Witching Night in WAR

So far I’m a little ambivalent about this event, or what I’ve seen of it today — which was only tier 2, with Amariel (the Archmage).

The good includes how much fun it is to have gigantic moshes in open RvR; at one point there were 30+ on the Order side in the Troll Country Witching Night PQ, and probably 20-25 Destruction. We owned them several times over, despite having to continually ask our own side to move back *inside* the PQ area. Kill someone outside of it, and there’s no PQ kill-credit. The line wasn’t exactly drawn in blood on the ground, but it wasn’t all that hard to work out, either… and yet a handful of people just kept charging past it.

Mask of the Bloodletter

I need to learn to be lean and mean in RvR — if you’re not in the right spot, no heals for YOU! No rezes, either! No more Ms Nice Archmage!

The second part of the PQ, which is a giant Lord-level skelly, was remarkably anticlimactic, though maybe that’s just because nothing is going to resist two dozen wound up players for very long. I think he’s also only around R14 or so, which makes it a pretty quick kill. The really BAD downside of this is that old Warband-credit bug: only the group that does the most damage (?) to that mob actually gets the Tome of Knowledge kill credit. Given that 10 credits are required for… whatever it is you get for killing 50 ghosts, 25 crones and 10 lords, that’s going to be tough for almost everyone to complete. Not so good.

The other major downside, at least of the T2 PQ, is that the influence bar needs something like 48,000 influence to fill up. Yes, 48 thousand. (I know this thanks to my handy dandy Influence Text mod.) We spent most of the afternoon doing that PQ, call it somewhere around 6 hours, and we managed about 8k. The event runs for 5 days, so… assuming you can play 6 hours on each of the 5 days, you will still only end up with 40k of that 48k you need. Again, more disappointed people, and again, not so good.

Time to add to the Good side: the PQ roll pixies were looking the other way tonight, and I won not one but two gold bags from that RvR PQ. I feel a little bad about that given that the only really neat thing in it is the very snazzy Mask of the Bloodletter, which Amariel is modeling for your viewing pleasure. Reminds me of the bad guy (you know, Tim Curry) in Legend, only skinnier. It has no stats, but doesn’t need em — its coolness is enough.

The second item of choice was a purple jewellery bit, R15 I think, with +11Wis/+9Tough/+80Elem resist… Nice, but not The Cool Mask(TM). I actually wish I’d rolled lower so that someone else could have picked up a mask. Shame you can’t pass to the next person down.

And finally, the really REALLY bad part of this patch — loading and logging times. There has supposedly been a hotfix tonight to resolve this, but don’t believe it. Poor Mort spent upwards of 10 minutes in transit every single time we used a flight master, and both times I tried to log out today I just ended up hanging in limbo, never even reaching char select.

A mixed bag so far, pardon the pun. I’ve heard horror stories about scenario load times too, and who wants to spend 10 minutes loading into a 15-minutes (tops!) scenario? Mostly, I wish more people had more of a chance at the fun stuff. I’ll be impressed if a majority of folks fill up that INF bar (unless it’s a per-account thing? now that would be neat), which means that there are likely to be quite a few either disappointed or not very impressed WARriors come Monday morning. We shall see.

EDIT – I’m told the loadtimes hotfix did have a positive effect on the times people were experiencing. Jolly good.