The RvR is quite good.  Not perfect, but good.  Keep assaults are a lot of fun, and even undefended it can be satisfying taking them back and getting your XP and Renown.  Scenarios can be fun also, though some of them are so awful that I refuse to do them in favour of others.  As much as I enjoy RvR, I don’t want to do RvR every time I log in, or for five or six hours straight.  This brings us to PvE.

I’ve never been a huge fan of questing, anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that.  I don’t hate quests, and some I like, such as the Heritage Quests in EQ2.  I don’t really mind the “kill 10 X” or the “deliver this message” quests, when they’re done for a point.  The Fed-Ex quests are a good way to send you to new zones or introduce you to a new NPC.

I can’t quite figure out what it is about Warhammer’s quests, but I struggle to bring myself to do them.  I just find them so dissatisfying.  The XP isn’t that great and the rewards, if you get any, aren’t of any use to you.  The quest directives are often vague, but not in a good way, and many of them send you to a PQ, so completing the quest solo is difficult if not impossible. 

In fact, I don’t like much of WAR’s PvE at all.  The PQ’s are a good way to grind XP and get good loot, so those I don’t mind.  A grind never really bothered me when there’s a prize at the end of it.  And with PQ’s you get a chance at a chest as well as the Influence rewards you get for it.  Problem with PQ’s though is that you need to be in a guild and/or organise a small warband to be able to complete all stages.

I decided to check out Mt Gunbad, a Tier 3 dungeon, to see what that was like.  I’m a bit of a dungeon crawl fan; it’s how I like my PvE.  EQ2 had a lot of great dungeons and so did Vanguard.  I’d been to Saccelum in the Inevitable City and wasn’t at all impressed.  So I headed to Gunbad in a group of four of us; a Black Orc as the tank, my lovely Witch Elf Kyrana, a DPS specced Disciple and me as the healer.  And I wasn’t impressed with that dungeon either.  This surprises me because Dark Age of Camelot had some great dungeons.  There’s a Tier 4 dungeon that I need to check out, Bastion Stair or something, when I hit T4.  I’m eager to get to T4, I’m getting a little tired of T3 now, and I want to see what this game really has to offer.

This week we’ve added new video content from the following television series:

• American Dad, Season 4
• Ax Men, Season 1
• Bones, Season 4
• Chuck, Season 2
• Fringe, Season 1
• Ice Road Truckers, Season 2
• Prison Break, Season 4
• Rumbling Hearts, Season 1
• Sons of Anarchy, Season 1
• Xam’d: Lost Memories, Season 2

We’ve also added the following feature films:

• A Christmas Story
• A Knight’s Tale
• A Very Long Engagement
• Analyze That
• Bad Company
• Ballad of Cable Hogue
• Batman: Gotham Knight
• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• Calendar Girls
• Casualties of War
• Clean and Sober
• Cliffhanger
• Conspiracy Theory
• Contact
• Deliver Us From Evil
• Diner
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Elf
• First Knight
• Four Minutes
• Freddy Vs. Jason
• Grumpy Old Men
• Higher Learning
• Immortal Beloved
• Jingle All The Way
• Kelly’s Heroes
• Layer Cake
• Linewatch
• Lost Boys 2: The Tribe (Unrated)
• Mighty Joe Young
• Miss Congeniality 2
• Sabrina (1954)
• Singles
• Sniper 2
• Stealth
• Step Up 2: The Streets
• Stripes
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
• Superman Returns
• Tarzan, the Ape Man
• The Devil’s Advocate
• The Juror
• The Killing Fields
• The Love Letter
• The New World
• The Science of Sleep
• The Yakuza
• U.S. Marshals
• Until the End of the World
• Wild Things

And, here are our top 20 movie and top 20 TV downloads for the week:

Have a great weekend!

My renown rank (rr) is horribly behind my character rank (r) in Warhammer Online, sitting currently at 17rr, 26r. This is mostly due to how I’ve been playing so far, staying out of the scenario grind and completing tons of PQs and quests. Odd that in a game with such great RvR, I’ve had trouble pulling myself away from PvE…

Up until last night, my RR trailing my rank has largely been a non-issue. Sure I’m missing out on some renown-point fueled stat increases, and I can’t purchase renown gear as quickly, but neither of those has been a huge motivator to go out and really work on my renown. Again, that was until last night. Logging in, I noticed four keeps in Tier 3 were Order controlled, including two in the Dark Elf area I was currently in. Noticing 5-6 players in the warcamp, I figured why not try and take the closest Keep back, at worst we will get a good fight from Order and earn some xp/renown.

Forming the warband with Forsaken and CoW, it took perhaps 10-15 minutes for the warband to completely fill up and everyone to arrive. Siege weapons ready, we stormed out of the warcamp and began working on the outer gate of the keep. With little resistance, the door soon fell and on to the next we went. Again Order only had a few defenders, and again the door fell. Storming up the stairs, we were able to control the lord and his guards, bringing them all down eventually. Thanks to the recent boost to keep chests, three gold bags and a bunch of greens were available, and I was lucky enough to score a top 3 roll. My options from the gold bag were an epic helm (rank 29), some blue gloves, and a blue Devastator set chest piece. While the stats on the chest piece are only slightly above average, the set bonus is amazing, and I could not pass it up.

Which brings me back to the original dilemma. In order to wear the Devastator set, I not only need a higher rank, but a much higher renown rank. (25rr to use the item) Looks like it’s time to shift my focus a bit, and go renown hunting. A nice mix of scenarios and capturing Objectives should do it, and it never hurts to be around for a zone control flip, since that gives a nice 1000+ renown point bonus. Hopefully I hit renown rank 25 before I hit rank 30, that’s my short term goal.

Ah, another weekend of Warhammer goodness. My DoK is now well into Rank 25, with his renown rank lagging behind at 16 mostly due to being too busy with everything else to queue up for scenarios. I consider this a VERY good thing. On the PQ front, all PQs in Dark Elf chap 10, 11, and 12 have been completed, with an exception for one buggy chap 11 PQ which currently appears impossible due to a bug. Annoying, but easily forgotten.

Things are actually so busy on the Monolith server that gaining influence per chapter has become difficult. What I mean is that as soon as we form a group to do some PQs, it quickly turns into a warband, which generally attracts 10-15 people, and the influence gain ends up being overly spread out. Sure we could limit things to just our group, but why be an anti-social dick just to speed up influence gain, right? I have no issues repeating a PQ, especially the more interesting ones, and with 15+ they all go quickly enough. You also never know when you are going to run into a PQ with a Lord boss rather than a Hero, and actually need those 15+ people to claim the generally better chest loot. Over the weekend I saw a good bit of gold and purple bags drop, with some very nice gear coming out of them, so it’s definitely worthwhile to gather a warband and attempt the tougher PQs.

Speaking of tougher PQs, my guild Forsaken took a trip into Mount Gunbad for the first time, and had a really amazing time. For those who have yet to see it, Mount Gunbad is an open instanced dungeon in the very north-west corner of the Badlands. You zone in through a blue swirl, but once inside you still see anyone else who happens to be inside. Gunbad itself has three ‘wings’, the easiest being the right wing which features rank 23-24 mobs, the left features 25-26 mobs, and I believe the center wing has 27+ mobs, but I never saw more than the first few. It’s a giant cave populated by Night Goblins and their ‘friends’, such as squigs, trolls, undead, giants, etc. Each wing is a series of three PQs, with a final, 6 man only instanced encounter at the end. It sounds rather simple, but works great in practice, as you complete each PQ naturally as you work your way down to the instance 6 man end-boss, gaining some nice loot and influence along the way. Gunbad has its own influence bar, with blue-level rewards at each level, scaling up from 23 to 25 to 27 in level at each reward pip.

Our first experience with Gunbad was to join a warband already in progress on the easiest wing. The zerg of 20+ made its way down murdering everything in its path with little regard for agro or strategy. Due to the overwhelming numbers and high levels of certain members, everything was a breeze until they hit the third PQ boss. This boss has a rather nasty ability to summon ‘circles of pain’ on the ground, which quickly kill anyone who stands inside them. As you can guess, the mindless zerg soon wiped. The frustrating part came next, as a small part of the overall warband was making its way down with our group of 5 Forsaken members, taking our time but still having success. Two of the members wanted to join the zerg, and also wanted everyone to start from the top (my guess is just to farm influence as easily as possible).  So what did they do? Run into as many mobs as possible to wipe us, forcing the restart. Thanks asshats. I’ll admit this is one of the perils of a public dungeon, in that random tools can ruin it for everyone. It also allows zergs to form and mindlessly farm, although in reality a zerg member gains influence slower than a 6 man, and also has a smaller shot at loot. But hey, it’s mindless!

Leaving the warband, and thankfully having it move on to another wing, we started from the top again, determined to finish the entire right wing. We had little difficulty with the first two PQs, and soon found ourselves in the final area of the public section, looking over the third PQ and also seeing the entrance to the final boss. Knowing a wipe on the tough third PQ boss would mean a trip back to the top, we instead opted to clear a path and enter the instanced part and fight the final boss, a Night Goblin shaman. The encounter itself is interesting, as you first defeat a giant, who then gets turned into a chicken by said shaman before he engages to fight you. The shaman himself was rather easy. He traps one member periodically throughout the fight, basically rendering them useless, and also summons green fists that pound anyone caught beneath them for decent damage. The fists are easily avoided, and his damage on our tank was minor for a major boss. Once defeated, he dropped four blue items, including one set piece. (we got some Chosen gloves) A fun fight, and good rewards for the effort. We returned to the public section, summoned the third PQ boss, and got our butts handed to us, ending our Gunbad trip for the day. When we make our return trip, we might have to pay that final PQ boss a visit…

Our plan is to gain 1-2 ranks before we return to tackle the left wing of Gunbad. We got a small taste when we completed the first PQ with another group, but it was clear we needed to be higher in rank to really give the place a good shot. That said, we are really looking forward to our return later in the week, assuming we can break away from the near-constant RvR. On Sunday we helped defend a Keep against a sizable Order force, and again it was a great time, but this post is long enough already, so more on that later.

Logged in last night at around 6pm with Aria, hoping to get some Dark Elf chapter 11 quests done, and perhaps have some better luck with PQs. The night before we had two full groups, but ran into a bugged chapter 10 PQ that required us to tag 12 flags, yet only 10 flags were clickable. Slight problem, and our dummy group (lead by me) tried the PQ twice. Tonight we were able to quickly gather a full group (god I love our full server, but more on that in a bit), and after only a few quests, we found the first PQ and got after it. In short order, we completed all three PQs in chapter 11, including a very entertaining one that required us to protect a necromancer as he summoned his army of skeletons. Wave after wave of champions attacked us, only to be repelled by our group and the necromancers minions. Rather epic stuff, especially at the end when the necromancer transformed into a demon and escaped. I wonder if there is more to that storyline…

I believe all of that took as about an hour, perhaps 90 minutes. We took a break for dinner, and later at around 9pm I logged back in to play with my old guild Forsaken (hopefully allied with CoW soon, Genda…), hoping to do some PQs in the Greenskin T3 area. I encountered a login queue of 178 people, and while the estimate wait was 18 minutes, I believe it took no longer than 5 or so to get in. Again, yay full population server, I’ll gladly take a 5 minute wait over empty PQs. Flying over to the Badlands, we noticed that the Order controlled Keep was under attack, and that the warcamp had a large number of players gathering.

Sure enough, Destro was planning a Keep siege, and it seemed we arrived just in time. Quickly taking two objectives with little resistance, we arrived at the Keep to find some Order players waiting for us in front of the door. This was the start of a rather epic battle, as Destruction had over two full warbands of players, and Order seemed to have a good number of defenders as well. After a good fight in front of the Keep, we pushed the Order group back and set up siege machines to work on the first door. Spells and arrows flew, the area around the door itself was a meat grinder of AoE, but eventually we got the door down. So far so good, but what happened after was a bit shocking. I fully expected our large group to rush into the keep and start working on the NPC guards, making our way to the second door. Instead, we found the narrow entrance completely blocked by Order tanks, and a nasty array of Bright Wizard and healers behind them. We charged, they held, we wiped. It was a slow grind at first, but inch by inch Order pushed us back, until we were fully pushed out of the door. At that point, 30+ Order players streamed out, completely rolling what Destruction players were still standing near the door. Running back to the keep, it was clear Order had won the day, scattering the Destruction warbands and leaving us all in disarray. Further attempts were made, but none got very far. Congrats to the Order players of Monolith, a job well done.

While performance was not perfect, it was rather amazing that I experienced only very slight lag considering I was staring at 60+ players throwing spells and whatnot. This is with the game maxed out and at 1900×1200, so no shortcuts were taken to increase performance at the expense of graphics. This was also the first time I witnessed a siege go basically point-by-point in design. Battle in front of the keep, siege engine phase with both sides shooting and destroying machines, battle at the door with attempts to break the siege, and finally an epic battle within the tight confines of the keep doorway, where collision detection and line of sight were in full force.

Perhaps it was just a rare case of everything coming together, but the optimist in me (or perhaps fanboy, depending on how you look at it) would like to think it’s a sign of things to come. Players are still adjusting to what WAR offers, and it’s going to take some time for the majority to play WAR ‘like it’s meant to be player’, rather than forcing old MMO habits on it. I’m starting to see this in scenarios as well, with a greater variety popping, and more advanced tactics being used. Already great stuff, and its only improving daily.