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Being saved to instances in WAR needs fixing

...because at the moment it's a bit rubbish and either broken or just badly implemented.

You get half way through Lost Vale, but with a bit of bad luck and a bugged boss, time runs out. No problem! We're all saved to the instance, so we'll just continue on Sunday we say. Sunday arrives, but one of our guys can't get online due to RL stuff. Which means, no continuing LV for anyone, because with the stupid system in WAR you can't swap people out and save their replacement to your instance. Why are people punished if a guildie is ill or something?

In fact I've not been able to see the last wing of LV yet. Due to regular bad luck both in game and with the effects of real life, everytime we arrange a second night something goes wrong.

Really REALLY bloody annoying.

Why didn't they just copy Blizzard's perfectly fine system for being saved to instances?
Mythic, please, please change this ASAP.

[update 1]
Annnnnnd while I'm here. God I hate run backs after a death in dungeons. Mythic you had a great idea in LV with those quest giver ghost things that spawn, you know the ones where you can remove your res sickness debuff. Why can't we also res at them when releasing? 5-10 minutes of running back is not fun :P

[update 2]
Ok lol, I got into the middle of LV tonight. :) My point still stands though.

Patch 1.2.1 preview including Keep upgrades and AoE nerf! (YAY)

Some links for you lovely people, first off:

Patch 1.2.1 preview:
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=725

Combat Responsiveness Improvements. A biggy for a lot of people. We've seen lots of work on this since beta, will this be the patch that finally sorts it?

Keep Upgrade System. A slice of awesome pie, at last. No destructable walls yet though, but can't have everything at once I guess. See below for more info on keep upgrades.

General UI Improvements. PLEASE let this include sorting the crappy alliance roster, we should be able to set alliance permissions based on guild rank. Also a guild UI that works without having to use /slash commands would be good..

RvR Zone Control Rewards. Sounds promising.

The Battle for the Gates of Ekrund Expands! – A 6-on-6 version of the Gates of Ekrund for players between the Ranks of 19-24? Now that is interesting! Are 6-on-6 scenarios something we'll start seeing more often? Has potential to be a bit of a guild arena type affair.

Beyond the Sands Live Event. Yay, I like live events.

Lots of Bug Fixes . Yay, details asap pls ;)

Return to Nordenwatch Weekend Event. Have to see what the deal is with this. Will it be Nordenwatch available beyond tier 1?

And More! – Lots more features, career balancing, and improvements to the game are on their way. More details about this next week.
Didn't see mention of AoE, but it's only a preview post. However I just found this:
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=archetype_ranged&message.id=416#M416
YAY!

And then some more detail about the Keep Upgrade system:
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=724

Keep upgrade system sounds great, just hope it doesn't cost the earth ;) Not that it should be too cheap either tbh, else we'll have level 10 keeps everywhere... A fine balance needed.

All told nothing new to any ex-DAoC players, other than Ritualists and Divine Favour, but all good. Being able to bind to your guild keep will be the most telling factor within your guilds main play times, but will upgrades be enough for your keeps to have a chance of not being capped early morning, etc? With Order doing things like taking a Fortress on our server at 9:37am UK time on a Friday, I doubt any keeps have a chance, regardless of upgrades. Unless you have a guild with a very wide spread of play times.

Not a lotta choppin and does the new AoE of doom cause the lag?

Not had that much spare time last few days due to a mixture of real life stuff and having the damned pox. Which has resulted in not much progress with my Choppa. What little time I have had online when not on my Chosen I've just used to grind out quests with Gashface.

Doing a chapter at a time in each 3 pairings, seems to work quite efficiently. So far I'm up to level 24 with very little time put in since I left tier 2. Though obviously this has meant bugger all renown gains, my renown rank is lagging behind at 21.

Maybe I'll get stuck into tier 3 RvR a bit more when I get more time, but it's kinda tempting to just hammer straight through and get into tier 4.

Though with the way tier 4 is at the moment, I'm not so sure I'd be wanting to use an undergeared alt in RvR there. If my pretty well geared Chosen can die in literally 1 second with the AoE spam of Doom, it doesn't bode well for a squishy choppa :P No joke, had this at a recent fortress attempt, walked anywhere near the gate it was instant death with just a wall of numbers filling my screen. Dunno how many Bright Wizards they had stacking rain of fire, but ouch... Same would happen to Order when our Sorcerers stacked pit of shades I guess. Literally impossible for healers to do anything, especially when combined with the horrific lag. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

Interestingly that night we noticed that soon as we managed to get the Order off the walls and the Rain of Fire spam stopped for a bit, instantly the lag got better. Like a LOT better. I had spell effects turned off, so RoF shouldn't effect my PC graphic wise and everyone in alliance chat was talking about the lag reducing. So it wasn't just me.

Is it the calculations AoE makes the game do or something that shafts the server performance? There's a link for sure it would seem.

WCPI link pimpage

Girl IRL has gone all tractor on us and is talking about her desire for some more farming action in WAR. Fair questions asked about expanding crafting in WAR at:
http://girlirl.blogwarhammer.net/?p=812

Gaarawarr has posted a dead good guide to armour sets in WAR. Something that will be particularly handy if you're new to WAR and working out WTF we're talking about with wards, sent, DP, etc. Check it at:
http://gaarawarrgabs.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/definitive-guide-to-armor-sets-in-war/

Pimped my Chosen, how about you?

I'm a big fan of the armour dye system in WAR. With every piece of armour having 2 different sections that you can change the colours of, it really does mean not everyone has to look the same. The clown vomit armour you had to put up with in Warcraft always pissed me off, it was ok once you had a full set of something and it was properly themed, but then you just looked like everyone else. Coming from games like Ultima and DAoC, I never understood why Blizzard made armour so restricted.

The other beauty with WAR's system is it's not just the customised armour colour to add character to your, uhm, character. You've also of course got guild cloaks and the wide range of trophy choices.

One of the things this is allowing me to do is as I build up a second set of Sentinel armour with different talismans (so I have a tanking set and a PvP set), I have them dyed differently. This way I don't have to check my equipment to see which I have equipped, I can tell soon as my character loads in. Simple little thing, but cool none the less. If I'm wearing Black/Red, then its PvP time :)

So come on my fellow bloggers, lets have a butchers at your characters. What sorta funky armour dye/trophy/cloak themed action you got?

Here's how Bootae looks at the moment:

Hip Chop ya don't stop

I've had a quality night of Choppa action :)

It started off with joining a warband and getting a few keeps, not hugely defended, but Order put up a fight none the less. Once it started getting a bit too RvE, we formed a guild tier 2 warband and did PQs and scenarios. Didn't lose one all night and had some really slick results, with us pulling back from the brink of defeat to get the win a couple of times too. There were a few big name Order guilds with what appeared to be premades in scenarios, which can be a lot of fun to go against when both sides are fairly balanced. Always good to get a decent competitive fight and doubly nice to edge the wins too ;)

As time got on and people needed to log, I went off to do some quests to hit 20. I've not really seen much of the PvE areas in Barak Varr before and on reflection there's probably quite a lot of the game world I've not seen yet. Maybe I need to do some more exploring... Anyways, after bashing a few dwarven heads in, I dinged 20 and got my mount. Yay! No more running!

Took it for a spin around Ostland, but it was a bit late and I didn't find anyone to run over. Then I realised that the keep in Shadowlands was showing as under attack. As it was about 1am at the time it was probably just a guard being agroed, but with the Elf oRvR influence rewards being the last ones I need, I figured it was worth a look.

Man I was glad I did ;) Order had at least half a warband hitting the keep, maybe 3 groups worth. There was only 2 other Destruction defenders... I joined their group and we had some amusment pouring boiling oil on the enemy, but we reckoned we were doomed once they got in. Not going down without a fight though, oh no sir! Soon as the door was down we moved up the 2nd ramp a bit and let them agro the Lord. His AoE kicked in and so did we :D The Order tried to exploit the Lord out to the balcony, but we made hit and run attacks and the Lord wasn't falling for it either. We killed about 3/4 of the Order as the situation threw them into disarray. Then the strangest thing happened... The last few Order jumped off the battlements and ran away, leaving us 3 heroes alone in the keep. First time I've ever seen Order leg it quite like that.

I have to say nice one to Wifz and Regain that I was grouped with, it was a proper comedy moment and they were good company for it :)

I'm the sexy one in the middle.

So all told a good nights Chopping. Lots of fun, lots of action and pet piggy to ride too. Quality stuff ;)

And it's made a big improvement to my Choppa's Dammaz Kron scores :D Nice session RvR stats ;) Of course now I've posted this I'm going to get bloody maimed for a month and end up on -500 :P