So, I finally did it

I spec’d my Shadow Warrior to Scout.

I hate that I did. I really do, I’ve adamantly avoided the spec because I don’t like the feel of the game play. Admittedly, it’s slightly better with a 1 second cast time on Eagle Eye, so my mobility stays pretty high, but I really REALLY miss playing as a skirmish/assault mix. Being a short-range to melee play style, weaving in and out, is just so much fun. However, scout is just as (if not more) lethal AND I never die. I was checking out my RvR Stats Improved mod after a handful of scenarios, and the results were stupid. 85 kills, 32 deathblows, zero deaths. I went off and tried to take a scenario objective from a Choppa and a WE by myself, just so I didn’t forget what it meant to be a SW.

Pink is the new Black

You may remember a post of mine from not too long ago where I talked about a particular community rallying behind a member who contracted breast cancer. Well, it seems that Mythic has caught wind of this situation and has given all players an opportunity to show support as well. The word is spreading. Get your dyes while you can from the special vendor, it won’t last forever. Mythic displays it’s attention to it’s players, and a warmth and friendliness that is uncommon in the industry. Personal attention and responses like this are not common, and is one more list on the reasons why I love this game.

Edit: Apparently I’m an idiot, and still don’t know how to work WordPress. I totally wrote this yesterday, but apparently didn’t publish it. I fail.

Weekend at T’char’zanek’s

With the very prominent release of the city changes this weekend, and the reality of the frequency of pushes, my guild and I really got to run the new systems through the paces. Overall, I love the new system. It’s fun, entertaining, it goes by incredibly quick if the opposition is lopsided, and you can turn around to do another instance immediately after for fun and a bit of profit. A good time was had by all. It doesn’t change the nature of the game entirely, and people aren’t going to be clamoring to do the city for the thrill of it, but I don’t think it’s going to induce the mass exodus to alts or real life stuff that the old city used to. It’s the right amount of fun to keep players engaged, with the right amount of guaranteed rewards to keep the progression moving along.

There were a few surprises of things I may have missed during testing, last-minute changes that I didn’t stick in the memory banks. For instance, losing an instance no longer gives a lock-out. So, if you are stuck losing over and over again, you still have a chance later on to roll for loot in a win. So keep on trying! This proved to be highly profitable for my Shadow Warrior, who was lucky enough to win a ridiculously good sword from a purple bag in stage 2. Evidence of hawtness  can be seen immediately to the right. All that, and around 13k renown, and a handful of each crests for each instance I do, and I can’t complain even a little bit. The city is almost entirely bug free, to which I will claim sole-responsibility for as a core tester. I did it all, those developers just want you to think they do the hard work.

So a fun and rewarding weekend spent inside of The Inevitable City. Okay, ONCE in Altdorf, but if you play on Gorfang, you know that already. Destro wouldn’t give up their weekend morning city push for anything. I was actually surprised, since they can get the loot on defense, I figured they would have just slept in and let it happen, but organization is good to keep up, and I’m sure they want to keep at it just so they can stay on their toes.

I promised you a video last week, and I deliver. It’s not long, but it shows you a bit of stage 1, with the dragon and a surprise, followed by Stage 3, with me as a champion, enjoying my actions be a constant ward check. Wish that was the case all the time. The song is an oldie but a goodie, on Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto Presents Album, disc 1, it’s the Quiver mix of Led Zeppelin’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, enjoy!

It’s alive!

I got to do my first instance of the new city siege yesterday on Gorfang. It was the first for our server if my sources are correct, and my guild had a good time. It wasn’t particularly challenging for us, on which I partially blame myself. We faced off against uncoordinated groups who hadn’t done this before, compared to our 12 members, led by myself and another player who was in the closed testing. We won handily all three stages, and I even got to be a champion, which was very cool. That said, the BEST experience of the night was finding out what the fix was to stop the punting from the bride outside the The Inevitable City’s palace gates. The trampoline feature was a glorious amount of fun. I took some video and some screenshots that I will try to compile this weekend. Like for real this time.

So, the patch is live, and kicking, and working almost flawlessly. Cities are being pillaged, players are learning the ropes, and the reception seems to be positive on almost all accounts. Despite the expected server-downtime hiccups that no one but a few players are really surprised or demoralized over. Europe wisely waited 24 hours to deploy their changes and let us Yanks beta test it for them (one of the few advantages of GOA service), so I hope you guys get to smash face today and have the same fun we did.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Burn them or Forgive them?

Can you tell what game I've been playing lately?

Ahhh, patch-day. Anyone who has been playing MMOs for any period of time has come to love and loathe these wonderous days of days. When large updates come down the pipe, the hordes of players flock to the game en-masse to experience the new shineys of the world they love so much. With so many people running across that bridge back to a wonderland of fun, it’s no surprise that things go wrong from time to time. Yesterday with WAR was no different. All servers were announced with downtime around 8pm EST, and slated to last till 9 pm, then 10:30 pm, and lastly, for 11:30 pm. At 11:30, the servers did come up.  Right now as I type this, servers are down again, until a prospected 5:00 pm EST. This is a lot of downtime for Mythic, and one that I can’t remember being equalled previously with any other patch. For Mythic mind you, I can easily recall the time of EQ2 and WoW where patches and expansions required DAYS of downtime to finally get things smoothed out. So, this lead me to wonder, how do people feel about these perilous adventures in newness?

Rock that city

1.3.5 is coming today. In fact, servers come down not 16 minutes from the time that I am writing this. If you follow the second link to the herald post, you’ll see a nice splash page that goes over the broad ideas of what this patch is brining and some neat screen captures from the game as it relates. Follow the first link to the notes themselves for a far more in-depth explanation of all the changes coming, and this patch is a beast of an update, coming in at 10,124 words. Yeah, reading it all will take you some time, so I’ll try to hit the highlights.

Sadness

I entirely missed out on Khaine’s Embrace for the weekend. The whole family thing put a complete, screaching halt to any gaming, and I missed out on what is probably one of the best SCs in game. Mythic, do a blogger a favor and bring it back real soon please. I don’t want to bottle my tears and send them to you for proof of how bummed I am about missing this.

Also, in a rare moment of disagreement, I have to say no, the map does NOT look like a Down’s Syndrome Dinosaur. Between Khaine’s Embrace, and Lost Temple of Isha, I think that Mythic has a healthy appreciation for the female reproductive system.

Just saying.

Family forcibly supresses violent urges

I’m back from my extended weeklong family extravaganza! My mom showed up on our doorstep on Thursday night, and then my sister did the same with her husband in tow at in the evening of  Saturday. It was enjoyable to see them all again, and for my daughter to experience Grandma for the first time. Mid-day of Monday though,  my fingers were twitching a bit for want of violence and face-crushing PvP action. I sadly missed out on all of Khaine’s Embrace weekend, and hope that it will be back sometime in the near future. Right now, I’m sure I have a lot of reading to do, to play catch-up on what went down over the weekend, on twitter, the forums, and my blogger-in-arms compatriots. So, back to our regular scheduled programming, I’ll be talking with you shortly.

See you on Tuesday!

My mother is coming into town today to finally meet her granddaughter, and will be here through Tuesday morning. So that said, please go visit these highly entertaining blogs and posts in particular, as I will not be here to entertain you slave-drivers until then. I’m breaking my chains and running free! Catch me if you can sucka’s!

• Werit finishes his series on the 1.3.5 changes. One change he’s not too stoked about, guess which!
• Tyanon’s awesome 6v6 tournies are going strong, and he’s trying to make it self-perpetuating.
• Aeo at Bluring Shock talks about escalation, arms races, and optimization of tools in WAR.
• Erbse predicts a shift in power with the new patch. Also, officially, congrats on 80!
• Krossus gives trolls a message, play or shut up!
• Kruel talks about the big offenders in the game. Abilities that is, he even names one of his own! Shocker!
• BeHive at Super Effective posts a guide to Lost Vale, but I stopped reading at the three-titted chick from Total Recall.
• Tarelther makes proper usage of POG-terminology.
• Skar ponders Skaven uprisings and the problems with a large, sudden influx of returning players.
• Grimnir gives his experience of the city, right fine action it seems to have been too.

Enjoy everyone, and I’ll catch you on the come-around!

A Facelift

If you’ve been playing Warhammer for any amount of time, you’re most likely aware of their main webpage, their forums, and probably the “Realm War” portion of the site. I remember when it was first launched, it was a very cool, interactive idea that provided a pretty slick interface for the community and hobbyists to check out the game while not able to actually play the game. For those of you familiar with World of Warcraft, it was a somewhat similar version of their Armory. The Realm War, is a tad clunky, and lacking in a few areas, but it’s so close to being a very refined and great tool for the game, that I wanted to go in depth on some areas it could improve. If you visit the forums of the game at all, I made a suggestion with some of the same ideas I have in here, so give it kudos if you like what you read.

There are a lot of things that it does right. It allows you to look up characters, guilds, racial pairings, and even rankings based on different criteria. The campaign interface is great, with lots of interactivity and little flourishes of style and smoothness all over the place. The searches are fairly thorough, and provide you with who your looking for as long as you know something about your desired subject. The leaderboards give you rankings on everything from guild-leader kill to renown gain for all time, and in the last week. It all works, as in it functions, and in a lot of places it’s even got a cool factor going on. But there are areas that need work, and improvement, which I’ll go over as I talk about each different system.