The first Weekend WARfront done

It’s been a busy couple of days for WAR, patch 1.3.4 went live and last weekend was the first of the all-new Weekend Warfront events. As such its time to have a little ramble about how it all went.
 
First off, it’s too early to tell what implications 1.3.4 will have on server activity, because as expected the entire server went ape-shit for scenarios. Any patch with new features will provide a potent dose of shiny new toy syndrome and on this front 1.3.4 most certainly delivered. This weekend has been scenario popping, Ironclad-tastic. Which leads me to the first topic for discussion, the Ironclad scenario.
 
I like it. The small zone, tight corridors, 3 objectives and 6v6 player limit put great emphasis on group organisation. I had some excellent and very tight battles against other pre-made groups, some truly epic battles there, but I also took part in (and fought against) some really good PUGs (pick up group). That said, when facing very random PUG set ups, unfortunately for them it was always a quite brutal massacre. The Ironclad does need some tweaking though, in particular:

The spawn guards are not tethered properly and on numerous occasions after someone accidentally pulled them, they then rampaged through the ENTIRE ship…

Order healers can use group heals from their spawn and still in be range of most of the ship. Yes Destruction players can do the same from the rooftop objective, but they don’t have NPC spawn guards defending them with 30k instant kills.

Other than those 2 issues, I didn’t have any problems in the scenario and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve got a feeling these weekend events could be a really nice spark of life for the game. An event every weekend is nothing to complain about and even if it’s an event you don’t like, it’s only a weekend and surely its better than nothing?
 
Then we have the patch itself… hmm what to say...  It seems ok.
 
I like the new scenario list and I like the new weapon rewards, though the amount of emblems needed looks rather high. I gather the 30minute rebuilding phase at the end of city sieges has been removed too, that’s good news. Not noticed any game performance changes as of yet, but then WAR runs fine for me anyway.
 
On the negative side, for some reason Mythic has changed the melee combat sound effects, this is proving to be deeply unpopular as to quote a friend “it sounds like you’re fighting using cutlery”. I dunno myself, as it’s not really bothering me, but then I quite like the idea of using a spoon to bludgeon Elves to death. Would a 2 handed spoon be a ladel?
 
The helm/cloak turning off thing is annoying. Oh and I discovered even after almost 2 years, Mythic are still able to introduce new bugs to Lost Vale. We had a targetable, but un-attackable, “invis something spell effect” slowly wipe out our whole group yesterday. It looked like a round shadow on the ground and no matter what we did it wouldn’t stop. Admittedly it was funny watching a goblin running in terror from an angry shadow. There were many LOLs at his slow death, until it went after the rest of us... Then the Spider boss went all weird and started doing CRAZY damage (without any of the little spider buffs) on our tank, which meant we had to give up. Considering this tank can main tank full 8 boss kills Vulture Lord runs, that was a little odd. But it wouldn’t be a WAR patch without something breaking in Lost Vale eh? :P
 
Anyways, all told I’m feeling positive about this patch. It’s just a case of Mythic hotfixing the mild irritants quickly (they're normally pretty good here) and then seeing how the server develops with the city and scenario changes. Fingers and other bits crossed.

What a difference (for the worse) a day makes

Bloody rollercoaster ride this patch.

The game was running beautifully in Lost Vale, a really big improvement with almost zero slowdown due to spell effects, etc. Very cool. I also finally got a Darkpromise Helm and was a happy bunny obviously, but then a few things happened that suck royally.

We started on N'kari and confirmed what others have been saying, it would seem to be impossible to do as things stand (unless you are REALLY lucky). Her Circle of Pain effects has a much wider AoE than the graphics represent and is doing stupidly high damage. On my Chosen I was getting hit for 2.3k, thats not so bad apart from when you get hit by multiple at once because of the size of the AoE. It's even worse when one spawns on a healer, hitting them for 5k BEFORE the graphic has even appeared and then the follow up tick finishes them off.

I simply do not believe Mythic tested Lost Vale properly for 1.2.1, it feels like someone has changed lines of code and not bothered to see what it happened. If they think they did, then they need to do a serious review of their internal testing procedure. With my own job one of my many oh so exciting duties is I'm heavily involved with testing and acceptance of pretty complex software in the public sector, it's a bloody nightmare let me tell you. So I fully understand how for many things you won't know if the translation from your test to your live system will work out, until you get it on live. You think it would, but it doesn't always work like that.
However, instanced boss fights with are very controlled environments, with set phases and events, that are easily tested. I do not understand how this, Gorak and the butcher can be so broken. It's not as if WAR has many end game dungeons, Mythic need to get this right and at present it's simply not good enough.

We tried N'kari a few times, same shit kept happening so we gave up and decided to go oRvR. And discovered that tonight on Karak-Norn Tier 4 oRvR had became unplayable....

Order were on a huge offensive, decimating Caledor as we arrived and in massive numbers. I think it was probably the most Order I've ever seen in one keep. The lag was horrific. Really odd crap was happening, I'd see players sort of vibrating one the spot for about 5-10 seconds and then teleporting away and entire warbands worth of players vanishing and reappearing. After a few laggy deaths, somehow I made it to the inner keep which is when it really went to rat shit.

Order got into the lord room and every single enemy player vanished for about 45 seconds. Confused we thought at first it was a server crash, but as we were still taking damage from them it clearly wasn't . Everyone on alliance vent was just laughing at how pathetic this was on the game's behalf. Then Order capped the fort and Caledor crashed properly. The laughter soon turned into a mixture of sardonic amusement or irritation.

Then the rollbacks started. I've not logged in with Bootae yet to see if I've lost that DP helm... Please note this is AFTER the emergency maintenance that supposedly fix things. If anyone works out what it fixed, I'd love to know.

Not good Mythic, not good at all. You need to hotfix like buggery chaps, because at the moment whilst I love this game, I can not defend this sort of crap.

Being saved to instances in WAR needs fixing

...because at the moment it's a bit rubbish and either broken or just badly implemented.

You get half way through Lost Vale, but with a bit of bad luck and a bugged boss, time runs out. No problem! We're all saved to the instance, so we'll just continue on Sunday we say. Sunday arrives, but one of our guys can't get online due to RL stuff. Which means, no continuing LV for anyone, because with the stupid system in WAR you can't swap people out and save their replacement to your instance. Why are people punished if a guildie is ill or something?

In fact I've not been able to see the last wing of LV yet. Due to regular bad luck both in game and with the effects of real life, everytime we arrange a second night something goes wrong.

Really REALLY bloody annoying.

Why didn't they just copy Blizzard's perfectly fine system for being saved to instances?
Mythic, please, please change this ASAP.

[update 1]
Annnnnnd while I'm here. God I hate run backs after a death in dungeons. Mythic you had a great idea in LV with those quest giver ghost things that spawn, you know the ones where you can remove your res sickness debuff. Why can't we also res at them when releasing? 5-10 minutes of running back is not fun :P

[update 2]
Ok lol, I got into the middle of LV tonight. :) My point still stands though.

Lost Vale; the good, the bad and the ugly

Had my first trip to the Lost Vale dungeon last night. I only had time to do the left wing and then have a little look around the middle bit, but here's what I thought so far.













The Good
I really, really like the atmosphere and the look of the place. You get a nice feel for the warping nature of Chaos as it's twisted this once oh so lovely tree huggers paradise. Presentation wise I'd say it is on a par with most of Warcraft's better dungeons, obviously comparing it with the ones also designed for a single group. I'm a big fan of out door dungeons, so this was just my sort of thing. Also the mobs looked spot on, just the way they should and I particularly liked the boss models.

I also love not having to faff around with sheep, banishing and all that long CC (crowd control) stuff that is so important in WoW. I prefer WAR's more in your face PvE in that respect. Good old fashioned scrapping, where subtle use of CC makes a difference. Getting away from over reliance on CC, and the class restrictions plus mods/macros that brings with it is no bad thing.

Bosses are proper tactic style, not just tank and spank. Of the 4 bosses in this part of Lost Vale, 2 were straightforward big hitters with lots of weak spawning mobs to deal with and very easy. The other 2 were more involved, 1 had a very fast moving boss where you had to use these pink cloud things to control who he agros and then the final boss was a big Spider that has a couple of stages and a range of things you need to deal with.


The Bad
When you walk into an instance and the very first mob you fight (a giant worm boss thing you encounter again later in another wing of LV I believe) bugs out, vanishes and then instant kills you all... well that's not a good start. My mate that was showing us round says it does that every few visits. That is totally unacceptable and is playing into the hands of the Mythic bashers. I've never had that happen in WoW, and I'm gob smacked there's a common bug on the very first thing you do in WAR's showcase dungeon.












That boss I mentioned where you have to use the pink clouds? Whilst my guide explained how the proper tactics, he then went on to say nobody actually does the proper tactics, since you can just stand on a fallen tree, the boss can't reach you, bugs out and you can just DPS down in total safety. Whilst I appreciate the easy loot and yes we could have done it properly, I would have preferred it if there wasnt such an easy way to bug and beat the boss. It devalues the challenge and epic feel of the dungeon.

Watch out for gettng stuck in scenery... there's some awkward rocks in the final boss room. Which if you get stuck in and the boss agros you, it can end up with a bugged boss and a wipe as the only way to clear it.

Run backs. Mythic have missed a trick here... Whilst they thought of how you remove the resurrection debuff, by having a healer dude that appears at various points throughout the dungeon, why can't you also respawn there? When you die you still respawn right at the beginning. Please change that, I really, really loathe running through empty instances if I accidently click release or we wipe.


The Ugly
Generally the place looks great so far, but some of the textures need a little love, beaches and some of the rocks in particular. Also having seen a video recently where someone applied a bloom type effect to Lost Vale, please please Mythic give us some more graphic options. Obviously I'd like general performance improved for everyone first, but places like Lost Vale could look so much better with a bit of blooming HDR goodness.


Overall, I liked it. I'm looking forward to going back, but I really hope there's less major bugs in the rest of it. I've been on enough MMO launches to cut the game some slack where maybe others wouldn't, but bad first impressions can still turn me off. Please no more bugged first pulls.