Thoughts on Patch 1.3 (Public Test version)

Take a gander! Here are my thoughts:

• The first thing I go to are the updates for Shadow Warriors, because obviously, after all this time, over 6 months of playing one, they have to give us a boost right? Oh. A UI update and an AoE nerf. Maybe next time? I doubt it. It's a good thing I have a great group of people to roll around RVR with, because without them, I would have ditched Kipling a long time ago. I can't solo on my Scout mastery because there's no good way to clear distance or gain any height. I'm tired of the disappointment every.single.patch day.
  

• Flag/bomb carriers and escorts in the immediate area (300-unit radius) will now receive 50 RP for capturing flags and setting bombs. Woohoo! Finally an incentive for hitting up the flag in scenarios and supporting the runner. That's a nice chunk of renown without it turning into a fight to get the flag before anyone else.

• [In Serpent's Passage] Added area-of-effect siege weapons to the bow of each ship to discourage spawn camping. Aww, but regardless of whether you're being camped or camping the other side, it's fun for everyone! Boo. I guess that's not how they intended the scenario to be played out though.

• [In Phoenix Gate] If both flags are held for over a minute, players can drop the flag off at the central bridge for 25 points, resetting both flags with no Renown rewarded. Now that's going to be interesting.
  

• Woah! Some nice changes to Black Fire Basin: This Scenario now functions as a shared capture-the-flag Scenario. A single flag will spawn in the middle of the Ice Lake, and this flag must be brought back to a capture location to earn Scenario points. There is one such capture point for each realm, located next to the realm's spawn point. Captured flags will decorate the wall at the spawn area. When a flag is held, the capture locations will be highlighted by a glowing effect. The Order capture location has been replaced with a large Dwarf anvil. The guards have been rearranged to prevent the opposing realm from griefing the spawn locations. This was the most neglected scenario since the beginning - it was turtle or lose. The landscape for this one is particularly interesting, and it finally won't be going to waste.
  

• Medallions will now be available to players in Scenarios, should the corresponding zone be captured by their realm while they are inside. Another good change, everyone should be able to play scenarios as a contribution to zone domination without fear that they'll miss the lockout they've played to achieve.

• Large-scale Keep fights will now have the possibility of awarding additional gold bags for attackers or medallions for defenders. More rewards ftw!

• Guilds can now purchase the Deadbolt upgrade for their Keeps. This upgrade locks the inner door of a claimed Keep, making it so enemies cannot use Pick Lock or Bypass Defenses to gain entry into the inner Keep. When the Deadbolt upgrade has been purchased, the postern door will be named "Dead-locked Postern Door." Well, that's halfway to stopping players from ninja-ing keeps. Do I want to talk about how certain Order players on Monolith have been ripping the rest of us off? Kind of, but I won't. I do want to see the inner doors barred from entry by opposing players on a permanent level though.

• Players now have the option to opt-out of the loot roll at any Public Quest. Opting-out will not affect your contribution, but will bypass your character when rolling for loot, allowing others to get a chance at the loot. Awesome! Now Kipling has all the Annhilator gear but keeps getting Gold bags, I will be opting out as soon as this is implemented.
  

• The action bar is now more customisable, hooray hooray! Characters will now be able to have up to five action bars on the screen. and The orientation of each of the action bars can now be set individually to vertical or horizontal. are brilliant, excellent, and long overdue.

• There is now an Auto Roll tab on the Open Parties and Warbands window that will allow players to set their preferences on loot. The system will automatically roll for items based on your settings and items done in that fashion will not even appear in the loot roll window, making loot rolling much easier Too complicated to really copy and paste without it being a huge lump of text, so I'd advise clicking through, but this is going to save a lot of pop ups on my screen while I'm fighting. Should be good.

• Players who have won loot from a Public Quest, but were unable to claim it for one reason or another, will now have that loot mailed to them 24 hours later. ! and that includes Keeps right? :D :D :D :D :D That is AWESOME!

There's obviously a lot more than this, especially in regards to character changes. Hopefully all the ones I like will get implemented in the final patch, and some miracle will befell Shadow Warriors to give us a damn break.

Thoughts on Patch 1.2.1

• Own a Keep? Want to keep it? Want to get more out of it? Then the new Keep Upgrade system is perfect for you! This deserves a post by someone more able to waffle on about the intricacies, but let's just say this is exactly what I've been gagging for. I want to spend hours scouting the edges of keeps, pwning things with my arrows, getting fat defence ticks and littering the grounds of the keep with bodies. Tier 3 is pretty active because it's a lot smaller than Tier 4, so I've seen this to a certain degree on my Archmage, but the lasting ability of either side is limited (although the other night I finally saw the attacking people loading up weapons on the pads, not just the defenders). Giving big fat rewards to defenders is great. The upgrades? Even more awesome. What would be even better, are set rewards for attacking a keep too.

• Guilds that successfully hold a Keep until the zone is captured will be rewarded with a free gold bag that will be mailed to the guild master, and is tradable to his or her guild members. Only one? That's pretty crap. More than that, it's not rewarding anyone for their contribution, but relies on the Guild Master being a) fair and b) actually involved in the game. What if it gets mailed to someone who's not logged on for a week? or just loads up their friends with all the fat loot? I can see a lot of people being unhappy with this. But I guess it means you have to choose your guilds carefully.
  

• Each character will now have its own Interface Profile. This will allow customization of addons and UI layout on a per-character basis. Awesome. I've reached the point with my Archmage where I've realised I have many more new moves to collect, and no toolbar space. But my Shadow Warrior (thanks to the stance bars) is perfectly laid out. I know where everything is. I can't change my Archmage's toolbar without destroying my Shadow Warrior set up. So this is perfect.

• But wait. For instance, if you want to have a different set of addons for soloing versus open RvR, just open the Profile Management window, create a new profile, and make any changes you wish. You what? How dare you make it even more intuitive! :D

• Guilds can now set up a "profile" for their guild using the “Recruitment” tab in the Guild Window. Settings for type of guild, careers, and levels being recruited, as well as guild "recruiters" can be set in the Recruitment tab... No more chat spamming required, just let the hyper-links fly! A feature that makes me say "um, why didn't Blizzard do this?"

• The Renown merchants that offer Tier-based Renown gear similar to the Renown merchants in the warcamps have had their titles adjusted to make it easier for players to identify each Tier of Renown gear. Ask and ye shall receive! Thank you!

• Upon successful destruction of the door into the city, friendly guards will arrive to support the invading army's foray into the enemy capital! Hah! Fun.

• Oh look! A single fix for Shadow Warriors! Enchanted Arrow: The damage for Flame Arrow and Festering Arrow will now be correct when this Tactic is slotted. Well that's nice, I guess.

• Archmages get a whole bunch more damage now + Magical Infusion: This ability has been redesigned, and how has an entirely new effect. It will now place a buff on the target that will restore their health if they fall below 15% Hit Points. which doesn't really make up for the fact that it feels like Shadow Warriors are being completely left behind. Ho hum.

• Weapons of the Fallen can now be sold to merchants. And are you giving me back the 200 I trashed because they took up too much space in my bags? :(

• This patch also introduces a new resource material that players in RvR can gather and trade in for deadly assault upgrades! Scattered throughout the RvR lakes, and acquired from killing players, Ordinance is collected and traded in for various items and weapons to use in open RvR! FTW! I like the idea of this a lot. Part of war is the struggle for real, useable resources.
  

• Characters Rank 19-24 will now be able to queue for a new 6 vs. 6 version of the Scenario 'Gates of Ekrund' from any Tier 3 zone. Well, I guess I'm camping my Archmage until the next patch. Sounds awesome. More options for play = more fun.

• Defenders will now be able to see the health of the Keep door at all times. Useful. A lot of people are assigned to yelling out the percentage of the door, but it's better if all can see it at all times.

Overall, an interesting patch. I am hoping that we're going to get a future big patch that upgrades the city siege experience for everyone. I'm expecting the other cities to open when all the realm transfers are finished, stablised and the populations can handle it. It takes a lot of people to unlock a single city at the moment - having three on the go at once will be hectic.

After I wrote the last post, Codpeace reminded me that I had the recent State of the Game by Mark Jacobs in a tab on my browser. It contains a few things I'm excited about:

• "The Ward system will be receiving an overhaul to make it more understandable and accessible.So many people have no idea how the Ward system works. Including me. Apparently you have to have a certain amount of wards to really be able to contribute to killing Kings, and complete certain instances. All this information should be in our tomes when we get set pieces of gear.
• We are also looking at implementing a “Nemesis” system which tracks the top 20 enemy players that kill you and which will give you rewards for hunting them down. Thanks to the Dammaz Kron addon, I already have a mental list of the people I hate the most, so being rewarded outside of my own personal glee when I kill them, that's just fantastic!
• We are looking at giving interesting and useful things to guilds who upgrade Keeps; defense improvements, guilds rewards, etc. & We have improved Rewards for Keep Defense in 1.2 and we will continue to improve Loot, XP and Renown for defending Keeps as well as giving loot rewards (gold bag) to guilds that successfully claim and defend Keeps through Zone Capture. More loot pleases this loot whore.
  
• The City Raid experience that we currently have in the game will also get some additional work. Our primary goal is to add more RvR opportunities throughout the entire Raid. We are looking at a number of options and possibilities under consideration for more “RvR” and less “PQ action”. YES. Make it less boring, more organic, and I am a customer for life.
• We will continue to experiment with, and improve, the Scenario experience. This includes adding new scenarios temporarily for events, adding new permanent scenarios, and continuing to refine the scenario play experience. w00t! The best part of the server transfers should be that scenarios pop more often. I enjoy scenarios just as much as the other parts of the game.

The thing I do not like:

• Additionally, 1.2.1 also contains... the Combat and Careers team will give some extra loving to the Archmage, Shaman, White Lion, and Marauder Dude. When people are saying the Shadow Warrior is the least loved/buffed up character, maybe you could throw us a frickin' bone over here?

But one misery against many joys = excellent. I look forward to every patch in this game.

Patch 1.2

All buff potions will now persist through death.

Oh shit yes!!! Thanks to everyone who didn't buy my potions in the past, I'm going to make a whole heap of gold from you in the future.

The rest of the patch notes are right here.

On Yesterday's Announcement

A quick post because I'm stil jetlagged and haven't managed to put more than a few hours gaming in this week:

• Slayers/Choppas: awesome! Awwwesome! I was never really excited about the Dwarf classes, or in fact the other Melee DPS characters, but who wouldn't want to play a Slayer? Smashing and bashing, and an extra-emo backstory (which is why I chose a Shadow Warrior as my main) to boot.
  

• Night of Murder: can't wait for this event, I like the look of collecting another trophy as a live event reward, as well as any excuse to brutally murder anyone in my path.
  

• Oh man oh man oh man, a free expansion! I love you Mythic! They're treating us so well. If there's one thing I enjoy about MMOs, it's seeing the game shift and grow as the months go by. I swear they keep putting new NPCs in Altdorf without telling us...
  

Patch 1.1

Patch 1.1 rolls out soon, and you can find the full patch notes here. There are many many things I am looking forward to, including:

• Chat linking - not being able to was a major barrier in discussions about gear and where to find it. Some guildies and I stumbled on a level 35 set of accessories, and while we did have it in our tome, it was hindering discussion with the rest of the guild as to why we were so excited. Aside from that, they've added a right click menu to people's names, so it's easier to say "STFU /IGNORE" in scenarios as well as invite them to group.
  
• We have added an additional item to the following armor sets: Redeye, Devastator, and Keeper. Not sure how fast I am going to level out of the Devastator gear, but I'm definitely going to have a look at that.
• The drop rate for Gold Bags has been increased in almost every PQ in the game. Because I have yet to see one.
• Open RVR influence Open RVR is the best part of the game hands down, nothing compared to the day they released the "Kill 15 enemy players in open RVR" Heavy Metal event live quest, and everyone charged to the battle fields. I am unspeakably excited at the prospect of being able to slaughter Destro every day outside of a 15 minute time limit.
• Player Statues OMG OMG way to appeal to the RVR overachievers among us. I've been checking out the statues in the War Quarter (by the steam tank PQ) and I'm wondering if they're going to be upgraded in any way, and how that's going to work.
• A Pale Eye Burglar that has been spotted skulking around the docks in Altdorf has been persuaded to move along. & Banker Lutz near the Mastiff’s End in Altdorf has found his courage and will no longer duck and hide behind the bank counter. just make me laugh. Banker Lutz was more than a little annoying, and we were all convinced he was sleeping on the job. Also: Peasants near the Bright Wizard College in Altdorf have given up trying to keep their clothes free from soot and ash. Their clothes now reflect the atmosphere and danger of living close to the Bright Wizard College. is a nice update that like the other two, tweaks the world to be more realistic. I hope NPC patterns/clothing changes a little in the future to make the city seem less stagnant.
  
• The mysterious barrels found in the capital cities will now reward those who are adventurous enough to open them, but be careful! Some of the barrels are potentially dangerous! Being one of the foolish that explored Altdorf at level 10 and managed to find more than one mob that would one shot me, now I'm an appropriate level, I hope the rewards suit me!
• Improved and diversified the appearance of many cloaks throughout the game. I'm one of those players that started dying her gear from the second I could afford the 20s for Warlock Purple dye. I have some lovely dyes saved up for level 40 thanks to Apothecary/Cultivation. Because most people get the same kind of gear, we all look the same. Looking the same when we have the option to not look the same is silly. Dye your armor!
  
• While exploring Altdorf and the Inevitable City, players might discover new citizens who have some interesting lore to share. Woohoo, more unlocks! I love unlocks.
• Fun new “chicken run” quests have been added to the Tier 3 Greenskin and High Elf warcamps. These quests send players back to Tier 1 open RvR areas for an update on the progress of the war. If you haven't gone into a lower level RvR area and become a chicken, running the whole zone clucking like a nutjob and hoping the other side doesn't find you... you're missing out. It's hilarious.
• Added the functionality for chat tabs to blink when they receive new messages. Still tweaking my chat tab set up. Still not perfect. This will help.

No doubt a lot of people will also be happy with the fact that Keep Contribution has been fixed - having a large part of the game broken and loot distributed wrong never makes anyone happy. Having discussions with other people about Keep Sieging in general, I think Mythic have a fair bit of work ahead of them to make it completely fair (eg: people shouldn't be eligible to continually get gold bags if other people need the gear more), but that's fine. We're only on Patch 1.1 - we have lots of time.