Do I miss WAR when I’m not playing it? By Sip.
No I don’t either. And it’s a bit scary. Am I growing up? I have friends who play but, unlike with past MMOs, we don’t spend all non-play our time talking about WAR either.
Y’know, not that I get to play too much lately. It’s crazy month around here.
PS: Trying to put a nice Black Orc video together, have most of the material I need, just need to edit it and slap some bad music on top of it. Maybe over the weekend…
Tags: random thoughts
Significant changes they say (coming with a free respec, at your local trainer). Let’s have a look:
All War Bellows will now persist through the Black Orc’s death. This means that you will not have to recast a War Bellow after respawning or being resurrected.
Nice, especially if you’re like me and always forget to recast your war bellow before hitting flee in a scenario.
Trip Em Up: The snare from this ability will no longer stack with other snares. Also, the damage has been reduced but no longer occurs over time. The AP cost has increased and the reuse timer has been removed.
Wasn’t this already in? Haven’t played much lately but I’m pretty sure it was. Bit of a shame they increased the AP cost, as I seem to be struggling as it is, but otherwise I’ll always take direct damage over DoTs.
Da Big Un: The damage of this spell has increased, and its radius reduced.
Sweet I guess? No really insightful comment to make.
Skull Thumper: This ability now adds an effect that deals additional damage to the target whenever they are critically hit.
Also seem to remember noticing this (the tooltip actually said ‘their head will ring for 0 additional damage for 0 seconds).
Right in da Jibblies: The reuse timer of this ability has been lowered.
Awesome. Black Orcs - now with more reproduction denying power!
Follow me Lead: The Toughness buff given to the defensive target should now work correctly.
Again, confused - wasn’t Follow me Lead supposed to buff weapon skill?
Juggernaut: This ability is now available at rank 12.
Not bad. It seems that most or all classes got their roots/counters pushed down to rank 12.
Guard: This ability should no longer attempt to work on players outside of your group.
It did?
Rock ‘Ard: This ability now starts a Plan chain.
Don’t have it, can’t comment.
Link to the full patch notes. All in all, I don’t really find the changes to be as big as to warrant a mastery points refund but again, I can’t complain. Some other things I like about the patch are: ironing out the morale bugs, the root immunity, the added delay on murderballs and the general improvements on interface responsiveness and animation. Huzzah!
I love these little bursts of luck. I logged in to my Witch Elf (it was only fitting) and immediatly got summoned by a friend to Troll Country, where an RvR PQ was about to reset. So I get there, we fight, we crush Order, we grumble at people to get back in the PQ zone and, eventually, we win. I end up 6th on the contributions list and 1st on the roll. Why hello there Massive Loot Bag! And inside, among other goodies, the epic mask pictured above. Wicked!
Do I look like Diablo or what? ((That is, assuming Diablo went around wearing skimpy clothes and dual wielding daggers).
After the horrible T3 slowdown, with barely any RvR to be found and only Tor Anroc and Talabec Dam ever popping up, I was beginning to get a bit short on enthusiasm.
Until I got to T4 that is. Let me just tell you, T4 is awesome. For one, it feels more like a real war than any of the other tiers, partly because of the numbers involved on each side (on any given night, there will be at least 2-3 Destro warbands fighting off an equal number of Order troops) and partly because having some leaders with a head for strategy is more important than ever.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re one of the leaders of an alliance made of 5-6 large guilds. You have 4 warbands at your disposal and there are at least 3 fronts on which you can do battle. Do you keep the warbands together, or do you split them up? Where do you send each group? Can you make quick decisions on what to reinforce and what to abandon? Cue about 20 more things that you need to look after at the same time. You sure went a long way from fighting 5v5 at the Lost Lagoon in Human T1, huh?
In conclusion, if T3 is wearing you out, keep your head up and try to think about T4. Because it really is great and it certainly helped keep my interest up.
Tags: random thoughts, RvR
Today, our office landlord dropped by, as he tends to do every few months, to collect the rent and catch up on what else we broke down. So we do a bit of talking, one thing leads to another and then he asks if we’re into online games. We say we are indeed so he nods, grins and mentions playing WoW.
“Oh, WoW, huh? Oww, we kinda gave up on that“, me and my coworker go. “We’re playing WAR now…”
To which he throws us an ironic smile. “Oh, WAR? Yeah, I heard about that. They say it’s not as good as WoW is…”
At this point, I had to decide between going into full geek mode and holding a 20 minutes speech about the perks and flaws of each game or just dropping a quick “Well, if you’re into PvP, then WAR is awesome.”
Tags: random thoughts
It seems they do indeed. I was killing some mobs in my own fashion (about 100-200 of them) and returning occasionally to the kill collector for the juicy xp bonus when all of a sudden, BAM, no more xp from the guy. That actually knocked some sense into me *wait a minute, why am I grinding?*
PS: I should be returning to a more regular blogging schedule towards the middle of the week. Till then, waaagh to yer mums.
Tags: PvE, random thoughts
Still alive, still playing WAR. Just very very bad at time management.
Started a Witch Elf. First impressions: very dangerous but also very squishy. Archmages fear me.
I have trouble noticing the change to Skull Thumper. Will need to test more. Also Trip’Em Up got changed it seems.
Got a new title last night, for taking 25 keeps. The Encroacher. So-so, as far as coolness goes. Still better than The Squatter though!
Can’t for the life of me figure out why my screenshots look like roadkill. The game looks damn fine, yet whenever I push that Print Screen key, the output looks like it was filtered through a rat’s arse. Help?
A couple of days of playing Witch Elf really make you appreciate the tankiness of Black Orcs.
Need to prod El G to write more Marauder stuff.
And last, in case you haven’t noticed, I added some new images to the blog (top right side). They should change with every refresh/page opened.
Tags: Black Orcs, random thoughts, website, Witch Elf
May apply to other classes. Your experience may vary.
Been looking at charts and reports all bloody day, so I guess some of that spilled over to this blog. Oops.
Tags: Black Orc, random thoughts, RvR
All you need to know to kick-start your Marauding career.
So you like runing around half-naked with an odd looking limb and a big bad ugly mace? Like having all those Bright wizards and Archmagi focusing on you when they see you charge through their ranks while praying that your healbots can keep up? Or you simply like making everyone that rolled Black Orc regret their decision?
If you said yes, then this little badass puppy is for you. and I’m going to show you - to the best of my knowledge and experience, how to make the best of this brute.
Enough with the generic guide introductions for now, I’m gonna try making this as simple as possible, using bullet points if I have to :)
Last night, while returning to the Warcamp after a good hour of open RvR on my zealot, I run into the scene pictured above. What was this guy doing? I laughed for a couple of minutes and decided to ask him. So he promptly tells me he’s “making dinner“, to which I ask “what, for the entire warcamp?“. “Me an’ mah friend are vewy hungry!” he tells me, as he pops yet another squig. Gotta love gobbos!
Tags: fun, Squig Herder