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

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

Musings on the 1.4 Patch notes

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/patchnotes/index.php?id=2010_1-4

Some interesting stuff, I've deliberately stayed away from the PTS in order to get thrown intot his first hand on release, which if they're releasing patch notes now may not be so far away (50% to 69 now - would liek to get 70 before 1.4)

I guess everyone is going to buy the progression pack, if nothing else for the buff to rp gains from 1-80

the personality pack seems a bit 'meh' but its a nice name for the order barber surgeon anyway

Class changes... nice marauder buffage along with the engi and magus changes, nothign else particularly springs to attention. Apart from the heart render toxin nerf which is really going to hurt Witch Elves

However

the most epic change of all epic changes of epicness ever in the land of epicdom is this...

"Falling damage has been tweaked to be more forgiving. Players can now fall further before incurring damage."

OMFG YES!!!!!

This might finally stop me getting laughed at by healers as i 'pop' down the side of a hill or leap daringly of a small ledge only to splat at the bottom

and maybe JUST MAYBE I won't die by taking a leisurely stroll down the dragonwake hills

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

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