The Lonely Borc Club

No posts this week of which I'm sorry for that. I was sitting trying to think and motivate myself to write something but it's been a fairly  hectic week at work and I really just wanted to chill for the weekend. I think one of the problems is that a lot of friends have now left the game and although the guild is still going strong and potentially is as strong as ever when people you have levelled up with, been through the first city dungeons all the way to killing colossus decide that WAR is no longer for them then the drive you have drops as well.

I'm still RR80 as well and know that once I hit RR81 the real grind starts and I'm really not looking forward to it with the more limited time I have now. I've been into two Skaven instances, both of which was double the number of Order to Destruction so it was pointless trying anything, normally had there been a group of us then we would have given it a shot but on my own, I won't bother. Heck, even on Friday night I sat down with a few beers to get something going and ended up just pugging EC for most of the night till I got so bored of it I just had to log out, that was also because there wasn't a lot of guildies on due to a RL meet up, but we used to get a good group going on a Friday night which was always a laugh, though with them now experiencing a cataclysm I think I can pretty much wipe out those nights as well now.

It always amazes me that really for a lot of people in a game it's the community which makes it for them, not the game itself. If you find yourself with a good bunch of people that you get on well with and can have a laugh and chat with then it makes even the buggiest game a lot more enjoyable. To be honest there's plenty of folks in the guild I can group with (although our healers have disappeared so balanced groups are a bit tricky outwith warband nights), so again some of that comes down to me though I guess being used to playing with set people and knowing exactly what each other does without even needing to speak on vent or TS has spoiled me.

There's also a bit of frustration right now with TTK. I loved being a huge mountain but now I realised that quite simply I get ignored as it's not worth the time to try and kill a tank, meanwhile I'm sitting hitting on a WP that is completely ignoring me as I'm doing hardly any damage, my debuffs are on long durations and he's immune to silence most of the time due to other CC effects kicking in. So I literally feel fairly useless right now, however this is also due to my spec and setup so I won't get overly frustrated.

One of the things I have to admit I'm disappointed the most in is the scenario matchmaking system. It's either a hugely simplistic and basic mechanic or it's broken. Yesterday I ran 10 pugged EC's, 8 of them were against premade groups with high renown players. Now either there wasn't enough destro premades running (our guild had two at the time) or the matchmaking just looks at something such as Rank and Renown Rank to give you the rating and then tries to fit you in somewhere and if nothing is found around your RR then just chucks you into the first available instance, and for the record I think I lost all 10 of my first instances and was still getting premades against pugs so either those premades from the best guilds on the server with the best players were losing a lot to be ranked beside pugs or really it doesn't work very well within the confines of a single server. I would rather wait a little bit longer for a scenario pop and know I'd get a balanced fight than get instant pops where I know I wont get any renown or fun.

Which nicely leads me onto what I think could be a huge injection of OMG for WAR... One which I have been against for a long time but now believe it's needed for the game. A proper "arena" style system which uses queues for all servers in the game, with a visible rating system for your team. A currency/token system which rewards you gear that can only be used in the arenas (imagine skaven fighting pits where they reward you with warpstone fragments that can be used to purchase better gear, though if you go out to the world the warpstone loses it's power rendering the armour and weapons useless other than for appearance *hint hint*). To me right now that would be awesome, it would give premade groups something a lot better to aim for rather than farming pugs and hopefully would give pugs a bit of a break from being constantly farmed in scenarios for 15 minutes as the objectives are ignored.

Ach well, I'll get back into the swing of things for WAR, need to find some motivation again for it as all I see right now is a huge grind ahead of me.....

RR100 Weapon and Shield graphic updates

Straight from the PTS I present the Black Orc RR100 weapons. I love the Deathbringa of Mork and it's glowy red particle effect (as a side note, green glow = offensive, red glow = defensive so it's easier to tell the type of weapon equipped). There's no shield particle effect and the RR100 two handers have the same skin as do both shields. I guess they have time yet to change that so no rush, but hope they will have different looks.

New RR81 Black Orc Weapons

On the latest PTS build the RR81 weapons are available. These require royal insignias and open up the doomflayer.

One handed equipment costs 730 Captain Emblems and 430 Royal Insignias, the two handers cost 1460 Captain Emblems and 860 Royal Insignias. Though keep in mind you can buy the bauble of Vice (trophy) as soon as you get 430 Royal Insignias so you don't (currently) need to wait until you're RR81.

 

To note one thing though, the two hander DPS is currently out of whack, it's around the same level as Invader so it's likely a bug since the other items are in line with slightly above royal

Edit: Two handers now have 112.6 dps

Preview of the Doomflayer and Warpforged weapons

Hopped onto the PTS and the new Weapons were for sale on the scenario vendor. Didn't have time to take a screen grab of the new sets but I'm sure the server will be back up. In the meantime, feast your Greenskin eyes on these choppas and blockas...

You can click on them for a better view as well.

(edit - Disclaimer: These are PTS weapons currently, they can and could change by the time they goto live so keep that in mind)

For Gorks sake.. give us something to do other than sieges!

Well as the Hand of Blood wait around for another siege to end we're at a loss... No ORvR... No scenarios... A lot of guilds just seem to log out now if it's not going to look like a lock.

We NEED RvR to do during this time if the city instances are empty and dont give us that horrible city scenario we had before please.

My thoughts? Open up The Twisted Tower and the Maw of Madness if IC is under siege and Reikland Hills and Reikland Factory if Altdorf is under attack. When Highpass Cemetery was on as the event scenario I've never seen scens pop so fast, you would be going straight into them after wards... People would rather fight than stare at empty instances.

I don't know what the average play session is but I'd say no more than three hours for the casual WAR player.. if two and a half hours of this are taken up by a city siege which is half empty then it's not productive to the game. The novelty has worn off already and the grumblings are starting again...