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.

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.

This was Order’s first ever fortress attempt to my knowledge. I believe we got further than Desto ever has against us.

To the PVE section of the post. I’m really glad Mythic made the PVE take under an hour for the zones we’ve been to so far. We’re trying to get Sentinal gear for all of our players, but it’s hard when we have seven players. We’re always leaving someone out. To that end, we’ve been trying to recruit more people to the guild. I am not sure why more people aren’t asking about joining. Maybe we’re too intimidating, or scary for an outsider to come into our close-knit group.

In any case, I hope more people consider membership. Have a look at the post for classes and the type of people we are looking for (and if you play another class, just ask). If anyone has any questions, send me a tell in-game. I’ll post the answers here for all to see. No question is too dumb.

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.

At some point they all seem to log on at once, and all of the keeps we took are completely overwhelmed.

It’s like kicking an anthill (and there’s about the same amount of red).

I have to say we were so hopelessly outzerged that we played alts for a little while. I think Organdonar is switching to a bright wizard. He was having too much fun in Tier 2 last Sunday.

As a side note, leaderboards are still not fixed Come on Mythic!

(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.

Toward the evening, we heard that Order was trying to flip Reikland back to Order control. Except it didn’t quite work out. A group of Order went to grind PQs while a couple of groups of us (aka Fight on the Flag + stragglers who didn’t want to PVE) roamed around Reikland.

And when I say “roamed” I mean, “we don’t have a friggin clue where we’re going, so let’s run around and see who follows us.”

OK that’s everyone. We ran into a giant zerg at the northern battle objective, and fled to the force that was still dawdling at the keep, where we slaughtered the Destruction.

Which leads me to my latest rant here. Zone control mechanics are screwed up. Seriously. That group of Order grinded PQs for the better part of three hours. Even after we lost all of the keeps and BOs and convinced people to stop PVPing (I never thought I would say that) we had a couple slivers of victory points. We still ran a few scenarios (good fights all). But having to PVE to claim a zone is rather lame. I am not sure what zone control should be based off of, and since we are the underpopulated realm I am not sure there is much to be done.

Rather than PVE, our guild rolled new characters. If we can’t help the realm at least we wouldn’t hurt it.

Oh well. Overall I’d say the weekend was a success. We have a few new 40s and many others on the way and Saturday’s keep defense will not be long forgotten. See you next weekend!

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.

He hoped Sunday would be the day, so we started off with some scenarios, but soon found an excellent AE grind spot and sat there for a few hours. We went to lunch and came back and decided to finish up in the scenarios. I managed to get a screenshot of the moment:

We would also like to thank Enelira and the many Destruction who were slain before her who made this possible. Needless to say we all look forward to the day when we are 40 and can RVR instead of do scenarios all day.

Otherwise we had much fun running scenarios and some open RVR on Sunday. For once we ran scenarios that were not Serpent’s Passage:

Grovad Cavarns was a nice change of pace and we won one game 400-2. Destruction isn’t usually that bad so I wonder what that was about.

We also had some fun in open RVR this weekend. We took an objective in Dragonwake and ran into a group of Destruction when trying to take the objective near their war camp. Good fights all

No leaderboards this week. I think the Herald Web site is wonky due to the recent server transfers.

That’s Pylith on the left, in the pink.

The assault was interesting to start. When we got there the outer doors were closed, so we all had to die on NPCs while Nerdgasm ressed us up top. We finished the inner door and tried to go up top, but the few defenders easily wiped us. Oh well, back to Serpent’s Passage with this disturbing report:

Um. I didn’t know squigs were mammals.*shudder*

We did a lot of Serpent’s Passage, and apparently Pylith did so much of it that he crept up on the leaderboards. He got #8 for weekly scenarios won! I should also mention our other leaderboard member: Saaz with 122 guild leaders killed came in at #8 for the week and #8 of all time (fess up, how many of those kills were yourself?).

I would also like to offer a hearty congratulations to everyone for not making headway in any of the PVE whore categories: Defenders (#1 in PQs) and Champions (influence gained). By the way, if you just want to see how you did vs your class, you can click in “sort options” in the upper right. For instance, Saaz was #7 in renown earned by Swordmasters, Organdonar was #5 of Rune Priests,  Pylith is #3 in scenarios won out of Bright Wizards. Perle, as far as I can tell, doesn’t play as much as the other Arch Mages on the server and doesn’t get anything in the top 10. (sadface)

Better luck next week I suppose!