Saturday 23 January 2010

Lair of the MissedOpportunityThatCanEasilyBeSortedOut Beastie

Tonight I logged in to WAR and shock bloody horror, omfg I can’t believe it, there was…. A city siege!
/sarcasm off

It was the Inevitable City under siege, which isn’t exactly tempting to take part in anymore. Most people will have gathered full Invader long ago, and we’ve done the same city fight many, maaaaaaany times before, so it’s not providing much in the way of entertainment or pixel rewards. Also having arrived after the start, it means I could either join a warband already inside, queue hoping to get into a decent competitive instance (and then of course run out of time), or join solo and instantly get a spot in one of the instances everyone is quitting because of uber Order bombgroups/whatever maiming everyone. Plus, thanks to the Underdog system you’re actually better off NOT defending your city, as there’s no downside to it being captured and you’ll actually get a benefit in the form of underdog points, which then make it easier for people to go farm their PvE Sovereign at stupid o’clock in the morning. Screw everything to do with this tbh. As you can probably tell, I’m not bothering with cities at the moment.

Aaaaaanyways, I was relieved and slightly bemused to discover a couple of guild groups doing a tour of the game’s Lairs. It’s something we’ve not done in a looooooooong time, like 8 months or something… I like the basic concept of WAR’s Lairs, I really, really do, but the implementation is flawed. The reason people only visit them once in a blue moon is that other than to get tome unlocks or simply have a butchers, there’s absolutely no reason to do any Lairs outside Land of the Dead. The loot drops are utter crap and the fights aren’t exactly challenging. It’s a real shame because many of the Lairs are really well designed graphically, with things like hidden caves, demonic prisons and Super Mario style jumping puzzles.

The frustrating thing is it wouldn’t take much for Lairs to be much more desirable places to visit. Mythic could make the loot actually relevant, rather than mere vendor trash, which would help but surely it wouldn’t be hard to spice them up with rewards that have some character. Special Awesome looking trophies, posh cloaks, funky titles and decent pocket items.

Before WAR's launch when hearing about the "Lairs", I had images of loads of classic Onyxia style fights. Awesome PvE moments that would complement the RvR. That was my favourite thing about WoW, the Onyxia instance. I bloody loved the whole concept of Onyxia's Lair, a dark and smoky cavern with just 2 or 3 trash pulls and then a huuuuuuge dragon to fight. Unfortunately what we got in WAR just doesn’t come close and now would be almost impossible to attain, but perhaps with a little tinkering WAR’s Lairs could still be something we might actually do more than, well… more than once a sodding year.

1 comment:

  1. So much missed potential for PVE in this game :(. The have (IMO) fantastic art/models, just need to add some more scripting to make PVE set-piece encounters more interesting to do. And bump up the loot in places like lairs and Bastion to make them worth doing in full. I never understood why you didn't get any trophies or titles for killing most of the bosses.

    ReplyDelete

About Me

My photo
Half man half pixel. Music obsessive, likes a drink, occasional bastard.