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.