(Just in case you cannot read the text in the picture, “Altdorf stands strong! The city is Recovering. No mercy for the straggling Order.”)

For those who haven’t surfed the forums relentlessly, Istaflyiii on Gorfang discovered a bug that basically hands Destruction the keys to Altdorf three times a day. By just respirating oxygen into carbon dioxide, Destruction can flip zones and get to Altdorf.

And order can do nothing about it. In fact, if Order tries to do something, it actually works in Destruction’s favor.

Wow. What a disincentive for RVR if you have any shred of realm pride. Fortunately, Mythic says they are working on the bug, though the timeline for a fix is sketchy at best.

One player on Gorfang wanted to try to quantify the gear and renown haul due to the VP bug, and Destro of course, say it’s not a big deal (though there are the few who are calling attention to this).

Case in point: Cald noticed that Order owned one keep in Thunder Mountain. We claimed it, noticed we had about six people and called in T4 channel for help. Anyone who wanted to defend with Ventrilo could join our warband and we could try to prevent Destro from taking the keep.

I wish I had taken screenshots of what some said to me (and I would blur the names to prevent too much humiliation). I got several tells from people saying “Don’t defend it only flips to the city faster” who were actually ANGRY at me trying to defend our lands!

Of course I didn’t listen, and we led about three groups from TM to KV to try to defend. It was all in vain. We were up against 5 warbands at one point (90 on the keep and another warband defending BOs).

Morale on Order side is very low. Let’s hope they fix this bug soon.

As you can tell from the picture, we only had eight players with us, five of whom were healers. We must have run around for five minutes before they killed even one of us. It felt good knowing that we stood toe-to-toe with one of the best guilds on Order side without losing. In the end, they gave up on the fight and went elsewhere.

Later in the night, we had a memorable keep defenses in Chaos Wastes. A group of Order had left to go to Black Crag to defend a keep. We preferred to remain where the fight was. We coordinated with other warbands to drive Order out of our keeps. Finally they returned with such numbers that we couldn’t defeat them. Many of us stayed up way past our bedtimes :p I imagine there are some sleepy people at work today.

Finally, we have been working hard to fit in to this roleplay environment. Someone in Temporal Space decided to start speaking in pirate jargon. Organdonar made a mod that helps us speak in pirate without having to think too hard. Soon we will send the mod to all in FOTF or TS who choose to use it. The pirate talk trend is also catching on with the general populace:

Inspired to play or resubscribe to Warhammer after reading this blog? Send Perle a PM on the Warhammer Alliance forums with your first name and e-mail address. The message goes directly to her e-mail. She can then hook you up with a 10-day free trial of the game.

This map represents Friday night at about 6:30 p.m. Pacific time. FotF is headed into the fray!

As we slowly accumulate Annihilator and Conquerer gear, we are getting less squishy. We stood toe to toe with one of the better Bright Wizard bomb groups on the server. I am confident once we get equivalent gear that they won’t stand a chance.

Apparently our guild is getting a bit of a reputation (if only for the guild name). I discourage bragging on forums. It’s sometimes hard not to provide advice without seeming like you’re bragging. I don’t want to come off as arrogant (oh but on this server we did it this way and it worked).

But sometimes you really can’t help it. We had a keep defense that everyone thought we would lose. The tank wall was rather massive, though, and I had every confidence that we would prevail. That is, until the people on the tank wall left the wall to chase down people who got past /facepalm.

We steered them (in a not-so-nice way) to get back onto the wall and hold fast. We prevailed and chased them out of the keep!

I anticipate more fun today and Sunday.

The real fun came at night, when we decided to defend one of the many fortress assaults (I forget which one).

After that, we defended a keep with the rest of Destro in Chaos Wastes.

Initially we skirmished inside, but we saw the group bunched up (before this shot was taken) and decided to bomb them, old style. We wiped the advance force with the help of other Destro, but then a wave of Destro Order came over the hill and we retreated to defend. After the Destro force repelled the attackers, we took the northeast BO in Chaos Wastes.

Finally, we went to Caledor to have some fun. The fun turned into Destro flipping the zone.

We had a ton of fun Saturday, and things are looking up as we get gear and renown rank! It was painful but the road is sure to be smoother from here.

Here’s why:

Check out that Order zerg at the zone line to Fell Landing. They are waiting for the first push to wipe. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out, guys. Really, the last time I saw a pop capped fort on Gorfang, the people who didn’t get in were pouting and screaming in region chat about the injustice of it all.

This is a seriously organized group of Order that we are fighting. All the more challenge for us here on Phoenix Throne.

Yes, we get stomped into bloody puddles because we are all in level 37 greens (which is bound to continue for a little while longer because one of our main group mates decided to switch due to the AE nerfs coming out). I wanted to publicly thank Nala on Destro for helping us out and donating some 40 blue repairable items. Those will be incredibly useful when we get Contamination (Nizzlegloz’s Maurauder) to 40.

Finally a rant.

I have to say that I’m incredibly disappointed with the Shaman class. The Archmage is so much better, and only because of  Funnel Essence. The Shaman’s comparable ability, Do Sumfin Useful, is not even in the same league. I get another heal over time, which is nice, but I prefer burst healing.

The patch is coming out today. Read the notes here. They did have a very brief round on the test server, and I think it was cut short because nobody logged in to test the patch (ShadowWar tested the changes on siege pads). Therefore, we are probably live testing the changes.

I will reserve judgment until I can actually play the game.

Khaevil was talking in this, but unfortunately I had him muted (we are in the same room after all).

I was really skeptical that we would win this fight, and yet we did. Look at all of the Destruction! I am pretty sure we were the only people there. If we weren’t there was maybe a handful of Order with us. Great teamwork all around!

View the following screenshots as an example of the fights we were in Sunday (click for higher resolution).

The first two are from two separate attacks on the north Battlefield Objective in Reikland, one from a defense and another from an assault where we are defending from the Destro trying to take it back.

The second two pictures are when 2-3 groups of Order took the far east BO in Caledor and defended against a seemingly insurmountable force of Destruction. They just kept coming and that fight lasted at least 10 minutes, based on my timers from using action point potions. That was an incredibly epic fight.

Destruction succeeded in taking two fortresses at once and entered Altdorf for the first time. Congratulations! (Though the first take was marred by the buggy Fortress lord in Reikwald, d’oh!)

Earlier I started a group of people who wanted to play Nordenwatch. Then another Nordenwatch premade wanted to join us so we could RVR together. Soon I had a three-group warband. We went to Covenant of Flame and joined Bolimor’s warband (I think Deer had a small group also).

That’s when the fun started.

We soon discovered that Destro’s defenses were too great and the doors were too heavy to pound down in the short amount of time we had left before the outer door would close.

We retreated, killed some Destro, then advanced and opened the Center Keep door (all the while another group opened the door that just closed behind us). The tank wall was too solid, and Bolimor and I decided to bring our groups to the gatehouse. (About then our LV crew joined us.)

It took a while for Destro to break our tank walls, but not before many of us gained a realm rank or two (I gained something around 10 percent in 62).

Destro stride in over Order's dead corpses.

A view of the battle map shortly before the Gatehouse fell.

Surely this is what the game designers intended.

But just as we logged in, we found our alliance warband was leaving the zone. Boo! They said there were too many Destro to fight. It makes me wonder if any of them remember how we fought when the server was new, Destro was overpopulated and Order was demoralized?

My bright idea to attack them when they were in the tunnel didn’t go as well as I planned. Instead we rushed to the north keep to take it. We waited for a minute or so, and once I thought they were well on their way to Gromril Junction, we started in on the door.

The Destro took Gromril Junction and we continued working on the door, sweating as the timer on the battlefield objective ticked down. Meanwhile I was trying to get the alliance warband to return. They showed up when the door was about 10 percent and we started in on the second door (at this point the keep flagged for the first time. Bug maybe?).

We took the keep. Destro finally showed up and basically stopped dead. I noticed a slew of names I had never seen before, and it seemed most of them had just arrived in T4. They got wiped at the north keep and we pressed south to Dolgrund’s Cairn, wiping Destro as we went. I ordered my WB to press on the south keep, while the alliance warband stayed to get the BO.

A quick note: Destro had at least two warbands, although the members were rather low level. We had Blazeric’s full WB and my three groups, plus a few stragglers here and there.

Once we bashed down the two doors, we set up under the lord room. My oh my they had a lot of Sorcs!

We wiped twice or three times to the Destro at this keep. I will admit the two warbands did not communicate as well as we could have. Charges, for instance, were sometimes announced in shout instead of region. Shout has a limited range. I also strongly suspect that the other warband did not have enough healers, or that the healers died first for some reason. I say this because my warband’s two groups that had two healers each all lived until the other warband died, then my warband was eventually wiped as well.

Oh well, live and learn. It was the first time I’d RVRd with my Archmage in at least two weeks. I was glad to be on her again. I also thank the Order for listening to me. I hope you all don’t think FotF has abandoned you. Far from it. We just want to give Destro a fighting chance so they will fight us another day.

Despite wiping so many times, I still had a blast. I hope Destro did too

I didn’t take the threat seriously until they flipped Caledor.

The rest of the night I can only equate to how a battered woman feels when her abusive boyfriend returns after a long period away from her: skittish, excited and afraid at the same time. I remember the days when Destro zerged the server so hard that Order were demoralized and weak. Then a few server transfers brought more people to the Gorfang and the Destro had some infighting

After Caledor flipped, I put out the rallying cry in alliance chat and told people to join my warband and get in vent. At this point the Destro had already claimed Covenant of Flame. When Destro hit Drakebreakers we had a whopping two groups.

So we did what we FOTF tries to do best. We queued for Serpent’s passage.

The beatdown was humiliating and awesome.

What happened next is something that hasn’t happened in a long time. We got stomped. It’s hard not to get stomped when you have a full group of PUG in the scenario. Somehow Destro made everyone who was not level 40 stay out of the scenario queue and only let the pro players go in preset groups.

After our beatdown, we went to Drakebreakers, but Destro rolled through us like we weren’t even there.

Destro flood the inside of Drakebreakers Scourge.

They flipped Dragonwake and we were then fighting in Eataine. By this time Order had I think two warbands trying to defend. The group of Destro had grown so large that we really had no hope of attacking the main force, so I ordered my warband to skirmish and cut their reinforcements. We tried to take defensive positions, but in the end it was just prolonging the inevitable.

Order tries to defend the Chillwind Manor battle objective in Caledor.

Our last-ditch effort to try to prevent a zone flip failed because the battle objective was bugged and we couldn’t claim the flag. It wasn’t long before we gave up and ran to the Shining Way Fortress to lick our wounds. For whatever reason they couldn’t take the fortress, but it was a mighty attempt.

After the Fort defense, I looked at the clock and three hours had whizzed by. There was more action to be had, but I had not yet eaten dinner. This morning I see Destro has pushed all the zones to their side.

I admit I am in awe of that type of organization, and I sincerely hope this is a sign of better fights to come.