Patch 1.3.0b

So today Patch 1.3.0b went online for the EU servers. I tried the patch on the PTS before - did not write about it due to GOA not answering/clarifying the Beta Testing Agreement we had to sign on login. With the overall nerf to AoE Black Orcs got hit as well. IMO Mythic will upgrade some abilities on classes like Magus, BO, etc. soonish, since some classes got hit harder (as they were weaker already) by the overall change. Since I'm too lazy to respecc all the time and i play the "annoying" role (silence, slow, etc.) in RvR with my heavy tank spec, for my playstyle the AoE damage nerf did not matter that much. I respecced after the patch since Big Swing is 30feet now and together with Big Brawlin' it finally seems to have a use for RvR and PvE. Mythic did give the LotD talismans new icons and fixed some, but i still have four (one of mythic quality) that still have no use. :S

1.2 Patch Notes Thoughts

Seriously long patch notes, takes a while to dig (or should i say chop?) through. Some major changes to RvR combat, like disorients no longer stacking, Immovable upgraded to 20secs and a large hit to resistances. Resistances will yield diminishing returns after 40% (and yes, Adam says its still going live in 1.2, despite patch notes initially forgot it) and also all resistance talismans values are being halfed. Some changes to armor debuffs as well. It's too early yet to say how it pans out. I'll enjoy my resistance set while it lasts. ;)

Black Orc
A few interesting changes and minor fixes (war bellows persist after zoning finally). The biggest hit is the Da Toughest change/nerf... less wounds/health when triggered. We don't know yet how much it was lowered, so its too early to cry doom. Some skills got a damage buff and I'm looking forward to the changes to Savin' Me Hide (reduce the magical damage taken by you and your group) and Not in da Face! (make you and your group briefly immune to disabling effects), although i liked the cooldown increase which could be used on PvE trash mobs as well. I'll stay full PvE tank specced also after the patch, will see how much its necessary to adjust my current spec. Looks like the annoying bug was fixed that eg. you could get stuck with the Can't Hit Me bar (its under Bug Fixes: Art).



Crafting & Apothecary
Some major changes to crafting incoming. THE buff to apothecary: All buff potions will now persist through death. Finally people will want to buy potions for a reasonable price. Mythic changes the gathering/crafting pairings, which means they will remove a bunch (!) of crafting mats and streamline the overall crafting process. In the long run this is good news. In the short run this will cause some hassle. Apothecary will work closely together with Butchering & Cultivating after the patch. My 200 Scavenging will be pretty useless for me. Luckily Mythic will offer a NPC in the capitols to switch from scavenging to butchering (confirmed so far, maybe other choices). Good stuff. But then again i saw this part for cultivating: All [new] special seed/plants are set to rare, and are Bind on Pickup. Hum, basicly for me this means i have to train cultivating again on my main (as i go to the dangerous places) and train butchering on an alt (which i wanted to do with my Choppa anyway). Question now is, train it now or do it after the patch? Mythic says the leveling curve was streamlined... but still. My bankspace will go havoc as well. Guess I've to get rid of a ton of grey BoP items to store stuff. Interesting as well: What happens to existing ingredients that will be removed? Two things say the patch notes: a) If possible they'll be converted to the new (same) type. b) Stuff that has no "mirror" will be converted in some kind of temporary special item, for 20 of them you'll get some kind of reward. Somehow i have the feeling it will be a lame title, but we'll see. I'm sitting on stacks of epic crafting ingredients, waiting for a crafting fix. I can only cross my fingers they don't all go *puff* in that change. :S

Stuff
New color variants for player mounts incoming: You can choose from three different ones and with guild rank 25 you gain three more choices. I wonder if the gr25 mounts will have some minor accessories attached to look different. Improved mounts will come with guild rank 37. Itemization for the Invader capitol PQs has be revisited, we don't know yet how exactly tho. No word on fixes to the boring first PQ. New Zone Control Domination system will go in. Capitols will now start to lose rank once pushed into a contested state.

Dungeons
Mount Gunbad, Bastion Stair and Lost Vale get an overhaul. Some much needed changes to LV will go in. Drops will be revisited, some removed, some new stuff (eg. special weapons with procs) added. Each Wing Sub-bosses will drop either Dark Promise gloves or belt, one piece granted. The Wing Main-bosses will drop two DP pieces granted (different careers). More rare dyes will drop as well.

And much more... overall the sheer amount of fixes looks promising I'd say.

Unfortunately i could not spot a single point from my annoying/broken stuff list in the patch notes. But since they're not final yet, there is still hope.

Patch Notes 1.2 (for PTS)

Just a quick note, as i know many are waiting for those... Mythic posted the patch notes for 1.2 going onto the test server soon. It's a looong list, check US herald here.

Ragbag

The picture shows one of the weird bugs you get from time to time. It's a Black Guard and the "deformation" will stay on your screen until you zone. It looks really weird if a player is running around like Mr. Fantastic. Talking about Black Guards, i recently saw some pictures about their Sovereign gear: gallery 1, gallery 2.

Everyone likes to speculate about upcoming patch notes. Often early posted patch notes are fake, sometimes real. Until nothing officially is being said, you've to expect the "leaked" patch 1.2 notes to be fake... or change completely before the patch. If you want to read them and speculate yourself: read here. I won't comment on them until i know they're real. ;)

Patch 1.1a quick Aftermath

Well, the new patch hit today. Like i posted earlier, the annoying muddy texture messup ofc made it from PTS to live servers. Textures, especially in the Inevitable City, look awful! :( In addition the settings don't seem to remember the texture memory cache setting, every time i login i have to adjust it. If i remember right when the textures were messed up before i could reset the setting by going from far to near and back. Does not work anymore. Textures are messed up and look like crap. Fortunately its not as much outside the capitol. I use a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB Ram, never had that much bad visuals before in WAR. In addition some textures are "green" now. Some trees (we call them disco trees as for some guildies they change colors all the time) are green and also some walls, etc. Overall i wonder how such a mess can bypass QA. Yes i know hardware is always complicated to take into account, but to mess it up for a bunch of people while it was fine before... sheesh.

The next major annoyance (at least for me, i know others love it) are the new actionbar animations. The "radial" global cooldown animation and the upgoing flash.. brought me close to an epileptic seizure. Luckily i was pointed to NAMBLA and once you edited the NAMBLA.lua its gone. If you want to get rid of the stuff: Install the addon, then edit the above lua file in a text editor, search for "piewipe", then change the SetAlpha to 0.0 and you're rid of all the flashy new stuff. The lua code is actually very well documented and its easy to find the rest of the things you can adjust - for my taste the text was too bold and i changed both lines back to default. I can't understand why Mythic did not make the "new" actionbar anims optional, so you can turn them off if you want. If you experience weird behaviour of buffs i suggest you go through your interface folder and clean it up, several buff related addons can be deleted or have to be updated.

As a last quick note, we visited the two new lairs with guildies today (i might post some screenshots on our guild website later) and that was fun. The lairs are not as easy to get into as most of the caves you just stumble into. They required some more searching/thinking, which was cool. Respawn on the trash mobs in the Saphery one is insta-bugged, but well. IMO lair bosses could have some more unique/difficult abilities, but i guess its for casual players as well. So far for the quick note on 1.1a - there is much more to come but i was asked to post about the actionbar fix by some, so here you go.

European Test Server

So more or less silently with not much flourish the EU Test Server Shifting Isles went online. Cool! i thought, let's check out the latest changes. You can copy existing characters (rank 10+) over to the test server. Log into your account management and scroll down to the very bottom, there you choose Character Server Copy and NOT Character Transfer. So far so good... bummer tho that GOA messed up the character copy for chars that exist on servers that were cloned a while ago. The only character i could initially copy over was my rank 20 Blorc from Zhufbar. I had to delete that char to be able to copy over my rank 40 main from Karak-Azgal. I'd say thats a F- for database management by GOA on this one. I did not play my clone char, so i just deleted him and was able to copy Thulf over. Of course before i used the copy function i robbed the guild bank to copy over as much coin as possible, you never know what you need it for. ;) Chill guys, i gave it all back. *grin* Your character will copy over with your full inventory and bank, mailbox won't.

The good news on using the PTS: You don't need two separate installs of the game. If you want to access the test server, just start testpatch.exe if you want to play the "normal game" you start warpatch.exe. The patcher will adjust pending on the version you want to access. First: Be excited, all the UI changes will make it necessary to adjust your complete UI once again. Not fun, but if the changes deliver what they promise its well worth it. Test Servers are also very good for addon developers, as some UI changes of patch 1.1 will make it necessary to adjust. The first thing i noticed on PTS is that apparently Mythics attempts to adjust performance screwed up the texture caching for my machine. Inevitable City looked *horrible*, low/muddy textures everywhere. This problem was there for some time right after launch, but was fixed. As things on the test server are subject to change, etc. i really hope this won't go live. The chat filters for more separated system message filtering looks promising. The item linking did not work on PTS (at least not in /say when i tried). In addition all stats on the gear are missing, paper doll says it works but they don't show. I slapped together a compilation of the changed Black Orc set bonuses for your convenience.

EDIT: The set bonuses changed on the PTS since yesterday. HERE is the latest version.

Since we had some open RvR planned from our alliance i did not spend that much time on PTS, but traveled to the open RvR area quickly to check out some of the RvR inf goodies. For each inf step there are two different items in blue (req rr31) quality and two in epic (req rr38) quality. As stats did not show i can only guess, but the epic ones look very good. The weapons (see pic) all have procs, which already made players complain on the forums that those weapons are better then the loot you can get from Lost Vale and Mythic should at least give those items procs as well. Looking at the procs i have to agree and this should be adjusted. I'll go back and try to test some more, should anyone want to give the city dungeons on test server a go, poke me.

PS: Should you have experienced a performance drop/change since the latest patch/hotfixes check your gfx settings. I realized mine were reset/changed and that's why i experienced stuttering in the live game recently.

Ragbag & Death by Pie

Hillarious. You can't get another impression as the guys at Mythic really are having fun working together. After the last video message when Paul scolded Colin about the lunatic code™, some people apparently got the wrong impression. I seriously wonder why as IMO it was obvious they were not that serious. Anyway, the latest video blog entry from Paul Barnett clears the air in... unexpected ways. I think Colin should buy Paul a T-Shirt with his very own "Death by Pie" title, he earned it for being a good sport. ;)

The patch 1.1 is running on the PTS (looks like we'll get one for EU as well now) already and slowly infos start to trickle in. If you want to see some screenshots of the UI changes and set items, check the Garrison of War (1,2). In addition Mythic seems to try to introduce more money sinks into the game, i read that flight travel prices doubled and that dyes at the vendor are increased by a lot (someone said 40s vs 10g for whole gear), tho atm its just the same old crapppy colors. Why not introduce some new (read: better looking) colors and put a hefty fee on them? Also, should you work on your talisman skills still, better hurry as the patch won't let you salvage any vendor gear anymore. In addition it looks like the next live event is just around the corner and this time, it's about beer: Keg End event.
Edit: Forgot to mention that PTS reports say the Wall is finally fixed, tho the appearance changed into a normal shield.

My latest trip into Bilerot Burrow rewarded me with gloves: Sentinel Andsplate, which leaves me with 4/5 Sentinel wards. Slowly getting there... as patch 1.1 will have a 50% belt drop rate, i should obtain that one hopefully rather quickly as well.

Should you use zMailMod i urge you to install the latest version as there are many improvements, especially in taking out mail/items/coin. Truely love this mod. I left the suggestion for z00g (author) that he exports the auto-complete for names from zMailMod into a seperate mod (that takes into account party, warband, friendlist and guild names) which you can use in chat to quickly tab through names as some people just use weird and painful to type names.

Referring to my ingame xmas wishlist, i just found a book i might get myself for the holidays: ORCS by Stan Nicholls. Did any of you read it? If so, is it any good? Supposed to be a trilogy about a warband of Orcs... do i hear them shouting Orc, Orc, Orc! in the distance?