Bloodwrought Enclave Info & Map

We did a quick Bloodwrought Enclave run yesterday and as we checked the mini-bosses for new loot i was able to create a complete map from Enclave, maybe it helps the orientation for starters. The dungeon is for six rank 40 characters and is located in the far SE of the Inevitable City. It's pretty straight forward as well and when you have a good group and know the dungeon you can just completely ignore the right wing, speeding up the dungeon a lot. It's the easier of the two city dungeons and you can get away with less wards on gear.

There are two (main) bosses inside the dungeon:
Korthuk the Raging (Sentinel boots & belt)
Barakus the Godslayer (Sentinel helmet & belt)

Since Patch 1.1a all mini bosses inside the city dungeons can drop the belt (now BoE) as well.

Bloodwrought Enclave MAP v1.0

Rotten Places

After i finished my assassin training in Reikland Factory i joined the guildies for a quick run through Bloodwrought Enclave & Bilerot Burrow. It was well worth it i snuggled with Lady Luck in some dark alley before, as during the evening i got two Sentinel pieces: Sentinel Eadplate and Sentinel Sholdaplate. That leaves me with three greater Wards, which will be valuable in Lost Vale. Overall we've been very lucky with loot drops yesterday, as I've never been to a dungeon run when we could use more then last night. Some silver lining after all those Magus & Marauder drops going to waste. The downside: You can't dye helmet or shoulders and will look like very other Orc. And on top of that, trophies don't show at all - not even with the gear switching trick. crap.

While I've been in Enclave several times, i had never been to Bilerot before. I think Enklave is really boring beside the last boss fight, Bilerot finally was fun again. The dungeon consists of very narrow and intricate paths so you have to adjust the camera view constantly. In the beginning this is *very* annoying, but you get used to it. It results in being careful to go around a corner as you can't see what's next. The boss fights are ok, with the last one being loads of fun! I really enjoyed The Bile Lord fight... without spoiling it to much for you: Everyone has to move constantly and pay attention while killing the boss. In the end he'll swallow you and you have to fight inside his stomach. The Orc flat on the floor in front of the Bile Lord on that pic is me, would you've been there.. it had some comedy value. ;) We killed him on the second go without much trouble tho. Fun!

Flipping the Switch

During the last days i switched from cultivating to scavenging on Thulf and moved cultivating over to an alt. One of the best choices i made, it's possible to train scavenging to 200 in about a few hours. It's always hard to lose progress you made, but sometimes it has to be done. Luckily with my knowledge about cultivating i was able to bring my alt up to 120 culti already and the next time I'll watch some TV he'll get to 200 easily, as the hardest part is over. I had some funny encounters while i was running around in full armor grinding low level PQs. Some peeps were really happy i was there to help them finish the PQ and i got a lot of tells what i was doing there. I still think one day i should go back to the starting area and hand out my own quests to new players... would be fun.

Since Mythic finally fixed the last PQ in wing 3 of Bastion Stair we went back to the Skull Lord (final and fourth boss) these days to send him back into the Rift of Rage. It's a fun fight and be it only due to the size of that Lord (check the size of his axe compared to the players). ;) I should take some time and write up for you a few orientation pointers for Bastion Stair, we all can run around there with closed eyes meanwhile. If you do wing 3 first and people got used to the portal jumping its always fun to lead group members towards the exit portal (in the other wings) instead to the boss instance - sometimes they take the bait and use it. I know, it was late. :P During that run i was lucky and got the Bloodlord Sholdaplate, which gives me the two piece set bonus. They look nearly identical to rank 3 white Orc shoulders btw. I was also finally able to get my hands on the Bodyplate of the Bleakest Despair, which eluded me for quite a while due to unlucky PQ bag generation. In addition we visited Bloodwrought Enclave, but i have to say i was quite disappointed as Bastion Stair is more fun and feels more of a challenge - needless to say we could not use a single of the drops in there. One thing that really annoys me is the lackluster high rank dungeon quests. You get these awesome tasks and then the only reward is some XP (it's a rank 40 quest, hello?!?) and there are not even follow-ups. At least should have made those more atmospheric and if nothing else reward some good looking social clothing you can wear while hanging out in the city.

The EU finally got a beta (!) version of the Realm War pages online. I used this fact to create a new info frame for the right navigation with a direct link to my profile. The EURW is still buggy tho... some weird localization errors and other bugs leave room for improvement. It's nice to see Thirst is one of the top three ranked destruction guilds on our server tho. Looking at the sheer amount of members other guilds have, I think we're doing really well. I think they squeezed in some kind of server status page into the leaderboards... but i dunno, overall the realm war pages seem ok, but there is still way to go. I hope we'll see some fixes soon and not in the same time span it took GOA to bring them online.

Tip of the Day: Despite a recent hotfix for the data.myp issue (every crash increased the file size), it seems that one did not fix an already existing large data.myp file. So it might be a good idea to go into your WAR folder and check the size of that file. If it's several gigabyte large (it's supposed to be around 50MB), delete it and tick the "full file check" in the patcher next startup.

Rippa of the Patient One

Due to some group PQ farming and further questing Thulf is rank 34 meanwhile. So finally I'm getting close to being able to play around with all those different tome jewelry sets and their boni, which i can use at 35. If you want to max. out greenskin chapter 18 influence and you're solo, here is a tip for you: Go to Cinderfall and do the Da Drakk Cult PQ. When you kill the Drakk cultists there, they drop keys to the cages. When you open a cage it will yield 300 influence. This speeds up solo grinding quite much... as the drop rate is rather high. If you're alone stage one will yield you around 17k inf quickly.

We manage to run Bastion Stair groups every other day with our guild, so chances are high to get some pieces of the Bloodlord set. I won a blue loot bag from the juggernaut PQ in there and it had a nice tanking shield in it: Gore Flecked Blocka. Unfortunately the bag was bugged and i could not retrieve it, but got coin instead. I know this happened to others getting either nothing or coin while definately selecting the item they want. Annoying. First time something like this happened to me tho. From the influence rewards inside Bastion Stair i gained Rippa of the Patient One, which looks awesome - like a huge butcher blade. The elite influence rewards are, while epic, utterly crap: Willpower & Initiative? Please... I also won my first Defender's Signs from a PQ in wing 3, so now only we need a purpose again for them. Maybe some new good looking trophies? Trophies for my mount! Talking about dungeons, some guildies went to Bloodwrought Enclave recently and one of the tanks got the Sentinel Eadplate, looks cool.

I also managed to obtain the Man Tactic II (Manly Strategy) from the tome tactics. I'd go for the next one, but i hear it's bugged and does not work. And I'm still of the opinion the 50% closer part is bugged as well. Part of this was to get an unlock from an order PQ, which was really funny as i could not see the stage/goal of the PQ, but was able to advance it myself by figuring out what one could do with gunpowder. This was really funny to be in the dark and try to find out what had to be done. ;)
Skill development after rank 33 feels still ok, you have one or another rank when you don't gain anything useful but there is still progress and the mastery tree enables some nice skills as well. My rank 4 morale ability Cant' Touch Us is great for longer boss fights or PQs as it will nearly refill the AP for your group and absorb damage as well. We did put it to good use when we gathered four 32-34 guys and went to do a chapter 20 PQ with mobs around 38 - the last stage was rather hard, but we made it. Challenging fights like that are good fun.