Fight on the Flag

First off, happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Destro wanted to give us a hug today so we decided to give back in spades. FOTF and Obliteration’s morning crew rolled the few Destro that were in Altdorf this morning. It was incredibly coordinated. Bright Wizards were grouping up as if they had a hive mind.

Cleanup, aisle 5!

It’s too bad we didn’t have better attackers. I would’ve loved to have seen what our organized group could have done against organized Arsenal. We have faced them before, and whenever they lose resoundingly they tend to leave to find easier pickings. At least we know we can put up a good fight.

Order also downed the King at a fairly reasonable time Saturday night. I was so hyped up afterward that I could hardly sleep. Andora, our SM, got his final piece of Warlord gear and will be able to tank the king as soon as he gets one renown rank. Woot!

Now, in a completely unrelated rant, please inspect the following two screenshots:

See the difference? In both screens, I took a screenshot of the moment the zone was taken by Order. However, in the top version, I only got 192 renown for taking Praag, even though I had been there for both keep takes and a number of Battle Objectives (see above: I had just helped take Armory when the Scenario popped for us). It appears that after joining BFP that I had the idle hands debuff (seven seconds left before scen starts, see ss). This reduces the renown you can earn.

In the second one I was in the Maw when Chaos Wastes flipped. You will notice I got a ton of renown. So in short, there is no incentive to take a scenario when you stand to gain so much from having taken BOs and keeps earlier in the day. This is really something that Mythic ought to fix. ~13,000 renown vs ~200 rewnown? There is really no choice there.

I’ll take the larger figure, please.

Just wanted to share some screenshots of the Order zerg that I took Saturday night. I am fairly certain more than 200 Order were swarming zones and taking keeps.

Here are more pics from the same location of more Order flowing into the Manor.

• Picture 1
• Picture 2

By the way, Saturday was the worst night I’ve had in gaming in a very long time. We had double overdog points (I guess that’s what we call them) meaning that Order had attacked Inevitable City twice within 24 hours. That means it takes much longer to cap zones. We couldn’t get enough Victory Points to cap either. Sometimes we were sitting at 105% of required VP and because of the underdog mechanic we couldn’t cap. I hope this was a big reminder to Order to keep those in mind when we schedule a city push.

Long story short, we started at about 8 p.m. Pacific and didn’t get to the city until midnight (major sorrow for the Eastern timezone people). I wanted to stab myself in the face with a screwdriver. We had a good fight at the entrance to Maw. Then in the city my warband just happened to get the one with the halfway decent Destro in it. I was soo tired. Unfortunately we had a lot of random PUGs in the scenario with us. Eventually they left to make way for Irony, but the damage was done.

Fortunately we managed to take the city during the Super Bowl and down the king. Unfortunately for us those of our guildies who watch football socially did not get to join us At least it’s one step closer to getting full Warlord for Andora, who will be able to tank the king for us during our future FOTF king runs!

I had work Saturday but imagine my surprise when I get home and Order was already pushing zones to get into the city.

Five members of FOTF got into a warband with V’los Vel’drin and a few other guilds. Bangrund did a fantastic job tanking. We worked with Run Like Hell to lock down an instance. Destro bodies were everywhere.

Fighting on the flag in a city assault is truly the best thing ever!

Teamwork among Order was great! For the instances that were losing the PUGs left and they were replaced by organized Order.

I think at least two king instances of Order got nice shiny Warlord/Sovereign pieces. Both Pylith and Truncheon are decked out in full Warlord. It was my first king instance and I also got a few pieces after breaking royals down. Next time I will be in full Warlord and will then be working on Sovereign.

Grats Order on our fantastic teamwork!

We had a very fun and productive weekend. First off, a few FOTF members got Warlord gear from the king captures over the weekend (myself excluded). This is great news for those of us who had tried 40 or 50 times to get Darkpromise breastplates.

We also had some really fun fights in BOs this weekend!

Here, the manor in Eataine (click to embiggen).

We were flipping zones like pros and almost made it to stage 2 on Sunday’s IC push for those of us unable to make the first king run. Unfortunately my WB was in the losing city instance. I think either a lot of Order left or a lot of Destro joined (or both) and we lost the last stage 2 event. D’oh! Maybe next time.

Destro was definitely out in force.

I was proud of how our realm did in almost defeating them during prime time. Destro must have been taking a break after beating our king Sunday morning or more would’ve shown up for that effort.

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Warhammer is a breath of fresh air to me after playing Aion. Several of our members have returned along with us, including Andora and Cald, who did not make the transition to Aion very well. It’s really good to see them and hear their voices in vent.

Now we need to get back to our previous state of pwn on this server. We’re basically handing out free crests at this point as we relearn our characters.

We definitely have a fight ahead of us though. Destro outnumbers us by a large margin. This is not the same server we left. The Destro are also more organized and higher RR than Order.

This screenshot cannot do justice. I wish I could do wide angle shots. The front of the north keep in KV was packed full of about four warbands at one point this weekend.

Destro is also in the city about three times a day. Sunday they did an alarm clock raid and pushed the city to stage 2. For those who have not been in the city during stage 2, it’s pretty boring, though there still are some Destro who remain to fight. Everyone else is in the Warlord PQs.

As a result of frequent city pushes, many of the high powered Destro are in full sets of Warlord gear.

FOTF is not the only group returning from Aion. Dooger made a post welcoming back those of us who are returning.

Do you want to return to Warhammer? I can hand out some 10-day free trials (as long as you’ve been gone for 60 days or more). Just reply in the comment using your real e-mail address. I can only send out one per day, though.

Saturday morning we sieged Altdorf after pushing zones for several hours. After getting into Altdorf, however, we were unsuccessful in pushing to stage two. It appears the best defense from a city siege is no defense at all.

Of course there was the usual complaining on the forums about the broken city mechanic. Who can blame them? It seems in every patch, whether it be with inventory issues, Lost Vale or not seeing objectives on the map, something is broken.

What is more frustrating to me, however, is the impact gear has on the game. Gear matters far more than most people realize.

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Fight on the Flag and Temporal Space helped Destro push two fortress zones and we entered into Altdorf instance 1215. We had a really good time. Sure, one guy complained that they had to *gasp* RVR in a PVP game. Overall we completed the PQ twice, and killed a *ton* of Order.

Unfortunately for progression’s sake, nobody in the lower levels queued for the city instance. That means it’s impossible for Destro to flip the city to stage 2. The change to the city capture mechanic cannot come quick enough.

N’Kari Keeper of Secrets defeated!

Congratulations to FOTF, we finally finished Lost Vale! Not that it was that hard, really, as long as we had at least four wards. This was our third or fourth foray into the zone. Our first attempts were made before our tanks had 5/5 wards. Unfortunately during the previous two runs, we had two Slayer pieces drop, one before the class was even in the game. To everyone’s disappointment, I managed to get 5/6 of my Darkpromise set. I was personally hoping for a Bright Wizard chest because ours doesn’t have his Sentinel piece yet.

The encounter took us about two hours to learn, and if you include the 10-minute run back to the encounter (until we figured out how to reset it) that’s not too bad.

Anyway, enough of that PVE crap. We also took the Inevitable City again. This will make it three for Order, zero for Destruction.

After sacking the statue area.

 We had a good group, but unfortunately we did not have the tanks to complete the second stage. We did confirm that we can tank the hero with a 5/5 Sentinal-warded tank. Unfortunately the only tank there with the wards was Andora. At least we learned something.

On the leader boards, as of Monday morning Grilar got #1 renown for the week in Engineers, bringing him to #9 of all time.

Finally a /wave report, which we haven’t had in a really long time.

Woo hoo! Good job Order! We took two fortresses within hours of each other, and it was a great effort. Both attempts went very smoothly. And we know what that means: We were able to siege the Inevitable City!

I admit I knew nothing about city sieges. Absolutely nothing. So when my warband zoned in, we had no clue what was going on, but I saw two nodes on the map that we were supposed to take. Off we went to secure those areas.

Word to the wise: when you first zone into IC, the warband leader has a choice of instances to pick through. For your sanity, please coordinate with another warband that knows WTF it’s doing and pick the same instance! That would have saved us a TON of heartache last night.

While my warband tried, we could not overcome the suckiness of the other warband, which was full of level 30-36 players.

(Side note: MYTHIC why do you allow anyone who is not capable of wearing the upper tier gear to siege the city? Those guards obliterated the Order who did not have the right equipment. Either fix the guards or up the level requirement, please!)

The warband leader, who shall remain nameless on this blog, refused to communicate to my warband, refused to recruit more players to his/her warband and did not talk with people who were in his/her warband (I know this because people from that warband came to vent because they were frustrated they were getting no answers from their leader). He put me on ignore when I asked a few pointed questions, such as “why do you only have a group and a half in your warband” and “could you please coordinate with my other warband leader so we can win a scenario?”

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