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

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

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?

Epic ToVL Fail

Bah!

FIrst off, a disclaimer, as a guild, Rigante have only recently really started running tovl raids and getting anywhere. As we all took a break to play Aion and a few other things most of us are around rr60-70 and with 2 rr80s and only 2 other people rr70+

So, on Sunday evening we went to tovl, and completed 5th boss with little to no problems and last night we went back to box it off

Our group setup was:

Chosen - Karrnock - rr80
Zealot - Squitch - rr66
Zealot - Zalera - rr5x (the shammy we took on the original run couldn't make it last night)
Sorc - Merilees - rr66
Melee DoK - Litless - rr80
Choppa - Mykael - rr6x (i think)

We had a nightmare with 6th. got the first two lords down pretty easily even with our chosen lagging to death, we had multiple d/c's and squitch fell through the floor twice when standing on different pillars on the last lord, which also enraged twice.

On the time we dropped it, Mykael d/c'd with the lord on ~50%. somehow our remaining (uber) dps managed to finish it off before it enraged (including zalera switching to offensive harbinger and dps-ing, squitch had fell through the floor at this point)

So, we dropped the lord and (typically) the choppa glyph dropped, which as Mykael had d/c'd he couldn't roll on (the inevitable taunting that followed was the highlight of the night). Somehow, litless also won the gold bag, I think this was a bug ;)

Anyway, on to 7th. This is only the second time we've got to 7th as a guild and last time we cleared him pretty easily once we'd figured out what we were doing. This time however a different story

It started off badly when Karrnock died when starting the encounter for the first time, reset

Stages 1 & 2 were a cake walk

Stage 3 we failed on every single time. After watching some videos of the fight this morning I've realised that we were moving around within LoS too much and too many people getting gtae's dropped on them and getting hit by lightning at the same time. We'll take lessons on this for next time

Next time I'm online for an evening though, stuff PvE and back to killing people \o/