Ok, long time no updates, took me a while to gather myself and write something, a lot has happened in past days, so this post is probably end as a quite long one.

All hail the Earthshatter

On saturday’s night I’ve finally dinged 40, and started to play with builds. I’ve went with the 14/0/11 route from my last post, and I’m very happy with it. The only thing I’m not actually using is Punishing Knock, I just feel that I’ve more than enough CC already and I’m often using Inspiring Attack just to buff my strength or my healer’s willpower, in such case having an inferior knockdown (which, as it turns out, is a stun and not a knockdown), which also apply 18 seconds immunity on my target making me unable to use Cave-In problematic in some cases, definitely good stuff if you are not that deep in Vengeance tho.

So, instead of that I’m loading Focused Offense on my bar, now many people will tell you how Focused Offense sucks and how you are not a tank when you are using it - they lie as they have no idea how meaningless armor can be in the endgame. From all destruction classes that deals physical damage: Black Orc will stack Wot Armors on you for -75% armor debuff (I know the math says 73%, but the tooltip of 5x stacked Wot Armor? actually shows 75%), chosen deals a lot of spiritual damage anyway, marauder can insta debuff 75% of your armor with Cutting Claw in savagery build or just ignore 50% of your armor with a tactic, Witch Elf doesn’t stay behind with armor removal either and Squig Herder has options to deal non-physical. It’s not like having less armor isn’t noticeable, but it’s not as bad as many people try to make it, what makes you a tank actually is your Toughness and Wounds above everything else (and shield block if you are running around with a shield).

The ability I was very positively surprised with is Earthshatter, going with the flow of Vengeance tree I was expecting this ability to apply a dot for the duration of the snare it applies, but as it turns out, it deals instant damage, and it’s a lot of damage, on 100 grudges it hits like a fucking truck, an aoe truck of doom:

 
The underlined damage is on a squishy after applying 100-grudge Stone Breaker and Taunt, probably some buffs from my group and/or debuffs on the target increasing damage as well, it’s usually under 1.5k mark for crits, and it crits not that often as I’m not using a single +crit tactic or ability atm, 1k non-crit hit is still quite a lot of burst damage anyway.

It’s also a good thing to notice that, while it’s an aoe ability, it actually (unlike Grip Of Stone) requires an offensive target in range, so you will never waste the cooldown into air - this is extremely sexy when chasing someone and spamming the button to get the snare from the range, much like piercing howl in WoW is used (PH doesn’t require a target, but it doesn’t have a cooldown either, so one can catch a target out of melee range with it).

Two-handed wielding tanks?

This is a very hot topic, as it has been since the release, there are countless topics about how two-handed tanks are viable, and just as many about how you have to use a shield to benefit your team in RvR. The truth lies in between, as two-handed wielding tanks are neither a true melee dps, nor are they a true hard-rock tank, but rather, as it’s often called - an offensive support.

I’m often actually playing the role of melee dps in scenarios, mostly assisting in melee trains (well, calling targets as I’m used to do that from WoW, but this time it’s not me who brings the mortal strike to the table), but I try to never loose an eye from my healer(s) and always keep the one I’m guarding in my defensive target so I see when he needs my help. There are times when all I do is staying at back near the healers to make sure that every Witch Elf trying to attack them ends watching the respawn timer, and this is something an offensive specced tank do really really well. 1h + shield tank can guard a healer just as well, but it will take him a while to kill any attackers, his best bet is to peel the attackers from the healers and wait for support to finish them off, offensive support is totally independent in this role, handling any ambush attempts on his own.

I’ve already had a good chance at doing pretty much everything with my Veng/Brotherhood hybrid, from T4 scenarios, to open RvR, to keep capture and defense, to PvE. In all aspects of the RvR I can always find myself very valuable, and in PvE when you have to tank, just grab a shield, switch the tactics and skill bars and you are ready to go, no respeccing required (same applies to tanking keep lords). Either way, having a shield in your backpack is a must, you never know when some big zerg fight starts (haven’t really seen them on live yet, but seen them a lot in last stage of Closed Beta), at which point not having Hold The Line when pushing is asking to be killed.

DAMN! Those Doombolts!

Well, not only Doombolts, but when wondering about what resists to pump up, your best shot is Corporeal and Spiritual, as those are the schools the glass canon of Destruction - Sorceress - use. Once they get to 100 dark magic (and they get pretty often in scenarios with healers at their back) they hurt a lot, and it makes it quite of a pain to do a melee push when facing multiple of them.

Stacking Corporeal and Spiritual resistances are your best bets for RvR as Order, and Dwarves have it pretty good, as we not only have a tactic for corporeal resistance (I don’t see anyone using it anytime soon), but also an ability to buff it on us and our oath friend - Stubborn As Stone - pretty cheap and has a quite nice haste effect for auto attack as well. I’m sitting at 49% corporeal resistance with this selfbuff, above that when buffed with Prismatic Shield by Archmage easily getting above 50%. Now resists are not granted, they can be debuffed just as armor can be, which makes stacking lots of them even more important, as having low amounts often counts for nothing (literally). Get the right gear and talismans, and you will see the results:

 
Eltharion queues, lags and poor GOA support

Eltharion is THE Open RvR server for Europe, which means it’s has HUGE population. In the primetime Destruction has to wait 2 hours to get in (if you have 5 hours of quality time to play after work, that means you are spending 40% of it just on waiting), and even Order gets to as high as 40 minutes queues. But that’s not what’s worse, it turns out the lag inside scenarios can really destroy a lot of fun from the game, when everything in open world zones works perfectly fine. Using some morale abilities is often virtually impossible - and I’m talking about self-castable stuff like Skin of Iron, where latency problems with target out of range are out of question, these are often life saving abilities, if you spend 10 seconds trying to activate a 5 second duration life saving ability, you end up dead. Fix this shit, seriously!

We had patch server unavailable for few hours, and there was no word from GOA at all, not even a simple confirmation “we know there is a problem and we are working on it”. Nope, nothing, the first information we got was from Mythic employee, seems like US is more concerned about European players, than European company running the game for us. It’s really sad that a company which can setup such a professional booth on Leipzig GC, is showing such a lack of customer support. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes, but after years of running Dark Age of Camelot in Europe I guess we all expected something more.

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

Yesterday Open Beta started. Looks like GOA has/had some problems with their flash site and OB registration, but since I was in closed beta my account got upgraded to Open so I didn’t have to wait for them to resolve the problems. I wanted to post about Da Toughest! yesterday, but I sank in with few guildies and didn’t go to bed until I was rank 10 renown rank 9, basically farming scenarios since rank 6. It seems that they lowered the amounts of renown needed for the new ranks, and experience alone was awarded pretty fast as well.

 
My main objective however was testing new Da Toughest! and I’ve to say I’m really happy with it’s potential use. From my testing it seems that the way it works - upon proc it turns on a 10 second buff and heals for the amount increased, it’s 3 wounds per rank so far, so at rank 10 it’s already 300 hp healed, about 10% hp. The trick is, once the buff is up it can’t proc again. Once the buff naturally goes down, your max hp drops but your current hp stays as it was, another proc will heal you again. Removing the buff manually, as far as I tested it, will lower the hp gained with the buff, so it’s rather hard to exploit. To say it in language that’s understandable for everybody - this is basically a ~10% hp selfheal proc with 10 second inner cooldown, basically same healing rate as second wind in WoW. In the screen above you can see it’s healing me for about 30% of my total damage done, that rate is going to be lower as my dps is going to be higher at higher ranks since I’ve no tactics atm and I’m going to have hardly any spare mastery points to spend into path of da toughest.

The build I’m now considering is this variant of 17/4/4, going into tri-spec is maybe not the best idea ever, but I still want to have the detaunt immunity from da boss. I never liked T’ree Hit Combo to begin with, so I can drop a point here, An Bestest! is going to be pointless if I’m not going to use Da Biggest!, so a free point here as well. Rank 4 morale, well, I can use the trainable one so a free point here as well. The good news are, we are going to get extra mastery points from renown ranks 40, 50, 60 and 70 which makes it possible to get 17/8/4, giving me everything I must have from brawling and detaunt immunity from da boss and relatively strong Da Toughest! for a good mix of offensive power and survivability.

Terhix

In order to become a walking machine of death we all want to be, you need good gear, and good spec. Spec in WAR is more than one layer, it’s not only about the mastery path of your choice, but also about the tactics and morale you are going to use. I’ve presented some strong points of the career previously, but due to popular request I’m going to give you a bit deeper insight into speccing for offense. The build I’m personally planing to go with atm (everything is subject to change as we are in beta and things changes all the time) is a variation of 20/0/5 - basically getting everything from path of Da Brawler, and putting spare points into path of Da Boss to increase the damage of Shut Yer Face.

The key abilities from brawling are Gork Smash! and Down Ya Go. An Bestest! is good to have since it’s a nice dps boost and turns Da Biggest into a group buff. T’ree Hit Combo is pretty good dps, as it’s fully utilizing Gork Smash! And since we already have filled the whole mastery bar, there is no reason to not take Puddle o Muck, rank 4 morale isn’t something you are going to use often, but when you get to that 100% morale it’s going to be a waste not to have a rank 4 ability at your disposal. From path of Da Boss You Got Nuffin’ is pretty much a must have, once people will actually l2p, they will spam detaunts left and right, some classes can keep detaunt up 24/7, having a tactic that negates their 50% damage reduction from detaunt is HUGE.

Ok, so we have the mastery build set, time to pick up tactics. There are only 4 career tactic slots at rank 40, but there is more good tactics to put your hands on. Whenever you want to deal some damage, two tactics are basically a must have:

• Stab You Gooder - core tactic trained at rank 23, it makes your crits deal 200% damage (base is 150%).
• Gork Smash! - we got from brawling mastery.

Those two tactics produce a nice synergy and turns you into a crazy crit whore, crit streaks, mmmm. Ok, two slots are still empty, now depending on what you are actually going to do you want to use two of the following tactics:

• Focused Offense - I R DPS. Doesn’t need comments, but (if it remains the way it is) it’s pretty dangerous to use. In many cases, mostly large scale RvR, using this is a suicide. Also, if you are defending someone with Save Da Runts, you are going to take increased damage from guarding as well, and in case of guard you take 50% of damage against cloth, your base mitigation and toughness doesn’t matter here. You can block the damage from guard, but that requires a shield obviously ;). Perfect solo tactic still.
• You Got Nuffin’ - doing any non-1v1 RvR? Take this.
• An Bestest! - overall good tactic, pretty much self-explanatory.

That’s my tactics of choice, and I’m most likely to use them the most. There are however some other tactics that are also pretty good for offensive spec that are worth mentioning:

• Loudmouth - with 25% chance to proc a War Bellow, this is a good dps boost. The downsides are that it’s another RNG so it’s not really controlable, and to be fully effective with that you might have to use a fast weapon. Granted, weapon speed doesn’t mean much here, it doesn’t affect your abilities at all, but who doesn’t like huge crits with 4.0s weapons?
• Keep It Goin’! - the first tactic from brawling mastery, it gives Big Slash a pretty big damage boost, turning it into the biggest burst damage available to the class.
• Unstoppable Juggernaut - reducing the cooldown of Juggernaut to 20 seconds, pretty good thing if you are obsessed about mobility.

And that’s it folks, should you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.

Terhix