The Forge of War

A bunch of the Destruction guilds on Dark Crag got together and attempted to push the warfront back on Saturday, Nov. 1. Apparently after an epic push from Praag all the way to Reikwald, with 100+ Destro near the Keep Lord, the server crashed, booting everyone to login. There is plenty of QQing to go around, hence these threads:

http://forums.darkcrag.org/showthread.php?t=316
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=176628

So Mark Jacobs, head guy at Mythic Entertainment, has issued a “State of the Game” address for Warhammer Online. Aside from tooting his own horn for orchestrating one of the smoothest launches in MMORPG history (and rightfully so), he made a few announcements about upcoming developments for WAR. Now I can still feel the stinging, festering wounds that were inflicted on my very soul this summer by the airy, unsubstantiated promises of another Game Director, Gaute Godager. Gaute’s malfeasance made me cry into my pillow every night for a full month as I mourned the loss of Conan and the promised-land of Hyboria.
However, Mark Jacobs is not a game dude to be flexed with. He’s generally pretty good about keeping promises, it seems, and he doesn’t try to sell folks on hype. Which is why I can feel a stirring in my heart of hearts as I read that they are going forward with the integration of the Dark Elf Black Guard and the Empire’s Knight of the Blazing Sun. Finally, the DE’s will have a tank archetype, and with a halberd, no less. I’m kinda ambivalent about the Knights, except I’m amused by their outfits; I think I’ve seen guys dressed like that at Mardi Gras before.

One is a directory of pictures of some of the upper-Tier armor sets. I think these pics actually came from OB.
I’m likin’ the Zealot T4

and this T4 Chosen.

Been getting really curious about the tome tactic unlocks in Warhammer Online and how the chicken rule is going to screw me. Now that Sivara is in Tier 3, I can’t go back to Tier One or I’ll turn into a chicken. Which means that lots of the tome stuff that involves actually killing stuff is now beyond my reach with her. Neikan warned us about this when I was in Tier 2, but I stubbornly ignored his caveats and now I’m having second thoughts. Most of the tactics award PvE bonuses like decreased aggro distance from certain types of mobs, or increased damage against them. The really interesting ones are the ones that award extra XP from stuff, which would definitely turn out to be useful later on.

So there are two resources that the discerning player can use to maximize their ability to scoop up these unlocks. One is the Bestiary ToK Unlocks thread over at Warhammer Alliance, which is amazingly comprehensive. The second resource is an in-game mod that sources that thread to help you reference it. It’s over at Curse, and requires libSlash, which is a library that lets you register slash commands in WAR.

An interesting side note about the Bestiary Helper add-on: it’s built on top of a mod that Killer Guides wrote to display their guides in-game. The enterprising Modder could use that original mod to display arbitrary content in-game.

And here’s a picture of Pookee:

Over the course of the last month I’ve encountered quite a few visual bugs in Warhammer Online. Here are a few screenshots of the weird stuff I’ve noticed:

These next few occurred after Sivara died and then respawned. For some reason, her upper body maintained the death pose until I activated her mount.



These are really bizarre ones. I’ve seen this happen a few times with several different models.

There has been plenty of QQing going on about Tor Anroc from both the Order and Destruction side. For those that don’t know, Tor Anroc is a Tier 3 Murder Ball type of SC where there is a central bauble that needs to be grabbed and held by a character. It’s basically a super-charged version of Mourkain Temple from Tier 2, but with a twist. The twist is that the layout of the scenario involves lots of meandering rock-bridges positioned over pits of lava; here is where the controversy comes in.
Order players tend to claim that Destruction has a slight head start to get the Bauble first because they have a slightly shorter distance to run and grab it. While this may or may not be true, it certainly doesn’t counterbalance the fact that White Lions have Jet Packs, as illustrated in this vid:

Order also has a pretty devastating array of knockbacks that allow them to propel Destruction players into the lava pools, where about half of the deaths in this scenario occur. While it’s true that some Destruction classes have knockbacks (like the Chosen), Order has more, and more powerful, knockbacks, as illustrated by this Ironbreaker playing golf with Destruction toons:

The truth is, though we know that Order has this sort of advantage on Tor Anroc, many of the Destruction players I’ve talked to still play this scenario for two reasons:

• It’s fun to be the underdog, sometimes.
• If you hang out in Avelorn and get the RvR quests for Tor Anroc between scenarios, you can pick up about 6k experience and almost 1 gold every time you turn both of them in.

Edit: Mythic has now patched the White Lion Jet Pack (Pounce) so that they now have to have a Destruction target to use it. Much celebration ensued.