Toe-to-Toe: Claiming a Keep

Yesterday night Thirst, with the help of Rigor Mortis & Da Meanest an' Greenest, took back the T4 keep "Ironskin Skar" in Black Crag from the filthy hands of Order. I did not participate personally, but will use this as an example how to claim a keep and what it costs. Before you can claim a keep, of course first you have to conquer it. So gather a strong warband and find one occupied by the forces of Order, preferably already claimed by an Order guild. ;)



You can check which realm owns a keep by looking at the mouse-over window. It will also show if a guild, in this example Thirst, has claimed that keep. So after you conquered the keep and slaughtered all the NPCs (including the Keep Lord of course) in there, you can claim the "empty" keep. If you just leave it, NPCs from your realm will repopulate the keep by themselves. If you want to claim the keep (Note: Your guild needs rank 14 to be able to claim) for your guild, after the fight you'll have to head to the top of the structure. IF you are a standard bearer for your guild, you'll be able to interact with one of the banner poles on top and you can place your banner there, claiming the keep.

It's important to note: The claiming standard bearer won't be able to carry a standard as long as the guild keeps that keep, because he "uses" his to claim it. Once your guild claimed the keep (your guild can only have one keep claimed at a time), the banners will transform into your guild heraldry, showing colors, patterns and emblem depending on your guild rank. In addition the Keep Lord will be hired by your guild and will show the guild tag as well.

But of course such service does not come for free. If you intend to claim keeps, you better fill up your war chest in advance with gold. The costs for keep maintenance are:
T3 Keep Maintenance =  6 gold/hour (144g per day)
T4 Keep Maintenance = 10 gold/hour (240g per day)

Maybe a good idea to talk about guild tithes & taxes or how guild members donate money in advance. We did not really plan for the keep claiming and had to realize our funds inside the guild vault were not enough to hold it for long. Next time then... ;)

So you wonder what the benefits are for paying maintenance and defending a claimed keep? Well, should someone attack "your" keep you'll get a warning in chat - so better make your way over quick when that happens. The benfits of a claimed keep include, that your guild banner tactics (the ones "equipped" in the banner used to claim) will be applied to the specified RvR area for ALL realm members to benefit from. In addition your guild will earn experience over time while holding the Keep. If a Keep (that is claimed by a guild) is captured, then the Standard associated with the Keep is considered captured.

Toe-to-Toe: Guild Taxes & Guild Tithes

As we level higher in WAR it will become more important to fill up our guild war chest, i thought maybe it's a good time to take a quick stab at the guild taxes & guild tithes features.


When the guild reaches rank 3, the option for tax & tithe opens up. Guild taxes are pretty self-explanatory: The guild leader can determine a percentage of your earnings that will go to the guild vault. The tax rate will show in the rewards tab next to the tax option.

What exactly is the tithe then? The tithe option is a voluntary contribution from each player towards the guild vault. While the tax is imposed equally for all guild members, the percentage of the tithe rate can be selected by everyone differently. If you want to donate to your guild bank, just click the tithe option inside the guild reward window and a small pop-up will open, here you enter the percenetage of you earnings you want to give.


Both options, tax & tithe, will add up. So if your guild has a basic tax of 5% and you choose a 7% tithe rate, you'll donate 12% of your income to the guild. I think i read somewhere it's rounded down where it applies. I'm not 100% sure, but i also recall the deducted money is only taken away from looting corpses and not doing quests, vendor sales or income from the auction house.

Updated Map of the Inevitable City

Due to popular demand and many questions about the trainers and such i updated the city map with all the available trainers (career, renown, crafting) inside the city. There are no talisman & salvaging trainers inside the city, you'll need to visit the trainer camp in chapter 2 if you want to train it later on. I was finally able to witness the Monolith PQ and updated the name accordingly.

Check out the updated post here:
The Inevitable City Map

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.

Guild Pattern & Heraldry Choices

As we're still discussing the final choices for our own guild, i realized it's nice to know the options you have. I have to say the options to choose from are far less then i expected, a tad disappointing. I also think it's too many different border options, which will enable two guilds to have nearly the same heraldry on the same server, as the borders are not very distinct - assuming the "unique" combination reserved for your guild is the combination of background color, border, emblem and standard shape.

Anyway, i found two websites listing the different choices:
Destruction Guild Heraldry
Order Guild Heraldry

Attack on Keep "Stoneclaw Castle"

Yesterday night a larger warband from Thirst members plus some randoms gathered in Hellfang Ridge to assault the RvR zone in High Pass. As we did not have many healers with us, after a small visit to Stoneclaw Castle, we decided to take Battle Objectives first. Usually those are guarded by one Hero and a bunch of other NPCs, which are not hard to take down with a larger group. I don't know if it changes with different ranks/renown, but i got 400RP for capturing battle objectives. Once we started taking over objectives we were opposed by a large group mainly from BOON Control and Vengeance. Fun!

The best battle was in and around Ogrund's Tavern, which has one small entrance with a door you can open/close. Due to the collision together with some skills this makes for a very fun combat experience, trying to break in or hold a building like this. If you don't have enough healing power its very hard to take over such an object tho, when you got skilled players holding the doorway. Even with a squad of Black Orcs using Raze and Hold The Line! The battle went back and forth, we took this battle objective, they took that. Some great open RvR action.

In the end we wanted to assault the keep despite our lack of healers. This is when the strange stuff started to happen: Some of us, including me, could not see the keep anymore. We saw only a few walls or parts of the towers and the rest was gone. The funny part was we could just run inside, as there were no walls for us. If "inside" most NPCs and players were "out of range", only maybe 20% could be attacked. I can only imagine how this must have looked for the players inside the keep, using a knockback and send someone flying through the wall. Butler was hit by the bug as well, think he frapsed it - so i might post a vid should i get one. This bug (probably due to server lag?) was really annoying and due to queues you did not really want to restart the client. First time i have encountered something major like this.

On a sidenote, phunqe on Karak-Azgal used the search function some during prime time and came up with estimated server population caps: Refering to his thread it looks like the population caps are 1500 players per side, 3000 players per server at any time. Feels about right, tho i can't say that all the zones on my server feel populated, sometimes you can walk for quite a while until you meet someone.

Tip of the Day: Did you know the sergeants at battle objectives will give you a 30min buff, when you talk to them? The type of buff you get differs per objective and you can see those in the "small print" when you mouse-over the battle objective on the map.

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.

Warhammer Comics

I always enjoyed those funny comic strips you can find for free on the internet, there are loads of them. But even better, when they are about your favorite MMO. There are a lot of "children scribbles" (excuse my french) out in several blogs, very few hit the nail despite being not illustrated very well. Beside the ones at The Greenskin and also Warhammerchen (unfortunately not updated since long), which i enjoy, i just found two new ones that are awesome...


One is Warhammer-Heads at comicstripclub. While they have a regular other strip (Electronic Tigers), we'll get a warhammer related strip every week there. This one is about a Dwarf who wants to play Destruction because he hates Elves. I laughed.

The other one is Tome of Knowledge. Greg will post comic strips (hopefully) regularly and they look great. Be sure to check the "A Lesser of Two Evils" one where mobs from Warhammer Online visit Lord Illidan from WoW. priceless.

Mount Gunbad: Mushroom-Crazed Night Goblins

Well, well... yesterday night we went into Mount Gunbad with a larger guild group. Me only being rank 20 and one of the youngsters. What initially started as a quick cave expedition ended up in a fully fledged mountain assault, visiting all three wings. But first things first... Mount Gunbad is located in the Badlands. In the far NW corner of your map you can see a cave, that's where you want to go. The mountain is home to crazy Night Goblins, that harvest weird mushrooms to brew potions. Over the years they have become very powerful through the forces they can access with their drugs. The whole cave is covered in moss, mold and mushrooms. The main inhabitants being Night Goblins, Spiders, Squigs and Giants... oh, and i did i say giant squigs? The cave scenery is very atmospheric, great place.

The whole mountain is a public instance. In most parts everyone can go and there are only (as far as i could discover) three one-room instances, which are group'o'six only, where a boss can be found in each. Most mob groups are larger and have at least a champion, usually 2-3 of them plus trash. Every now and then there is a hero in the middle of things. In addition respawn is quick some places so you better watch out where you go and what you pull. It's not possible to adventure solo in any part, a full group should be adviced. Inside the mountain is a *ton* of public quests and the final stages are enjoyably tough, like Biletongue (troll PQ). Mount Gunbad has its own influence bar and certain stages of influence seems to be needed to enter the private instance parts. XP gained inside the instance is, like in Sacellum, very weak. Maybe after another visit I'll write more about Mount Gunbad - I'll definately go back, it's some serious action in there. But not for the weak... *evil Orc laugh*

There are three wings:
#Right Wing (23+) contains Gunbad Lab
#Left Wing (25+) contains Gunbad Nursery
#Middle Wing (27+) contains Gunbad Barracks

It's possible for you to harness the mushroom powers of the Night Goblins: Just when you enter the instance - and later on at some places inside - is a cauldron bubbling. If you interact with it, you can choose from three repeatable quests to collect certain mushrooms. These quests do not yield any XP, but if you complete them will grant you three different 30min buffs. The buffs being Bloodfang Brew, Green Ooze Brew and Spikespore Brew.

Tip of the Day: Should you win loot bags from public quests and you can't wear the reward yet, store the complete loot bag in your bank until you reach rank. It could be, that in the meantime you find something similar - then you'll still have the choice to pick something else from the loot bag.

The Inevitable City Map (updated)

Watching the public chat channels and questions on some forums, there still seem to be a lot of people that have some trouble to find their way around inside the Inevitable City. Not anymore... here is a citymap with all important POIs in it. I did not clutter it with any trainers and such, as those are really everywhere and also show up properly on your map. The info & color code on the map should be simple enough to figure out. All city dungeons and public quests are on the map as well. enjoy.

Things to know:
Mount Vendor, needs to be rank 20, costs 15g.
Name Registrar, register 2nd name, needs to be rank 20, costs 4g.
The Viper Pit, Guild Tavern, needs city rank 2 (and guild rank 6) to open.

Points of Interest:
Bloodwrought Enclave, PvE instance (city rank 2, player rank 40)
Bilerot Burrow, PvE instance (city rank 3, player rank 40)
The Elysium, some strange garden (city rank 5)
Eternal Citadel (city rank 3)

Public Quests inside the City:
# Temple of the Damned
# Inevitable Rot
# Toil and Trouble (triggers by touching a cauldron in the alley)
# Chaos Unleashed - Defeat the Chaos Spawn (triggers by a skull in the alley)
# The Bigger They Are...
# The New Plague - Defend the Monolith (takes place inside the portal)
This PQ is triggered by a portal inside the Monolith, you can see the quest is "charged" by flashes below the portal that leads into it.

Tip of the Day: Did you know, that when you fall off the edge inside the Inevitable City, you'll get teleported to the resurrection point within the city, but without any penalty applied? Sometimes a fast way across the city.

Edit: Due to popular demand i added all the trainers (career, renown and crafting) to the map.

Crafting Trainer inside the city:
# Butcher
# Scavenger
# Cultivator
# Apothecary
# Salvager
# Talisman Trainer

Update 08/10/11: Added the PQ Chaos Unleashed, thanks Elsherath. Also added trigger info on two PQs.
Update 08/10/31: Added trigger info for Monolith PQ.
Update 08/12/13: Updated the Trainer locations for Talisman crafting and Salvaging for patch 1.1

Edit: Check this blog, should you search for an Altdorf map.

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.

Toe-to-Toe: Warhammer Auction House

Looking at the search hits, it seems like there are many people still struggling to figure out the warhammer auction house and how to best utilize it. I'll try to give you a quick rundown...
The most important thing to notice: When you hit the search button on the auction house (AH), your chat window will give you a number of results. If it states search results 500, some auctions have been cut off. The AH will only show a max. of 500 results at any time to you. Should you hit this magical number, its adviced to refine your search more to see all fitting auctions. Some features on the AH are still a bit bugged, like search for career related stuff, you'll always get some crap you can't use as its for someone else. You can sort results by clicking on the column top like name, rank, time left, etc.

From my use of the AH, your best tools are these (until the rest gets fixed):
# Item Name - enter a search keyword in here and you'll only get results that include it, use this!
# Rank from x to y - if you search for gear to buy, limit the search by a rank frame that makes sense. With rank 20 you don't want to search for rank 1 gear.
# Categories - if you only search for armor, weapons or crafting stuff you should use this one.

What about selling stuff at the auction house you ask? Well, the warhammer auction house UI makes it really simple for you. It tells you the the vendor price (good stuff!) and suggests a price connected to the vendor one with a little markup. Careful tho, some crafting material does not sell for much at the vendor, so its worth more then the AH suggests. If you think that the drop you found is only mediocre, you might want to take the suggestion (pending on the drop up it a little). I'm still amazed how many players try to sell crap rank 17 items for a few gold, no one will buy that stuff. If you have no idea how much its worth, use your common sense (would you buy an item for 5g at rank 17?) and search for the item first to get an idea about how others priced it (which does still not mean it's worth 4.9g if you know what i mean). You might want to adjust the duration tho, the default 24h seem a bit short. As a last sidenote: Your mailbox has a seperate tab for mails from the auction house - how could you miss that? ;)

The Sacellum Dungeons: Middle Wing (arena floor)

After the prelude with the first two wings, now we're talking about the real deal. The entrance to the Sacellum Middle Wing is on the arena floor. Monsters in there range from 17-20. Here you'll encounter your first dragonoid, a large Wyvern called Snaptail the Breeder. Fights now start to become more interesting... Looking at all those eggs, Snappy seems to bread a small army to release out of this dungeon. It is of no surprise hes guarding them and the lil'ones don't like their mother to be disturbed. Fun!

The Sacellum Middle Wing has three bosses:
Snaptail the Breeder
Goremane
Viraxil the Broken

The second boss Goremane is a manticore, i think he had a knockback but can't remember exactly - nothing special. The last boss is a large Hydra, Viraxil the Broken, and here things start to heat up. Beside his normal attack he does a flamebreath on the tank. The nasty part is that he starts to spit fire on the ground every now and then, don't be surprised if someone shouts: Don't stay in the fire! Just... don't. Therefore the tank will move him around a bit. If people are on their toes, this is not the real problem yet. He starts shooting fireballs that do 2k+ damage to people. This is a huge problem, as all the squishies are in danger to get one-shotted, should their health not be topped. The healer just moves out of a fire spit and *bam* eats a fireball, dead. We tried different things to find out of there is a mechanic behind those fireballs, but it seems so far the only things you can do are: Don't expect to kill him with group members much lower then him, stack on elemental resistance and wounds to be able to survive a fireball. This is a tough fight if you head down with rank 17 players and people have to come prepared with gear and potions. Seemed a bit out of place refering to the other encounters... could use a small tone down of the fireball damage.
One more thing we encountered were a few graphic bugs: Some team members could not see the fire spit or fireballs, only after a relog they were able to see them.

Alone and scared in a corner in this dungeon wing, you'll also find Grobbit, whom you need to find for the quest Grobbit's Errand. Two more things to note about this dungeon wing: Gravestones usually have inscriptions and if a fire pit is cold, something might have burned in there before.
That's it for the Sacellum dungeon, now back to leveling so i can visit the next larger PvE dungeon named Mount Gunbad.

The Sacellum Dungeons: West Wing

When we first went into the Sacellum West Wing, my Black Orc Tank was rank 12. In this wing trash mobs start to hit you hard, if you're lower rank then they are. The noteworthy ones are the Mawgut Bull ogres in there. They come single or in a pack of two. If your tank is low rank, you might want to consider a guard on him from an offtank to share the pain. Once you're the appropriate level, they won't pose much of a headache, but in the beginning they were.


There are three (and a half) bosses in the Sacellum West Wing:
Hoarfrost
Sebcraw the Discarded
Lorth Thunderbelly & Slorth Thunderbelly (brothers?)

Hoarfrost is the first boss in there, but IMO hes the hardest in the west wing. He got a freezing aura that does periodical damage which poses a threat at lower ranks. His room is also bugged, make sure the tank places him on even ground, or he might get stuck or reset. Not much to say about the other bosses, pie. The last boss, or should we say bosses, is a couple of brothers with large weaponry - looks cool, but i was expecting some bigass flamethrower action in there. Well, it was not like that... one of them also drops a green set item.
One more thing to mention about this dungeon: Mawgut Gnoblars know how to build traps! ;)

You'll also find Unok the Gladiator in this wing, you need to challenge for the Test of the Arena quest.

Winds of Chaos - Sacellum Arena

After exploring the Sacellum Arena we're ready to have a closer look at that strange portal in the back of those small floating islands. Did you reach it yet? Beside one or two things to discover on the way up there (have a closer look around, you might find people hanging around there) the portal itself is a magnificent sight. Using the portal will let you be a tiny snowflake in the Winds of Chaos. Where those winds will blow you? That's hard to say... every time you step through that portal you'll gain a short glimpse to another scene. Being a giant between tiny houses, an empty beach somewhere, flying ships... i could go on and describe it more, but i decided I'll spare you the words and let a few pictures speak for themselves. Be careful tho, who knows what happens if you follow the Winds of Chaos all too often? You might end up on the moon and never get back... use at one's own peril.