Warhammer Tank

Back to Scenarios I go...

Now that Heavy Metal is over for me I guess I'll go back to grinding scenarios... It can be fun but it's not something I want to do for hours on end in Warhammer.

There was a decent amount of open RVR tonight.  It was also fun but Destruction got rolled as Order outnumbered us by 2-1 on the battlefield.  

I must say however, that the time 10 of us ran over a hill smack dab into about 30 order, all grouped up and dismounted, was probably the coolest and most exciting feeling I've had since I started playing.  Good times.

As a Tank, I'm going to start playing PVP in scenarios much more conservatively, looking back for support more.  I die far too often and miss out on an lot of xp and renown wasting time running back from the respawn.  I keep telling myself not to over extend but I inevitably do.

Just finished the Heavy Metal Live Event

Well my wishes for an epic live event will have to wait for another time.  

The quests you have to do for the live event are quite lame and I think that, now that you can do them all at the same time, it's likely you could do most of them in an evening, minimum 2 nights, and unlock the early access to the new careers.

Since I'm just about 30 I probably won't roll a Black Guard until later but it's nice to be done.

Unfortunately I found the events to be to easy and a bit lame.

Do a Scenario

Go to a Capital City

Throw 5 Pies at the enemy (no pie splatter or knockdown)

Do a full PQ

Kill 5 chickens

Look at a sandcastle

etc etc

No where was their any mention of some kind of backstory on the introduction of the new careers.  Clearly Mythic was just adding the new careers in and tossed a couple co-op students into a room with a whiteboard and had them make a little game out of the unlock.  Those co-op students have been fired I hope.

ON the positive side, the live event kept me logging in, hoping that the next event quest would be super cool.  But now I feel empty inside, like I just at my kids whole bag of halloween candy when what I really wanted was a nice big order of butter chicken with garlic naan.

So where are the new Tanks? Heavy Metal Missing?

Is it just me or are the new Tank Classes not featuring heavily in the Heavy Metal Live event?

I figured that you'd see Black Guard NPC's and Knights of The Blazing sun roaming all over the world and would be integrated into the live event but that's not what we've gotten so far.

I must say that it's pretty non-immersive right now. Basically the live event is "go check out our new scenario", which, admittedly, is a lot of fun. But invading a beer factory doesn't exactly make me conjure up epic feelings of armies calling up reinforcements in the form of new tanks.

Perhaps the later Heavy Metal Quests will be more epic.  We shall see!  I certainly hope that they are.  I still want to see hundreds of Black Gaurds colliding with hordes of KOBS

Get in the Game!

I'm kinda bummed out for a couple of reasons.  But you know what fixes that?

Smashing Order Players in the face with my sheild!  

Lets Get it on!

So to all you guys in purples who are trading them in for greens right now.  :-P  I wish you were here!

Still Having Fun!

There's lot's of negativity out there but today I had fun in WAR and I don't care who knows!

When I logged in I was immediately grabbed by my two guildies and pulled into a warband to complete a PQ for the Heavy Metal Live event.  It was a small group but it was a fun as the only tank there.  I just kept throwing up Challenge over and over and pulled mass amounts of Mobs.  I felt like a real tank and my little Shaman did a nice job of keeping me alive until he died!

Once we completed that we hoped into the Reikland Factory Scenario for a little PVP.  It was my first time doing it, I missed getting in yesterday, and it was a lot of fun.  I'm going to like that scenario I think.

It's pretty simple I think.  WAR is going to be a success if there is constantly something going on and a warband forming to go smash the enemy.  As long as that happens it'll get my $15 a month even if I can't log in every night.  It's way better than smashing my face into the keyboard and wiping on bosses for weeks in some instance with 25 of my closest friends.

Incoming Hits Way Down

I haven't been posting quite as much in the early days, nor am I reading blogs on WaR quite as much and it looks like many others are doing the same.

The in the month after launch I was getting about 500 pageviews a day here on this site.  Now I'm getting about 150 a day.  It's still way more than I ever thought I would, and it's why I keep doing it. But it shows that a lot less people are looking for information on Warhammer.

It's my impression that server population has stabilized and is slowly growing, which is good, but I think it'll be a while before I get back to the 500 views a day.  Considering I only talk about Tanking however it's still not bad.

Maybe I'll go hang out on the Warhammer Alliance forums and feed the trolls for a while.

Leveling Talisman Making - My bad guide!

While this is not, exactly, a guide, I figured I'd comment on my experiences leveling Talisman making.

In short, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be but it did make a dent in my gold and it took a bit of time.

The first tip in Talisman making is this.  Don't wait forever and then do it all in one night, and, don't try and do it on the fly.  Take an hour a week and work on it as you level.

I haven't been reading around the web, there may be someone out there with better ideas than me but this is what I did and I'm fairly happy with it even tho I think that it's a horribly designed crafting system.

So here's the main strategy for those of you Googlers out there. 

Go download EZCraft from Curse.com.  It lets you click directly on your little crafting slots in the UI and select an item to put in.  Saves mouse clicks and movements and therefore time.

As you level, save every green you can get your hands on even if you can't Salvage it yet. I assume you have Salvaging or you're going to spend a fortune at the AH.  Put them in your bank if you can't Salvage them.

Once in a while, I did it all one evening, but you should do it once every week or 2.  Use your book of binding and find your nearest merchant.  

Buy 2 or 3 stacks of Level 1, Mojo Coins, Gold dust, Containers, and your Magical Essence.

Use your guild recall scroll to go directly to your capital city

Get any fragments you have out of the bank.

Stand beside the Renown gear vendor in your city and buy 5 to 10 pieces of armour.  Usually gloves are the cheapest to salvage.  Turn them into fragments.  Make sure you find the right level for the fragments you need before you make big purchase.

Now you should have the mats you need.  Make the Talismans and watch the levels tick up.

I got from Talisman making level 20 to 112 in an hour and a bit, maybe more, and it cost me about 17 gold in renown gear for all the fragments I needed.  Note that I had already gotten a bunch of fragments that were in the bank from salvaging renown and other gear along the way to attempt to keep up with my level. (28)

I just kept going until I ran out of basic mats, and in my case just did it again.

Keep in mind that you'll need to keep your renown level up in order to follow this method.  You won't be able to have a level one character follow this exactly.  In fact I'm not sure if there is a cap on your crafting level as compared to your character level at all.

If you're interested in Talisman making a bit more, I just read Tobold's overview about 2 seconds ago...

New Tanks Live Event - You are not prepared!

So the "Heavy Metal" Live event is coming soon, on November 18th.

You can find the default information on it here.

It looks to be an event that is very similar to the Halloween "Live" event where you can get some cool stuff if you gain enough influence.

For those of you out there who are looking to roll one of these new careers you'll want to get started fast and max your influence so you can start before the masses get access.  So, book some time off from household chores and get ready for a good old fashioned grind!

In my opinion it looks like there might be a bit more variety in this event than there was in the Halloween one.  Hopefully we'll see different quests every day, kind of like the WoW instance dailies that changed around.  And, there's a new scenario to try out.  It's in the T4 Zone but everyone can participate, I assume that you'll only fight people in the same Tier as you.

During the Halloween event I found the zerg in the RVR PQ kind of boring and my inf bar didn't budge much at all, hopefully the Heavy Metal event will feel more meaningful and a bit less grindy but I'm not holding my breath.

I have a feeling I'll be rolling a Black Guard as an Alt after I get to 40 on my Black Orc.  We'll see when that happens.

Good luck to everyone who'll be trying out the Feather Knights or the Emo Elfs.

Mount Gunbad - Fun for Tanks

Just a quicky.

As a testament to just how slow I am at leveling. I took my first few steps into the Gunbad instance tonight and dinged 28.

I found it one of the better areas for a tank that I've been in recently.  Often I find that the mobs at my level really don't hit that hard, and they are always solo pulls.

In Gunbad the champions hit you like they mean it at least and there are a fair number of multiple add pulls.  It's not really that hard but makes you work more like a tank, managing the pulls, and trying to keep multiple adds off your heals and dps.

I would like to see a bit better aoe threat gen on my Black Orc.  I don't feel like I can do much but rotate my dps around to build aggro.  And the abilities that do some AOE damage don't really look like in on the animations.  I want more spinning and chopping.  That's one thing I liked about AoC was the animations.

If you haven't gone over there yet, I'd say don't wait for till you're 27 like I was.  If you have a full group 23 is fine to get started and achieve success.

Till next time!

When is a Tank Not a Tank?

It's been two days since I logged into Warhammer but it feels like two decades.  I desperately need to get rolling and punt some people into the lava and blow off some steam.

RL has dealt me a couple swift kicks Right in the Jibblies. I've had some health issues pop up in the family and I got shown just how ineffective my personal organization system really was.  Don't worry, nobody is going to die.  I mainly just need to take a few days and reorganize.

Once I get out from the mountain of tasks I have I'll be back to my regular posting schedule, hopefully this weekend.

If all goes well I'll be in Tier 4 sometime early next week, about a month after I expected I'd be there.