Gashface the Conqueror

Cor blimey guv! It didn't take long to get Gashface a full set of Conqueror's War Brudda's Kit. Sure there's already other choppas with Invader, but then I don't play quite as much as those nut jobs ;) Plus I'm still using Bootae and splitting time between characters, so this was pretty damn quick really. Admittedly I've been a right jammy git with rolls, but it has to be said, the new token system was a huge help and I would be forced into BB/BE otherwise.

I got the chest, shoulders and belt with tokens, the helm from guild keep claim capture loot and both the gloves and boots dropped from players. Result :)

Token system, I salute you!

Embracing my inner git

Over the last few days I’ve had what could perhaps be an epiphany. I’m going green.

I’ve always liked my Chosen. It looks great, has a solid feel to it and performs well. It’s a good class and I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from playing it. Only recently I was saying how the Chosen would remain my main character and my Choppa would remain just an alt. Wrecka spec was great and all, but it never really grabbed me by the short and curlies. I’m not into playing a class or spec because it’s uber or the current flavour of the month, I just want it to be at least moderately competitive, have a cool appearance and most importantly be a good laugh to play.

As I posted before, this week I hit 40 on my Choppa, but decided to respec away from path of Da’ Wrecka. Sure Da’ Wrecka is the uber Choppa spec of Doom for large scale oRvR and it’s AoE damage in PvE is immense, but I just wasn’t enjoying it enough. No disrespect meant to the VAST amount of people using it, but I was finding it a bit boring. This led to me changing to path of Da’ Hitta and since I’ve had a bit of time off work this week and few evenings free, I managed to get a lot of practice in.

I’ve had an absolute blast.

It’s been immense fun and the playstyle instantly clicked with me. I’m still learning obviously, but already I’m very competitive and had some great fights against some decent players too. It’s not that the Da’ Hitta is stupidly uber or anything, but it seems to be the perfect spec for me. I think a lot of this is because it feels very similar to an Arms spec Warrior from World of Warcraft. I played a Warrior throughout my years in WoW and most of that time I was Arms specced. I went Fury at level 70 in the Burning Crusade, not because of enjoyment, but because fury was so dramatically superior for DPS. Even so, whenever I went PvPing I would respec back to Arms.

All of which gave me a bit of a dilemma. Do I carry on with Bootae (Chosen) as my main character, or switch to Gashface full on? A tougher choice than it may seem, since I've put a lot of time, thought and effort into Bootae's progression. After much pondering and several changes of heart, I've decided to switch to Gashface. I'll still be using Bootae for PvE with my LV group and log him whenever needed in RvR of course, but for general play I'm gettin' to da Choppa.

CHOP! CHOP! DING! DONG!

Hit level 40 on my Choppa today. :)

I've decided to respec away from path of Da' Wrecka. It is very good, but I'm finding it not particularly challenging to play. You run in, spam AoE, use git to da choppa to pull people in and that's about it. It's been a lot of fun and it made leveling VERY easy, but I'm wanting a bit more variety in the abilities that are worth using. Perhaps I'm missing some subtle details with Da' Wrecka, but there you go. I briefly dabbled with Da' Savage before, but it just didn't feel right to me so this time I've decided to try out Da' Hitta, which is the great weapon based mastery path.

It's themed around big spike damage with a range of what appear to be quite potent debuffs. Unfortunately I've not been able to properly get a feel for it tonight, as with 2 forts down (1 each) all the oRvR was focused in Kadrin Valley. A zone now simply known as bloody Lagville. Thankfully I managed to get a few scraps in before the 2nd Fort went down and everyone and his wife descended on the zone. It got pretty messy from then on and after the northern keep battle crashed the zone for a third time, I decided to call it a night :/

First impressions are positive in that I've got lots of abilities to choose from and I brutalised some people in 1v1, but I'm not so sure how it will play out in large scale fights. I imagine I will miss Da' Wrecka's more powerfull AoE in those situations, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Hopefully I'll get some time to really experiment with Da' Hitta over the next few days

One of those moments of RvR awesomeness

So last night there was all sorts of action going on across Tier 4, I was logged in with Gashface my choppa and decided on going to Black Crag with an alliance warband (we're part of The Evil League of Evil). The zone was rapidly turning blue as Order appeared to be pushing for a lock, giving us a lot of options, but since one of the guilds in our alliance had claimed Ironskar keep in the north, we decided we best try and hold it. As we rode through the winding canyons the alarm sounded, 21 enemies were attacking Ironskar. Clearly we'd made the right decision to push for the last Destruction controlled area.

At that point we had around the same number in our warband, so rather than rush inside the keep, we planned on charging the Order from behind. They were like lambs to the slaughter (or is that Slaughtererer? Nornians will get that :P ).

They must have been a PuG not using voice comms, because it was an utter, horrific massacre. We romped through their healer camp, cutting a bloody swathe through their lines and forced the rout in moments. Much cackling was heard on our ventrilo, but we knew we'd been lucky to face unorganised opponents. We withdrew to the keep and waited to see what Order did next.

We didn't have to wait that long, as shortly after roughly half of the same bunch returned. A group of us melee types went out to deal with them, which we were in the middle of doing when we heard yelled from the keep walls (ok ventrilo) something along the lines of "Order! Bleedin' thousaaaands of 'em!".

Those of us outside left the small combat outside and ran like buggery for the keep door. A few of us were cut down, but thankfully in res range.

We were now up to a full warband, there was about 1 group of random Destruction that had just arrived and a shit load of Order had arrived. GAME ON!

From here on there are so many tales of awesome PvP combat I could tell you, but this post would become insanely long. We successfully held the keep against 86 Order with just our warband and six others, almost 3-1 odds and we held. It was truely epic, we dragged the fight out for over and hour by destroying every battering ram they deployed and using coordinated melee assaults to clear the doorway... Their ninja teams were caught and killed everytime, were gave no quarter. We rained death from above and thrust sharp pointy sticks in their squishy bits. I saw some of the most gung ho ressurection missions ever as our brave Disciples of Khaines accompanied by melee fighters rushed into the enemy to retrieve our fallen. In the end as the door respawned, we wiped them to a man and won a monstrous defence bonus (don't remember the numbers, but it was BIG).

I can't do the fight justice, it was the best defence I've been on since the early days on Karak Hirn. I salute all my follow Destruction that earnt their victory and also the Order who didn't give up despite our brutal defence. Wether you were on the winning or losing side, it still provided a long and entertaining battle.

It's nights like this that show how awesome WAR can be.

PS it also meant I got 1.5 more levels of renown and finally got to equip my Annhilator chest and helm ;) Just need the shoulders now. "Woot"! or some other such geeky expression :P

Changes to 1.2.1 as a result of testing

Thanks to Werit for spotting this from Mythic.

Key bits for me are:

Increased base hit points on all pets. (Squigs, War Lions, Turrets, and Daemons)
If it makes them more relevant then that's all good.

Flurry/Lotsa Choppin': These abilities have been changed to a Cone area of effect that will only hit targets in front and on the sides of the character. Due to this change the abilities will no longer require a target to activate.
Fine with me. Generally I think the Choppa seems pretty balanced, but after a mammoth RvR session today, yeah Lotsa Choppin is as they say "OP". This seems like a fair change.

Players operating a Ram will now be immune to Knockback and receive reduced damage from Oil Siege Weapons.
and
Siege Rams will now do twice the damage as they previously did.
and
Keep doors will now have double the hit points they previously had.
and
We have significantly increased the hit points of Ram Siege Pads.
Excellent. I was asking for something like this the other day. Making siege weapons more important is no bad thing. Hopefully the start of more improvements.

Caltrops and Dynamite will no longer be introduced with the Ordnance system.
This I'm really pleased to hear. Players didn't like Caltrops, testing showed them to be to have a negative effect on the game, so Mythic got rid. GJ Mythic.

Now what I want to know is when is the patch going live? And when do we get the token based loot system?

Choppa update

Had a couple of emails asking if I was still going to update on my Choppa progress. Ten thousand apologies! I forgot basically :P

I've carried on with the PvE quest and PQ grinding to get up to level 35. I'm now thinking that I'll focus on RvR to get my realm rank up, it's a mere 24 at the moment. I had been told that we got pick lock at level 35, this would appear to be bollocks and I'm now hearing it's at renown rank 30. Doh. That was why had I raced up to bloody level 35... Bugger.

Aaaaaaaanyways, how is the Choppa? Pretty cool to be honest. I'm still going with Path of Da'Wrecka, which is fun though a little 1 button spammy with lotsa choppin. But it's fairly relaxing to play in a sort of psychotic way. It's very easy to farm mobs in PvE. When I've got rest XP I quite often just farm PQ mobs, since I kill up to around 5-8 even level mobs at once, depending on their type of course. With rest XP that's netting roughly 1.5k per mob, which adds up fast.

As for RvR, I've done a wee bit in tier 4. So far I've been battered in 1v1 fights (fighting geared 40s doesn't help ofc), but found myself to be quite usefull in group situations. With my AoE slow down, lotsa chopping, charge skill and Git to DaChoppa I've been able to cause some carnage and catch runners. I'm not sure how well Choppas are balanced yet, they seem ok to me in RvR, but it's probably too early to tell, but I suspect the yells of OPness are perhaps just the usual whinging.

Main thing for me remains, it's an Orc, it looks cool and it's fun to play, in a straight-forward Orcy way.

Not a lotta choppin and does the new AoE of doom cause the lag?

Not had that much spare time last few days due to a mixture of real life stuff and having the damned pox. Which has resulted in not much progress with my Choppa. What little time I have had online when not on my Chosen I've just used to grind out quests with Gashface.

Doing a chapter at a time in each 3 pairings, seems to work quite efficiently. So far I'm up to level 24 with very little time put in since I left tier 2. Though obviously this has meant bugger all renown gains, my renown rank is lagging behind at 21.

Maybe I'll get stuck into tier 3 RvR a bit more when I get more time, but it's kinda tempting to just hammer straight through and get into tier 4.

Though with the way tier 4 is at the moment, I'm not so sure I'd be wanting to use an undergeared alt in RvR there. If my pretty well geared Chosen can die in literally 1 second with the AoE spam of Doom, it doesn't bode well for a squishy choppa :P No joke, had this at a recent fortress attempt, walked anywhere near the gate it was instant death with just a wall of numbers filling my screen. Dunno how many Bright Wizards they had stacking rain of fire, but ouch... Same would happen to Order when our Sorcerers stacked pit of shades I guess. Literally impossible for healers to do anything, especially when combined with the horrific lag. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

Interestingly that night we noticed that soon as we managed to get the Order off the walls and the Rain of Fire spam stopped for a bit, instantly the lag got better. Like a LOT better. I had spell effects turned off, so RoF shouldn't effect my PC graphic wise and everyone in alliance chat was talking about the lag reducing. So it wasn't just me.

Is it the calculations AoE makes the game do or something that shafts the server performance? There's a link for sure it would seem.

Hip Chop ya don't stop

I've had a quality night of Choppa action :)

It started off with joining a warband and getting a few keeps, not hugely defended, but Order put up a fight none the less. Once it started getting a bit too RvE, we formed a guild tier 2 warband and did PQs and scenarios. Didn't lose one all night and had some really slick results, with us pulling back from the brink of defeat to get the win a couple of times too. There were a few big name Order guilds with what appeared to be premades in scenarios, which can be a lot of fun to go against when both sides are fairly balanced. Always good to get a decent competitive fight and doubly nice to edge the wins too ;)

As time got on and people needed to log, I went off to do some quests to hit 20. I've not really seen much of the PvE areas in Barak Varr before and on reflection there's probably quite a lot of the game world I've not seen yet. Maybe I need to do some more exploring... Anyways, after bashing a few dwarven heads in, I dinged 20 and got my mount. Yay! No more running!

Took it for a spin around Ostland, but it was a bit late and I didn't find anyone to run over. Then I realised that the keep in Shadowlands was showing as under attack. As it was about 1am at the time it was probably just a guard being agroed, but with the Elf oRvR influence rewards being the last ones I need, I figured it was worth a look.

Man I was glad I did ;) Order had at least half a warband hitting the keep, maybe 3 groups worth. There was only 2 other Destruction defenders... I joined their group and we had some amusment pouring boiling oil on the enemy, but we reckoned we were doomed once they got in. Not going down without a fight though, oh no sir! Soon as the door was down we moved up the 2nd ramp a bit and let them agro the Lord. His AoE kicked in and so did we :D The Order tried to exploit the Lord out to the balcony, but we made hit and run attacks and the Lord wasn't falling for it either. We killed about 3/4 of the Order as the situation threw them into disarray. Then the strangest thing happened... The last few Order jumped off the battlements and ran away, leaving us 3 heroes alone in the keep. First time I've ever seen Order leg it quite like that.

I have to say nice one to Wifz and Regain that I was grouped with, it was a proper comedy moment and they were good company for it :)

I'm the sexy one in the middle.

So all told a good nights Chopping. Lots of fun, lots of action and pet piggy to ride too. Quality stuff ;)

And it's made a big improvement to my Choppa's Dammaz Kron scores :D Nice session RvR stats ;) Of course now I've posted this I'm going to get bloody maimed for a month and end up on -500 :P

Level 40 Choppa already? You sir are a nut job

Yup one of my guildies hit level 40 with his Choppa earlier today. Our server's first (edit... possibly second...). I would like to put it on the record right now that he is officially a bloody mentalist.

Impressive, yet scary at the same time. Especially when you consider he has a job and a lady friend. I think he must have been inspired by 80's UK television when Roy Castle sang:

Dedication, dedication
Dedication, that's what you need
If you wanna be the best
If you wanna beat the rest
Oh-oh dedication's what you need;
If you wanna be a record break-er, Oooooh.,

Or perhaps he's just mad as a balloon. I know where my money is. Thankfully not in Icelandic banks.

Anyways, I'll get some level 40 RvR feedback from him ASAP.

The Chopwork Orange

I so wish I had thought of that for my Choppa's name. Ahh well, too late now.

Anyway, so me and my droogs have had a quality couple of days in Tier 2. All that was missing was some weepy young Devotchkas...

LOADS of action. Scenarios popping very regularly (quite often instantly) and large scale oRvR with multiple warbands clashing over keeps. Not much of the RvE nonsense, but lots of proper RvR scrapping. It's still Choppa/Slayer crazy, but there's a fair bit more diversity in classes than I saw in tier 1. My Choppa is at level and renown rank 15 now and it's been a doddle keeping both my XP and RPs going up evenly.

I'm still enjoying the Choppa, it's suitably manic in its playstyle and I think this will take over from my Witch Elf as my 2nd priority character. Lots of AoE spamming crazyness which is fun, but not very taxing. So far its really just a case of spamming Lotsa Choppin and Wild Choppin, with the odd snare or charge thrown in.

PvP wise I'm doing ok. I must admit that I can't quite shake my tank habits of trying to smash deep into enemy lines all the time, which with a squishy choppa can be more than a little suicidal. Of course for Orcs suicide is painless, but it is certainly bringing many changes to my Dammaz Kron score line (best add on ever btw), as I fluctuate wildly between insane killing machine and unsupported idiot in the middle of 4 Bright Wizards... But crucially I'm enjoying it regardless and that's all that matters :)
I've now had multiple 1vs1 fights with each Order class. I've beaten every class 1v1 at some point, but if I recall correctly it's only the following classes that I've had any losses against:

• Warrior Priest
• Sword Master
• Slayer
• Iron Breaker

Everyone else hasn't been that hard to kill. I doubt that's down to me being uber, more just a case of what the Choppa is designed to do. As in to kill squishy tree huggers.

Of course in RvR and scenarios, 1v1 fights are not the norm. It's sprawling melees and uneven fights that you'll most likely be stuck into, which the Choppa can do just fine in. Sure if I'm focused fired by more than 1 person I go down faster than a Kings Cross hooker, but with some good healing and staying in control of your rage, the Choppa can really bring the pain.

In scenarios I've hit the no1 spot for both damage and killing blows a good few times, even with me as low as level 13 in tier2. Obviously those scores shouldn't be taken as Gospel, but it is an indication that something is right when you're on the winning side and you're top in both. I've seen some other Choppas (and Slayers) get some crazy arsed damage scores too.

I'm not going to say the new classes are overpowered at this level, but they're certainly competitive.

First night of real Choppa action...

...and it was pretty cool.

I've had a bit of a sporadic nights gaming, but managed to get Gashface up to both realm and renown rank 7. So it's too early to really judge the class or anything, but enough for a first impression.

The mighty Gashface!

Unsurprisingly it's another melee glass cannon, but I think some people maybe surprised at quite how squishy they are. In RvR I died a LOT. This maybe due to me being a bit too interested in the Wrecka stuff, so meaning I was in full berserk mode the whole time, which in turn means I have my armour and resists reduced by 50% in exchange for increased damage by 50%. Or I could just be a bit cack.

Regardless, it was fun anyway. And I enjoyed playing the whole psychotic Orc thing, very different from the more calculated way I play my Witch Elf where stealth lets you choose your fights more.

In PvE I'm AOE farming quest mobs with ease. It seems the Choppa sure can kick some damage out.

Lots of guildies were talking about finding Great Weapons much better then dual wielding, particularly in PvP. No shocks there with the tradition in MMOs of great weapons for burst damage, but if this is the case yet again, then I really hope at higher levels dual wield gets better for PvP. Personally I want to play a dual wielding Choppa, I use a great weapon with my Chosen a lot, so a change would be cool.

Anyways I'll update again when I get more time playing with my chopper... fnar fnar

Choptimus Prime

Was already taken :( One of my guildies was gonna have that name, loved the idea :P I've gone for a good old fashioned orcy type name "Gashface".

Admist the usual rambling, I'll blog away over the next few weeks about how I get on with my new Choppa. But for now I'm faced with this still...


Bugger.

So we sailed onto the sun 'till we found the sea of green

If you've not been onto a public test server yet, this is what you're missing out on:

Choppa testing has certainly proved popular, as has the Choppa itself. I've only really dabbled a little bit so far, as unfortunately I've not had that much spare time to put into the test server, but everytime I have been on, there's been a lot of discussions in region chat about the Choppa.
People seem to be really liking it. And I mean really, really, really liking it. Loads of people talking about re-rolling.

Obviously it's all low level stuff, so it's not that indicative of end game performance, but it would seem to have very pokey DPS and looking through the skill lists it's certainly got some funky stuff. If you then look at the discussions going around about Witch Elves and Marauders, people are making out those classes are now redundant, particularly with Witch Elves. Hmm, I don't totally buy that myself, a class is only redundant if you choose not to play it. They will still have decent DPS, they may not be no.1 melee DPS anymore, but they're not gonna be useless surely?

That said, the 1.2 patch is nerfing Witch Elves and the changes to Stealth worry me a fair bit I have to say. Yet with so many changes to other classes, resists, pick lock, etc, will it all balance out? I'm really hoping that the new working pick lock skill is going to shake up keep sieging, something where Witch Elves could potentially be awesome.

I don't think we'll have any real idea of the impact of this patch until it hits the live servers, the PTS is too random and the various forums are so covered in bile it's hard to work out what's actually true.


One thing's for sure though. When 1.2 goes live, the Choppa is going to be hugely popular and we're all gonna be sailing on the sea of green.

BTW if you want an easy way of seeing all the new goodies the Choppa brings with it, go check out Wizards and Wenches. There's a great post up with the abilities, tactics and morale all on one page.

Getting hyped for some Choppa action

For the last couple of years of my time in WoW, I played a Fury DPS warrior (dual wield melee DPS). It was a class I really enjoyed, the whole in your face spamming attacks like a loony type thing. Whilst it sucked badly in PvP, it was a whole lotta fun in PvE and I always had the option of respeccing arms and getting the 2hander out... if I hadn't spent half my WoW time being disillusioned with WoW PvP anyway.

With the Choppa just a month away, I'm really hoping it's going to be another class that just totally grabs me. I'm really liking the look of the class and since generally the Orc & Goblin stuff in WAR is some of the most characterful and entertaining to play through, hopefully leveling up (again) won't be too tedious.


Wrecka mastery is sounding like the one for me. If it encourages the psychotic playstyle suggested in the video I linked previously, well that can only be fun. ;)

Bring on Nordenwatch packed with Choppas and Slayers! It's gonna be melee madness for sure :D