Bitching about the Witching. Warhammer Online’s first event.

Warhammer’s first special event is almost upon us. Wednesday for the US, Thursday for Europe.:

A chill is in the air. The twin moons Morrslieb and Mannslieb wax full, bathing the land in an eerie, pale light. The furtive footfalls of creatures unknown crunch on dead leaves deep in the dark woods. Strange apparitions half-glimpsed between the skeletal limbs of trees wander in the shadowy hollows. The souls of men are filled with dread, for the Witching Night approaches!

We are pleased to announce the first live event for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The Witching Night will bring to life one of the Warhammer world’s most mysterious and dangerous times of the year, when the veil that separates the realms of the living and the dead parts, and tormented souls wander the land in search of a peace they will never find. For some, it is a time to cower fearfully behind locked doors, praying to their gods for protection. For others, it is a rare opportunity to practice forbidden rites of dark power.

New Conflicts

The constant warfare and the approach of the Witching Night have awakened ancient horrors from their slumber, daring brave warriors from the armies of Order and Destruction to conquer them in the name of glory!

Four new Public Quests will be added to the game, spread across all tiers and pairings. Unlike the game’s current public quests, these will be set inside of the Open RvR areas, allowing players to compete directly against each other to earn influence that will earn them rewards offered by one of the new Herald NPCs we’ll be adding to the capital cities.

These new public quests are different in two important ways. First, they’re located in RvR lakes, rather than in PvE areas. In particular, the locations for the new public quests are as follows:

* The Tier 1 Public Quest will be located in Chrace
* The Tier 2 Public Quest will be located in Troll Country
* The Tier 3 Public Quest will be located in Black Fire Pass
* The Tier 4 Public Quest will be located in Caledor

Also, because of the special nature of these Public Quests and the rewards that players can earn by participating in them, the quests will reset less frequently than you might be used to. Expect a few hours to pass after a Witching Night Public Quest is completed before you’ll be able to try it again.

The Ghosts of the Fallen

Keen-eyed players will spot the ghosts of fallen warriors roaming the battlefields of WAR. There one moment and gone the next, these fleeting apparitions are not hostile, but if caught and killed, they have a chance to offer one of the Witching Night’s special rewards

Beware the Witches!

Witches and cultists long in hiding have come out to perform unholy rituals that capture the souls of the dead for some unknown, nefarious purpose. They gather around great cauldrons, chanting the names of blasphemous entities. Those who stumble across these secret cabals can free the trapped sprits of the dead and then claim their rewards for themselves.

Courage has its Rewards

The wearing of masks has long been the custom of Witching Night, and WAR will offer four such costume masks that players can obtain by participating in the event. These masks will be difficult to obtain: one is an Elite-level influence reward and the others are very rare drops on enemy players and the witches and ghosts who will inhabit the land for only this event. All four masks can be worn by each of the game’s playable races.

Also, a special cloak with unique art will be offered during Witching Night, and players can also earn a unique title. In addition, there will be new potions and trinkets to claim. All rewards for the event can be used by players of any level.

OK, here’s my problem with this, as designed. These events are supposed to be a bit of fun. Generally, in MMO holiday events, as long as you take part you can get whatever fluff items are available.

The event is going to last about 4 days, and they’ve given the special Public Quests a reset of several hours. The Public Quests are in the RvR zones, so only one of them will be available to any given character. Not only that but they state that the mask drops are going to be “very rare”.

Here’s the deal, Mythic. If I take part in a holiday event, I don’t want to be told, “No, you can’t have this neat time-limited festival stuff, because you are unlucky, do not play enough, or your server is too low population.”. That’s a fine reason (to me) most of the time, but not for fun holiday events. Seriously, lighten up, and let the folks who are still with you in Warhammer’s second month have some flippin’ masks without having to grind solidly for four days with no guarantee of success.

Not to mention that by using the PQ mechanic, you are once again penalising the classes who don’t rank well.

I can see you’re using the event to try to move folks into the RvR zones. That’s good for folks like me, but do you really want to be alienating the non-RvRers, even if they are a small group. I hope that it is possible to gain the Halloween gear without entering the RvR lakes.

Nevertheless, I am excited about the event, and will certainly be trying to snag myself a set of masks for as many of my characters as I can.

Osgard’s guide to Engineer Turrets

Avast ye!!

Greetin’s, denizens o’ the Old World. I be Osgard Blatterzarn, Dwarven Engineer, and today I’m going to be answering a few questions from the beardlings and beardless about the miracles o’ modern technology that are the Engineer Turrets. So often, on the battlefield, I’ll be beset by damn fool questions, and told not to be so noisy. Now I can just be tellin’ ’em to read the manual!

Warhammer Osgard With Gyrocopter 300x243

Your turrets’ll get better as you level, but, and this is a great big but, and I cannot lie, each turret falls into a different one o’ our mastery paths, and the turrets from the paths you don’t put points into will slowly fall behind. So, after a time, likely you’ll have one turret thats significantly better than the others. T’is a shame, but you will still find situations where you’ll be wanting to use one of your less powerful turrets.

So, let’s be introducing ’em!

Warhammer Osgard With Gun Turret 300x214

The Gun Turret

This here is the first turret you get, the Gun Turret. This is part o’ the Rifleman mastery path. With a range of 100 feet, you’ll find yourself relying on this workhorse a lot. It does regular damage, blocked by armour, and has 2 special attacks.

Penetrating Round’ll do a single target a whack o’ damage, but more importantly it’ll strip a lot of armour from your target for 20 seconds.

Machine Gun fires a lot of small shots at your single target rapidly. It makes a hell o’ a racket, and the dainty elves will complain constantly about it, mark my words!

This is the turret you want to be using any time you’re facing a single opponent in RvR. Stripping their armour will allow your own regular damage attacks to work a whole lot better. This is also the turret to use when you’re concerned about upsetting more enemies than you can handle. The following two turrets will invariably end up pulling additional enemies.

Warhammer Osgard With Bombardment Turret 300x179

The Bombardment Turret

Next up, it’s the Bombardment Turret, part o’ the Grenadier mastery path. This is our middle range turret, with a reach of 65 feet. Bombardment Turret’s do Corporeal Damage, and once again they have two special attacks.

Shock Grenade does corporeal damage to a single target. It’s really not very interestin’.

High Explosive Grenade is much more like it, doing corporeal damage to all enemies within 20 feet of the target.

I use this turret the least. Mostly I find it useful when I take part in attacking a Keep. I set it up to attack the oil machines above the gate. As turrets are not blocked by obstacles, it can often shoot the oil even in keeps where I ‘ave trouble finding a spot to shoot the oil meself.

Warhammer Osgard Flame Turret 300x229

The Flame Turret

Finally, here’s me favourite. A turret worthy o’ the name! The Flame Turret! This is part of the Tinkering mastery path.

Flame Thrower does damage to all targets within 65 feet in front of the turret (depending on which way it’s facing at the time). This can snag a whole lot o’ enemies. It doesn’t mention a damage type, so it might be normal damage. I suspect it’s elemental or corporeal though. Either way, they won’t be likin’ it up ’em!

Steam Vent is the reason I like this turret so much. By releasing a cloud of superheated steam it blasts all enemies within 30 feet with corporeal damage every second. If some greenskin be beating ye up, I can be strongly recommending standing next to me flame turret.

I use this turret in RvR all the time. Any time theres a decent clump o’ enemies in hand to hand with your mates, is a time to nip over there, drop a flame turret, and run like heck. And as I said earlier, they make a great bit of back up for your wizards and healers if they get in trouble. The damage ain’t massive, but can make all the difference.

Whooosh! Taste steam, evil-doers!!!

Whooosh! Taste steam, evil-doers!!!

It’s important to note that in no situation do our turrets ever do impressive amounts of damage to individual opponents, though the AOE attacks can certainly add up, and the armour debuff of the gun turret can facilitate a large amount of damage indirectly.

So there now, that’s me notes on turrets. I hope ye be findin’ that useful, and if ye have any questions, well, ye can be askin’ ’em below.

Five Warhammer Online Grumbles!

I love Warhammer. Being an aged and famously irritable fellow though, that does not stop me from getting rather annoyed with it from time to time. Here’s my current top five gripes, as heard in our guildchat!

1. Public Quests. I love Public Quests! I love the way they are woven into the storyline. I love that everyone who participates has a chance at some class-appropriate loot. They’re a satisfying and substantial way to spend time with your friends, working towards a common goal. PQ are dripping with awesome-sauce. What I hate about them is that I hardly ever get to do any.

As you get further into the game, if you want to do PQ appropriate for your level, you will need an increasingly large team to deal with the insanely grim hero that is going to turn up at the end. On my low population server, it is frustratingly hard to get enough people together to get them done. The idea that was put about by the developers that they’d be active all the time and you’d just need to drop by, is a lot of twaddle. I also hate that I’ve never received anything higher than a green bag with my engineer. Curse you, random chance!!!!

2. I hate the friends list. Because there isn’t one! I can /friend people, and I get a message when they log in, but can I see them in a nicely organised list? No. No, I can’t. Which makes it kind of hard to get them all together for a Public Quest now, doesn’t it. It’s a basic system that players expect. I expect it by 1.1.

3. I hate the various UI bits that insist on fading. You can turn this fading off in the options, but it won’t stick. Stop fading my text window! And stop fading my group-members health bars! What’s with that? Why was that ever considered a good feature to add? The full green bars weren’t bothering me at all. Actually I find them quite reassuring, so please leave them alone. If you want to get rid of something, by all means remove their action point bars, because I genuinely don’t give two hoots about those.

While you’re at it, please make it so that when I turn off the visibility of my cloak, it doesn’t come back every time I zone.

4. I hate that I am accumulating a long list of things that CSR cannot do. They cannot return items that have been looted by my warband, yet gone mysteriously missing during the rolling process so that no-one got them. They cannot launch scenarios for a server which has never, so far as I can tell, had a tier 3 scenario. I don’t blame the CSR crew at all. Having been in tech support myself, they have my complete sympathy. They have been uniformly polite, and knowledgeable. They’re just not being given the tools they need to do their job properly.

5. Hmm. I’ve run out of things I yell about. Oh, I know! Gyrocopter ticket prices! In tier 3 it’s 25 silver a pop! When you’re chasing (or fleeing) a constantly moving adversary, that can seriously start adding up. With the absence of scenario to make some cash in, Makaisson RvRers are being reduced to, *cry*, hunting NPCs. Perhaps if taking Battlefield Objectives gave you a little bit of cash, that might help a bit. Alright, thats more of a grumble than a yell.

Anyhows, those are the things that currently have me hot under the collar. Well, apart from the things I’ve written about before that I’m sure you didn’t want to hear repeated.

What’s getting your goat at the moment? Or do you go placidly amidst the noise and haste?

Warhammer Online Update. 21st of October.

My server, Makaisson, has been down for about an hour in Prime Time now, without comment from GOA. I’ll take the time to bring you up to date with my adventures!

Osgard, my Engineer, is now level 21, with a renown rank of 20. The renown rank means that he pretty much doesn’t get any renown from tier 2 scenario and RvR any more, so he’s been hanging out with the tier 3 folks.

The problem is, nobody I have spoken to has ever gotten into a tier 3 scenario on Makaisson. We are one of the lowest population servers but that can’t be all of the problem. We’ve had warbands of 24 folks, who’ve all said they’re permanently signed up for all the tier 3 scenarios. There are certainly enough destruction players in tier 3 to have a scenario, so what on earth is going on? There is something screwy with the way the game is deciding when to launch a scenario.

It’s so hard to find a fight in tier 3 that many people are playing their alts, and a vicious cycle ensues.

I will write more about the Engineer in the future. There has recently been a lot of nonsense written elsewhere about us though, so I’ll say this. We are one of the most powerful RvR classes around, at least for the three tiers I have so far experienced. We may not always look that impressive in your parsing, or in the scenario report, but that is because they do not mention all the times we kept the healers alive, rooted the enemy flag-bearer, or slung someone off the roof of the keep. We’re more than capable of scoring solo RvR kills too. A smartly played Engineer is a bringer of woe unto those who oppose you. So do try to remember to heal us once in a while, eh?

We are, however, probably the most appallingly bad PvE soloer that there is. In spite of using potions galore, I got the snot beaten out of me by 2 different level 7 heroes yesterday while slumming it on the Blighted Isle. Most of our best tricks (such as knockback) don’t work on these wily mobs, and with WAR’s respawn rate, using AOEs is often the fast way back to your bind point.

Osgord, my Ironbreaker, found my first ever Decimator chest piece last night. He singlehandedly went through all the tier 1 RvR zones, taking 10 Battlefield Objectives in all. That a single level 9 (He was halfway through 10th by the end of the spree) Ironbreaker can go around soloing Objectives, while my Engineer gets beaten up by champions half his level is a story for another day. On the last objective he found this lovely bit of kit on the level 10 Champion.

Decimator Armour 300x291

Hurrah! Except that it is the Bright Wizard one, the Decimator Flamerobe, and it’s bound to Osgord. I’ll try to make this the last time I go on about this, so I’ll spell it out really simply. Given that:

  1. You only get Decimator Chestpieces from the Level 10 Champions that guard the tier 1 Battlefield Objectives.
  2. These Champions drop them excruciatingly rarely.
  3. These Objectives are only available to take if your opponents have bothered to take them back of you.
  4. There are 10 possible chests. Soon to be 11 in December.
  5. Once you hit level 12, you can no longer fight in the tier 1 RvR zone without turning into a 1 hp chicken.
  6. Each piece of an armour set for your class is a tome unlock.

Given all these things, as it stands, there is precious little point Decimator armour even exisiting. You could, perhaps, grind away at these Champions in the hopes of getting the right chest, but all the time you are doing that, you are moving towards level 12, at which point your chance of completing your set is lost forever. Stuff that hard to get belongs in the end game. This is horrible design, and it makes Tome completists like me very very sad.

Aha, at 7 pm GOA have seen fit to bring my server back up. Time to see if I can get into a tier 3 scenario tonight, or whether I’ll be chasing Waroboros again.

The Warhammer Online Wikia rethemed to promote World of Warcraft

The Warhammer Wikia has received a new look. Or maybe I just didn’t notice until today. Either way:

Warhammer Online Wikia promotes WoW

That is more than a random advert. That’s a whole deliberate theming of the site portal, clearly specially designed for the purpose, and whether it is the owners of the wiki, or wikia themselves who have done this, I consider it to be pretty poor behaviour. I wonder how much Blizzard are paying them for such base treachery. A wiki is put together by a great number of people willingly sharing information and content, because they love the subject. How many of the contributors would be happy to see their work used in such a cynical way?

Maybe the privatisation of wiki, by companies like Wikia, was not such a good idea. Far better to use some of the perfectly functional public domain wiki software. By ceding control to a company that is quite naturally in it for the money, rather than out of love of the wiki-subject, something has been lost of the spirit of the enterprise. At any rate, I don’t see me ever contributing to a Wikia wiki ever again.

Neither the Age of Conan wikia, or even the WoW one has received such an extreme makeover. The whole thing smacks of a dirty tricks campaign by Blizzard. Certainly, as Lum recently pointed out, there is little love lost between the two companies.

Warhammer Online Experience, and 1.03 patch notes

There are certain parts of Warhammer Online’s content that cannot be accessed once you outlevel them. For instance, once you reach level 12, your character may never take part in any of the Tier 1 scenarios, such as the ever popular Nordenwatch. Once again, at level 22, you are now unable to access the tier 2 scenarios. Also, entering those tier’s RvR zones results in you turning into a 1 hit-point chicken. You’re not going to get much done as a chicken.

As you can only complete the tier 2 Obliterator RvR armour set by scoring a gold bag from a keep capture, if you haven’t gotten your chest piece by the time you hit level 22, you are completely out of luck.

The reason this is becoming an issue for me is that there are large groups of Warhammer players complaining constantly that the game is not giving them enough experience, and Mythic has reacted by repeatedly increasing the amount of xp we receive. So now I feel I am being rushed towards the 4th tier content. If you are going to throw xp at me because of other peoples complaining, please allow me to choose not to level if I’m not ready to leave all my friends behind, give up my chance to complete quests and armour sets, and move to the next tier.

Mythic clearly intend the lower tier zones to remain in constant use, as the trickle-up of victory points is an important mechanic. But within a few weeks, will I ever be able to get enough people together to take a tier 2 Keep, even if no players are opposing us? NPC Keep defences have been buffed repeatedly in the last weeks. I’m sure the tier 4 stuff is great, but is all the rest of the game going to become a desolate place?

Of the regular battlefield objectives, in tier 1 they are defended by 4 level 8 regulars, and one level 10 champion. That is just about duoable. Tier 2 Battlefield Objectives are guarded by a level 20 hero, and 4 champions. They respawn quickly, and all must be dead at once to take the objective. So to even take an ordinary objective, you’re probably going to need a full group. I imagine it gets even trickier in tier 3.

My issue is not that taking keeps and battlefield objectives is hard. It ought to be. But the pool of people who are going to be of the right level to be able to participate is going to shrink, and the more xp we get thrown at us, the faster that pool will shrink. Why is it so hard to have some sort of mechanism whereby a tier 4 character can be delevelled temporarily in order to be able to take part in a tier 2 or 3 keep assault, or scenario? If we increased the number of people eligable to take part in a given scenario, we might see scenarios actually start up a bit more often.

It’s possible that some of my opinions are biased by the fact that my server is one of the lowest population ones. Already, if it’s not prime-time, you’ve no chance of getting into a scenario. Perhaps this is not an issue for the more populous servers. I’m not sure if server mergers are even possible in a system (that I agree with) where you can only have characters on one team on any given server. Did DaoC ever have server merges?

Warhammer Online Patch 1.03 is now live on the US servers, and will be hitting Europe on Thursday morning.

Highlights

* We’re pleased to announce the addition of a new regional chat system. This item has been one of our most requested features, and you can find the details below.

* We have made additional improvements to the functionality of the /ignore command. This command should now work more consistently.

* A “new mail” icon has been added to the edge of the minimap to alert players when new mail messages have arrived.

* We have made some additional improvements to the handling of NPC speech and action text in an effort to reduce the amount of chat players see from NPCs.

* In order to provide a more challenging and rewarding experience, we have adjusted the overall speed at which players can gain control of zones and move the campaign.

* Pet behavior has been improved and should act more naturally when changing between passive and defensive modes while the pet is fighting multiple enemies.

* The war against the gold sellers continues! We have introduced a new “report gold seller” command that works as follows: when you type /rg, the game will automatically fill out a gold seller appeal using the name of the last player who sent you a tell. If you get an unwanted /tell from a pesky gold seller, type /rg to start an appeal and get them busted!

* We have added a new option to the user settings that will allow players to enable or disable shader caching. This is a graphical performance option, and for a full explanation, players can hover their mouse over this option in the user settings window. This should help improve performance on many systems.

Regional Chat System:

* Chapter-based chat channels have been replaced with a farther reaching chat system, referred to as Region Chat. A region is defined as the contiguous zones that make up a tier-based racial pairing area. For example, Blighted Isle and Chrace make up one region. Region Chat consists of two channels, Region and Region-RvR.

o Region encompasses the entire region area.
o Region-RvR encompasses the RvR-focused areas, such as the Plain of Bone.

* How to use the Regional Chat System:

o To type in the Region channel, use /1 [message]
o To type in the Region-RvR channel, use /2 [message]
Note: You must be in the RvR-focused region to use the Region-RvR channel. Players on Open RvR servers will have access to Channel 2 at all times.
o To disable these channels right click on the proper chat tab, go to “Tab Options” then “Filters.” Scroll down to Region and Region-RvR and uncheck the channels you no longer wish to view.
o If you have disabled either channel and wish to re-enable them simply return to the “Filters” menu and re-select the appropriate channels.

General Changes and Bugfixes

* In order to ensure that the Apothecary skill remains a valuable crafting profession potions will no longer drop as frequently.

* Seeds for Cultivation will no longer drop as frequently throughout the world.

* Monsters should no longer disappear and then reappear when attacked at range by players.

* In some rare cases, the game would leave “ghost images” of NPCs who had moved away or de-spawned. As a result, players would see NPCs that were not actually there. We have taken steps to correct this issue, and players should see far fewer of these phantom NPCs.

* We fixed an issue that would sometimes cause monsters to break off in mid-combat and attempt to walk away.

* We have made some additional improvements to the pathing and behavior of monsters. These fixes should reduce pathing issues sometimes seen when pulling monsters at range.

* Nurglings will no longer continue to make aggressive sounds after they have been killed.

* Fixed a crash-issue that sometimes occurred when entering city dungeons.

* Fixed a crash that sometimes occurred when searching the Auction House.

Content

* We have made some adjustments to the Hydra boss in the Sacellum dungeon to bring this encounter more in line with the original design and difficulty.

Realm vs Realm

* Reduced the interaction time required to deploy a guild standard

* Reduced the interaction time required for players to pick up standards that they own. Please Note: This does not include the capturing of enemy standards.

* Capturing an enemy standard will now reward the capturing player and his nearby allies with renown.

* Players can no longer be queued for a scenario while they already have an invite pending to a different scenario.

* Attempting to join a scenario that has already ended will no longer send players to the character select screen.

* Renown gained from healing players was granting more renown than intended over long periods of time. Players who heal other players will still earn renown for aiding their friends in combat, but large heals or repeated heal-over-time spells will result in lesser renown gains than before.

* While going over the data collected for renown gained by healing, we discovered a few incorrect values that led to players earning far more renown than designed. To ensure equal renown gains for players regardless of their chosen career and whether they group or not inside scenarios, we have made several adjustments to the way renown is granted from healing other players:

o Earning renown from healing players was erroneously granting renown while outside of RvR. This has been adjusted so getting renown for healing players outside of RvR or from a player that is not RvR flagged will occur less frequently.

o Healing players will grant renown correctly if the healed player has earned renown from killing other players recently.

Warhammer Online RvR thus far.

Me and my friends have been having a fantastic time in Warhammer Online so far. I’ve gotten rather a taste for RvR not matched since my DaoC days, and many an orc has fallen to the guns of Osgard, Dwarven Engineer! I do have a few concerns though.

Mostly I’m worried about open world RvR. With so many different RvR zones to choose from, finding where, if anywhere, the action is, can be pretty time consuming. I know a lot of people, on reaching tier 2 and finding they can’t just walk up the hill in Nordland to find a scrap any more, just start a new character. That’s not particularly ideal. There is an attempt to help, in that you receive a warning if a Keep in your current pairing is under attack. Unfortunately that warning is usually a complete lie. I have stood on the battlements of Mandred’s Hold and been informed that the Lord was under attack when there was not an enemy in sight, much less one inside the keep.

Are there just too many battlezones? Most open world RvR seems to involve avoiding the enemy army, and going to an empty zone to take objectives and keeps before the enemy figures out where you have gone. I am wondering whether some sort of count of players in each RvR zone might be a useful piece of information to be able to display. Or would that upset everyone who likes to take objectives without a fight?

There are special sets of armour that only drop during RvR. For tier 1, it is the Decimator set, and tier 2 it is the Obliterator set. That’s a great idea. My problem is that I’ve only seen about 5 pieces drop since I’ve been playing, and they were all foot items. Maybe the other parts are gained some other way? I have no idea. There is no hope of anyone completing the lower tier RvR armour sets before they have outgrown the tier. It may be different in the higher tiers, but the tier 1 drop rate needs to heavily raised, and the tier 2 drop rate could use an increase also. Once you outlevel the tier, you can’t go back and get these items later , and as they each give you an unlock, that hurts.

Update: I just read an interview that tells us where to find the rest of these armour sets. The Decimator chest can be looted from the champions guarding tier 1 objectives, the Obliterator chest comes from Keep Lords, and the Obliterator gloves can be purchased from a renown vendor. Nevertheless, I have never seen any of these items drop, and I’ve killed a whole lot of tier 1 champions, and tier 2 keep lords. Given how many people it takes to defeat a Keep Lord, and how many of them you are likely to defeat during tier 2, your chances of getting a chest for your class is damn slim. I have found my Obliterator gloves hiding at the bottom of the list on the renown vendor though, so progress has been made. Just need the chest now.

The Warhammer looting system (standard “need”, “greed”, “pass” system) had been breaking down in scenarios, where people can’t be kicked out of the group, or otherwise have good behaviour forced upon them. On our server we’ve had a few people taking advantage of that by “needing” every single item, while being completely silent in the face of community condemnation. While there is some small satisfaction in adding them to my blacklist, and letting them die, it has been extremely frustrating, and terrible for community cohesion. I am extremely pleased that 1.02 will only permit “needing” in scenarios if the item is usable by your class. I suspect this complete exploit was being used as a source of funding for goldfarmers, and overall it is going to make scenarios much more relaxing.

Another problem with scenarios has been that for some reason, you can only get into some of them. In tier 1, folks only seem to sign up for Nordenwatch. It’s a nice map, but frankly I’d rather play Ekrund. I have still never got into the tier 2 dwarven scenario. In a recent patch, it was added that you could sign up for a the scenarios for the other pairings provided you were in the right tier of land. In 1.02, you will be able to sign up for all 3 with a single click of a “join all” button. I hope that helps. But one annoying thing is that if I am in a tier 1 land, or in Altdorf, I cannot sign up for a tier 2 scenario at all. You have to be in a tier 2 land, and that seems to be to be a rather pointless limitation upon us. Also, getting into the Nordenwatch scenario removes me completely from the Ekrund queue, meaning that if I ever want to play Ekrund, I am not allowed to play any other scenario while I wait. Once again, needlessly limiting.

I am told Tier 3 has five scenarios to choose from. I wonder if it’ll still be just one or two that I ever get to play. I would prefer it if we didn’t pick specific scenarios. If the scenario was chosen at random when it launched, we’d see a much better mix.

I am not as concerned about all these issues as I might otherwise be, because Mythic is actually doing a really good job of addressing Warhammer’s problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if 1.03 chops the head off a few more of my worries.

Warhammer Online Patch 1.02 is now live on the US servers, and will be hitting Europe on Friday morning. Lots of good stuff in there. The patch notes continue below. Hit the link if you’re on the blog’s front page.

Continue reading Warhammer Online RvR thus far.