Patches, Laundry and Other, Less Exciting, Endeavours

I've been quiet about this patch. I've always said that I'd rather wait and see before I comment.

I've waited. I saw. I am not terribly impressed. Let me split this up in Pros and Cons (Pros as in "damn! he such a 1337 playa"; Con as in "convicted for the crime of sucking").

Pros

- I have a better mount now. No longer have I to consider making a few bogus accounts only to not be left behind during ORvR nights. Well, at least on my main, but I'll leave that part for the cons.

- My renown is boosted! Only, I haven't had many chances to up it...

- I got to change my hair! No longer will I be punishedwith clipping errors for a foolish choice made years ago when I didn't even know what helmets I would come across!

And...

I can't think of anything else...

Cons

- I got a new mount on my alts! Only, none of them is rr65. Good thing I didn't sell my old mounts before I noticed that little catch.

- I haven't really tried ORvR yet because, according to reports, it's terribad. Seems there's no time to do anything because Zerging still works. Maybe it even works better than before.

- Scenarios are... meh. I can't judge them because, in order for me to be able to participate, several conditions have to be met. If we're not in a city siege... and we needn't go any further because we're always in a city siege. Everytime. Even when no one's playing, there's a city siege going on because locking zones is ridiculously easy when there's no one in them. And they'll often be empty because zerging still works.

Or so I heard.

- I've also heard reports that, on certain players, critical hits will hit less than a regular hits or, at least, with a marginal dmg difference from a regular hit. Seems certain renown abilities could use a little revising.

- Speaking of renown training... I like it, for the most part. Some new skills are terribly interesting although most of them seemed (to me) to be tank or survivability related. One thing though: what in God's green Earth have they done to the interface? Why on Earth do you have to buy just one of them at a time from the longest list ever? This is particularly frustrating when you have over 70 points to spend. Looks like they did to that interface what they did to the AH.

- And what of the AH? No changes, I think. Don't think I actually checked but I at least read nothing about any changes. Which is a shame, really. Seems you can search for less things than before, most searched stats aren't searchable, (powers and crits) and you still can't searh for repairables. Plus, I have the distinct feeling I've been purchasing stuff from people I don't much care about.

I have to say, all of this reminds me of Ragnarok.
Not the end of the world or the spaceship. The korean MMO.

Let me explain:

It was my first ever MMO, possibly to your dismay and disbelief. I never played in the official servers, though, we played on a private free server. Drop rates and XP gain were faster there and, for a while, we were happy. But soon the "doner" factor started taking it's toll. You see, like any F2P game, people who chose to donate were quite OP and strut about like they were all that, discarding the best gear on the floor around us, like the french kings of old. We felt left out of the rain and, eventually, we became doners ourselves.

To a lesser extent, I wonder if this is what is to become of those that, unlike the most of us, won't buy the packs. I hope not. But people running around IC with useless two-headed gos between their legs reminds me of those colourful wings RO players could buy to look purty and be imba.

Fret not. I don't see myself dropping the game anytime soon.
No sir.
But I'd love to see some changes, for the feeling of disappointment to go away.
African-descendant person born equal under God and/or possibly other deities of the same religious nature now and for all time, PLEASE!

the way of the 1.4 choppa

1.4 brought many changes to the way people play their classes.

In the last few days I saw master bomber sorcs trying out single target specs, and full on damage marauders dabbling with defensive sets.

I am not an exception to this change, as obvious as I may sound.

With Epikk I was running a high damage crit spec (but then again, who wasn't?). Tons of melee power, capped str, high crit value, and some added damage tactics + crit triggered ones.

After 1.4 went live, my damage plummeted. Thanks to that forsaken "reduce damage from crit attacks" renown training, 2 out of 3 of my hits were being massively nerfed damage-wise.

It was a tough couple of days if I do say so myself. Must have spent around 50 gold and some 5 hours trying different things to see what now worked for me in this completely new world of post 1.4

for a while there I even considered a full defensive build, which would actually be something very very different from my usual suicidal builds.

But alas I crossed paths with an old friend called weapon skill. To be honest it's a pretty obvious choice, but one that didn't cross my mind at first.

So now, I ditched crit completely. Ok so I have some on parts of my gear, but to be honest I couldn't care less for it.

My current renown training is completely devoted to strength, weaponskill and parry. nothing else.

Thanks to this, I gained two new tactic slots (since there's no crit.. there's no need for crit-triggered tactics) and with my newly acquired high parry, I'm actually trying out Riposte for the first time. That and some healing coming from my exhaustive blows (25% chance) are making me survive a little bit more at least in scenarios (still running an exhaustive blows spec btw)

Best part of all of this? I'm still pro at dying, but now I can actually deal some damage to 2h tanks, and every order that trained reduced chance to be critted and reduced damage from crits actually just has a huge amount of useless renown points when it comes to fighting this choppa :P

let's see how this goes from now on. I suspect that with more people training reduced crit and reduced crit damage, more people will stray from crit builds. and with that happening, I can see people dropping the reduced crit training (or at least not going as far as 50% reduction)

Time will tell.

cheers.

Paying Customers

I recently reached rk40 with yet another alt, bringing the total of my rk40 characters to 5: a Zealot, a DoK, a Shaman, a Magus and now a Squiggy (not to be confused with Squiggzy, that guy's an ass.)

His renown rank is shameful, sitting now at 30. But I have high hopes for it. Squig Herders have been treated with a bit of indiference among the RDPS classes (not so much as Magus but hey, they're no Sorcs). This is why I leveled one, the same reason I have a 40/52 Magus. I wanted to see for myself what was so wrong about it.

Yesterday evening I went into a scenario and, lo and behold, a Sovereign piece for SH dropped. I stared at the loot roll for three seconds before I pressed the "Need" button. There was just one more Squig Herder in the scenario (compared to the whooping 5 squigsters we had in a previous one, among a total of 12 Destros) and he was probably, read "most likely", a higher renown SH than me. I won the loot roll.

This must've made him mad and I totally sympathise with his plight. But the thing is, although I'm a few months away from being able to wear that, why should I be less entitled to have it in my bank waiting for me? We're both paying customers, aren't we?

Some people believe only people that can wear certain gear or are relatively close should be able to roll on it. So far, Mythic have disagreed and I salute them for it. I got my first Royal crest on my main when I was rr35 and I still can't use any Sov but, by golly, now I'm within earshot of finally spending it. Who's to say that in the near or far future I won't be able to say the same thing about my squiggy? Me and any squigster who is close to 80 are paying the same monthly fee and have, for the same price, acquired the same rights.

The thing is, the time we've spent on a specific character does not entitle us the acquisition of loot, it only determines if we can or cannot wear it. The acquisition of such loot is determined by wether you've paid a monthly fee, and can thus play the game, and dumb luck on drop rates and loot rolls. It's not an optimal system but I think it's fair.

Same goes for the new sets and renown ranks. If you're willing to pay extra for those ranks, you're willing to spend extra time to get them too. If you're not, you're not. It's like almost any other game out there that provides its player-base with new content, only this one seems to be much cheaper. Am I making much sense? I dunno anymore, but I think I got my point across. I ninjaed a Sov piece and I'm sticking my middle finger up. As for the new packs...

Pay, don't pay.

I for one, will.

Colossus MDPS weapons

Before I start, let me warn you that this is going to be a whining post, and even though there are more weapons besides the ones I'm talking about, I am concentrating on the high crit ones only.

Ok, so, yesterday we were running some scenarios and I noticed Skreavar (a guild mate's Marauder) had a sweet looking weapon on his un-mutated arm.

I inspected him and found out it was one of the Colossus weapons. a Mesis Djaf, to be more precise.

Looking at it's stats I got kinda pissed cuz it had more stats than a Ur Khsar Odji, which made me fly to LOTD after a couple more scenarios just to check if I was wrong about the stats or not.

Surprise surprise!!!

Most of you probably know what I'm gonna say next, but I only noticed it yesterday (yheap, I know. I'm kinda slow.. but hey, I play an orc.. I'm expected to be slow on the head)

THE CHOPPAS GOT SHAFTED!!!

I mean... if you consider Destro's 3 MDPS classes, the choppa has the shortest end of the stick when it comes to weapons bought with pages from the Liber Mortis...

Let's take a look at the WE's dagger:

Sweet looking thing tbh.

Nice crit (10% crit if you use 2 of these babies.. niiiice) and some pretty cool MP going on there

the STR isn't that bad either, and the same goes for the DPS

all in all, I like them. They could be better (I wouldn't complain if they had a talisman slot hehe) but they're pretty awesome and I wanna have their babies

Now let's look at the Marauder's hammer:

Not too shabby.

same DPS and Crit as the WE dagger up there, but less Strength and MP.

ok so it has +3 AP per second. that's a nice bonus. But does it really make up for losing 14 STR and 11 MP compared to the dagger? I honestly think not!

But still, it's a nice piece of gear that I wouldn't mind using if i was a Marauder with a page of the liber mortis lying around and some spare funerary masks burning a whole in my pocket.

and now, the focus of this post...

the Choppa axe:

same DPS as the two above.. ok

same Speed, same crit chance

oh nice. it has more AP regen than the Marauder's hammer. I'm liking it already!

hmm 2 less STR than the hammer... ok I can live with that.. I mean, it must be to compensate the extra AP point per second.

and now let's check the... errr... WAIT A MINUTE!!!! NINETEEN MELEE POWER???????

let me get this straight WE get 44, Marauders get 33 and Choppas get 19????????

that's almost HALF of the Marauder's hammer stat (14 difference) and, dare I say it... LESS than half of the WE's dagger (25 diference!!!!!!!)

what's going on here? I mean, honestly...

Let's assume there is a WE out there dual wielding those daggers

and let's also assume there's a choppa somewhere dual wielding those axes

They should be comparable weapons as we are talking bout same archetypes and same source of gear.

How can a difference of 50 MP and 32 STR compare to the 8 AP per second???

what gives, Mythic???

i'll take some RvR to go, please

As you all know there's been some info roaming around about the soon(?) to come RvR packs.

There's bits and pieces about this scattered all over the place. Enough to get my mind crunching some ideas, but not nearly enough to give us definitive knowledge about the stuff.

It's obviously Skaven themed. That much Andy and Carrie have disclosed and it's one of the few questions that they have openly answered.

Andy put up a thread on the official forums for people to ask questions and he's been answering them (you can read it here) and I find it funny that he openly says "no" to subjects like the racial capitals, but he says "we are not ready to discuss that" to things like fortresses.

One thing is for sure, I was thinking of how cool it would be to bring the Fortresses back but in another area, and have them host relics like the DAOC ones, but he already said that there are not going to be Relics as they don't want to give the strongest side even more power =(

What follows is a rant about what I'd

love to see as the result of 1.4 and the RvR packs. It's based on the information that I've read online, but it's more of a wishful thinking rant than a factual future.

According to the concept artwork (that you can see above) the new skaven area looks like it could be a network of underground tunnels.

Add to that the fact that they say the new area is going to be part of the campaign.

Also, on the forum thread i linked to before, one person asked "where is the new area gonna be situated on the world map?" to which Andy answered "it's going to be on the world map" (or something in those lines)

At first i thought he was making a smart remark, cuz obviously everything on the world is on the world map... but then it got me thinking...

what if the new skaven area is BELLOW everything we already know in T4??

think of this... there are 3 pairings. each with 3 zones. making a total of 9 T4 maps that are RvR enabled.

The new area could simply be a chain of tunnels that go underground, bellow the T4 as we know it today, linking all tiers and all zones together. A mesh of pathways that have diferent exits for each one of the 9 maps we have today.

They also told us that they are keeping the keeps and the BOs but they're gonna change the way the campaign advances, and that they're removing some of the locking mechanisms for the zones.

AND they wanna break off the zerg.

So. with all this in mind, my idea is as follows.

Imagine there are no zone locks. Only Pairing locks.

to lock a Pairing, you have to controll all BOs and Keeps on that pairing.

but the zones themselves do not lock. and you don't need to advance from Chaos Wastes to Reikland to lock the pairing.. you just have to controll it all, but in no particular order.

Let's consider that destro starts taking keeps and BOs in Chaos Wastes.

We take both keeps and all BOs.

We don't lock the zone cuz they don't lock anymore

We decide to move on to Praag, so we send some Warbands there to take the keeps and battle objectives BUT!!! we must leave some warbands behind in chaos wastes to defend the already controlled keeps and BOs because Order could just run back and take them away from us.

BAZINGA!!!! the zerg is broken. we need to split our forces to be able to defend shit :P

Now.. we manage to take control of Praag as well, and we try to advance into Reikland, but there's order there.. so we end up having a big fight... and obviously, as order is there, people in Chaos Wastes come up to help... leaving just one warband to defend Chaos Wastes (you twats.. you're gonna lose us a zone!!)

all of a sudden... ZOMGFACEPALM!!!!

a warband of Order goes un-noticed through the skaven tunnels. they go right into Chaos Wastes, where there's only a warband of Destro there trying to defend everything... MISTAAAAAKE!!!

all of a sudden there's order in chaos wastes and in reikland.. and Destro is sandwiched between those two zones... the shaaaame.

only way destro could have prevented this??? by having a warband of destro controlled skavens roaming in the underground tunnels, trying to catch order as they were trying to sneak by!!!!!

so. bottom line is.

no more zone lockings.. you can controll any BO and Keep freely of zone locks, and if you manage to capture all of them, you lock a pairing.

underground tunnels that you can use to stealthly go from one zone to another zone, and the oposing faction can try to block your way by playing skavens

that's what i'd like =)

Creamy Glory indeed.

oh yhea, on another note. to use the tunnels you'd have to gain access to them. the side that has access to them can roam them freely, and the side that doesn't have controll can only go there as skavens, to prevent the other side from using them.

that's all

cheers