KruelhandGamer

Chugging along

2012-01-17T04:47:00.000-08:00

I was too busy to play this weekend with other shit but got back on last night and played.

I did the 29 Flashpoint for the 1st time, it was fun but not really challenging mostly due to the fact that my guildies ran me through and they are mid 30s now so it was pretty much a spankfest... either way I managed to get some very much needed gear upgrades. Now I'm finally feeling my gear is catching up to where it should be although I do feel somewhat undergeared for my level.

I think that is in large part due to the fact that the game has a lot of Sidequests that either need to give better rewards, OR not as much XP. I find I level up too quickly on a planet and before I finish the Class quests I'm the high end of the suggested lvl for the planet with still 1 or sometimes 2 basecamps of sidequests to go, not to mention the zone Bonus series which up to this point I've sort of ignored, because I level past that gear to the point that sometimes on the next planet greens are on par with the rewards from the previous planet.

That's all well and good, I don't like missing story line stuff. Back in other MMO's I never cared about side quests, but in SWTOR I do, mostly because of the fact that the stories are pretty cool.

----

I've gotten to Alderann (sp) and I really like the plot for this planet, the civil war and the Death Mark. The villian (a Sith Assassin) is really interesting and I look forward to chopping him in half with my lightsabers. I have caught up with my crafting and managed to make some credits and promptly spent all of it upgrading gear and abilities. It's amazing the difference a mod can make when you go from a 26 blue to a 30 blue or even purples. As I said, I've caught up which means I can now afford to invest time and resources into making purple mods and armorings for my shell gear. Now I'm wearing all oranges with a blue belt and wrists, implants and earpiece. I think I have 1 green relic tho, gotta fix that.

I respec this morning just before heading to work to Watchman, which is a dot/lifetap spec and tested it out without a companion and it seems like it's got a lot of potential, just have to work out the rotation. I want to gear up T7 to tank for me because Kira is fine, but she dies a lot because she'll dive into a pack of mobs for no good reason and I can't save her in time. T7 is a tank, if I gear him up right he ought to be able to handle that shit...

plus T7 is the best companion I've had yet, he's awesome!!

The Force is With me?

2012-01-12T06:49:00.000-08:00

SWTOR Continues to be a good deal of fun.

We've rerolled to another server to lvl up Republic alts together with a sort of lvl cap system. Basically we're all around 18-22 ish in lvl, I hit 23 last night and won't log on my new Jedi Sentinel until everyone's around that level. It's great, we can do Heroics and Flashpoints together and gear up and so far it's been a great time.

I like the Sentinel class so far but it appears it's a late boomer in terms of pure dps. That being said, I do like the dmg output but the Focus/Rage mechanic is still something I'm learning to manage at a consistent rate. I originally was going up the middle Tree (duel wield mastery tree) and found it's damage seriously lacking and after specing to the Right Hand tree which appears to my eyes at this lvl bracket to be about Crit% on abilities with cooldown reductions on Master Strike etc to be a better build option for low level toons since I don't really have the points to make Mid tree good. My mind tells me that the Left DoT tree is also going to be really awesome once I'd be up past lvl 30 or so and have more Burns to exploit the tree's cool talents.

The Story is going well, I prefer the Sith Juggernaught story up to this point but one thing I love about the Jedi is the T7 droid who I think is just a great character. I didn't care about Vette at all, Quinn was cool and I like Jaesa on my Warrior but not as much as I like T7. I only have my Padawan as my other pet on my Jedi and she's ok, her story hasn't developed enough yet for me to care very much but T7 seems real interesting.

I really want to start up a Gunslinger as I think that class would be super fun to play.

SWTOR

2012-01-04T04:24:00.000-08:00

So like so many other people (like what, 1million+) I jumped over to SWTOR to play.... reasons are as such.

One

I am a HUGE starwars fan, yeah nerd that shit up, we're all gamers right haha. But I grew up on those movies, I love the original trilogy and I actually did like the last movie and thought it was pretty good (EpI and II are shit except the duel with darth maul and the battle sequences in II). I love the lore, the story and the drama of the universe and all I wanted for Xmas was a lightsabre for like 10yrs.

Two

I played the shit out of both KOTOR games and loved both of them... to me KOTOR 1 was one of the best RPG games that I ever played and while II was a rush job the engine updates and combat system/class system was an improvement. But what made the 1st game better was the story and drama. When I heard that Bioware was making a 3rd KOTOR game but it was going to be an MMO I was skeptical because up to that point I didn't really ever play MMO's until WAR. But as I got into WAR more and more and a little WoW etc I got more and more excited about SWTOR to the point of giddy anticipation about a month ago.

Three

WAR was getting old, population dying and it was too little too late for the transfers for me. That being said, I'll continue to keep my WAR sub up and play it time to time when I need some good PvP action and most of the guildies are playing both. More on that later.

Ok, so my take on 1 week of TOR is thus...

PvE - Questing is just fun, a whole lot of fun. Mostly because you feel like a complete badass due to the story. It is not terribly challenging but it can be time to time. I am playing a Sith Juggernaught atm and find clearing out trash and whatnot is easy, but strangely satisfying.

Instances I've not done much. I've done 3 flashpoints I think and I liked them a lot, especially Black Talon. I hope the mid/late game Flashpoints continue on this line. Very cool stuff.

Heroics - Typically what I have done is cleared out all the class and side quests on a planet then find a group for the Heroics and man, fun! I really like them, that being said I don't like to PuG especially as a tank because to be honest I'm learning the ropes of how to pve tank and now that i've caught up to a bunch of guildies i'll be tanking that shit for them and looking forward to that.

Storyline - amazing, I'm really into the story and want to know what is going to happen next. I just became a Sith Lord last night before I logged off and was like... "shit I'm a fucking sith lord!?!" how bad ass is that!!

Crafting - one thing I hated about WoW and WAR was crafting... sitting there pressing plus or going off to find some rare bullshit so I could make a blue something was boring as fuck. TOR's crafting companion system is amazing, fire and forget but at the same time exciting to make those decisions... do I invest my credits in crafting and lose that companion incase I need heals for 25min?

Money - Money actually is important in TOR unlike WAR, this adds an element to the game that I was not ready for, and thus poorly managed my credits for the first 24 lvls lol

PvP

here's where I get off... as a PVP guy from WAR I am very frustrated with the PVP in TOR and I'm not surprised. Now, it's not that bad, but there are aspects about it that drove me crazy in WAR until they fixed it mostly to do with Stunlock and CC. They need to ballance the CC with Immunity pretty badly. When I get into a Warzone, turn a corner and some asshole stuns me and kills me while I'm still stunned I wonder how the hell they expect people to want to PvP. Granted I'm willing to accept a certain amount of gear gaps and ability gaps mostly because of my 2nd least part is the no tier system... you start pvp at 10 and you are up against anyone else, lvl 50s even. yeah they bolster your stats pretty good but seriously, how can someone at lvl 10 with the hp etc compete when you have like 6 abilities against someone with 5x the abilities on top of the fact taht they will have every piece for their armor (at 10 you maybe have a helm, probably not)

There are more pitfalls but I worry not because I think it'll all get fixed eventually. Lucky for Bioware they did such an amazing job with the PvE imo that I can't wait to log on tonight when I get home from work!

Happy Holidays

2011-12-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

I got myself a Xmas gift last night on xmas eve by hitting renown rank 100 in praag. I would have done it long ago but I took that break, a needed break.

Anyway not that is done, I plan on playing WAR a little bit still, afterall what's the point of getting to max lvl with all the gear if you don't ever play it. Right now I'm sitting in my Parent's living room looking at this shiny new Starwars game thinking... I want to go home and install that shit... sadly turkey dinner is far more inviting and the roads are icy so I'm not risking anything just to do probably a 2hr install or some shit.

Anyway, I hope that everyone/anyone that still reads this blog has a wonderful holiday season and to stay save.

Almost?

2011-12-08T05:14:00.000-08:00

RR98.85

It's pretty close, I must say that I'm tasting the finish. In fact I would even go to say that this stupid Epic quest that I ignored for a while is helping me stay motivated as it shows progress... small goals moving forward... just on the part where I have to kill the 1st boss of TI 5 times and cap 5zones with a skaven, but TI isn't popping argh.

Last two nights we had small gank groups running around the lakes with 1 healer or no healer at all and were kicking ass, taking names and if I must say so making Order look really bad. Even against high lvl groups. For example, my goal is to try and make %10 of a rank a day. Yesterday I got %15 thanks to the horrible playing of Order and the obvious assistance of AAO and my teammates.

I've been screwing around with builds for fun. Lately since during the days I'm solo I am back to using Deadly Clutch which is a great tactic (obviously) and I've been able to run around the lakes solo in my offensive gear and be effective, in fact taking on 3v1 fights and winning or taking 2 with me. I'm also derping around with renown using a little more weaponskill or staking a little bit less strength and instead grabbing some disrupt/dodge. I'm just trying to keep it fresh.

Also enjoying my Zealot, who has gone to RR71, fun class.

Anyway I'll keep you up todate on my progress as I try and cap my level, get my warpforge. After that, I'm looking forward to playing Skyrim.

The Video

2011-11-17T06:13:00.001-08:00

Vol3 is uploading as we speak to Youtube.

As a preface to it, this is a video that is about 10mins long, about 7 of it is pvp action and it uses the build discussed in this blog only recently. I had been collecting footage for weeks of an earlier build and had lots of great stuff but this is where I wanted to go this time.

After the 'release' of Vol3 there will be a Vol3 Directors Cut with video commentary by a very special celebrity personality, my guardbot Eschatology, easily the best guardbot chosen to ever play this game.

If I stay playing this game, there will be a vol4 which I will do of exclusively 1v1 and duels to off-set all the group play in the last video. Vol1 had plenty of solo stuff in it, but that was way before Marauders were good again, and I do enjoy dueling and 1v1 fights. Plus I have a great soloing build that I seldom use but am willing to bust out.

Anyway, stay posted for the video link.

Alts

2011-11-01T04:11:00.000-07:00

Yeah alts have come back into the picture. In fact a bunch of us are back on alts right now and since it seems like a good option to kill time while Destro zergs we've been just having a pure blast.

I've been playing a Slayer. Since I have a WH and Wl both at 40 and am a sucker for melee classes it seemed like the only option. I've never played a Slayer or Choppa past level 10 or so (when the patch that came out brought Slayers/Choppas into the game, I had the early access and yeah I played a Choppa but didn't like it).

So far, it is pretty much win. I've got some gear, not really twinked out or anything but yeah I have a crit tali etc. But the class is pretty fun, I like to get my rage to the yellow, get my M1 sever nerve, charge in and just merk someone before they realize wtf just happened, then flee out haha. Now at the end of T1 (15/22) I'm ready to be the bottom of the totem poll in T2.

However it does seem to me like Destro took a break and Order has taken over the zerging in T4. This means it's time to hunt some AAO? 2 nights in a row of Order zerg seems like it's too good to be true. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to put up with some 4/1 numbers against, I want the even odds the even fights, I want those contested zones to take hours to decide not 35min to rank the keep and beat the doors down. If that means for a while we have to take it on the chin with some AAO then that's cool, it'll be faster to 100 that way (ha) but a nice break from zerging.

The New Build

2011-10-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer. This build is very group orientated, can work in smaller fights but requires certain elements of group play in order to maximize the potential for it as a pure DPS killing build. This build offers little survivability, and while on paper looks like it has all the utility of my regular build, honestly things die too fast for it to be called Utility.

This set up may not be something you could enjoy if you don't run in a group with someone dedicated to healing and absorbing your damage. This is not a solo build, this is a build for premades and is a way for the Marauder to be as lethal as a Sorc or Witch Elf in terms of burst damage. Also, this build really requires you to be in your 90's for renown rank, although I'm sure you could still make a pretty efficient variant on it in your 80s

CONCEPT

One of the many things Marauders have going for us is the amount of useful tactics we get. Now, we aren't Chosen or Witch Elves but we do get a lot of great tactics to run with. Most of the time we all think that the typical Marauder build is to run a variation on 3 tactics + 1 extra tactics. This is no longer true for yours truly.

The combo of 3 everyone runs.... Growing Instability, Piercing Bite and Brute Force.

Most other Marauders then cycle depending on their build between Feeding on Fear, Flanking, Subvert Strength, Deadly Clutch etc etc.

I say, no. Drop Brute Force, keep Flanking GI and PB and cycle a 3rd one depending on your build. For me, it's Feeding on Fear.

You might then say, but Kruelhand what about your strength? Well, good point folks. I build my renown by getting all 5 levels of Strength and 4 levels of Melee Crit tossing the rest into a variety of other things ranging from wounds to parry depending on what's left over.

What this really means is I need a chosen in my party with a high strength aura. In the gear I'm wearing (i'll get to that in a second) I sit at around 1020 strength (if memory serves me) which is indeed below the r95 soft cap but when I am grouped with a chosen I am at the cap. I'm at the cap with a 295 damage bonus and a flat 42% melee crit with a liniment, over 9400 hit points, 4000 armor and a 34% parry

but I only have 160 toughness, a 12% to be crit and my AP management is somewhat lack luster. Feeding on Fear does seem to work as intended now as I take a lot of crit damage, and am thinking about dropping all the points I put into parry and seeing how low I can get my -% to be crit... again that could hurt me more because less then 30% parry seems like a mistake considering how much melee there is out there.

GEAR COMBINATION

The gear set up is to help get my strength up without brute force so that with the support of a group I can be at cap. This means that I drop my normal set up I was running which was 4 doomflayer, 2 tyrant and then 5 tovl glyphs. While this set up gave me a slightly higher inate damage bonus (about 304 incl the %5) my crit is higher as well as my auto attack speed is better now that I run 4 offensive doomflayer 4 offensive sovereign and 3 glyphs

Healm - doomflayer
Shoulders - doomflayer
Chest - doomflayer
Gloves - Doomflayer
Boots Sovereign
Belt - Sovereign
Back - Sovereign
3 glyphs and sovereign gem.

The build is based off of procs for crits. In doomflayer gear the 2 piece crit proc is extremely strong, coupled with Feeding on Fear I can get double procs to over 70% crit coupled with the targets chance to be crit when I get on targets often times nearly every attack crits and if the doomflayer melee power proc goes up...

Before I was on occasion getting crit hits 3k with Guilotine only and now I'm seeing 3k crits on TB and on Guilotine I'm routinely getting 3k. In fact if guilotine is not hitting for 2700 I get disappointed. I hit debuffed tanks for 1800-2000k with guilotine. I hit a city Warlord mob for 3900 and I've hit a slayer for 1774 when guarded standing right beside his guard with Guilotine.

Without a doubt in my mind some of these players I'm hitting this hard are losing to me on hidden levels but I am hitting RR100 slayers for 3k on the regular, not so surprising because it's a slayer but hey it sure looks nice.

I have no doubt that this build is the hardest hitting set up for a Marauder in terms of it's ability to take down a target very fast even through being healed. I'm contemplating respecing to Deadly Clutch to see if that is an improvement but I have yet to run across a healer yet who has been able to outheal this damage output... I have met healers that were able to escape (punt or detaunt or whatever) but in terms of me giving the full burst roatation even with only 1 doomflayer proc up there is far too much damage happening at in a short period of time. Actually many times the target dies before I get to Guilotine in the roation (which is great because then I have it right away for the next target).

Oh and mastery. It's the same as I have posted before only now I drop Draining Swipes and max out the Savagery tree for a 1800 armor debuff. In 1 more RR I gain another passive level... which I'm excited about to see how that goes.

IN CLOSING

If I was running solo all day I would never use this build. I would go respec for something a little more tame. I like to play with my friends however, and I tend to be in a group where I play the Main DPS role split with a 94 Sorc who deals with the targets I cannot get to, as well as stealing my god damn death blows (<3 Laonsela). If you run solo, or don't have a guard or healers capable to a lot of burst healing, don't use this build, you'll hate it. If you get the support you always wish you could have, this is the absolute most efficient killing spec I have come up with yet.

The PvP Video I am finishing up this weekend will be %100 in this build, so you will be able to see it in action.

Vs Slayers (And Video Update)

2011-10-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

Slayers, easily in my opinion when it comes to this game are the top of the melee food chain when it comes to how the game is supposed to be played, in group combat. The Slayer gets so many great abilities and skills that when they are supported properly they do more damage, kill more enemies then any other class in game.

Shattered Limbs
Inevitable Doom
Rampage

the list could keep going. However upon catching a slayer by himself or not supported properly who is not specifically geared for small group play they are also the fastest class to die. A Slayer ought to be able to 1v1 any class regardless of what the build is if they are smart and use their rage mechanic to their advantage. The trick to beating a slayer is patience and captiolizing on your opportunity. As fast as they might be able to kill a target, a Slayer out of guard range will die faster.

Against any slayer that I fight I want to get them out of position, away from that guard. That means I could pull them from their guard when he's not paying attention or use co-ordination with my tank to disable the guard so I can pull the slayer. I only need 3 global cooldowns to kill a max rage slayer and that's if there is no other dps on them. You might think that I'm exaggerating, well truthfully I'm not. I recently killed a RR100 slayer in 3 cooldowns when he was not anywhere near his guard and it was only me on him, they are inbelievably squishie and when you combine the armor debuff with their red mechanic they mitigate no damage at all. Hitting a slayer for 3k+ is something that happens to me now daily and I make it a point to do it to put them in their place.

That being said, no slayer can be taken lightly. Slayer in the red can kill you very fast on his knock down especially if he's running his crit%dmg tactic and is low on health. A lot of slayers run this tactic, which was the old Marauder tactic mirror (until that got changed). A slayer might kite you until he's burning red and get on you wait for you to get him low then knock you down and kill you with that 2s knockdown hitting you for crits in the 3k range. I've seen some slayers lately running 2handed spec doing just that. In fact there are a few slayers I've seen quite intelligently using Last Stand that way... waiting till they are at 20% health, popping last stand and killing 2 or 3 people sometimes more while it's up just popping rampage and owning everyone's face then of course dying. Thing is, they're going to die anyway and with that build they're going to take someone with them. When they get into that mode Spellbreaker is going to be hitting for 2k on non- crits!

Slayers who run solo tend to spec the same way a Choppa might, for the channel heal. The trick here is to interupt the heal with disarm/knockdown/moutho'T and at that point they are in trouble. You cannot count on parry here because they will pop rampage to make sure they get the heals off, only thing you can do besides that is hope you get huge damage off on them or absorb when they channel depending on how badly you want to win/don't want to lose. Remember also that in the yellow they're going to be hitting for huge numbers, you need to be equalling that.

The next big thing to know about Slayers is that a lot of Slayers (most if not all) spec a lot of Weapon Skill. You know what that means right... monstro proc. If you get into a situation against a Slayer you want to get a monstro proc up right away and keep dancing through stances to try and mitigate as much weapon skill as possible. Granted, you don't want to do the entire fight in Monstro because your damage will be nerfed as well, don't get into a DPS race with a Slayer because it's a bad idea.

In all honesty most slayers I run into I just explode and don't care what level they are. 3 shot them 2 shot them whatever. Most are wrecklessly trying to kill squishies thinking that I'm going to try to take their healers out. Truth be told I go after Slayers first every time because of Shattered Limbs and what that can do to my group in terms of screwing up rotation, auras, heals and whatnot. After Slayers then I make choices about over extenders or healers.

The Video

Volume 3 of my pvp videos was completely scrapped and has been redone. Reason being is I've got a new build for renown and gear and a minor modification to my spec. This new build works in duels okay but it really shines in group play to the point where honestly it's almost not fair. So what I have done is started filming over again from scratch in an effort to highlight this build and show some absurb damage numbers. In fact in some instances my damage on scoreboards is kind of low compared to what it used to be, and that is because my TTK is so fast right now that I don't need to compensate for heals, the targets just fall over dead in 3 or 4 seconds.

Stay tuned for that.

Vs White Lions

2011-10-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

Despite what a lot of White Lions may claim, the WL is a very very dangerous Class if you come across a situation where you have to deal with them by yourself.

In fact, I would much rather fight a Slayer or a Witch Hunter then a White Lion if we're of equal level and gear mostly because a White Lion has the ability to absorb a lot more punishment then their other MDPS brothers/sisters.

While dealing with Mitigation for a marauder can be easier then most classes due to the debuffs offered in Savagery, a lot of Marauders don't use Savagery and are a Brutality Monstro build. This is fine, however when dealing with a higher armored target piercing bite only grats returns on abilities that require the mutation, which means without an armor debuff you're auto attack damage won't be fantastic. Note also that you lose your only undefendable attack with Cutting Claw, and you will not find a White Lion without Force Opportunity, you're going to get hit very hard and fast by WL and you have to make quick choices.

But the one thing you do have going for you against a WL is that you know that 9.99999 times out of 10 there are only 2 builds you're going to see. Both builds have Pounce, LF and FO the other is depending on if they have their knockdown, or their finisher.

In a lot of situations for 1v1 a WL will go for his knockdown. 2s+lag can be pretty insane especially when it can ensure they get all 4hits from Co-ordinated strikes off, this combined with armor debuff, LF and AA hits provides that burst most people are so afraid of (myself included). Since my burst rotation relies on the target being less then %50 health I get up from msot WL knockdowns at 50% before I got more then 1 or 2 hits off, and it's playing a horrible game of catch up.

One thing you can do is if you have Savagery is hit them with Draining Swipes as soon as you get up. WL have extremely poor AP management, and stifling them more is going to go a long way to helping you catch up. A smart WL will also kite you after the kd burst so they can get AP back... they have great snares (one on the pet, one in their rotation) and can charge away, replenish AP and pounce back in to finish you off. You cannot kite a WL (charge, pounce) and they can kite you (double snare and knockdown if in guardian spec), advantage WL. Now, a Marauder does have his pull, but a 2s cast that will be set back due to the lion is a folly and you might as well not try because they can just pounce out of your pull to throw your timing off.

A WL that is spec for CTW is going to be running a high advantage against healers and casters but not really against other MDPS except maybe a Choppa, and even then, it's a race to the choppa's kd and then killing the WL. Losing that KD costs the WL a lot vs a Marauder.

Best way to deal with a WL is to have your own knockdown or get your disarm up fast. The other thing is to detaunt right away going into the fight. This mitigates the pet's damage even if you're hitting the primary toon for everything you have. Trying to keep both in the parry arch is not a practical idea but keep the primary toon in as well.

If a WL starts to kite you to get his AP back, kill the pet. Most WL pets are squishie, if you take that pet out and then pull the WL you're going to win that fight because of the amount of damage that the WL loses with the pet on cooldown (re: their %50dmg to crit tactic is dependant on the pet being alive)

Vs Witch Hunters

2011-10-19T04:30:00.000-07:00

I got a message yesterday (very late) from someone asking me for advice on how to deal with a Witch Hunter in a 1v1 situation and if I would post it on this blog to help all the other ppl out there that have problems with WHers. I figure, I could do a whole series based on most of the classes out there.

Here's a confession, WHers are hard in 1v1 situations for just about any class possibly with the exception of turtle/regen tanks which I like to affectionately call "retard spec." WH is a class built do kill targets that are vunerable, separated from their friends or otherwise unsuspecting. If you are a solo player out in those lakes or carrying a part in a sc or any other sort of situation and a WH jumps you, well my friends you're in a great deal of trouble.

Note friends that this advice does not apply to Order fighting a Witch Elf, be clear, while these two classes share a lot of similarities, they play a great deal differently and ask anyone who has played both classes to 80+ and you're going to get a lot of information about the differences between them.

Also do note that there is a large difference between a 1v1 situation out in the lakes and a duel. I was not %100 sure if this find upstanding marauder was asking about duels or just getting jumped in the lakes. Dueling a WH is in fact far easier imo then fighting in the lake for the most part because of one very important fact... predicatbility.

If you are in a duel with anyone you know you're in a fight and who it is against. In many situations you know what level and what build they are in, thus you can prepare yourself mentally and perhaps emotionally for the asswhiping you might just get. In the lakes, you tend to not know it's coming, and then suddenly you're down on your ass with someone beating on you taking away your health before you even knew it was going to happen. That is where a WH shines specifically. A good WH never fights on anyone's terms but his or her own and is in complete control of the fight. My strategy against WH is to take that advantage away from them if not turn it in my favor completely.

A good rule of thumb when you're out and about is to have your Detaunt bound to something effortless for you to hit. Myself, my middle mouse button is my detaunt, and when I suspect some shit is about to go down I keep it pressed down. Call that "pre-loading" your detaunt. This way when they go to pop on you, you're going to have a split second to take your finger off the detaunt and boom, they're detaunted and you're going to take 1/2 of their damage while you're knocked down. In a situation like this you've taken away their advantage of a front end burst. You should be able to get up from that knockdown at about %70 health to %60 depending on gear or lvl gap. A smart WH while having you kd for those 2s will have put Repel Blasphamy on you, or at least is going to apply it as quickly as possible for when you're back up. This as you may or may not know gives them 5s of %100+ parry. So for 5 s the only ability you're going to have to hit them with unless you can get their flank (out of their parry arch) is your Armor debuff. In this situation what you do is hit charge and back off out of range of their attacks OR you just try and keep them in front of your parry arh for when they get up.

Kiting a WH is a daunting task because of their movement barb. You don't have to move too much but you also don't want to give them your flank otherwise they'll take you apart with torment. They won't have many accuastions built up at this point because most times they've blown their wad on BaL or EW (depending on spec).

Many WH have a base parry around 40-50% depending on their level and tactic set up. However, you do have Pulverize and if you can get that off early in the fight you can help to mitigate thatm.

Most WH are also very squishy and thus cannot take too much punishment. In my experience if you can get out of their parry wall (RB) with %40 health you're going to win the fight because most WH's tend to do one thing after RB is up... panic.

It's amazing watching a WH get flustered once they have failed to kill you after they pop everything on you be it SoD, RB, and all that good stuff. Most of the time they don't expect it.

Oh and if you're going to play it anything goes. I like to try my best to pop my absorb trinket before detaunt if I can time it. That way I get 3500 aborb taking half damage most of the time they don't get through the absorb by the time I'm back up and they are in a great deal of trouble at that point. In fact most will just self punt off and run... but running from a Marauder is not so easy with the pull.

Other then surviving the burst from 9 out of 10 wh you can just follow your normal rotation of whatever spec you're in. If you're running the knockdown I would wait for them to get to about %60 to %50 health rather then trying to knock them down right after you get back up, because they'll have their parry wall up. If you're running a disarm then the same thing applies.

Some WH will not knock you down and will disarm you instead. That actually tends to be more effective but the KD they use hits incredibly hard and most then will use that.

Good WHers are very difficult to take on 1v1 and there are plenty out there that even are not good WHers that still will take you out if you're completely jumped and taken off guard. I have no advice for a situation like that.

Gosh I wish

2011-10-17T05:23:00.000-07:00

there were more Order to fight on badlands.

Throughout 3yrs of this game we've seen the balance of power switch from side to side several times, that isn't so shocking or alarming. This time however it was noted by Lyram (a guildie) that it happened far faster then it has in the past. This to me is a cause of moderate concern.

With SWTOR coming in 2 months time many are speculating that WAR will merge the last 2 NA servers into one or even as drastic as taking all of the servers and just making 1. Now, I don't really think that is the solution at all, I think we need 2 servers and I think it's important not to force people with alt toons on the other faction to be forced into 8hr lock outs, nor do I think there should be an abolishion of the lock out. 2 servers I think is the most effective scenario and we all know that WAR isn't trying to get 'new' players if anything they're trying to get old players coming back if anything.

You don't see them updating the website (as noted) and you don't see them really pimping 14 day trials as they once did. Patches are somewhat meaningless attempts at changing something in an RvR system that probably from the start never worked properly.

I understand the excitement about SWTOR and I'm looking forward to playing it (GW2 and D3 also) and since most of the WAR people seem to be fixated on WOH I don't expect any sort of patch coming soon (maybe January) and in said patch I don't expect anything other then return of Keeps (which would be cool).

That being said, I wonder how on earth I'll be able to make rr100 if there is only a few fights, unbalanced SC and flipping empty zones. I suppose my original prediction of never getting to 100 will hold, despite the fact that I'd love to get there... right now RR95 seems like forever away and i'm %20ish through it.

Video Footage

For those who have asked, yes I am currently collecting FRAPS footage for a 3rd video which will feature various aspects of the game from premades to solo to duels to small party combat. Most of the footage if not all is going to be between RR93 and 95 depending on how often I remember to hit the record button. It will be in my typical Sav/Brute build and either in a two armor combinations.

I've also dropped Draining Swipes as of yesterday for full 1800 armor debuff and wounds debuff which seems to be pretty interesting although I need to find a substitution in my rotation that is actually effective other then just hitting flail. I suppose it doesn't really matter since DS was a 20s cooldown and I always forgot to pop it anyway (laugh). That 1800 armor debuff is very nasty I must say.

Zealot

Loving my zealot still and in fact on the weekend took him into ToVL... at lvl 34. Yeah we went through the first 5 bosses before we decided to call it due to our DoK who was melee healing to help me out had to go due to what I can only assume was wife aggro. You can just tell how that dungeon was not built for people in doomflayer while we only had that dok and the main tank in doomflayer it was just too easy to heal. I would say that absolutely if we didn't have Tig melee healing we wouldn't have gotten past boss 5 in my opinion but even when we fucked up trying to bug boss 4 we were still fine the entire time. I got enough currency to buy my LOTD Cape/Ring and I got a glyph drop hahahaha.

I'm thinking we'll be trying to finish the run tonight.

Realm War

2011-10-12T04:38:00.001-07:00

bring back realm war

kthanksbye

I wonder if they realize

2011-10-11T04:13:00.001-07:00

I wonder if EA/Mythic realizes how completely horrible it looks that their news thread on their main page has not been updated since 1.3.6.

And if they realize that really sort of shows how much they care about attracting new players to this game. While I sure do understand the desire to build more and more hype around SWTOR since they set a release date etc etc... it is kind of disappointing that they have essentially jumped ship and have given up. Patches now are so small and generally useless attempts to freshen an RvR system they should never have brought in in the first place...

The only thing I really want is to put in a scenario list that is voted on by players and not be putting in these absolutely trash scenarios. It's to the point that I just don't want to queue up anymore, stonetroll was my least favorite sc leveling up through the tiers and I would just drop queue whenever it popped. It's still shit in T4 and will always be shit.

I find myself just dying for EC or a 6v6 Gates of Ekrund

An Interesting Session

2011-10-02T04:16:00.000-07:00

I had all day to play WAR yesterday in between some working on my own career side projects and what not and for the most part of the day I frigged around on Order side.

My boy hooked me up with a RR82 BW which I respected SDR to see what it was like on the other side of the barrel. As the owner of a RR73 Sorc I already had a feel for what the Rotation was going to be like as well as the need to kite. This BW was pretty decently geared, had some glyphs, had his sovereign etc. First SC was top DMG and tied DBs... I was not so surprised.

Subsequently in other SC you see the difficulties of BW life, that in order to be crazy effective you have to have heals, which I didn't have. But in any instance were I did it was stompy goodness.

I was a noob and didn't write down the account info, must get it back.

That night we rolled an epic 6 man group. The problem is with that you can't face another good group because any SC you join, it's a spawn camp. Even if they try really hard to put up a fight you just kick their ass. Problem with spawn camps... as MDPS you just have to wait for your chance and when someone does get punted, falls or comes off every tank and other MDPS jumps that guy and you feel like you're just zerging instead of trying to play. Lucky for us Cryst was on the 90+ Sorc he is playing and we got plenty of kills. In fact in the only SC that had a fight in it I kicked a lot of ass... why? Bad punting.

Pro tip to tanks out there who like to punt MDPS away from guards or just off their own MDPS... if you punt them to your back line, you need to make sure they are controlled. More then once last night I got punted off the middle temple in MorkT into the back line and proceeded to kill all of the healers in about a minute 3 shotting the AMs and BWs pretty much without any opposition. You cannot let a 90+ Marauder run rampant like that all over your squishies. If you do go for the punt, you need to get back there and challenge, snare get the MDPS back there to finish me off. My Guard has to find me and make a bee line for me and then our backline is vunerable. Don't just punt and forget because I'm going to wipe your entire group, I hit just way to hard and strike way too fast to be ignored. This would not just go for me but any 90+ MDPS like a Choppa or WE and when you have no healers, you're fucked.

Better luck next time.

Things you Wonder if the Dev's actually Thought about

2011-09-29T04:58:00.001-07:00

How about those T4 Influence gear.

You know, the idea of Influence gear in T4 was something I thought was awesome, and yeah at the time it was some good shit, especially the weapons you could get since SC weapons didn't exist... they were replaced by LOTD weapons, and then SC weapons and no doubt some other stuff.

I often wonder if they just gave up on the concept... you know they could re-introduce zone influence and put some gear out there worth using. Right now there is absolutely no reason to use any of that stuff except maybe... MAYBE one of the crit boost weapons, and even at that point it's not that great and not viable

PQs

This game is loaded with content despite what people complain about. Unfortunately those people have good points, the PQ system is awesome and I like the idea of open world Quests with rewards. However for 2 out of the 3 years of WAR PQ's have not given any drops worth running unless you're just looking for title unlocks, and if so, then fine. Some of the PQ's in the game are actually fun, challenging and look really awesome. However for most people there's no incentive to PvE since really... Ruin Gear?

Bringing me to the next point... the scale of Tiers.

When they changed lvl and renown caps on T1-3 and the gear you can wear in line with what they thought would pull the balance closer when new players got to T4 (typically they get to T4 around rr70 if they stick it out as long as possible in all of the lower tiers) they completely eliminated any need for any gear other then the PvP gear you can buy with gold. There's no need to opt in and out of keeps, no need to see all the great PvE content in the game. Most people run into T4 with Bastion Stairs crit weapons which despite a lack of DPS stats have great stats (%4 crit) and take 20minutes to get.

I'm sure the task of adjusting or re-itemizing or adding new PvE gears to this game is not something Mythic is interested in doing. Considering the epic failure TI is as an instance I find myself wondering if there wasn't a way for them to spice up the PvE in this game so that at times when the PvP is slow that you can have something in game to do that is fun. I do understand that the vast majority of WAR players dislike PvE which is why they're not playing WoW but still PvE with a good group of friends is something I am always willing to do. Even to the point where I've offered to do ToVL to run guildies through for gear, it's a change.

The problem I think many people run into with this game is they get burnt out on the grind to 100 or just constant rvr in the lakes. I think there's plenty of stuff out there to do in the game if you want to actually go do some non-pvp stuff for an evening... no you'll get no renown but you're not going to miss out on not making 90 or 100 because you wanted to see how fast your awesome 6 man can clear Lost Vale...

and honestly that actually sounds pretty fun.

Modern Kruelhand?

2011-09-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

Tells, Posts on Forums... the live of a Marauder is not so hard anymore but the demands on the player who knows what he is doing means you have to keep sharp. For me, I go with what has worked the most consistently for me since patch 1.4.0 when the Damage Buff to the class came.

That being said, I will review my builds in Gear, Mastery and Renown and explain in a new sort of "Bump" blog post what I do with my Marauder that gets me the attention from Order I seem to always be getting... ie they want to kill me, and they want to kill me badly... this in my experience means I'm doing something right.

Mastery Build

I run mostly (%90 of the time) a Burst build of Savagery and Brutality.

There are lots of variations on this build. Some people might want to put the extra mastery point I throw into Sav into Deadly Clutch or into Brutality. You might not like to have Draining Swipes and instead invest more points into Brutality also. These are viable to me and you can do what you want. In my opinion the two greatest abilities Marauders have are Cutting Claw and Guilotine, and you get more returns on Guilotine the higher your Armor Debuff happens to be. Thunderous Blows is a close 3rd to Guilotine, I couldn't think of a better Wounds debuff running at the moment because Blast Wave(Chosen) might be AoE but it requires the Spirit Debuff and it hits for next to nothing and is on a longer cooldown. TB will crit for me for 2k on the regular and that is a hell of a wounds debuff (especially when it's dropping an extra 1740 off the top of their health pool).

With this Savagery tree set up I have an armor debuff that removes 1740 armor that is undefendable, that's right they have -%50 of their armor unless they are running Defensive Doom/Sov or stack armor or are a tank... sounds good? Darn tootin;

This build is about the maximization of Mitigation on your target and then blowing it up with Guilotine/Pulverize depending on cooldowns, heals and or guard on the target. In most situations 1 rotation kills anything except for a WP stacking armor, Tank or Tanky RP. This also is not taking Detaunt into effect, in which case you should switch targets once you're detaunted anyways.

For Tactics I run several combinations but in each combination I use Brute Force, Piercing Bite and Growing Insability. The other options are...

Flanking - A great %15 dmg bump that is positional and I do love to run with this especially in ORvR when it can be too difficult for a target to focus on keeping you in front of him/herself.

Unending Horror - Permanant Detaunt is a great thing, just as any healer who can keep you detaunted forever, this is something you can do on a Marauder on AoE for 30ft... great for getting melee trained as you can detaunt till you get parry up. Great for when solo

Subvert Strength - Unlimited Action Points unless fighting people who stack -% to be crit... still Marauders have high Crit anyway.

Feeding on Fear - This is my default max damage in SC's 4th tactic which gets me insanely high crit on procs. This gives the most burst dmg (more then flanking) but you cannot rely on it unless you're protected as you do become squishier... it's still bugged but not in the same way I cannot tell but I know when I have this on I take more dmg... but I dish out a lot more.

most of the other tacts are trash.

Sometimes when I'm bored I run this Brutality/Monstro build, which is fairly cookie cutter.

I happen to really like Wave of Terror and think it's highly effective especially in large fights. This isn't the sort of build you use to win the love of Chosen who use Quake (ie; all chosen) since Wave of Mutilation is a stagger breaker of epic proportions but that WS and Ini debuff is really awesome. This build has more AoE in it also which is nice for large scale PvP and your AoE dmg out of Monstro will be significantly better. You don't armor debuff so your AA dmg won't be as good but Guilotine will hit for about the same amount if you still use corruption. You're using Impale and Flail as spamm attacks in here and with WoM up your AA proc should be up 10s out of ever 15s if not always up, same with Feeding on Fear if you run it. This build is great for killing Soft targets and Melee DPS because you have that awesome AoE KnockDown!

Gear

I am RR 93 which means I am wearing Doomflayer in my gear set ups. If you're not 90 you should be running 6 offensive Sovereign with 5 ToVL gems or the new R40 gems you buy with medallions if you haven't ground out your PvE gear.

I have 2 gear setups in my Closet Goblin.

1 Max Group DMG
Helm - Doomflayer (offensive)
Shoulders - Tyrant
Chest - Doomflayer (offensive)
Gloves - Doomflayer (offensive)
Belt - Tyrant
Boots - Doomflayer Offensive)
Gems - 4 Tovl Glyphs + Back Piece for 5 piece bonus
2 RR90 Currency Weapons from SCs... when I get a good vessel weapon I will probably try that in my offhand.

This runs me with a wounds+crit liniment a 43% chance to crit 9070hp and 1044 str before any party buffs. Typically witha Chosen/Zealot I rest at what works out to a 307 damage bonus before I get any procs or pop my str/toughness buff.

This also gives me a relatively high chance to be crit, and about 160 toughness... it is a very squishy build. Luckily I tend to be guarded and have healer(s) so that in a group I can put all my effort into max damage and kite myself out of trouble if I can.

Solo and Duels
Helm - Doomflayer (offensive)
Shoulders - Doomflayer (defensive)
Chest - Doomflayer (offensive)
Gloves (doomflayer defensive)
Boots - Doomflayer Offensive
Belt - T1 Stage 1 Green Melee Crit
5 piece TOVL set up from the other gear set, same weapons as well.

I actually get 45% crit in this build (better then offensive) but I lose the 180MP proc and have a lower dmg bonus (by like 20pts). I still hit hard, but the 2pc DOomflayer Bubble saves me a lot of trouble when I'm solo or we lack healers. I haven't actually done any dueling in this set up but I think it's going to rock face.

Renown Points

Restating this from earlier in WAR Forum Posts
Max my Melee Crit
Max my Parry%
IV lvls of Strength
pop the extra points in Wounds
good game.

Rotation

The Rotation is simple and can be varied. As needed for cooldowns

TB>CC>Corruption>TC>DS>BRUTALITY>Pulverize>Guil

You can hit this entire rotation in 10s which means you get it all off under Mutated Aggressor if you are not interupted, disarmed, knockdown/punted.

If anyone is on the same target Pulverize won't be needed, nor will Draining Swipes. You want Guilotine on them when they're at 30% because between that and a more then likely x2AA hit it will take care of 30% on any non WP or Tank.

Some fights require a lot of improviation. For Example here is how the average 1v1 fight against a melee WP goes.

I rush in pop MA while I go in and detaunt so his first hit does half dmg (clever no?). Start whipping his ass, it goes fast he'll take a lot of dmg fast because most melee WP axe their surviability because they think they can heal through my dmg. Before he knows it he's below %50 and goes for channel heal... 2 options

Disarm him because chances are you've parried him by now with %40 parry that I have in this set up... he has nothing for 4s and you can finish him off.

Mouth of T - Cone Interupt stops his channel heal and he's on cooldown. The Disarm is far more effective because most people hesitate when that happens and they don't know what to do. The Interupt they can snare you and kite. If somehow the fight goes past that first rotation and he goes again for it and you've disarmed him he'll be immune, that's why you save the Interupt.

Good ones will try for the punt the second you disarm them because it still works when they're disarmed, even then you have the Pull so that they can only really get 1 heal off and then you have immunity also and they have no knockdown, disrupt, disorient to use against you and you'll probably win the fight shortly there after.

In closing

This build is not for everyone but it works if you want to go wreck face. It really shines with a guard on the Marauder so that he can freely do his thing. Unguarded the Marauder is still great because, yeah sure we can keep ourselves up better and more reliably then a WE or Choppa but it's not as great as most people people make it out to be. If you carry absorbs and healing pots you're going to make life a lot easier for yourself and your healers. Remember that builds and gear are only parts of the game... not-overextending, communication with your party and proper assisting ethics will win you most any fight large or small. I can be very selfish on the battle field going for the kills rather then most important target because I am bloodthirstly out there (hahahaha) and I'd way rather kill that Shadow Warrior who's not doing anything to anyone then kill the Archmage healing the White Lion. Sometimes I stick my head out of my ass and play smart.

BTW all ShadowWarriors must die.

Morales?

2011-09-26T04:21:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about things to try and improve WAR that would not be horribly unbalancing to one side or the other. One of the things I've noticed is that for the most part, all classes in their archetype use pretty much the same Morale abilities except for some classes having some really great ones.

As I look at some Morale Abilities I question why they have remained in the game. If we look say at MDPS, almost all MDPS Players use Confusing Movements, having 7s of defence against other melee classes as well as Engis/SW/SH etc is too good to pass up for the other M1 abilities that the classes get. All of the MDSP get Sever Nerve as well, which after T1 serves little Purpose except for that 1 shot chance to get a Tank or killing blow with an undefendable attack that garuntees dmg, and that's great but is it as good as 7s of dodge/parry... I would say no.

The Marauder/White Lion mirror gets a ranged 5s root. This might sound very cool, but really with immunities the way they are in this game most of the time your target is already immune and I suspect that you can simply break the root with juggernaught as opposed so say the Sword Master M2 pounce/snare which is not cleansable, breakable or otherwise removed at all thus making that morale amazing.

Choppas I know recieve a M1 absorb, which you do see as well in the Archmage. Both make sense as good options for morales considering how the Choppa really doesn't mitigate much damage and an absorb is just really handy, and if I were a choppa I would indeed have a good deal of trouble choosing between the absorb and the parry, in the end I guess since you cannot parry a bright wizard or an archmage I would take the absorb as it is the most universally applicable. Choppas also get other great morales like superchop and tantrum!

As a Marauder, really the only morale that is any good is Confusing Movements. I honestly wish they kept the M1 self heal to mirror Ensnare on the WL and give the WL the 1200 self heal but again this was like 2yrs ago I guess. M3 dmg and heal is not worth saving up to M3 for and really honestly hasn't done much for me in any given circumstances. If it did AoE Dmg then that would be viable but...

M2's Force of Will is meh, The Cone attack is what I tend to push out in morale pushes with (saving it for when everyone is low) and what is the purpose of that idiotic core MDPS M2 that gives a little bit of AP back... that needs to be removed/changed completely from all the MDPS. M3 Broad Swings is also bad. Then of course Morale 4 Frenzied Slaughter...

Since the core M4 for Healers doesn't work and Frenzied Slaughter is also worthless I often wonder how it could be fixed. Morale pushes for me is about Tank M4 cycling with DoK/WP M4 in the healing tree. Outside of that no DPS classes are really specing for Morale, they get far more mileage out of putting points in other trees to maximize scaling. Healers will often spec M4 just for pushes out of keeps but nothing is nearly as good as 1K1 + ID cycling. When I am at a keep and someone is calling to build to M4 I just sit there and think... ok M1 is up, that is enough I guess since it'll be about staying alive to dps with my regular rotations and not about some quick burst.

I guess I would love to see some changes to the morales, and the core morales at that not the class specific ones so much. Although Black Orcs need some viable morales I would say.

Marauderlolcritz

2011-09-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

crit is OP

ooh and you could add %50 if you had a WE in the party, oh and you could add %5 with a Banner

back at WAR

2011-09-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

Yeah I caved and came back to WAR until SWTOR comes out. I figured restarting the blog might be something to pass the slow times at work or at least when something interesting happens.

Maraudering

I have gotten my Marauder up to RR92 and have been playing with various builds and gear combinations. Lately my favorite is running 2 Tyrant (shoulders/belt) 5 Glyphs and the rest Offensive Doomflayer. I also am slotting FoF which when all the procs go up (and they do stack) gives me a 346dmg bonus with a 75% melee crit.

LMFAO

It is rare to get that all up at the same time, but it did happen once and I had MA up and I 1 shot a AM with Thunderous Blows + Auto Attacks coming out of Brutality with the armor debuff up. I laughed so damn hard I couldn't screen shot it and it was in ORvR so I never got a ss on it but the TB was for 2.9k and the AA both crit one for 1.9 and one for 1.7 and a sorc proc. Clearly a low level AM but still stunning non-the less.

3.4 Guilotines on Slayers and BWs is somewhat routine if you can find a Slayer unguarded (rare) but whenever I see one out there over extended or not guarded it dies.

I used to love Soloing in the lakes. I don't care that they nerfed the 7piece Sov bonus on defensive one bit (I used to solo in 6 offensive + ToVL Glyphs) but soling now is very difficult because there are no other soloers out there. In the past you used to be able to run around solo or in a 3 man and find other small groups and have a nice little fight. Now you always run into a group of no fewer then 6 it seems and if you're solo against 6 and not a tank you have no chance of escaping, I just try and take one with me and often times it's not really possible. Order on Badlands runs tanks and healers, and most tanks are S/B which is a nightmare for me.

I'm glad to have some guildies back, and to be back. But really once SWTOR comes out I'm there in a flash, mostly because i'm a big SW nerd and I think it looks like a good game so far.

Alts

The grind from 87 to 92 when I resubbed has been brutal. Yeah I would like to get to RR100 but I just cannot see it happening. I've resolved that I will only play this game when it is fun. Strangely that has meant rerolling toons with guildies and screwing around in lower tiers more then T4. T1 is amazing fun, there is always ALWAYS a fight in T1 and there are SCs popping all the time. Since there are no retard builds or 1 win buttons in T1 it actually is a challenge for everyone except for melee WP/DoK and DPS AM/Shamans. I tried a Magus, to 10... didn't like it that much. I then went with a Zealot and love it. My guildies are all around the same level early in T2 and we're running around the lakes with a little 5 or 6 man playing toons we started years ago but just got caught up in T4 when it was fun.

Today I'm starting a Black Guard and I think that I want to play it as a completely stupid turtle regen tank and if I like it as much as I think I will (becaus I love the IB) then I might actually take it to T4 for a laugh. T2 is actually hopping with fights if you don't just trade zones and most people are bad enough that you can be effective if you're a good player regardless of level difference. I was able to kite a 26 WL around BV for about 5mins before a WH came up and I still kited them around for another minute or two /lol at them over and over. Twas funny.

Other Games

A friend bought me a game for my Bday, some sort of compute rhacking thing, Deus Ex I think. He said it's great, I will believe him and try it. It seems like a puzzle like game and although I haven't yet tried it I don't know, I don't like Puzzles, my brain doesn't agree with them but maybe my initial thoughts on it are not correct, which is fine. I'll probably load it up tomorrow or Wednesday and see what it's all about.

Over the Summer I played mostly Civ 5 and read books instead of spend a lot of time video gaming hence why this block was totally inactive.

Dragon Age II

2011-03-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

Well hello folks for anyone that might periodically stop by here.

While no longer do I play Warhammer Online I still am playing games in and out of my day to day life of trying to make it rich in this world of ours... well maybe not rich but at least pay my bills and support those who I care about. Lately gaming has taken somewhat a back seat until last week when I ferociously dedicated my spare time to restarting and finishing Dragon Age Origins in time for my pre-order of Dragon Age II to be released which is currently installing at home on my PC as I clicked 'install' when I was walking out the door to head to work.

When DAO came out I was very interested in the game as the trailers really seemed like it was a lot of fun. I spent a great deal of my Holidays that year playing DAO playing through the origin sequences, trying out the classes and generally having a great time. I played as a Tank Warrior all the way up to just before the landsmeet before the final act and then as work started up again put the game aside, worked and played WAR. I restarted again months later trying a rouge and found it not to be nearly as enjoyable as the Warrior and stopped playing. Now I played from the start again as a Mage and found it a lot of fun. The Mage was rather OP and was making up for over 40% of my party dmg mostly due to AOE attacks like fireball and Blizzard (which was my favorite spell). I beat the game on Saturday of last week played through some of Awakening and when I got wiped without saving for 2hrs I did my usual rage quit and have no real desire to play Awakening as I went to the DA2 demo right away.

I liked the demo although it seemed somewhat unpolished and the cut scene transitions were choppy. I didn't mess with many of the graphic settings and there was little to do outside of basically do a couple of quick fights, get introduced to the new communication system and meet the main character. It did however make me excited as a gamer for the released which was of course today.

When work is over and I get home, play with the dog (not a metaphor) and have diner etc I'll sit down and no doubt bury myself in the game until 2am or something stupid like that. I love the Dragon Age world and mythology and I think it's a great system of combat in the 1st game. Clearly some things have changed a great deal in DA2 for combat and whatnot but as in any RPG you're just as excited for the story as you are mechanics (at least I always have been). I think I'm going to start out playing a S/B Warrior... I don't really like letting the AI do my tanking for me if I'm totally honest...

To those people also interested, no I don't have any intention of going back to WAR any time soon or no doubt ever. There are just far too many things about that game atm that I don't want to have to put up with and there are other games out on the market atm that I'm really enjoying.

Recently been playing Civ 5 again, awesome game. I played Red Dead Redemption on PS3 and loved it. I play EA NHL 2k11 and Tiger Woods somewhat regularly and I find those to be excellent distractions. I'm always up for Company of Heroes with some of my buddies also, fun game but I'm a horrible noob. I'm looking forward to the new Total War game out I think next week!

Moving on

2011-02-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

2/15/2011 is the last day of my Subscription to WAR.

I will not resub.

I have several purposes for writing this post, mostly because I'm sitting here drinking a coffee after spending the last 2 hours working on some new Music and throwing snowballs at my Dog realizing that all the time I have spent playing this game was silly. But Fun silly. Now that I think in many people's opinions this game has run it's course. I carried a blog about this game, I spent many hours laughing and joking around with people from all over the World on Vent or in the game's chat channels.

This was an excellent game. But the game is somewhat a drug. I think that's the goal, to offer you such outlandishly fun times as to make you keep pumping money into their pockets. Hey, afterall $15 is not a lot of money and in fact most of you young pups spend more then that in 1 hour at the bar on any given night or for lunch for you and a friend. $15 is a reasonable price, in fact a cheap price.

My motivations for leaving are that I no longer feel the motivation to keep pouring my spare time into a game that in reality isn't going anywhere that I'm willing to follow. Sure, it would have been great to have reached RR90 or higher and have all that epic gear and just rizzelstomp bitches and have a good time doing it, in reality I'll partly miss not being able to do it past the 15th.

However, it has run it's course. I have decided that Rift is worth a try because... what is $100 anyway (game order couple months of giving it a shot) for some more laughs and fun with some iFriends that I've made the last two years? I fact I am looking forward to the opportunity to play with people who I have been trying to Kill for the last 2 years non-stop.

WAR was my First real MMO, and before it I never understood the alure of this game genre and now I do. However, like all good things they do come to an end. I'm not selling my account because who knows that in 6 months time I might choose to play on a more casual level when everyone is in warpforge and I cannot compete due to the gear.

Mad love to Feared, ROC, DN. Respect for oldschool DC throwbacks on both sides.

Until the 15th I will still be playing and I'll be out there trying to whoop ass as best I can (for whatever that's worth).

tl,dr version

I'm done in 2 weeks, see some of you in Rift.

86

2011-01-30T17:07:00.000-08:00

Hit 86 Tonight and it makes me curious about what Mythic was thinking about some of the 80+ gear.

Mostly because I'm looking at the jewels and the world drops i've gotten and I have yet to find something that I would split up my 6 piece offensive bonus over, and moreso my 5 piece TOVL set. I have a rather nice RR86 Cloak that I would wear, but it isn't worth the loss of the %5dmg in crease I get from my TOVL backpiece.

The Set bonuses is what kills it, because so far to my knoweledge no gear is dropping in RvR that matches the stats and the set bonuses that DPS classes are getting from tovl. This creates imo a significant issue.

1 - Players who want the best gear in the game must PvE in a game that is constantly driving towards PvP all day every day and leaving PvE in the dust. While some people might want to do that, grind TovL to get their gear, this leaves casual players, or players in less populated Guilds/Alliances without groups to grind it with. And those players who are not on 6 or 7 nights a week, when they get on they want to PvP and now they find themselves up against better geared players because those people went and did TOVL when it was the fasionable thing to do.

I see in /1 and T4 and Alliance chat all the time people looking for TOVL groups that never get into one because most people who still play this game who aren't new from 1.4 or returnies have that gear already and don't want to go up against this.

This is going to be presenting itself as an issue now with the sheer grind of rr90. On badlands we have several 90+ people in doomflayer and that gear is so far above Sovereign gear atm that those players might as well be their own 6 man group. Heaven forbid they roll in a premade with guard etc etc. The joke that we're looking at this game turning into Gearhammer is an apt one because I'm finding myself more and more determined to get to 90 just so I can compete and or experience that unbelievably overpowered RR90 gear so that I can laugh my ass off in def Doomflayer just to be a complete asshole.

Edit

I've decided as an experiment to drop the TOVL gear and wear the new gear. My DMG bonus has gone from a 294 unbuffed dmg bonus (280+%5) to 260, a 34 pt drop. My Crit only drops 1%, but I can pick up the 7th piece Sov bonus for the %7 crit on-the target proc...

The next thing is that I'm running 8990 HP with a liniment up from around 8560 which is a nice little bump in wounds. My Toughness goes from a sad 164 to 252 and my Resists skyrocket up about 200pts in each category. Looks like a more durable slightly softer hitting version of the old set. Overall the TOVL set looks like it will be harder hitting but this new set up looks like it might be more viable in terms of a balance between Offense and Defense. I still ought to not be missing out on my 2k+ crits. But we shall see about that.

The biggest downside, the upkeep. 15 doom flayer crests every 2 days or so... means I have to run more TI and I just loath that place.

I'm using the Crit DMG with str andt he Crit DMG with Wounds/Tough, Melee Power and the Sov Piece + an RR86 Backpiece.

Bam!

2011-01-28T17:11:00.000-08:00

I figured it would take doomflayer.

Oh well.

PvP Video

2011-01-27T05:23:00.000-08:00

Those who haven't seen it on the WAR Forums yet, I have a new all Offensive Sovereign PvP Fraps video up on Youtube for your qq or zomgz pleasure.

Offensive Sovereign Video

thanks for watching (if you watch it)

Kruelhand's Guide to Emoting

2011-01-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

Emoting is in many ways a point of controversy in MMO's and in WAR it's pretty much one of the most misused features in the game. Before I get further... why are there not enough animations to go with some great emotes like Hug or taunt (bad animation) and or sometimes animations just not going off... lame.

Laughing

Now, this one is easily the one that burns people the most. Basically there are plenty of scenarios where laughing is in bad taste. Why would you laugh at someone you jump 5v1 and kill them even if they killed 2 of your guys in the process? He should be laughing at you for being bad.

The Laugh emote can be and has been used strategically to goat people into making mistakes to try and shut you up. But in most cases it's just people being asses. When I /LOL it's when 3 ppl jump me and I kill them with them potting absorbing etc etc... I laugh because they were bad and needed to be taught a lesson. I also laugh at funny situations... because that's what people do, laugh when something is funny. But I'm laughing at the situation and not at you. Suffice it to say, very rarely will I laugh at someone just to get them to rage.

I dislike it when you get into a 1v1 situation and you get beat badly and get laughed at. There are far to many factors going into any fight to deserve a laugh. Someone might have lagged out, or an ability bugged or they just made a stupid mistake (guilty of that myself many times) and they lost. Try that guy again and he might roll you right back and I bet you wouldn't appreciate the laugh you get in return. If I go to duels and I rip someone to shreds and will cheer their attempt or clap for them out of respect.

Perhaps that's my problem? I believe in sportsmanship which in most cases is absent from WAR almost entirely except for a small percentage of the player base who is willing to play with respect and some assemblance of honor. Yes the spirit of the game is to kill your enemy and that's all well and good. If you want to emote no one can stop you... but in the end people who emote out of rage or epeen are the ones that look bad.

Aside from cross-realming, emotes are the only way to communicate with the opposite Faction. I think it's something that should be respected and not Overused.

Duels

On other servers I don't know the duel etiquette so for those on Badlands thinking about dueling and don't know how it works I want to summerize it with the rules.

Rule No1

Aside from a Liniment and an Armor/Resist Potion there are no pots allowed. No moral pots no Heal AP pots no absorb pots etc. No LOTD Pocket items!

Unless the duel is labled as Anything goes of course

Rule No2

No group buffs and no Groups. Other people should not be able to benifit from renown by leeching in your duels. It is 1v1 fight and there are far too many risks of a sorc buff or chosen aura to accidentally get added to your buff bar if you're grouped.

Rule No3

IMO first person that dies is the loser even if the other person is killed from DoTs. Some might call it a draw, and I accept that but imo if you die first you lost the duel.

Rule No4.

Duels with Range should always start at 65ft (which is the range of an axe toss). If the Ranged class is willing to be closer then that's his perogative but further or at max range... not cool.

Players are allowed to start with pets out mutations/stances. Mechanics that require ramping up must start at Zero (ie Bright Wizard combustion or Choppa's rage)

Rule No5.

If at some point someone during the duel emotes for you /Hault... you stop no questions asked. Someone might have crashed the duel or they hit their pot hotkey by accident etc. Stop the duel and restart.

How to Start

Signal to your desired Duel partner with an emote.

/beckon
/wave
/point
/taunt

They must agree to the duel with an emote such as /agree.

You can move together with /beckon to an area that your AoE (if used) doesn't interfere with other duels or their duel doesn't interfere with yours.

One person bows (/bow)
once the other person (/bow) back to you the duel is on until someone stops it or someone dies.

So....?

2011-01-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

I'm curious how one can operate a video game, especially an MMO video game that needs subscribers, new players and whatever and have WAR's website so completely out of date.

Their news wire hasn't had a title update since September...

No Producer letters for months as well...

RealmWar while being revamped is dead...

Devs/Andy not posting on the Official Forums...

Community left to speculate and assume that this game is going tits up...

I am, in part a doomsayer in terms of that the glory or best days of this game are loooooong gone yet it still is a great deal of fun. In fact, moments in this game get so epic that it's almost like a drug that you resub or you log on just for a glimpse of those fights that you used to get every night, several times a night. Now they're days or weeks apart. Last night for the first time in it felt like a month we got a legit well balanced 6 man group together for scs and got 1 sc (Isha) in which there was an opposing premade and we duked it out (mostly in the valley to their spawn) and it was a great fight, we (again) had a very strong group (2 chosen me, SH Shaman and DoK, all good players). But then, no scs... lakes seemed to empty once Order fliped LOTD and I logged and that was it... it was 8pm my time.

So in a continuing plea for Mythic's staff to at least communicate clearly their intentions for this game... just please throw us a bone enough so that people don't go running off to Rift like it looks like we will do.

It seems to this consumer that a completely lack of communication for those who render services I pay money for is an insult of sorts. There used to be a time when Andy would frequent our IRC community channel... haven't seen him in over a month... granted it might be an over stretch of his duties to visit us scrublings in IRC but it was a nice gesture on his part to keep in touch with even if he was constantly harassed by bitter players but he always held his own and trolled us right back.

Since 1.4 was a huge change to the game system I am curious, as most are as to what the follow up is. For months we were told that they were changing Orvr... they did... are they going to do more or just go into a maintenance cycle to keep the game going, bring it all down to 2 or 1 server and let the game go quietly into the night?

Seriously these are questions I'm asking here... what is next if anything?

85

2011-01-17T06:49:00.000-08:00

No screen shot... I fail...

In between regular life and some sickness that I've been suffering through (flu season) I logged on this weekend to see %50 bonus to renown gained. I said "lets do some RP farming" and it was so. While never having an optimal group to fight them with, the bonus brought Order out from hiding behind warcamp guards and turtle-ing inside keeps to actually go on the offensive in some zones.

Destro says they want a fight, but they lie like little liars. Me and some DN buddies farmed Order in zones with AAO Buff because Destro wanted to PvDoor their way to Altdorf for the billionth time. This was fine with me, I don't care about being out numbered or being zerged down by 16 guys to my 4 because I still killed 6 of them before they finally were able to kill me and my team. Order is bad, Destro is worse in most cases.

Anyway, after the RP fest was over for me I went and dueled for a while with some of the actual capable Order on the server and had a great time.

1 month left on my subscription means Mythic has 1 month to do something interesting or at least stream line, correct or fix the issues in game going atm. Rift has a beta starting next week, I'll be preordering so I can get a key.

Rift

2011-01-11T06:35:00.000-08:00

I'll be pre-ordering Rift in anticipation of the next Beta Event and moving to that game full time.

Most of my Guildies are going to be moving to Rift, at least the core of said guild and the guys I enjoy playing the most with. WAR has been stagnant and boring since 1.4 with no communication from the developers and no competition in game. While I do enjoy a good fight more then I enjoy anything they are so rare these days that you just can't find motivation to stay logged in for what, the sake of getting renown?

While sometimes I admit that I would love to get to 90 and 100 I just cannot do PvDoor anymore, there just has been far to much of it and there is no PvE content in this game that is remotely challenging for fun to do that I've not done a million times already. I'm ready to move on (again) but this time I think that an extended break is incoming. If Rift is as good as my guildies say it has the potential to be then it looks like when my WAR subscription ends in February then that's all she wrote.

This is all of course is all subject to change. A lack of communication from Mythic really has been the cause of a lot of my own personal grievances and I would love it if they came out and said something to the effect of what it is they plan on doing in the future for this game. Right now they say nothing except for changing cast times for healers... I'm pretty sure healing has been out of wack in this game since release so making it easier to heal probably isn't a good direction to go in my opinion. While I'm find with the idea of making WP and DoK actually melee/front line healers as they were perhaps intended to be originally I just don't see a need to give RP/Zealots Sham/AM's more healing (especially if I'm honest RP and AM are vastly superior healers to Zealots and Shaman although Shaman/AM are close enough).

What WAR really needs is new content. There hasn't been new content added to this game worth putting any time into since Land of the Dead. Now that everyone has their tyrant and pocket items (not everyone, no) it is a moot zone that I never go into anymore and most people don't even bother with. In fact not 2 weeks ago I took my Marauder to LOTD to see what ganking could be done just to see if people still go there to level. I found 2 people in the entire zone and I combed that motherfucker for a good 30-45 minutes looking for anyone, anything to kill.

The new "pvp" dungeon is a joke. Since 1.4 I've done that thing a dozen times if not more and not once have I gotten an instance with a fight in it. I've tried solo, I've tried 6 man I've tried 12 mans I've tried as soon as it opens or half way through... nothing. Not only that, it's buggy and boring as hell without any Order in it. Shit, I don't even know if it's fun with order because I've never been in there with order!

I want WAR to survive and I want to do my part. At this point however I just don't know what to do. We have no feedback we have no sounding board. I'm contemplating transfering to an EU server where Destro is out numbered just for a challenge but then I'd be leaving behind all my guild friends I've made over the last 2 years and that to me isn't acceptable.

Lets hope that we get some feedback/communication from Mythic sometime in the next week or so!

Spec

2011-01-08T08:46:00.001-08:00

There's a new website replacing the old WARDB and it gives a nice little feature where I can link and english my current spec and gives a link to a chart like the old WARDB (although not as polished)

Career Builder: Marauder
===================

Path of Savagery: 14
Path of Brutality: 9
Path of Monstrosity: 0

Purchased Abilities
===================
(Path of Savagery) Draining Swipe
(Path of Savagery) Cutting Claw
(Path of Savagery) Thunderous Blow
(Path of Brutality) Mutated Aggressor
(Path of Brutality) Growing Instability
(Path of Brutality) Guillotine

Selected Tactics
================

Tactic 1: Brute Force
Tactic 2: Piercing Bite
Tactic 3: Growing Instability
Tactic 4: Flanking

Selected Morales
================

Morale 1: Confusing Movements
Morale 2: Great Fang
Morale 3: Tzeentch's Reversal
Morale 4: Frenzied Slaughter

View on The WARdrobe: http://wardrobe.war4scrubs.com/CareerBuilder.aspx?class=MAR#14;9;0;13:9:5:;9:7:5:;;5196:5191:5217:5197:;5201:5193:5194:5204:

84

2010-12-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

Ding 84 in a horribly boring Scenario that I took just to get the last 1500 to get the RR. The lakes have been awesome lately, weekend Order gets the numbers over Destro in the morning/afternoons so I've been soloing or running with a small gank group soaking up the renown from 68% to 100% over Sunday and Today.

Tonight, while no AAO was great as we were pretty much farming Order at their spawn until they put enough numbers to push our 8 with some extra destro out. I was shocked how long we were able to stand in their shit, even to pulling guards. I was like 50 kills and 6 deaths while the next highest killing blows was my guard with 20. It was a good night for me at least.

I don't even find myself looking to do scenarios anymore, and when I'm out in the lakes I try and stay clear of the zerg as much as possible, but sometimes it is unavoidable. The Pugs for Destro are just so bad and generally have no clue (sorry) and I just end up getting focused by the Order premades that I always see running (or combinations).

Top Tens pt I

2010-12-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

I'm going to do a series of Top Tens in Warhammer

This Installment...

Top 10 Things that Annoy Me About WAR

10. Limited Available Trainers

IC/Altdorf and Viper Pit/Sigmars are the only places to respec in the game outside of T1 makes no sense. Also, not only that but in City instances you can respec in your spawn your Mastery but not your RR and in LOTD you can respec your RR but not your mastery... wtf is with that, it makes no logical sense!

9. Cave In

An Offensive 4s knockdown on a 20 cooldown that has no requirement other then a great weapon. The Black Guard requires a shield AND block and gives you an extra second, granted that I think is retarded as well 5s or 4s knockdowns are stupid, no KD should be more then 3 s and that should be only in the hands of Defensive Tanks

8. Healers Only Being Able to cleanse limited Debuffs

All healers should be able to cleanse the same shit, not this mamby pamby 'oh i can't cleanse cuz I'm a zealot'

7. White Lion Pet AI

This is horrible, unreliable and has been since day one. Why Mythic hasn't fixed this yet is beyond me. The WL would be an awesome class if the pet mechanic actually did something to aid the class rather then (for the most part) hinder it's ability to be functional in group play.

6. Terribad Weekend Scenario choices

Last while.. Black Fire Basin, Blood of Black Carin?! These were horrible SCs that ppl wanted gone in the first place only bringing them back reminds us how much we hated them.

Why not bring Logrens Back and let us mount up so ppl can't dodge the fight so easily, what happened to Reikland Hills, Howling Gorge, Grovood Caverns those were decent SCs for the most part (well Caverns was somewhat annoying but at least there was always a fight to be had)

5. Spawn Guards

Pulling, Punting etc into guards is old. Some players can't kill anything except for cheap shit like that. Granted I have pulled into guards many times but I only do it when spawn camped by a double premade and we are all pugs just to break up the stupidity. Every SC needs a set up like EC does, no spawn camping possible, just portal in and everyone has 5s of immunity and then it's on.

Not to mention also Spawns are not ballanced anyway. You can take a lot of SCs and see that it's easier for one side to Spawn Camp another or guards react differently..

Norden Watch
Order Spawn is a slope, guards aggro super easy, long punts into guards. Destro spawn is easier to break out from but is a long stretch where you have no terran advantage and Order can just wait back well out of range of any Destro punt

Reikland Factory
Same deal

Serpant's Passage
Relatively fair but Destro's guards don't react to any aggro. Someone can get pulled or punted right into them and nothing happens. Order aggros easier, not by much. This is why I like SP anyway, the guards relatively even and spawn is fair.

Isha's Will
Even

Battle for Praag
Even? Order has more guards at the front of their spawn then Destro does.

Caledor Woods
Order has a much wider spawn cliff face to work with and their guards are right on the edge while many Destro guards are way way in the back out of range of any fight. The Destro spawn is far more narrow as well but has more rock faces to LoS so I suppose that's fair enough.

4. Pistol Whip

As a player of a 59 WH Pistol Whip and Heartseeker are glaringly overpowered in my book. No knock down should hit this hard. In many instances on my WH I was getting nearly 2k crits on Pistol whip and that is in conq/invader gear with mediocre weapons. Not only that, but combined with FP you can pull this kd off anywhere for butt loads of dmg and pretty much burst through any target not in heavy armor to a sizeable advantage. Perhaps even worse is the fact that WHers get too much defensive abilities (Magnus, Repel and Declare) that if something goes wrong they can panic out of it.

3. DPS Healers (AM/Shaman especially)

Healing archtypes shouldn't be putting out the damage that they are capable of putting out. An Archmage has the ability to roll with 2 punts 4 dots a heal debuff an aoe snare that debuffs their dmg type, an M1 bubble for like almost 4k silence and a channel dot that ticks for 1k a pop not to mention can heal themselves rez others and buff their groups resistances. Shaman are similar minus dots but have all sorts of kiting abilities that make them almost impossible to catch for any melee damaging class. While the trade off might be squishieness all one needs is a modest ability to kite or just find a nice comfortable place to snipe from and you just can wrack up renown and kills without any effort what-so-ever.

2. No Snare Immunity

Currently snares are broken to the point in which many stack. IBs Knights and other tanks are putting out so many snares (and AoE Snares) that it is crippling MDPS in a way that it is makign it impossible for them to get on any soft targets of priority. Now, I can break a snare or root for 10s every minute, but other then that I am snared. I can charge, get myself back to normal speed 14s out of every minute which gives me 24s out of 60. This might sound reasonable but because Snares have no immunity I can be KD and or punted at the same time to eliminate the effectiveness of my Root/Snare break and or Charge.

Snares need to be looked at, especially now with the stacking of it. Either give an automatic 5s snare immunity (which I think is fair) or lessen the time you get snared from an ability. This perma-snare bullshit has got to stop.

Partily I'll admit that most Destro tanks on Badlands are horrible with their CC because 80% of them are Chosen and they just want to LOLRAVAGE spam their way to victory (and seldom do they actually contribute anything to the victory)

1. Bright Wizard Utility and CC Abilities

No way on Earth should a class with this much damage out put get this much CC without sacrificing anything

SDR - 100 foot knockdown? Please.
Firecage - AoE Root on an instant cast
Withering Heat - Channel Dot with a snare from range?!
Mage Bolt - M1 Knockback
Cauterize - Remove any debuff... wtf
I don't know the name but they also get a heal debuff an AP drain

now some of this you have to spec for... so what. This plus a shitty BW can crit you for 8k in 1 time stamp if they actually know how to rotate and do it all from 100 ft away while you try to get close to them. Oh I pull you... nope KD, kite dot you up Sear is 1.5s Pyro is 2s and you're dead.

Not saying Sorc's don't have their retarded shit also, but Bws just have way too much and if anyone tells you that BW and Sorc are balanced then they are smoking drugs.

I'd love to hear back from readers as to what Annoys them in game the most!

WHAM

2010-12-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

I've been messing around with builds and playing alts. Tonight I went back to my 1.4 build and I hit a Slayer (who was city champion) for the above.

My question is, he didn't mitigate anything... which seems odd.

Oh yeah and Happy Holidays

Been Quiet

2010-12-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

Things have been slow lately in WAR mostly because a lot of people in Guild are taking breaks or trying out some other games... most harmful was the loss of our guild's top Defensive minded Tank's account due to a hacking. We're hoping he gets it back.

So while his stuff is waiting to be restored I spent a lot of time duoing and such with him in lower tiers. A lot of guildies have gone back to WoW or went to test Rift. Me, I'm a WAR guy and I don't have any interest in either of those games. So Escha and I (his BG and my Shaman) have been terrorizing the noobs a bit, and to our delight many DN guildies wanted to join in on it jumping on their T2 toons as well! I forgot how interesting it could be and exciting to level in a group through RvR... getting that tactic or skill that pushes your class to the next level is fun.

Maraudering

I've been running a new RA build were essentially i'm able to run capped strength with a chosen buff, a 35% crit and a 40% parry. My STR drops a lot and I lose some crit when I put defensive gear on but I remain ultimately an equal force when i switch gear in terms of a solo guild. The 6 Offensive sov + Glyphs and the 40% parry is just a real nice thing to have when Order melee turns their wraith on me and also a whole slew of Melee spec WPs who are out soloing a lot... I don't spec CJ anymore so WP can be tricky with no knockdown but with the Parry + Disarm it's pretty much cake. In fact I find myself toying with most of them, and there is one that I need to get some payback on for him getting the better of me a few times before I respected. I also have 1 level of Cleansing Winds... why someone wouldn't spec that unless they were a healer is beyond me because that thing has saved my ass too many times to count already.

Oh, of course Ding RR83... I didn't capture the moment because we were in a very intense Scenario at the time but i do have the /g announcement ss!

ding 82

2010-12-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

Busy at work, busy at play. I'm enjoying the game more probably then I have in a while. This makes me happy. But hey check it out, ding 82. Lucky, that at the same time I am not really that concerned with hitting rr90 or higher. I know i'll get it so I'm just enjoying the fights as they certainly are numerous!

Defensive Sov vs Offensive Sov and why I run Offensive

2010-12-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

Wow I got a gear upgrade last night when I finally dug out enough Captain's Emblems to buy my RR81 main hand weapon. She's a doozy and actually amazingly enough the artwork isn't utter shit on it.

77.X DPS is a nice little bump, while I logged right after I slotted a tali in it and have yet to check it out I'm interested in seeing what it's going to give me for more white dmg. ATM My main hand is getting crits in the 1k range on medium to squishie targets (1.4k on BWs or AMs) and my Offhand is getting 900s and 1ks. Brutality combo with Savagery is giving insane AA dmg when the Brut proc goes off with Cutting Claw up.

I'm still working on the rotation and trying to fine tune it. Honestly it's not the greatest build for large scale combat but I am getting through just fine. Having a double Marauder group over the weekend was sort of cool also with Rathead(another 81 marauder in DN) in defensive gear running the same build.

I've been running in the lakes with Defensive gear up solo lately and it's funny how you don't trade off a whole lot of raw dps with that set up then full sov with your defensive status being raised through the roof. Either way, I didn't wait 2 years for this patch to gimp my dmg by wanting to live longer... I just go get a pocket guard.

The trade off is really that sustained dmg wise Def vs Offensive is about the same when you take into consideration the 7 piece proc. However Burst wise, Offensive is through the roof. With a liniment I have %40 crit without Feeding on Fear (so %60 if I opted to run it) and 1100 strength atm with brute force (if I am running it).

What this means to me is that I can run 4 tactics without Brute force in a group with a chosen or zealot. In defensive you pretty much imo have to run BF and FoF because your crit is not going to be touching 30 with a liniment and so you're limited from that point since you probably want to run PB as well leaving 1 swing tactic.

Your damage and utility options in Offensive Sovereign are significantly improved over Defensive. Think about it this way, if you drop BF and always run PB you don't have to worry about weapon skill and you can swing tactics 3 tactics (since you always have PB) and don't need FoF

Flanking, always take it imo
Subvert Strength, great for long fights lots of tanks or healers
Unending Horror, save your ass
Deadly Clutch, you could spec that for the heal debuff, not such a bad idea
Growing Instability, which of course is now part of just about every single Marauder build.

As of late I run two tactic set ups in a group where I get a str buff.

Flanking, Piercing Bite, Growing Instability, Subvert Strength
or
Flanking, Piercing Bite, Growing Instability, Unending Horror

Many Marauders, especially lower RR Marauders might want to run Feeding on Fear because you won't be able to obtain a %40 Crit without that proc, and that's a good idea since our dmg is so based off burst atm.

In Defensive Sovereign you are probably going to be running

Brute Force, Growing Instability, Feeding on Fear, Piercing Bite as your most logical options to be able to maintain some sort of DPS level to match your survivability. It works really well, in fact it's probably stronger then the Offensive set up, clearly in 1v1 situations at least.

In my current build WHers are the only things giving me significant problems in offensive sovereign because of their opening burst. I almost always bring them down to 30% if not lower once I get up. That being said most WHers are cake if they don't get the jump on you in the first place since they have to ramp up their mechanic. WHers in defensive sovereign are just like Marauders in Defensive Sovereign, complete pains in the ass and probably better in the long run due to Torment and Feinted Positioning.

But as said, I didn't wait 2 years to not go for big numbers and huge burst. If anyone is interested in a cool addon-mod for tracking your big hits, try moneyshot. You can reset it as much as you want to and as long as you disable it going into Stage 3 or say beating on a resource carrier with AAO you get some nice honest numbers on big hits. It comes with an other mod that will screen shot your big hits as well as they come along. I currently have that disabled because I dunno about what sort of lag that would cause... maybe I'll give er a shot!

6 Vs ???

2010-11-29T20:12:00.001-08:00

I don't know what the exact numbers were tonight.

Over the course of the evening, we had a 6 man that started out in Praag that repeatedly wiped entire warband(s) of Order and even spawn camping them. This went on for about 40 minutes until a guildie busted out in chat

"%400 AAO in BC"

so it began. We moved to BC and started to farm Order wtih between 200 and 300 AAO bonus for well over an hour to the point of actually spawn camping the remaining 200% bonus until we started to take BOs. They had rank 5 and we had rank 2 but we had them bottled up in their keep. At one point 4 melee dps bypassed and killed ppl inside the keep that came out to fight... defensive sovereign is OP.

We split our 2.5 groups up after the AAO disappeared and ran some SCs and when I logged of now we were up to 4 stars in that zone... I'm wishing I had time to go there and flip that zone... it would be fitting... and soooo funny.

Lesson learned... Order zerglings are horrible.

One Shot

2010-11-25T21:48:00.001-08:00

My first ever official One Shot.

... Ding

2010-11-20T22:29:00.001-08:00

About 8 months of no renown gain on my Marauder culminated today in reaching RR81. Now the hard part begins as no more renown bonus from the progression pack and an army of Order to fight.

Been pretty much in RvR since Thursday. Tomorrow I start working on the 730 crests I need for my RR81 weapon... which I could wear now if I had the scratch!

Spec

2010-11-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've been asked by some people who read this blog via in game tells some questions. I apologize for not replying, my ISP is really having trouble with the game and I'm getting disconnected before I can give answers.

The Most common question has been what spec I've been running since Thursday. Well it's easy.

Savagery - Draining Swipes, Cutting Claw and Thunderous Blows
Brutality - Mutated Aggressor, Growing Instability and Guillotine.

Tactic set up is Growing Instability, Piercing Bite, Flanking, Brute Force/Feeding on Fear (if I have pocket chosen aura).

The Trick to this is back load burst, I'm aiming to get all my mitigation debuff's up on a target in time for a huge Guillotine crit to finish them off. This isn't always open but your TB and CC are still going to be hitting hard on crits enough so that you don't need to rely on Guillotine to finish people off. Draining Swipes can also hit for double 1ks after Cutting Claw if you get their back.

My highest crit thus far was 3k on a sub 40 AM so I won't count that. I ran into a Slayer at badmoon 1v1 and my Guillotine hit him flush for 2.7k. This is a somewhat situational build and more for smaller fights a great scen build. In Open RvR I will be running a Monstro Bomb build

Monstro all the way with Energy Ripple, Wrecking Ball and Concussive Jolt with Brutality with Mutated Aggressor and Growing Instability. Tactics will be Brute Force Subvert STrength Growing Instability and Piercing Bite. Considering with my sav/brute spec I'm getting some 1300 demolitions on soft targets I'm expecting a lot of AoE dmg from this spec which I want to try out later today if I can log on.

Curious about Renown Points?

I haven't changed anything and am specing all the strength and crit with 1 pt left over that I just throw into weapon skill (1 point is useless). Once I get to RR89 or 90 I will respec for total cleanse.

Reflections

2010-11-17T06:40:00.000-08:00

2 years of this game and the Open RvR lake system is about to change in a drastic way. There's a lot of controversy about this, some people are against it, some vastly for it. Want to know what I think?

While I don't know how the new system is going to shape up, I am very happy that there is a change of this magnitude. I came into this game and cut my teeth on Dark Craag, for North American servers that was an Open RvR Server that had a 1500 Order zerg going 24hrs a day 7 days a week (slight exaggeration yet only slight) When Ruin left for Aion Destro had it's turn to push and we were putting out huge zergs. I fought on both sides of the coin and was burnt out on Open RvR to the point of after moving to Badlands and getting RR80 I hardly ever ventured out into the lakes to fight for a few reasons.

The biggest being that there was no reward and all risk. Yeah it's fun to get into those huge fights but with the stability of the server being the way it is often times open field fighting was a disappointment and since there was no gear to obtain and no renown to be had. I grew to prefer scenarios, a smaller staged combat which had an even playing field of numbers 12v12 all the time unless people quit or crashed. This let you test your skills gear and teamwork against the opposition without the threat of 60 order coming over the hill and stomping you into the ground.

I did a lot of Dueling, and dueling is fun but pointness and in a lot of ways proves nothing. Some classes are naturally suited to defeat other classes with ease or can gear/spec in a way to make them unkillable or have absolutely zero chance of winning. Either way I did enjoy duels and became alright at them, Marauders were for a time the ultimate duel class with the AP drain the way it used to be, and I see them becoming top of the mountain dueling classes again after the patch.

I digress.

I was burnt out on ORvR because essentially it was vastly the same every night in and night out with the same strategies employed by both sides. The new mechanic does not offer for the same strats anymore and both sides have to develop new ideas and new ways to lock the zone. The objective might be dumbed down to "take the other keep" but defense of BOs, Resource collection and protection, skaven forces and new ways to fight in on or around keeps are making this change for lack of a better expression "a shit load more interesting." Zerging is just flat out not going to work the same anymore, with bombers, having to protect BOs and defend or attack philosphy things are going to be very interesting and shall I say... different.

DN is on the cusp of an all rr80 warband with balance (although tbh melee dps heavy). And that is one thing I am seriously excited about getting to do is role deep with all guildies.

Not because I will be able to get gear and renown but because the system is offering up something new, I'm excited to go back out in the lakes and zerg it up with my fellow Destro. I anticipate some epic shit to be honest.

Tonight is the last night of old school RvR and I'm going out into the lakes tonight in celebration for all the great conquests and even the defeats that have taken place in this game for 2 years. Thursday the packs and patch hits and I'll be downloading/buying all of it. Won't really get to play until Friday... with the Marauder class getting a big buff, the changes to the game's mechanic and a strong server population I think WAR is really heading in a positive direction. Now lets nerf the Sorc/BW mechanic shall we?!? I hit a rr80 Iron Breaker last night for 6k in one time stamp and my sorc is rr69... that is broken.

1.4 - This Thursday

2010-11-14T12:25:00.001-08:00

Well after a lot of controversy on forums and in discussions all over most WAR related interwebz the new expansion RvR packs are hitting the market this Thursday for a total price of $15 USD.

The Price is good, lower then I anticipated (was thinking $20 was reasonable) and with the added Renown levels and other cool items and peronalization options between the packs it really in my view a must buy addon for the game.

The PTS testing was in my opinion somewhat useless. Lucky for Mythic it will take some time for players, even the hardcore ones to reach 100, or even 90 for that matter. Thus there is time for them to work out the tweaks. I'm anticipating 4 months for RR90 at a reasonable grind rate and that is taking into consideration things like AAO and the new mechanics. Very hardcore players might make 90 in 3 months. That being said once you start seeing more and more 90s appearing on the field those people not buying the new packs are going to get left in a dust so thick that it will in my opinion hurt the game from getting new customers.

For example now if you are a fresh 40 and lets be generous and say are RR40 as well. When you get into the lakes or a scenario and look across the field and see a half dozen 75-80 ranked players you know that you don't have a hope in hell of winning the fight let alone even taking one with you. Low rr players are at a significant disadvantage. Do you wonder how long it would take a RR100 Choppa to kill a RR57 Witch Hunter? I say two global cooldowns (3 if the WH parries something).

While I am not an MMO veteran my experience, and from conversations with many people who've played multiple games is that much of the MMO Experience is the grind of level and gear. Adding 20 new levels and 2 new RVR gear sets gives me something to work towards again, which is cool and I look forward to that (in some ways). Obviously, as a Marauder I'm more interested in the buffs to the class coming on Thursday more then I am for having to grind renown again (if I want to grind renown, I get on my alts).

Many people are conflicted as to what is going to come of WAR after Thursday, I think for the most part things are positive, moving forward and growing. The game is going under a drastic change, and especially for those players who mostly play in the rvr lakes things are getting shaken up to the point that it's almost a completely new game again, which is a good thing. In addition the new Scenario system might offer a change of pace for players that tend to send their time queued for scenarios (like myself).

Either way, the cool thing coming us is that the guild I am in is about to have 24 RR80s with a good mix between DPS, Tanks and Heals (although it will be heavy on melee). Which ought to be really cool to be able to run in a 24 man group once and a while... that's not counting our sub 80s (which there are plenty of I suppose).

And those that aren't 80 come Thursday will probably hit 80 in a hurry once they download the packs.

I've been unable to play much this weekend as my ISP is really shitting the bed and I keep getting disconnected from the server any time I try to log on and play so lately I've re-installed Dragon Age, which is a great game I never finished when I first bought it. At least it calms my gaming addiction!

Burst Test

2010-11-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

Burst build on the PTS with my copied RR80 Marauder. This is on an unkillable Mob. I have to work on the timing still. But almost 19000 dmg in 10s.

Thanks for the buff Mythic.

It's going down

2010-11-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

1.4 Patch Notes are Up... Marauder Changes going Live!

Grats to the Marauder community, it's time for our revenge.

I have ZERO SYMPATHY for all the complainers, bitchers and crybabies out there. Most people are smart, staying quiet. The first BW or Sorc that I see complaining about Marauder dmg I'll probably laugh so hard I'll crap my pants. We've been brought up to speed in terms of damage and if built properly and geared properly... yes we probably are on the lower side of Overpowered. But fret now all over melee classes, you still are needed, it's been 2 years of horrible Marauder living and there are not a lot of us out there who actually know how to play the class and have the correct gear to make everyone look bad yet. Those of us out there who fought through all the nerfs and lack of attention already make people look bad when we roll them in PVP.

In conjunction with the release of Patch Notes EA/Bioware/Mythic have released details on the packs and opened their download store...

I'm not going to pay for a mount for lvl 2. I'm not going to pay for 10buck free level. I'm not going to bay 10 bucks for a 'pet'. Seriously overpriced shit here guys I'm sorry. I like the idea of offering that sort of stuff, but you're asking too much money imo.

I'm clearly buying the progression pack, the personality pack... I dunno we'll see what the prices are when they're released. Until then I patiently await the 1.4 patch which probably will be out in a few weeks.

Isha lawl

2010-10-27T07:49:00.000-07:00

I did 1 Scenario on my Marauder in the last 4 or 5 days. Mostly I've been playing my Sorc or playing Civ 5 (i know i know don't hate it's a great game). Last night after going like 200 for 7 with my Sorc in RvR and a few sc's I solo pug'ed an isha's will on my Marauder for laughs.

I picked up the murder ball at one point and ran into the middle of the temple with a guard on me and some heals and killed 8 order in about 15 to 20 seconds. It was pretty damn funny as they were desperately trying to kill a DPS DoK and Choppa on the other team, ignoring me almost completely as I was practically 2 shotting people, 2k+ crits, auto attacks flying and assisted by a 2handed Chosen made for a good capping of a decent night of pvp.

BTW, if you liked the previous Civ games and haven't tried 5 yet, it's awesome. Probably the best one yet in my opinion.

Some fun Memories

2010-10-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

I was talking the other night with some players and we were enjoying some story swapping about some of our most fun times playing this game. I thought I'd share some of them.

R21 White Lion

I have to say that the most fun in this game that I have had was playing my White Lion when I was finally able to spec for Pounce. That first Scenario I was a death machine, mostly because no one knew how to deal with Pounce and the CC that even a R21 lion has. I was pouncing into the back lines on r15 squishies and just murdering them. I carried AP pots with me at the time and had heal pots and all that stuff, essentially I was a Twink I guess but it was the Pouncing and killing that was insanely fun. That's the problem with low tiers, once you get to the top of the food chain it ends so fast. I got to T3 and like many servers at that time, T3 was dead due to massive powerleveling shit in Land of the Dead. Now that's not an option which makes me wish I could re-level my WL or perhaps roll a new one. Either way that was insanely fun.

T1 Witch Hunter Death Blow Race

Way back in the day when I first started playing my Witch Hunter I got into an argument with a WL in T1 about something completely trivial and we decided to settle it with a test of skill. We'd group up both r11 and do a scenario. The winner would be the person with the most death blows at the end of the scenario. I managed in a nordenwatch at rank 11 to obtain 27 death blows on my Witch Hunter. It was hilarious for sure.

1 hour 57 minutes

Clearing ToVL before any boss nerf's in under 2 hours including the obligatory smoke break for Snotslinga after boss 4. We would just coast through that dungeon and have a great time doing it. I remember when ToVL used to be the biggest pain in the ass and that night when he cut it under 2hrs set a chain of events where farming ToVL under 2hrs was probably our average time. Which was great, we could go in and do a full clear with our group and be done with time to do some Scenarios before it was too late in the evening.

I'm sure people clear that shit in 1.5hrs now but back then that was fairly unheard of on our server at least.

Riposte/AP Drain Insanity

I mentioned it before on this blog but my Riposte/AP drain build before both those tactics were nerf'd was absolutely insane. When I say that 7 guys were trying to kill me at the same time and I was able to kill 2 of them before the rest of the team showed up to help me out I'm not exaggerating at all.

Riposte used to crit, Exhaustive strikes would rob you of 40AP on every crit. This sounds pretty sweet, but you combine that with a %40 parry and a %30 crit chance you're basically draining everything hitting you from the front. Buying time with absorbs up until M1 is up and you could take on an indefinite number of melee attackers for a long time. This was way way way before the new defensive sovereign and I could only imagine how retarded OP that would be in the current live version. Boy that would be a treat to try out if those tactics still worked. I would solo que for days like that and hardly ever die and pick up lots of kills.

Duo

I love to duo with Chosen. I don't care if they are S/B or Two Handers it's just a lot of fun. A marauder and chosen make a great team since all the debuffs that go flying around really can play havoc with your enemy. I don't know how many times a chosen and myself have stood up against 6 to 1 odds and managed to cut them down to even numbers before finally getting overwhelemed. Not that long ago Eschatology and I went to MS in Praag and took on at least 2 groups of scattered pugs and managed to kill over half of them before the rest of their zerg showed up for the 2nd cap and ran us down. I don't ever mind dying in this game unless I am killed for a stupid reason. But 12 v 2 and coming out with 6 or 7 kills is a good day at work and that shit is fun as hell. Now, if we had a healer with us I think we could have taken them all!

Turtle Turtle

Again a long time ago we had a 6 man held up in South BO in Reikland while Order was zerging. It was me, a Chosen, a Squig, a zealot and DOK and we held that BO for over 45 minutes before Destro showed up and hit their zerg from behind. I gained 25% of a 7X renown rank in there just from all the assisting and killing. I don't think I ever spamm'd Demolition so much in my entire life.

Old School City RoFL Bomb Marauder

Probably the funniest OMG moment on my Marauder was in the city where I was spec all the way up Brutality for the M4 since we were running a bomb party. This was the old city mechanic with the BO flags you had to camp. We were defending the middle BO and I went off to check on BWC with a few other of my realm (a BO and a Zealot) and when that place was decided to be safe we went to flank for lolz. My morale was steadily going because for some reason we were not getting out of combat. I had the BO guard me and popped Forked Aggression (a 20s barb that deals all dmg back to the attacker +%50 extra) and ran into the middle of them with my Monstro arm out. We got into the half way point of their little zerg which essentially was right in the heart of their casters. They turned to kill me just when the BO aoe punted. I was now in group heal range of the rest of our group but they were focusing me and I probably killed at least a dozen people with the barb and demo spam. They fell apart and tried to retreat but we managed to kill the stragglers.

Sadly ppl got too much tunnel vision and ran right into the General aggro'ing all the pve mobs and getting half our group wiped. But I was pretty pleased either way, it was fun.

Anyway those are a few fun times.

QQ Moar

2010-10-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

Pwnage?

2010-10-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

For some reason things really have been clicking lately on the ole Marauder. I think i've been re-inspired by the class considering that the 1.4 Marauder will be a dangerous creature indeed. However, I must be clear about a few theories that I have about 1.4 Marauderdom that I felt I should share.

Pwnage?

I don't think honestly that the Marauder has any issues live with being an effective class. I don't use myself, an experienced Marauder with the top gear available as an example. A Marauder brings plenty of useful tools to the table while still able to deal out respectable damage. While this is all pretty much limited to one build the Marauder in said build is effective. We live in a world of RR80 full sovereign toons and if you are not high renown rank (lets say rr70 = high RR) you fight an uphill battle against all the better geared higher level toons out there. This does not mean you are hopeless and that you are ineffective. The number 1 issue with the Marauder live is that much of what you do is not visable unless you're rolling with lots of debuff addons.

When 1.4 comes out the Brutality tree becomes vastly more attractive to players who probably should have rolled a WE or a Choppa. Now, after 1.4 they probably still made the wrong class choice because the camage, in Brutality will be considerably increased yet still it won't be touching the type of burst you would find here.

2,000 crits for high level Marauders will be available only on half dead targets and only with certain combinations of buffs and positioning. People thinking that Marauders are going to be running up in everyone's grill wrecking face will be pleasantly surprised to the fact that basically only those people who stuck with that Marauder and leveled him up, geared him out will be capable of wrecking so much face. Either that or just superior players who just have a talent for roflstompage.

Specing?

I see a significant issue coming in the Marauder community will be people experimenting with Tri-spec and moving on builds and playstyles that require a lot of stance dancing. In my experience this probably is not a good idea. To want to have the Armor debuff, Growing Instability and CJ you really spread yourself very thin and end up gimping what should be the dmg you are trying to obtain while keeping your crowd control. I'm certain that people will make it work but on average it isn't going to happen. Other builds people are talking about include a Brutality build with Savagery up to CC with TB. While this might present the absolute max DPS you can do it requires far to much micro management and with the 5s cooldown between stances is very very situational. If you are caught outside of your starting stance your rotation is not going to flow properly. I can see it working however in my experience you want to try to minimize the amount of stance dancing as much as possible so that your rotation can be un-interrupted.

I've never been the type that believed in the "Jack of All Trades, Master of None" concept and think that in group play you'd be far more effective in going with either Brut/Monstro or Sav/Brut for a strong DPS build. The first, clearly a straight dmg build and the second a dmg build that still offers group synergy with a wounds, armor and healing debuff. I intend to use both frequently and of course like many long time Marauders will be specing brutality once the patch goes live.

Testing

For those curious I have not done any testing on the PTS except for the EvsC test last week. I don't have an 80 template made and cannot copy my character. I do wish I could test, however tis not in the stars.

Some Fun SCs

I give mad props to my man Eschatology, boy having someone who loves to guard and CC for you really makes this game so much more fluid and enjoyable. We rolled deep with some scs with Shintoa's DOK (now I think rr75) and really ripped up some Order. One point, my highlight of the weekend was me and Eschatology turning back for the bomb at Howling Gorge just the two of us running into 8 Order, and some of these were not scrub order and I wasn't in defensive gear and we won the fight. Granted we got lucky after we got 4 of them down that a healer showed up and tossed heals up on me and I had the perfect combination of shit going on. Never underestimate the use of Unending Horror, that tactic has saved me far too many times. Be aware that dropping another tactic for Unending horror when you're going into an uneven fight is probably wise, I'd drop Brute force if you can afford to (ie if your str is 900 withoutit, drop it for UH).

Multiple times I was top DB and DMG in scenarios over the weekend out doing RR80 Sorcs, Choppas and WEs. So yeah, buff my damage and my class and see what happens right?

Lastly.

This past weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada (I'm a canuck) and I say happy Thanksgiving to anyone who reads this blog, and to all my Canadian WAR brothers.

REJOICE

2010-10-06T05:22:00.001-07:00

the current 1.4 RvR lake and archetype changes are on the PTS as we speak and while I won't be talking about Marauders I will be talking about Tanks.

First, I do have an inkling of what I'm talking about. A reminder to readers or new readers. I have two 40 Tanks (Chosen and Knight) as well as a T3 IB. All of these tanks are spec'd for Sword and Board. I believe that if you want to be a Tank then you need a shield to fullfill that role in a philosphical sense. Most tanks roll 2 handers and try to be very tough to kill DPS and are able to do that because Warhammer's concept of archetype roles is totally crazy with all classes able to DPS while Tank and Healer archetypes are able to fill another role extremely well (ie healers healing or dps or both, tanks Defensive offensive or both).

On the PTS currently Guard requires a shield.

No more Insane Melee DPS trains with IB's cave-in for a guarded Slayer/WL to eat you up before the kd is up. That IB cannot guard the DPS. That Chosen cannot guard with his giant axe and that Sword Master cannot guard either. Only if they have a shield.

This to me makes perfect sense. You eliminate a lot of usefulness of a S/B tank by making his ability to soak up team dmg the same as a 2 handed weapon tank minus loads of damage. Now their role is far more niche oriented. Now, I also know plenty of IBs and Chosen who can crack some serious damage S/B but those guys are great players and very well geared.

This effects both realms equally in my option. While I think on average the Order tanks are better then the Destro tanks it really brings Black Guards up some more (not really like they needed it) and brings IBs down to earth somewhat. Chosen lose more damage but still S/B they are more then effective (not so much as a Knight who will be even more popular now). Action will quicken, all you have to do in a fight is count the number of S/B tanks and that's the number of possible guards.

My guard bot Eschatology is laughing because he's always Sword and Board, to him this is awesome. To me it changes nothing because I have a guard still. Well he often will guard other classes who need the defensive boost more (like Usurps a choppa with like 40 toughness).

You SB tanks loling at your DPS while maintaining high survivability for you and a friend, I have no sympathy for you.

Lowbee's

2010-10-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not a low level griefer. I tend to only go after low level guys in T4 if they pose an issue in terms of chain res or just another healer. If there's 6 healers in a scenario you probably can take out the r37 AM pretty darn fast, at least it relieves some fluf healing.

In the lakes however, soloing out there I won't run and chase after sub 40 toons, and in many cases below RR55 I won't put much effort into going after them. Sometimes people get cocky or tunnel vision and that's all well and good. The saying is 'red is dead' and I don't argue with that.

However if you're out there by yourself and you're say a 33 Witch Hunter....

Now, I have a rr58 WH and that class is pretty much as strong as you can get 1v1 in this game. However at 33 you have no business being out alone in the lakes, and you have absolutely no business trying to take on a RR80 Marauder. I was in the Maw just 30mins ago picking off people trying to get to IC and this WH turns the corner and sees me. I think, yeah ok let him go he's probably some alt.

He stealths, I figure good luck on your loot roll and start mounting up. But no, this WH decides he's going to have a go and pops on me. I was baffled and in some ways insulted... does Order disrespect the marauder class so much that a 33 WH thinks he has a chance of betting me? Is he a new player to the game and not recognize gear, on Badlands there are no more then 6 marauders wearing more then 5pieces of Sovereign that play and I'm probably one of the only full sovereign Marauders in prime time. I was wearing my Defensive/Offense combo also, this guy had absolutely no chance at all.

Maybe he has enemy titles hidden or doesn't know Exalted = RR80?

I don't understand why you would pretty much commit suicide like that and have to ride all the way back up to the Maw with in your head the thought that I'll still be there waiting... then what do you try again or do you try to bypass? I probably wouldn't let him by a 2nd time to prove the point that you don't fuck with high level Marauders.

Most people don't have a chance in hell fighting me 1v1 anyway and the only classes that pose a problem are DPS AMs and S/B Knights. While I do believe for the most part anyone on any given day could win a 1v1 fight, you just never know. But if you're below RR55 and you are out there alone with no help don't bother jumping the RR80 Marauder.

That's all I gotta say about that.

Marauder PVP Video

2010-09-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

Click Here

Makesure that you up the quality to 480

This is a link to my first ever attempt at making a PVP video

The Music is random and tbh is a troll on all the horrible Music most people put on their videos.

This Video is mostly Ganking and Duels. I intend to make more of these as I develop more skills with this sort of shit. I used the windows default movie maker and wish I could have done more with it.

Most of this is just me remembering to hit the fraps button. I have more footage but wanted to keep it under 10mins and really didn't have the patience to sift through a lot of crap.

Badlands/Badserver

2010-09-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

I would like to play this game.

I cannot play on Badlands. The Server issues are garnering more and ore renown then the players are at this point as unplayable lag and constant Crashing to Character and Server screens is hurting our community to the point of overflowing, sarcastic raging posts.

Me, I pay for this game, and I want to play it. I'm a patient man and thus I will reserve my rage and turn it into a request, since I know some of the Bioware|Mythic community reads the blogs we bloggers make.

At least give us some feedback, some information about what is going on. How long are we going to have to experience this? Last night instead of playing the 6v6 Scenario with my premade I was reduced to playing in T2 which I didn't really want to do. Eventually I logged off and did something else with my time, which was time I set aside to play Warhammer as I didn't get to for most of the day with my other irl stuff I like to do.

Are you upgrading your hardware? Is the server overloaded? I find the 2nd hard to believe considering how huge Darkcrag was compared to Badlands in it's hayday and it ran better then Badlands does now.

Do the EU servers that apparently are all larger then Badlands run this poorly?

Getting herald posts stating that once again we're getting cut off for some bodywork no longer gives me a sense of security and hope. You need to identify the problem and apply a significant effort in resolving it instead of these little bumps and blips to try and keep the server nudging forward. You can't just keep giving the rodent a shot with a cattle prod before it finally falls over and dies.

Now the community is starting to gain momentum to reroll on other servers, which does absolutely nothing but transfer the issues somewhere else. You offer us cool weekend events and scenarios but then you just bail on it and we the customer end up resenting it.

Andy demanded I blog

2010-09-21T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yes Andy came on IRC this afternoon threatening me to blog about the upcoming changes to the Marauder class in 1.4.

Here they are off the forums

We're making some changes to the Marauder career which will address a few playability and potency issues which we've been concerned about. These adjustments affect a few different aspects of the career - most notably the Mutations themselves - but are largely focused on the Brutality Mastery.

* Gift of Brutality, Gift of Monstrosity, and Gift of Savagery will neither cause the global cooldown, nor be prevented by it.

* Growing Instability will no longer vary its effectiveness based on Hit Points. Instead, it will now always provide a +50% bonus.

* Guillotine will now almost always critically hit, and its damage has been slightly reduced. By "almost always", we mean that it will critically hit the victim no matter how much Initiative or Reduced Chance To Be Critically Hit that they have - the only thing that will prevent it is if the victim is completely unable to be critically hit at all (such as from the Sovereign "Absolute Preservation" ability).

* Impale is now usable from any position. When used from the rear, it will now ignore an amount of the target's armor based on Mastery level (ignoring 990 armor at full Mastery at rank 40). Additionally, its damage has been reduced. The net result is that Impale will deal more damage than it currently does when used from the rear, and will now also be usable from non-rear positions as well.

* Pulverize's damage has been increased, and the Block penalty has been reduced to -10%.

Thanks and we look forward to your feedback.

Nate Levy

Alrighty.

First

The Stance GCD changes, long ass time coming. It doesn't make a huge difference, but difference enough in smoothness of the mechanic. I've taken to Stance Dancing lately mostly to get Ferocious Assault up ever minute for a little extra whenever I can get it. All you Marauders know that you have to take every inch you can grab for Offense, it also pops nice defensive with the toughness. Thumbs up.

Second

Growing Instability going to a straight %50 Crit dmg buff is awesome. Now, many are complaining that this is not fair. I say, screw you! Marauder has less burst DPS then any class in this game, straight out of the gate. Growing Instability as it is live is unreliable and since it depends on your health being low to get good damage it basically cancels itself out. Yeah, I run with it time to time because you just wanna see some of those nice fat crits.

Marauders were asking for a scaling %25-%50 depending on wounds. Basically we wanted some sort of guaranteed return on our Crit dmg for loosing our Knockdown if we're in Savagery. This Crit DMG buff with the new Guilotine will give Marauders that bump they need in Brutality as well as give Savagery some Burst that it also does not have.

Most people are going to cry and state this is a buff to Savagery. It is, it's a buff to OVERALL DPS to the class. Savagery with Brutality means

no reliable decent anytime attack and no aoe knockdown (what Order QQs about the most with the Pull) and no aoe DoT Debuff. IMO doesn't make the new GI overpowered.

If you look at it from a continued viewpoint, White Lions and Witch Hunters both have %50 critical damage tactics available in their mastery trees, Witch Elves are the lone Destro class with that mirror tactic. Now, should Slayers get %50, no they should mirror the Choppa Stab you gooder. Mostly because the Slayer mechanic offers up significant damage as it is.

Thirdly

Guillotine's change is a point of slight concern. If all crits do %50dmg and all Guillotines automatically crit and cannot be used unless target is below half health it might be a little too powerful depending on the reduction of base damage that Mythic is going to do. I reserve judgement on this until I see the PTS.

In Brutality my Guillotine can crit for 2k before I get to half health, which makes me curious to see what it's going to look like. A viable finishing move depending, again on what the base dmg is reduced to.

Fourth.

Impale's change is crucial to making Brutality a viable damage tree. The Armor negation is very cool, and letting us use it anywhere at any time is exactly what we asked for. I don't know how this would stack with Piercing Bite or using Cutting Claw, does Deeply Impale become vialbe... no it doesn't. DI is only usefull in PvE imo. In Brutality you still have limited Tactic selection to work with (Piercing Bite, Brute Force (or CE if you spec) Flanking and Growing Instability, anything other then that really is a poor choice.

Stance Dancing into Brutality now is useful because Impale ought to be viable at only 25AP to use.

Fifth

Pulverize is an ability that I love to use but is limited by stance. The shift to the Stance mechanic is probably enough to make me happy. I'm interested to see the dmg increase, mine will crit for clear over 1k live without any problems. A reduced block debuff is completely inconsequential unless you're a noob and are beating on tanks.

--------------------

A Damage buff to the Damage tree has been a long time coming for this class. Marauders have been stuck in Savagery since the AoE nerf patch 1.3.something. Now, Savagery is great, one of the best lines imo however if you're rolling a DPS class to DPS single target, the Marauder offers you debuffs instead of straight damage.

At least in 1.4 you're going to have a choice that is viable, which is great. I, probably like most people are expecting to see a lot of Brutality spec coming out in the first month or so but I suspect most Marauders will go back to Savagery after the novelty of it wears thin, but a lot of respecing I think is in the future.

I do Intend to test on the PTS if I am able, I also will run Brutality probably when it all goes live for a change of pace. Me, I'm too big a fan of Savagery as it exists to change things completely. I enjoy respecing Brutality from time to time live, it's fun.

Now it'll be viable.

Or so we hope

Try this out you high RR Marauders

2010-09-10T05:01:00.001-07:00

Gear?

Defensive Sovereign
Helm
Gloves
Boots
Belt
Jewel

Tyrant Chest
Tyrant Shoulders

3 Glyphs and Back from ToVL

Main Hand RR75 Crit weapon
Off Hand Vessel Weapon with STR and Melee Power

Wounds+Crit Liniment

Tactics

Brute Force
Unending Horror
Deadly Clutch
Piercing Bite

Run into their shit and pop your Detaunt and pick someone to kill. In this build I still am running around 260dmg bonus if I have a zealot buff or a Chosen with a decent str aura. Being guarded is great also. You're running with over 4k armor at this point and you're going to be hard to kill. I had 1 Zealot hotting me up and with the detaunt and the amount of armor I had all their melee couldn't touch me. On top of that I had just under 10k in hit points. Still enough power to kill any low defensive targets like BWs AMs and Slayers and enough of an annoyance that the front line ran back to try and deal with me leaving the rest of my Relm open season on everyone else. Very effective, going to play with this set up a lot more.

I also ran without the Tyrant, dropped the Glyphs for a Defensive and Offensive Sovereign mix that seemed to have a little potiential but I had to go off and do TOVL on my Sorc instead of continue with the face rolling.

And

A shout out to Laonsela, my GL who got his second RR80 toon last night on his Choppa (Ruthaer). Lao is a boss player, a class act guild leader and has that great French Canadian sense of humor I am so fond of.

PvP Video, 1.4

2010-09-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

I've started Fraping my exploits soloing around the lakes on Badlands, some Solo Que Scenarios and other random things for fun to see if I can put together a reasonable PvP Video.

So far it's slow going. I tend to forget to start filming (lol) but I've gotten some cool stuff so far including WTF owning some high RR DPS Archmages, Engineers. 3v1 Two WH and a BW (well 1 of the WH was 37 but one was rr71) and some other 2V1 fights etc. I play to win so yeah there is poting and Golden Eye usage for sure but it's all game imo.

I want to get some Duels in there too.

Orvr on Badlands is a sea of Order Zerg so there is lots of killing to be had but lots of getting killed too. This isn't helping my Kill/Death ratio that much but it's still fun and I feel for the first time in a long time that going out into the lakes has a fun purpose to it.

Makes me curious to see what the RvR Pack is going to offer us Higher level players who've been waiting for something for a while. I was (like a lot of ppl) full Sovereign long before the new sets were introduced last patch, and I've almost got my Defensive set.

Speaking of the RvR Pack.

I am on the fence about increasing the level cap. I want more content, more options for things to do with my toon other then grinding out another 20 long renown ranks. It makes no sense to do that other then to just re-engage the 80s in the hunt. If those players ho have RR80s have a desire to get renown they all rerolled other toons and played them. My Guild Leader almost has 2 RR80s (I think his Choppa 79.2 ish) and I know other people with multiple RR80s on Badlands as well as other servers. Me, I play my RR80 more them most people play theirs mostly because leveling is boring and grinding RR is a pain in the ass. My Sorc is my highest level at at just a hair under RR61 and the reason why I keep going back to my less powerful class (Marauder) I still play him because I'm done with the grind and I can enjoy the max tier of gear, level and power that class has to offer. Once 1.4 comes out I have to start again, and I'm not looking forward to that.

A New zone is great, new classes are awesome and I'm happy with that. I hope it brings new ppl to the game or brings old people back. The game is really strong at the moment and I'm still enjoying it. I go through phases of nerd rage about my time in the game but it keeps me coming back just because the PvP is so good and the sense of community, for the most part is a heck of a lot of fun (save for the Trolls who are just there to be trolls).

Dear Mythic

2010-08-28T19:43:00.000-07:00

Please fix Badlands

This is getting out of control with the amount of crash to character screens. You introduce a 6v6 SC like so many have asked and %25 of the time you take the que you crash. You're lucky your Quitter Debuff isn't attaching itself or you'd be lossing a lot of customers right after a patch, remember what that felt like?

I haven't noticed the crashes on Iron Rock at all, it's been pretty bad on Badlands to the fact that I log on my toons here, crash trying to zone or get into a scenario and then just log off. Why play when the game has absolutely no flow due to crashes and half the time you crash it takes 5 to 10 minutes to get back into the damn game.

Fix it.

Signed Kruelhand

Are You New?

2010-08-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

Are you new to the Marauder class?

You might be, just fresh at 40 and wondering where the hell the fun went when i was in T3 roflstomping everyone. What happened to my class, my damage, my gear?! I sympathize my mutated friends, and I felt your pain once. In fact I felt it far far worse then you do now, for when I turned 40 Marauders were the worst class in this game (Magus were better yes), when the AoE nerf hit Marauders we were basically useless until our Mechanic was finished and Savagery was buffed because of it, we now had something to offer.

However lately I've seen a lot of new Marauders running around on some servers, new because I can tell they are new by playstyle and gear. Also some new people on Badlands to the class sending me tells asking about things and basically complaining. The WAR forums are full of Marauders crying and complaining.

Honestly if you are considering a Marauder you should know what you are getting into and it basically comes down to this....

The Marauder is not a burst DPS class, it isn't a class that you play to see big huge crits or flashy numbers. It is a DPS class, it is a class that offers great assistance in groups with debuffs and has killing power. In small warfare we excel since we are more difficult to kill then the other Melee DPS, we have a great single target pull and you should also claim the main assist.

Marauder targets are the easiest to kill as an assister (if you assume they are in savagery). Once you get on my target it is down 1640 armor 164 wounds 123 toughness within 3 attacks. I embrace my debuffs and accept them as useful and sure the DPS isn't Choppa like but I hold my own out there dmg wise and I kill shit.

If you want to play a class that has 1 button easymode roflstomp then the Marauder is not for you, that's all there is. You can play a Sorc, and have fun blowing shit up. My Sorc is almost rr60 and it is OP. Is my Marauder OP, no. But for what it is, you should try it out.

Alts part 3

2010-08-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

Since the patch and the Double Renown weekend I haven't logged onto my Marauder for more then 20 minutes to make pots for my Sorc who has gone from rr54 to rr58 since the patch. Not only that but was going from Conq and a few DP pieces to Tyrant in 2 tovl runs which was pretty funny.

I really like aspects of the Sorc class, mostly the unreal damage possibilities. I get my rotation off (Chillwind - Word of Pain- Doombolt - Gloomburst) and if the target isn't dead in those 4 spells I still have ID and HoR. It's silly how much damage, and sure the class is squishy, wayyyyyy to squishy for my tastes which makes me go back to my Marauder (even though I play a fairly squishy build).

What I want is to get things rolling back on the Marauder and really see what this Sovereign gear can do. Sadly with the renown weekend everyone was on alts (myself included) getting their RR up. I'm fine with alts, no problem. But a Main is a Main and I want to play mine at least a reasonable amount of time.

I dusted off my WH for a few scens yesterday before I had to take off for an overnight gig and refreshing to have a melee dps that can so easily burst out so much dmg. I wish it was better geared, and I might take my PvE efforts to that class to get him some DP and Tyrant.

1.3.6 Kruelhand Build

2010-08-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

1.3.6 is tempting me to resub based on some testing with a new build and the new Offensive Sovereign options with the Land of the Dead 5 piece set for accessories. Granted I understand that a lot of people do not do PvE, or don't farm that shit to get the gear, but it is the best gear so it's up to you if you want to sacrifice some time in a PvE Instance. You won't get the same results without the 5 piece set, you'd get similar with 3 pieces with the Ring/Cloak combo, easier to obtain.

Ok so this may seem strange, but I'm basing it off the fact that Deadly Clutch is broken and Exhaustive Strikes is sub-par. I'm giving you my gear, renown build and my Mastery build, tactics all that.

Character Build

Renown Build

Gear was All points Offensive Sovereign (Helm, Shoulders, Chest, Belt, Gloves and Boots. 4 Glyphs and the Back piece from ToVL) Strength talismans across the board except Melee Power and Melee Crit (in appropriate slots) and 2 RR75 Scenario Crit weapons. This gave me around 1060 strength 350+ weapon skill 3k+ armor with pot toughness is low (160ish) and wounds iw just shy of 8.4k with a wounds liniment (you can go crit of melee power, up to you).

This gave me a damage bonus of 321 with the 6 piece bonus proc, which coupled with Mutated Aggressor timed right = some very tasty Burst, certainly nothing like Marauder's are used to on the live game. The Proc is up a lot also, it will proc off your Savagery dot, Rend application or even jagged edge. It is up I'd estimate upwards of %40 of the time.

This gives me more damage to my Cutting Claw, Draining Swipes especially which are sort of key to DPS in this build. With this set up at %50 life I was getting 2k crits with Thunderous Blows, 1.5ks on Draining Swipes (combined) and 1k main hand auto attacks. I got up to 2.7k with an armor debuff'd TB at 1k health. All these against medium armor'd White Lion (3.3k armor). The real juice was coming off the armor debuff'd auto attacks. At rr80 with the Sav tree max I get a 1640 armor debuff which is half the armor of any White Lion, I'd say seeing crits for 1k on some 2handed tanks would be common place with this build after you debuff their armor and then smack them with Draining Swipes for a nice little spike to dmg, then TB would be back up (as you should really open all the time with it) and you should be looking at some nice single target damage.

I don't know how Brutality is fairing on the PTS, my theory is that it's still trash, although I would imagine that Guillotine is hitting pretty hard with GI up. Either way I'm still convinced that tree is beyond useless at the moment except for a sub-spec for Savagery.

I am currently spec'd into this build live and will be trying it out over the coming days to see how it does with the current game as it ought to be viable.

L 2 Marauder....sigh

2010-07-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

I want to say a few things.

First off, Marauder is a middle of the road class. I don't (honestly I don't) think that we are the worst class in the game, I don't think we are hopelessly waiting for some amazing patch. I think that the Marauder, if played properly is a fine DPS class with lots of kill power and is a threat on the battle field.

If you go to the official Warhammer Online forums and go to the Melee Damage Dealer threads it's a constant strain of Marauders crying about how we are being ignored. That is fair, we are being ignored and to the point that it makes me want to move on at this point in time (ie my Knight). However it's all the QQ about the lack of damage, how everyone out damages a Marauder, how tanks and other classes do more damage and how even as one Marauder who I think was renown rank 45 says that Rune Priests are better DPS classes then a Marauder is.

L 2 Marauder.

I mean seriously, it's just stupid to buy into all of that. Agreeing for the thousandth time that Brutality needs a buff I go out into the lakes or Scenarios and don't worry about my ability to kill. And I've been like that long before rr80 and wearing all the gear I have. I did a bunch of scenarios last night with a 3 man, a DoK and a Chosen and in every scenario but 1 I was top Damage and in every scenario but that 1 I was out DPSd and one more I was top Death Blows. Most Scenarios I didn't die or died at most 3 times which was from Isha's Will burning me out. In a slew of those SC's another higher RR Marauder (Morend) was out there and kicking ass as well and was always the next highest DPS for Destro behind me and often times not by a heck of a lot. If you Learn the class then you will kick some ass. Most people just don't want to have to work for it, so they roll a Choppa and apprently just spam Lots of Choppin (as I have seen in Volkmar, it's very comical actually).

Point being, don't buy into the crying baby Marauders bitching about this class. They have no idea what they're talking about. You will find most of the higher RR Marauders are comfortable and helpful with the class and will tell you that, Yes there are rough patches but you fight through them and you'll be just fine.

I remember back when the Marauder was a shell of it's current self back on Dark Crag and there were maybe 5 Marauders active in T4, one of them still plays on Badlands actually. A guildie at the time said to me "stick to the class and get good at it. When they buff you, you're going to own everyone". He was right, when the AP Fix came in and AP drain was overpowered I did own just about everyone. Now that is not really an option anymore so you baby Marauders have to wait your turn.

It'll come, just work with what you have and eventually you'll get your due.

1.3.6 some PTS thoughts

2010-07-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

Cutting claw has had it's AP cost reduced...

So the hell what? Marauders have the option of near unlimited Action Points with Subvert Strength. I'm sure this is to bring the new Forced Opportunity and Cutting Claw into mirrors exactly of each other, however screwing around on a White Lion on the PTS, the Cutting Claw version hits harder then the White Lion's mirror. I chalk that up to overall DPS on a WL being higher or just it being broken. Ok, moving on.

The first night I tested I was playing with the Offensive set, I went 6 pieces with LOTD Set not full Sovereign as imo 7 and 8 pieces are trash and all anyone was doing was dueling or ganking. At this time the Melee Power proc was broken and thus I was getting rolled by a lot of people in full defensive set up. I did go back to it when they fixed the proc and I ended up with essentially a 321 damage bonus with the proc and the %5dmg from the LOTD set with a 37% chance to crit (melee power and wounds talisman) so that could go up higher with a melee crit liniment. Which is quite nice. I ran with feeding on fear because the heal debuff is still broken on the PTS as well as live so I was basically running around with a 57% crit and got good mileage out of it. The Offensive set is very good, especially I am assuming with protection and in a group.

The Defensive set is just stupidly unbalanced for Melee. I was able to duel tanks in offensive gear easily, I had 2 Witch Hunters try to gank me and took them both out of the picture with 1/3 of my health to spare. I was able to do this still with 970 strength a 220 damage bonus with almost 10k health 4.4k armor etc etc etc. You might see a lot of Monstro Marauders back after this patch rocking Sovereign solo around not being able to be killed.

The End of the Kruel Blog?

2010-07-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

My Marauder account is near it's end.

I won't be re-subbing it. I'll be continuing to play on my Order account until it runs out and then make a decision about what to do from there. Since I know that I have people who read this (marauders mostly) I will give my reasons listed not in any particular order.

First

The Marauder has been, since the 1.2 Patch an ignored and nerf'd class without any reason what so ever. Mythic's concept that Utility is equal to DPS is inaccurate. Marauder, in my opinion is a class that needs help, significantly because of this miss match between Utility vs DPS. Clearly this mistake on Mythic's part has ruined a class that was intended to be a Damaging class. Mythic has let the Chaos careers sink into shit (except for the Chosen) and I don't see any changes coming to the Marauder or Magus that would revitalize the class. Our Mutation procs is the completion of our Mechanic and brought us up to the Shadow Warrior level mechanic (which is horrible to say that we were buffed up to Shadow Warriors)

Obviously, there are plenty of Marauders out there and some do well in spite of some of the Career's short comings and I think that the class if played by a competent player, or a decent enough level and gear level is effective and should be welcomed into any party for whatever it be PvE, RvR or Premades. However, with the state of the class, looking for DPS comes down to people would much rather have a Choppa or Sorc over a Marauder any day of the week, and I don't blame them.

Builds and Broken Abilities

The Marauder has 1 viable mastery path, Savagery. Yes, sure lots of Marauders go Brutality and spam impale and guillotine and good for them. However they probably haven't done the testing or research to know that the Utility tree does more damage over all with the Sav dot proc, debuffs etc then brutality does by a significant Margin. The marauder then must choose between a Knock Down or added Burst DPS, so more Utility in the KD or more lackluster DPS bump from Brutality.

Flail doesn't belong in Monstro
Pulverize should be in Savagery
Ferocious Assault shouldn't be restricted, neither should several other abilities that make no sense to have them put in 2 mutations and not all Mutations.

Our Healing Debuff is broken, and I'm pretty sure Cutting Claw is broken atm as it's supposed to be un-defendable and I've had WHers parry it with Repel Blasphemy.

I'm keeping my eyes on Marauders, and if they offer up something to us next patch or the patch after or whatever I could consider resubbing to play Kruelhand. I think it's sad that an rr80 toon can be shelved because of the fact that Mythic just doesn't care about the career.

I've rolled a Knight on Volkmar and am enjoying it. I wish I could transfer my Order toons to Volkmar but I cannot until my account has been unsubbed for a certain period of time. But for know my Knight is my main and I might be jumping on Kruelhand periodically until the 18th of August but I just cannot be motivated to do it.

I will continue to blog, but I won't be blogging much about Marauders, as I won't be playing one.

As the DPS Turns, Rotations

2010-07-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Got asked yesterday by a Guildie who plays a Marauder alt (strange I think we have more alt Marauders in our guild then any other guild but only 1 active main (myself)) about DPS rotations in Savagery.

In Brutality it's simple, you want to use Impale as much as possible popping your dmg buffs as you get them off Cooldown, also you want to be tossing in Pulverize as an opener and Guillotine as often as it's off cooldown. Pulverize is a great ability that hits decently and it should not be mutation limited (same old song). Great thing about Brutlity is that you get GI and Mutated Agressor with the knockdown and the Flail dmg isn't that far off Impale dmg if you get stuck in 1v1 situations where getting their back isn't as easy.

In Savagery you have a long rotation of debuffs and not a lot of time to waste spamming Flail or Corruption. The challenge of Marauder DPS is that there is no 1 button that will get you anywhere but dead. Many other classes can dish out superior dmg just spamming Torment/Agonizing Wounds/Ravage etc etc. A Marauder has to follow a loose yet adaptable rotation of their debuffs to be effective, and the rotation varies from Archtype to Archtype.

Vs any class

Thunderous Blows needs to be your opening attack if it isn't on cooldown. This is to maximize your wounds debuff. Most Marauders who are up to Draining Swipes get 150 wounds debuff which is 1500 hp that cannot be healed or mitigated. However that is off the top of their max hp so that if you do more then 1500 dmg to them before you apply the wounds debuff then you've wasted the debuff, probably the best wounds debuff available to any class. Therefore, TB is first before you do any mitigation debuffing, and by the time your next two attacks are up TB will be available again to use as max dmg to a single target in Savagery.

Regularily TB hits non-tanks for about 1500 after Cutting Claw which isn't a big deal in terms of WE or Choppas but it is as hard as we can hit 1 target in Savagery. Of course opening up with it for 1k + 1.5K off the top of their HP is a significant blow.

Vs Melee Classes

After TB you want to debuff Armor. Even on light armored WHers you want to debuff their armor because it will pretty much leave them naked against you after a corruption and won't be mitigating much of your damage (or anyone elses). The other bonus, Cutting Claw is undefendable, thus a WHer with Repel up still gets hit by your Cutting Claw which is always nice.

Tainted Claw is next, while the debuff is not currently functioning properly with the tactic this still will hit for around 800 to 1k on crits and still %25 debuff on their healing

Corruption and Flail. This is up to you, you can go either way. Flail hits harder, Corruption costs few AP and debuffs Toughness. You won't really need to debuff toughness on squishie targets like AM, Slayers enraged or Bright Wizards. Against a White Lion or any Tank class, DPS spec or not you want to debuff them.

This simple rotation will get you a long way, it also leaves room for things you need to anticipate

Knock Down when you have them between 60% and 40% then while they are down apply Draining Swipes when they are down repeat the rotation while they are hurting now for action points.

Vs Casters

Debuffing Armor with Cutting Claw is not important unless you're against a Warrior Priest. You're going to want to use Touch of Instability on Arch Mages and Rune Priests especially. You also will want to use Debilitate right away after TB. Our Snare is horrible but expect to be punted the second they feel threatened, this will save you from using your KD or Pull to get back into combat as they will be snared.

The Pull Kill

Marauders are pretty important on assist trains since Magus are rare to find and Marauders are more abundant. The Pull Kill requires some co-ordination with your team mates. I recommend a MOD called Calling or working up a Macro that lets your people know when you are pulling a target. Here are some tips

Don't pull Tanks

Wait for Healers to finish casting a big heal or putting down their big CC's (RP Staggers, AM MotM) to pull them. Secondly, when pulling a healer don't stand in 1 place and wait for them with open arms, Shift your position to one side or the other and time your knockdown OR better yet get a tank to knock down the target so you can save yours since an AoE knockdown is so much more useful then blowing it on one person. You can get 2 free shots most of the time on the knockdown, Thunderous Blows and Debilitate unless you're coordinating in vent with tanks who will handle the snare, which is a thing of beauty.

One thing that works so well is a Shamman assisting the pull with his Sticky Feetz, this works better then a knockdown assist as if you place it behind you and the victim punts/KD he will naturally turn to run, and will run right into the snare puddle. Awesome stuff!

New Sovereign Set

2010-07-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

Str - 232
WS - 134
Wou - 116
Tou - 106
Spi - 294
Cor - 289
Ele - 289

This I have no particular issue with, clearly a heavy set on WS and Str which was to be expected. I don't know why you don't have all resistances equal but whatever.

6% melee crit chance
40 melee power
20% auto attack speed
3 AP/s
2% parry strikethrough

All this looks nice as well, especially the %6 crit and the AAH. I could care less about AP/s since Marauders don't worry about AP if they slot Subvert Str, plus with two royal weapons they should be regenning a lot as is.

3 piece - 85 Str

Obvious

4 piece - 85 WS

Ok, this I don't care for. One of the good things about the current Sov set is the wounds buff. Sov pieces as themselves contain a lot of wounds and Marauders don't need to worry a lot about WS since if you wanted WS you just slot Scything Talons. Since this set also has very little Initiative you'll want to try ST anyway to try and balance that... now high WS set with a 1500 armor debuff, seems redundant

5 piece - 5% DPS

Will be able to stack with 5 piece LOTD Set which is very very nice. I approve of this bonus

6 piece - On Hit: 10% chance to increase melee power by 130 for 10s.

For a Marauder this is going to be a huge bump to damage. DPS with marauder is 9 times out of 10 in Savagery, with dots from the mechanic plus the odd Rend, Wave of Mutation this proc should be pretty much always on. 130 Melee Power will also be available with 5 LOTD Set which has 158 Melee Power on it which means with this proc buff you get 288 Melee Power not including individual pices, Glove Talisman, and Royal weapons! Should see a nice bump in numbers for a Marauder here, not as much for other classes in Melee who don't have as much DoT damage or already burst fast enough to kill without needing a proc like this. IMO Significant improvement to the Marauder.

7 piece - On Hit: 10% chance to increase parry/block strikethrough by 10% for 10s.

Useless, the Tyrant 5 piece bonus is significantly better.

8 piece - 2m cooldown - Increases movement speed by 40%, auto attack speed by 25% and you will gain 60 AP over 10s.

Very cool, in fact I'd say worth wearing full Sovereign for this + the first 6 piece bonus. However 6 Sovereign + 5 LOTD Set will be the best option for a Marauder imo. The 8 piece will be nice if you're dueling kiters but not super practical in a regular RVR setting.

Alts alts alts Pt2

2010-07-14T07:12:00.001-07:00

My Marauder is, for all intents and purposes beaten the game.

No, I haven't just kidding. But in terms of progression I only miss very minor pieces of gear that I have no desire to PvE for (World Boss Weapon, missing some Tomb pocket items and some Dark Promise). I still love my Marauder and play him all the time, but at this point it's only going to be in a proper premade. I'm sick of pugging on that toon because I get focused fast when I'm not supported.

So it's been alts. My Witch Hunter especially whom yesterday rolled so much face with in LOTD that I earned all 12 anks for my cloak, got my tomb sword and half a renown rank defending the warcamp for about 2hrs against wave after wave of Destro, not just lowbees but 40s and some higher RR ppl helping level up their guildies. My dmg bonus went from 222 to 264 after all the upgrades to my gear yesterday and I'm looking forward to getting back on him today.

What he really needs is 3 pieces of Dark Promise right now, that %5 is something I certainly have to get my paws on since my crit is not even at %20 right now (sadface).

The Sovereign

2010-07-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I've completed my Sovereign set officially when I won my shoulders in a lewt bag the other night. Man I look awesome. Fortunately as well the upcoming changes to the Sovereign gear look impressive, although the Melee DPS class set has yet to be unveiled, probably should see something on that I'm suspecting this week, early.

Considering how huge of a bump the Tank set is giving them I'm suspect on what the melee Classes will get. Many in the healing world are split on what they're getting but at least the proc of 130 melee/range/healing/magic power which seems to be a 6 piece theme looks very good to me. Especially at %10 chance to proc. I'm curious to see what the 8th bonus will be, Healers are getting %50 crit dmg, which makes sense but you can't do that for Range or Melee DPS because those classes get those sort of bumps already, unless you're going to design the DPS sets around the mirrors and not just a large group as we've seen thus far.

Stage III to remember

2010-06-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

I joined this City instance just as Stage 2 ended, while it was resetting. I stepped into Stage 3, Order won both the first two stages.

As Champion, here is what I did as a pug. I know probably not that impressive to a lot of people but for me this was so fun and I killed... everyone.

It also put me 29 Royals away from Full Sovereign. My Shoulders are all I need. Maybe I'll finish my Dark Promise? Then I think i've got every T4 piece of gear worth getting.

How to Spec Your Marauder.

2010-06-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Spec

I get fairly frequent Tells from Marauders who are either just rolling or new to T4 about how to spec effectively for PvP in WAR. This is a good question to have a prepared answer for, so now I've decided to write it all out so I can refer people to this blog with tips on how to spec.

First off, your spec has a lot to do with your Renown Rank, this is pretty obvious, but for a Marauder it is even stronger then it is for many other classes. A lot of classes do not need as long a rotation to kill in this game as the TTK as a Marauder is longer then any other damage class save a Magus, which is about equal. Marauders are required to purchase a lot of their Mastery abilities to get the abilities that they need.

Essentially all the abilities in the Savagery line are usful as well as the tactics with the exception now of Exhaustive Strikes (which used to be the best tactic in this game, now is useless).

Savagery is the best Mainline mastery tree for Marauders by a significant Margin. The Brutality line is only viable as a support tree or in PvE (talk about that later). Monstrosity is not without it's uses, and most Marauders should be specing into Monstro. Do not be fooled by the tooltips in Brutalities Mastery Line, while some of them look inviting they are not as effective as they lead on.

Leveling up in PvP you are going to Focus first on Savagery. Start putting points into this Mastery Tree. The First Tactic Scything Talons is an excellent Tactic, but should be taken later on, not right away. The 160 Weapon Skill and Initiative is very handy to have however you need to get to Thunderous Blows as quickly as possible. TB is probably a Marauder's best single target blow as it hits the hardest + it's Wounds Debuff. TB functions both as your opener and your finisher. Keep pumping points up until Cutting Claw, which by even looking at the tooltip will be the best Armor Debuff that Destruction has in terms of pure debuff, plus it is Undefendable. After taking CC, the next level go back and tact the ST Tactic.

Once you have Cutting Claw, TB and ST it is time to go up the Monsto tree. It will take 10 levels but put your points into the tree up until Concussive Jolt. CJ is Destruction's best Knock Down ability, 3sec and AoE arch infront of you. When you get to R40 and have Terrible Embrace you can Pull and knock your target down. Most Destro seeing this will quickly assist you and kill the target straight on. Once you have CJ you ought to have 3 points left, spec back into Savagery and take Deadly Clutch. DC will make your Tainted Claw vastly improved giving you back %25 of what your target is healed and reducing their heals by %50.

This takes you to R40, and looks like this on the wardb chart.

http://www.wardb.com/career.aspx?id=14#11:2600:0:0:9:512:25

Moving up the renown ranks all that you need to do is put points into Savagery and take Draining Swipes, an AP regeneration debuff. With your last Mastery Point at RR70 take Wave of Mutation. The Issue with WoM is that it is a good way to break Staggers. However it is also a 21s Dot, which works as an Ailment for your Healing Debuff.

http://www.wardb.com/career.aspx?id=14#13:10792:0:0:9:544:29

Aside from CJ being a solid CC Monstro scales points into Flail, which essentially is the Marauder's best “anytime” attack in terms of Damage. Corruption scales with Savagery, together this is a good combination to throw into rotation.

(You want to open always with TB. The Wounds debuff takes off the top of your targets total HP so if you do more then 1500 dmg before you apply it then you've missed out on the debuff. After that then you hit the armor debuff and heal debuff then TB will be up again. Use Corruption before you start using Flail. Keep your Armor debuff up every time the cool down is over, same with your Heal Debuff.)

At Higher Renown Ranks, with Gear in your pocket you could break off the Monstro support line and put points into Brutality, taking Growing Instability and Mutated Aggressor. These two abilities will pump your damage up but lower your Survivability. MA gives you burst, don't use it at the start of fights, use it when your target is half way dead to push it over the edge. GI is a risky tactic to use, because your burst is relative to your death. It is unreliable, however with guard and a healer it will rip people apart. I often times will go back to GI/MA support tree and run with a high wounds build so that I have more mileage.

Tactics.

Scything Talons
Brute Force
Deadly Clutch
????

The Final Tactic, has many options. I tend to use Subvert Strength or Flanking. Growing Instability if in Brutality subspec.

Morale, Most use Confusing Movements. I do sometimes, but Sever Never is better for me. I find whenever you are looking to pop CM you are already screwed. When I think about all the times I was saved by CM I probably killed 3 more with SN. M2 I use Great Fang, M3 Tzeench Reversal and M4 Frenzied Assault. In the end, saving past M2 is a waste of time. M2 is good for clusters and Morale Pushes, whenever a Morale Push is called in Vent I always go and use M2 when the enemey is at about 1/3 health and steal some kills. At RR80 your moral hits for 1224, undefendable, unmitigated.

This is the best PvP set up I have discovered in almost 2 years of playing a Marauder. It's fairly standard, I've been experimenting a lot

Upcoming Blog Series and ... what was the best...

2010-06-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

Coming up on this blog will be a series of blogs on How to play a Marauder effectively. For those people rolling marauders or just having trouble making the class work I'm going to offer my views on the class from builds to gear to rotations to how to fight specific classes.

I'm no real authority, I just have played this class since release practically and have managed to gather a lot of experience that new Marauders might find helpful. Don't flame, if you don't like my posts, deal with it. If you think i'm bad, then deal with it.

Anyway, in that spirit I wanted to share the 5 days that I had when I went with the ultimate asshole Marauder build gear set that let me 3v1 or more with relative ease. Granted, really great players or premades will own anyone. But I was soloing a lot because that build let me do it. This was before the Riposte/AP Drain Nerf.

here goes.

Mastery

Savagery, up to and including Draining Swipes with all the abilities in the tree. Monstro up to the Knockdown (incl the KD).

Renown

Weaponskill, as much as you can get. Max out your Parry, and whatever I had left put into Melee Crit and renown tactics.

Gear
Tyrant 4 piece bonus (Helm, Shoulders, Chest and Gloves) Dark promise 2 piece bonus (Boots and belt)

5 Piece TOVL Set for the %5 dmg %5 crit 108 Melee Power

Weapons
RR75 Crit Royal Weapons

Tactics
Scything Talons
Riposte
Exhaustive Strikes
Deadly Clutch.

Wounds Melee Crit Talisman.

Basically, %40 Parry, %30 Crit. I still had 1010 strength before any sort of buff (Zealot or Chosen). With Riposte Crit and ES Up I could lock down groups attacking me left and right, I could disarm anyone 1 on 1 to save my KD for when he called for help. This was especially effective against (obviously) any Melee Class, and mostly against White Lions (due to high AP costs) but really messed with Witch Hunters, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves when all they would see are parry parry parry and then out of AP on top of me hitting them with my own attacks.

In Duels I was completely unbeatable with the exception of DPS Archmages or very very skilled Shadow Warriors who still the best I fought lost. But without any sort of Disrupting abilities and all the CC a AM gets they're tough in any build to beat. BW's are a joke in duels since on Badlands they start with 0 Combustion and if their opening burst doesn't get me to 2/3 health they won't have enough to compete with my damage.

Anyway, I loved that build and I miss playing with it. It is just not effective anymore with ES now hopeless. Lossing the Riposte crit isn't so bad, but it just revolved around the %25 AA haste crit and riposte to completely leave people standing still.

Mythic, use your Unlock System, stop the rr30s from stealing Sovereign

2010-06-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

It's getting silly really when low level characters roll on gold bags in Stage III. First of all, if you are on an alt(especially) in a warband of people who are your guildies or alliance-mates who are able to wear that shit then for the sake of not being a total asshole, OPT OUT.

Last night we witnessed it in two city defenses, low level people rolling on Stage III and Stage II when they can't even wear conq gear saying that they want the purple bags, which I don't buy for a second. I would love a Warlord Weapon to add to my pile of gear but I opt out every stage I and II because I want relm-mates to get gear they can use to motivate them. I hate it when I have a guildie who is RR80 sitting on 6 purple bags because some rr41 Chosen decided to roll on gear he'll never wear.

Mythic, you need to fix this system. I thought about it this morning while making my breakfast (it was awesome btw, mmm) and figured, just use your ward system to define what one is able to roll on.

For example, if you don't have your Warlord unlock, you cannot roll on Gold bags in Stage 3. If you roll, the only thing that you roll on is Purple bags and you leave the Gold bags to people who have the Ward that comes from full Warlord.

There, fixed. Your lowbe toons can roll on those precious purple bag weapons and the higher RR people aren't ganked out of their Sov gear.

Or you can give another level of Gold bags and toss in 2 Warlord Gold bags so that they can get to their Warlord gear a little quicker.

I understand the 'grind' aspect to this game when it comes to gear. Mythic wants to keep people with something to do while they work towards their next patch. Now, we've heard next to nothing about 1.3.6 or even a whisper about a 1.4 patch!

With my sub up in 6 weeks, I'm unmotivated to resub because of this. I'm 6 of 8 pieces of Sovereign and I'm fine with not finishing the set. I have my royal weapons and am accumulating Royal Insignias for no good reason. I am Full Tyrant, Renown 80 etc etc etc. Besides grinding sovereign out what is there left?

Not to be a negative nancy, I just am looking to see wtf is Mythic going to do.

At this point I'm looking to reroll to another server with some guildies and just 6 man some shit for fun. I like a lot of the Order classes and while I have 2 40s on Iron Rock, that server doesn't do anything for me. I like to play with the guys I play with now and so I'm trying to organize a reroll for a few of us for when it gets quiet on Baddielands.

Oh and on a fun note for some reason I got promoted to officer last night. I dig that, and thanks. I am happy to be in DN, what a great group of guys and some excellent players!

In a Game of Numbers...

2010-06-13T05:12:00.000-07:00

Here are some numbers I live with.

I won my Sovereign Chest last night. Sadly this almost comes as a disappointment considering the Tyrant Chest is superior for my current build situation as well as making future gold bags increasing the chance of winning a piece I already have. I feel at this point I have optimized my gear build even though I would have preferred to have won my Back piece over my chest.

I'm currently rolling with the following

Helm - Sovereign (w/ +23str)
Shoulder - Tyrant (w/ +%3 Melee Crit)
Chest - Tyrant (w/ +23str)
Gloves - Sovereign (w/ +35 Melee Power). In Situations with solid healing I use Tyrant Gloves for more power (because Tyrant gloves and Sovereign are closer in power then Tyrant boots and Sovereign Boots (which Sov boots imo are vastly superior)
Belt - Sovereign
Boots - Sovereign (w/ +23str)

Glyphs + Backpiece from Tovl
Two RR75 Crit Scenario Weapons (w/ +23str)

Wounds/Melee Power Linimient
660 or better Armor Pot

I end up with stats that look similar to this (roughly, things always change)

Strength 1050 and change (not including a buff from a Chosen or a Zealot which I always have)
Wounds 9300
Toughness 180ish
Weapon Skill 450ish
Initiative right around 400
Melee Crit is %31
Armor Pen is %33
Parry is %25

My Damage Bonus is 270 + %5 = 283.5

"Keybindings," the crazy world

2010-06-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

So there are 'clickers' and 'real players' (I kid I kid. One of the best WE and Chosen I know are clickers.). I like hearing from other players about keybind set ups because I'm relatively new to this sort of game (MMO) and I thought I'd share some of my keybindings and hell maybe even help some people out trying to get more efficient. lately this is a goal of mine, to have to not work hard to get my rotations off effectively. So here are most of my important bindings for my Marauder.

F1 F2 and F3 are my mutations (Savagery-Brutality-Monstro). Typically I do not stance dance, however spamming some Demo or getting a quick Ferocious Assault off can really make a difference in Survivability. Not having to click or really have a long reach lets me swap my stances quickly. I hate the 5s cooldown but oh well, that's what we are stuck with!

The Number key-panel on my keyboard is important for a few quick reaches from my mouse hand. My Morales are 1 2 3 and Zero (M4). My "+" is officer Pot, Shift"+" is my regular 3k HP-Pot so I can quickly double pot in situations that it calls for it.

For Actions I use buttons 1 thru 4 as such.
1 - Debilitate (Snare)
2 - Flail (anytime Spam combo)
3 - Thunderous Blows (Wounds DB highest dmg ability)
4 - Deadly Grip (Disarm) * requires Parry

then I go with letter and command letter combos such as the following
F - Cutting Claw (Armor Debuff)
R - Terrible Embrace (Pull)
T - Tainted Claw (Heal Debuff)
V - Wave of Mutation (AoE Dot and Debuff)
C - Concussive Jolt (Cone AoE Knockdown)
Z - Charge
X - Growing Instability (Magic Barb)
U - Crook of Radiance (Undefendable Pocket Item)
H - Summon Mount

I Use my Mouse Buttons a lot here is that set up
M4 - Draining Swipes (AP regen Debuff)
M5 - Guttripper (insures next action crits) * requires Parry
M3 - Wave of Horror (AoE Detaunt)
Shift M4 - Mutated Release (Root/Snare break)
Shift M5 - Mouth of Tzeentch (Cone AoE Interupt)
Shift M3 - Golden Eye Rah-Nutt (3.5k Melee Absorb)
Shift F - Rend (sing target DoT)
Shift 1 - Muated Energy (Ranged KD) * requires Disrupt
Shift V - Corruption (Toughness Debuff)
Shift T - Touch of Rot (Melee Barb)
Alt 1 - "Call" (calling Mod)
Alt 2 - "Assist" (calling Mod)
left Control - Push to Talk in Vent

I click my Liniments and Armor Pot as well as Fault Finder. I Turn with my mouse but I also use the WASD to move as well and I use Q and E to strafe, I need to work on that because that opens up some sweet bindings, yet I don't know if I can get used to that change. I want to find better, more comfortable binds for pots and morals probably something that would be easy to do. I'm thinking Alt Mouse Buttons for Pots but that probably is too easy to Pot by accident...

Alts alts alts

2010-06-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been playing a lot of Alts. I've got my White Lion to 40(rr28 LOL) and have been working on leveling a friends Zealot (r26) as well as my Iron Breaker (15/15).

So far all are very fun classes. I certainly understand the woes of the White Lion, even looking from the eyes of a low level T4 with utter shit for gear, still I can see the problems with the class. Either way, it's fun. I like the mobility of the class as well as the potential for the burst damage!

Truth be told, I'm not one for healers. I have a 32 DoK which I think is boring to heal with. However, the Zealot is fun. I like not having cast times unless I'm group healing. In T3 we ran around this week with a warband led by guys in my Guild and we had so much fun. Man, T3 keeps are the most fun to defend and attack. I like healing with the zealot, and I'm hoping my buddy decides not to bother to come back so I can keep it as an alt.

The Iron Breaker however is my new project. Man oh Man what a great class! At rank 15 I'm a punting machine, boy I was at the keep in Brak Var just punting Destro off the ramparts left and right just keep punting their Tanks off and the lord resets or switches agro to a squishie. I can punt and knock down and snare all effectively and hell I can do some damage as well... not really that much but enough so that I don't really worry about small situations 2 on 1 or whatever. Fun as hell. Makes me want to finish it and play it regularly. But leveling really in all honestly drives me nuts.

Also I have a 15/15 Archmage that I'm playing pure DPS, screw healing! It's fun as shit also.

The Return of ORvR

2010-06-03T05:29:00.001-07:00

I was a Dark Crag Destro.

ORvR was something that we were bred to do I think. Fighting the Ruin Zerg was a day by day experience. I think it burnt me out on the Lakes and since coming to badlands haven't been out there much, instead stick with Scenarios because I find them more fun. However, man the RvR Lakes on Badlands are amazingly active, especially the last 3 or 4 nights.

One of my primary concerns with the new City mechanic of awarding lewtz regardless of who's City is contested was that it would kill ORvR Completely as one side would zerg and the other would let them into the city just for the purpose of getting to do the instances. It has proven to be not so, in fact the other night things were so intense that I don't think that any city was Contested as Destro and Order bashed it out over all 3 zones probably with anywhere between 10 and 12 warbands active in the lakes. I was happy to see it and even dusted my ORvR Chops off and killed Andy in the lakes (muahahahahaha, or so he told me).

Well I'm happy to see it. Even last night I was in an Alliance WB before the Blackhawks/Flyers game. I should get my Sorc out there for some renown!

What's Next?

2010-06-03T05:21:00.000-07:00

Andy from Mythic frequents the Badlands IRC server, usually in the morning probably before the task masters at Mythic crack their whips. He's a good guy and isn't afraid to answer questions, something I think is very important from a Company to Customer point of view.

I like what he had to say about the next patch, although the producer notes obviously are not going to give out a lot of information. He didn't give out much himself only that he's excited for the Zealot/RP changes and that there might be some cool changes for Magus as well! Nothing for Marauder no doubt and that is good, because ussually patch notes for Marauder is nerf or nothing and I'd rather take nothing atm.

With my Subscription up in August, I feel a need for Mythic to offer something substantial by the end of the summer to make me resub. It isn't for a lack of enjoying the game but more for a lack of the feeling of progression. I think that in 10 weeks from now most of my Sovereign should be in my vault or at least enough pieces to make the combination work in a way that I felt like I have obtained all the gear that is worth obtaining in game. I don't have a desire to take another toon to RR80, especially not a Destruction toon yet simultaneously don't want to play on any other server then Badlands. I don't want to pull a Plumpjack and delete Kruelhand in favor of rolling some other toon on Order side and I guess I could deactivate this account and start another. I've had a back up Order account on Badlands but it's subscription has run out as well.

So I'm curious about hearing more about the next patch and future patches. I might leave in August but to return sometime late in the fall... who knows. I do not buy into any "doom and gloom" about this game going under even if the subscription rate is falling. After something as serious as the billing facade you have to expect something like that to happen. Now I hear about ppl being hacked. While I think the hacking is no where near as rampant, tis a serious issue that I'm confident Mythic will resolve.

Sov Helm

2010-06-02T05:56:00.001-07:00

Yay got my first Sovereign piece this morning, my helm.

Gotta say, best looking helm in the game!

How To Make Armor Sets Viable

2010-05-26T10:39:00.001-07:00

It is clear to me that the original concept of set armor pieces was to recieve bonuses, growing in power as you progress through collecting the pieces of that set. Weither it be 3 pieces like your T2 sets all the way up to the 8 piece Sovereign set the goal to me logically is to collect all 8 pieces because the abilities you gain from the set bonuses should make you stronger.

Things have changed in WAR to the point now where it is the stacking of multiple sets which is the way to go. People want capped stats over a Disorient proc that really is lackuster. While some of these set bonuses are really nice! %5 crits, or dmg, armor debuffs, wounds debuffs/buffs! These are great things to have, yet at what at this point becomes at the expense of better efficient stats.

When you get to the Warlord and Sovereign sets you run into another huge issue, the fact that the bonuses do not start until 3 pieces, and on top of that a jewel piece that is trash compared to even jewels available at release of this game! With the expansion to LOTD Tyrant became the set to wear, for stat bonuses, and for procs as well as the Jewels.

Mythic must revisit the RvR sets of Sovereign and Warlord. Invader and Dark Promise are fine for the most part with good set bonuses overall (wearing 4 invader is viable for almost every class, while 4 Warlord... not so).

One way that I think Mythic needs to justify a 3 piece bonus start for what is supposed to be end game gear is to scale your stat bonuses. Sovereign gives +85 bonus to stats, that is the end of it. If you want to wear Sovereign up to your GIAB ability (all of which are useful for the most part) you gimp your str or wounds or whatever. However, if you make the stat contributions from Sovereign scale with the number of pieces you are wearing then it becomes far more attractive

3 Pieces +85 stat
4 Pieces +85 stat/+85 stat
5 Pieces +90 stat/+90 stat + bonus
6 Pieces +95stat/+95 stat + bonus
7 Pieces +100 stat/+100 stat + bonus
8 Pieces + 105 stat/+105 stat + bonus

While this does not equal the double stacking of multiple sets, the individual armor pieces should cap primary and secondary abilities with this sort of scaling (taking into consideration weapons, and jewels).

The other option I see is to take your final full set Sovereign bonus and attach it to your ToK just like wards were changed. It only seems logical to get something out of collecting the full set besides a title. This would give you the option to use that heal debuff or range increase on the cool down and potency without killing the rest of your gear set up.

Pink for Tink Round 2

2010-05-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

I want to say thanks to Mythic for adding new Pink dyes for us to help continue to support Tinkerhell, a BW on Badlands who has had her Breast Cancer return recently. It was a server wide effort to dye all our armor as pink as possible, change our last names to Pinkfortink and show up for a server wide photo / huge battle in support for her.

I missed the battle as I was working, but I was one of the first to take up the charge. I have known several strong women in my life who lost their battle with this Cancer and some who have made it through, it is a painful process and anyone who has to deal with this ordeal becomes my Hero.

I recommend anyone who reads my blog to buy the new dyes and change your name back to Pinkfortink and keep supporting this wonderful strong woman.

Get your act together

2010-05-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

If you're too fucked up to be able to understand a simple instruction such as "Get in Vent and Don't enter the City" then log off, fuck off and don't ruin a good fight for a Guild trying to get some gear.

IDK if ppl like to drink or smoke when gaming but when it literally ruins it for the rest of the people then you can politely go fuck yourself

I got ta be big

2010-05-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

Wish I was taking more screenshots when I get champion because it's fun and I hit stuff hard. I was down to about 20k HP and hit a WL for 8k with thunderous blows (Yes I had GI on).

So far no loot for me, and my lock out on Royal is days away. I think I'll wait on taking my Main into the city when that's up to get a better shot at picking a bag up. I'm sitting on a butt load of Crests after converting them but I'm not interested in trading them in for gear when if I open that 1st gold bag it's what I bought, you dig?

I'm playing my Sorc now lately and I think i'm getting the hang of it. I played it mostly in RvR until half way through my 30's then just went to LOTD. So I really am rusty and unsure about how to get my rotation proper. However I think it's coming together. Now I just need a good premade happening and yes... oh yes much better gear!

1.3.5

2010-05-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

Server downtime is epic Fail.

It's annoying. I don't know why every time Mythic releases a patch that this sort of crap happens. Can they not just get it right?

I'm talking from a Customer standpoint here, I don't know anything about computers other then how to play my game, write some text, emails surf and whatever. But as a paying customer for 2 years almost you figure that after this many patches they could release something smoothly. They don't learn their lessons it seems or at least they are ignorant to their mistakes?

I suppose this post won't win me any kudos on their blog rolecall huh.

TbH

2010-05-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

I'm bored of this game.

Maybe this patch will re-ignite it. I had fun testing the city in closed testing, twas a lot of fun but I think it was a mis-representation of the whole mechanic and that in reality there will be a lot of problems.

I'm currently going to go looking for another game to play between Royal raids. My Marauder just isn't fun enough to go in to SC's solo just for the hell of it. I get focus fired because I drop royals and if you don't kill me your healers will die. While all that is fine and dandy and how it should be done. But it seems like my Guild is slowing down lately, not many ppl on, and it's like pulling teeth sometimes to get a group. But when we get a premade going, it's fun times.

Just too few and far between maybe?

I'm gonna go watch Robin Hood and get a steak!

Some OP Abilities

2010-05-08T07:20:00.000-07:00

Thinking more about this game now that I'm at the end of what it has to offer until the 1.3.5 patch, some abilities that are OP.... (not in any particular order)

Stop Drop and Roll

A 100ft ranged KD for a Bright Wizard is insane. Most BW's always lead with Ignite to get themselves rolling, and to have this available is just wrong. 100 foot range is what is the most OP thing about this ability, it really ought to be a shorter range, 30ft maybe. Some of my guildies say melee range, I don't think that is appropreate, however being able to stop someone from getting to you while still having other CC available means that a BW can pretty much stay out of the grasp of most all Melee Classes with only a few exceptions (Maruader being the most obvious)

Pounce

Now, I don't think Pounce is as much OP as it is unfair for there to be no Destruction Mirror to this Ability

Exhaustive Strikes

Until the patch goes live this probably is the best Tactic for a Melee Class in the game. If you know how to build your Marauder and you have a solid rotation you can eliminate your opponents ability to fight you leaving them with a %50 slower Auto Attack (from Savagery) and no action points to use. After the patch, usless.

Crippling Strikes

-%20 dmg for 10s... Off Tanking never was easier, and if you have a Chosen with a Choppa throwing out Chop Fasta Rending Blade becomes spammable and undefendable meaning you're taking that dmg away from everyone in front of you. It's OP.

Word of Pain

Until the match WoP hits just too hard, i've seen 5k crits from rr80 sorcs with WoP with Focus.

1001 Dark Blessings

Best Morale in the game, it's a game changer

Gromril Plaiting

Until the match 2nd best Morale in the game. If you have several IB's cycling it it's better then 1k1.

5 Piece Tyrant Bonus for BW/Sorc

When this procs with Focus Mind you can wipe an entire Warband if they're grouped up close enough. Instant Clast Fireball/Doombolts for 3k on a single target for 10s will kill anything. It's 10s of I Win and badly needs to be nerf'd. Meanwhile the Haste for Melee is being gutted which is OP as well.

IMO Best to Worst Classes

2010-05-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

After playing since release, overall I was thinking about what the best classes were in each archtype. I decided that it needed to be refined for some of them, ie Tank Spec/Tank DPS and Healer DPS/Heal Spec.

I'm basing this off the experiences I've had Dueling, RvRing, SCs and general witnessing the power of all these classes not only as Destro (as my main is destro) but on the order side as well. This is taking into consideration comperable Renown Rank and Gear on each level toon. Overall, I think that the strongest/best class in this game is the Bright Wizard for Order and the Chosen for Destruction. Both offer challenges in playing, as well as offering significant numbers of options for gear/spec combination. All 3 trees for each class are viable, all are desired in all situations be it RvR or PvE. Both classes are good 1v1 and needed in groups. No one says no to a BW or a Chosen in their groups, and will often see spam in regions LF BW for (insert what they want).

Tanks in Tank Spec

Knight
IronBreaker
Chosen
Black Guard
Sword Master
Black Orc

Tanks in DPS Spec
Chosen
Iron Breaker
Black Orc
Sword Master
Knight
Black Guard

Melee DPS
Witch Hunter
Slayer
Choppa
Witch Elf
Marauder
White Lion

Ranged DPS
Bright Wizard
Sorc
Squig Herder
Shadow Warrior
Engie
Magus

Healer in Heal Spec
Warrior priest
DoK
Arch Mage
Zealot
Shamman
Rune Priest

Healers in DPS Spec
Arch Mage
DoK
Shamman
Warrior Priest
Zealot
Rune Priest

This is what's wrong with Marauders

2010-05-05T13:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrParvun#p/a/u/0/6Wwu76p0qA8

Watch that Video, keep a running tab in your mind how much this Black Orc hits for.

Ok I'll save you some time. His AA is averaging 1k hits, he's getting 2,9k crits on abilities. At one point he hits a BW for 3k then a 2k Auto Attack.

This is a TANK.

Now, granted I say props to the player for getting the gear, developing the rotation and grinding whatever Renown Rank he is at. That's cool, and you cannot expect someone to not go with the classes strength. But I play a Melee DPS (damage per second) class. I have only hit someone for 3k once in my life, with Growing Instability on (Crit dmg increases as health decreases) and on a squishie who had an armor debuff on him. This is just so stupid, I cannot get over the fact that it has come to this.

To those people out there that say that Marauders trade dmg output for debuffs I say this, you go look at all of the things a Black Orc can do in terms of Debuffs, then add bass stats from lvl 40 and increases from renown rank, you add the overall survivability of a Black Orc and tell me that all evens out in the end right? There's no good logical reason why a Tank should be putting out superior numbers to a DPS class, melee or range.

Most recently the highest Crit I've seen was 1600 when I was messing around with a Sav/Brut combination when I hit someone with Thundering Blows with Mutated Aggressor on. I put out decent damage, because I have been running a lot of DoTs and win most fights 1v1 because of AP Drain (although lately not been using it). Once ES is thrown into the shit pile I just really dread how this class is going to work when a Black Orc can hit someone that hard. SURE now they can be detaunted, I don't know if he was running that tactic, I didn't see any Detaunt animations go up at all, someone could correct me on that.

At this point I'm seriously considering shelving my Marauder. All I have left to do is my Offhand weapon and Sovereign. I am thinking Sov will be easy to get. I have a Chosen, but I prefer a tanking style with that toon and a Sorc I loath to play. My BW on the same server is fun, I'm going to lvl it to 40 but I need a destro toon I can log on and enjoy. I also really just want to play Melee Classes, casters to me, I dunno.

So what do I do, roll a Black Orc and make it DPS? Roll a Choppa? I honestly don't know. After tomorrow I'll have my Off Hand weapon and will still play my Marauder until I just can't handle the bullshit anymore.

So my Best of the Best

2010-05-05T05:29:00.000-07:00

Best of the Best polls on the Forum turn into Troll Fests. So after thinking about that last post about Faceless people. I shall now make my own Best of the Best post for Order

High Elves
Sword Masters: Muzashi
White Lions: Phibes (although i think he's in trouble with the next Patch)
Archmages: Crysalist
Shadow Warrior: although not that active, Interpolar

Empire
Knights: Sparkkicus
Witch Hunters: Finleath
Warrior Priests: Zinlove, but really a faceless class
Bright Wizards: Fryday

Dwarves
IronBreakers: Faceless Class, Terrorshard does well 2hander
Slayers: Picklesurprise, although again not that active
Rune Priest: Kearbear
Engineers: No good Engies playing right now.

Destruction

Dark Elves
Black Guard: Anomandar
Witch Elves: The Grifter
Disciple: Faceless, too many DoKs none stand out anymore.
Sorc: Laonsela

Chaos
Chosen: Faceless class, too many Chosen hiding behind a strong class
Marauder: will pass on this
Zealot: Musana
Magus: Soulwanderer

Greenskin
Black Orc: Snotslinga
Choppa: Heyitsvince
Shamman: Chairz
Squig: Pointymushroom

Is Destro Faceless

2010-05-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

In an interesting conversation yesterday on Vent I came to the realization that a lot of the problem with Destro on Badlands is that many of them are faceless.

Particularily in the Sorc department, it's hard to find many stand out Sorcs. Ones that Order probably has a great deal of concern about. There are many well geared and high Renown ones out there, however for some reason very few stand out. It's the same with Black Orcs (although Snotslinga and T are both excellent), Choppas (because there are so many) and DOK(because again droves of them).

Over the weekend I started a Bright Wizard and realized that Order protects their Bright Wizards like mad, while I do not notice this trend on Destro. Yesterday I did a half dozen SCs on my Sorc and no heals, no protection and no assisting whatsoever. Now, pugs will be pugs. But if you watch pugs on Order they still protect those BWs like crazy. I find this to be very interesting. Is it because Destro spends more time protecting the Choppas and healing the Chosens? I'm not saying don't protect the Choppas but most Chosen can fend for themselves.

I've never played this game with a pocket healer with only maybe once or twice over the last month with Stradegist but again, a DoK, so no focus single target healing. Plus he lags so much I might as well not bother. I'd love to have a Shamman or a Zealot follow me around like a puppy for a week and see what I can do. Even now without some of those happy little toys I do fine in SCs but...

Is it also because Destro healers are not as appealing to play? It's very seldom you go against Order where they don't have 4 healers minimum in a Pug scenario. 2 of those are Warrior Priests heal spec and then you just toss around the other options. Meanwhile destro is lucky to end up with 2 healers that actually are spec to heal. DoK's is always a 50/50 shot at getting a DPS one but now the last sacred line is crossed that we see so many DPS Zealots. Now... i'm all for ppl wanting to play their Zealot as DPS. But please L2DPS and not get everyone killed Kthanks. If you want a role model for a good DPS Zealot, go talk to Lyram.

Oh

And just because You're DPS doesn't mean you cannot throw out a group heal or rez people.

Riposte... too bad it's nerf'd too

2010-05-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

I've been running a Parry build as of late with Riposte.

1v1 I'm still strong and actually find that i can take on 2 or 3 at a time (as long as one is not a healer) and defend myself while DPSing them like crazy. I base %39 Parry and use Confusing Movements. If I put 5 Tyrant on I could get that extra %10 parry proc, that's a lot of Parry.

However, Riposte will no longer crit after the patch. While I still see this as a viable option, I don't know if I am going to stick with it or not. I'm thinking of trying a Savagery/Brutality build again so I can get Growing Instability, but without a knockdown, I feel somewhat naked out there LOL.

Maybe I'll give it a shot tonight!

The Tyrant/City Test/ES Nerf

2010-04-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Three Topics I want to address in todays writing, thus this may be a long blog. So bare with me :-)

The Tyrant

Last night, after farming ToVL for the last 3 or 4 months, and trying to farm it since release my completely Epic ToVL group and I went on a regular run through the forrests of the Vulture Lord's palace. We got purged and no one showed up, Boss 6 bugged and we had to reset and Boss 7 did some weird ass shit that you always see. One thing was different however, the DPS Helm dropped and I won it.

YES!!

Full Tyrant, yes I have everything from TOVL Except for a Library page and while I would love to have that %5 crit weapon that comes from the fruits of that labour I honestly could not give a Rat's ass about going back in there on this toon. There are too many good players in DN that need some Tyrant so unless it is demanded of me, Kruelhand will not go into ToVL again and it is time to get my Sorc warded and start my Chosen through there regularily. I'm very pleased to have all 6 pieces. I'll be swapping out as I go along because I don't have enough Dark Promise to really get a strong DP/Tyrant combo going. Right now I'll stick with the DP boots and belt, the rest Tyrant with the 5 piece set of jewls.

City Testing

Tonight is the RVR-City test on the PTS which I will be attending unless I get bumped out for someone else (entirely possible). The best of Iron Rock's Black Listed Guild will be there and they work a lot with Art Supplies, so I honestly do not know what to expect, nor would I expect them to want to take a Marauder now that we've been nerf'd into a horrible position. Either way, I don't really care about loosing a RVR Test fight to a bunch of rr80's in full Sovereign/Tyrant combination. What I am interested in is the new mechanic and seeing how things are going to go. This is such a badly needed change for this game that I can see it really resurrecting it for a lot of people who have grown tired of it's hopeless end game. Mythic is lucky their PvP mechanics are so good or else this game really would have died a year ago.

ES Nerf

After testing the new AP Drain Tactic on the PTS yesterday I am unhappy to say that Marauders have been nerf'd down to where we were about 8 months ago. This is bad, and while Order rejoices in the thought of no more AP drain from Marauders I am utterly disappointed.

I played this Marauder starting in December 2008. Since then the Marauders were nerf'd every single patch one way or the other. The real kicker was the epic AOE Nerf which made Marauders basically a Joke of a class and you never saw them anywhere. Some minor DMG buffs later and a reworking/finishing of the mechanic saw Marauders stronger, competative with other weaker classes instead of easy kills. The AP Regen Bug was fixed and then suddenly Marauders were the bane of all of Order.

Now, as I've said on the forums I do believe ES was Over Powered and yes it needed to get a nerf. Did it need to be made utterly useless? No, you kill a valid play style with the way it works now and Marauders now have to find a way to move forward with lackluster DPS abilities, marginal survivability and all we have is the Single Target Pull and 3 decent debuffs (Cutting Claw, Draining Swipes and Thunderous Blows, all sec required).

In the end, I've gotten rid of ES in anticipation of having to relearn new builds of this class. Savagery to me is still the best option in any situation with or without an AP drain build. I'm trying a Parry build right now, it is so far proving effective. We shall see.

Anyway that's all for now, have a great day.

Renown Rank 80

2010-04-24T21:13:00.001-07:00

Tonight, in IC I ranked RR80 when DN went into the city to defend. It came from flipping the PQ to the final stage, fitting I think since I didn't really want a solo kill thing I wanted something silly.

It took a long time to get to 80, and I'd like to explain why. Firstly, WAR is the first MMO I ever played to max level (in this case 40) and the only MMO I ever stuck with. I don't consider myself a gamer, I just like to do it. When I decided to stick with this game, it was a great choice for me. It's offered me many many hours of entertainment. Sometimes it was hard and frustrating. There was a very steep learning curve to PvP in this game, something I did not have any experience nor equipment for. I played on an outdated Laptop for the 7 months, unable to handle the outrageous Ruin Zergs of Dark Crag. In fact, upon entering any PvP situation I ussually had to die 2 or 3 times before I could catch up and start seeing the enemy on my screen. Thusly when I hit 40 Kruelhand was a mighty RR29.

It took a long time to get renown, the guild I was in was a Casual guild, a great group of people but not people with ambition to go out in the lakes or go and do Premades. Renown was hard to come by, especially for a lowbee Marauder which was at the time the worst class available (maybe Magus was worse, but they still had rift when it was good).

Eventually i started to educate myself on specs, mechanics, rotations and basically L2P. I don't consider myself to be an outstanding player or a great player but at least a good player playing a very well geared toon with other great players. DN(the guild I am in) is full of great players and they make me better. The proof was how bad I was in Lost Souls and SoC (although I was improving a lot during that guild tenure). in Lost Souls and SoC I was a guild Officer and I appreciate that rank. I got to learn about leadership in the game but realized I was better off being a front line soldier and am more then happy to be a strong part of the DN family.

I do not intend to shelve this toon even with the upcoming nerf. Kruelhand will be my main forever. Right now I'm working on RR for my Chosen and for my Sorc while the 2 week bonus is going on. Then I will level up another Order toon to 40. All the while I will be running premades and warbands with DN, finishing my Tyrant and starting on my sovereign gear. Ganking squishies and taking care of business.

I want to give special thanks to these people for all the great times which I guess is in no particular order

Xina, Eilo, Greenriver, Gorthak, Kitsuko, Devve, Laonsela, All my ToVL teammates(Snot, Dahhaka, Taotao, Alcii, Musana), Beefsteak, Usurps, Spyy, Indasoth, Shintoa, Guttersnipes, Stradegist, Medikage, Lyram, Carso, Sparkkee, Arwing, Carri, Maebus, Gargis, Renae/Finleaf, Fryday and the rest of Feared. All of Artsupplies for being the best enemy to fight against. All of DN

The Renown Train is Off the Tracks

2010-04-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

100% Renown bonus

The other night, after ToVL I hit 79. I was happy, but not looking forward to what I anticipated to be about 3 weeks worth of grinding scenario after scenario. However, after the fiasco of the billing issues, Mythic decided to give everyone %100 EXP/RR for 2 weeks (which after that time I assume 1.3.5 will be live).

I'm on the fence right now as to what this means. For example, in grinding SCs mostly a few zone flips I caught, nothing out of the norm I wracked up %31 of RR79 in 1 day of gaming. I'm on pace to be 80 by the end of the weekend (pending on distractions and PvE). This is great since I've been wanting to finish this for a little bit now and move onto leveling up some alts and getting my RR on my Chosen and Sorc improved. But you're going to see a lot of ppl at 80 after 2 weeks, people who right now might not even be 70.

The next thing, is most people anticipate that Sovereign gear will be very easy to achieve once the new City mechanic is live. I being one of those people am worried that full Sovereign is not going to be the rarity on Badlands that it is now (only 2 ppl I know of are rocking it, 1 got it through cheating 1 got it through being good) and Mythic will be stuck with people with the best gear the highest level and nothing to work towards other then just the PvP aspect of the game to keep them subscribed.

Basically, a lot of people are going to 'beat this game' in the next two months.

So what are you going to do Mythic?

PS

Thank you Kollar, my long standing Slayer Rival (although I doubt he considers me a rival) for the kill that gave me 79. I'm glad it was a DC Vet and not some badlands scrub.

Quote of the Night

2010-04-20T07:30:00.001-07:00

Indasoth: Kruelhand... I would Fucking hate playing against you.

made my night.

How to Have a Chance puging in SCs

2010-04-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

Step 1

Always kill Healers first, get the squishie ones then get the Warrior Priest. After that you kill the BW's. Ideally you kill the BWs at the same time, it'll be easy if you keep the healers busy on themselves.

How many SC's have you joined in only to watch the Choppas and Chosens beating on the Iron Breaker with a shield? If you answer at all anything above 1 you're playing with people who aren't paying attention.

Step 2

Don't solo group. Healers, even if you're not spec for group healing, group heals still heal. Toss them out there. Your buffs, your procs etc etc make a huge difference. Yes, we all want more renown. But you aren't going to get shit all for RR if you loose 500 to 10

Step 3

Tanks, Guard your DPS. Yes, everyone loves a guard, healers like to get them and they feel more secure. But a healer can take care of himself. The DPS need the help, especially crashing into all the other dmg. Guard your DPS, do it now.

Step 4

When the fight begins, don't split up. This is what kills PUGS before they even have a chance. In Nordenwatch 3 guys run off to the LH thinking they're supermen while all of the other team moves as 12. If you move as a Zerg you will improve your chances of wining as a Pug by about 50% right then and there, even before you guard your DPS, Attack Healers and group up in 2 6 man units, just moving together is enough as it is. If when you wipe your enemy you want to split up and capture points decide after you've seen their strength.

Step 5

Always fight on your own terms. Don't let the opponent dictate how the fight goes. If they are heavy on Melee then kite if they are loaded with Sorcs/BW's then get into situations where they are getting zerg'd by melee.

Step 6

Know your classes. It doesn't take a genius to know that if a Chosen is running in ahead he's probably going to Quake so don't spam your AoE button like a lunatic hoping to see numbers flying across your screen. If you're being spawn camped dont' CC the shit out of the Melee trying to kill you, let the Magus or Marauder use Rift/Pull to get guard agro, let the BG punt into the spawn etc etc.

Step 7

Don't Overextend.

Brutality

2010-04-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

I respec'd Brutality with this set up...

With the gear set up I was running when I respec'd without Ferocious Assault I was sitting at 281dmg bonus. This gave me some nice base numbers to work with on Impale and Guilotine. Wave of Terror hits nice and is a good way to keep the Absorb Morales a little bit undercheck especially with it's short cooldown. Once I start taking dmg shit gets crazy.

I was in SP when a Witch Hunter saw me at around 35% and thought... easy kill. Oh no you didn't! I hit him with Pulverize and that with a Covenent Proc, Frozen Fury and my Auto Attack I hit him for just shy of 4k in 1 swing. He agile escaped away faster then i've ever seen anyone try to escape. Terrible Embrace, knockdown and Guillotine and he was very dead. Seeing the big numbers is satisfying right now. In Savagery I see a lot of smaller numbers always flying across the screen. No more dot dmg for me right now, it's all about the big numbers.

Now that I have my Tyrant belt (which is utter shit) I have %25 attack speed increase which I'm looking forward to working with in this build, obviously because the Brutality AA proc going %25 faster should equal a significant DPS upgrade.

In Vulture Lord I was at 320 DMG bonus against Boss 8 which was sick. I was hitting him routinely over 2k with impale!

Auto Focus? Are you Serious?

2010-04-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Just finished a SC against a premade, possibly a x2 premade with like 3 BW's all using Auto Focus.

This Mod is hacking, I don't care what people who use it say to justify this bullshit but if you can click something and everyone's abilities fire off at the same time it's bullshit. no amount of healing, challenging, guarding or detaunting can do anything when 3 Fireballs hit you at the same time + all the dots and procs that come with that. You die, and you don't have a chance.

People who play BWers and need auto focus, I'm sorry but you are HORRIBLE and I laugh at you for doing such things. Where is the challenge in that, the sport in it? Just hit your "kill everyone button" and get your renown and crests.

So I hit my "I Win Button" and pull everyone stupid enough to get close to my guards into them and laugh while I do it. The Problem in that is, BW's slot their "cannot defend fireball" and get to fuck you up every 3s. I have to wait 30s and hope that they don't disrupt or block it and that who knows if the Guards will even agro.

So people on either side who Auto Focus... you fail at this game. Try me 1v1 in a Duel and if you beat me then then no problem. I'd say that you wouldn't stand a chance.

1 Hour, 58 Minutes

2010-04-13T20:26:00.001-07:00

Full TOVL Clear 1 shotting all bosses except for 7 (which would have been 1 shot if the 1st add didn't parry Quake) including a Smoke break for Snotslinga the monster MT.

I had fun in ToVL, we were on point. I now have 4 pieces.

Dolla dolla bill y'all

2010-04-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

Well, everyone knows about the Billing errors that Mythic has made this past weekend. Lucky for me I have been spared, which could have been ugly since my last sub payment was a 6 month one which was like 77 bucks or something like that. Multiple billings of that nature would have hurt my credit card but not killed me. However, my concern is for the young people and the people who work week to week to make their ends meet and getting drilled for sometimes over 1k in charges from Mythic. Those people are hurting and I feel badly about the whole thing.

As a protest I have cancelled my account and in August when I am no longer paid up I will leave Warhammer Online unless something major happens to this game. Right now everyone is quietly waiting for .3.5 to come out hoping it is a savior patch much like 1.3 was supposed to be (and was in a way). However after the total clusterfuck of 1.3.4 and the RvR token system, AFK, rollbacks and all that trash I wonder really what hope there is left in this game.

At this point i'm sitting %25 of the way through rr78 not really playing my Marauder that much and instead screwing around on Alts on the Order side trying to find that class that I want to play after I ding 80. I'll be rerolling to Order when this all goes down and probably buying a 2nd account so that I can stay on Baddielands. The other servers have no interest to me atm which sucks cuz my WHer is fun. I really am liking the SW and IB right now and think I'll stick to Iron Breaker when the time comes. But I want to be a DSP Iron Breaker, oh yeah that shit will be legit.

Hopefully this week I can get another pro tovl group like we has last week. Snotslinga is the best Tank in this game that I know of in RvR and PvE and I love running in his ToVL group. Not only that but his rl Significant Other Musana is probably the best zealot on Badlands, no offense to other great zealots but she is unbelievable (solo heal all of Tovl is a feat to behold).

So I patiently await patch notes for .3.5 with my Marauder nerf incoming but a whole new end game system which I hope is going to kick ass. I'm confident it will be functional as long as Mythic doesn't "jump the shark" after this epic fail on the weekend.

Oh PS

This last weekend Talebec Dam? Are you serious? That is like the worst SC in T3 and I played it once all weekend on my Marauder, I just didn't que for it. It's trash. Mythic please pick good Scenarios to feature on the weekends Kthanks

Ding RR78

2010-04-07T07:43:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the faceless no name Arch Mage that tried to kite me for the solo kill that dinged me rr78.

I appreciate your Fail kiting skills

AP Drain Nerf

2010-04-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

Well I didn't think it would happen so fast but apparently Mythic has decided to nerf the Exhaustive Strikes tactic thus nerfing Marauders again.

Great job Mythic.

Now, I understand the AP drain is OP. But it's not OP when you think about the long run big picture. The Marauder is a weak class, people who spec Savagry such as myself sacrifice a lot of DPS for the drain. The Drain is best effective by rr60+ Marauders who are wearing high Crit gear, thus low defensive stats, low DPS and then they have to be on their target going for the kill which eventually is eaten up by Choppa spam.

Going to a 40AP/3Sec is a massive nerf. I think that it would have been better to put an internal GCD on it + bump it down to 30 AP/Crit and it would have been more fair.

So Sadly I think tonight I'll be respecing out of AP Drain and bumping my my DMG bonus again and get some practice in. I still think I'll be AP Drain spec, right now I'm in 'asshole' AP drain mode (48% crit, Force of Will M2 + Kamenra) and could be 'uberasshole' (if I slotted Feeding on Fear and used my Bloofist Axe)

I think that Sav has the best long term DPS of the 3 trees with the dots etc. Brutality has the best Burst Damage, but really it's so situational (Impale = Flank only) that I would just hate it right now.

Think I'll be respecing my renown out of Crit and into Parry too. We'll see.

Prolord Weapons, The Gate and some... ownage?

2010-04-04T15:01:00.000-07:00

All and all a fun weekend just about to end. Pheonix Gate was my favorite low level SC with MT a close second. I love me some Nordenwatch but we get that all the time now, so when PG became open I was very pleased. Especially with Mounts! Now, wasn't happy about two things.

1. PG doesn't talley points on Kills, only flag Captures means that it is a long SC. For crests this is bad, for RR and a good fight it is awesome.
2. The Siege weapons were rank 15. Making them totally useless in T4 but utterly OP in T1. I started a Shadow Warrior this weekend (holy fun class) and did some lowbee shit when IC was under siege and the Weapons just tore us up.

Onward.

I got my Warlord Weapon last night, the 65 DPS is noticeable to the point where with 238 dmg bonus I am seeing similar dmg to when I was rolling with 271. Not to mention that I'm rolling with around 46% crit chance I see a lot of numbers all over my screen. Lately I've been running two tactic sets...

Deadly Clutch
Exhaustive Strikes
Brute Force
Scything Talons

This is when I count more then 3 healers, and adjust if I note DPS healers, OR pending on the group make ups (if there are a few Squigs for example) I won't need the extra juice on my heal debuff and so I'll swap out Deadly Clutch for Jagged Edge.

Jagged Edge now being fixed ticks pretty good for me, plus it's almost always up same with Savagery DoT. Since a Sav Marauder cannot Burst for DPS I figured soak up the DoT dmg. I don't have Rend on my hotbar anymore, I used to. Anyway, two constant DoTs up on a target with all the other debuffs I am finding that I can burn down targets right now better then I have been.

There was a SC the other night were I had 7 solo kills which I can't believe I didn't screen shot because those kills were mostly on Iron Breakers and Witch Hunters?!?! Yeah I was wrecking face a little bit which is not the norm.