skurm

I’ve added a whole slew of warhammer-related blogs and sites to the blogroll/link (direct your gaze over yonder to the right bar, sirrah!). Also changed the theme. The whole white-text on black-background really isn’t very friendly.

If anyone spots a broken link, be so kind as to whip up an irate email and send it winging on it’s way to skurmish AT gmail DOT com. Or just post a comment. Whatever.

Also,  come ’09, keep an eye out for a new initiative by Syp from Waaagh! (I’ll have a post about it Jan 1-2 or thereabouts). WAR needs more good press, it’s deserving and worthy of it, so watch this space!

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As is usually the case with this seesaw of a game, I have to take some of my earlier comments back. I finally dinged 40 and spent the past few days almost exclusively embroiled in ORVR.

Yes, all the problems with performance persist. Yes keep sieges are still a huge zergfest.
Here’s the thing though. Tier4 changes things a bit. There’s enough people around that you can start strategising. It might be rare that it happens, but it can. There are a couple blokes on Hirn at T4 who are starting to take command, and that simple act changes everything.
Guys like Bionic are respected, and now that our generals are starting to show their mettle, things are turning around for us.
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I’ve spent the last few days at 40 focusing almost entirely on RvR. Little to no Scenario playing, instead I’m focusing on trying to get my Influence up, and perhaps get my Renown to 38 so I can use the purple Influence rewards.

It’s going to be a fair amount of grind but here’s the thing : as frustrating as RvR CAN be due mainly to performance problems, it remains probably, in my opinion, one of if not THE best way to indulge in an MMORPG endgame. I literally cannot believe, today, that I found raiding in WoW ‘fun’, compared to this.

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It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, the last 4 months of WAR. Finally, after what felt like forever, dragging my heels through Tier 3and 4, fooling around with alts and taking a timeout to get some console gaming done, I returned to my Ironbreaker and made the final push to 40.

I have to say, it was worth it. Punishing Blow is super cool. Heh. We heard you like dps’in so we put some dps in yo cc so you can dps while you cc. Nothing like snaring, PB’ing and punting a Witch Elf off a healer to just Make Your Freaking Day

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A few real world circumstances have conspired to keep me from WAR for about a week now (dead graphics card, getting an Xbox, Fallout 3 being awesome, etc) and I’m actually rather thankful I have. It’s given me some perspective. You see, playing Order has become a bit of a Scenario grind. It’s about all that Order has left to do, at least on my realm. Destruction has, effectively, already won.

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So here’s a post that has nothing at all to do about WAR or MMO’s… at first.  The Skurm went out and bought an Xbox. What spurred this impulse buy? Well, a string of hardware failures left my screen and graphics card toasted so while I wait for both to be replaced by warranty/insurance claims, I figured I needed something to keep me busy. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, get back on the console scene. No hardware or software incompatability hassles, just pick up and play. I like that. I got myself Fable 2 while I was at it. Playing this amazing RPG it really struck me. MMORPG’s are yuck. (more…)

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So far it seems this patch has been a successful one. Unfortunately it seems to have also introduced some glitches of it’s own : buff indicators occasionally not expiring, and weird animation bugs where my toon gets ‘stuck’ in a certain position until I do something else. But for the most part, the new rvr influence rewards seem to have sparked life in rvr, even in the lower tiers, the rewards themselves are awesome, and my client’s performance seems to be far better. The cast-delay bug seems either completely gone or at the least less pronounced for the most part. The game is still far from being perfect but I believe it is nearing the point that we can call it relatively polished, and finally actually out of beta.
All they need to do now is fix a few persistant bugs, and keep adding content particularly to the rvr lakes (i’ve seen some PQ’s in T4 Praag already so it seems they’ve taken the advice of commentators on this aspect and are starting to look at making the rvr areas less ‘sparse’).

All in all, I give it a big thumbs up. This is why I keep playing this game.

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Patch 1.1a is here. Note the ‘a’. Apparently they couldn’t fit everything from 1.1 in, so we’re getting a chunk of it, but not exactly the whole deal.

That said, it looks like a biggie. The dealmaker is RVR influence, which I reckon is another step in the right direction. If you want to emulate WoW’s success, unfortunately you have to appeal to at least 2 of the 3 greatest motivators in human nature. Which are Greed, and the lust for Power. the alst being Sex, but this is a family-rated game… more or less. It may not appeal to all WAR players, many of us just wanna hit things. But for the most part, gear is a huge motivator, and giving players relevant and useful rewards for doing something they should be doing for free is, unfortunately, a necessary evil.

I’m hoping the patch revitalizes things in a big way. I still think a lot more needs to be done, but it’s always heartening to see that Mythic is really busy working on this game. It’s alive, so to speak, and evolving. They could very well have taken a break for the holidays instead.

I’ll post my impressions on the new patch from the perspectives of both my Tier4 IB and Tier2 BW, early next week. Looking forward to a sit in weekend of WAR with lotsa New Stuff!

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Over the weekend thanks to my BW reroll(see below) I experienced, for the first time, proper skirmish RvR in Tier1. While doing some questing that took me into the RvR lake I ran into 2 guys trying to take BO’s, nuking them down while safely camping the BO (cheesy tactics ftw). Thereafter there was a little cat-and-mouse between myself and they, they routed me and took the BO, at which point I called for reinforcements in region chat and had a couple Order folks rock up and curbstomped them. Destro must have done the same because pretty soon they had a group of 6 too, and we spent a good bit of time battling it out, 6 v 6, in Tier1, ultimately resulting in our small ragtag ORder group being able to seize a bottleneck, at which point the Destro players gave up. A small victory for Order, but you take em where you can get em. The irony? There’s better, less ‘zergy’ RvR in Tier1 than Tier4, and room to accomplish things as an individual or small group rather than just falling in with the mindless swarm. There also seems to be more reason to enter RVR lakes in Tier1, I must’ve been in and out of there a few times where I have yet to enter a Tier4 zone for any quest beyond the token ‘scout BO, report back’. This definately leads me to believe that injecting more pve content into the RVR lakes, as I’ve speculated before, is a surefire way to promote skirmish RVR.

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Bright Wizards are fun.

This might be a pretty obvious statement, but I was never big on clothies in WoW. I tried to like them – everything from a mage, warlock to a shadow priest but they always felt… wimpy. Hard to put a finger on why.

I decided to try out a Bright Wizard over the weekend. I didn’t think I’d like it, but the current dearth of BW’s on my server at Tier4, and the fact that even post nerf they’re awesome for RvR (ranged versus ranged, lol) as well as the current impasse that Tier4 is ito progression, made me make the decision to roll one as an alt and see how it plays out.

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