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.

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.

 
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.

 
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.

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.

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

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.

 
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.

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.

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.