Fight on the Flag

FOTF has been running plenty of scenarios lately, and for good reason! The new scenario patch comes out today.

Here’s a screen of a scen where we were horribly behind but we pulled it together against one of the better Destro teams. They have a few random people in there, but we had a full group of random people.

Finally the qotd, we haven’t had one of these in quite a while. FOTF was trying monolith PQ with some Oblit and other people. Order finally beat it at a later date. If you have ever done this PQ then you know why most people do not try it.

We did not win during this run, but many of us were finally getting the hang of it as the timer ran down.

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.

I have never seen anyone utilize their class the way Khaevil can. He min/maxes in every way, using spreadsheets and dps logs to figure out the best way to WTFpwn the enemy.

I hardly believed my eyes when I saw he got more than 100k damage a minute in a scenario. See for yourself:

Yes, 5:09 minutes, 45 deathblows and 544,121 damage. Of course he’s being backed up by two healers when we go into scenarios, but almost any player who runs premades is bound to have a healer or two in their groups.

So Flags in Space ran some scenarios together and we managed to get into Logrins Forge. We checked out our opponents, as we always do, and noticed they were all dwarves.

I wish I had recorded the vent conversations. It was freaking hilarious.

“It’s like an adorable, terrifying zerg.”

“I feel like I’m killing puppies.”

And…

“There’s this dwarf back here snaring me and rooting me… ”

“And biting your ankles?”

They were pushovers but they didn’t have far to fall.

We entered with the scenario with our flags drawn. As we pushed forward, a sneaky dwarf stole Contamination’s flag.

Krohm, you have made a mortal enemy. There is now a price on your head for the blatant theft of our precious flag!

On Saturday, Flags in Space made a journey to Bastion Stair, and most of us now have our crit weapons. Yay! After that, we ran a bunch of Nordenwatch scenarios. We stomped the pugs, but we got stomped by the Order premades.

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.

It’s been a while since Order had their collective asses handed to them. FOTF was ready for yet another day of playing alts to find any semblance of RVR action when we heard of a couple of Destro warbands.

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.

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I think much of the reason FOTF tries to push Dragonwake is because Caledor Woods and the zone Caledor are so much fun. The scenario is like the Temple of Isha scenario from T3.

Massive fights at the center BO in Caledor are also worthwhile. This doesn’t ever seem to happen in Dragonwake, where the warcamps are separated by the length of the zone.

Caledor, middle BO, awesome fight!

Last night, we had the opportunity to participate in a fortress seige. Apparently some pretty significant changes went into effect for the fortresses, all of which was completely lost on me because I don’t obsess over the patch notes. Well, other’s dont either, because when we went up, a bunch of people died and started crying for a res. I don’t mind people crying for a res, because I like to res them. But one of the changes was to prevent healers from ressing while the fortress lord was aggro. Doh!

Fortress Destro tank wall, ur doin it… pretti well, akshully.

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It’s cool the way you form friendships even across realm lines. I’ve seen Rugbyrat often on the battlefield. He’s always willing to charge out and fight even if his team is hopelessly lost.

Here he’s trying to give Pylith a hug… I think… Be careful Rugby!

So anyway, on Sundays the Order tends to take keeps around noon eastern time. Why don’t we see Destro defending? My theory is they are all in Sunday School.

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First let’s address Bablog’s comment in the previous post about how we only had our keep for 30 minutes Saturday:

(Also if anyone wants to comment on the Web site they all have to be approved by me. There will be a delay with your first comment)

In any case, keep defenses were not nearly as exciting Sunday. I guess Destruction learned its lesson from Saturday, where we repelled several invasions in the span of seven hours. They zone hopped and avoided us like that annoying person at work who is always trying to get you to buy their daughter’s gee gaws to raise money for the PTA.

We took every keep in every zone save one, so by the time Destro got back from church (that’s where you were right?) we were pretty bored. Fortunately something other than Serpent’s Passage popped. Thunder Valley was a blast:

Lots of destro to fight, and they were actually trying.

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There are times when the battles are hard fought, when I can be proud of our performance. And then there are times like these:

Who wants to roast some hotdogs?

*sigh* I love a fair, equal fight, but sometimes we’re just too organized for our own good. Most of the weekend we ran scenarios with Pylith, Saaz, Organdonar, Banofir, Vanhellings, myself and our newest member, Cal. A good time was had by all, except the Destruction, I suppose.

But our goal was to get many more of us to level 40, and that wasn’t happening as quickly as we would have liked with mere scenarios. We decided instead to PVE our way (ie. AE grind a chapter 22 quest in Caledor). However, my husband, Saaz, and I have a hard time staying awake when PVEing. We trekked to Fred Meyer and bought our first ever coffee pot:

Well, we figured out how to use it (I still feel dumb typing this) and we also got to stay up until past midnight because we drank way too much coffee after 3 p.m. Ugh. That sucked. At some point we also made a brief appearance at Bastion Stair, which we weren’t terribly impressed with and we aren’t sure if we really want to go back.

Cal made an interesting post regarding Bastion Stair and other PVE-oriented loot on our forums. He explained to us die-hard PVPers what the PVE gear is for (because we don’t really want to PVE our way to victory in any game). I, for one, am hoping Cal’s predictions hold true:

The fun part is that this all changes in 1.1, if rumors are to be believed. No one is quite sure how that’s going to happen, at this point. If I were a gambling man, I’d gamble on all pieces in a set dropping in PvP from someone of that level renown rank. At least, that’s what makes the most sense to me.

I would love Mythic so much if they did this.