Finding the groove…

I think some of us are getting to that point in the game which other blogs I read have already hit on. That point is the great slowdown effect we are facing. Some members of the guild still get on every night (im looking at you Grom and Schmitty!) while others are starting to taper off their playtime. I think I’m falling in the middle. I’m not sure if anyone else in the group is with me, but I have been on every night since the release of WAR. Hard to believe, but on that first night that I ran out to Gamestop and picked it up at about 8:30pm, ran back home and installed to play but maybe 1 hour, was the first of a series of nights that has yet to end. I don’t plan on ending that streak soon. BUT what I DO plan on doing is cutting back my actual playtime, and I think so far its making me enjoy my experience while in-game even more. 

For the past week or so I have been getting a feeling like I’m getting a little burnt out or bored with WAR already, but my underlying love for the game is forcing me to log in every night. I still love running through scenarios, and love ORvR more…when its happening (two nights ago right after I logged in someone shouted that Fangbreaka Keep was under seige and I ran there just in time to thwart the 1 full group of evildoers from their plan to take it….loved it).

The last couple nights I have been playing Left 4 Dead and enjoying myself immensely. If you want to be prepared for the Zombie Uprising, then I suggest you go buy this “game” (simulator is more like it).  Amidst playing L4D, I have still been logging onto WAR, but reducing the amount of time I actually play. I have to say, just logging on for 30 minutes to an hour I think is slowly building up my want to play again, if not at least keeping me interested in playing. I only played long enough last night to finish out my daily task for the Heavy Metal event, then I logged back off. This morning I had that feeling like I had a month ago. That feeling of…man,….I wish I had time to log on right now and get some exp going towards Rank 22.

So whats the message of this rambling? I dont know, I forgot where I was going…oh yeah thats it, the message is:

Find your groove, and you will love the game.

See you in game!

For those about to rock…

And so the next live event begins with todays patch. Im actually somewhat excited about this one. It seems that the team made the tasks pretty easy to do, so anyone with any desire to try out the classes a week before they are available to the open public should be able to obtain the reward. (that means you Marv!)

Im not sure about needing the final reward, but the idea of obtaining a trophy and a sweet looking cloak interests me:

 

On a side note, they have held off on updating the game with the class balances untill after the live event. SO, this means we will see one more patch (1.0.6) before the big 1.1 release. Wait…so then what was 1.1 again? Wasn’t 1.1 supposed to be the game balance/class adding/mail fixing/everything under the sun patch? I guess Mythic figured its best to fix things based on priority. Good thing! You can see today’s patch notes here…

1.0.5 part duex

and the reasons and current plans for 1.0.6 here…

From the desk of Mark Jacobs 

I like that they are re-evaluating the 3 biggest concerns that people had from the initial patch notes. Good news for Runepriests escpecially seeing as your HoTs will now not be touched and the GRANDE HEAL has had its cast time lowered in order to lower the chances of the heal being reduced by combat. So, they turned the nerf,…into a buff!

They are also doing more tests with the Ironbreakers, Bright Wizzies and Sorcerers to make sure that dont over-nerf. I hope they get this all figured out before the new tanks are available for play (since the Black Guard uses a similar mechanic as the Ironbreaker).

In honor of the “Heavy Metal” theme, I plan seting up a nice playlist on my iPod and rocking out as I play tonight. You may even see the return of DJ Slurm over vent.

LETS ROCK!

Oil + Noobs = Slurm FTW!!!

Well the title pretty much sums up my T2 Open RvR experience last night. I was in the midst of questing to get my Engineer to level 20 (which I did, thankyaverymuch). At one point, I had to go from the warcamp in Barak Varr to the camp near the big gate public quest. I saw on the map that there was an option to take a road south and then loop back north through a mountain pass and out to the camp where my quest would end. I also saw that I could simply run through the Open RvR zone and be there in about half the time. Hmmm, risk of ganking vs time save….

I went into the lake and within 2 minutes was jumped by a pair of witch elves who gave me no chance to live.

I figured if I went back in with a plan of being ganked I would stand a better chance (even though bolstered, they were only around level 12, and I should be able to take at least 1 down with me). After re-entering the ORvR area, I happened to see a full group running by the fort on their way to the battlefield objective. I steered clear. I continued onto my original objective to complete my quest and what do i find? one of the Witch Elves. She dies.

I then notice that the keep is being seiged by the group that had ran by moments before. OOH heres an opportunity. I ran as fast as my little drawven stumps could take me and popped into the keep. I then proceed up to the second level and placed my oil above the door (never leave home without it). A few spills later and the whole group goes down. Slurm wins.

Funny thing is: they came back twice and did it again. Yummy XP.

Last night was dead…

And I think I found out why…

Everyone was busy?

At least thats my theory right now. I cant get on right now to see the status so I’ll update later, but I assume that the scenarios were dead last night because more people were playing their mains.

Even if this isnt the reasoning for the low scenario pop, it still tells me one thing:

I wanna do stuff like this. Lets get the Juddster’s Runie leveled up and boogie.

See you in game!

1.0.5 goes to the test servers…

Well the big update that most of us have been waiting for is one step closer to hitting our patchers. No, I speak not of the 1.1 patch which will bring us 2 new tanks, I speak of the first batch of class buffs/nerfs. We can now see what Mythic has been working on behind the scenes to ensure a good balance for the classes. Heres the link…

1.0.5

It seems most of the classes got increases in damage to some abilities (some more than others of course) and the only real nerfing that went on was the insta-cast root/snares used by all the ranged DPS classes. The roots now have a longer recast timer, but a decreased AP cost….I don’t really see a problem with this I guess, the primary purpose of this ability on design was to get out of sticky situations, and now it will most likely be used for just that.

Overall I think the nerfs/upgrades seem well done, but I’ll let you guys review the notes and decide for yourself.

*edit* Going to agree with Grom, I dont think DoT ticks should have a chance to expel the AOE Roots, and if they are going to let damage take away a root, they shouldnt have lowered the immunity on it.

See you in game!

Slurm’s Corner…

Welcome to another exciting episode of randomness!!!

First off, I would just like to say that nothing can make a father prouder than when he receives confirmation that his son or daughter actually pays attention to what he says. We are still working on potty training my 2 year old daughter and as she finishes, she stands up…looks into the potty and gets a proud look in the eye before she cries out, “Daddy! I dropped a deuce!!”

My wife….was….thrilled.

But anywho, time for links to stuff thats just plain fun…to me…

First off, for those of us who have played ANY of the Ultima games, you may or may not know that the creator of those games (Lord British) is back from his journey. What journey do you speak of Slurm? His visit to the international space station duh!

So you’re back, from outer space I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face…

I have not delved into this website (seems that its just a guilds website), But I just had to post this due to being one of the funniest names EVAH:

Mmmmm tasty

And finnaly I just wanted to comment about something very near and dear to my heart. Its something that is seen by some (and by some I mean me) as more important than the big election today. Some people go through life questioning “what it all means”, and “is there a point” and then life affirming events like this take place. I, of course, am talking about…

…Todays new release.

Hopefully its not the last.

Balance…

…otherwise known as “I hope this isn’t the reroll part 3”

OK roll call:

DPS: Check – We have a White Lion, Witch Hunter/Engineer (depending on which route I go), and two Bright Wizzies

TANKS: Check – An Ironbreaker and two Swordmasters

HEALS: Tried to check but the pencil tip broke – We have a Runepriest, and an Archmage whose Internet is borked. COME BACK TO US ZONIC!!!

I hope Zonic DOES get the network issues fixed, and that he comes back to us, because otherwise Shad gonna be angry….you dont wanna make him angry…

So, questions I have regarding the future:

-Does anyone know if Zonic has great intentions of coming back once his ISP problems are solved?

-Who would not be objective to rolling a healer? And by rolling a healer, I mean rolling a healer as their MAIN. I know Grom’s “I’d rather cancel my subscription” feeling. I mostly share the same attitude, although I WOULD play a Warrior Priest (quite happily) even thought this offers little healing, mostly the WP is “in case of emergency break glass for heals” .

-If we get our Zonic back (iwantmyzonicbackzonicbackzonicback….ribs) we probably don’t need to worry about any of this, and that leads me to question number 2. How long do you think we should wait before someone rolls a healer?

If push comes to shove, I’ll suck it up and roll a Runepriest, but in return you must all name your firstborn some form of the name Slurm.

Let me know, so I can sleep again….

Character Transfers…

Hey all,

In case you were not on last night and happen to see this post before logging in, we have moved our Destruction characters.

With the transfers being offered right now by Mythic, we chose to move the Kragg characters to a server with (hopefully) more action. So, if you havnt done so yet, and don’t have any objections, you can move your characters from Kragg, to Monolith.

You can do this from the accounts page (theres a my account button on the patch screen if that makes it easier).

I don’t think theres a huge push to go back to Destruction, sorry Marv =((, but if we ever get the itch, at least we will be on a more populated server. (no more 45 minutes queue times for scenarios!!)

See you in game!

Here’s an idea…

I was sitting at work doing my once a week mundane computer task (kind of like a kill quest, but instead of kill 10 Unholy Flesheaters, it was enter 400 pieces of data), and a thought came to me.

More than just a thought about an improvement to the game, it was an idea for an ad campaign. Its probably too late at this point with just a couple weeks to go in the presidential election, but, with there being just 2 sides in this Realm vs Realm game, I thought it would be neat to see an Order vs Destruction political ad campaign hit the air. The timing could have been perfect with the end of the free month. Maybe it could have pulled in some late buys, maybe not. But I think it would have been great fun seeing political smearing of the 2 sides of a video game.

While this would be hilarious, the trick would have been not to make any direct ties to the real life race for the white house (like saying that one of the realms is the advocate of Change, or making a reference to Joe the Witch Hunter). But by mirroring how the ad campaigns are ran, it could show just how rediculous they are. I for one am pretty much done with the real life campaign, and could use some laughter about the whole situation.

Experience Enhancements III…

OOH lookie,

The latest from the Dev team stated that we will now be receiving even MORE exp for killing in Open RvR. In fact, we will see DOUBLE the exp that we get for a kill in scenario RvR. If they implement an increased amount of loot drops (which WAS hinted at in the state of the game address) I think I may just park myself in open RvR zones from here untill 40.

I plan on going out into one of the lakes tonight and seeing how the action is. Now that there is Region and RvR chat, I’m starting to notice more poeple filling up my chatbox with messages of action. Last night while waiting on scenarios to pop, I was standing in the Marshes of Madness and saw nemerous messages about the keep there being under attack. When I opened my map I saw alot of crossed swords (it was like opening the frontier map in DAoC when there was tons of action.

If anyone want to join me tonight feel free, I plan on at least making a couple runs and to see what I can do at this level (currently 19) and to determine if having the mount first would a huge difference.

See you in game!