The Long Dark Witching Night of the LOL.

Warhammer Online’s Witching Night is upon us! I posted a few days ago that I was worried it might be excessively hard to get our hands on these fun fluff item rewards. How is it turning out?

There are four masks you can get.

The Leather Mask of the Gobbo has been duly gained. It drops quite often from restless spirits, and is tradeable. This is good, as it means that everyone is pretty much assured one of the masks at least. I got enough for all my alts while trying to fill my influence bar.

The Delicate Silver Mask is gained by filling in your influence bar for the event. So far Osgard has gotten his cloak as the medium influence reward, but this is certainly doable. I don’t think you’ll be getting the influence from killing players in the PQ, unless you’re extremely lucky, as the influence you get is tiny and the bar doesn’t move. Your best bet is to find some restless spirits, and sit down to kill hundreds of them. Not especially entertaining, which is why Osgard’s only up to the cloak. He will summon up the mental fortitude (I am very grinding averse) to finish that off before the end of the event.

On a positive note, I would like to say that the cloaks are pretty darn cool. So is the basic reward, though it is a shame that it was given only five charges, instead of having infinite charges with a cooldown. Looking spooky is hardly an unbalancing ability, and having charges means that folks are always reluctant to use it, and it’ll end up getting stuck in the bank and forgotten about.

Osgard decided to get his spirits by beating up old women and smashing their cauldrons, which brings forth a few restless spirits. He did that instead of finding a faster, spirit-only, spawn-spot, as there are tome unlocks for slaying the crones, so he might as well kill two birds with one (high velocity) stone.

Osgard used this cauldron spot in Chrace, but there are a number of other locations scattered about the world.

The Gaping Skull Mask is dropped by enemy players in RvR. I have yet to see a single one drop, so I’m not rating Osgard’s chances in his scenario-free tier. If I’m lucky I might be able to find one with a tier 2 character, and pass it up to him, as it seems tradeable.

The Mask of the Bloodletter comes in the gold bag for winning the opposed PQ. So to get a Mask of the Bloodletter you have to:

1. Kill 100 players before the other side kills 100 players, under conditions I will describe in a moment. Do this before the PQ resets back down to zero kills on each side for no apparent reason.
2. Kill the Witching Lord. Or let the other side kill it, if they’re going to be daft.
3. Roll well enough, against probably a lot of competition, to get the gold bag.
4. Within 2 minutes, get to the the magic chest, and loot your bag while under enemy fire

My server has managed one completion of the PQ so far in tier 3. There are a lot of problems with it. Even if fixed, I think we can safely say that we ain’t going to be seeing a lot of Mask’s of the Bloodletter.

Primarily, it seems that Keeps and Battlefield objectives use a similar system to PQs, and cannot overlap. So if you are anywhere near a keep or objective, your kills will not count towards the PQs. As BO and Keeps are the natural places that fighting will gravitate towards, this is pretty unhelpful. Black Fire Pass has Bugman’s Brewery smack in the middle of it, and it is all too easy to end up too close to it. Warhammer technology needs to be improved to the point where these things can overlap.

The other area that combat with gravitate to, especially if you can’t use the former areas, is the warcamps. This was mental agony, as I saw our forces, time and again, walk over to the enemy NPC guards and be killed. This would, of course, grant the enemy another kill towards their tally. Unfortunately, too many of our team seemed to be getting their LOLs that way. “LOLs” is not a word I would normally use, but I very much wanted to use the above post title. Usually I would just call them “witless”, and be done with it.

After Destruction beat us in stage one, the Witching Lord appeared at Bugman’s pub, which we held. I have no screenshots, as I was too busy yelling at people not to attack it. All too soon, we had killed it, completing the PQ for Destruction. The roll took place, I am told, but no-one has the faintest idea where chest turned up, so none of them managed to get their hands on the reward bags. I would strongly suggest that the chest appear in the camp of the winning warband, rather than some mysterious contested area.

With all the difficulties, we only managed that single completion of the PQ.

Anyways, that is the state of play after day 1 of the Witching Night on Makaisson. We’ll be having another try at this PQ today, hopefully with less of a display of ineptitude. I’m fairly satisfied with the event, as it goes. With us still being in the second month after launch, I would not have wanted to see too many developer resources poured into temporary content at this stage. I have no doubt that this will all be back again next year with more polish, more features, and more atmosphere.

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