Fight on the Flag

Patch 1.0.4 is live this morning and Witching Night (the live Halloween event) has begun. Because the servers are down I am unable to provide screen shots. Those will come in a few days.

Here are the relevant notes for RVR:

• The successful capture of an enemy battlefield objective now rewards the capturing players with experience.
• In response to player feedback, the amount of renown earned from healing players has been increased slightly

Read the rest of the patch notes on the Warhammer Herald.

There is also more information about the two new classes, Blackguard and Knight of the Blazing Sun. Apparently there is going to be a server-wide live event to introduce the two classes to the game starting November 17:

When the Heavy Metal live event (the event to introduce the Blackguard and KotBS) begins on November 17th, players who log into WAR will see a new tab in the Tome of Knowledge. Clicking on this tab will open the Live Events page, where each day we’ll place a new daily task. Completing these daily tasks earns influence, just like you’d earn in a public quest. There are rewards for Basic, Advanced and Elite influence, culminating in the ultimate prize: the chance to play WAR’s new classes a full week before they’re released to the public! This last reward won’t be easy to earn, and players who want to get to the Elite level will need to log in each day and complete on the daily event.

Hrm, and I bet they are PVE tasks. Let’s hope not all of them.

There’s also going to be an exclusive Tier 4 scenario during the time of the live event:

Participation in this scenario will give players an extra 10% bonus to their Renown point gain.

This weekend we did a lot of PVP. I have few screenshots to prove it though, save one:

That’s Pylith on the left, in the pink.

The assault was interesting to start. When we got there the outer doors were closed, so we all had to die on NPCs while Nerdgasm ressed us up top. We finished the inner door and tried to go up top, but the few defenders easily wiped us. Oh well, back to Serpent’s Passage with this disturbing report:

Um. I didn’t know squigs were mammals.*shudder*

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Wonderful news! We now get twice the experience for killing people in open-field RvR combat! Read the WAR Herald for more:

With the addition of the new region-wide and RvR-wide chat channels we have seen a marked increase in Open RvR participation. In order to encourage this trend even further, we have made an additional adjustment to the experience awarded for killing enemy players in an Open RvR area. Previously we increased this amount by 50%. As of today, that bonus has been raised to 100%. With this change players killed in Open RvR will now be worth double the experience than those killed in scenarios!

I’m catching up on my reading and just got done with Marc Jacob’s State of the Game. Along with the announcement that Mythic will add the Knight of the Blazing Sun (supposedly a mirror of the Chosen that can twist auras) and the Black Guard to the game for free in December, Jacobs also says the game needs to be more stable for low-end PC players:

Creating an MMORPG, especially an RvR-focused MMORPG, which runs perfectly on all types of PCs, is one of the most challenging technical aspects of game development. While the performance of WAR is great on most higher spec machines, we know that we can improve its performance on lower spec machines.  We’ve been working non-stop to improve that performance and we’ve got a number of things going into the game between now and 1.1 that we expect will help to address everything from crashes to desktops (CTDs) to stuttering.We have a number of other client changes that will improve things such as propagation and ghosting.

This is great news. I know a few of our members have been highly frustrated with their play experience to date. It’s only been a month since the game came out and they are trying to get the game to work for everyone within the spec requirements. Awesome!

RVR-specific changes that Jacobs addresses:

• An RVR influence system similar to the PVE influence system
• Item linking in chat
• Improved PVP gear drops, drop rates and itemization
•  ”We will also be giving players more incentive to engage in open RvR by improving the rewards for both assaulting and defending in RvR.  WAR is an RvR-centric game and we will continue to do whatever is necessary to encourage people to join in RvR and reward them when they do so.”

Other changes in the pipeline:

• Server transfers to underpopulated realms
• Improved targeting system, such as adding main assist and target of target.
• Most classes will see changes in the coming weeks, and few of them nerfs (and people will complain about those I’m sure)

In a nutshell, I’m really happy with this game, and I’ve always been happy with how Mythic communicates with its player base. I only wish they’d bring back the weekly grab bag like DAOC had for so many years.

It’s not that we didn’t have standards — we always have (see the rules section). But this is a different kind of standard, our guild standard! It’s another type of flag we can fight on. Our standard currently gives us toughness and action point regen, so it’s super useful.

And though the standard costs 2 gold if we lose it, we figured it was worth the expense. After all, we do have every type of tradeskiller in the game within our guild. What else would we spend our money on?

Oh yeah, dyes. We’ve decided to currently run with chainmail gray as our wardrobe enhancement of choice. Apparently player-crafted dyes with cultivation/apothecary are incredibly rare. I’ve skilled up both to 175/149 and I have only gotten two pigments. They’re both brown, a lame color.

Anyway, we did some Isha’s Temple and Tor Anroc yesterday. And I finally got a pic of two people flying into the lava.

In other news, we finally reached guild rank 10. Saaz and I will pick the colors and the heraldry sometime. There’s an incredible number of choices, and you can’t change it later. If anyone knows of a heraldry builder please post it in the comments section. I’ve been trying to find one without success.

For the uninitiated, Tor Anroc is simply awesome. At least it is for me, when I go in with at least one other friend. I love the mechanic of being able to knock people into the lava. Eventually every character gets the ability to knockback.

As you can see, I knocked back three people with this blow (I’m in the blue dress). I think only the guy on the left went into the lava, I’m not sure. I’ll have more time to practice my screenshots for this later. It’s a very precise operation, really

Friday night, Fight on the Flag had five people queueing for Tor Anroc specifically. I think that’s our favorite scenario. And we also had our first perfect game:

This means none of the Order side died at all, including the guy with the bauble (quite a feat for the healers). The other team had adequate levels, and a couple of healers. I for one will not try to level past 31 unless it is in PVP.

The leveling bonus is gone, and I say good riddance. The population was just starting to feel balanced, while I prefer an underdog server. Hopefully it’s not in favor of Order now, because that’s what we wanted to avoid.

From Saaz/Khaevil on the forums:

Starting at guild rank five we’ve been getting a guild tactic every level. The choice in these appears to be unchangeable so it needs to be made carefully. We will eventually have three standards and six standard bearers, allowing two groups to run around with nine bonuses at once.

But our tactics are not respecable, so we have to be careful about what we get. Currently we have the tactic that gives us 30 percent action point regen, and 5 percent renown gain. He lists the tactics in the forums or you can view them on the Warhammer Wiki

Let’s have a discussion about what we want. We will be specing our tactics for end-game RVR, so please keep that in mind.

Also, Mythic introduced patch 1.03. Here are some of the notes that apply to RVR:

• Reduced the interaction time required to deploy a guild standard

• Reduced the interaction time required for players to pick up standards that they own. Please Note: This does not include the capturing of enemy standards.

• Capturing an enemy standard will now reward the capturing player and his nearby allies with renown.
• While going over the data collected for renown gained by healing, we discovered a few incorrect values that led to players earning far more renown than designed.  To ensure equal renown gains for players regardless of their chosen career and whether they group or not inside scenarios, we have made several adjustments to the way renown is granted from healing other players:

• Earning renown from healing players was erroneously granting renown while outside of RvR.  This has been adjusted so getting renown for healing players outside of RvR or from a player that is not RvR flagged will occur less frequently.

• Healing players will grant renown correctly if the healed player has earned renown from killing other players recently.

Ugh, the 20s are slooooww leveling! And boring if the PVP queues aren’t popping. A few of us decided to push the envelope and return to a tried and true method: AE grinding.

There’s not much out there by way of information, if anyone was wondering. There are no guides to grinding AE style yet (though there are other guides to leveling). For those who came from Warcraft and are wondering: mob grinding and scenario queues are the fastest way to level from what I hear. Quests, as the fellow in the link says, are not worth the time and effort if you want to maximize your experience per hour.

AE grinding goes waaay back for long-time FotF members. One of our members has a video of a rather large pull from Avalon City in our DAOC days (I’ll ask around and put it on YouTube). Throughout the weekend we did some AE grinding, which was a heck of a lot faster than questing, mixed in with scenarios.

I’ve not been as great a photographer in recent weeks. We just moved and I just reinstalled photoshop, so now we’re in business. Expect a weekly report, since we mostly play on weekends anyway.

PVP report below the fold:

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One thing I like about Warhammer is the achievement system. You get titles for every crazy thing, including fighting naked in RVR or talking with NPCs while you’re naked (ie meaning no clothes, though jewelry and weapons are OK).

Our newest member, Brinn, and I tackled some Nordenwatches, he with his Engineer and me with my Witch Hunter.

He’s fighting on top of the flag, and my corpse!

I don’t want to spoil all of the fun, but some titles you can get for naked gaming “The Showoff,” “Vain” and “The Celebrity.” The best way to get some of these titles is to fight naked in your first levels. You don’t have much equipment then anyway, and the titles are earned pretty quickly.

By the way, if anyone is wondering where some of these new members are from, I’ve been a member of The Safehouse for several years now. I started back when I was playing a rogue in EQ. My rogue only got to level 16, but I stayed for the discussion.

Finally, a picture I forgot to post from Sunday of a keep siege we attempted. I say attempted because, just like in DAOC, people are disorganized and don’t tend to follow orders well. We also hadn’t sieged a keep before so there was some uncertainty on the leadership side.

I hear on good authority one of our founding members is back from Texas. Welcome back. Hopefully we’ll see him this weekend!