WAR - My Last Day of Head Start

This got to be my shittiest gaming session.

I only leveled from 8 to 10, with 2 scenario RvR in the beginning. After I got booted off a scenario to character selection screen and a 2 minute queue, my 2-box did not get in any RvR anymore.

My UI says I'm in the queue, but I never got in for the rest of the night.
I end up doing most of Chapter 3, 4, and 5 Dwarf area PvE quests. I also did a few PQ which I thought was a waste of my time.

Obsinius (guildie) said it best, WAR fails without RvR. PvE is ok some of the time, but not all the time.

Anyway, I pushed my Ironbreaker with mostly Renown Gear at Rank 8 killing mobs Rank 7 to 9. At Rank 10, I was killing mobs Rank 9 to 12. I pull 3 to 4 mobs and see how many AoE I can handle them when clearing quest objectives. My only AoE is some shield move the minor cone damage, while the Rune Priest have an AoE Dot. AoE becomes micro-managing the Snare Dot Grudge move, with the RP assist dotting each target. Then it's a matter using shield bash when it's up.

The RP uses the small insta heal every shield bash the IB does, and the RP casts HOT every snare move the IB does.

NPC Champions and Hero are easy too with the IB's Taunt, and the RP's Detaunt combo. I would then cycle to grudge moves that give buffs: Toughness, Armor, and Strength. I also started using hotkeys to use up the RP's Rune Nuke, and the Morale abilities when the come up.

I was hoping I hit Rank 14 last night, but I'm satisfied to be able to access Tier 2 at least.

I'm R10 RR8. I will probably grind RR exp as 11 IB + 11 RP in the Tier1 scenario and play more out 2-boxing in a pvp environment.

I got sick of PvE last night that I took a 15 minute break and rolled 2 Engineers, named them Locken and Load. Oddly enough, they got in a couple of RvR scenarios, I wondered why my IB/RP could not get in--but it was too late as I was in a Tier 2 camp at R9 at the time, I could not queue for the Tier2 scenario yet.

As fro the 2 Engineers, I wonder if they have good burst damage as a duo, without the weakness of 2 Bright Wizards.

I started on Head start - but i think i'll put warhammer on the shelf until they add more content and classes. Its a very fun game but i can see it getting old very fast after running around for a bit. One of the other things that kinda got me worried was the way open rvr was. Everyone would just stand there nuking eachother with healers in the back.... i guess you'd have to get a good sync'd group to make pushes... but it was like a snowball fight that never ended...

In Open Beta I had the scenario queue bug also. It was strange, because i'd group with someone, and queue for the fight, he'd get the message to enter the battle ground immediately and i would -never- get it. Restarting didn't help. it only happened one day, thank goodness.

There's was a period of crashes in the Tier 1 and Tier 2 scenarios last night.

AS for the Open RvR, well that's like many places of Southshore in WoW--but back then, it was just people going at it anytime of the day. There was not points/quest in it other than killing each other. It was more of a tug of war.

In WAR, there are quest objectives so zergs roam all over. One good implementation about WAR is how easy it is to join the zerg via Warband. I can make my group Open Group, and on some objectives, it auto invite people in my group if they have the same objective in the area.

Or I can make my group a warband. If a smaller group invited one of my groupmate/warband member, I am informed and I can group all of them.

If I don't want to open my group, I can make it a closed group.

But since I run a Tank + Healer, I'm always grouped--and I just invite people in as I move along my objectives or quest. People join and leave at will. It's a good spontaneous gaming, and efficient with more people to complete objectives. The feature is well done.

There are some design failures too. Some finite amount of mobs spawn, and when they get killed, the don't respawn for another set time. It can happen that the particular mob is needed for a Public Quest stage. Say it needs to kill 6 Champions, but 1 was killed before the Stage started. The PQ will fail because is has a time limit to complete the objective.

A great game would be if they took WOTLK, threw out all the PVP/arenas/BGs/etc, and jammed in all of WARs PVP.

I played on and off during CE headstart (I have key but cancelled my order), its a decent game but it just doesn't "grab" me. I think because the two people I was gonna play with both decided not to order, WAR loses a lot of appeal if you don't play with friends, whereas WoW for me is very fun solo.

In a few months when I'm bored again with WoW, multiboxing, and WOTLK I'll cancel my wow subs and try out WAR then.