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.

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.

Tor Anroc - How I hate you!

My life consists only of punting dwarfs into the lava.  That's it.  No more, no less.  

I think I'll be getting from my current level 27, to 30 in this scenario.  I am out of quests and there's no open RVR to speak of. 

Heck I enjoyed the 60 to 70 grind in WoW way more than this.  At least there, there was a lot of instance runs to keep busy, not that I want to promote rep grinds.  But at least I was wanted as a Tank, or a Healer depending on what I was specced.

Somethings got to be done and I hope the next patch comes soon and promotes more RVR. That is what this game is about after all.

Gear Grind - Priority goes to...?

The Greenskin effectively captures my feelings from the recent grab bag on the Gear sets in Warhammer. 

I actually find it a bit scary that the requirements sound so ominous.

If it's anything like WoW getting this gear is bound to get a little intense, and, quite possibly, will bring in guild DKP systems to make sure that gear goes to the most "worthy"

Obviously I have not seen any of the top end fights so I am not sure about their mechanics but in my minds eye I imagine that your tank would be the first person you'd want in resist gear.  Can anyone out there confirm if that's true or not?  I just can't imagine everyone in the group/warband taking damage equally.

I am pretty sure that the gear that drops won't be in the form of Tokens, as those are out, so it'll come down to fighting the random number generator to see if your gear drops.  And if the drop rate sucks it'll mean farming the instances or the RVR zones for months trying to get your stuff.

Right now I'm kinda hungry so I'm going to rail against long leveling times and stupid gear grinds.  I don't mind gear checks in MMO's, they're almost a requirement, but don't make me run an instance 20 times just to fill out my gear so I can move on.

NPCs in Scenarios - Fun and Tanking Opportunities

One thing that I liked in Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft was the fact that there were NPC's Alterac Valley.  As a Protection Specced Paladin it was a lot of fun to tank them.  Now, admittedly, AV wasn't so much about PVP as it was about rushing to the other end as fast as possible, but it was still fun.

I'd like to see some boss type NPCs roaming around various scenarios that would sometimes appear and help one side or the other.  As a tank it would give me something compelling to do rather than punt people into the lava endlessly.  

It's pretty simple really.  And if done right it could shake up the routine of scenarios and make them a bit closer to open RVR for us tanks.

Damage Taken - Why it's important

Right now in WAR there's a bit of a bias against tanks, and for dps and healers.  As I've said before, overall it may only be a %5-%10 bias but it's enough that it should be addressed.  It's unfair to have non-tanks get more renown and xp in scenarios and rvr when tankspecced.

So I have two options for Mythic when it comes to tanks.  Either you can give xp and renown for damage taken in RvR and Scenarios, or you can give renown/xp for damage blocked and avoided.

Personally I'd lean towards the latter.  That way you could give an incentive to tanks to actually block players and take damage, and get into the fray, rather than spec dps as many do to level faster.  You would also give incentive for tanks to throw up guard on non-tanks and soak up some of the attacks on them.

And, if you did that, you'd be able to do the same for all classes, and not have to give xp or renown to that bright wizard who just got nuked and while he took a lot of damage, he was naked and not doing anything.

Of course this wouldn't work in groups, where xp and renown is split, but it would possibly help in open pve where, I'll be in a PQ, tanking some champion, and slowly working him down, when some other player comes up, 2 shots him, and takes 66% of the influence points.

Lastly, one thing it might do, is show who the real tanks are.  The dps and healers get to sort their scenario summaries and see who is on top, and tanks could then do the same.

If Mythic doesn't do this then there will always be a sense, particularly in scenarios and RVR situations, that a tank is less useful than heals and dps.

New Character Slot for new Careers?

I've read in a couple spots, where players are asking for an extra character slot so that they can try out the new careers, Black Guard and Knight of the Blazing Sun, when they come out.

The reasoning seems to be fairly sound.  That is that, a lot of people may have used up all character slots in order to try out the other classes and mess around on alts.

Personally I don't think that Mythic should do this, although I believe they will.  The following is my reasoning.

First, I don't want the starting zones swamped by everyone just trying out the career on day one just for kicks.  It's going to hurt the experience of new players who choose the class and players who are more dedicated to rolling one.

Second, players are just asking for, IMHO, another mule to store stuff on.  I think that this is a BS reason and that Mythic needs to better address the storage management issues in Warhammer Online.  The Mail system is still crap, the UI is bad making it a huge time sync to mail stuff to alts.

But why should I have to mail stuff to alts?  Why shouldn't I have enough storage space on my actual character, and the means to manage it efficiently.  It shouldn't feel like a job to manage my inventory.  

I played SWG for years were it was, (not sure if it still is) a single character per server system.  You could pick up auction mail anywhere, access the AH anywhere at a terminal, and there were banks terminals all over the place.  And it worked.  Also being able to use containers to manage stuff was nice.

So, I don't think that Mythic should add character slots.  I'd rather they minimize the need to have mules for storage space and inventory/AH management.