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

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

I work in IT, web development to be precise. When WoW was released in November 2004 about 75% of web browser market was taken by combined IE6 and IE5, there were other browsers, namely Mozilla - placing itself somewhere around 15% - and Opera with about 2% of the market. If you ever worked with websites, you probably know how disgraceful making anything work under IE can be, and as such the “alternative” browsers were mostly used by people interested into them, ordinary people wouldn’t even know about them in the first place. Why I’m mentioning this is to make you realize that only few years ago, many people wouldn’t even think about another browser than IE getting more than 30% of the market share, yet becoming more popular than Microsoft’s product pre-installed to Windows. Not once was MS sued for monopolistic practices. Why Opera was never a board success? It was, and still is, a very good browser, it has a lot of functionality and works like a charm. So why not?

Because they didn’t do it right. But when the browsers of the past failed at the competition, it didn’t mean that the competition was lost. It was also November 2004 when Firefox was released. Firefox finally did it right - it was fast, light, free, open source, secure, had tabs and addons. On the other hand IE was stagnating and had a lot of problems with security. It just had the right timing and was a great tool. At this moment 63.6% of you - visitors of this blog - use Firefox, and only 29.5% still has IE (seriously? what are you waiting for?). On the other hand, it didn’t made IE obsolete, it actually made Microsoft think about their shit, IE7 was a step in the right direction, IE8 AFAIK is going to get better. Granted, the world is not so pink, MMO gamers are a bit more advanced internet users than most people, but even then Firefox stands overall strong.

I guess you know why I’m talking about this. Neither Vanguard, nor LotRO, not even Age of Conan did it right. Those games had some good ideas, but failed in a much larger scale. But just because they failed at the competition with WoW, it doesn’t mean that competition with WoW is impossible. Warhammer Online isn’t going to be an instant win, Firefox was not either, it will need time even after release, but it’s on a good road. It doesn’t have to beat WoW’s amounts of subscriptions to be successful, getting anywhere near their scale will change the MMO market forever.

Terhix

The big, the bad, the removed

 
Hammerers and Choppas were in the beta year ago, Knights of the Blazing Sun were in game at some point as well, out of the 4 classes that were removed from the game only Black Guard actually never made it to the beta. KotBS was shorter in the game, but when it comes down to Hammerer and Choppa you have to understand they had a lot of things - skills, art, models and items - actually finished. So why they removed them? Because it’s all about “Fun you fuckers!” I’ve played the Choppa a bit, and I actually liked the class, dual wielding is not my kind of thing as I prefer two handers, but other than that it was a pretty cool mixture of a rogue (gouge, positional attacks, sprint) and fury warrior (berserk, red glowing hands, pew pew).

The problem with Choppa, and Hammerer as they are pretty much in the same bracket here, is that they hardly had any gimmick what so ever, granted when I was playing my Choppa in Tier 1 the amount of skills I had at my disposal was nowhere near what it would be at rank 40, but overall the fight would look like that: Sprint to some poor soul, land a snare with a positional attack, launch berserk (20 sec duration 60 sec cooldown it was I believe), spam 222222222 and watch the target die, drop in a gouge if it’s a healer and tries to heal. This was effective, gave a good feeling of berserk, but in the long run was just plain boring. With career revamps done during the beta, things changed and were polished, Mythic has done a lot of hard work to implement 60(!!) different mastery paths for all the classes that are currently in. Could they ship the game in september with 6 cities and 24 careers? Yes they could, but the whole game would have lower quality then what people are expecting. It’s a pity that they didn’t manage with all of that, but I’m more than sure they will implement the lacking classes somewhere after the release (AFAIK DAoC was much faster with updates than WoW with it’s turtle speed of development ever was). Of course in the perfect world, they would postpone the release for the nth time, but even with EA at their back, development time = cost, and they have to be aware of the market, especially WotLK getting (theoretically) released at the end of the year. Personally, I’m a bit sad about how it went, but I’ve to admit this is the lesser evil and it required some balls to make a decision like this.

Communication between developers and the community

Blizzard is really good at listening to the community, no, they really are. For example, it took them only FOUR FUCKING YEARS to unlink Flurry from Enrage, something that had no sense what so ever from PvE POV since WoW was released.

Mythic has a vision of their game, and during the closed beta, that vision was changing. It was a whole new experience for me to see them going above their ego and changing the game (for better) according to what people said. Few examples: the whole mastery system was born because players felt they didn’t have enough impact on the specialization of their career. Tactics and morale got more spread over levels and tactic slots are now given as you gain power (from one slot to four at rank 40 - don’t be fooled, tactics are really powerful, a set of 4 tactics can totally change the play style of any character), because people felt they were given too early in the game and there was nothing exciting to get at higher ranks. One of the most important development decisions was moving away from being heavily scenario (read: instanced) based to more open world. Mythic was at some point even considering cross-server scenarios, and I guess we all know what happened to “realm pride” in WoW when cross-server battlegrounds were implemented. People were already bored to death with battlegrounds, we wanted the whole RvR campaign to be more based around open world, we wanted battlefield objectives to matter, and we got it, not only that, we got Keeps and siege battles all over the place.

With all that Mythic actually manges to keep behaving like normal human beings. Just as DAoC, WAR is going to have no official forums. If you weren’t born yesterday, I guess you are fully aware how brainless the official WoW forums might be. In fact, I think that’s one of the most retarded places in the whole internet. Obviously they do have forums for beta, since it’s easier to gather feedback this way and it must be a closed forum, but that’s it. The biggest hub for WAR community is the Warhammer Alliance website, which is fully fan-driven It’s kind of a wonder that without any PR bullshit a figure like Mark Jacobs himself can come to those forums, and post some important stuff, keeping people up to date and letting them know they are being heard, especially now that NDA is down and we are after the preview weekend. It’s even a bigger wonder that in the recent career poll, a class like Witch Elf can be placed somewhere at the bottom of the popularity list, on wow official forums it would probably be placed near top with posts like “BOOBS LOL!” all over the place. Hopefully, my faith in humanity isn’t going to get tested anymore and that community doesn’t change much after release. Who would have thought that the lack of official forums can be actually such a good thing?

Terhix

I’ve launched Terhix.com on Chyrp as I’ve read a lot of good words about how lightweight it is. If a simple page showing one post and comments takes 17 SQL queries and generates over 1 second on the server side, then it seems that the word ‘lightweight’ means something totally opposite from what I thought it means.

Luckily, the blog was still young so I’ve copied the whole content of what was up on chyrp over here, including comments, so nothing is lost. Not to try anything new, I’ve just copied the new-old theme from WarriorPWNS, changed the background and logo. This is still NOT a final version, so expect more changes anytime soon.

Most of the perma links shouldn’t change, if some did - accept my apologies for the confusion. Obviously Chyrp’s atom feed is not working anymore, use RSS instead.

Terhix

You can say a lot about Mythic, but they know how to build up the hype. Warhammer trailer blows WotLK’s one out of the surface, plus nobody in Blizzard is as charismatic figure as Paul Barnett is. This has it’s good sides, as well as bad ones. It’s obviously good that there is interest around the game, but the expectations people might have might not be met when they actually play the game.

The release date before WotLK release is a pretty good timing, as people are getting sick of TBC and want something else, but on the other hand we observed the fail of AoC not so long ago. Luckily, WAR is pretty much complete content wise, unlike AoC, what WAR promised it does - RvR is here, sieges are here, renown system is here, pvp leveling is here, classes are pretty solid (except for the 4 that were removed). When it comes down to graphics it’s not the second best thing after sex, but it’s on a pretty good level, could use more polish, but is not bad at all. The biggest problems WAR have atm are purely technical stuff, crashes to desktop and some jaggy things with combat sometimes just can’t be forgotten. Luckily, bugs and technical problems can be fixed pretty easily, and while I don’t expect everything to be ready for release, I guess we will see some great improvements. Looking how AoC did, they managed to get their performance and stability fixed in the very last weeks before release, at least for the early zones of the game, we know how the game looked like past 30-40.

So, will Warhammer live up to the hype? Well, if you are expecting this game to cure cancer, AIDS and stop starvation in Africa, you better think twice before buying it. If you expect it to be better than WoW in every possible aspect - it’s not. It does what it does and it does it well, it’s a very solid MMORPG that’s heavily basing on RvR as it’s main feature.

Terhix

With the Warhammer NDA lifted I’m finally moving from WarriorPWNS.com to Terhix.com, consider this new blog as a very VERY beta version ATM, I’m now somewhere in the middle of refactoring the design, and I’ll continue to polish it for some time from now. Instead of playing with templates I’m rather going to present you some hot information first, so here we go!

I’m currently uploading a small movie with some random PvP to vimeo, should be up in about an hour (going slow), Will post that in a while. Not to flood the blog with one big post I’m going to split the information, so keep coming back as I prepare some information in the coming hours (damn I’m going to be sleepy tomorrow, again ><). Preparing a post about basic Black Orc mechanics and Tactics just about now.

Terhix