Mists of Pandaria

Unfortunately the "epic battle" I was raving on and on about in the last post was a bit lackluster and leaned towards Stormbluff isle and strongly towards Henge of Denravi at the end leaving them the victors of the match. Eredon Terrace has dropped to world 4th and to be honest I haven't really had time to play guild wars 2 since World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria just happened to come out that same week and all spare time went to that trying to get capped on at least 1 character. I managed to do that within 5 days of only playing 2-3 hours when I could of course more time allotted for weekends since I don't have any classes or meetings.

So far in Mists I have had tons of fun just leveling from 85 to 90 as the quests were humorous and it was not just a grind fest like the other expansions. I actually did not blast music like I normally do because I did not want to miss the jokes or npc interaction between quests which felt fluid. I chose to level my Death Knight first because it was my main for essentially 2 expansions and it is what I am used to especially for massive pulls and just destroying stuff. I played using a Blood spec which was able to tank just about anything and with the new changes added on 5.0 allowed me to pull some amazing aoe damage and whenever I was in an instance for a large boost of exp and gear I was topping meters which I was not used to, this will probably be nerfed as we go on because it makes all the other dps cry apparently "TANKS ARENT SUPPOSED TO DPS QQ." personally its refreshing to see big numbers every now and then but it feels wrong sometimes to do 100k dps on a trash pack while the others are struggling to do 30k and the better ones 50k. Its only the 2nd week of the expansion and there will be balance issues that will be fixed once blizzard looks at the grand chart of raids and how the various classes compare to each other healing, damage, and tank wise.

Started leveling my monk as well and if it gets exciting enough around 60ish I might make it my main alt or possibly a main. I just love the idea of having a Pandaren Monk that drinks beer, doesent give a fuck, big enough to tank with that beer belly, and is just overall a good concept of character. Who doesn't want a drunk tank that is viable?

The Ultimate Showdown

Alright guys so the great World vs World match of guild wars 2 is happening right now, The servers Henge of Denravi (Currently number 1), Stormbluff Isle (Currently number 2) and Eredon Terrace (Currently number 3) got matched up this week for WvW and right now shaping up to be a great match. Stormbluff Isle has taken an early lead by taking Stonemist castle and keeping pressure on Henge of Denravi and Eredon Terrace in both the eternal battlegrounds and the surrounding borderlands. HoD within the last few days has been rather lackluster and has been bullied by both servers which lead to early point loss causing ET to step ahead by a few thousand points.

As of right now Eredon Terrace has managed to match Stormbluff Isle's point gain in spite of them having the almighty stonemist castle which give the largest bonus of all the keeps. What this means is they have to cling on to the castle in order to keep the points ticking in their favor. Personally I wonder what my guild leader Archaos is planning this week as we slowly choke out HoD and make gains towards SBI's lead.

small WvW insight

Alright so I have been playing some WvW lately and our current match up is a bit boring. Isle of Janthir and Sea of Sorrows have completely given up and some of the server is currently camping their respawns in Eternal battlegrounds after taking everything from them. The first day was great because atleast we had resistance but after day 2 or 3 we just took everything and upgraded it to the max and they never retaliated.

Here is a screen shot and you can see we still get points but our bonuses are maxed at a good rate. I haven't really had time to use them as I have been busy all week but I have some of the weekend to use em before our next match. Speaking of our next match I kinda want to go up against henge of denravi just to shut em up about our last match. It would be a nice even playing field this time since we can actually get in to the WvW maps without having to worry about the long queues and hopefully this does not happen with our current server because that would just be hectic.

I aim to level up a bit this weekend and hopefully hit level 80 which is 29 levels away. Gonna rush it since i want to get to 80 fast so that means riding dynamic events across zones and maybe doing a few hearts but most importantly alot of drops and alot of money will be had.

Guild wars 2 update

Sorry about not posting for a month been busy since college is starting and stuff.

Alright so whats been going on in gw2 is my guild Ruinous has been going up against some of the best servers up there in world vs world and holding their own because that's how we roll. Anyways our first server Northern Shiverpeaks became full before we knew it and became saturated with large guilds and a shitload of non guild members. This meant we were not able to get our officers in to direct the regulars because of the long queues just to get into the battlegrounds. Unfortunately if you don't have some authoritative leader inside the "PuGs"(players not in guild/alliance) will swarm wherever the enemy is aka all of the dueling symbols on the map. This is not a bad strategy but it sure as hell is not the best especially when the goal is to own as many keeps, towers and supply camps as possible for points. In light of this realization that we could not direct our reinforcements we decided to use the free transfer to Eredon Terrace one night and once there we took the other two servers by surprise and owned all of eternal battlegrounds and farmed the other teams in their spawn. It was an amazing few hours because it was the first time we were able to switch between the maps freely without having to wait in a one hour plus queue.

News of this of course got out within hours and we were soon followed by a few guilds and a few players for mostly World vs World purposes and the fact that the bonuses for having the most points are so great. our entry into the server was not too bad the queues were still short after a few days often being less than 10 minutes for the borderlands and up to 30 for eternal battlegrounds. during the first few weeks arena net decided to have day long skirmishes with 2 random servers to determine rankings early on so it is not an totally unfair match when they switch to the 1 week format and later the 2 week format. The servers changed every now and then but most of the time there were the same 2 servers and we fought like usual with us on top of close second.

However one server already has a reputation for cheating and we exposed them with a video and a reddit post here.The server was Henge of Denravi and the exploit was they could attack our keep lord in stonemist castle, the largest point value keep, by using AoE spells on the first floor to hit him on the second floor. This of course lead them to taking the keep as we did fortify the lord's room with siege weapons and a few officers to report to the guild on team speak. The exploit was one of the few ways for them to get pass our exceptional defense. After we reported what happened the comments of the reddit post contained all of what they did to other servers and it made me chuckle at how everyone had a bad time against them and had proof of other exploits. Since they took the keep by exploit there was no way we could keep it even if we took it back so we just made them have a rough time outside the keep by disrupting supply lines and taking their fully upgraded towers which took about 1 gold to upgrade. Long story short we lost that skirmish.


After all of that we went up against some other servers and well had no support from the other players on the server so we went from having a lead with most towers/keeps, fully upgraded which took about 10 gold or so which is a pretty nice bit of change, to being in 3rd in the morning because no one defended. Seeing this our guild leader Archaos said fuck it and gave up on the match since it was a money sink. So for the rest of the day we did nothing organized and just fought where the PuGs were because we refused to take and upgrade keeps for them to be left undefended. Needless to say the server learned that our presence is needed in order for them to have a chance at winning any world vs world matches.

Fast forward to today and we are currently going up against the servers Isle of Janthir and Sea of Sorrows for the first week long battle. During the beta we had fun going up against them but now they kinda gave up and we are up by almost 200,000 points already and there is no hope of recovery from that. I just hope they get servers they can deal with next time because its depressing knowing there is a server in first you cant touch and is owning most of your stuff.

WoW

Sorry about the late post been busy setting up some college stuff so I couldn't get around to typing something up.

Recently I have really been intrigued by World of Warcraft and I have started to make use of my professions and bank toon after what seems like forever. I started light with just inscription using tradeskill master to manage my glyphs. The selling is rough because my home server seems to be losing population and there is a lack of interest right before the expansion. Apart from the financials of my return the fun factor is back for me as I level my fire mage. He is currently nearing the end of burning crusade instances and heading towards Wrath of the Lich King regulars which should be pretty fast considering blizzard buffed the experience gain in all previous expansions. Only thing I am worried about is the dps queue later on since for now its about as short as 2-3 minutes but it could go up to 10min+ after I hit 70.

Stress test

It seems Arena Net still want to test the stability of the game hence the back to back stress tests we had Thursday and Friday. For the test that was Thursday it had a rough start with the log-in servers going down for the first 30 minutes which I did not mind much since it is just a stress test, and after that in world vs world it was a lag fest and tons of desynchronization which makes a normal battle at the gates of a keep rough because its hard to escape AoE when you have position lag and you just cant move in general. That part lasted about an hour while my guild struggled to get to the center of Stonemist keep in the eternal battlegrounds. It was like fighting an uphill battle because to get to the keep lord there is a ramp and the team defending can just set up on the outside and spam aoe on the choke point which gives them easy kills if they have enough players that can aoe or just a lot of elementalists. We finally got the keep with about a hour left in the test and defended it against both of the servers we were up against until the end of the stress test. They got close to our keep lord but our siege equipment kept them at bay and it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Dayz is fun.

Alright, been playing dayz recently on server US 717 hosted by a friend. Its a pretty popular server so you do meet other people in the large map you have to find loot in and survive. The types of characters you do meet on the server are interesting in themselves ranging from hackers, regular players, squads that shoot on sight, and the typical bad ass that shoots everything with big guns they most likely found on another server. In my travels I have been killed by just about every type of character and haven't been able to kill any squads because obviously I am out gunned and out manned and usually run out of ammo or get shot too many times making my character pass out and either bleed out or one of the guys runs up and delivers the finishing blow.

The most interesting however are the hackers because they are an unpredictable bunch. Often they like to grab everyone on the server or at least a large part of it and send them to a death arena called the thunder dome. In this dome everyone spawns in the middle and has to scramble to find guns and ammo in the crates if they did not already have a gun and if the hacker is good enough he will strip you of everything and make you find everything within the dome. After this its last man standing including explosions and bullets flying everywhere causing a death blow to all unlucky enough to escape the rage of all of the players around with the hacker watching as everyone else scurries as he tosses grenades. If you haven't played Dayz explosions are particularly deadly as they can break your bones even at the tail end of one and getting shot is no laughing matter either since it causes you to bleed at a steady rate until you can find time to bandage yourself which takes about 10 seconds. If you manage to survive the onslaught some hackers give you a gift such as a sniper rifle or they get mad that some one survived and drop a nuke on the server which kills everything and usually causes the server to experience heavy lag or even shutdown until it restarts.

Hell even with the occasional hacker they make the game interesting when all you do is run from town to town avoiding zombies and other players while trying to find loot in the few open building you can find.

Mild adventure

Today I played a bit of WoW mostly on my mage for some nostalgia. Instead of my usual fire or arcane spec I decided to try frost since it was one of my favorite specs back in the day and a lot has changed since then. There is the typical stuff about spam frost bolt and icelance on Fingers of Frost procs which is quite nice because it produces high numbers and a ton of crits if done right.

I generally had fun in the few dungeons I ran with some random people but I was rather disappointed with the quality of people I had to run with. The range of dungeons I was running was 50-60 which is about mid range level wise and this also should promote a certain amount of skill or teamwork assuming the players have done any dungeons at all on the way to 50+ which is highly likely with the Looking for Dungeon tool. Anyways out of the 4 or 5 groups I was in maybe 2 went flawlessly and without confrontations in chat. For the first group we had a tank that could not keep up with the pace of the mobs in the dungeon and whenever we had extras pulled the healer would die or come close to death, the unfortunate part was it was a slow death with the heals running around the tank in a circle trying to get the mobs off. This lead to a stoppage in heals to the group and long story short we all died because of the tank. In this situation if I was healing I usually try to mix kiting the mobs to the tank and healing myself because keeping yourself alive is top priority along with the tank, also if your mana is above about the 50% mark you should be trying to use any and all quick heals you can to avoid interrupts and push back from the mobs clubbing you.

Guild Wars 2 Engineer theory.

Hello first time readers to my new blog. I am still working on the layout of it because I am still getting used to Blogger's settings and I do not have access to good backgrounds due to the 300kb limit on images. With this blog I do intend on sharing whatever seems significant to me as I progress throughout the days playing whatever I am in the mood for. This mostly includes World of Warcraft, Dayz, Team Fortress 2, League of Legends and Guild Wars 2 when it comes out.

I am really looking forward to playing Guild Wars 2 so I can try my hand at playing an engineer which is ideally the perfect concept of a class for me. Playing through all of the beta weekend events and the stress tests It is my most played class and one of the most complex offering an incentive to explore the different combinations of skills the engineer has since they are the only ones who cant swap weapons but they can swap tool kits. In the last BWE (Beta Weekend Event) they tuned the shield skills since they felt it was a default choice if anyone wanted to use a pistol for a condition build. It was a default decision because it was pretty useful with the situational knock back and absorb it helped move people off flags or doors and saved you from impending doom at the hands of a firing squad of Rangers and Elementalists. I'm not sure if it was the tuning or a bug but the knock back did not work at all so every engineer went with dual pistols or tried to go Rambo with the rifle which was really a shotgun.

The buff they gave to dual pistols was great as it allowed us to add a blaze condition to our already ticking bleed which gives us  decent chunk of extra damage and AoE as long as we are close enough to the target for the close range bonus. That bonus is something I have recently discovered while I was chasing down some targets in world vs world and it works for Poison Dart Volley (Pistol), Blowtorch (Pistol), Blunderbuss(Rifle), and Overcharged Shot(Rifle).

Even though I prefer to use a more ranged approach running in after using Elixir B and giving a small burst with poison dart volley is fun and effective as it causes the average player to use an evasive roll early or back away playing into your ranged game where you can just keep boons up with elixirs and stack bleeds and burns on your target at a comfortable pace. This however does not always work which is why this is risky because if it is a melee you will be close and in their territory allowing them to set up a good stun and damage combo especially if the target is a warrior because they have one skill that can absolutely wreck a person if you are close enough and not moving. I tend to try to keep a distance and if they get to close drop a glue shot and roll out, the further away you are the less skills they can use on you and in this game kiting is usually a losing game since the slowing boons don't last long and there is no single class that can permanently keep something slowed so good use of evasive rolls and environment will take you far.