Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Karl Franz's response to a visit from the Jehovas was perhaps a little extreme.

Those of a negative ilk may have thought this post's title was going to lead to a misery post. Quite the opposite actually, it's just a reference to the above screenshot. This weekend on Karak Norn there has been a seriously OMFG huuuuuuge battle for the Chaos Wastes. I was there for about 3 hours tonight, but I've got a feeling it may have been going a LOT longer... For the last hour or two both keeps had their doors destroyed and it was both factions trying to balance attack with defence.

Our return to WAR continues to provide much entertainment. Large scale crazy huge batles, plenty of small scale roaming and fast popping scenarios. Me like.

Like a Lion

I do like themed warbands and groups, they're just a good laugh to mess around with. And I'm not alone there.. Check out this video from Karak Norn's Champion of the Gods.

Order scumbags ofc ;)

Norn in pictures

On Twitter recently I've had quite a few people asking me what Karak Norn is like to play on, is it busy or a ghost-town? In general I would answer this by saying when it comes to activity and being competitive it's bloody excellent, in fact it’s quite possibly the best of them all in that regard. But today I shall answer through the medium of screenshots!

 

So yeah, if you want a busy server with plenty of fighting and you're on EU timezones, Norn is pretty damn good..

Epic fights on Norn

That’s been my weekend really, in between real life stuff of course. There were some truly epic fights in Chaos Wastes, Eataine and Caledor. Some of the fighting in Caledor was just brilliant, the bridges providing the choke points, but as the zone has plenty of alternate routes it was never a simple single choke point fight.
We ran with a mixture of very different set ups over this weekend, from Witch Elf+pimp groups to the occasional bombing set up. Numbers wise we were normally about 1-2 groups, peaking at 3 briefly, but we tried to fight around the HUGE zergs from both factions where possible. And it was just plain bloody awesome. We kicked much arse and we also had a few proper slappings in return, but regardless it was all fun.

What was very cool was how the new server coped with the large fights. They really can deal with far larger numbers of combatants in a zone than the GOA servers did. However it’s still not all sweetness. We are occasionally getting the crashes when zoning and I’ve had 2 random crashes to desktop this weekend, which I think is 2 more than I’d had earlier this year… Also a few people are complaining of regular lag, I’m guessing this is something to do with the route between their PC, ISP and the new servers, but I’m only guessing. Certainly when they complain of lag most of us are not getting any at all, which suggests it may not be the fault of the server per se.

Still, overall it’s been a great weekend of WAR, after a pretty good week too. Hopefully as Mythic continue to improve our new servers, this will only get better.

Of course now we are all looking forward to seeing the patch notes… I wonder how much drama they will provide ;)

New servers are great! Oh wait... What? No! Noooooo!

I had a post planned; a nice, happy and congratulatory post for Mythic after what had been a very smooth and successful transfer from GOA to the Mythic servers. And then this weekend happened…
 
It started with ever-increasing mailbox and auction house lag, with some people reporting having to wait minutes for their mail to load. And then with a resounding DOH the crashing started. When changing zones, be it from using a flightmaster or a scenario, the game started crashing. Sometimes crashing to server select, sometimes to character select and on occasion right back to desktop. And I’m not talking about the occasional crash, oh no sir, this was consistent and constant crashing. It got to the point where most of us just gave up, as WAR was simply unplayable.
 
It’s real shame, not because of a bit of lost game time, but because this is yet another opportunity to further WAR’s resurgence utterly squished. You see this coincides with Mythic reactivating every EU player’s account for 2 weeks free and by the looks of things this was taken advantage of in a huge way. Over the last few days I’ve seen entire guilds return to see how WAR is doing, seriously loads of old faces popping up everywhere. These are people that when they saw all the improvements to WAR would quite probably subscribe and enjoy the game, at least for a while and Mythic’s next patch could well have kept them here longer. We’d told them the lag was so much better, that the new servers were so much more stable and at first they really were, but then BOOM! Server meltdown, with crashing eventually became so constant and epic that WAR no longer functioned at all.
 
Gutted.
 
Prior to this I’d maintained a comfortable FPS in fights that were on a scale our old GOA servers could not have dreamed of running. I remember at one point looking at the map of Chaos Wastes and seeing the entire RvR lakes covered in fight symbols, WAR was indeed everywhere. It was brilliant, the new servers a joy.
 
Now I’m sure Mythic will get this sorted out. It’s just a crying shame that all those returning players return to WAR was met by such massive server problems. Perhaps all those returning players cramming onto our servers were the cause of the problem? I don’t know, I can only guess. I know a lot of those people quit because of a combination of the dominance of AoE and poor game performance, they come back and discover AoE is still dominant (albeit point blank) and it would appear to them, the game performance is actually worse.
 
Yet it isn’t. WAR is soooooo much better now; the game normally does run extremely well, in fact in the moments when the server stopped dicking about, I had some great fights this weekend. For me Sunday night ended on a real high with brilliant scrapping in Black Crag with 2 groups of KF and about the same from Tainted working together to fight an Order zerg, really tremendous fun and drama. And Mythic genuinely are finally starting to make and talk about the right kind of changes for WAR. It’s just such a crying shame that all the improvements and future potential has been utterly overshadowed by a weekend of epic server failure.

My evening's RvR through the medium of song

This also works...



Can you imagine the fun?

Breaking the first rule of Fight Club

After the dismal performance by the English football team on Sunday and the crushing defeat by our biggest rival Germany, I was in desperate need of something to lift the spirits. Thankfully we had the perfect tonic already prepared. That evening we had a little guild event scheduled, but not quite to our normal daft standards, this was more serious, well a bit anyway. We had arranged to meet up with the Order guild “Champions of the Gods” in a secret location and have an evening of even numbered fights and amusement away from the zerging that is so rife in WAR’s RvR lakes. It was a brilliant night and both guilds had some tough fights, healthy banter and a great laugh.
 
CotG joined us on our ventrilo in a channel set up for them and our two guilds met up outside the fortress in Butcher’s Pass. This ensured we would have no interruptions from zergs by either faction and gave us plenty of room to fight. Being the first of these events and the evening after big World Cup games, we both had slightly lower attendance than we probably hoped for, but both guilds had enough people for 12 player teams with substitutions available on the bench. At first we planned to fight to try and claim a banner from behind the other team, but we actually both ended up ignoring it and just fighting to the death, or until it was obvious one side had won.
 
It was a fascinating match up tactically, as we both set up and approached it very differently. CotG had a mixture of DPS, which included a melee assist train and 3 Bright Wizards in a bomb set up. Where as we had 2 Sorcerers both more set up for single target and our usual collection of MDPS, so pretty much the usual KF single target heroes bundled together. Due to a healer shortage I used my Zealot for the first few fights and it didn’t go too well at first, with us losing the first 4 fights in a row. Half of the losses were fairly quick, yet the others took quite a long time before we got fully nailed. After each fight we spent a few minutes discussing and preparing different tactics to try and believe me we tried every trick in the book, but no matter what we just couldn’t deal with their combination of excellent melee assist training on our healers and the stacked Bright Wizard PBAoE reaching that infamous critical mass of firey death. At least not while we played as pure single target…
 
So we changed tactics again, respecced our sorcs and two of the Chosen, juggled the groups about, another Zealot logged on and finally I got to change onto using my Chosen. We went with a Sorc/Chosen Bomb mixed with Marauders and others including me on healer shafting duty. Instantly everything changed and we got a surprisingly fast victory. CotG are no mugs though and they adapted to our new play style and the next few fights were much tougher, one of which was an absolute epic. After our big tactical change we had 3 wins for KF and 1 for CotG, giving a final result for the Fortress fight of a 5-3 victory for CotG. I’d like to think had we continued further we might have pulled it closer to a draw, but it’s hard to say, many of the fights could have gone either way at numerous points to be honest. Plus it didn’t matter really, it was just plain fun, I was pleased with how we built on our losses to start winning and when either side lost they had always put up a great fight anyway.
 
After the Fortress fight we decided to do something a little different and took ourselves off to the secret demon prison lair for some 6v6 and good filming opportunity for the KF auteur Durtbocks. Those duelling flagged themselves for RvR, while Durt remained unflagged and resplendent in naked greenness, which allowed him to get some decent footage (more filming required, so this vid is a while away). It had all got a bit silly for the 6v6 with us fielding things like 4 Chosen groups or Marauder groups and I had to AFK quite a bit, so didn’t monitor results at all, but I could hear that everyone was having a good laugh. I have to say it really was a very atmospheric setting for a fight club event, certainly one to use again. As the evening came to a close we all jumped into one vent channel and everyone was saying what a great night it had been as well as a refreshing change from playing dodge the zergs. We’re definitely going to be meeting up again, not too often or it could get stale, but we’re already identified some great locations for our next event.
 
If you’re guild hasn’t done something like this already, I highly recommend you consider organising this kind of event. If you can keep the epeen out of it, focus on just having some good scraps, good humour, be open to try new tactics and learning a few things, then you are assured of a great night’s competitive, fair and thoroughly entertaining RvR.
 
A big /salute to Champion of the Gods for being good sports and all that stuff ;)

Getting my arse kicked and why audience participation is not always a good thing

Last night there was another 6v6 event on Karak Norn. I always like to attend these events (if I real life doesn’t get in the way) and yesterday I was happy to ninja myself onto the PC without causing too much marital strife. In the past I’ve always entered these events with an almost completely melee group (other than healers) and have done fairly well, our win/loss ratio normally around the breaking even mark. Pretty much every event we’ve cobbled a group together at the last minute, but it’s still often had the same pool of people to select from and we managed to get my desired melee theme. Last night though the people I’ve usually gone with weren’t available and nor were the type of careers required for a melee group. Not wanting to miss the event we built a group up anyway from who was online and decided to give it a go. We knew the group wasn’t quite right and really we should have changed things, but over confidence stepped in and we just went for it.

BIG MISTAKE

We got the shit kicked out of us and ended up with a 1-6 win/loss ratio before we decided to call it a night. Ugh… this was by far the worst result I’ve ever had in an event like this. I’m not going to make excuses for this poor result, as we were outplayed by Order and the speed of some of our losses said it all. However I want to ponder on it a bit, since this was such an unprecedented arse kicking for me and losing a fight is not just about how well your opponents play, but also about other factors like how well you play, your group synergy and the environment you’re fighting in.

To be clear then, /salute to all our opponents, in each fight you outplayed us and fully deserved your wins.

Our group looked like this:
- Chosen (shield)
- Chosen (great weapon)
- Disciple of Khaine (heal specced)
- Disciple of Khaine (DPS specced)
- 2x Sorcerer (single target specced)

First off, this is no sleight on the people in my group. They were all good (or even excellent) players who don’t make a habit out of getting their arse kicked. We just didn’t play well; our assisting was sloppy, ventrilo was a muddle, changing to better targets was off and our use of crowd control was rubbish.

I respecced great weapon for this event, which was a mistake, I’ve been sword and board for ages now and I discovered I just didn’t quite know anymore where I should be and what I should be doing in a situational sense with this type of group when using a great weapon. For the last 2 fights I went back to my shield spec and did a lot better (which included the one win lol). No escaping though, I was shockingly shite for most of our fights. Oh! The shame… Meh I'm no epeen ego monkey, I'll freely admit when I played like turd :P Anyways, I don’t know if other people will think that group should work ok, but for me there was no synergy. It’s a set up that didn’t seem to know what it was trying to be and it felt very squishy. The squishy bit I’m a little surprised at, since there’s this impression of DoKs as un-killable monsters, but it was Slayer central last night and they were absolutely tearing through our DoKs. In previous groups we always went with 2 proper heal specced players and I think this was our biggest mistake in creating the group. To summarise my rambling, on top of just plain playing badly, I think we made 3 key mistakes in our “setting up phase”:

1) Overconfidence based upon past performances meant we didn’t put enough thought into setting up the group. In an event that will have some opponents in absolutely perfect “FOTM” (as people on forums like to call them) set ups, be cocky and over-confident is asking for an arse kicking. This is the root of the other 2 key mistakes.
2) The group didn’t have an overall purpose or theme; we didn’t consider synergy of careers or anything other than having 2 healers (1 ½ as it turned out), 2 tanks and 2 DPS.
3) Individuals not being clear on their role and responsibilities led to headless chicken moments. Changing to unfamiliar specs in an unfamiliar group was not my brightest moment.

Important to state again that I’m not saying had we sorted ourselves out better we would have won. Order outplayed us and judging by the score on my Casualties of WAR mod they outplayed quite a few others too, but had we got our shit together we would at least have had put up a better fight and not got steamrolled so much. A lesson in humility learnt perhaps.

There was one other thing that was a complete fucking headache. Idiots in the audience.
These events attract spectators, which is cool and normally not a problem. Spectators sit naked on their mounts and watch from a distance. Unfortunately last night the audience (from both Destruction and Order) decided it wanted to get a bit closer to the action and in some cases join in. We had people circling the fights at close range, running through the middle, adding onto fights, throwing in resses onto our opponents and all sorts of other crap from a mixture of people who weren’t all naked either. This meant that for a bunch of our fights I couldn’t tell who was in the enemy group and who was just some random bell-end trying to screw things up; in fact there was one fight where I had (by a rough count) 18 red names in tab targetable range. It also looked like Order was having similar difficulties. At another point what appeared to 2 groups worth of spectators tried to gank us, we killed them mind you, there’s a big difference between puggies and the proper Order pre-mades. In your face psycho spectators! :P

(update) for fellow Nornites, this was in Praag ;)

It was incredibly annoying though. With us realising our group just wasn’t working at all and the idiots amongst the audience making everything a headache, we decided to call it a night after just 7 proper fights.

Events like these can be great fun, but it requires more than just respect from the teams taking part. It needs those watching it to not act like total twats.

Praag: Vice City

Someone needs to clean up the streets of Praag, seriously man, its really going downhill fast. First there was all the fighting and shit, but now you can't turn a corner without some pimp offering you his Elven sluts...


Youtube link available here.

/salute Durtbocks the KF auteur

It is all in your head mate

The tabletop version of Warhammer has rules for what it describes as psychology; things like fear, terror, panic, frenzy and stupidity. Rules designed to make the game’s units act like real people. Before Warhammer Online was launched, I remember seeing people debating if these rules would somehow be included in the game. The thing is they didn’t need to be coded into the game, simply because the in game characters have real life players controlling them. You’ll get to see the classic Warhammer psychology rules in action almost every day…



Fear
More than anything in WAR I’d say numbers cause fear. Often you’ll see the following scenario take place; warband A strolls around a corner and discovers a horde of enemy sitting there, the warband become hesitant, unwilling to commit, perhaps the odd person starts backing off. Battle commences and with confidence low, even if the numbers weren't actually that different, it’s a foregone conclusion.

Panic
This one you see all the time. 2 zergs are fighting, bombing away. Everyone is comfortable in their bombtastic scrap. Then a premade guild group/warband arrives and charges the enemy in the flank or rear, panic starts as players run in random directions, healers die and within seconds one zerg falls apart.

Terror
We saw a classic example of this recently. We had 2 groups of Kill Frenzy fighting at the south keep in Praag, alongside us was at least one warband of PUGs, probably two. The enemy keep was claimed and defended by a big reputation enemy guild. They’re very good and are known for always moving round in a large and strong warband, but they also make the most of psychological warfare outside of the game, with people dedicated to inflating their reputation on forums. And it works too, some people just crap their pants on seeing their guild name. So, back to the keep… The inner keep door breaks, but instead of a static defence, the Order charge out of the door; I think 3 groups to a warband of the aforementioned guild, backed up by a couple of other groups from other solid Order guilds.

Other than my 2 groups of Kill Frenzy, every other Destruction simply turned tail and ran. Utterly terrified they routed before they’d even been hit. It went from Destruction outnumbering the enemy 2-1, to my poor 2 groups being left alone facing at least double our number, which obviously didn’t go so well. To add further insult to injury I could see the Destruction so desperate to escape that a bunch got stuck in the outer doorway, their pixels doomed to a bombtastic death.

Frenzy
This one I’ll claim for me… If like KF you normally run with 1-2 groups in oRvR you will often end up facing greater numbers. In those situations running will achieve bugger all and if our pixels get killed, well... we don't care about that. We’ll just charge in and see how many we can kill before we die, proper frenzied troops style. Sure we’ll give the enemy some renown, but we’ll get some ourselves and most importantly it will be more fun than running :P Of course if we’ve got back up somewhere or something, then we’ll attempt a tactical withdrawl, but otherwise I'm all for shouting WAAAGH and feeling the frenzy! :P

Stupidity
Alas this one you’ll see all too often. It would make a huge bloody wall of text just describing what I saw yesterday. :P So I’ll just pick one moment… A destruction player put a king keg down on our spawn point barricade in Altdorf, which stopped people getting out of the spawn. I’ll assume it was stupidity, rather than a dirty cross-realming tart.



If I recall correctly the tabletop game has other psychology rules; stubborn, unbreakable and so on. All of which you’ll see in WAR. And you know, that’s the beauty of PvP based MMOs and particularly WAR, you don’t need to code in things to make your enemy react like real people. PvE is all good and well, but you just can't beat oRvR style PvP.

It's not all zergy zerg zerg

I've had a few slightly funky RvR sessions over the last couple of days, almost all of which were not Zerg related!

Using my Chosen I teamed up with a Marauder from KF and we went looking for trouble in Reikland. In some ways this was a bit dumb as the zone had zergs from both sides trying to capture it, but we figured we could scrub about and maybe, just maybe get some small scale action. I was very pleased to find bloody loads of it! Sure, we also got zerged by warbands plenty, but we did get lots of fights against more manageable numbers. Was a good laugh taking on whole groups at once to see how many we could kill before their numbers won the day. Ego whore moment; we kicked much arse :D

It was also cool to see some enemy warbands and random players recognise and respect what we were doing, and letting us fight on fairer terms. Though I did have a full retard moment where I quaked a warband that was quite happily riding past me... Didn't work out so well for me that :p I blame the latest post pig pox illness slowing my feeble brain.

Then a bit later I went to Karak Norn's designated duelling area and had a few scraps, which is nothing remarkable in itself. However I had a duel with a Swordmaster that lasted over 10 minutes... I didn't note the start time alas, as it was only when I realised it was taking a while that I started watching it. So it may have been as much as like 15 minutes... I wonder what the longest fight ever has been? DoK versus WP could take a while I bet...

And then tonight there was a preorganised 1v1 roaming PvP event in Praag/Chaos Wastes. Unfotunately I could only go for an hour or so, as the wife & sprog needed me to resolve a conflict... Alas epic pixel bashing doesn't qualify as a good excuse to stay on the PC. Anyway, it was a cool event and if your server doesn't do this sort of thing, I would recommed you try it out.
 
As for how I did? Meh, I had a rough time. I won a few against a mixture of opponents, but I also got my arse well and truely kicked. Before tonight I had never lost to an Archmage 1v1, which led to a big shock when I was repeatedly kited to buggery :p I have a new found respect for DPS Archmages. The other people I lost to were a Bright Wizard, Ironbreaker and White Lion. They're not classes I normally struggle with 1v1 at all, but all of these guys were not only high RR but also great players and I got spanked like a cheap tart. Whilst I would have almost certainly lost against them regardless, it has highlighted to me that I need stop fucking about with my 7 regularly played alts and focus on getting Bootae's renown rank and gear up to scratch. That's not an excuse for losing, like I said I would probably have lost anyway, but I'm not doing myself any favours.

Coming up tomorrow is another server event; roaming 6v6 fighting. Not sure what my group will look like yet, as it starts a bit early for a guild like ours, but whatever we throw together it should be a good laugh.

So there's plenty of non-Zerg action out there, if you want to find it.

The King is dead! Long live the King!

Yesterday Karak Norn witnessed it's first king kill. Well, I say Karak Norn witnessed it, but to be honest that's a somewhat misleading use of words. It was a server first, but it was only witnessed by a very small number of people, since the kill happened at 4:40 AM. :P

As you can no doubt imagine, a lot of negative things have been said about the time it happened. I'm not sure if it was a pre-planned alarm clock raid or just one of those opportune moments that ends up dragging on and on until it's stupid O'clock. Regardless, while it's a shame more people weren't involved and it was undoubtedly easier to do at that time, the thing is people do legitmately play at those times. The morning hours are not just the domain of students poncing of society or workshy life leeching toerags, there are many people doing shift work or playing from timezones that are very different to the servers. They're all allowed to play the game just as much as the rest of us.

Plus some people with more "normal" working hours are just plain mad and will have gone to work after 2 hours sleep... It's not something I would want to do, but I'm getting too old for that nonsense and would probably need to do a Scarface to stay awake. I hope the pixels were worth it you bunch of mentalists ! :D

Aaaaaaaand it's worth saying that Destro have done early morning raids and didn't kill the Order king, so no matter how people may malign Order's kill, they still did it first.

/salute Karak Norn Order

Tick Tick BOOM!

Since the transfer of players from Karak Eight Peaks, my home server of Norn has seen a massive resurgence of AoE bomb tactics. That’s not to say it wasn’t there before, undoubtedly it was, but nothing like to the same extent. With the monstrous zergs now present from both factions, at least in these early days it has become rare to see a fight not based around AoE bombing. I’ve personally been on the business end of a zerg where I counted 9 Bright Wizards at the FRONT of the charge. Amongst them were a very large number of Slayers (I didn’t manage to count them) and as a result it was literally instant death for us. Likewise I’ve seen Destruction doing exactly the same thing with Sorcerers and Choppas. There are always angry debates on forums about which side has it easiest with bombing, but I’m not going to touch that with a barge pole, as most comments I’ve read were a load of biased bollocks. Let’s just say both sides are perfectly able of running very nasty bomb groups.

I’m not a fan of bombing, particularly in large-scale zergs. The lag problems when 10 warbands collide and the sheer destructive power of overlapping AoE make tactics and skill defunct. If your healers are lagging and your 9k+ hit points get removed in under a second (even with 750+ toughness and capped resists), there’s not a lot you can do. Who lags least and bombs first, wins.

To add to my distaste for zerg bombing, Kill Frenzy is not a zerg guild. When possible our groups/warband are normally found away from the zergs and doing our own thing. We of course use the Destruction command channel and work with the other guilds, but where possible we try to avoid taking part in following the zerg. As such we often have to fight larger numbers of Order, which is cool, but becomes fairly ridiculous when outnumbered by multiple good bomb groups. In that respect with the incredibly high population on Norn right now, it looks like our way of playing the game is under threat, but that’s a different subject and it’s still early days (no need to panic yet), so back on topic I go…

In small group play bombs are not so horrific and are easier to counter, but against unprepared enemies they can still be devastating. I’ve talked before about when Kill Frenzy ran rift-bomb groups for a week or so. It was insane, we were killing literally 3 times our number in oRvR and we were pretty much unbeatable in scenarios, even utterly destroying many of Order’s best. However, we stopped running those groups. Partly because of the nerf death of Magus, but far more because most of us just don’t like bombing much. In KF we are nearly all using single target specs. Yes bombing is very effective, but it isn’t exactly challenging and most importantly it’s boring.

That doesn’t mean the people doing it are in the wrong. For sure some people do it purely because it’s easy and stupidly powerful, but others started doing it because they had no choice. Bombing is a very effective tactic against an uncontrolled zerg, so for organised guilds struggling to deal with an enemy faction that hugely outnumbers them… you could perhaps argue they were forced into bombing. As we’ve seen so many times with the 2 factions, there’s normally one of them outnumbering the other. Combine that with the small RvR zones funnelling people into enclosed areas and the whole system promoting zergs. Well, it’s an obvious choice. And from there it's not a big leap for it to become the norm for many players.

How to beat the bomb?
I’ve limited experience on countering large scale bomb zergs, so I can’t give any advice there and would welcome any suggestions on the subject. However here are a few brief (and probably obvious) tips for fighting bombers in smaller scale fights. Which as I’ve got to get my own guild back on track with dealing with bombers (it has been a while since we had to do so regularly), I figured I’d post it in case anyone finds it helpful.

Ok this is assuming you’re not too outnumbered…. If you are I hear praying is good.

Coordination.
Organised and controlled voice communication is a must.
Assisting on 1 target is not always ideal. If there’s 3 wizards/sorcs bombing and EVERYONE attacks one of them, then the remaining 2 unmolested wizards/sorcs will kill you all. There’s no reason why you can’t have most of your DPS assist target, but have your tanks hitting different targets to shut down every bomber.

Interrupts
To prevent a bomb detonating you simply need to interrupt its cast. There are lots of abilities that can be used, taunts, stuns, knockbacks, knockdowns and good old fashioned interrupt spells. Just don’t have everyone use them all at once, or you end up with everyone on cooldowns. And don’t use them too early or the enemy gets immunity timers on them before they even started casting! Timing is important.

Just as a reminder… TANKS! REMEMBER YOUR SINGLE TARGET TAUNT INTERRUPTS! It’s amazing how many don’t seem to know that.

How to kill the Invincible Nuker
You don’t! If your DPS is trying to kill a bomber and they just won’t die due to heals and guards, then keep them shutdown and hit something else, or take apart the things keeping them alive. For example the guard ability alone does not make a bombing wizard invulnerable, but guard and 3 healers will do. The guard is harder to prevent than the healing, so… you work it out ;) Flexibility and focus is the key.


I’m sure to many people I just stated the obvious and others may disagree or have better ideas. If so please feel free to share! Also I'd welcome some tips on dealing with Slayer bombs, it's something I've very rarely seen before. Since the transfer I've encountered a large enemy guild that appears to be entirely based around Slayer bombs in scenarios. Harsh...

I’ve one final big tip for coping with bombing… Sometimes you’ll be in a PUG, or for whatever reason a less organised/experienced group, and then other times you'll be outnumbered or just plain outplayed. There’s no way to avoid it, sometimes these things mean you will get bombed to crap. I know plenty of Order has seen me die to their bombs of late. Shit happens. Just try not to get too stressed, it’s not done me any favours :P

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

The Guild is dead. Long live the Guild!

Well that's a transfer done then... Karak-Hirn's Blood Pact is no more, the name was taken on Karak-Norn. So we formed Kill Frenzy today! Same quality people, just with some renaming for both the guild and some of our characters.

It's going to be very interesting on Norn over the next few weeks. It looks like all the destruction and order alliances from Hirn have moved there, I can't think of any that didn't off the top of my head. It's certainly going to mix things up a bit! I don't know what Norn is like for organisation currently, but as both factions have a load of very organised alliances (in fact really it's alliances of alliances) arriving today, well it can only complement or even enhance the server's existing factions.

Putting aside GOA's rubbish promoting of the transfer, I was impressed with the ease of the process. Only difficulty was at the time we tried to create the guild, IC was under siege and that complicated things somewhat :P

Looking forward to some hot Norn action ;)

Community spirit is alive and well ;)

Well it looks like all the big guilds (including mine) are moving from Karak Hirn to Karak-Norn. Representives from both Order and Destruction met up on a ventrilo server to discuss how to keep our community together and between them decided on Norn.

There were big events on our server last night as people said goodbye to it. Lots of fighting, emote banter and some fun between enemies. I'm really impressed with the attitude of people here and it bodes well for people on Norn to have us heading there. Check this screenshot taken by Svengrom from last night:
http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/1858/svengrom007.jpg

Fair play to everyone there. Stay classy Karak Hirn ;)