So finally order side on my server managed to rank up the capital city. The big change here is that Sigmar’s Hammer opens up. If you are in a guild with a guild rank above 6 then you are able to enter the tavern. It is located far to the south in Altdorf at the top of the stairs behind the guild registrar. It holds a quartermaster where you are able to buy crafting items and recall scrolls. Also there are two renown gear merchants, the ones you from tier2 and up normally have to locate inside keeps. Lastly we have a flightmaster on the roof of the tavern as well where you will have access to additional flight paths based on your guilds rank. Bit expensive though, a trip to chaos wastes was 50s. Other than access to Sigmar’s Hammer I did not really see many changes. Slums still look like the slums but merchants carry more items. I am sure if we all looked more careful we would be able to spot alot of smaller changes, but probably need a lot more than just one rank to really spot a difference.
So when I got the collectors edition home one of the first things I did was get out the mousepad so it could replace the mousepad I got from Burning Crusade collectors edition. The mousepad looks really cool, but… After having used it for a little while now I am afraid I have to call it a failure for one simple reason. The mousepads backside is to slippery and you end up moving the mousepad instead of the mouse a bit to often. Sad to say the mousepad will go back in the CE box as a collectors item and I will get out the previous mousepad again. I hope Mythic or GOA will consider this when including a mousepad for the collectors edition of the first Warhammer expansion pack.
Update 29th September: Remember to peel the backside plastic off the mousepad.
Seems the time has come for server cloning in Europe as well. Not very long ago GOA posted the following news on the eu Warhammer site. The servers that will see cloning are
Karak Eight Peaks will be cloned to Tor Anroc
Karak Azgal will be cloned to Zhufbar
Karak Hirn will be cloned to Yvresse
Eltharion will be cloned to Tiranoc
Which includes the server I play on, Karak Eight Peaks. Now we start the whole situation with scouting server over again. To best honest as order player on KEP I didn’t mind the queues that much. Queue times were about 15 minutes for me when they were the worst. Of course if the game crashes a lot which it did at first, then it sucks to wait that long to get back in. But after my reinstall from disc that I mentioned in a previous blog post I haven’t had a single crash. I must admit I even prefer a “full” server since with realm caps this ensures that as long as people are queuing up the two sides are of equal size and we have a fair fight. Now it seems to me we risk having a healthy online population turned into two unbalanced populations since the destruction queue on this server was often four times as long. Seems I am a hard person to satisfy, even when they do something to fix queues very fast and much faster than Blizzard ever did in WoW I find something to complain about. As for now my guess would be that most people will not even notice the cloning and just log in on the old server name. If that theory is correct Karak Eight Peaks should hold the largest slice of the players with hopefully reduced queues by having some go to the new one. Seems to be the time to start reading forums to see what people are planning and especially what some of the larger guilds are planning to do.
One of the more popular addons for World of Warcraft was Scrolling Combat Text by Grayhoof. He had announced he would make a port of it for Warhammer and a few days ago it was released on curse. For me personally this has been the addon I have been waiting for since release and I am very happy it is now here. The fact that all healing and damage done is around the target avatar makes it to easy to miss and you do not have time to parse the text in the combat log down in a corner of your screen. Time to go install and see if the Warhammer port is everything I remember it to be from WoW.
Ever since I picked up my Warhammer discs I have been considering whether or not to dump the patched version of the beta client and go for a full reinstall. Seems to be rumours floating around in the blogosphere as well that you might get better stability by doing this. That I cannot confirm though, however I have now done my reinstall purely for the fact that clicking cinematic did not work with the beta client. So after a reinstall and a patching worth about 800MB I now have a clean install. The cinematic turned out to be the already known trailer two that Mythic release a while ago. Whether or not the game is more stable I cannot tell yet since I am now waiting in queue to log in, 28 of 71. If I discover any other significant differences I will let you all know.
Update 16:37 CEST: So stability wise I can say that I have not had a single crash since I did the reinstall usually I have 2-3 crashes in the same amount of playtime. In fact only reason I am here writing right now is that the server just crashes and I am fairly certain that I had nothing to do with that.
I must admit I am really pleased with how the scenarios have been so far. I especially like how each tiers scenario seem to be based around a common theme. Take for example tier one is all about some form of zone control, while tier two is some form of capture the flag. I have not reached tier three yet so cannot say it this theory still holds true there, and as for tier4 I hope, since that is the last tier, that we have scenarios of all the different types. Even better have all scenarios be available at rank 40 in special top rank mode with option to just join first available scenario. While I am already giving suggestions how about the possibility to join all scenarios of your rank range while in capital city please?
Stone Trolls Crossing is the empire versus chaos tier two scenario. The “flag” in this one is a troll pacifier places on top of a hill in the middle of the zone. The team that captures the pacifier needs to take it to 3 troll spots within a time limit to score points. After this is done or time runs out the pacifier resets.
Mournkain Temple is dwarf versus greenskin tier two scenario. In the middle of the zone is an artifact that must be captured and held by someone on your team. The person holding the artifact will take periodic damage. If your team is holding the artifact you get points ticking in. If you kill the person holding the artifact your team gets point. Finally if the person holding the artifact kills someone you get points. The last one encouraging the holder to stay in the battle for a fast scenario.
Phoenix Gate, the elf tier two scenario is straight up normal capture the flag. Get the flag from the opposing teams base and bring it to your own. Just please do not use terrain exploit when you are holding the flag cause you are scared to get hurt and will do everything to win. In the picture below you see a destruction player with the order flag in the destruction start spot. No you are not supposed to be able to get back up there after you go down and I do not know how he got up there and I would not tell even if I did. In the hopes that Mythic will fix that terrain exploit as fast as possible that was all I had for this post.
With the arrival of the real launch and the chance that you were able to get a collector’s edition comes your chance to respec the face of your character without having to go for a reroll.
Dwarf male head model ce item
Once your register your collector’s edition you will receive the item seen in the screenshot in your ingame mailbox. If you take this item to your local dye merchant you are able to view the exclusive head where you can then choose to change or not. This is a one time change and you will not get the chance to change back afterwards.
In the image below you can see how my runepriest looks after the addition of the new head. In my opinion a huge improvement over the randomly generated one I had chosen before. For screenshots of the complete set of new head models head on over to TenTonHammer.
From the moment you are born to the moment you die you learn something new every day. For me the lesson of the day was how to massively increase my renown gain from scenarios. Basically the deal is that healing is one of the best ways to get renown at the moment, if not the best. But when you are in a scenario you auto join the scenario warband, and when you are in a warband you share all xp and renown gains with the rest. Next time you join a scenario try opening the scenario warband menu and leaving the party going as a solo player. All that juicy healing renown is now yours, and yours alone. The best part is that you do not even have to live without the warband ui since you can still see the other parties without being in them. This allows you to heal just as if you were in a party, with the only exception being group heals and buffs. The first time I tried this my renown gain increased by a factor four compared to the previous attempt. Just remember to cast a few instant damage spells every now and then to get in on the kills for the kill player quests.
As a runepriest I cast a rune of restoration heal on a low hp player for 500hp heal and got 55 renown from that alone when I was solo. Rezzing is also a good tactic since this brings up a player in the need of some very big heals which again gives you good renown. Now is it good that healer will want to go solo I don’t really think so, but until Mythic changes any of this, if they ever do, this at least is a good way to get started on farming those 80 renown ranks.
A special thanks goes out to Whistler on Karak Eight Peaks for telling me I should try going solo healing in a scenario and check renown gain.
Been a few days now since I posted and of course a lot has happened since then. One tiny thing… The game has started! So naturally I have been busy in the game and created a runepriest on Karak Eight Peaks and got it to 10rr10 on the first day of playing. A thank you to GOA is in it’s place here since the launch went really well and there was no problems what so ever with entering head start and bonus item codes. Had a couple of crashes of the game in the first period that made me have to sit in launch in queue a few times but that is a Mythic problem and so far it has not been more than I could accept for the launch of a new mmorpg.
Now I have a lot to write and share about Warhammer Online already. The first thing is a video i captured on the first day that I hope shows how special a launch experience is with the starting areas being more active than we will ever see them be. This video is from the first public quest in the dwarf area and I doubt that we will ever see it be completed much faster than this.
With head start rapidly approaching I must say I am beginning to feel a bit more confident with GOA. Over the weekend we saw them extend their open beta so we could play quite a few hours more than we had originally been promised. Furthermore the CEO of GOA announces that everyone who has participated in the open beta will get 7 days of free subscription credited to our accounts on the 18th. However the real test comes with the head start launch. They announced the name of the head start servers late on Saturday, and when head start code registration came online at 2:10AM CEST everything seemed to be working perfectly. I myself was able to enter my code without any problems immediately after I saw it was up, and very shortly thereafter I got an email verifying I had been credited with head start on my account. Now it is also possible for us to enter our bonus item codes but I have not received any confirmation on that one yet. GOA announced that they have put priority on head start codes over bonus items and I think we can all agree that was the right choice. Everything seems to be shaping up for a good launch, we just have to wait for this afternoon to see if they will follow through to the end.
As for my choices of career and server going into the head start I will be playing a runepriest on the Karak Eight Peaks core ruleset server. I always knew I wanted to play a healer class, that is what I have always done in all the mmorpg’s I have played and I still like this archetype and saw no reason for that to change this time around. Also knew I wanted to play Order side so I read up on the three healer classes: Archmage, Runepriest and Warrior Priest. The WP seems to be similar to paladin from World of Warcraft and the Archmage needs to mix and match dps and healing equally to be most effective. Which led my focus to the runepriest. Reading up on it made me realise that this healer seemed to have a chance of being the healer class most likely to become the “primary healer”. So I tested it out in open beta and have decided to go for this career in live.
The second biggest decision, if not the biggest after all, is to choose a server. I had already decided on the type of server so when the list came in I saw one server named Axe Bite Pass and a lot of others starting with Karak something. Seeing as Axe Bite Pass is going to stand out among the others it seems to be the obvious choice so I will stay away from that one, the reasoning should be less likelihood of long queues. My tactic then was to go to WHA EU Server forums and I started looking for which server might have a good and active community. Ended up being that Karak Eight Peaks had the most posts, also the name is pronounceable and shortens down to KEP which seems nice. After GOA confirmed that KEP will be one of the head start servers I decided this is where I will go. Now when picking a server that will be one of the absolute first ones you have to be concerned with the possibility of queues. Every CE’er going to that server is bound to have at least a few friends/guildies that will join that server as well come SE start. But since I will be playing order and it has been annouced that there will be separate caps for the realms and that destruction seems to be the “popular” choice in Warhammer I figure that order will have smaller queues and going for a launch server will increase the chance of having a well populated order realm. Now here goes hoping that everything will go smothly and as planned. Next step, find a guild… anyone looking for a runepriest with alot of previous healing experience on Karak Eight Peaks?
