Good Wild Hunting

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a WAR live event cause such mixed opinion. Some very vocal people have been calling it out for being a load of PvE rubbish, some have been saying it promoted great RvR around the portals and then others just loved the whole thing. I found it a bit of a mixed bag.

The Hunters Vale
The instance was good. Ok, other than the cloak there was bugger all gear relevant to me, but to be honest it would have sucked if the dungeon brought in the latest uber weapon of doom. It doesn’t have to be an arms race anytime something new arrives; sideways itemisation is no bad thing. By giving the dungeon armour from the Ruin set, moderate weapon drops and the stag cloak, it ensured that instance was relevant to everyone.

The dungeon itself looked great. It was very pretty and absolutely nailed the wood spirit theme. The mini bosses were not the most exciting ever tactic wise, but that’s fine for a live event, you don’t want to be researching tactics for an instance available for just one week. The puzzle and main boss fight (which had a bit more too it) worked perfectly, not too hard to learn, but not one everyone would instantly beat either. Also having the PQ timer to complete the instance in (or you got less loot) added a bit of spice to the dungeon as a whole. On the subject of time, Mythic got this exactly right. Depending on your group it took between 20 to 45mins to complete, which is spot on. I like mixing in PvE to my gaming, but I don’t like having to spend 4 hours in a dungeon. I’d love it if Mythic added lots of instances on a similar scale to Hunter’s Vale. Oh and I didn’t encounter a single bug in HV.


Stag chasing…
For a week Benny Hill has been alive, well and playing WAR. There were these Lord level Stags that run through the zones and if attacked they just keep running. Part of the Live Event required us to kill these 5 times, which obviously resulted in zergs of players chasing bloody Stags around everywhere trying to hit the damned thing. The zerging whilst funny to watch was dull as hell to take part in, but if you chased a stag in a quiet area it was potentially great fun. I grouped up with Khalie a sorc from Kill Frenzy and we went stag hunting in Etaine. At first there was nobody else there, but then a few Order turned up and joined in. What followed was running battles around the zone trying to not lose sight of the stag, while fighting off enemies. It was actually a brilliant laugh. Small scale combat rocks ;)

You’re the Piggy Pig!
Some of the other popular tasks were killing or being killed as “beast hexed” players. What happened here was whilst in the PQ area people could get a hex on them, they then had 20 seconds or so to pass the hex onto another player or they would turn into a pig. This could be both frustrating and fun. When in Zergland it was very hard to get credit, but in smaller scale stuff it was most amusing. It also provided the epic title “Squeals like a pig”. Alas no banjo though.

Other bits.
Other tasks were a bit meh. Kill a variety of animals, a brief PvE quest, do some elf scenarios, that sort of thing. Nothing to shout out about.

All in all, it was a fairly good event. If you got into it and ignored the “its all PvE” crying then you’d find there was something for everyone and I certainly had some quality PvP scraps out of it. The dungeon shows great potential and I really hope Mythic pick up on this. On the negative side there were too many humdrum tasks and I know some people had problems completing certain tasks because of zerging.

Not as much fun as the Night of Murder one, but it had its moments.