But in the middle of our photo shoot, a Destro jumped in the middle of scorched earth spam and promptly died. I didn’t catch the name.

Click to embiggen.

“I know what you’re thinking. “Did they have three Bright Wizards or only two?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a facerolling class, the most powerful in the game, and would burn you to a crisp, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

In Warhammer, WAR is everywhere, right? Yet every day I log in, I see barely a single crossed sword on the map. ORVR seems incredibly rare. Genuine pushes on zones by Destruction tends to only happen in the very early morning or in midday when most people are at work.

When Warhammer first came out, the only reason to flip a zone was to get to the fortress. There was no flip renown, not for keeps, BOs or for zones. The only way to get renown was to fight people — run scenarios, go into ORVR and slaughter until the ground ran slick with blood. The only reason to take a keep was to get annihilator gear. When a zone flipped it was because we wanted it to happen.

Then the game designers decided to add renown for taking objectives and keeps, and then for taking zones. This meant that people who might work hard for a zone flip could be anywhere in the zone and get renown for just standing around:

Mailbox is safe!

In theory you don’t ever have to step into the RVR lake to make it to RR 80. You can just hop from warcamp to warcamp and enjoy the flip renown while reading a book, writing a blog post or doing chores around the house. Just keep an eye on State of the Realm and it can tell you when zones are ready to flip.

I am not sure how much this has changed ORVR. People interested in easy renown probably would not contribute much (other than their renown to the enemy) if they could not get renown from zone flips.

I do not blame the players at all for this. They are only following the carrot that Mythic has offered. This begs the question though: Is this the experience Mythic intended? I really don’t think so. Without having talked to anyone at Mythic I can only guess that these renown changes were done with good intentions and without any idea of how the carrots would influence ORVR.

ORVR is dead also due to the player’s preference for scenarios. Scenarios have always been fun, but the player base needs to do scenarios to chase yet another carrot — RVR weapons. I am glad they are in the game. People just starting out who want to PVP now have an avenue for getting gear that does not include PVE.

Now, on to the solution.

As I mentioned in my previous post, players will pick the path of least resistance. Yes it is possible to get your RVR weapon from ORVR but it’s far more efficient to do so via scenarios. Mythic could make the insignias drop from players in ORVR also.

EDIT: Here’s a thread on the RVR forums at Warhammer Alliance, which sums up my thoughts pretty nicely.

Every time I see this guy I think of the song “Earth Angel”

Orkangel,
Orkangel
Will you be mine?
My darling dear
Love you all the time
I’m just a fool,
A fool in love, with you

I can’t wait until you’re 40, Orkangel.

In other news:

We did a ton of scenarios this weekend. The times we were out there were very fun. We are out there making friends and influencing people :p

I have to say I miss ORVR a lot (even attacking keeps) and I look forward to the day when we are closer to getting royal weapons so we can go back to ORVR on a more consistent basis.

Truncheon and his mad heal skillz almost topped the million mark. Wow! This was a very difficult match and we almost didn’t pull out a win. Trunch and Cent did a fabulous job keeping our DPS alive. I am shocked at Syharrth’s DPS. I had no idea a DoK could dish out that much damage. I died more than a few times to his skillfully placed blades (or maybe it’s a she? I couldn’t tell I wasn’t looking that closely).

We ran a lot of scens this weekend, though still not enough to get me into invader insignias. My furlough IRL comes up at the end of the month so maybe that will be the time

Here’s a scen I ran with Oblit once. (My targeting skills are not to be envied.)

Also FOTF’s VL group made it up to the Seventh boss, though not past him just yet. We have the colors thing down though and I think his number just might be up next time.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.