The Changer of Ways is as good as a rest

Not written anything for a while, as I've been pretty busy. I've also not been playing my Sorc much over the last couple of weeks

Instead, I was tootling about on my baby Witch Elf (rr37). I was mainly playing this because I got irritated with my sorc. However after a week or so of playing it (including a be/bb run which I've not done in a while - incredibly getting two drops I could use) I'm quite happy to be back and melting faces

Did a couple of city siege's in Shus's warband on Sunday morning with the sorc and netted just over 100k renown, typically though my loot roles sucked donkey balls and I walked away with a sum total of...... Nothing Useful (except a few crests), which is irritating as I still need 1 pc of sovereign to complete the set

And last night I joined in with Kill Frenzy's oRvR warband for an hour or so (taking my number of respecs for yesterday alone to 3 - respec to bomb for the city, respec to ST after the city, and respec back to bomb for oRvR) which was good fun with some nice fights

Also installed a bundle of new addons and had a little fight with my UI, the latest iteration of which is here, think I'm finally nearly settled with it, and can't see me doing any more major changes, just little tweaks every now and then

And finally, nearly completed the Keg End event, after spending half an hour getting lost in IC trying to find the last few drinks I now just need to find a giant (still not seen one) and launch a few more fireworks from BOs/Keeps

Oh speaking of the event... Sticking kegs down in keep doorways is really really really irritating. Please stop it :P

Mailbox guarders

So, this is beginning to irritate me now, it wasn't so bad pre-1.4 when the only renown these afkers would get was if the zone locked. Now however, its quite easy to get over 10000 renown an hour just by standing in (or just out of) the warcamp, without the zone even locking. I know people who have characters logged into WAR leeching renown while the actively play WoW - thats ridiculous

So, here I have two solutions, one is simple, one not so much

The simple one, stop the resource carriers giving renown when they reach the wc/keep

The not so simple one, remove warcamp guards, in their place you will have a barrier, you will only gain renown if you are outside the barrier. Players can freely move and attack through the barrier defending their warcamp, but the enemy force is unable to. This method would mean anyone afk-ing outside the warcamp is free renown for the opposing force. I think this method would prevent wc farming as well as the defending team can attack through and if they do die, then they respawn at their keep anyway

This still leaves the issue of people afk-ing at the keep though, how could this be prevented? the only method I can think of really is to use another 'idle hands' debuff, if you've not done anything for 90 seconds you receive a debuff that stops you from gaining renown, performing some actions removes this debuff. Maybe a better way to remove this debuff would be to right click it, obviously a warning box informing you that you have the debuff and how to remove it would need to be implemented as well

Another way of preventing people from AFK-ing at the keep could be to prevent you from gaining renown while within the keep unless its from killing another player (i.e. mdps classes and gutter runners that can bypass defences) or the keep is flagged as under attack

While not perfect, I think something like this could only have a positive impact. There are loopholes to every system though, and no doubt someone would write an addon/macro that works around it.

All I want for Christmas is..........

This list of stuff please.

Lokax over at Mmmmm Gud has posted a wish list of what he'd like to see happen in Warhammer in the future. And hell, its a good idea, so I'm stealing it... erm, borrowing it

While Lokax tried to be un-selfish with his list, I'm not that altruistic so there will no doubt be some things in my list that I want (and stuff everyone else)

1. Lower respec costs - I'm close to having to pimp out my sorc to be a Black Orcs play thing in order to be able to pay for the amount of respeccing I have to do, I have one spec for scenarios and solo/small group roaming  (ST dot based), another for Cities/oRvR warband action (Bomb) and a final one for PvE dungeons (high agony for max doombolt)

2. Lower costs for Invader/Warlord gear - OK so they did lower it a bit, but its still too expensive. Due to the RP gain buff, 60-70 can be rocketed through and the chance of having enough medallions at the end of it for the warlord gear is slim (I still haven't bought WL helm or Belt), sure they added invader/warlord gear to keeps, but with the amount of people involved at every keep siege, the chance of getting the required bag is slim

3. Less Bugs - OK, who doesn't want this? ToVL has been out for well over a year now (maybe close to two?) and its still buggy as hell. I understand that its an MMO, and bugs are inevitable, but massive bugs that affect everyone really should be looked at asap

4. More/Different Scenarios  -they're not linked to the campaign now so mix them up a little. What I think would be nice would be to stick all of the scenarios in a pool and then hvae 4 or 5 live scenarios at a time and they just rotate on a first in first out basis per week, this would give a good 4-5 weeks of every scenario. There are some great ones that we just haven't seen at all (Grovod for example) and some that are restricted to lower tiers that could be fun in T4 (Tor Anroc?). Also, adding some new ones would be nice, more 6v6, maybe even an 18v18?

5. Make PvE equipment easier to obtain - Even something as simple as ensuring that the set items that drop are usable by someone in the instance would make a hell of a difference. Stick the items in gold bags and make it a PQ, convert the items to repairable by archetypes/races (a la tovl)

My Current Thoughts & Issues

So, not posted in around a week, in the little free time I've had I've either been farming scenarios or enjoying the delights of our new Sky HD box (yes, a bit behind the times I know)

So, 1.4 has been here a while now and I'm just going to whitter on for a little bit with things I like and things I don't. I'll re-iterate here that I don't oRvR much, generally just while waiting for scenarios popping. My laptop (yes, I play on a laptop) really doesn't like 100 vs 100 fights

Anyway...

The Good

First off, it has to be the EPIC RENOWN. Yes, I do believe that that statement deserves capitals, bold, italics and underlining, even in Eternal Citadel, which one we'd remember how to play we did pretty well in, I got over 8k renown in a 2 minute scenario. I also tend to be getting around 25-30% of a renown rank in an evening (about 3 hours play) which is insane so I'm pushing 72 now, which I'll hopefully get tonight

Secondly, the skaven. In what oRvR I've done (normally weekend mornings) I've now played all of the skaven classes. the packmaster I found a bit dull and didnt play it for long, but the buffs it can kick out are insane. The other 3 classes (Rat Ogre, Gutter Runner and Warlock Engineer) are all pretty fun and definitely bring something new to the game. We had 2 Rat Ogres at a keep siege one morning and we threw pretty much the entire warband into the keep which caused some chuckles. The gutter runner scout ability is really nice as well, showing where the enemy is on the map

Thirdly, Scenario Pops, now Mythic have fixed whatever they broke they're poping thick and fast, which suits me down to the ground as I'm regularly hitting 15k renown per scenario which is awesome. As a guild, we're performing better in scenarios as well. taking on a lot of the top order guilds, and while we're not always winning, when we don't we're certainly giving a good fight.

The Bad

Bugs... How can a patch break something that wasn't changed???? We had a guild outing to ToVL on Sunday (still need the glyph from the 6th boss) and we wiped 3 times on the first boss before getting irritated and running scenarios. Everything was fine and as expected until he popped into Carrion Phase, none of the usual CC to stop him spinning was taking effect as it should and as such our RR80 chosen and RR76 (I think) marauder were just getting destroyed by the insane damage.

Matchmaking System... I don't understand how this works, we still see a lot of pugs vs rr80 set groups, we can win 5 scenarios in a row (which you would think would boost the rating) and then fight a bunch of low level puggers. Work needs to be done on this

Need to go do some work now (bah) might add some more later

1.4 is here!

And my evening kind of went like this...

got online around 8ish, specced my sorc, sorted renown points out, went to get mail from packs, no mail, got the hell out of IC, mail!, saw enemy wasn't working since the patch (along with a few other non-essential addons), installed squared again, found out there was an update to enemy hidden away (http://netload.in/dateiH2mAWll9uc/Enemy.rar.htm) so installed that and removed squared again, reconfigured my unit frames with enemy, flew to DW, server maintenance in 15 mins, bash head against table, go play a bit of Dragonquest IX on the DS and then watch Castle

on the plus side, I'm probably not going to be online till the weekend now, so maybe people will have a clue about wtf is going on in oRvR...

If, for example, everyone that was in DW RvR zone suddenly got ported to Ellyrion's RvR zone, most of the chickens would be headless

Some good news then...

Rancid's Career Builder is finished!!! http://wardrobe.war4scrubs.com/

This is fast becoming my favourite site for WAR related stuff, I tend to respec weekly, so being without a builder for so long was agony for me and Rancid's put a hell of a lot of work into this bad boy

There's also a renown builder available at WARStats.net (another one of my fave sites, I just wish searching was a bit easier) http://warstats.net/rbuilder?lang=usa

Bring on Tomorrow!!!

Yeah baby!

I'm 50k away from 70 and we get to play with new toys

I'm quite looking forwards to trying out the new oRvR and seeing how things work, hell, I might even give a packmaster a try if the opportunity arises

on a side note, had an evening of scenarios/IC defence as dirty bomb spec the other day

Quite fun, but I'm pretty certain that ST is more effective for SCs than bomb spec now, in a warband, its a different story

Additional testing complete!

So, plugged away at a keep door this morning in TM using my usual rotation (instead of CQ DB spam)

Frozen touch only ever procced off Arctic Blast, Gloomburst, Impending Doom and Hand of Ruin (any tick)

Guess SoG is looking more and more promising

Been running it for scenarios the last few days, overall, damage hasn't increased by any great shakes, but I did notice that those players who were surviving a rotation with a sliver of health now arent :)

Still going to continue playing with it for a bit longer and see how it goes

on a side note, dinged 69 the other day, one more rr to reach my target of 70 before 1.4

Swell of Gloom - Worth it or Not?

Been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd land back with a bump and have a look at one of the tactics that I've been looking at recently and wondering whether its worth it or not

So, my base spec is:

Agony: 11 points spent including picking up Echo of Power and Impending Doom
Calamity: 17 Points spent, including picking up Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Hand of Ruin

and my tactic loadout is Endless Knowledge, Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Frozen Fury

My new spec (as of last night) is

Agony: 14 points spent including picking up Echo of Power and Impending Doom and Swell of Gloom
Calamity: 14 Points spent, including picking up Vision of Domination, Shadow of Disaster and Hand of Ruin

and tactics are the same except FF has been dropped in favour of Swell of Gloom

So, ultimately, I lose a small amount of WoP/VoT/HoR/CW damage and boost AB/FB/DB/ID/EoP by a touch, so these pretty much cancel out

which only leaves the difference between SoG and FF

Ignoring the backlash component of SoG (as in group play its pretty irrelevant anyway) its a guaranteed 628 damage (according to my tooltip) every rotation (additional burst!)

Whereas FF boosts the proc chance of frozen touch to 75% from 25%

some simple mathhammering now...

I'm only concerned about the damage during the burst window, during which time these spells will land on an opponent...

CW (one tick)
VoT
WoP
AB
GB
ID
HoR (one tick)

Assuming FT can proc off dot spells (not sure, will test) then with FF slotted (75% chance) you get 5.25 procs at around 200 damage per proc for 1050 damage total

If it doesn't proc off dot spells, then its only going to proc 3 times for around 600 damage total

So, with SoG slotted instead of FF,

Assuming FT procs off dot spells, its going to proc 1.75 times for around around 220 damage per proc (additional points in agnony boosting the damage slightly) for a total of 385 damage

If it doesn't proc off dot spells, then it will only proc once, for 220 damage total

And to this needs adding the 628 damage from SoG itself

In summary...

	FF Procs of Dots	FF doesn't proc off dots
FF slotted	1050 total damage	600 total damage
SoG Slotted	1013 total damage	848 total damage

So, for pure damage numbers, FF performs slightly higher if it procs off dots but if it doesn't then SoG massively outperforms it

However, even with the slight damage boost for FF if it procs off dots, I think the additional burst potential from SoG would make it worthwhile

Anyway, I'll play with this spec for a week or two and start checking my combat logs to see exactly what FT can proc off

I Take it all Back

The Leather Face Mask (screeny below) is awesome!

OK so I lose about 100 int due to losing my DP set bonus, but I switched the DP belt I was wearing for invader to give me a toughness boost and changed liniments for the intelligence once, so i'm only 30 or so int down

Add to that the +10% from the event buff (basic reward) and I'm now running at +20% damage pretty much all the time

There are some stupid numbers flying over my screen

None of the other masks really do anything for me, the +crit one is quite nice, but I dont think its anywhere near as effective as the leather face

Daemon Moon Rising

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/liveevents/2010DaemonMoonRising.php

So its that time of year again and the hallowe'en event rolls around

the event itself seems relatively straight forward and I got a bit of it done last night (/drink at all careers - finding a magus was fun :/) and got a few of the 'children of the mask' quests done

My only complaint about this is that to complete a lot of the tasks you have to be wearing a mask... this means I'm not wearing my DP helm (grrr) which drops me about 90 intelligence as I lose the set bonus. Some of the abilities on the masks are quite nice though, lets see what I can remember from memory...

Bloodletter Mask - 10m cooldown, +10% movement speed/+20% damage/healing done for 10 secs
Goblin Mask - 20' radius aoe attack on target that does poor damage
Mask of the Unborn - plague - deals 1200dmg over 10 secs to target then jumps to another target and does the same, hits 5 targets total
delicate silver mask - 10m cooldown, fills morale bar
gaping skull mask - makes friendly target immune to damage for 10s (channelled)
Meatcleaver's mask (advanced reward)- timed explosion, after 10secs, aoe's around target for 1200 damage and aoes around caster for 1800 (healing)

These next two are pretty rare and have passive bonuses and abilities

Leather Face (Gold bag RvR PQ) - Passive: increase damage and healing done by 2% for each ability activation (stackable x5) Activated: apply built up passive bonus to everyone within 30 feet
Face Eaters mask (Gold Bag PvE PQ) - Passive: Each Critical attack increases crit chance by 2% (stackable x5) Activated: Sacrifice self to deal 300 damage in 30' pbae, then continues to burn doing 240 damage every 2 seconds for 30 seconds

oddly, didnt get a single High Pass Cemetary scenario pop last night which prevented me from starting some of the tasks, and I didnt get over to the orvr zone to look at the new PQ, might give it a try tonight if I'm around

For the rewards, the basic reward is probably the most interesting....

its a 3 day buff that grants +10% damage/healing/xp/renown, I can't remember whether this is 3 days logged in, or 3 days real time.. I think its logged in time, will confirm later

the advanced reward is the meatcleaver's mask, I remember the ability being called 'Pain and Pleasure' which makes me think its some sort of lifetap, will confirm later again

and the elite reward is a 60day event slot item, IIRC the sorc item was 16 INT / 10 WOU / and some toughness maybe? again, will confirm later :)

And there's a final reward of the Magnus Daemonicum which can be got from the PQ and (I believe) as a rare drop from the repeatable quest

EDIT: Updated mask info, need to get my mits on the leather face mask methinks

Thanquol's Incursion

Now this I actually like the sound of...

Full details (or full details so far anyway) are here

So an instanced, 24vs24 dungeon, with rvrve elements

killing a boss (I expect high level lords) while dealing with the enemy realm is just my cup of tea. the fact that these bosses are going to do stuff (unlike Karl Franz for example) adds a whole new dimension to the fight, and the fact that you have to be rr65 to even enter the dungeon says that these beasties are going to be challenging

Quite looking forwards to this, the win-o-meter sounds nice and it'll be interesting to see what kind of goodies we can use the warpstone on

Is this the tier 5 we've all been waiting for?

New Home

Well I've moved now, and I figured out why the comments hadn't moved over as well, so they're all active

New Renown Abilities

EDIT AGAIN: Stupid Google Docs playing silly buggers. Have uploaded both of the files to 4shared.com and they're accessable via this link: http://www.4shared.com/dir/4RZObJMV/WAR.html, have changed the file names to make it obvious which is macro enabled and which isn't

EDIT: The links are pretty difficult to spot on the posts using this theme I've found, so I've also added links to the two calculators to the 'screenies and stuff' page, the link to this is at the top of the bar

So I had a bit of time spare at the weekend and knocked this little excel sheet up so I could look at what kind of spec I could go for with the new renown abilities. For those of us who are security conscious (and why wouldn't you be in this day and age) the sheet is macro enabled and has one button which is simply used to clear all of the checkboxes, I you really truly dont want to download something with a macro in, I created a version that is competely macro free (you'll just have to manually uncheck things). You can download either or both of these versions from here. Once these changes have gone live and are confirmed I might do a nice swishy web-based version

So anyway, my thoughts on the changes (full details of the new realm abilities can be found here)...

Changes:

• Wounds now worth taking as they increase at the same rate as the other stats (unlike previously)


• No armour buff anymore (considering this was bugged and only rank I worked, not a major deal)


• Criticals... 15 more points for 2% more crit than previously... Ouch


• Resolute Defence, rank I now costs 10 points, this is painful

New Stuff

• take less damage, deal less damage - hmm interesting, though for pvp I dont think its much use, might be good for tanks in pve though


• +18% dodge/disrupt, thats pretty impressive, probably better things to take first though


• +18% parry, pretty impressive also, could be useful for those classes with parry reactionals, especially with the likely nerf to undefendable talismans


• Reduce chance to be crit by 24%, wait... what??? really??? almost cancels a bw/sorc's full comb/DM


• Reduce crit damage by 50%, cancels bw/sorc's full comb/DM bonus


• +AP pool... doubt anyone will spec this


• +health regen... those tanks in full def sov might enjoy this


• chance to boost movement speed... what is the point of this? odjira in boots proces enough and you're losing 24 wounds for that, or you could spend 10 rps for a lower chance of a lower boost. Considering those 10 rps could be spent to give +38 wounds


• improved flee... really? run out of ideas?


• Cleansing wind... purge, nice. expensive though, and I think i prefer resolute defence


• efficiency, not too fussed about this either


• last stand.. interesting but probably not worth it

Yay 67!

So, an epic night of SCs (100% win), dinged 67, wrote an addon (a toggler for dascore - seeings as I could only access it with the slash command or a macro since installing minmap) and boxed off my ui to what (I think) I'll stick with for the forseeable future

Only thing you can't see on the screenshot is the friendly target, but its just the same as the hostile one but on the left hand side

all bufs stack below the unit frame and debuffs are above

ripped a fait bit from yakui

Bye Bye WARDB

http://www.wardb.com/

you'll be sorely missed!

Sure, a lot of it was out of date, but there really was no where else with the resources this had, especially spell details (http://war.allakhazam.com/ is probably the next best thing)

So, curse are working on a major new WAR project... could be interesting?

Anyone know anyone willing to write a career builder app? This was probably the thing I used most on wardb (second most would be the renown builder) and as far as I know, there isn't another one out there. If someone can correct me that would be brilliant. Failing that... Anyone want to write one? :)

The WARdrobe

http://wardrobe.war4scrubs.com/

This is awesome, pure and simple saves faffing about with armour sets in game trying to figure out which set pieces work best

Just add talismans and its perfect

Scenari-Oh Oh Oh its magic!

Oh i love scenarios, we had a great group lasyt night with some awesome fights

our group...

Squitch - Zeal
Hellmedic - Sham
Disarm - BlOrc
Finnark - Mara
Litless - dps DoK
Merilees - Sorc

we won most scenarios (which is always a bonus) and had some really nice fights - Kudos to facemelting's & ishum's groups - though when someone shouts 'facemelting/ishum up' and we all switch target to focus them down I kinda feel sorry for them, but thats the way of the game, and hey, if you're getting focused it means you're doing your job right

beginning a sc and seeing someone like ishum in there will always prompt the line 'kill ishum first, he f***ing hurts'

clocked up around 50k renown last night so I'm only 30k away from 67 and warlord shoulders (yay!) which will no doubt prompt another re-working of equipment (need to get my grubby little paws on DP boots for more crit)

Old School Dungeons

We rocked through be/bb last night to try and gear up some of our lower rr players

I remember that we used to struggle with those dungeons, took probably around 45 minutes

dual sorc, BO, chos, zeal, sham

the other sorc got sent shoulders (i have no need for anything there so was just along to help) and the BO got sent chest, think there may have been a shammy drop as well

easy peasy :)

Going to rock some SCs tonight... lookin' forward to it

Scenarios/Altdorf 07.10.10

Had some nice scenarios last night. Apart from starting off playing like an idiot it was pretty much all good.

Our group:

Disarm - rr4x Blorc
Squitch - rr66 Zeal
Gwaragh - rr41 Sham
Merilees - rr66 Sorc
Mykael - rr70 Chop
Finnark - rr74 Mara

We all use Enemy as standard and run a single target assist train. If you're in a pre-made group and you're not running Enemy (or something similar), quite simply, you're doing it wrong, the same goes for voice comms.

I simply love having an rDPS in the assist train (though I may be ever-so-slightly biased) it just adds so many tactical options is amazing...

randomstealther pops on healers - they shout, rdps turns round, disarms and kills or roots and everyone moves away. mdps trains would have to reach them first in which time the healer can be dead
an enemy healer or rdps over extends to position on flank away from main fighting, rdps breaks from main assist and kills (sorc is amazing at this)

and more things to boot

on the subject of breaking from the assist train, quite often a bright wizzy or healer will break from their pack to gain advantageous positioning. With a sorc's rotation (cw, wop, vot, ab, gb, id, hor), quite often players don't realise that they're being targetted until its too late. If you think about it, until arctic blast lands (which due to flight time is around the same time that gloomburst lands) the only damaging ability you've got on them is chillwind, both word of pain and vision of torment just sit there doing nothing until their timer is up and they explode. Once gloombusrt has landed, the next two spells are instant cast as well (and land instantly) so there's pretty much no escape.

Assuming full dark magic, you're going to get a lot of crits with these spells and can easily hit a stupid amount of damage. As everything is hitting around the same time, you need healers that are really on the ball to stop it. On the rare occaision that something survives, they can be easily finished off with either a stricken voices (insta aoe silence + dmg - which also stops them self healing) or frostbite (1s cast disarm + dmg)

We also went to Altdorf in an alliance warband... pretty good fun with some nice fights, and I even respecced to bomb for it... and while I was pretty near the top damage and db chart (didnt get championed so the sorc that did ballooned his score) after playing ST since the last patch, it just didnt feel right and it wasn't as much fun as single target (which is a massive u-turn for me as I used to be a massive advocate for face-roll bomb spec)

Oops

Mykael is rr70 not rr6x as I said the other day.... Sorry mate

Of course, if the character search on warhammeronline.com actually worked at a half decent speed on EU characters then it wouldn't have been an issue in the first place