One of the things we’ve been discussing with the Core Testers lately is the economy of WAR.  We received some excellent feedback and we’re formulating plans based on that discussion, however we want to open up the dialogue to all players for broader input.


As we continue to look at Warhammer Online (where it’s been and where it’s going), we’re examining the game from a macro and micro (big picture, little picture) level. One of the more macro areas we have discussed is the overall game economy. To put it bluntly, it’s not where we or the players would like it to be.  The designs and decisions made during development left us in a hard position, where, in order to jumpstart the economy, we need to make some changes.  Before we go into that, let us look at the status of the economy now.


The basic principle of a viable sustainable economy is supply and demand. If these are balanced, economies can sustain themselves. Tipping too far to either extreme can cause an economy to falter.  In WAR, one can see examples where we made a misstep based on this principle; too much supply for the demand (plenty of gold, nothing to spend it on), and not enough supply for demand (not enough items are tradable). In a way, these two dynamics feed one another.


Let’s look at an example:
Public Quests provide loot bags which allow the owner to choose an item that is specifically tailored to their class and bind on pickup (BOP). This does two things; limits the potential demand for the product because it is class specific and makes it so it can’t be offered in trade because it is BOP. This feeds the problem that there are  not enough items being available. Compounding the issue, if the item is not useful to the person that earned it, they will sell it, gather gold, and due to the lack of items in demand, they have little to spend their gold on.  It’s a vicious cycle.


So how do we look at ways to change our current economy to balance both supply and demand?  To accomplish this we need to look at solutions that will tweak the way items are rewarded. Not just how useful they are to the individual, but also as potential trade goods in the economy.  We have a good idea on how to do this, but we want to throw the issue out there and get some feedback proactively, before we settle on a design.
 
What we’d like are some thoughts on how to change our world drops, PQ loot, and the like to make them more viable and valuable to the economy which will hopefully balance supply and demand.  Examples would be: making items BOE versus BOP, making items useful to multiple classes, etc.  
 
Making some changes will allow us to redefine the balance of supply and demand and give us greater flexibility in introducing items going forward, which will benefit characters of all ranks. 
 
We’re looking forward to your comments and feedback.
 
James "That Guy" Casey

Associate Producer
Mythic Entertainment
-Link to the Forum Post-

 
Ah, Economy. There's an aspect of the game that's gone more or less untouched since release. Oh sure there's been additions as the like of Medallions, Scarabs and now Insiginas, but these are autonomous and mostly separate from the Gold standard economy. Boot-selling has finally been fixed after nearly a year of easy money being made from collecting a few Officer medallions, although they came from players that made their way through the game legitimately at least once. You can find Gold Scarabs on the Auction House, but their value is slim if only for a few Soul Talismans that are easily enough farmed. Anything resembling Economy is watered down to the point that unless it's an ultra-rare drop, farming up the cash for it is just as easy as trying to get it yourself. I've been taking my time on this post mostly to wiggle through everything that I wanted to have in here without having to write a damn book about it.

The first thing that comes to mind would be a revamp of the BoP/BoE system. Currently, the biggest gripes over gear is doing PvE dungeons that will drop something for anyone that is NOT present at the time (or so it seems), and a lot of gear going un-usable and being salvaged or just sold off. Because the PvE armor sets do not require renown to wear, allowing them to hit the AH unchecked would be disastrous for end-game balance of commitment:power scaling. 

Currently there IS a system in place to allow players to get Wards without wearing a single piece of the armor, I know as I've gotten my lesser and greater wards on my Chosen doing this (he's RR31 at the moment). Although repairable set item drops in PvE would alleviate some of the issues with getting this gear, tying them to a tome unlock (killing the boss X times) to allow them to even be purchased or traded would go much further. Essentially any piece of PvE warded set gear could go on the auction house, but the restriction would be on whether or not the player had gotten the unlock tied to it in order to purchase the piece. It's another system that guarantees you will eventually get your piece, but ties into player based economy at the same time AND requires players to experience content before reaping the rewards.

Another piece of changing that system would be to go back through and tweak the BoP rates so pretty much everything in the game no longer has it except for the most obvious stuff, and then making any item that is bought off the AH to become BoP when it's removed from their mailbox. Adding a system that keeps the AH from being gamed by gold farmers and sellers will go a LONG way to stabilizing the economy and revealing where it's truly at.

Another place that I feel could really afford to be looked at are the Chapter Influence rewards in PvE. For one, the first part of the influence reward is always absolute garbage to the point of being insulting. Most of the time I don't even bother taking it from the Rally Master at the camps. It should be removed, and the green item should be moved into the first spot, allowing room for the Elite reward to be a purple drop. Seriously, if I went out and killed 50 guys for a reward of a +2 strength talisman someone would be wearing their own ass for a hat. Alternatively, put some real damn talismans in there as a reward, and I don't mean blue ones either, or a stack of blue potions for your archtypes DPS/HPS or heal/resto pots. Also, tie the rewards to the stages. If you never flip past the first stage then you don't get the advanced and elite rewards. More gated requirements for participation in content is good. It keeps people from farming the chumps in order to get their easy loot and encourages groups to get together and battle through some of these awesome PQ's that are ignored out in the world.  

Allow people to continue to accumulate influence even after they recieve their Elite reward. It would keep people coming back at regular intervals in T4 to stock up on good potions or talismans without needing to be a craftsman. Basically on a cumulative scale you could continue to accumulate influence to receive the same rewards over and over again. Say every 10k inf you receive a stack of 5 potions, then every 20k inf you get a purple talisman or something like that. People would be more likely to return and help out after they get their initial gear out of it.

 
Of course, most of this I could care less about. The real money makers should come from the fallen bodies of your enemies. As such, I would encourage our RvR currency to be locked similar to the Scenario currency. No down-conversion, and only allow up-conversion after your renown rank allows it. By doing this you have opened up additional possibilities when it comes to looting, possibilities for itemizing renown ranks instead of dropping normal ranked items, and possibilities for a new segment of the auction house that allows you to sell by medallion and crest costs instead of gold. Keep up with me here because it gets more interesting.

Most recently with Insignias and Emblems hitting the Scenario market we can start to see a trend as to where focus could be shifting. Scenarios net you weapons of all types purchasable with weapon oriented currency. I think on top of this, drops during scenarios should also be weapons. BoE weapons and only as high in RR as the player dropping them in the first place. Get some itemization in there for purple, blue, and green drops for every couple of RR's then balance them against the current scenario weapons. This means you have additional ways to get your loot, from drops and currency.

Originally, Medallions and Crests were added into the game to supplement horrid drop rates and randomized bags. Why aren't these two factors being added into scenarios along with the currency? Take for example at the end of each scenario the winning team gets a lottery roll. One gold bag containing a weapon closest to their RR, then random amounts of other bags depending on the total score between both sides (500 v 499 being the best score possible). The Gold bag would be the next blue weapon you could possibly get with a selection of archtype based liniments, talismans, and crafting materials if you weren't interested in the weapon itself, or fused-whatever-currency. Purple would contain the next lower ranked purple weapon that you could use, Blue would be next blue down the list, etc. etc.. Think one gold bag per scenario is too much? Have it happen once an hour or every three hours. Want to see people scramble around like crazy? Announce at the beginning of the scenario that this battle would be for bag drops in big dramatic fashion.

Either way, adding drops to PvP and Lottery rolls every handful of scenarios would stimulate something silly and get you out from under the death stare from people that have been collecting, nay HOARDING, medallions for the past year. These items hitting the Auction House would only go so far since the required currency to buy and sell them would be the very Emblems and Insignias that it requires to buy them from a vendor. Again, gating the rewards by requiring content to be experienced. Granted, prices would be regulated by the players instead of the developers, the only thing devs could really do is put a reasonable cap on the amount of Emblems and Insignias allowed to be requested at a time.

The trick to adding in tons of content is to blitz the field with so much stuff at one time that people scramble around like crazy to get it across all facets of the game. With the release of 1.3.4 dumping all the candy into one corner of the game, things have been pretty sour for anyone that actually enjoyed RvR and weren't that fond of facerolling premade scenario groups. Developers shot off a little too early, gave the entire playerbase one singular goal, and then made it so ridiculously unattainable that players became fed up and stopped trying to do it legitimately. Now instead of every other player having a fancy weapon and fighting over who gets theirs next, we have players literally running into the middle without worrying about dying, KNOWING that they'll be rewarded for losing and embracing the fact.

It's really not that hard to AFK through a scenario. Put on some TV, click yes when a scenario pops, run behind a building. Wiggle your mouse occasionally and collect emblems/freenown. You people can all burn and die as far as I care, but I understand why you're doing it.

Without further ado I would present to you the same system be added to RvR as well. Renown based armor drops from players, and a continuation of Renown Gear merchants that extends all the way up the RR's. Add on top of this something else that all the hoarded medallions could finally be used for. Relatively cheap renown gear that should be slightly less powerful than the equivalent set gear (mid RR40's being better than annihilator except the set bonuses, but not as good as conq). Granted of course the renown gear merchants would never sell anything besides greens, wheras drops from high RR players could be blues or purples... 

Considering the epic endgame renown grinding that is ahead of us all, I think we've been secretly wondering as a community, why are armor sets the only thing we have to look forward to? Add RR based gear to the game for RvR as well as scenarios and you'll spread out the population a little bit more. Add lots of filler in-between the uber shinies and you won't have people grinding their fingers to the bone to get it. With the current system in scenarios, people WILL eventually get their shinies, but in the meantime they have NOTHING to look forward to. Give them a something else to play with and more than likely they will calm down on the ultra-focus of uber-shiny at the end of the nigh-endless tunnel. Renown is just another leveling system, and it's BY FAR the longer path to take, yet we have how many thousands less items involved in it? Two weapons every 10 RR's past 40, and a grand total of 5 armor sets? Compared to the THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of normal R1-R40 pieces of gear?

Alright then guy-who-picked-up-itemization-responsibility, get your ass to work on finishing the game. Maybe we'll see something in 1.3.6, because I know something to that magnitude wont make it with 1.3.5

Cheers!

Of course, by mid-game I'm talking about T2 and T3, not RR60.

Having recently leveled up a handful of toons my insights to these two areas of the game are as sharp as they've ever been. As such, I've been picking at my brain thinking of ways to make the RvR flow better. T2 isn't bad, typically 2 warbands are the minimum on each side of the field, during primetime, peaking at around 5 throughout all of the pairings. T3 is a bit more barren however, peaking 3 warbands on the best day I've seen so far, and occasionally going with no RvR at all. This I partially blame on Land of the Dead, although many new players returning to the game have no idea what it is. However, the other half is the self-fulfilling curse of having no players will net you no players. Rather than try and force their way through a dead tier, players are more than content to go back and enjoy T1 and T2 all over again. The other alternative is to quickly grind their way to R32 and enter T4, which is more often than not a very painful experience. I've seen my fair share of players wearing Obliterator early in T4. 

The solution that everyone interested in a good fight would prefer, and can rarely find, is simply an active RvR lake with fighting on both sides so they can continue the action and excitement over from T2. It's time to break out the funnel. We have something of a lack of passing time in Warhammer. There's nothing that really notes when a day passes, it's just constant fighting or waiting. My funnel would be to introduce an off-time for 2 pairings, and leave one pairing as the main focus until it is either captured or an arbitrary amount of time has passed before freezing the zone and moving on. Battles simply don't last forever, and they really shouldn't in T3. There hasn't been a population to support 3 pairings for over a year now, maybe 2 pairings if you get lucky.

With a single pairing available, players would have little reason aside from skirmishing to be in the other pairings. However, one has to plan for expansion as 8 warbands in a zone might make things a bit unstable. Based on sustained population in the lakes (something like 15m interval checks), the battlefront would dynamically expand to open two pairings at one time instead of just one provided the population could support it. Say for example the sweet spot in T3 is 72 vs 72, or 3 warbands each, the sustained population would need to hit 150 total players for 30m (two 15m intervals) before another pairing would open up. At this point, a new pairing opens and gains it's own timer. If the 150 players is not sustained, then the first zone would simple go inactive and the lakes would return to a single pairing at the end of it's duration. Otherwise it would open up the third pairing and continue the rotation. Now, in the unlikely event that a tier is hosting 300+ players, all three zones would be open, and timers would be removed until it drops back down.

This is just another example of a content-free change to some rulesets that could perk up areas of the game which are under-used. It's scalable so when the server fills up at any given time, people aren't cramped into a sardine can. Also, it's randomized, so you aren't limited to the same content all the time when there's plenty off to the side going unused. It focuses on getting people action any time of the day and driving as many players as needed into one spot. If the live pairing is Empire, you should see a surge of people getting into the Empire lake and going crazy. Empire PQ's should start lighting up across the board. Open warbands would form and /region would spam "LFM! LFM!" at frequent intervals. It's not crazy talk either. You know what happens to T3 when either faction gets Land of teh Durr? Anyone over R25 (that's trying to escape T3 QUICKLY) hits up their fave flightmaster and BAM, instant-funnel to a zone. The problem being RvR quickly dies in T3 as a suffering result.

I wouldn't mind seeing LotD being R32 or higher because of this reason...

The recent resurgence of interest in the game, post Endless Trial, brought some life back to RvR in T3. A few tweaks since there's population to test it out would come in awfully handy. You could even apply this ruleset to T4, each pairing unlocking all three zones, while leaving the other 2 pairings locked up tight. Not to mention how incredibly effective this would be at breaking up the zerg. There's no way you could roll through three zones in one massive blob and expect to capture the pairing, the opposition would just snag something from behind you rather easily. Of course, one would have to adjust how the VP pool works so you capture the pairing instead of individual zones. It'd give the world that connected feeling that we miss out on by using Flightmasters to get to all the battles instead of just running north and south through the zone transitions. Once you finish leveling you kinda miss out on that a bit and it breaks up the flow of the game. I would MUCH rather run through seamless transitions instead of seeing loading screens.

For example lets say that there's less than 150 people doing RvR in T4 when you log on. Throughout the day on this pretend server Destro has been doing really well, and each pairing has gone along nearly flipped, but not quite enough. The old State of Realm addon would show you all three pairings having little activity, with T1-T3 noted below. My new mockup however would show you a single pairing, with each Keep and it's associated BO's for each zone in a single pairing. Also, take note of the Fortresses on each end. There's gotta be good stuff in those! (always capture-able, but defenders can use a flightmaster to get inside if the outer doors are still standing, whoops different thought).

Mind you, the other pairings haven't been locked, as you can tell by the percentage left on the zone. That percentage would be locked in place until the zone timer (i didn't stick it on there, but assume one at the bottom section of each pairing, hurr durr), expired and a new zone opened up. Possibly a 5 minute downtime in between so people wrap up their fighting and get moving to the next zone?  

I find it's always therapeutic to end my brain functions with incoherent rambling. Sorry about that. I've intentionally left a lot of stuff out as I think it might spur YOUR mind as well. Man I love this job. =D

Cheers!

Thank you google. You make all the random things I find possible.

While contemplating writing up a summary on the 1.3.4 patch I stumbled across a relatively new site for WAR. Although the author of it stopped playing the game back in October, it's still up and running somewhere on the internet. Basically what you have here is graphing of the VP's in each tier and pairing. It grabs the past 24-hours of data and spits em out into something pretty. Nice and handy to have when figuring out what kind of activity you can expect on any given server in RvR.

You can check out the authors blog here.

http://www.pvphistory.com/

So maybe a few of you guys follow me on Twitter, probably not. Well, like 5 of you do. Anyway, I don't pass judgement, Twitter is what it is and most people couldn't be bothered with it. However, if you DO follow me or the likes of @werit @vn_cydoc @siberwulf or @cpodemayo you might have noticed a bit of frothing this afternoon.

First off, this stemmed from the recent patch that removed the ability to purchase RvR gear with medallions, and sell it for gold. Apparently you could make something in the range of 45g for each Invader broken all the way down to Decimator gear. One Invader crest, 45g, 100 Invader Crests, 4500g. Okay, I can see where that might be a problem, no biggie.

Connect the dots now, what can you buy with unused RvR currency at the moment? Well, there's a set for each tier and crest. Then you have heal/ap potions. Once you're all set on your gear it's really just coming down to heal/ap potions. That's a LOT of crests sitting around fairly useless. I figure across all my toons I have a couple thousand Officer medallions in equivalency that I have unused.

Another line to another dot. 1.3.4 is bringing us RvR weaponry. This has already been confirmed in various places across the internets. Unfortunately it's also bringing us RvR weapon currency. The question is why, and so far the answer has been to start a level playing field for all players. Now, a lot of players are concerned about the premade vs pug scenario matches. Since the Weapon Currency will mainly be gained from RvR, it's not really promoting much of a level playing field at all. The premades will quickly earn their weapons anyway, and will be right on top of the game with the best that these weapons offer us. As far as we know at the moment, there isn't any real changes coming to scenarios that is going to remedy this situation.

To be honest, I could care less that premades are beating pugs silly. It's their damn job.

However, to say that a new currency is needed to create a level playing field is just silly, especially when the playing field involves RvR. Land of the Dead scarabs? Yeah, fine, that made sense. Those are from PvE, you don't kill people to get them, although during the live event you sure could (and guess who did all the killing? premades!). The point I'm getting at is simply that there is NO LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. The haves and have-nots are going to be seperated as far as the game allows these discrepancies. The haves will have the BEST weapons, armor, accessories, pocket items, potions, talismans, liniments, and abilities. The have-nots will... uh... not, for the most part. So why beat around the bush? Are you so deluded that this is going to change anything? 

This is simply a brand-new grind. Thanks for that. We all love grinding our fingers to the bone. At least we can kill people in the process... well, at least some of us can, like the ones that aren't having problems killing people in the first place. Look, just get rid of the Weapon currency and stick to the RvR currency that we have all accumulated over time. Do the haves get it faster than the have-nots? Well yeah, but they were going to get it faster anyway. It's the same playing field all around, with less grind. Which is a good thing!

Yanno, for a conversation lasting 20 tweets or so, this was all rolling around in my head. Now onto the meat of the matter.

Since we're introducing more stuff that people will want to spend their hard-earned RvR currency on anyways, you might want to go with things on the lower end of the scale to pad your options a little bit. If you make weapons scale in power with a range of 500-1000 medallions, there should really be a lower end that buffers some of that savings away. Things that are consumable, or wear off over time. Things like +20 stat talismans, r200 crafting ingredients (blue seeds! zomg!), r200 talisman/apothecary containers, maybe some weapons or armor normally found at PQ's, tons of stuff! Fill in the bottom end of a vendor with gear and it'll make reaching that top end so much harder! 

 Here's the thing that makes it all beautiful, randomize the loot list over time. Ok, well this leads into the other part of the equation. Where are you going to put these vendors? In my mind, they belong out on the battlefields. Skaven scavenger merchant caravans! Picking clean the bodies of the fallen, there would be one roaming Skaven merchant with a pair of Rat Ogres pulling his cart of goods. Neutral to both sides and a fan of violence! See, the thing is these merchants wouldn't want to roam around in an active battlefield. That'd just be suicide getting caught between two blood thirsty tyranid swarms of raging warriors. Oh no, these merchants would be in the other six RvR lakes just begging for small group on group confrontation. Or rather, ganking.

I've always been a big fan of ganking, even though I'm quite horrible at it.

This is the beauty of the thing. Each time a zone flips, in either direction, the merchant would be displaced. The zone coming out of contention would get a new merchant with a fresh loot table and probably a bit of skirmishing over who gets to sample his wares first. How cool is that? Haven't you ever been in the middle of fighting over a zone when it flipped to watch the battlefield go empty immediately? It's frustrating! 

Also, for the people working at Mythic, the hardest part of the implementation would be coding the randomizer for when zones flip for a couple dozen different loot tables. The great part is that since it's in RvR, dead enemy players could be wearing gear from anywhere in the world! Fill loot tables to your hearts content! Aside from that it should just be 9 copies of the same merchant, pathing across the RvR lake like the good ol' cultivating mobs do in the PvE areas. Look, your dev team is undeniably shrunk. Making small things like this goes a loooong way to bringing something new to the game. Do something like this with every patch, just something small and interesting that is persistent and draws in a bit of RvR. It's not the scale of huge live events and dungeons, but it's something players will look to when they're tired of the options presented to them. People LIKE options.

So, to sum up. Two things.

1. Leave RvR rewards to the already implemented RvR currency.
2. Introduce roaming RvR scavenger merchants to inactive lakes.
3. ????
4. Profit!

Thanks to some of my old-school guildies returning to the game I've been put in the position of leading warbands through the mostly barren battlefields of T3. As I almost alluded to in a previous post that was eaten by the internets (I.E. it never got posted) the tactical state of doorhammering, or Keep Sieges, is frankly quite pathetic for the majority of casual players. Don't get me wrong, I happen to LIKE casual players for the most part, it's just that a lot of them have no idea what to do when you're rolling up on a keep that is likely to have a dozen defenders or more. As such, I'm taking personal responsibility for not enlightening these players earlier on the more subtle tactics and strategy involved in Keep Siegeing.

Hopefully, I can right my heinous mistakes with this short guide.

Keeps, starting in T3 and typically continuing through T4 have a few key points of interest to note. Understanding each of these and the strategic significance not only to your realm, but the enemy realm, is a challenge that most players are either uninterested in, or the zerg as a whole considers unimportant.

First, the main focal point of a keep siege. The door.

•   Mistake #1: During a siege, all the MDPS will run up on the door and flail away at it seeing their big unmitigated numbers fly across the screen all willy-nilly, driving them to raging e-boners as they get perverse satisfaction from big hard numbers in their face.
•   Mistake #2: RDPS will focus on the oil with single target abilities and dots, leaving the oil pourer relatively unscathed the entire time, freely dumping hot splattery love all over the mass of MDPS humping the door with reckless abandon.
•   Mistake #3: Healers panic. All their bars are dropping as melee and tanks alike get rocked by oil splashing freely all over their faces. Half the warband dies, the enemy pushes out and drives hard and deep into the warm and squishy center, the Keep Siege is wiped, rags are handed out at the warcamp to clean up.

A question for anyone playing a melee toon, do any of you really think that you're doing a reasonable amount of damage when compared to a ram that hits for 30-40k a swing? Fine, of course you do. Well, stop it. Your job is not to beat on the door, your job is to kill incoming reinforcements. It's not as exciting as afk-humping the door and tugging off to your big damage numbers scrolling across the screen, but it's necessary. Not to mention, with ~6 melee guarding each postern, you're going to quickly destroy any enemy that wanders through. Hey look! Renown, Xp, AND Influence! You just have to WAIT FOR IT.
 
Here's one for the RDPS, why are you trying to focus down the oil if there's someone pouring it? Once oil is loaded into that thing, it gains 10x it's unmanned hitpoints, and can be repaired almost instantly. You know what really sucks for someone trying to pour the oil? AOE the damn thing. Yes, move into your 65'-80' range and drop every AoE you possibly can on that stupid thing. If every RDPS in your group can do this, that oil is going to stop pouring as the poor sap trying to tip the bucket will either quickly die, or run like a bitch crying to his momma. Hell, for this reason, I'd recommend leaving the oil UP, so you can nuke whatever poor soul thinks he has a chance at dumping the stuff.

Healers... for the love of god... you have one archtype to worry about for the majority of your keep sieging. YOU can shape the battlefield with your unique ability to keep people alive. 4 Tanks on the ram, 4 targets to heal. Move out of the 100' group heal range and stay safely between 100-150'. If some MDPS get into the oil LET THEM DIE. Drop a rez on them, and let them LEARN the hard way that "No motherfucker, I'm not healing your stupid ass if you're playing in the oil. Go guard a postern". It's OK. You can be the biggest dick on the battlefield and NO ONE is going to forsake your healing if they die immediately after doing some stupid... well, at least after the first couple times. Now, to be fair, if they're doing what they are supposed to be doing, by all means heal them when they get in trouble. If you see no melee on the door, but life bars are dropping, run over and give them a couple quick bursts of loving goodness, they'll do their job much more frequently when you give them candy for doing it right.

Tanks, your job for the first two doors of each keep is simple. If you have a shield, take the ram and slam that bitch into the door. If you DON'T have a shield, then go join the MDPS at a postern. Hell, you might even want to guard them too. Now, if your warband leader is one cool savvy sonofabitch (like me), he'll have all 4 tanks in the same group so you can have a 4-way with each others Guard ability. Yes, Cross-guarding is good. Everyone with a shield has a chance to block, everyone guarded/guarding with a shield has a chance to block TWICE AND TAKE 1/2 DAMAGE. Don't QQ over taking damage on the ram. If you die, you die. Expect a rez shortly, probably before you can whine about how little heals were spammed on you, or how long it takes to get a rez around here. If this doesn't happen, you're probably wiping anyway for any of the above reasons. Regroup, smack a few of the assholes that failed at their job, and move along. The game doesn't end from a single wipe.

Now, the secondary and more tactical aspects of keep siegeing is where things require a bit more finesse and patience. Oh, and a picture for Passwatch in EvC T3.
 
So, everyone should understand the positioning here if you read the previous paragraphs. 
 Red is the four Tanks on the ram. 
 Green are the healers in the middle, closer to the DPS for group healing, but within 150' for focused heals on the tanks.
 Yellow is the RDPS, close enough to AoE the Oil, or to nuke anything rushing the middle.
 Orange is the MDPS spread out near each postern to intercept incoming reinforcements.

Two new lines here, the path for Order in light blue, and the path for Destro in purple. It's important to know where your enemy is coming from, and where they're going to head. 60% of the time, if they're going for a postern, they'll be swinging around wide to stay out of sight as best they can. Also, having a single RDPS near the postern is more than acceptable, faster to dismount them at max range, and let your melee eat them alive. Now, chances are if anyone is coming to defend a keep, they won't be very organized until they get inside. It's a bit more rare to see a well established warband roll in as a single force. At best you'll have 3-6 players at a time that are actually organized, and aside from that one or two at a time that will try to sneak around. Provided you have a suitable force, it shouldn't be an issue to kill them before they pop inside. The KEY TO KILLING THEM, is simply to keep your distance from the postern. Standing AT the door, or even within rez range from the wall does absolutely dick. You need to kill them far enough away from the wall that a healer can't reach them without risking their own ass, because they simply won't (most of the time). 

During this stage, you may see renown pouring in like crazy as small amounts of players are focused more on getting inside than fighting at all. They drop fast and hard, with sexy RP's and candy flying around. Guarding the Postern will give you MORE RP than flipping the Keep (which you'll get anyway if you do your job). MDPS have the unique ability to Charge or Stealth, not to mention Mara/WL Pulling. At RR30 your stealthers can sit right inside the postern and crush the hopes of anyone who thought they were going to survive, this is more common in T4 however. 

Eventually, your enemies will most likely get tired of filtering into the keep and go RvE somewhere else (the battle is won!), or they'll get their shit together and come storming through the center. IF they choose the latter of the two options, everyone (TANKS INCLUDED) needs to fall into the middle and wipe the bastards before too much damage is done. This is tricky, and not guaranteed to work, but occasionally you can deflect an attack on your rear if everyone reacts accordingly. Provided your grouping is done well, send one group of melee to the back for healer assassination, the other group to the middle to intercept and defend the squishies. Derpa durr, it's RvR, good luck with that!

Moving on to Stage 2, where most warbands wipe since they usually fail at executing stage one properly and the inner keep is full of pissed off enemies. With fire.
 
-Pardon the horrid image quality here...-

So here we have the same idea in practice, the only real change is the MDPS. One group will be guarding the most likely postern, while the other one does laps around the building killing off guards and catching heals as they pass by the core group on a hunt for any other enemies wandering around. Also, you have the greater danger here of Morale 4's being thrown around, possibly many at one time. Keep some distance between each other (as best you can) to lessen the AoE morales, and use whatever CC you can to mitigate the rate at which they're flying about.

For Passwatch in particular, the healers are going to be pretty damn close to the walls. Not a lot of great places to go between the 100-150' range and still have LoS on your tanks. Spamming group heals, if tanks are in your party, in this instance is fine and dandy. You'll probably need them anyway since defenders inside the keep are REALLY hard to get rid of. Keep the same strategy in play as the first door, and soon enough you'll be walking up those nice new big stairs to wipe the Lord.


So there you are. Essentially a two step process for any class to what they need to do during a siege. The problem currently is getting people used to the idea that yes, you get a LOT more renown for guarding posterns than humping the main door. Also, getting people to listen falls mostly on the shoulders of the healers and the warband leader. If you're leading, make sure your healers fully understand what you are planning to do. Getting them to agree to your devious plans will make things a lot easier when they keep people in line.

As a disclaimer, running a pug warband with tactics does not equal a premade warband with 10x the communication. If you want to get serious about RvR, join a guild, get on Ventrilo, and take part of the glory that is vocal communication. Even WB leaders have to fight, we can't sit around and give direction the whole time.

Cheers!

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.

Alright, so for one, Altdorf has no chance in hell of ever looking this cool...

As I've come to understand, not everyone is having such a great time defending and attacking cities. After about 6-8 sieges in a span of a few short days, people start to miss things like scenarios, RvR, hell even having time to do instances, or crafting! Yes, two hours of being stuck in your city to defend can be something of a nuisance. Getting stuck with the same group of players that holds a death grip on the objectives while they casually melt your face can get a trite irritating. The cute little tactic of having a Chosen stand at a choke point, guarded and focus healed while spamming all of his auras to lag out anyone nearby while the backline casters nuke the general area... ah, that was fun to deal with. So I suppose there's a time and place for City Sieges. Everyday is a bit much for the average end-gamer in WAR. Way too much for the R30-39 crew as well. Then you have the rest of the T1-T3 players that watch from the distance as the sieges take place.

I've posted on City Sieges before, a really long time ago actually. Some of the points I made there eventually snuck into our current experience. Some of them haven't. I'd like to take a moment while sieging is on everyone's mind to refine and refresh what else I'd like to see. (Then cross my fingers and pray that it happens...)

One of the major differences between a siege and RvR is the lack of Scenarios. Some would liken the City to it's own hugely scaled scenario with a 2 hour timer, but it's not really the same. The beauty of scenarios is what drew people to WAR by the boatload. 15m skirmish action that gave you objectives to complete or let you kill to your twisted black hearts content. You never needed to be in any particular place to queue for them, and they popped frequently enough that you could make for a full night of enjoyment. Some players absolutely lived and leveled on scenarios! So now we have semi-regular city sieges and all that falls to the wayside. Why should it? 

First off, we have The Undercroft and War Quarters for each city to defend. A while back now they were tweaked so only non-T4 players could join them. This makes no sense to me at all as T4 players are the only ones that would survive fighting over the city to begin with. Is there not enough demand for scenarios when the city pops? In the past, perhaps. Cities were sieged very rarely on most servers, so I would imagine most players that could, certainly would take part in the actual siege. However! Things have obviously changed! With the increases in sieges, I believe this would be the perfect chance to re-introduce Scenarios to the city for players needing a change from the same 2 hour long grind.

This of course, gets you nowhere fast. What else then? Well obviously you would need multiple scenarios, lest people get tired of playing the same one over and over again. How about the Twisting Tower and Reikland Factory? Oh, but people love the hell out of those, and they should! The Twisting Tower sits atop Chaos Wastes and has a great amount of detail put into it. It's a rather large population scenario that has some GREAT mechanics (like turning into Skaven). Reikland Factory is also an epic scenario that people go absolutely NUTS over. I know it was one of my favorites the few times I managed to play it. These are shining pinnacles of design that Mythic has decided it needs to hide away and play on their private servers (I know you do, you dirty bastards!). They fit seamlessly in the concept of a city siege, Twisting Tower supporting the Inevitable City, Reikland Factory supporting Altdorf. Both of them important for strategic defense and supply of their respective capitals. Brilliant!


So great! We have scenarios back in action for the city siege, what now? Well, Mythic in their strangely wise decision has left VP's entirely to the players actually fighting in the city. I don't mind this actually, not one bit. It makes a lot more sense for the ground troops to affect the ground war more than the backline support troops. Instead, the two scenarios should affect city instance buffing! For Order defending in the city, a War Quarters win would equate to a defensive bonus. Adding 10% to armor, resists, and HP. A win in the Reikland Factory scenario would be an offensive bonus granting an additional 5% damage, 5% armor penetration, and 5% crit, vice versa for Destruction capturing these locations of course. Let the buffs persist for 5 minutes, making them temporary but useful, and not applied 100% of the time. While you're at it, have each instance of a scenario only apply for a single instance of the city siege so you don't have multiple scenarios effecting multiple sieges at one time. Say we have Altdorf 10, 15, 20, and 25 running, there should be a War Quarters 10, 15, 20, 25 as well as a Reikland Factory 10, 15, 20, 25. Allowing people to queue up for the City Instance# they know their alliance or guildies are in would be another great move as you could then have your skirimish/RvR groups working hand-in-hand with your elite Scenario groups to win out the day.

City Sieges are one of those things that really focuses down hard on one single aspect of the game, but with proper tweaking embracing what people love about Warhammer, they can become the epic sieges we all fantasize about.

One other thing, for the love of all that is sacred, can we remove the Invader Belts from the damn gold bags already? Make them rare drops off players in City Sieges, but getting one in a gold bag is really GD irritating... Rawr...

No one loves you sad skeleton. That's a pity hug right there.

Anyway, I might be touching on an old sentiment right here, but no less valid. Perhaps even more valid considering the upcoming changes to forts and server populations slimming. Currently the way I see Land of the Dead, is a big sandy treasure trove that we fight like children over. One side wins it, they get to go in and get free Conq crests, then loot PvE instances for the next hour or so. The other side in the meantime is locked out, and has an easy path to RvDoor their way back to the sand pit. The importance of LotD has diminished quite a bit since launch. There's rarely some huge rush to get in there, although I typically see a warband getting their free Conq crest, and the occasional 6-man meandering their way into the Tomb of the Vulture Lord. I've ranted about the things they could do in the desert before, but it seems to be more clear to me now that the zone should simply open up to both factions all the time.

It's not like we haven't collected millions of resources already throughout the WAR. I think our flight masters know how to get to Land of the Dead by now. Opening up for a REAL RvRvE (sounds familiar...) area will bring a bit of competition for one of its competitors in particular. We can keep the Expedition Resource counter, but allow it to unlock Lairs and the Temple instead. That's where the REAL expedition is heading. We want our loot from bosses. The rest of the desert doesn't really mean a damn thing to us. Not to mention, wasn't there a mechanic to INVADE ENEMY INSTANCES that was put into the game? Wow, yeah, I've been doing that ALL the time. It's so easy... Or not. 

 You really don't have a chance to invade enemy instances unless you REALLY sit around and WAIT for them. The chance of being in Land of the Dead with a full party when the zone flips is rather slim to begin with. Chances are, you're already in the Temple, or you were heading to one. Now you have to deal with the Warcamp Assault, which takes a good 20 minutes or so before people start heading to their dungeons, if at all. Also, is there any tangible benefits for ruining an enemy instance short of the glee of griefing and the moderate amount of renown for spilling their blood? I know some of the guys at Mythic have acknowledged the failure of instance invasions, but I really don't think the concept has people deterred. I think it's just the lack of availability. If we had a free ride to the Land of the Dead, more or less anytime, this wouldn't be as big of an issue.

So I have to think about what would need to change then, eh? Well, the first thing for review would be the Assault on the Warcamp. I think extending the warcamp out a bit further and pushing all the merchants down there would be a good change. I still want to run in and destroy, but to give an open door, there will need to be a safe point. The back end of the warcamp would have a healer, the mirrors of teleport-me-out-into-the-damn-desert, and a couple of War-Champ-guards-of-doom for safe keeping. Aside from this bit, everything else would be attackable, flight master included. So there's your 30m lockout, Assault the Warcamp, kill the flight master, no one else gets to come into the zone for 30m until another blimp shows up and more guards are deployed. I think there should be at least an hour of invulnerability to prevent camping, but inevitably these will be heavily targeted. Might wanna add a few more objectives that just killing the boss and the ship to draw it out a bit longer.

Adding a few more options to the Teleport mirrors would be a good idea too. Once the spawn points are figured out, the can be camped. Hell, find 20 random points that are mob-free and randomly teleport people there. We have summoning stones, people could deal with it.

Another thing that I mentioned before was imposing a cap on the amount of people allowed into the zone, something akin to Fortresses but with a good reason, not a stupid one. Airships can only carry so many people, lets say 12 at a time. Charge a fee to buy a ticket to the desert. 10 gold would be a fun amount I think. When you 'use' your ticket, it queues you up for a trip to the desert. When your spot opens up, you better make your way to a flight master within the next 5 minutes or you'll miss your flight, and your 10g. So, every time there's 12 spots open for people that have logged off, or left the zone, or have suffered enough fatigue (2 hour debuff?), everyone that bought a ticket has a 5 minute window to get into the zone. This means most people will be arriving at the same time, grouping gets easier, and you're all focused on getting something done with your limited amount of time. AS ARE YOUR ENEMIES. Woo! Conflict creation!

The actual amount of people allowed on the airship at one time is debatable and flexible. I'm not saying that 48 in the zone is some magic number, but it's about how many I would expect to be spread out enough doing different things without being TOO zerg-y. There just needs to be enough people left in the vanilla RvR zones to continue battling without overwhelming the desert with floods of people along with balancing a good amount of people in the zone as well.

Anyway, it's just one of the many things that has been on my mind lately. I think something needs to change down in the desert, once I started writing, this is what came out. XD

 

So I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine who had just finally transferred servers and caught up with me about the state of RvR on Badlands. This guy in particular gets a lot of respect from me since he was one of the original members from last year when my guild was started, and he was consistently the first to hit top levels, finish dungeons, get the phat lewt, and just be a badass in general. To have his insight as a fresh pair of eyes to our sad battlefields was refreshing. One thing to keep in mind, he transferred and experienced a pretty weak city push on his first day, but the Lion and Gazelle thing... That rang pretty true to me.

It's a matter of zerging really. The offensive participators are the Gazelles, roaming in herds from BO to BO to Keep and so on, grazing on renown, and in no real danger of death or fear. Their numbers make them invincible, their pack mentality leads them flawlessly to each grazing point. Occasionally they can get a little tricky, but for the most part it's easy to lead them around and you know exactly where they're going to be heading next. They don't mind trampling you if you're directly in their path, and will probably leave you alone if it seems like you're too far off to bother with. Anyone bearing witness to the herd will stay far away and bask in the sheer massive force rolling across the open fields. I hate this, and last night I partook mostly because I was doing some cultivating, and hey, free renown is free renown after all. I was queued for 2 straight hours and didn't get a pop...

Personally, I much more enjoy the defensive end of the equation. Here be Lions, and no, not the crappy NFL team hailing from my hometown of Detroit. A pack of lions lurking in the fields will track movements of the herd, where there may be 100 or more Gazelles, only a dozen Lions or so needs to be nearby to keep them in line. A perfectly straight line, with the outliers getting picked off one, two, or three at a time. You see, a hoard of Gazelle only tramples what is directly in front of them, not directly behind, or even flanking off the rear sides.

This brings me to the experience my friend had, and his gripe with these tactics in general. First off, there's no issue whatsoever with the position of the Lions. If you can't field large enough numbers, than field small enough ones to get kills. Awesome. I would love to be doing that again. However, when he saw a Gazelle being picked off and ran back to assist and eventually rez, the Gazelle bolted back towards the herd leaving him to die at the gnashing jaws of a dozen Lions. What kind of cowardice takes hold of you to abandon your savior with the full knowledge that he is absolutely going to die? Especially in this game, where death is so frequent and common, why would you bother to run? Well, I know why. Mostly out of fear of being killed, but damn does it suck for the guy that just saved your ass. You could at least TRY to kill something.

Just another day on the battlefields of WAR. I sure hope the tables turn on us soon, I hate Gazelles.

I've been working on an anti-Aion post for a while now, building up seething hatred for those who have turned their back on WAR, and generally kicking puppies down the stairs while calling out the old Dwarven gods for strength. However, while I'm 9 paragraphs into tearing a hole in the glory perceived to be Aion, I've come to a few realizations. For one, this isn't the kind of blog I run. It might be the attitude I use to fuel my rage on the battlefield, and take it out on tanks that see me as yet another harmless Slayer. It's not how I like to promote the game or the community though. We're haters for sure. Lots of hate and pent up rage without a doubt. We generally take that out on each other though, and more or less ignore the rest of the MMO community. Well, at least until people start taking out their rage and frustration on WAR itself. Don't get me wrong, I understand it and I've gone through that phase a couple times.

I'm not mad at the bloggers walking away from the game. It doesn't bother me that guildies are dropping left and right, regardless of the shinies I try to inspire them with. I can cope with running around in game and getting insta-ganked by a Witch Elf + Squig Herder combo, or a Chosen + DoK combo. Even with the "Coward" debuff in scenarios, I don't really mind getting farmed for 15 minutes. It's all part of how the game goes really. Populations sway back and forth, wildly at times, but there's always a good period of time where competition is really tough. This isn't an arena based e-sport kind of game. Sure we have scenarios, but there's no ranking system aside from the scoreboard at the end of it. I think the downers are continual, and the release valve is hard to find. Sometimes, a few months off from the game can bring you back more than refreshed and ready to rock some Greenskin arses into the ground, while walking over a few Chosen along the way of course.

Personally, I don't really think the campaign is all that great either. Sure, there's a point to it I guess. It represents some kind of end-game we could push forward with. Awesome. Sadly though, I've never really been one to go around chasing carrots when I can have blood in my cereal bowl. WAR, your RvE endgame does not amuse me. However, if the path leads me to killing 500 Destro in 6 hours, I'll poke along I suppose. That was a new record for me btw, ~500 kills last night got me a full renown level and we never flipped a zone doing it. Granted my K/D ratio was probably something like 1.3:1., but some quick rezzing healers kept me and one of my guildies up most of the time holding back a line of destro around 30 deep. Oh, and your warcamp Hero guards in Eataine hit like sissy girls.

What I'm getting at, and my huge reason for playing WAR, is the fast paced action in the game. Unlike anything I've played before and how it really pulls in the feel of the Warhammer fantasy. This is a smash-mouth beat-em-up bloodsport kind of game. Tear into your enemies with reckless abandon, rip out their entrails, strew em across your face, and dive right on top of your next warm target screaming bloody murder the whole time. There's a LOT of death involved, and if you could see some of my scoreboards, you'll notice my 10-15 deaths in a scenario with 12-18 deathblows, and rocking top damage with the best of them. If I get an assist, which is becoming more common as new players on the server start to recognize my bloodlust, I cause so much confusion and disruption in the back lines the front half entirely falls apart as all their support craps their pants trying to get rid of me. Yeah, you Sorcs and healers on the back lines, you know my face, beard, mohawk, and Spanners all too well. You'd better damn well /lol when you kill me, change your thong too, I'll be back sooner than you hope.

If you fear death, or can't stand being ganked, or panic at the sight of a reckless enemy, this game is going to piss you off. If you dwell on the inconsistencies, overpowered pocket items, mechanics associated with your class, or just can't seem to figure out how to best utilize your powers, this game is going to piss you off. If you overanalyze the best spec to play, and realize not all specs are made the same, you'll be scratching your head just before you go off on a tangent demanding developer intervention with the threat that your sub is in danger. If you find yourself smacking a door for 3 hours a night, and taking BO's with a hoard surrounding you, salivating at the sight of an enemy to show its face, you're going to be disappointed when the said enemy force either rolls over you or drops like a ball of lead entering orbit. I can go on for a while outlining everything I perceive to be bad about WAR, and other players could go on equally as long with a very different view on what is wrong with the game.

The point being, when the communal focus goes from positive to negative, it ain't easy to get people to flip sides again. It's like a cancer that needs to work itself out through attrition, people NEED to leave the game while doing as little damage as possible. I encourage this frequently among my alliance members, and enforce it within my guildies. If someone is gonna go, they're still friends and co-gamers interested in finding that next best thing. The greener grasses that are tantalizingly out of reach, always elusive, but maybe something else can idealize the perfect game or at least something better than what you have. This is why, on the official forums at every opportunity, I try to get people to leave as fast as possible when they start a "QQ this game sux, bai!" kind of thread. The less people that share the frustration, the more potential enjoyment they can continue to have in game anyway. I see a lot of complaints, I have a handful myself, but the core aspects of the game that are great I enjoy with incredible zeal and fervor.

The people that stay through the horrid patching, pointless expansions, Ultimate Nerf Bat of Doom +7, and blatantly overpowered class combos really don't dwell on these things for very long. Yeah, they're a concern, but so is breaking a face in with whatever you're holding in your hand. I like to hold kittens on occasion. The players still involved in this game I associate very well with actually. It's light PvE, with a load of PvP. It kinda sucks that we need to PvE for the better gear, but it's a nice alternative to the grinding zerg that rolls through zones on a mission for the city. I'll be the first to admit I refuse to take un-contested contested zones. If there isn't blood pouring like a river, or geyser where I'm involved, I'd rather take my chances with mobs that either one-shot, bug out, and occasionally die appropriately while dropping some loot. I rather enjoy that a lot of the PvE is damn near impossible short of a burst of luck (see Gorak in Lost Vale, or any of the LotD Lair Bosses). It gives people a reason to stop doing it, and go back to killing each other.

So what are you missing about WAR? What is your brand new shiny game giving you that's any better? How does WoW stack up for the equivalent PvP? I went back and played DAoC for about a week, it was SLOOOOW. You run short of endurance and power constantly even if you're pretty well buffed. Casters are regularly sitting down IN COMBAT to regen. Can you imagine this in WAR? Oops, healer ran out of AP/RF/SE, gotta sit down for 20s to regen it. Hope you guys can survive. Yeah, wow. Amazing. The pace of combat in WAR can be attributed to a FPS in comparison. I'm not talking about a Halo-style run around for 10 minutes with a load of armor and shielding, but more akin to a CoD4 type game, where a few stray pistol shots will have you lying on the ground wondering where the hell they came from. Sometimes you get lucky and run around racking up kill after kill for no other apparent reason than everyone seems to be ignoring you, and sometimes you so much as stick your nose around the corner to find a melee meat grinding train being supplemented by 3 different kinds of caster damage flowing over their heads picking you out like an albino at an NAACP rally.

I think it all comes down to carrots. Every other game has a long train of carrots for the next best thing. Do this, get shinies. Do this, get more shinies. Do this really hard thing, get some really shiny shinies. There's a few carrots in WAR related to RvR, but they're so distant. By the time you get them you've forgotten that you were even going after them. The REAL carrot in WAR is the guy standing across the field begging you to spray his blood across his realmmates. It's pure unadulterated killing for the sake of killing. Keeps and Objectives be damned, tell both the Capital Cities to go to hell, show your PvE bosses the darkest stain of your taint. If you don't enjoy killing people because they happen to be standing somewhere in your vicinity, you don't have a carrot. If you expect to go around finding carrots, not only are they going to be small and insignificant, you'll probably find one stuck right up your arse by the time you're all done. Bring on the carrot rage, I'll bring on a boatload of weapons.

I really love me some killin'.

How do you beat a zerg? Zerg harder! Or carpet bombing... Or a healthy dose of napalm...

The battlefields of WAR can be quickly littered with corpses in all stages of rot and decay. When facing a hoard of enemies, what better way to even the tides of any battle than with the freshly fallen bodies of your buddies? Consider the current state of the lifeless lakes of RvR in the event of an unstoppable zerg, and the need for opposition quickly becomes apparent. I propose a few roaming Vampire Lords wandering these lakes seeking out the stench of death, and for each fallen player outnumbered by the enemy realm, a R40 champion zombie to spawn in his place. I'm not saying this should be an ally by any means, but his hate should be fully directed at the person who felled him. In the event these zombies DO turn the tide of battle, well, they should turn right back on the nearest living fleshbag. Too much AoE nuking would likely do the same thing as you fill up his hate bar.

Dynamically changing the battlefield during confrontation in favor of the losers by using their own fallen corpses may somehow effect morale. I think a further question would be how this should affect resurrection on the battlefield however. To keep things a bit closer to fair, as long as your zombie is up and fighting, a rezzed player should suffer some sort of Wounds penalty. The zombie is acting off his life force after all. It'd keep them tentatively out of combat until that proxy falls again to the ground. Oh, and one zombie per dead player please. If the same player drops again before the zombie is killed, no need to raise another one. We're just trying to balance the field (and cause some chaos) a small amount, not overwhelm the attackers.

These mechanics are already in the game to some degree. In the Altdorf Crypts you fight a boss that summons a clone of your spirit during battle. I believe there's a boss in LotD that raises a skeletal copy as well. So perhaps Vampire Lords are a bit of a stretch, but the random Necromancer or Tomb King would not necessarily be out of order. I think just more moving bodies out there would be a pretty cool thing to take part in. Knowing when you fall, as an outnumbered defender, that someTHING will take your place and avenge your death should grant some sort of comfort and boost morale. Hopefully to the degree that the outnumbered faction gets back into RvR on a regular basis and the need for this falls off the side.

Alright, so that's my favorite idea for on-the-fly faction balancing. Yeah, it sorta reeks of more RvE, but there's only so much you can do with a system that depends on player interaction. Sometimes RvE is necessary... unfortunately. No, I don't think these zombies should be worth any renown or XP, or even drop any good loot for that matter. Just another speedbump in rolling over your enemies. The point is to give them a bolster to bring some life, or undeath, and fighting back the the lakes. Myself personally, I'd love a third faction as a solution, but in lieu of that, gimmie zombies.

Too hard to code for our Mythic Dev brethren? Well, you guys could always start out small with some kind of battlefield specific buffs to an outnumbered force. Write in an RvR lake check for level disparity popping every 5 minutes, anything from 21-30% would give a 5% buff to armor/resists/damage/healing, 31-40% a 10% buff, 41-50% a 20% buff, and over 51% a 30% buff with a free 100 Wounds. Play with it for a bit, find out what gives a small group of defenders a fighting chance. It only takes enough that defenders can hold them off in the open field long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Using a 5m window will allow these mailbox lickers to get in on the action, still have a buff, and push back with more even numbers. When the check comes up again, and the buff fades out, the idea is to have enough people in the lakes to sustain a real fight.

You could even use that Rally Call to announce what buffs are active on the battlefield, I bet people would start pounding on that thing a lot more frequently.

Damn that's pretty.

Changes are coming to Forts... eventually. Supposedly it's going to be "...cool. Trust me." according to the Producers Letter and Jeff Skalski. Of course, as is my habit, I jabber on to my guildies more than I probably should about things that could have been. Forts have me twisting in ten different directions. Okay, maybe not ten, but at least three.

First, we have the concept of a Fort being the premier stage for hosting an army. The smartasses at WAR have hinted at Forts being something important when it comes to Realm Pride. I love their little hints, it gives me visions of strangulation and face stomping. Ergo, I would like to see forts become smaller versions of RvR centric cities. Cities that your enemy, if they so choose, could break down the doors and interrupt your flagrant AFK'ing with bloody hamfists of punching. Well that's the violent side of it anyway. Take the RvR gear Quartermasters and toss em all in here, and have a new set of merchants sell race specific gear as well. There's a good incentive to stop by and visit, no? Okay, well at least once every couple of levels.

So how would this affect RvR? Well, with the decoupling of the Forts for a City Siege it might make a reasonable difference. You'd still need to go THROUGH the fort to get at the city, but if there's a preloaded defense you might think twice about that. No, you wouldn't need to go inside, leaving that door and AoE fest to itself, but just getting around might prove difficult, let alone trying to respawn and run back if you drop in the rush. Of course, once invaders hit the city walls proper, you'd still need to cut off any flightmasters. Then again, what fun is fight masters? I say a summoning room, where you can call guild or alliance members, and/or put the Rally Call into the players hands. Seriously Mythic, you said you were going to do something with that. It's still dumb. Let us play with it for a while.

If you've read my post on the Dogs of War you might be putting together the OTHER cool thing that Forts would house, the mercenary faction (cross your fingers and pray). You certainly wouldn't want Skaven and Ogres running around your city proper when allegiances flip now would you? This new mini-city as a staging point for T4 RvR organization would be scabs better than what they are now. Sure, don't make them necessary to flip for a city push, you're still going to need to push through one to get to a city however. So that all is an interesting option, but I mention not one, but three!

Second, move the fortress out of the damn way a little bit. Make it be important for something else. Like... in-game arenas. I'm not talking about 1v1 dueling, we players can figure that out no problem. Been doing it for ages now (no thanks to you). Nay, I want to see 6v6, 12v12, and 24v24 fights to the death. A myriad of rulesets ranging from no-rez, no-buff, no-cc, naked, chicken, fisticuffs, racial pairings (i.e. DvG only), interference (random mob spawns), and murderball. Randomly generate matches, and allow people to flag themselves for Arena play. Same pop-up as scenarios except you would see the Fort and Ruleset in place of the Scenario name. Unlike scenarios, these would not reward renown (leaving the battling where it counts), and instead grant influence or tokens to buy arena gear. Yeah yeah, this sounds familiar, but it worked dammit! Take it step further and have Arena Champions based on ladder style scoring. Arena gear, imo, should be somewhere between Conq and Invader in stats, but grant vanity effects as well. On top of this you could have winners of these matches get a slim chance at a Conq piece. Say 1 gold bag for winning a 6v6, and 4 for winning a 24v24. It'd take some luck and a ton of runs for that gear, but shouldn't it be easier to get than Sentinel anyway? Annihilator is TONS easier to get then Bloodlord after all. Hell, with the new changes to the City Siege, Invader should be getting significantly easier as well.  Hey, you PvE'ers get cool new shit all the time. Can we killers out here catch a bone?

Now, you wouldn't actually need to GO to the Fortress for any particular reason. Sure you COULD I suppose, but most people wouldn't bother unless something like the first suggestion was in place. I'm fine with this. The game doesn't hold enough people on any given server to really NEED to spread out any further. Once you start seeing 2-3k people on a server at once, it might outlive itself. I also wouldn't expect Arena's to be wildly important after the first couple weeks. As most things, they'll fade over time. Initially, there should probably be a limit on Arena battles to go off once an hour and dependent on how many people want in. If there's enough to run 24v24, then fire that one off. If there's only enough for 6v6, so be it. Limiting it to once per hour would allow you to set the amount of base influence you could possibly earn regardless on the amount of players involved. Not good enough? Make it a 1 hour lockout timer then. This way you could approximate WHEN people will start getting Arena gear, and adjust around that however you need.

Third, if RvR cities and Arenas don't do it for you than you're probably looking for a little more PvE in your diet. This is fine, you can get some phat lewt out of PvE, and I've brought myself to doing it on plenty of occasions. I still think forts should be an RvR gated, warded, and invade-able instance however. So, when we get around to locking a zone, it stays that way for a couple hours. In this timespan, the fort should open up an instance allowing you to go after your Conqueror gear in a different way. Yeah, there's already Sentinel gear for doing PvE in the safety of your own city... how else are we supposed to get Conq bags after the change?

I'm no genius when it comes to PvE, but it would need to be do-able within the 3 hour window you have when the Fort is contested. Maybe not all in the first try, but at least possible for those wearing Anni equivalent gear. 4 PQ's taking about 20m each and one boss fight with the Fort Lord would probably do the trick. There's enough room inside forts to run the grounds at different points and do the kill-kill-kill-loot-rinse-repeat. One PQ to drop boots/gloves/belt, then one for the shoulders, helm, and chest. Then dropping the Lord granting 3 repairable BoP Conq pieces or some sort of rare weapons. The rare weapons would at least keep people coming back, not to mention the elusive purple fort bags. Oh yea, while each PQ might only have a single Gold Bag, they should also be dropping that blue and purple bag from time to time.

Right? So am I crazy yet again? Would you believe I was going to use this post to rant about factions as well? I have to stop myself sometimes though. I've been pent up working things out in my head so much that I haven't even mentioned the new promotional thing I wanted to start doing. Well I certainly don't have time for that now! I'll have at least another post about Factions and RvR before I get back to that little nibblet.

Oh, and apparently they did more server merges. Darklands and Ironclaw get the boot. woo.

Ah, it's finally here. The Land of the Dead, filled with glorious loot, tons of the "dry" undead, and lots of sand. Someone forgot to mention to hoardes of roving enemies and RvR. Seems more like short violent spurts of immediate wiping, or the occasional gank-squad-murder-party sprinkled in over a few hours at a time. There's always traditional RvDoor now that the opposing faction is taken aback by their shinies, skeletons, and sand I suppose. Gotta love them doors, they'll always be there for me at least.

Oh, does this strike any of you as a problem? It'll work itself out eventually I suppose. LotD will go the way of Lost Vale as a mainly PvE area eventually. The grind to each others capital will resume at some point in the future. Maybe some of you are well on your way to normalization, and have freakishly become content with the Land of No Return. Run in, get your loot, watch your Capital get invaded, never go back. That's about how I reacted to it. It's really sad too, such a beautiful zone with SO MUCH DAMN POTENTIAL.

I'm not all gripe. I have some very interesting ideas that would make this work even better. First step, we have to look at why this zone worked so well in DAOC, as we all know it was spawned from it. The major contributing reason was a third faction. Well, we don't have that... yet. However, since I've already covered the Dogs of War in my last post, so I'll be going in a different direction entirely. Instead of making our freshly laid desert a mirror to something already done, mix it up a bit. Everyone loves a friendly game of MURDERBALL.



Step 1. Open the zone to all comers. This needs to be done, if only for the sake of keeping RvR in all areas viable. People won't feel the impeding urge to rush to the flightmaster as SOON as it becomes available. When that happens it leaves the entire RvR battlefront WIDE open for the opposing forces to rape as they see fit. It's depressing for the handful of people that play WAR to RvR. At very least it will get people back to the normal RvR grind without the feeling that you're missing out on something unwillingly.

Step 2. Tweak your brand spanking new PQ's to be the Dwarf vs Greenskin style CONTESTED PQ's. Maybe not ALL of them, but the ones in the desert proper at VERY least. We're all going to be fighting the same mobs most likely, but make a TON of them despawn as more enemies enter the PQ area. Change the Stage 1 to add a few RvR kills instead of entirely mobs. No enemies in the zone? No finishing the PQ. This would encouraging zerg-alicious enemies to fall back to their own PQ's occasionally to attain more glyph-age and at least present the illusion the underpowered realm has a chance. Kinda. It would also deter mindless farming, present a reasonable excuse for greater rewards, and as was touted by the big cheese's, promote moar RvR.

<THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART>
Step 3. Add random RvR drop MURDERBALLS. Call them, oh I dunno, SOULS or something. Unlike your normal scenario balls, have no timer on them, and still give a sexy bonus. Let us toss them to each other as well, in case someone needs to log off. Also, have a set amount of balls in play at a time to prevent the whole realm from getting all hopped up on deliciously murder-y power. But wait there's more! These aren't just a handy killing tool, they'll also fuel your very own, realm specific CASKET OF SOULS!

Step 4. Yeah, that thing. The crazy powerful Undead siege weapon that could wipe a battlefield in a round. Therein lies the dilemma for your standard player. Do you give up your uber-balls of RvR (or PvE i guess) pwnage? Or do you rush and fill up the casket and kick out the enemy realm via mass-death for that 30m lockout timer? Oh the choices make for such wonderful concepts. Yes, we get a fat burst of Renown/Xp for that. Just like Khaine's Embrace when it flips. It'd be a good thing.

Step 5. There's futher chaos to cause as well. Say your enemy has been taking the second option, and filling his casket with all the spare souls. Knock it over! Something along the lines of a Battle Objective would have four elite guards and a hero defending the casket at all times, throw in some extra trash mobs for fun (them scarabs love souls I tell ya), and it becomes an endeavor requiring at least 8-10 players, and a battlefield of chaos distracting the enemy realm!

Step 6. Souls are unstable leaky bastards. While we can keep them in our weapons to blast away the opposition with (they enjoy that), a simple uber-casket will probably still leak one or two every couple of minutes as they thirst for more killing and murdering. This allows further intrigue as players get lost in the chaotic battling to keep it ongoing for hours at a time. A serious effort should be needed to collect all the souls necessary, and the draining mechanic would add into this.

Step 7. Instance the whole damn thing. Yeah, like a city instance. 48v48, queue up for it like a scenario. Leave whenever you want. If things become unbalanced, knock out the player from an opposing realm that has been there the longest. Require 24 on each side queued at a time to start a new instance, and if the balance goes outside of a 6-man party, allow the overpowered side a chance to remove a party at will, with the longest standing players as a backup after 5 minutes. Even further beyond that, only allow a set number of instances running based on overall server population (god please balance levels/archtypes as well). As in, if you have 250 people online from the less populated realm, allow 20% of their numbers in at a time, and the higher populated realm to match them. This would open a single LotD instance for plundering. At 325 players online, a second instance could be started with 24v24, and more as the number online climbed. It's a little tricky, but some good math, checks and balances could keep things evened out.


Pardon my wall of text. I just get worked up over things sometimes. Personally, I think this implementation would be a helluva lot more fun, even if only ONE idea was used...

I've given a good amount of time in game, read all the other blogs, digested and let settle all the changes and issues risen from the most recent patch. I've resisted writing a review with an initial knee-jerk reaction, and feel now that the majority of reactions have been made by Mythic to cover the most game-breaking emergency patches. I see a lot more good in this patch than bad, and for the most part feel that they have accomplished their goals in releasing it. It ain't perfect, but I can't blame Mythic entirely for their failures in light of the vast amount of work stuffed into this patch. Overall, it's been a good one, with some bad spots throughout.

Among many things, their major goals include Keep Upgrades, Siege Weapon changes, Combat Responsiveness, Guild UI overhaul, Character UI profiles, RvR PvE adjustments, Medallions and Crests, Ordinance, Guild Recruitment profile, the new Gates of Ekrund 6v6 Scenario, Capital City fixes, a large myriad of Class adjustments including : Pet buffs, AoE fixes, Choppa/Slayer spam adjustments, AM/Shammy dps buff, Stat caps, and persist-through-death-buffs. Not to mention the upcoming Live Event, which I wanted to wait and see how difficult it would be, but I kinda already have a sense of it. Everything they went out to touch, they did so quite well imo, but some things took a swift nutkick along the way. A bit of bitter aftertaste if you will, but, is it gamebreaking?

This is gonna be a massive wall of text, so bust out a bucket of popcorn and grab a soda. Maybe even bookmark the page and go for a walk during the intermission...

Keep Upgrades

Of all the things they could have done to make RvR that much more challenging, this was probably the best move. I've had experience in every tier taking and claiming keeps, upgraded and not. Keep in mind, I play on an oRvR server, so level requirements are a bit more lax. Tier 2 keeps are the easiest to hold at this point when fully upgraded with Champion mobs all around. You don't get the option for additional guards in T2, but the overall cost for maintenance is much lower, coming out to around 8g per hour. Upgrade times are fast, ranging from 5-10 minutes, but you have to be wary about getting rolled quickly if a large enough force shows up. One door before the Keep Lord makes for easy pickings if there's more than a warband running around taking them. However, the max rank allowed in is 31, so you won't get a hoard of R40's sneaking in to steal the zone. It leaves the best chances to successfully repel invaders for appropriately leveled ranges

T3 is a slightly different story. Maintenance cost is up a bit more, and you still don't get the option for extra guards, but there is more of them roaming around anyways. The inner sanctum is a bit more deadly because of this, especially when surrounded by champion mobs. To counter this, R40's CAN get into these ones, which can make for a lackluster defense if you're randomly defending the zone you're currently leveling in. Also, at this point, you'll find Lockpick/Bypass Defenses being used to ninja the Keep lord by groups as small as 5 R40's. Between banner rez, and rez pots, they can get just barely enough healing to pull it off, and in some instances, they can sneak a healer inside. Same story since the hotfix after 1.2, so no real change there. Taking a fully ranked keep in T3 requires a full warband of ~R25 or, as we like to do it, a party of R40, and a party of ~R25. Running the guild across the zones, we closed our warband, stayed in vent, and managed to take every keep we came across. Two R40 MDPS managed to wipe whatever forces tried coming in the backdoor to defend, and the rest of us the doors, and stomped in the Lord.

I had a brief run-in with a couple keeps in T4, through roaming with our Alliance in a push to the DE Fortress. From what I hear, these are quite a bit more expensive when fully upgraded, and the difficulty isn't really that different when it comes to scale. It's all R40's v R40's on Pragg, and Destro really doesn't have much in the way of tactics and organization. When the Alliance wants a fort, we flip all the zones until we get it. Usually takes about 3 hours. Champ mobs simply did not slow us down and were not a deterrent for Destro pug-bands either, so for the most part, T4 hasn't changed except for being a bit more expensive.

Overall, I really enjoy the difficulty presented with a claimed keep. It takes coordination now, which means less pug-bands running around like a mindless zerg getting in our way. Also, the spam when a keep comes under attack has changed. You now get a notice of how many enemies are in the area, when they kill a guard, and where they are on the keep. If they attack the Outer Doors, Inner Sanctum, Keep Lord, it lets the whole guild know about it. The extra information allows defenders to respond appropriately, and bring a nice fight at most of the keeps. When running with a group of 12, we had enemies show up at every claimed keep with at least equal numbers. The only thing that still bugs me is the banner/pot rezzing Healers into the keeps. Reduce the range even further Mythic! Make it 10' instead of 30. :)


Siege Weapons 

If anything were to slow us down, it would be that we simply couldn't zerg against the door to shred it to pieces anymore. Thank god! Door hitpoints have been doubled, and Ram dmg has been as well. Effectively, reducing normal attacks by 50% effectiveness. Also, the rams have added damage reduction against Oil, so eveyone isn't getting insta-wiped when splashed down upon. The Epic Rams are crazy powerful too, those will reduce a door to splinters in half the time! I wish they would have added a bit more damage to the ST and AoE siege weapons though, plinking for ~500 with a ST siege weapon just doesn't cut it when you're looking at ~5000hp on a smart healer. Even with 6 of the things up and concentrating fire on healers, it'd take two full volleys to kill them IF they held still, did not cast, and were not healed. The AoE shots are fine at ~250-300 dmg, it just falls in line with the rest of their scheme to love all over AoE damage.

"Combat Responsiveness"

Notice the quotation marks. This is an area with mixed results. The idea was to reduce lag in large oRvR battles, and give casters back a respectable cast-bar. It seems to me this is something of a continual improvement instead of a one-fell-swoop sort of deal. I believe I've counted two hotfixes on top of the initial patch to reduce lag, crashing, and general badness in T4 forts/capital. On the upside, spells are being cast at appropriate times now when lag-free, and "Mythic" seconds appear to have been abolished, though the casting animation seems to be the same for the most part. I've noticed, insta-casts have become more instant now, and you can generally ignore the animation suggested by GCD. This could be bad, as it brings back the macroability of insta-death via stealthers. Also increases the insta-DoT spam from various classes once they figure out whats going on. I've tested it on my AM, with his instant no-cooldown DoT and I'm getting double the damage I used to by spamming a dozen people in the time it used  to take me to ST DoT two.

Also, resurrection is broken 80% of the time. Whether intentional or not, a rez will bring the person back to life at 80-100% hp most of the time. No idea how they managed that, but it drives me crazy (unless I'm playing my healer). Battles are more chaotic now, since that choppa you just slaughtered is only going to be gone for 5 seconds. Good luck killing the rest of the mob that quickly. This so far is the worst part of the patch, but at least it happens on both sides equally.

UI Overhaul : Guild, Profiles, Recruiting

Excellent job by Mythic on this one. I think they not only hit the nail on the head, but managed to drive it through 3 feet of petrified wood in the process. The only gripe people have had on this is having to set up profiles for each toon. The Guild tab is amazing now. There's so much information available, as a guild leader I salivate each time I hit G. Setting permissions is much smoother, and is done from one window, which makes it easy to compare all the different ranks. The Roster simple works now. You can promote/demote, assign/un standards or recruiters, see who is in a party or warband, locked or not, AND join them in the same spot. All the issues my officers have had with losing guild permissions are entirely gone. Our Alliance tab hasn't changed a whole lot, except for being able to see all our allied guild Standards, and which keeps they hold, if any. Oh, wait. That's a pretty significant change too! Being able to have different UI's per character is nice, though I would lik, e to have a Master profile in case I like how a set of toons are worked out. Obviously I don't need SquaredHealBot on anything but healers, but my DPS classes could all use the same UI elements. Of the tons of addons that I have, only Minmap broke, so that's a big plus as well. Huge patches that don't kill my list of addons are cool with me. Lastly, the recruiting profile, and Guild Links are pretty cool. There's a LOT less spam out there from guilds, and when it is, all you see is [random guild]  then nothing else. So much nicer than block-spam about how l337 these R7 guilds are. Try the search function out too, it actually works how you would imagine it should!

Medallions, Crests, and Ordnance

I really like how the system works now. Medals drop off players depending on their rank, and you get them ANYTIME you kill someone (10% drop rate). Some think the cost is far too high, but I disagree. It's meant to add on to the existing system, people are still out taking Keeps and running PQ's for Gold Bags. If they replaced the bag system for tokens, you wouldn't have nearly the incentive to get out there and do it. In the past week, spread across 4 toons, I've collected at least a hundred medallions, and a handful of crests. I've also won three gold bags for set pieces that I need. Figure over the next week I'll pick up three more bags, and be able to redeem (if all on the same toon at least) medallions for the final piece! Two weeks to collect enough to buy sounds about right to me. It will certainly take a bit longer if you're afflicted with altoholism, but I don't mind the system encouraging playing one toon. Personally, I think that's also a step in the right direction. The more people focusing on one toon, the higher the average RR goes up, and the better a chance for Crests to drop in RvR, instead of psuedoRvR-PvE. Ordnance is something similar, also dropping from player kills, but only in RvR lakes from what I've noticed. They're also scattered around each BO, Keep, and randomly throughout. You use em to buy the aforementioned Epic Ram, Epic Siege Weapons, Oil Immune Pots, and Rest/Heal pots. A small, but effective, additive to further push the propaganda of RvR.
 
[---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------]

I'd like to recommend you stop here, go have a smoke (if applicable), hit the bathroom, visit the concession stand for more popcorn, and/or molest your significant other. Don't want anyone to go blind, ya see?

[---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------]

  
Gates of Ekrund
Moving right along we have the new 6v6 Scenario revisiting the Gates of Ekrund. Open for players from 19-26, this is ideal for premades and essentially a party vs party duel, at which I notice Order does VERY well. Perhaps its just the large ratio of Destro : Order on my server, so the chances of getting lesser skilled players is higher. Regardless, there's some interesting little quirks to it. For one, there's a quest at the spawn point to find a Book of Grudges. It's sitting on a pile of rocks atop the gates, and can be difficult to track down if there's some combat going on. Either way, grab it and turn it in when you spawn again for a nice 63,000 XP. Yes, 63k, tons. That is indeed correct. O wait! There's another quest to do! Kill 15 players, and you get another 63k XP, and it's repeatable! This is a very fast way to level up to R27, and helps the pace of the game move along pretty quickly. Unfortunately, you miss out on a lot of area, quests, potential storyline and RvR when you take this route. It is tons of fun though, highly recommended!

RvR-PvE adjustments
This one is pretty simple, essentially they've cut the renown/inf/XP from Keeps and BO's by 33%. The changes come, I'd imagine, to keep people from carebear-flipping BO's back and forth, and actually dominate the zone. What's that go to do with it? Well, remember before when a zone flipped, and everyone in the region got a sweet chunk of renown for it? Well now, the game tracks all the renown/inf/XP you get from those BO's and Keeps, and when the zone flips you receive all that tracked renown/inf/xp but DOUBLED, on top of the normal big fatty renown boost. Kinda makes things interesting eh? Now if only the other guilds in T2/T3 would take a Keep once in a while we could dominate these more often...

City Siege adjustments
Seen those Kings get captured lately? There was a lot of snares, roots, and snap-taunts flying around that simply shouldn't have been there. Haven't heard about any fix for the instant-rez-to-full-on-respawn issue, but I'd imagine it snuck in with one of the hotfixes or simple went unmentioned. Simply put, they fixed the King encounters. Woo. Now if I ever get a chance to get into one of those, I can uber-fail! This fix doesn't really bother me much. No one on Praag has gotten close to a King fight, let alone past stage 3.

 Now, the part that IS relevant, and supposedly fixed with the latest hotfix, is queueing for the first city instance. Your Warband leader will run at the portal, and automatically be assigned to an instance, at which point any other player will be able to run in and join them. Also, I believe if you add or replace players, they will automatically be added to your instance at whatever stage, giving opportunity to replace members that DC'd, logged, or whatever else. Which in turn will keep the warband full, and the rest of the city instances playable. Nothing sucks worse than getting to stage 3 after 3 hours of playing, just to have a handful of people need to log off for the night.

Class Adjustments

AoE for BW/Sorc/Engi/Magus/Slayer/Choppa have been adjusted to be less wtfpwn, and more reasonable in large scale combat. I.E. GTAoE does not stack on each other, and the melee spam AoE's have been adjusted to a cone effect instead of 30' radius.

Archmage/Shammy get a DPS buff to all abilities, making them just a bit more deadly. It's noticeable, but not OP by any means. I doubt you'll be seeing many more of them DPS specced. They're great at killing champions though, typically can take one out 3 levels higher. They're pretty viable as a 1v1 solo class too. Not a lot of classes can burn em down as fast as they can heal/dps.

 Pets (squig or lion) recieve different stat bonuses based on your gear, and type of pet active. All pets have had their HP boosted significantly. Turrets/Demons get the extra wounds, but no stat buffs. Land Mine/Demonic Infestation is now based off CR, and damage off Tink/Daemon.

DoK caught a hefty debuff, Khaine's Bounty/Imbuement tactics for direct heal/dmg crits no longer count HoT/DoT crits and CoV doesn't heal if the damage was disrupted. 

WP's no longer Cleanse everyone in the world, just the targets party, and the Guilty Soul tactic is no longer capable of crits damage or heals.

WH/WE lose Accusations/Frenzy when switching targets.

Stats are capped, though it varies per class as to where. You can tell when your stat numbers turn gold. After that point, it costs 2 stat points to equal 1 normally. I'm a little confused about this one, as I've heard varying reports of stats capped at 750-1000, yet my Engi with over 1k Ballistics seems unaffected. Some say that tactics and pots do not count towards the cap, still investigating on that.

Lastly, potions and zone domination buffs will now persist through death. I can't remember offhand if the BO buffs do so, but I think not. I know ability buffs do not persist.


The class changes overall don't particularly break any of them, though the Shadow Warrior could definitely use some love, and has needed it for a long time. They're simply no match whatsoever for the Squig Herder, and are more akin to the Marauder anyways, minus melee survivability. I'm surprised they keep ignoring the class, and brushing it off. Does anyone even bother to run from a SW? The only chance they have to survive is kiting like a madman, and hoping the opposing class doesn't use anything resembling a snare/root/disable/disarm. Maybe it's just a flavor thing, but I hardly see any SW's in T4. I tried to play one for a while, and I couldn't enjoy it due to their impotence, but I loved my SH. Ah well, they seem to have made the entire battlefield a bit more survivable at very least. Melee has a chance to do their thing now, and that'll make em happy.

Still need to get rid of the rez-to-full glitch though. That's the new gamebreaker.



Not a lot to say about the live event, except that I'm expecting another cake-walk with somewhat lame rewards. No unique world drop uber-item, just another trophy, title, and vanity gear. With any luck the goggles will be able to find GOOD loot later on. So far, it's been more fun to head out into the RvR zones and find dozens of other players in the same area. We even had a chance to repel a larger group of Destro from our chunk of Thunder Mountain. Knights of the Feathered Hats has been doing some very nice guides about it.

Overall I'm rather satisfied with 1.2.1 post hotfixes. I haven't been so lucky to experience a lot of the weirdness I've seen in the Bug Reports section of Warhammer Official Forums, which probably keeps me in a better mood than most. I've seen more RvR action, more open RvR, and a revival of players that I long ago thought quit the game. Those who are coming back, seem quite pleased. The few bugs that concern me the most at this pointis the spammability of insta-cast no-cooldown abilities, and the full-health-rez. The rest of it is good enough for me.

There's a load of other things in the patch notes here. If your eyes haven't started bleeding by now, you should go check em out and see if there's anything else interesting that I might have missed.

Devzero, oh you guildless little Shaman.

T2 is fun to run around and PvP, but sometimes, you meet a challenge unsurmountable. It was just sad. I saw this R12 shammy while running my R13 archmage. Ever see two healers fight? Even with the damage buffs, we were impotent against each other.

He was minding his own buisness against some mob, actually saw me coming and ran down into a valley of fog. I lost track of him for a second, but the tab-targeting picked him up hiding between some rocks. Classy gobbo move, truly. I used to do the same on my SH. From range I throw on my DoTs, spam my hot a few times, and jump into channelling him. Curiously, he seemed to piddle a bit, and /wave at me. I did this for about two minutes before I realized something... I was not going to solo a healer, with a healer.

He sat there and /lol /wave 'd at me for a while, then started walking backwards, peeing himself occasionally.

Eventually I got the hint. Tossed him a /lol /shrug, and left him to his buisness.

Sadly, the next spot where I found some destro, was being tanked by a R31 chosen, and spot-healed by a R28 DoK. I guess these things are necessary in oRvR, but damn, would I be bored out of my skull...