The best thing about sieging Altdorf was...

...seeing this: The worst bit? Everything else.

Just like when Order attacks IC, our first Altdorf siege was also a laggy pile of crap. I've got a good system, my mates have good systems, but these city siege instances run terribly.

Why are city siege instances so bloody laggy?

Why did the zone crash twice?

Why was there numerous zone crashes before people even got to Altdorf?

Again today I had people comparing it with Alterac Valley in WoW, which doesn't lag anything like WAR with roughly the same amount of people. Bad comparison? Not really. I'm sure from the dev's perspective there are a million and one reasons why we shouldn't compare the two, but purely from a gamer's perspective its an 80 person PvP instance and it doesnt run like a lame goat.

The worst bit is that I can't even tell if the public quest set up is ok or not, because the game runs so badly in these situations it's not being given a fair trial.

Amazing really, in 24 hours I've had some refreshingly brilliant moments in T4 and then been rudely slammed back down by what should have been a large slice of awesome pie, with custard. It's such a shame that reaching the end game tarnished all the great work put in by Destruction to get there.

There was some entertainment to be had out of it, but not any thanks to the game itself. After the 2nd crash we ended up in an instance against what appeared to be a full 48 Order from one of their powerfull alliances (some of the same faces from last night). We were down to 3 groups in our warband after the crashing, but thankfully there was another warband of destruction in there too. The first battle for the PQ was a real tough one, with us failing to kill the Lord. Clearly this wasn't going to be a loot farming instance, so what did the other destruction warband do? They quit and left us with just our 3 groups against the Order. Hah bit lame tbh, but it sure left us with a challenge... :P

We obviously got battered, but we put in a pretty good show for ourselves IMHO and at the least managed to stop the Order warbands farming the PQ. Think we gave them a few scares when we charged their healers in the back a few times :D

It seems that getting to Altdorf was exactly what we needed and at the same time, the worst thing that could have happened.

I saw people that until now had stayed positive about WAR become very disillusioned. This was the carrot they'd be working towards, the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out the carrots actually a bit of a turnip.

There's still fun to be had in Tier 4

Had a great laugh in tier 4 tonight. It all started with us forming half a warband of Kill Frenzy and then just sort of snowballed. We were hearing that it was zerg central in other zones, so we headed over to Black Crag to try and find some smaller scale fighting. Black Crag was all blue and we figured we'd knock on a keep door and wake up some Order.

We rode up to Ironskin Skar and started battering the doors down, the few defenders there couldn't stop us and the keep was ours :) I whipped out a banner and claimed the bugger for Kill Frenzy.

A bunch of guys from our alliance (The Evil Leage of Evil) made it over, getting us up to 3 full groups in our warband. Just in bloody time too, cos just then Order woke up. What appeared to be a full warband of Order turned up, all from two decent Order guilds (Ginnuga and Renegade Legion) and launched into an attack. Epic keep defense ensued, with things looking a bit dicey a few times, but thankfully in a close encounter we managed to defeat them after a looooong fight in the Lord room. It was a proper scrap and it was great to win against quality opponents.

Having been defeated at the keep this bunch of Order weren't going to just throw themselves at it again, oh no, too cunning for that. They had other plans it seemed and we sent our scouts out. Our lads clocked them hanging around the Rottenpike Battle Objective, waiting for it to become attackable. With us being slightly outnumbered, we hatched a simple and not exactly new plan. We'd attack them as they attacked the guards. And maybe it would have worked, except for a few rather large problems....

As we rode in to attack we realised we'd left a bunch of our warband behind us at the keep, but it was too late as the enemy could see us now. So we then in a moment of comedy gold, took the most direct path to the Order, which meant jumping down a small cliff... Small yes, but bloody high enough to take off half our health :P DOH! So we ran headlong into a warband of good Order guilds with half our health missing and our already outnumbered warband further depleted.

As you can imagine, it was a massacre :D If you've not been to Rottenpike before, it's got lots of walls and scenery you can use to your advantage, it really is perfect for defending. And those Order guys knew what they were doing. To be honest if we'd had even numbers it was going to be a tough fight, but they took us apart big time! We suspect it may have been their devious planto lure us out in the first place. :P

As the night continued we had a few more guildies and alliance members join us and a ended up with full warband going for the rest of the night. There was a shit load more fights and plenty of quality moments in both defeat and victory, but crucially for me tonight, it was all a good laugh. It didn't lag, the fights were mostly competitive and it didn't once get frustrating. Sure we did one time give up on a keep attack because of a wall of AoE at the door, but instead of suffering it we just moved to a BO and to Orders credit they followed out and got stuck in.

With our alliance warband we held onto our claimed keep against multiple attacks by a few different Order warbands and as I log off now its still ours and our allies have claimed Badmoon Hole too, hopefully the night owls amongst us will be able to finish the job and get the zone locked. All told a great nights RvR, fair play to both the Order and Destruction that made it a whole lotta fun. After having my Tier 4 morale crushed by laggy fortress crap, tonight's smaller scale action has reinspired me in a big way with Tier 4 RvR.

Stat Adjustment pondering

Was chatting with some mates about this stat adjustment proposal yesterday, very mixed opinions.

I quite like the idea, as at the moment there's just too many irrelevant stats and I don't see it meaning I'll need to re-gear myself much. Other tanks I spoke to also seemed to like it, but some of the DPS nutters I chatted with were quite concerned. At the moment they've mainly stacked things like say Strength and Wounds, but to maintain decent crit damage with these possible changes they would also need to get a load of Weapon skill somehow. Apparently requiring quite dramatic changes to their current equipment.

It seems like the toughness change would fit in very easily, its not game breaking and I imagine those that would want the benefit already have a lot of toughness (i.e. tanks), but perhaps this isn't the case for stats related to damage. I've not seen any PTS feedback on it yet, but it's sounding like this could be a delicate one to get right. Here's hoping...

WAR Proposed Stat Adjustment! Hmmm :)

Check out this thread by Mythic:
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=1-2-1_fd&message.id=3#M

Very interesting indeed.

Critical Damage Calculations
Currently (on 1.2 live), the amount of base critical damage dealt is a random value between 40% and 60%, which then is further modified by career mechanics and buffs. The proposed change will remove this random range and set the base value to 50%. From that 50%, a formula that utilizes the attacker's secondary stat for that attack type (Weapon Skill for Melee & Ranged, Willpower for Magic) and the defender's Initiative will shift that 50% to anywhere between 5% and 75%, based on the values of each stat as compared to each other. With a high positive offensive ratio (more Weapon Skill than Toughness, as an example), the critical damage gain has the potential to be higher than exists on live now, but with a high positive defensive ratio extra critical damage can be greatly reduced.
Your Weapon Skill or Willpower and your targets toughness effecting Crit Damage? Wow, that really mixes things up. A lot of currently dodgy armour sets would look totally different, for example all those Magus items with lots of willpower. At the moment its useless, but with this? Hmmm... Look forward to hearing how this works out.

I like this a lot:
Health Regeneration based on Toughness
Currently (on 1.2 live), the player has no health regeneration in-combat. The proposed change would give every player a health regeneration tic every 4s that would occur even during combat. The amount healed would be based on the player's Toughness, with the current discussed value at Toughness / 5 worth of heal every 4s. Any health regeneration bonuses would then be added to this amount.
At the moment Toughness is the bastard red haired step child of the stat world, this could really change that. If this went live I'd be very keen to see how this works for tank classes.

PLEASE NOTE!
These are just suggestions being put on PTS for testing, they're not set in stone as going onto live servers. It's our opportunity to see if we like the suggestions and then provide feedback.

PS: GJ Mythic, I really like this style of being open about your ideas and promoting constructive feedback. It's refreshing to see a developer giving the players such an opportunity to shape development.

Chosen - Rending Blade nerfed, Dread mastery ruined again

- Rending Blade: This ability’s tooltip now correctly states that the ability is undefendable. Additionally, this ability’s reuse has increased and the cost has been lowered.

It's a 5 second reuse timer. Bah! :( 1.2 nerfed Chosen's single target DPS to the point of being useless, but with Rending Blade (if we specced for it) we had respectable AoE DPS and the range helped us deal with runners.

It made up for the nerf to Touch of Palsy, Cleave STILL not working and the weakening of all our other single target abilities. This 5 second has now basically killed the Dread tree again. :(

This post by Zaknarakh sums up the problems in each patch perfectly:
http://forums.war-europe.com/warhammeronline/board/message?board.id=choEN&thread.id=20

I don't expect my Chosen to be a top DPSer, but if I spec high in the Dread (DPS) tree, use a great weapon and build my armour up around strength, etc , then I expect my DPS to be pretty good. I have after all sacrificed a lot of survivability to do this and yes I know we're primarily a tank class, but we have the option to use great weapons for a reason. We don't want to go back to them being pointless and everyone speccing Discord again, but that is what's going to happen. Ravage is once again our only ability with any clout at all and that's not what it once was either. :(

What Mythic should have done to Rending Blade was just reduce the size of it's AoE effect to 20ft.

They also need to make Touch of Palsy worth using, it's our level 40 ability for crying out loud. At present as a Chosen you get "Ding 40! Uhm wtf is this shit?"

And for all that's unholy, why is Cleave, our undefendable skill, defendable? And why does it do a LOT worse damage than Ravage, even if you have full Dread and bugger all Discord?

Bloody hell :(

BTW I know I don't normally rant, so sorry :P

Patch 1.2.1 patch notes are out- Chosen Dread spec killed again

...and it's on the US PTS.
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=728

I've not got time for a full review before I need to hit the sack, but here's a few highlights for me:

The Guild Window has received a major facelift and several functional improvements. We have added more information to the Guild Window, such as new news alerts and additional statistics on the profile tab. We have also resolved several interface bugs with the window, such as promoting and demoting through the UI and loss of guild permissions.
This is going to make my life sooo much easier, thank bloody fook for this.

Various improvements have been made to Zone Control Rewards in Tier 4 zones to reward players for zone captures more so than individual Objective and Keep captures. When active zones are captured in Tier 4, all players in the zone are awarded Renown based on their level similar to Tiers 1, 2, and 3. If a Keep is claimed by a guild when the zone is captured, a Gold Bag will be mailed to the Guild Leader who can then mail it to anyone in the guild, as they see fit.
Oooh, gold bag? Sounds cool, could help with getting Annihilator for those unluckly sods that every guild has. Possibility for abuse? Dunno, nothings springing to mind immediately.

Upgrade Your Assault with Ordnance!We are pleased to introduce a new resource to RvR that players can trade in for deadly assault upgrades! Scattered throughout the RvR lakes and acquired from killing players, Ordnance is collected and traded in for various items and weapons to use in open field RvR! Battering rams with more hit points, ballistae that do more damage, oil immunity potions, caltrops, and dynamite can all be purchased and used on unsuspecting enemy players!
Hah, sounds funky :D

Chosen
- Auras will no longer immediately dispel themselves and go into the temporary version.
AT BLOODY LAST!
- Bane Shield: Fixed a bug that allowed this ability to turn off some auras.
Good, good.
- Rending Blade: This ability’s tooltip now correctly states that the ability is undefendable. Additionally, this ability’s reuse has increased and the cost has been lowered.
Bah, shame to see this nerfed, but with all the mostly justified crying about AoE, it's no shock. I dread to think (pun intended) to see how long its reuse is.
[UPDATE] It's 5 seconds. Bah :( 1.2 nerfed Chosen's single target DPS to the point if being useless, but with Rending Blade (if we specced for it) we had respectable AoE DPS. It made up for the nerf to Touch of Palsy, Cleave STILL not working and the weakening of all our single target abilities. This 5 second has now basically killed the Dread tree again. Lame :(
This post by Zaknarakh sums up the problems in each patch perfectly:
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=274177

Bright Wizard
A few changes here which I've not put up cos it doesn't mean much to me, but this one does: Rain of Fire: Fixed a bug that allowed this ability to continue channeling after the caster’s death. Additionally, this ability will no longer stack multiple times on an enemy. Instead, multiple Rains of Fire in the same area will begin to affect more people.
Knew it was coming obviously, but I still want to say... thank fook for that! Same applies to Engineers, Sorcs and (Havoc) Magus and their GTAoEs. Everyone knows AoE is killing tier 4, this can't go live soon enough.

Witch Elf
Where are the buffs to this now rubbish class? If the "target out of range" problem also gets fixed in this patch and the reduction in AoE of Doom has the required effect, maybe we'll see improvement for WE from that, but hmmm. Disappointed otherwise.

Lost Vale
Mounts can now be used in exterior areas of the Lost Vale.
YAY, about bloody time. Also good to see a range of bosses being fixed.


Loads and loads of other things in the patch, but it's late and I need to crash out :)

EA and Activision-Blizzard to merge?

Holy poo Batman! Credit Crunch is hitting bloody everybody!

Does this mean WAR will become WoWAR? Seriously this has the potential for some pretty messed up turd, I fear for the future of WAR if this goes through... We'll have Goblins in bloody tuxedos and poxy Gnomes discombobulating Dark Elf poontang left right and centre.

I've refrained from emo-nerd-rage-quit moments, but this could tip me over the edge. Depressing shit indeed :(

You can check out the details here from Blizzard's PR people and then Mythic's follow up announcement here.