Orc Motorbike Gang

Today i got the idea to launch an Orc motorbike gang... after killing some frost Yhetee i got a tome unlock for the cloak you can see. Doesn't that look like a motorcycle jeans jacket emblem? ;) As you might also realize - due to the four skulls on the shoulders - Thulf just dinged rank 30. In the meantime i saw most of the trophies i was missing when i posted about them, but none really awoke my interest beside the skulls. Aside from the fourth trophy slot and bigger bags i also got the skill Where You Going?, which seems very useful. In addition i got enough mastery points to respecc and grab Can't Hit Me! - a skill i was really looking forward to get and will test properly to see if it might also change the way i solo grind multiple mobs. I'll post about it once i had the time to test it...

The Inevitable City ranked five today - finally we catched up to Altdorf, which reached that rank a few days earlier. Overall i have to say the feeling inside the city while ranking up did not change much. Beside a few quests (one of them is still bugged for me, quest guy only respawns after server restart), which were not very exciting so far, the view inside the city did not change. You'd expect more banners, more merchants and such. When we ranked 5 today the guards inside the city changed to a better armor and got some wicked looking shields now.

We also got access to The Elysium today with city rank 5. While it surely does not look like what i expected, it's still an interesting location and might also be a cool place for a guild meeting or some party. The last time i was inside the Eternal Citadel it seemed like the vendors for the epic gear were disabled. I wonder if Mythic changed it that you can only access them when you can actually buy from them or if they were disabled due to some fix. At least i found out what those tokens are you need to buy gear from them. You gain them through raids on the enemy capitol and gain them from quests and as drops during a city raid. They're named Defender's Sign & Defender's Mark.

In the meantime i found some of the "bugged" items as well. There are a few items that you can equip, that use models from other classes. Some combinations look really strange, like a witch elf with chosen shoulders. We got a thread in our server forum at WHA with a bunch of screenshots about those.

Raid on Altdorf Capitol (on Karak Eight Peaks)

Wow, while reading some other blogs, Book of Grudges pointed me to the fact that on Karak Eight Peaks (KEP) there was a raid on Altdorf main city (1,2) going on tuesday. That's pretty fast, after we heard it would be such an epic expedition to gain control about the enemies capitol. O.o
Apparently around 19:00 Destruction players started to raid T4 Keeps and did not meet much resistance, either because not enough higher rank players were online or simply because still too few people care. The taking of keeps continued until around 23:00 and after midnight Altdorf was open for an assault. Some people claimed that there was a bug that did let players enter the last fortress through the postern door, while some say a few classes (anyone know more about this?) will get skills to use these doors later on. Apparently it's enough to capture two racial pairing, so taking over two T4 Fortresses is enough to be able to move forward on the opponent's capitol.

From what i could research the following happens once a capitol is under assault: The city becomes contested (which will result in the loss of one city rank!) and invaders can enter it. The whole city becomes an RvR zone and everyone inside collects victory points. The points are collected by participating in one of the two public quests (with opposing goals) that show up inside the city, involving killing enemy players & citizens and burning down tents and stuff (for the attacker). A new scenario will open up as well - in Altdorf it's called Altdorf War Quarters - plus there are battlefield objectives inside the city to capture as well. During these activities, both sides will collect victory points. Once one side can accumulate enough points to tip the scales, one of two things happen: If the defenders win, they attackers are pushed out of the city and all T4 resets to neutral. If the attackers win, the capitol is captured (will result in an additional city rank loss!) and the opposing side is pushed out of the city and the winner locks it down for 36 hours. During this time the PvE content (PQs, dungeons, King encounter - if the king is killed the city will lose two additional city ranks!) are open for the attackers to enjoy. After the time is up the city and T4 will reset.
We pillage, we plunder we rifle and loot Drink up me hearties, Yo-ho.

One important thing to note: Apparently you need to be rank 32+ to be able to help defending the capitol! If you're lower rank, you can't enter the city in a contested state. While the city is contested your new "hub" for bank, etc. will be some black market at the border of the city. Question remains, if Altdorf is only rank 2 at the moment of the raid, would it be possible for Destruction to raid the king's quarters as the leader's hall is not open before rank 3? I assume you'll need to conquer the PQs & dungeons inside the locked down capitol before you can attack the king? The decrease of the captured city rank will not affect the current capture and only take effect after the city resets.

Some issues stay with the attack on KEP... the attackers did not capture the city as apparently the control bar was barely moving. Was this a bug or because the defenders did better? As there were so few defenders before, this seems doubtable. The question in the first place should be: If one faction manges to level up faster then the other (two hardcore guilds would apparently be enough), there is little the defending realm can do if they got not enough players rank 32+ online during that time. I know this will even out later on, but at the moment it poses a problem. I also hope this city raid will raise awareness for every player to bother should there be T4 keep attacks going on. I know many don't bother as renown points are better in scenarios - at least that's the impression i gained when i see how few bother to travel to an assaulted keep quickly. As a last sidenote: Once the enemy city becomes contested you can pick up a quest at the T4 warcamp to capture the enemy city - reward 3k XP and 30s. Yay!

Inevitable City - City Rank 3

Today i logged in and the Inevitable City has reached rank 3 already! Mythic mentioned (or will that be in the delayed patch?) adjusting contribution of PQs and such towards the city rank, maybe that's why. Advancing the city is a nice feeling of the realm working together, although i have to say the "city view" does not change perceivable - could be much better with new NPCs and structures. Nontheless i celebrated the success of the last days with registering my 2nd name. Now I'm known as Thulf Teefrippa, fitting for an Orc don't ya think? On the picture you can also see my new epic helmet, i won through a public quest in Mount Gunbad - have tons of cool screenshots to post from that place still. The name also made me think what would happen if i leave the guild for an afternoon (to get rid of the tag), choose a cool title and go back into the newbie start area, handing out my own quests to new players... maybe reward them with potions for bringing me monster drops.



The city is rank 3, what does it change? Well, first thing to notice: The Eternal Citadel is open for business. Awesome place, looks like a large cathedral and is home to Tchar'zanek, leader of the Chaos warhost and the elite Raven Host. The only new quests i found inside the Inevitable City were found inside the Citadel. While three of them are RvR quests and involve raiding keeps from the other faction, there is also one that seems either to be bugged or very tricky. It's called The Wind of Change and while i was running, riding and climbing around for quite a while and tried a few things, i could not solve it yet. Others have the same problem. The only thing you find in that area is a mysterious altar, giving you a cryptic message that for me hinted towards a group, but from reading about it, a group does not help. I won't spoil the rest for you, but take my advice: The small bit of the quest area high up in the mountains you can't reach at first, it's completely empty; been there, seen that.

One more thing you'll realize when you enter the Eternal Citadel: There are vendors in there, selling epic gear. But you can't just buy it with money, you need some tokens to buy the stuff. My guess is those tokens will either come from T4 RvR action (maybe connected to some repeatable quest) or from raiding the other realms capitol city. The gear is awesome, every piece has three talisman slots. There are two different kinds of tokens (green and blue), where the blue ones (for helmet & chest) somehow look more rare.

If you venture further into the back of the Citadel, there are more NPCs and some of the warlords in there have very cool trophies attached to belt & shoulders, have a close look. The NPCs inside the Citadel also behave interesting and use voiceovers when they talk to each other from time to time.
The recent small patches and hotfixes brought some good stuff: crash queue fix and cross-zone scenario sign ups, but i have to say the patch notes information policy from Mythic/GOA sucks. Did you realize you have to scroll down the patcher window for notes and that GOA does not write every info like the US one does? Best to check the US Herald from time to time for better info.

One more thing i recently discovered are the excessive log files Warhammer Online keeps by default (at least for me, never ticked that option) - my logs folder is 50MB! Every single tell is saved there and all other infos as well. As some readers might have noticed, the list of warhammer addons i use is growing steadily, so many small helpers that make your life easier. I'll try to dedicate a blog entry to addons soon. My crafting skills are, thanks to the help of some guildies, developing nicely as well. I can brew rank 35 potions already and think i figured out how to overcome the worst gap i had, so the rest should not be that much of a problem i hope.

Inevitable City - City Rank 2

Finally the Inevitable City on our server went up to rank 2 two days ago. What exactly happened and if it was "locked" before, no one knows yet as there was no official statement from Mythic/GOA. What happened inside the city with the new rank? Well, not so much in general to be honest. I only found one new quest so far. In addition i realized some strange behaviour around the place with the Nurgle effigy - sometimes it changes to a Khorne effigy and the surrounding mobs change as well. Has this been there before? If so i must have missed it. If not, what's the point?

The major change with city rank 2 is the access to the guild tavern (Viper Pit) should your guild have the correct rank. While the Destruction tavern is IMO rather disappointing - boring interior, not much going on - there are a bunch of renown vendors in there. Great to not have to travel to all those keeps anymore just to have a quick look if something useful opened up. Even more interesting is the Quartermaster in there, as she also sells some basic apothecary ingredients. Some with (to me) new possibilities like snare bombs. Two things to note tho: a) The apothecary vials she sells are bugged (you can't add main ingredients) and b) She does not sell any talisman things.

One more cool thing you can buy from her are Guild Recall Scrolls, while they don't stack and are BoP they are dirt cheap and will (if used) teleport you back to the Viper Pit. Awesome! I'm not really sure tho, if it's intended we can buy them already, as later there is a guild rank (17) that promises "faster transit to The Viper Pit". If the teleport scrolls can be bought once you have access to the guild vendor, what will the later rank offer you? I can't imagine it's connected to the flight master inside the tavern as running to a warcamp flight master is of course far more annoying then just using a scroll. We'll see if it stays like this... too bad my bank is crowded with crafting stuff, else i would stash some.

The Bloodwrought Enclave opened up as well. While i see the first people that did hit rank 40 (first one i ran into was Flea from Eva Vix) already, I doubt there are enough already to move into BE yet. Beside the Viper Pit not much else happened as you can see.. or did i miss anything, any new you want to share about the capitol? GOA also posted a FAQ about Warhammer City Rank Advancement. A good read and more useful info in that news post as well.



One a sidenote, i finally activated AA/AF via my graphic card drivers and WAR looks much better now, without all those jagged edges. My performance stayed about the same, so no big deal for me. Should you need a pointer how to do that yourself, check here.

And finally, on monday we'll also get the queues bypass system like the US. About time they fixed that. Annoying enough you have to queue when switching chars. maybe thats gone then as well. Server cloning helped some on our server as well to tone down the queues.

Mount & City Rank

So what's happening to Thulf you ask? And rightfully so... there is so much stuff to explore and write about and only so much time. I hope between still posting useful information (which at this point i think is of more use to you guys) i find more time to blog about my own adventures. I got *tons* of screenshots from weird, funny and cool places. I also have a large directory of dead stunty pictures i intend to throw in every now and then.. hehe. We started to refer to "DPS = Dwarves per Second" lately. ;)

This weekend Thulf dinged rank 20. yay! Of course i immediately traveled to the Inevitable City to buy my mount for 15g, which was not hard to collect until rank 20. I did not have to work for my mount, which was "casual" for a change. Black Orc's ride warboars (see picture).. looks a bit strange at first, but you get used to it. The idle animations are fun, the boar scratches his head on the floor sometimes or you pat it on the head - tough Orc love. The mount moves with a speed buff - being 50% faster then running/walking. Great to go places to explore or work on Tome unlocks. The mount summon takes 3 secs, which seems ok. Any hit from a monster will dismount you immediately, but falling damage will not! I really enjoy my mount...
Tip of the Day: Should you not have your mount yet, use your Flee ability to travel long distances. Your Action Points refill fast and as long as it's not a very dangerous area, you should be fine.

Since a small discussion on our server forum at WHA about advancing the city rank, i was asked how to check the current city rank? While inside your main city, there is a small red star above the minimap, mouseover it to get a pop-up showing city rank with "benefits". As of now there is no progress bar for city progression. While killing mobs inside the city, participating in PQs inside the city and also doing city dungeons (like Sacellum) and overall RvR performance should increase the city rank slowly, some players think the city rank progression is turned off for now - at least during beta it was much faster. And no, the "lock" on the bar above the map does only mean that it's not possible for the other realm to raid that main city. Due to the lack of a progress bar, no one knows for sure yet. Searching the net it seems like NO city reached rank 2 yet tho. Only time will tell, maybe we get a statement from Mythic/GOA about this soon. Should be nice to be able to use the Viper's Pit Tavern and access the vendor in there.

NOTE: Seems one of the imagehosters has problems today, don't be surprised if the blog looks a bit strange or some pics are missing, hope this will be fixed soonish.