Huh? What? Real Life? Awwww no!

HALLO!

Happy New Year and all that Bo!@#$ks.

getting up at 06:25 this morning was a shocker

Deliberately not posted anything over the break as I wanted to spend time with the kiddiwinks and what not.

So as a result my in-game play time was pretty limited as well, with only a couple of evenings (and a few more early mornings), but I'm now only 40k renown away from 76 (huzzah)

Currently running at 298.6 damage bonus (3 glpyhs, cloak+jewel, and 3 int set bonuses) so I'm melting faces, my survivability is ridiculously low though (Beslen looks at me and I fall over) and I might have to drop 2 of the glyphs and go 4pc sov when I hit 76

But anyway, the developers have woken up from their hibernation and Andy has posted a list of what they're working on (http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/232/index/5618700/1) and here are a couple of musings on said post...

• A fix for the RR84 Respawn bug is currently in testing. We're hoping to have this pushed live this week. As such, we're delaying weekly maintenance until this fix passes testing.

This hasn't affected me, not being 84 'n all, but I've heard a lot of complaining about it, good show

• ORvR Anti AFK measures currently in testing

Hooray! you know my thoughts on this

• Tweaking Thanquol's Incursion boss encounters.

Again, good one, but maybe more needs to be done to actually encourage players to enter the dungeon

• Revamping the Packmaster Play As Skaven class to make it more utilitarian and globally useful.

Excellent, by boosting the packmaster, you're also boosting the Rat Ogre by proxy which means we may see more people flying onto ramparts in a keep siege near you soon

• Potentially adjusting Battle Field Objective interact flags. Looking into possibly increasing interact time and requiring players to be out of combat to use

lost a BO the other day by a WH using last stand and capping the flag while a warband failed to kill him, good times ^^ preventing this is a good idea

• Evaluating pre RR81 RvR Weapon Costs, looking into further reducing their costs

Can only be a good thing for those people ranking up

• Minor mirroring changes between the Warrior Priest and Disciple of Khaine

Not fussed :)

• Internal design and testing on Single Target Healing changes. Potentially reducing cast time of AM, SHA, RP and ZLT single target high value heals (long cast time), improving single target healing capabilities of WP/DoK and moving WP/DoK melee lifetap into the appropriate Mastery Paths (melee healing).

This could be interesting, on the rare occaision I play my zealot, the only time I ever use Elixer of Dark Blessings is just after I popped Focused Mind, and even then I'm more likely to use Dust of pandemonium, dropping eodb down to a 2s cast could be a really great change for a healer that is already amazing at ST healing

Nothing mentioned about the borked Realm War pages though :(

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)

DoK/WP Love/Hate Letter

its like a blog chain letter....

http://grimnir.mmofansites.com/posts/1926-love-hate-a-letter-from-an-archmage

Not Very In-depth Skaven Class Review

pretty much does what it says on the tin...

I've played all the skaven classes now, only for a short amount of time for each of them, but here are my intial thoughts...

Gutter Runner
The star of the show, the ability to show the enemy on the map is immense. In fact, its a game winner. We had 1fg roaming KV last night, our gutter runner let us pick the fights we wanted.

"Oh look, a warband! lets hide"
"There's only 8 of them... CHARGE!!!"

Add to that fairly decent damage, a nice snare and you have a pretty well rounded class that works brilliantly in groups/warbands

Warlock Engineer
This is probably my personal favourite to play (I do have a liking for rDPS) the condenser buff is amazing, +200 magic/healing power? Oh yes please. That's around 40dps, they also have another buff - ap regen I think, after seeing the power one I didn't really care about the other. They have a pretty nice conal aoe (that works through keep doors - but I expect that's a bug) a funky warp lightning thing and a hilarious Doom Rocket. Again, amazing group utility, if only for that buff

Rat Ogre
Personally, not a fan. The throw ability is nice, and in  warband could give those bored looking tanks something to do other than play noughts and crosses (tictactoe for the Americans). but the other two main abilities seem counter productive. you have a pbaoe stagger (you need to be in the middle of everyone) and a Charge-like ability (which punts everyone away from you when you run in) kind of opposites there

Add to this the fact that they can only be healed by packmasters and you have a pretty underwhelming option, Oh, and the damage they do to keep doors is pathetic - as they're the only thing apart from rams that can damage keep doors I think this needs boosting a little.

Packmaster
Crap, crap and a bit more crap on the side
You can heal rat ogres, but the heals really don't help much considering the Rat Ogre has over 30000 hit points, this needs increasing. the other abilities are pretty useless as well

The only saving grace of this class is the ridiculous +25% damage/healing/dodge/disrupt/armour buff which is insane, but consider that you're giving up whatever your own class can do to get this and I really don't think it's worth it. I did only play the packmaster for about 10 minutes, so I might give it another go and see if I can figure out what the point of this class really is... However, hover over your keep on the zone tracker and I bet you see something like this:

4/4 gutter runner
2/2 rat ogre
2/2 warlock engineer
0/2 packmaster

says something doesn't it?

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