Black Orc Newsflash: Sentinel Armor fixed in patch 1.2

Joy! I just logged on to the PTS running the latest build and oh wonder: Mythic finally fixed the Sentinel armor for Black Orcs. You can dye all parts and also the trophy slots work now. One happy Orc here.

Thulf the Sentinel

I went back into Bilerot Burrow yesterday, still hoping for my last Sentinel piece that eluded me for quite some time now. Lo and behold, finally the Sentinel Bodyplate piece droped for me! Yay! Now we have two tanks with 5/5 wards in our guild and have a third only lacking the chest as well. To celebrate the ward (and since we were able to recruit some healers recently) we started off with running two groups into Lost Vale. I took the tourist & sightseeing group (none of the guys had been deeper into LV) and we did very well. Killed all bosses up to the Butcher without much problems... we'll go back and should be fine. It's great to see we got the people now to run two groups into Lost Vale, which is (beside the annoying running) by far the most fun instance in WAR.

Since i have six Sentinel pieces now, i did some tests with the six piece set bonus: Preservation - On Being Hit: 10% chance to increase Wounds by 80 for 20 seconds. While the tooltip of the proc is wrong (says it reduces wounds) and it does not show in your combat log, the proc itself is not as good as i thought it would be. The "on being hit" does not trigger if you block or parry. The increase in wounds does not stack with the Da Toughest! and the proc also does not heal you, but only increases the max. amount of hitpoints you have. Being a tank i block & parry a lot, making the proc even less useful for me. After some testing IMO that set bonus is a joke and you're better off using another belt. Maybe if i get another Darkpromise piece I'll use the belt from that set, but as most Darkpromise pieces are rather weak compared to the Sentinel - as the single item bonuses are better for tanking - you're better off using Enervating Gutstrap (Gutstrap of Maiming) or the Black Orc Ransacker's Gird (with wounds talismans) depending on the situation. It's a pitty that a green belt is better then any blue/epic you can find. The Black Orc belts and also the Darkpromise set really should be looked at again.

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

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?

Bilerot Burrow Info & Map

During our last run through Bilerot Burrow i created a map from this place as well. The whole dungeon is very straight forward, but maybe a map can help with the initial orientation. Bilerot Burrow is located inside the Inevitable City (near Monolith) and is the harder one of the two capitol dungeons. If your group doesn't have enough wards you'll be better off going to Bloodwrought Enclave. Some of the trash mobs are harder then the bosses, but you'll find out very quickly if your group should be inside Bilerot or not, it's a gear check right at the beginning.

There are three bosses inside the dungeon:
Ssrydian Morbidae (Sentinel shoulders & belt)
Bartholomeus the Sickly (Sentinel gloves & belt)
The Bile Lord (Sentinel chest & belt)

Bilerot Burrow MAP v1.1

Update 04/12: added the location/name of the missing hero.

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!

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.