I was checking out the newly updated Realm War page and it looks pretty cool. You can see how each tier is doing for each of the three armies.
For example if I go to the Realm War page, then scroll down and click on Red Eye Mountain I immediately can see that the server is up and I have the option to either click on the server name or click on any of the three WAR pairings or I can click on the server name to be taken to the Empire versus Chaos pairing.
At the top of this page I can see a quick breakdown of exactly which zones in Tier 4 are locked down or contested. Scrolling down I can get more details on Empire versus Chaos and see that Destruction owns tiers 1 and 2, tier 3 is contested, and tier 4 is currently contested in Reikland.
Pretty cool stuff. You don’t have to login to see how your side is doing, you can just check out the Realm War page and know exactly where everything stands.
If you completed all of the quests in the Heavy Metal event, you were able to start a Blackguard if you are Destruction or Knight of the Blazing Sun yesterday if you are Order. If you did not complete ALL of the Heavy Metal quests, you should have access to start your own Blackguard or KotBS next Tuesday or so.
I started a Blackguard at about 1pm or so yesterday, and I must say the mostly Blackguard scenarios versus mostly KotBS was fun at first but got boring pretty fast. Melee is just melee after all. And to top it off our first game was full of level 1-3 Blackguards on our side, and they had mostly level 1-3 KotBS on their side, but they also had a level 9 Runepriest. Sadly, we had no healers. And sadly for the Runepriest, we found him early and often but he still had a major impact on the game.
Let’s see what else the patch brought us:
“Mastery Point Refunds – Due to a number of significant changes to many of our careers, we are providing a full Mastery Point refund to certain careers. Players who belong to one of the careers below will need to speak with a Trainer to retrain their Career Mastery: Bright Wizard, Chosen, Engineer, Ironbreaker, Magus, Shadow Warrior, Sorcerer, Squig Herder, Swordmaster.”
So don’t forget to sign in and retrain first thing.
After the servers came back up today we all still had access to the entire Heavy Metal live event. So I hurried through everything, got my loot and already opened the chest to get the message you see above:
“Your account is now flagged for premiere access to the new careers at the conclusion of Heavy Metal.”
Now you don’t have to play every day through the Thanksgiving holiday, you can complete the quests whenever you like.
So now I get to make a Blackguard alt and check it all out but I’m not sure how much time I’ll put into it. I dig my sorcerer and if I’m playing WAR I think I’ll stick to that.
It is pretty amazing how quickly everyone is running through the rest of the Heavy Metal quests. This makes me think that a live event with 5-10 quests a day would work in the future, keep everyone busy and moving and trying to catch up to get the best loot.
Today when the clock hit noon we were given access to do ALL of the Heavy Metal quests, not just the Kill 10 Factory Chickens in Reikland Factory quest we had for today.
I must say, it was much cooler having access to all of those quests at the same time. In the first scenario I was in someone found the Famous Factory Sandwich and I killed the 10 chickens before we won the scenario.
The chickens are easy to find, from the starting point you go just across the bridge and then turn around to face the bridge as you see me doing in the screenshot above. From there you can tab to any of 4 chicken spawns that seemed to respawn every 30 seconds or so.
I’d imagine it’s the same for Order, but I only looked on Destruction side.
Mark Jacobs has written a lengthy post about the huge changes that are currently in development for Warhammer Online, all revolving around Open RvR combat:
“First, we have created an RvR Influence system. This system is designed to reward our oRvR players with lots of new stuff that you can only get through oRvR. This will be a complimentary system to our PQ Influence system. This system is already implemented in 1.1 and is scheduled to go LIVE along with that version in December”
This is pretty cool, wonder if we’ll all start at zero or be compensated for what we’ve already done? Probably zero.. still I hope it’s cool rewards and not just belts with bad stats.
“Second, we want to improve the visibility that players have into oRvR and make it easier for players to get involved in the action quickly and easily. We have a number of wide-ranging changes going into our map and travel systems to allow players to better understand the state of oRvR in our game and also allow them to get to the action faster. We have already taken one step with putting a Rally Master in each Warcamp but we will also add the ability for people to have a second bind point to make it even easier for players to move around the maps. We will also make it easily for players to see where players from their Realm are engaging in oRvR, a Campaign HUD for all tiers and other improvements We will also improve Tier-wide messaging about what is going on in Battlefield Objectives and Keeps. Other additions include changes to the UI, in-game manual improvements, map enhancements, and a few other changes.”
If players can find the action quicker and easier they are more likely to go fight. Cool.
“Third, we want to provide greater incentives to players to participate in oRvR. In order to accomplish this we will be adding additional layers to the questing system of oRvR including the addition of Keep Quests, “Daily Event Quests”, Chained RvR Missions, improve the initial Tome Unlocks and other oRvR-oriented Events. We will also improve our BO itemization. Our goal is to provide players with even more incentive for participating in oRvR than we have already.”
Fidzlefou has a video on Youtube showing the location of Tarestil and the Spite Ale bubble maker that you receive for killing Tarestil. Travel to Mount Bloodhorn and ride all the way to the west side following the main road.
35 seconds into the video Fidzlefou shows you the exact spot where Tarestil was when I went there.
These events couldn’t get much easier could they? Today we had to go into the Reikland scenario and find the sand castle. Sounded cool at first, but I found it just off to the left on an island from the Destruction starting spot and it only took about 15 seconds to find.
Order apparently found their castle faster or didn’t care, either way they were ahead of us at the beginning of the scenario but we came back to beat them. Pretty cool scenario but I wish they would put more time into building cool RvR things to do then working on scenarios like this.
I would rather see something more challenging, like “Find the sand castle in your tier’s RvR zone.” Much more exciting and fun then just finding it quickly in the scenario without anyone there to fight.
MAULor1 posted this great video on Youtube showing off the secret trophy The Skull of Ograrand. The skull is behind a hidden wall in the Inevitable City, more MMORPGs need things like this:
The Heavy Metal “Live” Event started today. Two things were immediately noticable: We had new horn sounds when you summon your mount, and the new scenario was broken. The new Reikland scenario would give us all an afk tag and everyone got booted out of the game not long after the game started.
The first game we played we were winning 12 to 4 when the game ended. It said we won but we didn’t get credit for it in the Tome of Knowledge. I logged out, waited a couple hours and logged back in to try the scenario again. This time I got into a game after about five minutes and was done minutes later.
Heavy Metal Loot
From the way it looks, you will have to log in every day and complete whatever the Tome unlock is to be able to get enough influence to get the Elite loot reward. If you miss any day, or do not complete the Tome unlockfor any day, then you don’t have a shot at the Elite loot.
Here’s what we get at the three different influence levels for Heavy Metal:
Basic - A trophy called Harbinger’s Signet
Advanced - A cloak called Harbinger’s Cloak
Elite - Heavy Metal Chest “Open this chest for premiere access to the new careers at the conclusion of Heavy Metal”
I must say, I expected more out of a so called “Live” event. Logging in to try a new scenario is great and all but it was just ok to me.
Because the Koreans need more game addictions, thanks to NHN and EA their hard core PvP/RvR players will be joining us in WAR in 2009. I am interested to see what they think of it and how many players there pick the game up:
“Seoul, November 13, 2008 - NHN’s Hangame - Korea’s largest game portal, and Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), a leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment, announced today that two companies have signed a multi-year agreement for Hangame to publish the critically acclaimed Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game (MMORPG) Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning™ (WAR) in Korea. This agreement further expands the reach of WAR with servers to be available in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceanic territories.
Developed by Mythic Entertainment, WAR is a groundbreaking new MMORPG that launched in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceanic territories in September and has attracted more than 800,000 registered users since launch. The game will be launched in Korea in 2009. “
