Obliteration

Order forces finally managed to take back a keep near Baraak Vaar, so I was able to fly over and grab the gloves for the Obliterator set. On the way I found some interesting pieces about getting chickened:

• Chickens can buy from vendors. So you can always go back and get pieces from keep renown merchants.
• Chickens take no falling damage. So it can be difficult to kill yourself if you want a quick trip back to the warcamp.

Next up I'll need to start looking for pieces to the Devastator Set. And gaining renown so I can wear it.

Third Tier

I officially levelled out of tier two last night. Rank twenty-two was gained while in the Mourkain Temple scenario. I had been running around in the Troll Country RvR lake so when I got back I was immediately chickened. I went on a rampage. Oh yes, that is a dead pidgeon at my feet. None can withstand the might of chaos.

Trying out the new PvP scenarios was fun. I poked my head in on three out of the five, and they were pretty fun. The first one I got into had the sides fighting over a bomb that they then had to place at the enemies base. It reminded me a lot of SOCOM's footbomb missions.

Finally, I was trying to get ahold of the gloves for my obliterator set. I ran all over the place. Turns out you can only buy them from the renown trainers in the tier two zone RvR lakes. Last night all the tier two keeps in the whole world were order controlled so I got nothing. We'll see about tonight.

Area of Effect Spirit

Here we are, one big happy family. It's a picture of me with all my minions. I'm the Gorton's Fisherman looking guy there in the middle, and the rest are my loyal subjects. The picture is a bit out of date, since I have a new staff now, and Umbrella has stepped it up and dyed his armor nuklear orange. When you're trying to work as a team in PvP it turns out that having dyed armor is actually pretty valuable.

I sat myself down and looked through some forums yesterday to see what other people were doing with their Magus buildouts. Formerly I was going all single-target direct damage, with my mastery tree specced to increase the damage this was doing. Turns out most people are doing area of effect damage, speccing to the mastery tree that boosts the skills that do spirit damage. I gave it a shot and there's a huge difference. I can single-handedly take down Champion mobs that would have crushed me before, sometimes even handling two. I also manage to crush large groups.

Working with Umbrella, he can turn on an aura that draws aggro and just run around until he gets a train of eight to ten guys on him. Just bring them back to me and the DoT spam begins. Before we would look at stage one of a public quest and see that we needed to kill fifty guys to get to the next stage. Now we can clear that in around ten minutes.

We muscled through the intro stages of a number of chapter seven and eight quests, and cleared the Chapter 8 PQ "Lurza's Blight." This was a three stage PQ. The first just having you kill a bunch of plague priests and their attendant nurglings. The Train and Pain tactic working great here, as we would mow down at least eight at a time. Stage two had us killing nine Rot Bearers(lvl 17 champs I think). These spawned in groups of three and summoned nurglings that could be killed in one shot, but that would basically be DoTs against you. AoE cleared the little guys right out.

Finally Lurza his/herself shows up, accompanied by three plaguebearers. When fighting her, just concentrate your attacks and ignore the plaguebearers. Any time you kill one another will come right back and as a 17 Hero it will probably take a minute or two before you knock her down.

Of course, the loot from the PQ was worse than what either of us already had. I don't understand why with just two people finishing a PQ in the area where they belong we still ended up with two Lesser Loot Bags. Where's my awesome PQ loot?

Public Questing

I was working on finishing out the influence from some earlier chapters, so I went through the stages of a number of public quests in Ostland and Troll Country.

Umbrella and I finished out the Krul'Gor Herd and managed to horn in on Ragash's Last Stand. Krul'Gor Herd is a chapter below where we are, and Ragash is a chapter ahead. With Krul'Gor the two of us were pretty much able to solo the whole thing, and with Ragash there would have been no way to do it all without all the other people who showed up.

We also mucked about with Bells of War (chapter 5) and Griffon Outpost (chapter 7), and while we didn't finish either of those off, we did make it to some of the later stages.

Ragash's Last Stand was a disappointment for me, since I didn't get any loot. Umbrella managed to snag a small bag, but I don't think he got anything from it that was particularly spectacular. I understand that rolling for loot and assigning a bonus based on contribution is a good way to keep people from simply hopping in at the end of a public quest and grabbing a reward without having put the time in. But when I'm there for all the stages of a quest and I still end up with no loot I come away feeling cheated. Especially since that's the only time I'll ever do that quest. As fast as levels go by in this game I'll never end up going back and doing those quests again. Higher level PQs are a different story, since once you hit the level cap there's little else you can do to advance your character except search for better equipment.

Witness Krul'Gor Herd

Here I ended up with the second highest contribution bonus, but sill only barely managed to snag a loot bag. If there had been one less loot bag or one more higher level person helping out I would have gotten nada again. As it was I still ended up getting nothing useful for myself.

Griping aside, I do love some of the public quests. Staged monster fights are a great joy, giving me a sense of discovery and accomplishment as the encounter stages tick by and we, as a group, discover the mechanics of each stage. I'll be logging on tonight and hope to tackle a few more public quests, and maybe even poke my head into the Sacellum Dungeons.

For the Raven God

A buddy and I have been playing Warhammer Online for a couple weeks now. He's the tank and I'm a fragile glass cannon of a magus. Together we roam the countryside making trouble for the forces of Order.

For instance, this guy named "Calvus." Don't know who he is or what he's about, but he's in for a world of hurt.