options for any kind of damage/event/heals coming in and out. Very neat, mess with it

WarWhisperer - /t replace, works more like an IM service. Keeps a history of everyone you talk to, and what was said.

XPStatus +G - UI element that has XP/RP/GP/Gold and time to level

zMailMod - an example of things that WAR has added into the default UI. zMail is still being worked on, with mass-add per profession its still a keeper.

There's a couple other ones out there that I'm looking into at the moment. Just for good measure, I leave you all with a current (mostly) shot of my UI.

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