Our newest member, Brinn, and I tackled some Nordenwatches, he with his Engineer and me with my Witch Hunter.

He’s fighting on top of the flag, and my corpse!

I don’t want to spoil all of the fun, but some titles you can get for naked gaming “The Showoff,” “Vain” and “The Celebrity.” The best way to get some of these titles is to fight naked in your first levels. You don’t have much equipment then anyway, and the titles are earned pretty quickly.

By the way, if anyone is wondering where some of these new members are from, I’ve been a member of The Safehouse for several years now. I started back when I was playing a rogue in EQ. My rogue only got to level 16, but I stayed for the discussion.

Finally, a picture I forgot to post from Sunday of a keep siege we attempted. I say attempted because, just like in DAOC, people are disorganized and don’t tend to follow orders well. We also hadn’t sieged a keep before so there was some uncertainty on the leadership side.

I hear on good authority one of our founding members is back from Texas. Welcome back. Hopefully we’ll see him this weekend!

Guild members hold back the Destruction forces in Stonetroll Keep’s courtyard.

Throughout the day we had played in Stonetroll Crossing, another scenario, but for the 12-21 level set. Basically you grab a ball and pacify (and by pacify they mean exterminate) three different troll camps. We decided two of our newer members needed renown gear so we headed toward a keep, which subsequently came under attack.

Timmm, who plays a bright wizard, was initially shy to jump in the middle of the fray, but once we explained that we’d keep him alive throughout the semi-suicidal effort he was more than eager to use his point-blank, area-of-effect spell to down the Destruction forces. When Destruction had the keep’s door down, Timmm jumped in the middle of the ram and we must have killed 20-30 people by ourselves. The entire raid was in full-flee mode after that. We didn’t hold the keep, though, due to overwhelming numbers and a rather disorganized warband. But we did have a great time last night!

Also, please welcome our new members, Vanhellings and Defleshedz!

So a few days ago, Perle, Saaz, Organdonar and Arle all entered
Nordenwatch together and basically butchered the Chaos forces. It’s not hard to do so with a somewhat organized group. Saaz is a swordmaster, Organ is a runemaster and Arle and I are archmages… Three healers to one tank. They couldn’t even dent Saaz.

Saaz, in white, with Organdonar, Arle and Perle healing.

Unfortunately logic was not the word of the day. Despite our organization, not everyone was on board with our tactics.

The PVP mindset in Warhammer is very much like that in Warcraft: zerg ftw, and chase everyone else away from the flag. Oftentimes we’d jump through the Chaos forces to get to the flag behind them.

We are fighting on the Fortress flag after we were on the other side of the Chaos forces, currently on the bridge.

On one of our second to last runs, I got knocked in the air by some ability (clue me in if you know it) and landed on the house next to the Barracks node. From there I jumped on top of the Barracks flag! I could heal without being harassed by tanks, it was pretty cool. I eventually died to casters though.

Organdonar and I joined up for some fun in some of the scenarios. Scenarios are like AV or WSG in WoW, except you can queue from anywhere in the world. When you are done with the scenario, the game puts you back where you were when you left the PVE world. We initially tried to play on Destruction, but the queues were literally 45 minutes. It reminded me of the queues we had to put up with when WoW implemented the dreaded 2.4 patch. So we switched over to Order and gave it a shot.

There we reigned supreme, or at least, according to the screenshots. Actually my photography kind of sucked. I’ve completely lost my touch with all these months away from gaming. I didn’t even get some battle shots. Oh well, heres what the scoreboard looks like:

Burnination was my Bright Wizard, the class I plan to play on launch. Bright Wizards are hella fun because if you’re not careful you blow up and die. As Organdonar can attest, I did this several times without complaint.

Notice to the far right there’s an XP column. Do not ignore this. The experience in a BG is awesome. And from our perspective playing Order, we got so much experience so quickly we could barely get out of the start area before we were too big for it.

Organdonar did really well as he played his dwarven Rune Priest.

Notice how Organ is level 6 (they call it ranks in Warhammer). Each scenario has a level limit, but even if you are at the lower end of the spectrum, the game boosts your hit points and armor (and maybe your spells?) to levels 8, 18, 28 and 39 depending on the scenario.

There is also a large open-world RVR aspect to the game. At level 11, it was really fun. I can’t wait to see what it’s like at higher levels.

Also when you PVP you get points called renown. You gain ranks with renown, like realm points in DAOC. You can spend your renown on abilities, like more intelligence or the ability to absorb damage. Also, with higher renown ranks you can unlock equipment. Yes this is all through PVP. I couldn’t tell as I only attained level 11 during preview weekend, but I think you don’t have to PVE at all to gain levels or gear.

Once we know what server we’re going to be on, we’ll post in the forums. Hope to see you all there.