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.

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

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?