Zone Control and Slayer tidbits

Last update for now, phew.

The EU herald has a mini background into the Slayer for all who are interested. I am particularly interested in this small quote from it.

The twin axes of the Dwarf bit deep into the troll hide and now, the men could see the glow of rune power that surrounded the blades.

Could that be a hint as to what the class mechanic will be? Who knows. Wait and see I guess.

And zone control, as many have mentioned before, there is changes to the way zone control works in patch 1.1.1, this post on WHA tells of some of the upcoming things.

Basically, your side has to hold all six of their blocks in order to flip the zone." This is supplemental to other ways of flipping a zone.

So grab an objective, hold it for 30minutes, grab a keep hold it for 2 hours, do the same for all the zone and bobs your uncle you lock it down. This should help end the countless grinds for getting nowhere in Tier 4! Anticpation level rises somewhat!

Character Transfers

Aparantly I missed the next stage of Character Transfers.
Karak-Izor is being offered free transfers too the following servers:

• Karag Eight Peaks
• Karak-Azgal
• Karak-Norn
• Karak-Hirn

Now not to sound too biased, but since I play on Karak-Norn. And I know how much we would love new players (who wouldnt afterall) I link now to Wizards and Wenches advertisement for Norn. Dont be swayed by the temporary bonus to Hirn and Eight Peaks! Come to Norn for all your fun and WP love!

P.s. not all of the banner is true, I regret to inform that Regis is not the best WP ever, and in fact the biased nature of my blog I am 🙂 Sorry Regis!

Update time!

Well ok its not really the update, just the announcement, and what an announcement it is! Not only does it cover the two new classes, Slayer and Choppa as expected, but also a whole new zone, and FOUR live events! Rock on!

So where the hell to start? Guess at the beginning of it all.

First up in Chronological order is the Night of Murder event scheduled to run from the 6th to 15th of February. Very interested to see what form this will take, again it has the daily tasks given to us from the Tome of Knowledge, looking forward to this one. Currently I havent bothered much with the live events, but I think its time to change that!

Next up is Call to Arms (Randomly the name of my old CoD4 clan but I digress), This is the announcement of the schedule for the new content launch.

First up in this is the Slayer and Choppa release live event, Bitter Rivals allowing us the 1 week headstart similar to the previous “Heavy Metal” event for BlackGuard and Knight of the Blazing Sun. This event is due to to start towards the end of February, so I would expect the last week that we will all be looking towards this. This also brings the Twisting Tower Scenario into play.

In April the Call to Arms update brings us, Beyond the Sands live event with the promise of riches from the dessert lands.

Rise of The Tomb Kings in May starts the fight to control the new zone with the Land of the Dead officially opening in June. Which while it is a damn long time away, is always something to look forward too!

The deserts of Nehekhara open to players with the addition of a new RvR-gated dungeon zone. To gain access to the Land of the Dead, opposing Realms must battle for control of the zone to access dozens of new Public Quests, instanced lairs, and a massive new Tomb Kings dungeon to plunder in search of the Casket of Souls.

In addition to all of this FREE content, yes Free! We can also look forward to official WAR forums, Free Trials of WAR and more RealmWar functionality aparantly.

What do I think? I reckon Mythic have rekindled the spark in many folk with these notes, yes folk will be annoyed expecting the Slayer and Choppa events to start today, but Mythic never said they would, only that they would tell us today.

My only worry is that Mythic has bit off more than it can chew with this, only time will tell if they are up to the challenge of meeting their schedule. That said, they wouldnt have announced it if they didnt think that they could do it.

All in all, I am pleased with this now lets get to WAR!

The Poem Quest Continues.

Well with the impending Class announcement tomorrow from Mythic, we are left wondering what will be happening, and what the new live event will be. In fact will there be one? Probably, infact I would stake good money on it.

So there have been some more developements in the hunt for the poems, the letters and the potential meaning of it all. The main speculation is it will tell the name of the event, with parts of the poems dropping hints towards what the event will be and when.

Wizards & Wenches have a nice ordered post showing what each letter is and who got each one.

The new additions include, Fires of War, Stylish Corpse, /random and Lagwar.

Aparantly the handwritting on some of the letters is hard to make out, and as such could be taken in different manners. This ambiguity is proving of some interest as certain combinations seem to make more sense that others.
Since thats all I know so far that is all I will say anyway.
Oh and random shiny picture of the Destro attempt to siege Shining Way 10minutes ago for fun.

Seems I was slightly ascew as I ran off the ramparts to hit someone with my hammer!

Mythics guide on tactics.

It seems Mythic has put together a small guide on Open RvR Tactics. If you havent already checked it out do so.

Tactics is one thing that I see lacking alot on Karak Norn for order, while destruction use the same one over and over again – the 3 warband zergathon.

When seriously outnumbered, playing tactically is all that we can ever do. The daily situation on Norn is that during the day, order is able to dominate the T4 zones, with very few destruction around. What this tells me is that either, alot of destruction are kids in school/eductaion, or folk who work these seemingly “normal” hours of work.  This is great for order, we can run in, nab all the keeps and BO’s etc but rarely is there much of a fight going on.

Come around 5 or 6pm though, the scene shifts dramatically, suddenly destro are able to field a similar number of players and we have a good fight, but slowly and surely it turns. Order start to log off for dinner, while more destruction log on. Before we know it we are vastly outnumbered again. And so we end up retreating, trying to goad destro into a fight, however with such a state of play that no matter what we do to goad them, to fight them, to gain any footing, we get steamrolled.
Main ranting point is that bringing a bunch of warbands to the field, while fun for you, isnt for anyone else. Yes we should organise ourselves better, but order seem to lack this capability, more and more players we lose every day to this zerg mentality. Until the forthcoming zone control patch, I see no way for order to get any reak grasp on Karak Norn.

Sentinel Update

After being specced the past day as a Wrath WP, I found myself today going to WBT tunnel with my guild as a DPS and not a healer. Yes I did have to cast the odd heal, but its still within my capability and mechanics.

The run consisted of 3 WPs, 1 grace, 1 salv and 1 wrath, 1 IB, 1SM and 1ENG.  Very fast run with only a few deaths, mainly to the ENG as they seem to do insane damage.

DPS was fun, all beit completely different to what I was used to.  Killed the boot boss easily enough, and got Sentinal Boots for my WP Yay me!  So now 3/6 Sentinel with 2 Greater Wards.

Our guild leader, and the salv specced WP in the run also gave me a gift today, Sledge of the Warden contemplating staying as Wrath to maximise its potential. Could dump 2 STR talismans on it and really go to town.

Mythic send some bloggers some love poems.

Well I am truely in awe at how Mythic have taken to advertising the new classes and what we assume is a new live event.  For the classes, read the posts farther down Mythic has a sense of humour and Pending update 29/1/9.

Now it seems Mythic have taken to sending “love” poems to unsuspecting bloggers. I say love, with some scepticism, since theres not much love around them!

There are aparantly 13 poems that have been sent out, only 5 have so far been posted/discovered yet according to Paul Bennets twitter site,I just did a quick shufty.. out of the 13 we sent out.. 5 are posted.. the others.. we await..

So far the lucky folk to have found one of these “poems” in their mail boxes are, RainbowMMO, Werit, Keen and Graeve, Asuryan Flames, Epic Slant.  So hopefully more wil be around there!

From these poems they alure to a RvR event, on the night of murder which would typically alure to being Friday the 13th to me.  So it sounds possible the date to a live event being launched for the new classes?

Aparantly some of the discovered letters/poems have a number X/13 and a letter on the back, but not all have been posted, could be the name of the event being announced…we just have to wait and see.

Wizards & Wenches made a suggestion as to what the event may entail from the fact it talks of the “Night of Murder”.

WHA has a discussion thread running to track all the poems and try to decipher the cryptic clues in them.
What do I think? I reckon we are getting a live event announced, but as to what it could be, or will be called? No idea.

Keep it coming Mythic!

Crafting in WAR

At the start when leveling Kutu I thought of what crafts I wanted to pick, and chose Apothecary and Cultivating, which support each other nicely. However being a healer I found the use for pots very limited and soon gave up around skill 60.

Well tonight I decided to rethink my decision and wiped out my Apothecary and Cultivating, and replace them with Magical Salvaging and Talisman making.  Now chosing Talisman at this stage is a hard hitting move on your wallet, a few patches ago you could salvage RR gear, and so skilling up was fairly easy as fragments could be found easy.  Now its more difficult. Ever tried to find level 9-14 greens for cheap? Theres plenty on my AH, but not enough to skill me up without costing a fortune.

So it is farming time, crack out your DPS Warrior Priest and lets go to town on level 10 mobs! YAY!

Well now I have started to digress, anyway, crafting.

Why Talisman making though? It seems to me to be the most profitable, constantly I find myself, well every week or so, buying willpower talismans of 5day length at 30g each, these get expensive fast.  Soon I will be able to tap into this market and also Salvage any keep bag items i get, since I really dont need more Annihalator gear and those pesky random dungeon drops I end up with for no reason could have some use!

Initially, both Magical Salvaging and Talisman can be skilled to 25 with much ease on npc bought items, after this level 9-14 greens get you fragments for 25-50 Talisman and so on.  I found this chart to be of a great help to me, after taking an hour or so to work out what the hell it meant.

Note: I did not create this chart 🙂

Starting in the top right corner this chart shows what Salvaging level you need to get a Fragment and skill up on green/blue/purple/orange items. Which is great when you are looking to find a place to farm items.

Each Tier of Talisman you wish to create has a certain value, this is worked out by adding the value of the tiered fragment, curio and essence, from the left hand coloumn on left side of page and using the result to check against the coloumn of what you can expect.  Its hard to explain.

But if you use a Green Skill 100 Fragment, a green 100 curio and green 100 gold dust, your total would be 65, 18*3 and then a +1 since its dust and not essence you are using, comparing this to the chart you lie between the T5 and T6 results and would end up making a T5 Talisman of  either 9 as talismans only make the stat compared to the colour they are. (unless they crit)

At 200 aparantly certain Curios and Essence/Dusts give you extra boosts. In addition to this the chart lists some extra crit chances, 8% to get random tier up crit, 2% to bump the talisman colour up.

As for me, my Salvaging is at 60 already and Talisman making is at 35, lacking the greens so on a mass farm effort in Nordland right now!

What is others views on the crafting system? Any other crafts used instead/ I know Scavanging/Butchering rakes in a fair bit of cash in npc junk anyway. Let me know if you have any thoughts. I reckon I will no doubt end up with a Scavenger/Apothecary or a Apothecary/Cultivator on my alt again just for completions sake 🙂

Its all confusing for my head, and I am not so sure I have explained it well at all!

Oh well!

The current loot system – End game dungeons

After many runs through Sigmars Crypts and WBT getting little to no gear (Only recieved the Sentinal Bookstrap for my WP so far) I have been thinking through the drop system and what could be done to improve it.
With the current system each boss has a chance to drop Sentinal gear but only random pieces, given that all pieces are BoP with the exception of belts, this ends up with either one happy guild talisman or with a load of trash for folk to vender.
This system is hampering progression through the game, with the group I go with to these runs we can clear fully Crypts in 90minutes and about 2hours on each wing of WBT just now, but end up with no drops to show for our work and thus having to come back to fully gear our characters before we can even contemplate moving to Lost Vale.

The solution to me seems clear, either update the loot table to only contain loot from classes present in the instance, which while it sounds a sound valid idea, programming wise would be a complete nightmare to test correctly, or the two valid ideas i have.

Firstly make bosses drop a chest with contribution similar to keeps and PQ’s, this is a valid idea as the bag system is already in place within the game, or creating a system similar to that which LOTRO have where each boss would drop a gem which can be traded to an npc for gear.

Either of these systems would help the average player who doesnt have countless days to farm for gear with a low drop rate and allow them to experience farther into the game much easier.

Mythic has a sense of humour.

After the folks at Keen and Graeve got their little hair dye bundle from Mythic last week, it seems The Greenskin also got some luck in with a surprise package from Mythic.
So it looks like Choppa and Slayer for sure!

I have to admit, I like this approach that Mythic has taken to getting their news out their and keeping the public guessing while also helping to build bonds with the blogging community.  Good game Mythic!