So this week has not been a good time as far as MMO progress goes; notably, I’ve made even less than normal. Currently I have active subscriptions to both WAR and WoW, and I did not log into either of them for more than 5 minutes during the course of the week. I then got an email mid-week from Turbine, telling me my LOTRO account has been reactivated for the weekend, and an email invitation to the Runes of Magic beta stress test at the weekend. So I decided this weekend I’d try and nail a little MMO goodness, see what I could get done with 4 MMO’s at my disposal.

Friday night; went to the cinema, didn’t play any MMO’s at all. Bad start. Also, Saw 5 is rubbish, and there is no surprise ending. I wont’ believe the ending? I WON’T BELIEVE THE ENDING!? It ended in almost the exact same way as Saw 4, which was also terrible. The gore level was high though and the level of intricacy in the “traps” was pleasing. However, I digress…

Saturday. Decide to start with the laborious process of patching/updating LOTRO, and installing Runes of Magic (RoM). LOTRO patched quickly, this pleased me. So I log into my lv49 (yes I got to lv49 and quit) Guardian for the first time in like a year, and decide to head over to one of the new areas. Seemed to have lost all the flight points (horse points?) I’d picked up in Evendim (which I DEFINITELY got) so that was annoying. Rode my stupid horse all the way from Bree. Got to new areas, saw mammoths, laughed, logged out. Not so productive.

RoM finished downloading, create character, log in. Bawk at disgusting graphics, realise settings are low, turn up, looks ok. Play for 5 mins, log out.

Spend an enjoyable evening watching The Mighty Boosh live, no more MMO playing.

Sunday. Log into WAR, can’t really be bothered to do anything, kill like 3 mobs, log back out. This is my single problem with this game. I love playing my Ironbreaker, the class feels great, I like the game, but I have no desire to log in. Slightly confusing, but there you go. I’ve made resolutions to go join a proper guild, in the hope it’ll motivate me to log in more. Whether I’ll actually do it or not is another question.

Right, so onto the final of the four MMO’s I had to play; WoW. Log my Rogue, spend my talent points on a Mutilate build after doing a little scavenging through the class forums. Buy cheap daggers from vendor, go to work over a practice dummy for a while. I have to say, this build seems genuinely interesting to play. Gone is the old feel of just building 5 CP then spending them, you now have a sort of juggling game to play. You have a self buff to keep up, you have to Envenom before Slice N’ Dice runs out, and you have to try and keep rupture up too. This leads to you (or me at least) using finishing moves with different numbers of combo points at different times, to try and keep all my buffs and dots up as much as possible. The build seems a little punishing when you accidentally let one drop, as you panic and suddenly everything goes to the shitter, but its way more involved and fun than any other rogue build I’ve tried.

So I get my build sorted, mess around with the UI, then suddenly realise; What the hell am I doing? This is a PvE build, I’ve been playing WoW on and off the last year without doing any PvE, so when am I ever going to use it. Scrap plans to go find some good daggers, decide to check out some PvP builds. All PvP builds are boring. Log out, go to shop and buy Fallout 3… happy again.

So all in all, a very unproductive weekend of MMO playing, with little-to-no progress made in anything.

With Ironbreaker currently sitting at 15, I’ve a little experience in both Tier 1 and Tier 2 scenario PvP, along with the comparison that can be made with my Marauder. As with my previous post, this will be interspersed with random scoreboard screenshots, as per my ego dictates.

Starting off at rank 4 or so, I have to say I felt pretty useless as an Ironbreaker. Healers and damage classes have their roles and abilities to perform them clearly defined from the beginning of the game. However as a tank I found I started with a series of mediocre damage moves, and nothing that made me feel very tanky. I basically just ran around with a two handed axe trying to chop people’s kneecaps. This proved vastly ineffective some matches, and slightly better in other matches when the opposition were unorganised and a healer decided to take pity on me.

I ended up avoiding scenarios until about rank 10, where things started to pick up. By this point I still wasn’t feeling very tank like, but being higher for the bracket and having a wider selection of skills made me a little angry powerhouse. Slapping your Oathfriend ability on whoever happens to be getting the snot beaten out of them helps keep your grudges high. Not that keeping your grudge level at 100 is ever hard when in combat anyway. Good matches in the later part of the Tier 12 bracket frequently ended in me topping the scoreboard, whatever metric I chose to look at.

At this point I was still thinking in a similar mindset to my Marauder; try and get lots of kills and do lots of damage. Yes I’d put more of a focus on protecting the healers if I saw someone break through our lines and attack them, but I still didn’t really have many tools to do much about it, aside from taunt.The only class that was consistently out damaging me was Bright Wizards, but then that’s not a surprise is it.

Moving onto Tier 2…

This coincided with my decision to try out sword and board (or axe and board in this case) rather than the two handed weapons. My main motivation for this was actually wanting to try out the shield skills, which had been sitting on my bar for a few levels and I’d never tried. In PvE questing I found the switch not to slow me down much, at least I haven’t noticed it so far.

I now have a series of skills that make me feel more like a tank, I won’t name them all (because I don’t remember the names) but in essence:
- Oathfriend – good for keeping my grudges up, as mentioned
- Guard – protect your squishy, or the guy carrying the scenario objective. Or maybe that Warrior Priest that you hope might heal you but never does
- Shield of Reprisal – activates on parry, knocks the opponent down for a couple of seconds
- The other shield ability (told you wouldn’t remember all the names) which allows you to swipe up to 3 opponents
- Away with ye’ – Knock someone down, 20 sec recast (I think)
- Hold the line – Increases block and disrupt chance for yourself and all team members who are behind you, good to use when moving forwards (if you remember to)

All these skills enable me to much better do the job that I’m supposed to be doing; protecting squishies, holding the line, generally making a nuisance of myself, AND dishing out whatever damage I can. This has lead me to change my focus a little. My focus has been more on protecting people and holding our lines, than trying to kill people myself. Often this involves knocking down and harassing the tanks or melee DPSers that are trying to kill our healers. I find that if I get my hands on a squishie I can dispatch them quite quickly too, so annoying the enemy healers myself also seems to be a valid tactic.

This new focus, combined with my low level for the bracket, and move to one handed weapons, has lead to be sitting much lower down in the tables as far as kills and damage goes. However In the matches that have gone well, I’ve still felt like I was doing a very useful job. After playing a DPS character though it feels slightly weird; you don’t have a metric on that scoreboard that you can use to measure how good your performance was. Yes I know that even for melee DPS characters if you’re just sniping killing blows, or doing loads of AOE damage without ever actually killing anyone you might end up topping the scoreboard without actually helping your team that much, but at least you have some figures on the board to show in most cases that you’re doing well. It’s both a blessing and a curse; I never feel like I really know if I’m doing well compares to other tanks, but at the same time I don’t feel the need to try and beat everyone in quite the same way. Essentially if you’re protecting the right people and doing the right things your team will win (in most cases) and people will recognise you did a good job. That seems to be about the closest you can get to knowing you did the “tanking” part of your job right.

To sum up my general strategy right now; slap Oathfriend on Warrior Priest, melee DPS or other tank, guard a healer, then head to the front lines and simultaneously try and stop the enemy getting through ours, while trying to get my hands on any squishies that venture too close.

In conclusion; Ironbreaker PvP just got fun!

As is becoming the norm with me these days, not much gaming went on at all this week. My little Marauder is still sitting at lv23, and my Ironbreaker has not been touched from one weekend to the next. This is not for any reason other than laziness to be honest. However, in the last couple of days I’ve done a few different things, which seem to have got me back into my groove (and out of my funk?).

Firstly, I decided to log back into World of Warcraft for the first time since Warhammer Online came out, to test out patch 2.3 (or whatever it is). So far I’ve tried 3 of my different characters, to see the new talents.

Paladin – I tried out Protection spec to se the new skills, and get a feel for the changed seals/judgment system. The talents seem to sync nicely with Paladin tanking as a whole (not that I have much experience in it) and make it feel a little more interactive. The new seals system I find to be a massive improvement on the previous one. However none of this really motivated me to go do anything on my Paladin, so 20mins later back to sleep she goes…

Shaman – Currently sat at lv66 my Shaman has switched between Enhancement (mainly) and Elemental (when duoing). I decided to give Enhancement a bash with the new talents, who wouldn’t want pet wolves right? Well the answer is me. After the second time you cast them the novelty wears off, and I soon realised that Shaman has gained nearly nothing in this line from the new talents. I have a new skill to use, which triggers an off hand melee hit…. awesome (that’s sarcasm by the way) and that’s about it. Every other facet of this spec seems identical to me. I levelled at pretty much exactly the same speed as before, if anything my ability to take hits and dish them out seemed slightly depleted. Nothing new here, and hours play and it’s time to move on. Having said that, I did get to witness Retribution Paladin whilst on my Shaman, in the form of Dan’s Ainia. I have to say it was impressive, he was killing monsters in a couple of hits (literally) and putting anything I could do to shame.

Almost made me want to switch back to Paladin…. almost.

Rogue – Here we go, killing spree, that looks fun. This immediately made me think of those Marval Alliance games. For anyone not familiar they’re isometric view punch-em-ups where you take control of Xmen, and maybe other comic book characters too. I’m not nerdy enough to know whether they’re all Xmen or not (and not it’s not relevant and I don’t care). Aaaaanyway, I was going somewhere with this. Wolverine has this special move in this game (think Morale moves if you play WAR – don’t think if you play WoW (you might hurt yourself)) where he sort of ports back and forth around the screen in rapid succession, slashing the play doh (bet you’ve never heard that one before eh?) out of all the bad guys on the screen. As one of my friends could attest, I loved playing as wolverine, in fact I pretty much only ever played him and Deadpool (drop bombs!).

Where was I?

Oh yes, Killing spree, it made me think of Wolverines special move. I have to say, I wasn’t entirely disappointed. It’s a weird feeling in an mmo, sort of hopping around in a disjointed manner. These games normally make your character so… solid, consistent, there. It’s only fair right, means the other guy can hit you back.

After trying that move once or twice though, I quickly realised I can’t actually be bothered to play the game. Yes I am one of those people who gets lured back with the promise of shiny things, but can’t actually be bothered to put any effort into it. So, with a lack of shiny things, I log out.

On the plus side, they finally made mounts/pets into “spells” rather than items in your inventory, and provide a separate space for you to store Battleground tokens too. Why has this taken so long to implement?

So, onto Warhammer. I’d been feeling semi-jaded with this game, due to mine (and my friends I suppose) inability to choose a “side” and stick to it. I think I’ve finally settled on Ironbreaker now anyway. At least until I change my mind again. I find as he levels up I’m enjoying PvP more and more (post on that to come tomorrow) and grinding mobs is a joy with 100 grudge, as he becomes a little power-house. I’ve also just switched to sword and board rather than two handed, and I seem to be enjoying it a lot. The knockdown and swipe makes things a lot more fun. So I’ve progressed swiftly from 13 to 15 today. I’m hoping for another level or two tomorrow.

This could be slacking period over, for now.

So I find myself at somewhat of a crossroads at the moment. Usually I level one class to the level cap before I allow my rampant alt ADD to take over. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have happened this time. With my friends trying Order, and me inevitably following, I’m now completely unsure of even which faction I’m going to keep playing, let alone what class. As the most important thing to me is playing with my buddies, the former is not necessarily my decision to make, and the latter depends on the former.

My little Ironbreaker is now lv10, and while I still haven’t felt that I’m that useful in PvP (though it’s getting better) he is so much fun in PvE. I’ve never been one to take to Dwarves in games (Golden Axe aside!) but WAR has changed that for me. Goodbye angry midget, hello cool looking ball of rage. The grudge mechanic is proving to be awesome. It acts to bolster a lot of my skill,s increasing my damage, and also acts as an additional AP pool to use when my actual AP is depleted. With strength, toughness and Armour buffs so far, questing is a breeze. My main melee attack getting an additional DoT aspect which scales with grudge is awesome, especially considering when questing you spend most of your time at somewhere near 100 grudges.

I do find myself missing my Marauder though, I played him a little last night and it just felt right. Currently he’s rank 23, and I’ve just finished Chaos and Dark Elf chapter 12 influence grinds. I have a feeling I’ll be flitting between these two classes quite a bit for the moment. If I end up sticking with destruction, then I desperately want them to brig Black Guard back, this mechanic feels so much better to me than any of the other tanks.

Without further ado, some pictures of Tnak, the mighty Dwarf.

I got this little thing I’m holding from a quest. I think it might be one of the collectors edition rewards, but I’m not entirely sure to be honest. I also have a mug of ale which increases my toughness temporarily, might come in handy. You can also see the little anvil trophy on my shoulder, isn’t it cute?

So far I’ve been favouring the two handed axe. Though I’ve recently picked up a couple of shield skills, so I might try the whole sword and board thing quite soon.

Making friends with the locals…

So my buddies decided to make Order characters, just to see how the other half lives. I already have enough problems with alts, so thanks guys. Anyway, I figured why not go along for the ride, not like I’ve doing anything else important.

So I was umming and arring between tanks and healers. I tried Warrior Priest, and it was cool, but doesn’t feel quite right to me. I obviously couldn’t play either of the High elf classes; a tank in a dress? no, a wussy healer in a skirt? no no. So that left me with the Ironbreaker.

So Tnak was born, apparently Dorf is 4 tnak. First thing I decided to do (naturally) was head over to the Empire T4 zone (after visiting Altdorf) and jump off the highest spot I could find. I assume this is standard game play for all level ones. This is of course after spending 20 minutes sitting in front of the Dye vendor trying to work out whether to stick a barrel in my beard or not. I decided not, but I’m keeping the barrel just in case I change my mind. It will come in handy when rescuing lost mountaineers from icy peaks. Anyway, on to the highest point I could find.

I forget the Chapter this was, but it was right next to the influence vendor in the Empire tier 4. I wont show you the “after” shot, but suffice to say my meeting with the rocks at the base of the mountain did not go well.

Currently the little tyke is sitting at rank 7, and I must say I am enjoying the Ironbreaker greatly. They seem to be powerhouses for grinding once you get your grudge level up and slap on all your buffs, I can literally chew through mobs without ever stopping. I even managed to solo a champion Orc mob that was rank 4, I think I was rank 6 at the time. Maybe that’s not amazing, but I felt quite powerful.

Only problem I foresee with Ironbreaker is that ALL of their skills look useful/good. I have no idea how I’m going to organise them all on my bars. Also RvR seems a little mediocre at the moment. I suspect that may be because I don’t have any knock-back or snare moves at the moment. Also I’ve yet to be on the receiving end of many heals.

Why is it that I spent every scenario I did on my marauder killing Rune Priests and Archmages, yet I can do 3 scenarios as an Ironbreaker without encountering more than one healer the entire time. The world conspires against me.