Fight on the Flag

First, the fights. Order was bent on capping the Chaos pairing. There must have been 4-5 warbands of order and I don’t know how many Destro. For the first time since I can remember Order seemed to outnumber Destro, but not by much.

Here is a pic at Chokethorn Bramble BO. That is just the front of the vast Destro zerg. (Click pic to embiggen)

FotF ran with our good friends in Obliteration. Since both guilds are fans of using assist, getting in vent and working together, we  wiped the Destro nearly every time we faced them.

We also ran scenarios together, although some people had trouble with Queue Queuer:

On another note, the 1.3.4 patch notes are here. There is a pretty long discussion on the Gorfang forums lamenting the loss of such scenarios as Serpent’s Passage, Caledor Woods and Logrin’s Forge. Really Mythic? This makes me a sad panda Why are these scenarios unpopular? I saw Serpents pop way more than Dragon’s Bane.

Here is the list of scenario offerings:

* The following Scenarios now make up the regularly-offered list: Nordenwatch, Gates of Ekrund, Mourkain Temple, Phoenix Gate, Highpass Cemetery and Battle for Praag. The breakdown of when these Scenarios are offered is as follows:

* Tier 1

- Nordenwatch

- Gates of Ekrund

* Tier 2

- Nordenwatch

- Gates of Ekrund

- Mourkain Temple

* Tier 3

- Nordenwatch

- Gates of Ekrund

- Mourkain Temple

- Phoenix Gate

- Highpass Cemetery

* Tier 4

- Nordenwatch

- Gates of Ekrund

- Mourkain Temple

- Phoenix Gate

- Highpass Cemetery

- Battle for Praag

With the possible exception of Phoenix Gate and Battle for Praag, your team can win every one of those scenarios by avoiding the fight. The scenarios that were removed seemed to favor single-point battles. The lower-tier scenarios that were removed were a rite of passage, as Mezirah stated on the Gorfang forums.

tor anroc was a rite of passage. isha introduced dynamic LOS pvp.

LOS pvp is incredibly important for strategic defenses and offenses. Why they removed Temple of Isha I will never know. It was one of my favorite scenarios leveling up, along with Tor Anroc. It is a shame they are removing these scenarios. (Here is a link to one of FOTF’s early reports from Tor Anroc. Here is a screenshot of Temple of Isha.)

But at least we won’t have to do Thunder Valley anymore.

On a positive note they are adding weapons that you can buy with new scenario currency. So when we are bored out of our minds doing the same scenarios over and over at least we will have something to look forward to.

It’s finally here, the long-awaited Land of the Dead. But we have to wait a week or two, depending on who wins the resources race. The side that wins the race, Order or Destruction, gets unfettered access to Land of the Dead for an entire week.

You know what this means? Destruction or Order is going to be sooo bored for an entire week while the other side frolics in LotD.

In any case, here are some links to get you moving:

A superb Live Event guide by Gaarawarr Gabs. This link includes a rundown of everything you must do to complete the live event, pictures to show you what airship parts look like, stuff about the Reikland Factory scenario that I didn’t know:

Also, when the scenario is won, you get the Desert Madness buff which increases your Renown and XP gains by 5% for 30 minutes.  Good times.

This guide will also include the location of an Easter Egg, but people haven’t found it yet.

Once we actually get inside Land of the Dead, here is a beastiary by Gaarawarr Gabs, which includes what mobs drop tome tactic fragments.

Warhammer Blog Times also has a guide for boss strats in Tomb of the Vulture Lord.

Sigil explanation guide, again by Gaarawarr Gabs (maybe Syven won’t have to keep telling us wtf it means). The meat of the post:

The Sigils and their Unlock Requirements

Each Ward has five fragments and each fragment has one or more ways to unlock it.  You do not have to do all of the tasks listed, just one.

Finally, I am suspicious of how this patch and content will affect RVR. I fear this will make RVR a constant RVE fest, because everyone will want to be in Land of the Dead.

Here are some concerns posted by Warhammer Alliance member Anglakhel. She (or he) went into the test server to try out the new content. The only problem was, nobody else was really there.

The PTS, however, was completely unequipped and unprepared to test out these two dimensions of the Expedition Resources Quest. Player Kills were almost impossible. Once one side had control of the Land of the Dead, they all abandoned the RvR lakes to explore the news lands. The consequence of this was that the faction without LotD control didn’t have any enemies to kill and the Expedition Resources Quest failed to advance in any meaningful way.

Without player kills, the Expedition Resource Quest depends upon zone capture to generate resources. However, the PTS didn’t have an established group of guilds with the Rank, Resources and Standard Bearers to claim Keeps and lock down zones.

So basically what we have is a live testing environment. Let’s try to bear with these changes. I still think Warhammer is the best PVP for me, but only because of the strength of our guild.

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.

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!

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.