After a couple of weeks of heavy drinking, it’s time for festivities to cease as everyone gets back to the daily grind. And in Warhammer too (ahhhh!) The Keg End festival in WAR is coming to an end, and I’m back at work in real life, t’ch.

Keg End was something of a mixed bag. Like the previous event, Heavy Metal, there was a nice long list of activities you could participate in for event influence. Visiting pubs in Altdorf was easy enough (*hic*), and the addition of new “boast” and “toast” emotes set up a couple of fun tasks, /boast-ing to 20 dead enemy players and /boast or /toast-ing a member of each career (easy enough, once you could find a Blackguard in Tier 4). The other tasks revolved around spawns of new mobs added around the place for the event, and unfortunately tended a bit towards the grind of Witching Night. On the plus side, there were plenty of the improbably titled Brew-Thirsty Ogres and Drunken Gnoblars around the place, several spawns in every zone, and although the Explosive Snotlings did explode (the clue’s in the name I s’pose), they at least hung around a bit longer than the Witching spirits. Killing 50 of each of them was a bit dull, but you could break it up, do a few groups here and there as you rode around the world; I got a fair number in the process of questing up to level 40 (handy extra XP as well), and after hitting level 40 I spent a while going back to lower level zones for tome unlocks, and nuking the odd Keg End spawn on the way (a couple of times I tried to nuke goblin players, mistaking them for snotlings or gnoblars, but fortunately they weren’t PvP flagged at the time, saving me from en-chickening). Fireworks dropped from the mobs often enough to make collecting them for another three tasks pretty easy, but beer kegs seemed to drop at a similar rate; ten fireworks, no problem, one hundred beer kegs… Hrm. The final task was to kill 20 hero class Massive Ogre Tyrants, who hung around the RvR lakes, and that didn’t really make much sense to me. I’m fairly sure the usual warband/party tagging rules applied, wherein only one party of a warband gets kill credit, so if you were thundering around attacking objectives and keeps and stomped an Ogre or two on the way it was a lottery as to whether you got any credit. More to the point, when thundering around the RvR lakes in a warband, everyone was usually far too busy heading for the next objective to even bother stomping the Ogres on the way, leaving them about as busy as a fruit seller standing next to a dual carriageway with a couple of manky-looking punnets of strawberries. I’d managed all of zero kills by last night, but fortuitously a guildmate needed a few to complete the task so I tagged along with him and another guild member, then we bumped into three more Ogre hunters and merged groups, and everyone was kind enough to stick around as we ran between two spawn points in Praag to rack up the full twenty I needed. I don’t really get the point of sticking PvE encounters in the middle of RvR lakes; if you’re there for PvP you’re probably not going bother with them, and if you’re just there for a PvE objective, with nine T4 zones, of which six will be locked at any given time, it would take an incredibly busy server not to find a nice quiet place to go Ogre hunting untroubled by the other side. As the Ogres are hero level and need a party it’s not even like a Witch Elf/Hunter could hide near a spawn for a few cheap kills. Still, ale’s well that ends well. Cheers!