Category Archives: war

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

If the rumours are true, then I have my work cut out for me. Within months there could finally be a melee DPS dwarf in Warhammer Online. Not just any dwarven melee DPS, but the hint from Mythic’s marketing hype machine suggests that it’s going to be the legendary Slayer or a close derivative thereof.

I’ve mentioned recently in passing that I would quite like to play a Slayer in Warhammer Online. ‘Would quite like to’ as your average cat ‘would quite like to’ lounge around all day snorting lines of catnip from off of the claw-shredded remains of your favourite curtains.

So I have to get as far as I can in LotRO with my current melee DPS dwarf in order to determine whether I want to stick with lording it up online, or to move across and get my mohawk on. Admittedly even if I do switch back to WAR and give the old girl one more whirl, I’ll probably keep my LotRO subscription running because even though I generally can’t play more than one MMO at a time in earnest, I do think that LotRO has enough to offer even the most casual of drop-in players.

All of which reminds me that I must have another crack at leveling my melee DPS dwarf in World of Warcraft. To have a melee DPS dwarf at the level cap in three MMOs is a fine goal, don’t you think?

Well, an altoholic dwarf fancier can dream. Oh how I dream.

Keg End Ends

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!

Dingrats II, Return of the Rats of Din

Maximum levels in MMOGs are like buses. They’re big, have wheels, and carry lots of passengers. And then two come along at once. No sooner has Melmoth hit the big eight-oh in WoW, I made rank 40 in Warhammer (which might only sound half as impressive, but he did have a 70 level head start…)

No screenshot I’m afraid, partly ‘cos I rarely remember to take screenshots, and partly ‘cos I hadn’t really been keeping much of an eye on the XP bar and it caught me by surprise in the middle of some random quest. Things were a bit slow in the late 20s/early 30s, but whether it’s the tweaks made in recent updates, or just that time off work has given the opportunity for some major play sessions ’til ludicrous times of the morning, the last few levels positively flew by.

Like Melmoth I’ve also been thinking about what comes now, though in my case the answer’s a bit easier: carry on regardless! I’ve been mixing up general questing, public quests, scenarios and open-RvR while levelling up, and other than cutting down on the general questing (unless there are particularly shiny rewards on offer) I reckon there’ll be more of that as WAR rages across Tier 4, with zones flipping back and forth most days. How much longer I’ll keep going I’m not sure, but WAR certainly reinvigorated my MMOG habit, given me a few good months, and a third game with a level capped character. Huzzah!

Happy Christmas (WAR is not over)

I couldn’t look a gift song title in the mouth, as it were, especially one so appropriate. The Tier 4 war in Warhammer rages on unabated, Destruction last night locking Dragonwake (which at least gave a temporary break from Serpent’s Passage), but Order weren’t to be denied their salvage part capturing fun and locked Eataine down shortly after. Unfortunately I’m going to have to take a break for a while, as Christmas is family-touring time, so I’m off for a while. Happy Christmas to everybody out there, I’ll be back in the New Year!

Too many buttons!

So Warhammer’s 1.0.6 patch has arrived, tier 1 areas host roaming packs of Knights of the Blazing Sun hunting ostrich, emu and peacock for decorative feathers (but, following the law of the MMOG, having to make do with sparrows and the odd chaffinch to start with), battling with hordes of Blackguards in scenarios dubbed “Clash of the People Wearing Lots of Armour who Hit Each Other for a While with Little Effect”. I rolled one up, and can exclusively reveal their level 1 ability involves hitting people. Possibly with a sword, though I wouldn’t like to commit to that level of detail just yet. I still seem to be generally immune to alt-itis, though, so chances are he’ll get parked up next to the level 3 Witch Hunter, level 3 Archmage and level 3 Swordmaster who hang around the background of the character select screen looking a bit fed up that I only log in to them when bag space is getting tight and I’m shuffling around some dye.

Back to my main Bright Wizard, and things have changed a bit. I popped in to the Warhammer Alliance Bright Wizard forums to see what people were saying about the career tweaks, read a couple of threads, and spent the next half hour squirting bleach up my nostril to try and cleanse my brain. (Remember, kids, never squirt bleach up your nostril. Try a brillo pad on a stick instead. Actually, better still, just don’t go to the class forums of Warhammer Alliance. Or any other MMOG, ever.) Non-exhaustive empirical testing from a few scenarios, I’m further down the damage table; it used to be rare for anything other than a higher ranked Bright Wizard to be above me, now there’s a fair mix of Order careers towards the top of the board. It’s not a disaster, I’m still putting out decent damage, so I’ll see how things pan out over the levels and the 1.1 patch before singing the Doom song at maximum volume.

One thing I did needed to do was sort out my talent points, and re-slot talent and morale abilities, which meant sorting out my action bars again. Pop quiz, hotshot: you’re a Bright Wizard in a scenario heading off to capture a flag and your party encounter the enemy. You notice a Witch Elf vanish into stealth, a Magus and a Shaman are hanging around at the back casting spells of some kind, and a Black Orc and Disciple of Khaine are charging towards you. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

If you said “apply a healing debuff and DoT to the Magus, de-hex any DoTs that have been applied to you, detaunt the Black Orc, drain the Disciple’s action points and increase her global cooldown, root the Witch Elf that inevitably stabs you from stealth, activate your shield then focus fire on the Shaman using morale abilities to knock the Black Orc back”, well done, you’re an elite PvP machine. If you smirked at that previous sentence because only some sort of n00b would try those tactics, award yourself a further 10 smug points. If you said “AAAAAAAHHHH, push buttons, AAAAHHHH he’s hitting me get him off get him off hit him with a bucket ruffle his hair up they hate that AAAAAHHHHH I’m dead”, congratulations, you’re a normal human being. And if you said “that’s a stupid question utterly unsuited to a multiple choice format especially with such limited and specific options”, feel free to provide a short essay instead, though I’m afraid it won’t count for any extra credit.

Anyway. The point is, there’s lots of options for a Bright Wizard in WAR. A few too many, I think; I’d filled two actions bars of buttons by level 30 and I don’t really want to start a third, partly to preserve screen real estate, and partly because I’ve got quite enough to be getting on with already, thanks, with my standard fireball, and standard DoT, and better DoT with longer cooldown, and AoE DoT, and instant cast PBAoE, and detaunt, and healing debuff, and spell to get rid of combustion, and spell that knocks the target down, and quick cast single target attack, and channelled damage/snare, and cone AoE, and channelled AoE, and targeted AoE, and a ten second shield, and a one hour shield, and some other buff, and… what have I got bound on alt-7? Something useful, I’m sure… and panic/flee, and a mount hotkey, and a potion or two, and an assist macro, and a coffee maker, and a speedboat, and a nagging sensation that you left a window open upstairs… I exaggerate, of course, there’s no action bar option for that last one. It’s a morale ability. No, I’m kidding. It’s obviously a tactic.

Generally I’d be happy to lose a few of those abilities, my poor brain (and action point bar) can only cope with so many possible courses of action in the middle of a fight, but maybe that’s just me. And sometimes you really do need a quick way of activating the coffee maker while on your speedboat…

Not so Heavy Metal

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!

Contributor? I hardly know ‘or!

There are rumblings in the MMOG-o-blog-o-sphere over the “contribution” system in Warhammer’s Public Quests and keep capture. I really don’t know what actually happens in the depths of the code; having run through pretty much all the public quests in a zone with a guild group before I can’t say I noticed everyone having the same contribution time after time, though I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Keep sieges, on the other hand, there does seem to be a weight of anecdotal evidence of people arriving just as keep lords are killed, or guarding postern gates or similar, and getting top five contribution scores, suggesting it’s either horribly broken or random. Is random a problem, though?

I think it’s a brilliant idea. As discussed previously, in an incentive scheme based on measuring performance “what you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want”; as widely observed, how can you put a numerical figure on the relative contributions of someone tanking the keep lord, someone guarding the doors to stop the enemy crashing the party, someone who’s had to go AFK, someone who’s really trying their best but is getting a 0.1fps lagfest and the keep lord doesn’t even turn up on their screen ’til it’s at 25% health? So instead have an illusory “incentive” scheme, everyone will play as best they can in an attempt to influence their score upwards, and the final result is all random anyway. Perfect!

Well, no, obviously it’s horribly flawed; apart from anything else, wherever numbers exist in an MMO, players will pick away until they expose the mechanics. The best case scenario is the numbers are laid bare, more likely there’ll be a period of half-developed theories and suggestions, violent argument, and those weird urban game myths that pop up (“if you re-map your abilities so you only push prime numbered hot-keys during a keep siege you’ll *definitely* get top contribution!!1!”) It’s also quite hard to disguise an entirely random system when the top-contributing loot winner pipes up with “LOL I was AFK the whole time!!1!”, and puts a bit of a crimp on the next siege when a massed force turns up, stands poised ready to launch the assault, then go AFK en masse as that’s the way to top the chart. If you’re totally open and stick the precise formula up on the web, though, whether it’s random or whether it’s an incredibly intricate formula involving the phase of the moon and average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon (if you arrived here via a Google search for “average rainfall of the past three days in Swindon”, I’m awfully sorry but you’re probably going to be very disappointed), you’re back to the problem of a system open to exploitation (if random, just standing near a quest/keep and naffing off for coffee) or manipulation, and players being angry that you’re screwing over tanks/healers/melee/DPS/everyone. Damned either way, as per usual. My solution: I think they should’ve shipped a set of USB scales in the box with a built-in feather of Ma’at, and when rewards are to be determined all eligible players place their souls on the device and upload the results. Simple! Never let it be said I don’t offer practical suggestions…

Heavy Metal Farmer

Here in Europe we’re just starting on Day 3 of the Heavy Metal event in WAR, and it’s going pretty well after getting over the initial disappointment of logging in to find it wasn’t really a massive Black Sabbath concert with an RvR lake of a mosh pit (turns out Ozzy’s really more of a WoW man. Though after watching the advert, I’m not entirely sure he’s fully aware of what WoW is. Or where he is. Or what year it is. No change there, then.) Still, there’s Guitar Hero World Tour for that which continues to be excellent, though after really looking forward to Love Me Two Times I promptly failed when it came up, those guitar trills are tricky! But anyway…

After a bit of a grindfest in the last event, I was slightly worried about what sort of tasks we might be faced with, but day 1: “take part in the new Reikland Factory scenario” was easy enough, the only obstacle being the length of time in a queue for it. I suspect something might not have quite been working as intended, as I’m sure both sides would have been signing up for it in numbers, but unfortunately a couple of guildmates never saw it pop at all over the course of an evening. Day 2, complete three stages of a public quest (any public quest) was also straightforward. Seems like a good idea to encourage people back into PQs, though I slightly went against the spirit of things as I didn’t have too much time by zapping back to Tier 1 and soloing a PQ there. From the list of forthcoming tasks over at Waaagh!, it doesn’t seem to get much more time consuming, either. Not that it really matters, as I’m not too fussed about starting a Knight a week early, so just two thirds of the tasks should be enough for the shiny cloak reward, but it doesn’t look like too much farming will be needed after all. I couldn’t miss the opportunity of getting a Bad News song in the title, though, all together now: “I’m a heavy metal farmer, I’ve got lots of heavy metal animals…” (Note to Activision/Harmonix: Bad News downloadable content, sure fire winner!)

Save Our Scenarios

Aren’t scenarios in Warhammer brilliant? Yes, I went there. I believe the correct response now is for you to say “oh you didn’t”, and then I say “don’t go getting all up in my face”, and then there’s a vague attempt at a fight involving some slapping and hair pulling, and then security get involved, so let’s just take that as given and presume we’ve moved on to the point of glowering at each other while being restrained by burly individuals.

Anyway. Yes. Scenarios. What with fake plastic rocking, rugby watching, comedy gigs and other more tiresome not-playing-WAR bits of Real Life going on, I haven’t had much time to be Bright Wizardly. In the odd half-hour here and there, though, I have been logging in, been *wanting* to log in, and why? If you said “scenarios”, well done, take a cookie. If you said “because of banjo-playing pigs in trees”, no cookie for you, honestly, the clue was in the first sentence. And post title.

They’re not perfect, of course. Individual scenarios can be awful depending on the respective team levels and compositions, and some of the maps and game types aren’t great (evenly matched teams frequently end up in a points-from-kills-only stalemate of a mass scrum). If scenarios were the only thing on offer in WAR it wouldn’t be much cop, just playing a few scenarios here and there is more akin to playing a few rounds of an online FPS (especially now so many FPSs have some persistent unlock type features), so if that’s all I was going to do, I might as well be playing an FPS. Nothing but scenarios, bad. However, UND THIS IST A BIG HOWEVER, I really don’t think heavily devaluing or removing scenarios, as suggested in many other places, would be good for WAR long term. The usual argument, grossly oversimplified, is that scenarios take people away from open world RvR, open world RvR is good, ergo scenarios are bad. My counter-argument is that open world RvR *can* certainly be very good, but can also be very bad, or very dull. As p0tsh0t points out (in an interesting post worthy of pondering more deeply sometime), there’s an imperial stackload of variables to deal with, and while we seem to be pretty lucky on our server in having a good number of players in Tier 4, roughly balanced between Order and Destruction, and fairly frequent RvR battles, there’s no guarantee that something will be happening at any given time, much less something I’ll be able to get to and actually participate in within half an hour (what is going on with zones like Dragonwake and Black Crag? Big zones, with irritating cliffs and plummeting drops such that if you’ve never been there before it’s a right faff just getting from a warcamp to a keep, so you fall off somewhere and die from the drop, and then come back at a camp, start running again from there, find a frikkin’ horde of level 39 mobs wandering around in the middle of the road that you can’t really avoid, and you can’t really kill ‘cos you’re level 32 which is fine for the RvR stuff once you’re bolstered but this is outside the lake, so you try and avoid them and the gitting things chase and kill you dumping you back at the camp and… anyway).

In half an hour, I can log in, hit the “queue all” button for scenarios, then have a crack at a quest or two, or sort out mail and the inventory, maybe do a spot of crafting, check out what’s on auction; a scenario pops up (usually Serpent’s bleedin’ Passage, but I gather they’re working that), play that, then repeat the process if I have more time, otherwise log out. This is a Good Thing. I’d love to be spending more time in game, doing a variety of activities, hooking up with the guild more (unfortunately I’m not getting the time for much past “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” in guild chat), tackling dungeons, taking keeps, but failing that at least scenarios give a quick hit of PvP, some XP and renown, even a bit of cash and loot, everything a growing Bright Wizard needs, and once I get some free time again I can get more involved in the rest of the game. Without scenarios I’d be far less inclined to fire up the client for those odd half hours, lose momentum, maybe be less inclined to log in at all.

Season of the Witch(ing Night)

WAR’s Witching Night event comes in two basic parts, PvP and PvE. Just to switch things around a bit, the PvP side is a Public Quest: tromp around a somewhat ill-defined bit of a nominated RvR zone in each tier, and kill 100 of Them before They kill 100 of You. The basic problem with this, as those with a keen grasp of maths may notice, is you can’t let Them kill You as much as You kill Them, and that leads to everyone being a bit cagey. It’s an excellent demonstration of why death penalties aren’t an unqualified good idea, the lack of them can make PvP meaningless, but the presence of them can make PvP utterly tedious. The side that’s outnumbered hang around at their warcamp, with siege weapons and heroes to back them up. The side that’s outnumbering them hang around just outside of siege weapon range exploring the communication possibilities of emotes, presumably hoping the other side really hate mimes:
Zoso walks against the wind
Zoso is trapped inside an invisible box
Then you wait and see who gets bored first.

Three times I’ve headed into the RvR/PQ zones. Once was great. The keep and battlefield objectives started out in Destruction hands, when I arrived Destruction players were outnumbered and sticking around their warcamp. A couple of Order warbands eschewed the hanging around and miming option and instead headed off for an objective and the keep. Destruction came out to play, objectives were attacked, defended, captured and recaptured, though almost no kills in the process actually counted for the PQ as they weren’t in the arbitrary PQ area. The final phase only really kicked off when a Destruction force had re-taken the brewery and were pursuing the former defenders when a second Order warband turned up from taking the keep, completing a rather beautiful pincer movement in the PQ area, Order finally ending up with their 100 kills to about 90-odd for Destruction. The only downside was that I wasn’t keeping a close eye on the scores, so when the count ticked up to 100 and Phase II began I didn’t instantly turn and run towards the Witching Lord. I’m not sure what killed me, Destruction players, or the boots and hooves of what had been the Order front line as they trampled me in the process of legging it to the Lord, either way I’d just about respawned back at the camp and was about to mount up when “Rolling for PQ loot…” appeared. Guess the Witching Lord lasted about as long as me, needless to say I wasn’t close enough to get any kill credit.

That was the good. The bad was another time, when Destruction were outside the Order warcamp in force, and everyone had a much higher boredom threshold; in the course of an hour the kill counts had risen to about 10 apiece as both sides glowered at each other, edged forwards a couple of steps, edged back a couple of steps, and waited for the other lot to attack. If there was any way to dig trenches, we’d’ve been set for a re-enactment of Ypres. In real time. Over four years. I emoted sitting down playing a mournful harmonica for a while, wrote a bit of poetry, then gave up and joined scenario queues.

As for the ugly, that was the third time, when Order had the edge in numbers again and Destruction had fallen back to their camp. This time around a few Order players weren’t going to wait them out or head off to another objective and kept trying to attack on their own, falling to siege weapons/hero NPCs/the massed pipes, drums and spells of the Destruction forces. Players in zone/warband chat tried to suggest that everyone backed away from the warcamp, some people did, some didn’t, the kill count kept ticking up, people in zone chat got more annoyed and capitalised, insults started flying, and as exciting as it was to stick around to see how many variations of “NO U STFU” exist, I buggered off with Destruction about 70-50 up. That’s the problem with open RvR in a nutshell: when it’s good, it’s very very good, when it’s bad, it’s ZOMGZ WTF R U DOING??/?

So: one of the goals of the Witching Night event is to kill 10 Witching Lords, and I believe they only spawn as Phase II of the RvR PQ. Time spent in RvR PQ zones: about five hours. Number of Lords killed: zero. Now, according to my mental calculations, that would require me to spend… um, let’s see… carry the 4… precisely “divide by zero error” hours to get the ten needed for the quest. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really got divide by zero error spare hours. Still, not to worry, there’s always the influence rewards, right? Like other public quests, there’s an influence bar to fill, and rewards along the way. Killing other players during the PQ nets you influence; I’m not sure exactly how much, by the time you divide it between a warband or three, if you manage to be involved in 50-odd kills over many hours of tedious stand-offs, you’ve netted yourself a good few hundred influence points. Rewards here we come, woo! Oh, apart from the minor issue that a few hundred influence points is but a tiny fraction of the influence bar.

Off to the PvE areas then. As well as the Witching Lords, there are a couple of other scary mob types, Crones and Spirits, sprinkled around PvE zones. Crones stand around a cauldron; after killing the Crones, interacting with the cauldron spawns a bunch of Spirits, then the whole lot respawns after a while. Spirits also turn up by themselves in a couple of other areas, and both Crones and Spirits are worth 100 influence points each. They’re also not very challenging, at least the ones I bumped into; I could slap a basic Bright Wizard DoT on to them then stand and auto attack, they’d die in a few seconds having barely scratched me. Trouble with this part of the event is that there really aren’t very many cauldrons around, every time I found one there were other people there. If they were Order, I’d try and group up; if they were Destruction, it was a race to tag mobs as they spawned. Either way, not great influence rewards, and lots of standing around waiting for cauldrons to respawned, so after racking up the requisite 25 Crones, I moved on to Plan C. A helpful forum post pointed out a bit of Talabecland where Spirits spawn, I wandered over and started mowing through them. These Spirits spawn in a haze of purple tendrils, and only hang around for a few seconds before vanishing again, so, as they can’t really hurt you, the only challenge is in spotting them, hurtling towards them (ideally avoiding non-Spirit mobs) frantically mashing an instant cast spell until they’re in range, then spinning around and looking for another one; if you can tag them with damage, they stick around until dead. I think three spawn at once, at least that’s as many as I ever managed to simultaneously tag, sometimes they’re conveniently close to each other, sometimes they’re spread too far apart to get more than one. It’s mildly entertaining for a while, and as nobody else was in the area doing the same thing the influence bar filled up at a fair old rate, I got enough for the first reward and headed back to Altdorf to cash in.

I thought that would be it for Witching Night, but then the event was extended, so the next day I popped back to the RvR zone, resulting in the standing around bore-fest detailed previously; then I thought “hmm, those cloak rewards look pretty nifty, I could always grind some more Spirits to fill the second part of the influence bar and get one”. I’ve got a bit of a problem, see, show me a progress bar with a reward, even a fairly inconsequential reward, I have a compulsion to make it go up, push that lever, get the food pellet… If something’s only available for a limited time, the compulsion is correspondingly greater, I’ve spent hours in City of Heroes grinding Christmas presents and Halloween costumes just for badges that have no effect on anything. So I stuck a podcast on, went back to Talabecland, spent another 45-odd minutes grinding out the Spirits while listening to the ever-splendid Mark Kermode, got enough influence for the cloak, and headed back to Altdorf again.

Yesterday… well. The final influence reward is just a mask. Purely cosmetic. It would look silly on a Bright Wizard, and replaces headgear that actually has useful stats so you wouldn’t want to wear it in combat anyway. But… there’s a bar to fill… it’s only available today… I couldn’t help it, back to Talabecland, killing spirits while half-watching television. About halfway through the final bar I was pretty fed up, but by that point as well as the usual “must get reward” compulsion, there’s an additional “if you give up now, you just wasted all that effort”, so I kept on going.

Now I’m in no position to have a go at Mythic for putting in a lengthy, entirely optional, influence grind, having stood around killing hundreds of Spirits for hours on end. It’d be like criticising an electric fence manufacturer after grabbing the wire and going “OW THAT HURTS!” Then grabbing it again. And again. And then getting a free toaster after grabbing it a couple of hundred times, when I didn’t even need a toaster (unless my existing toaster had been taken by an otter to an ice cream factory, which is hardly likely). The mere fact that I (and presumably others) did it vindicates their implementation in some ways. A few tweaks could’ve improved things, though; spawning an awful lot more Spirits and Crones around the place, for example, so you could butcher a load during normal PvE questing rather than having to hunt them down in a few small areas. Making them a bit tougher, or having Champion versions with increased influence rewards, could go some way to alleviate the fact that, being trivial encounters, I could burn through Spirits as fast as they turned up, and any sort of teaming up could serve only to reduce influence gain over time (course it’d have to be a fine balance, or I’d be complaining bitterly about the difficulty of taking them down…) On the RvR side, plenty of other people have made suggestions for tweaking the Public Quest goals, mostly involving bringing objectives or keeps into play to avoid everyone hanging around their warcamp (though you have the problem of needing some way of giving an outnumbered side a chance at winning the public quest, or they’re just not going to bother trying). Definitely room for improvement, hopefully the new scenario for the forthcoming Heavy Metal event will be fun and perhaps liven up the influence grind a bit for that.