Servers are down, and I’ve nothing to do, so I guess I can bring some drama here.

Number 3: Mightshade aka Skeptic, or Spectic, or something, don’t remember

This is probably some 16 years old living in basement, listening to Linkin Park while playing his Chaos Chosen. His brother (who should share the third place with him) has actually a name Nightshade (Mightshade and Nightshade, wtf?) and thus Mightshade rolled under another name in game, not to confuse his guild mates who apparently don’t see a difference between letters N and M.

Famous quote:

Who am I? I am your worst ENEMY and used to killing off guilds making them reroll or quit, I am your worst Nightmare and I will rip off your face and make a lampshade from it. why? Because you rolled here!!!!

Number 2: Calmdown

Clamdown is the kind of guy who you might call a professional troll. He is manipulative, making people into his games and enjoying it in the fullest. Bashing both Order and Destruction players, his crusade for… well, I’ve no idea what he tries to accomplish, but he is going to do it!

Famous quote:

Was this meant to be semi-insulting? Lol.

Number 1: Boru the Winner!

Anyone seen this guy in game? Does he even have a character on our server? Boru is the kind of guy who puts quanity over quality, like half of the posts on Eltharion forums are made by Boru. That being said, his trolling is still top notch, unquestionable winner!

Famous quote:

Hey, I was taking sexual pleasure from that hat long before you were buddy. You’re a Johny-come-lately to the hat sex scene.

Terhix

 
Not many updates recently, I know, but I’ve a good reason for that I think you all know about - powerleveling. Just dinged 32 which means I’m now a fully into T4 and can no longer play T3 scenarios.

I think I’ve a pretty good idea about the class ATM, and I think I’m going for a 14/0/11 hybrid build with a twohander, that grants me a single target knockback, aoe knockback with snare, aoe root, single target root from morale, aoe snare and two knockdowns, that’s hell a lot of CC you have to admite, and for that an Ironbreaker is really a great class. Not using Focused Offense and stacking toughness will guarantee that I’m tough enough to run into large groups even with twohander, and throwing aoe knockback (small distance tho) with a snare applied on it makes me a really hard target for any melee trains, while with the amount of tricks I’ve already at 3X peeling people off my healers is pretty easy.

The one ability I still has to test and I’m not totally sold on is Ancestor’s Fury, the short duration and grudge costs doesn’t really sell this ability to me, if it had at least 20 seconds duration then maybe, 120 strength is a lot (108 actually in this build), so is 10% crit, but IB doesn’t have a lot of burst damage, or crit synergy like a Black Orc, to begin with.

Terhix

 
Yesterday’s action in Mourkain Temple, captured by me on teh Ironbreaker. We played with two full (most of the time) parties, sometimes got in with both in one scenario, but you don’t want to see that, nothing exciting in winning 500 : 0 after all :P.

Movie should be up on WHMovies anytime soon. In the meantime, you can already download the movie from filefront.

Terhix

Servers down so I can finally post something. After two days I’m sitting at career rank 18, renown rank 16. I wasn’t really sold to the Ironbreaker when I rolled him, but soon enough I’ve realized the potential of the class. The grudge mechanic is simply awesome, I was a bit concerned about the fact I’ve to take damage to build grudges, but Mythic did a great work to ensure you are not going to be grudge-starved when people ignore you, Oath Friend is awesome indeed. What makes me wonder is the fact that when you switch your oath friend target, you just tap it once, while with Guard you have to tap once to cancel previous one and 2nd time to put it on new target, makes it hard when you want to switch guard to a dying guy. At rank 15 you get Rising Anger, and at this point you basically have no problems with grudges what so ever - you get them from taking damage, dealing damage and from your oath friend taking damage.

IB, unlike BO, has little to none burst damage potential, no exta crit damage (altho you can stack crit chance pretty well), instead you do a lot of dps with dots, so even if you don’t see huge numbers, you can end up on top of the dps chart without huge problems. Once you hit 100 grudges (and you can get them pretty fast), you can lay down some serious punishment, for example at rank 40 with maxed vengeance Binding Grudge has 852 damage over 10 seconds at 100 grudge, to compare Trip ‘Em Up deals only 360 damage with maxed Brawling at rank 40.

I’ll try to fraps some stuff from Tier 2 RvR when the servers get back up, possibly a commentary video, I’ve to say I pretty much like everything but the looks about the IB.

Oh yea, and a bit of bragging:

Although i have to say. I did lose one scenario yesterday (T2 greenskin) with 500-19

But it was a PUG, not a guild run. I think Order had a group of [FiRe] guild in there!

We are leik famous.

Terhix

With pain in our hearts after some hours of pretty heavy discussion on ventrillo my guild decided to go Order, which means I’m obviously not going to play a Black Orc. The only option I see atm is the Ironbreaker (no, not going to play Swordmaster, tyvm), so that’s the direction this blog will have to take.

Now I also must add vodka to my list of preparation, I don’t think I’ll be able to roll IB sober.

Terhix

OK, it seems that this time GOA has done their stuff right, a guildie with collectors edition had his key already registered correctly, which hopefully means that everything will work tomorrow morning for SE preorders. I’ve got my headstart key yesterday, so all that’s left to do is preparation. Things to do before getting into the game:

1. Disable phone - to make sure nobody is going to bother you on your days off (you did take days off, right?)
2. Stack some sleeping - you know you are a nerd if you rest whole day just because you don’t want to sleep the next day. I guess I’m not going to bed before rank 20 tomorrow, so stacking sleep is a good thing to do.
3. Hoard food and drink - chips, frozen pizzas to heat up in microwave, a lot of coke, red bull and powerade, my body will hate me.
4. Get a shower - last one in many many days.
5. Be ready for dark hours - get some movies and/or books (got 3 books to read myself) and some ASCII-dicks to paste on forums when shit hits the fan and servers go down.

I guess that’s it, WAR is coming! Also, we have yet to make any official statement, but most likely we are going to pick [EU] Eltharion Open RvR server to pwn on, hopefully that name is Order-ish enough to lure some Order guilds.

Terhix

WoW wasn’t the first game where tanks used to spec offensively to be PvP viable, WAR has gone away from this model, and while dps-specced tanks are quite viable, there is the other path to be a superior PvP machine. To accomplish this thing, you need to be able to deliver some serious pain in the ass while having insane survivability, and luckily enough, a Black Orc can have both!

 
Our best friend here is a shield, which provides block rating allowing to block all incoming damage and effects from any source (as long as it’s not a morale ability or another undefendable attack). But while a shield is nice and all, it’s not enough alone, we need to stack a bit of block chance %. Our options are: Good Wif Shield - core tactic gained at rank 27, Less Stabbin’ Me - available with 4 points into path of Da Toughest, if you reach high (70+) renown rank it’s possible to get 12% block chance from that as well. The biggest source of shield block however is Can’t Hit Me! - deep Da Toughest channeled ability. Combining all of the above can give us some pretty sick +block% values, that’s A LOT of avoidance. And what to do with all of that? Well, for example you can use Youz see me blok’ dat’?! to boost morale gain by a quite big margin, and exploit some defensive morale to the fullest, but be careful kids, there are only 4 tactic slots!

Shield block is not the only survivability tool there is, but let’s leave it there. Let’s take a look at the second part of being a tough motherfucker, which is being a motherfucker. One of the most annoying things you can do in RvR are knockbacks. And what’s more annoying than a knockback? An AoE knockback! That’s brawling spec ability, but it’s a core ability, and we are not interested in it’s damage here, so it’s fine and dandy to use it with another spec. Two other things that are worth to notice is the cooldown increase on Not in da face! and from offspeccing path of Da Boss we get Big Brawlin’ which gives us effecitve aoe snare and disorient on Big Swing, now we are talking! There is more good stuff to be taken, and with additional 4 mastery points from renown it only gets better.

Terhix

Will the european headstart make it?

So, I’ve contacted my retailer (polish language alert) to make sure about when they are actually going to bill me for the preorder and send the headstart code, here is the anwser I got (roughly translated):

Yes, five days before the official release day you will receive an email asking for confirmation / payment of your order. First 800 people, who’s payment verification for Warhammer Online will go properly, will receive special items and headstart access.

They have strange politics with those 800 people, but that’s not my concern as I’m online 24/7 (how do you kill the one who has no life?). 5 days before release is the standard procedure for my retailer as this is not the first preorder I’m getting there, that would mean they will actually send the codes on Saturday 13.

On the Warhammer Alliance forums Magnus has confirmed that nothing has changed about the dates, and GOA will actually try to bring the headstart registration before it going live:

(…) We’ve previously announced that we’d open the registrations for Head Start on the day it opens. In response to this week’s events we are working very hard to enable registration before the 14th. I’ve yet to see this confirmed, however. I’ll get back with an update as soon I can.
(…)
HS is planned as follows
September 13th - Open Beta servers close
September 14th - Collector’s Edition Head Start
September 15th - Standard Edition Head Start
(…)

Seeing how CE still seems to have problems with Open Beta I’m actually glad I didn’t order CE copy of the game. SE headstart beginning on 15th also gives them 1 extra day to fix stuff in case something goes terribly wrong on 14th (not like the CE owners aren’t going to spam GOA to death on forums in such scenario). We can only hope everything goes smooth.

Orcs officially can’t count

Patch 4.1.1 is out, the notes are pretty darn long - mostly bug fixes and last-time enhancements to crafting system and such. Anyway, there few class changes, and along them one is pretty funny:

T’ree Hit Combo: This ability now hits 5 times instead of 3, and its damage per hit has been reduced.

This is the official proof that Orcs can’t count, or rather can count only to 3 - 1,2,3,3,3 combo! On a serious note, this should be a bit of a dps boost on this ability, which is rather good as I didn’t even consider taking it in my last planned build, and that’s a deep-Brawling damage dealing combo finisher, so it should be good.

Armor and resistance calculator

And to end this post, I’ve added armor and resistance calculator to Tools, checked it against profiles on WARDB, should you find any mis-matches in game let me know.

Terhix

The very first Tool is here!

Nothing really complex, but I’ve decided to get my lazy ass to work a bit instead of playing OB, so here it is - Instant Attack Damage calculator. This will take some basic data such as your strength, weapon dps (also accept offhand for dual wielding careers), enemy toughness and, obviously, the base damage of an ability. The result is, if i’m not terribly mistaken at the formula, the actual damage of an ability before armor mitigation. Ever wondered what’s the difference between 1h and 2h damage? Want to check which weapon is better? If yes, this should be helpful.

Da Toughest! is exploitable after all

In my previous post about Da Toughest! I was actually wrong. As it turns out, you can remove the buff manually and the healed HP will stay. That means if you are removing the wounds buff quickly enough, you will get it proc more often (as it can’t proc again once the buff is up) getting pretty insane healing. I’ve soloed some Champion marked mobs with this, and it’s just down right broken, hopefully mythic will do something about this, as it looks like people are already starting to cry about it.

Terhix

 
At rank 10 Bright Wizards gets Fire Cage, which is pretty hard to handle when you have full melee group and abilities that remove CC come late in tier 2. We played some more organized scenarios and in quite some of them there were like 5 bright wizards (that’s 12v12 scenario) backed up with a rune priest and/or archmage here and there. Not all of them were rank 10-11, but some were which effectively stopped our melee train. So I’ve decided to change a tactic, bought the RvR 1h sword and shield and, as I was rank 10, put Hold the Line on my bar.

This is a pretty nifty ability, especially now when it got it’s cooldown removed. You get 45% increase to dodge and disturb chance, which gives you huge defensive power against spells and ranged folks, and everyone behind you (in a line, picture above) gets 15% buff to disturb and dodge as well - pretty easy to notice since everyone with the buff gets a green foggy texture on them. If you have 3 tanks, all of them can use it at the same time to stack the group buff to 45% as well. Anyway, that 45% chance to dodge and disturb combined with pretty high (30%+) chance to block with shield gives you a lot of avoidance, with zealot at my back 5 ranged guys were not only unable to kill me, they were unable to move my hp bar down by a pixel. It was pretty darn funny to see them push all that dps they have only to have it soaked by a tank while my team successfully captured the flag.

I found it also pretty effective for closing the melee range with a BW or SW trying to kite me - you can actually move at full speed while “holding the line”. The downside is the AP drain, 12 seconds of channeling and you are left with 10 AP, but it’s still ways better than when it had a cooldown.

The other noticeable shield abilities are: rank 2 morale Shield Wall available at rank 12 (this is basically 10 seconds of god mode) and Can’t Hit Me! from path of da toughest - ability very similar to Hold The Line but with a lower AP drain and giving you protection to both ranged and melee, no group utility tho, and reduced walking speed can be a bit of a problem. Sadly, no avoidance can help you register your Open Beta key on GOA website which seems to still has problems. I hope they can figure it out before headstart, I’m taking vacations next week to play the game, not to spam F5 :P.

Terhix