I’m sure completing every stage of WAR’s Heavy Metal event was supposed to be tough. I can’t find the exact quote, so I’ll just apply standard journalistic integrity and roughly paraphrase what I think I probably remember reading somewhere (ooh, biting satire): it was along the lines of “only the most dedicated players will be able to unlock the new careers early”. After the Witching Night had turned out to be a bit of a grindfest to fill the influence bar up, that set the old alarm bells off and caused a shift in GRINDCON status to Bikini Speckled Rumba (moderate to heavy grind expected, keep doors and windows closed and fill a bathtub with machine tools). Turns out it was a false alarm, most likely I misremembered or misinterpreted the quote, either way it was a waste of machine tools and it’s going to take forever to get those oil stains off the bath, but more importantly the Heavy Metal event was a positive breeze. After the first seven days tasks were assigned on specific days, the final seven tasks were available to complete at any point over the last week; I cheekily zapped through a Tier 1 public quest again and did five PvE quests in pretty short order, then with another task being to rack up 15 kills in Open RvR I wandered off to Black Crag, where there were reports of the occasional minor skirmish. By which I mean there were a good three or four warbands per side charging around the place. I got a spot of good keep defence in, but after Destruction withdrew and we charged after them, to be met by an extra warband or two coming up to reinforce, the Lagfiends of Gorax VII reared their ugly heads and made fighting a bit tricky, granting warbands mystical invisibility and teleportation abilities. Still, I’d racked up the requisite kills by that time, and most of the other tasks involved the Reikland Factory scenario, which happily was popping up very frequently. Within three or four runs we’d eaten a sandwich, thrown gravy bombs and killed some chickens, which I understand is a reasonable approximation of what our American readers call “Thanksgiving”, and that was enough to secure the final influence reward in one evening, the chance to roll a Knight of the Blazing Sun early with the new 1.06 patch; I hadn’t even needed to complete all 14 tasks, only 12 being required to fill the bar, giving some leeway if you’d missed a previous day. All in all, very sane and reasonable requirements leaving plenty of time to pursue other Heavy Metal-related activities, like drumming through the Ozzfest stage of Guitar Hero: World Tour. All aboard!