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)

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

Have a thought for your healer!

Played my lowbie zealot for a while yesterday (40/32 when I started) and finished on 40/35 with full annihilator gear

Shes horrendously geared but still did quite well and I enjoyed playing a healer for a day (I played a cleric in DAoC so I'm used to it)

What I had forgotten about was the incessant whine at healers during scenarios, one that springs to mind was a squig herder saying 'learn 2 res'

Funnily enough, after that he never got a res, strange how that can happen

Typically, when I play a healer, every scenario seems to have 4+ healers in, when I play my Sorc, no scenario has healers :)

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

One of 'Those' Nights...

Have you ever had one of those nights where everything seems sh*t?

We only had a few people online last night for the start of our sc group (sorc/dps dok/sham/zeal) and were later joined by a mara and another sham

I was playing pretty under-par really due to being tired, but I couldn't skip out and swap for someone as no one else was on, so I struggled through. won some, lost some. We kept running into order premades with what seems like a new fotm setup, sometimes getting our faces smashed, others getting a win

The most irritating group was WP/WP/Knight/Knight/Slayer/Slayer

What did make me chuckle was the zealot bomb group of xzi and friends, nice idea and well implemented, had a few scs with them and they did well. Once day I'll get my zealot into Invader gear and start DPSing

On the plus side I finally picked up my warlord trophy and started accruing royal medals - kinda wish I'd never stopped playing for Aion now as I'd already have the royal weapon

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

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)

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)