Askgar

Last night was the unofficial beginning of the @vanhemlock WAR group, a week early because they turned on the new servers in time (just!) Here’s a rundown of how the evening went for me.

1930: I get home from work, look at twitter and I see a tweet saying that there is a patch and the new servers are online. It seems to be patching 10gb of files but actually it is doing a full file check and only a small amount of data is downloaded.
2000: All downloaded and I’m in game, logging into the server and I see my character from last weeks warm up all my items from my ce and preorder still exist and all is good. One of the guildies, or to be guildies as the guild was not set up at this point. We form up and I head to the inevitable city to try getting our 6 people together to form the guild. I get given the details for the new mumble server and hop in to discover another couple of people still patching.
2030: We have 5 people and are waiting for a 6th to create the guild when I get a whisper from someone asking if the guild was set up yet, I find out he has a full account so I get him into the group and we get him to come across to the city so that we can set up the guild.
2045: The guild is up and running and we all head back to the chaos chapter 2 town to start forming up the warband and inviting people to the guild, I walk into someone who’s name I recognise and I then get a tell essentially saying, yes its me so off another invite goes.
2100: We charge into the nearest pq, it involves killing things a few times, there was probably something more to it but tbh it was so chaotic I couldn’t keep track. We do this a couple of times, completely ruin the pq for anyone else by clearing all of the spawns very quickly and waiting around for more spawns to finish the pq. After a couple of these we head back to the town, hand in a couple of quests and we head off to the hard pq in the area.
2115: This was much more suitable for us in that it was designed for around 10 people, the size of our warband at this point and was more of a challenge, although the tanking squig almost despawned the boss at one point, causing a few problems but a lot of hilarity!
This pq had 3 stages, the first was the standard kill x mobs, nice and easy with as many people as we had. The second was more challenging, we had to light houses on fire while also preventing people with buckets putting the fires out, 2 champions came per fire to be exact. Our tactic was to split into 2 groups of 5 and go a different way around the zone, ignoring any other people doing it and getting on with out own thing, this worked very efficiently with us sorting out the problems that the randoms running around made.
The final stage involved killing a man, probably important in some way but in the carnage I didn’t see what. After that we celebrated, until a massive chaos demon spawned with loads of adds. The squig seemed to get most of the adds and we just beat on the demon. This worked well and we got the demon down however once the squig decided to take aggro then run away, and he ran outside the PQ and just to the boundry of the boss despawning (which would have meant restarting the kill). Luckily we killed the boss still but there was much cursing the squigs name.
Between doing this PQ we had a quick run over to the easy PQ here but we were so over powered we didn’t even work out what was going on so left again rapidly after completing it once.
2145: We head back to the chapter 2 town after maxing our inf bars, get our loot then head over to the joint t3 and open rvr towns. Upon getting there we decide to try some o-rvr so we all ran into the zone, unfortunately the server had only just come back up so the destro population massively outnumbered order and there was very little fighting, however the fights that did happen were excellent and we did get to renown rank 4 or 5. Out we pop and get our renown rewards and renown abilities!
2215: We head off for some cave to kill an epic monster, some weird puzzle to get in and it was empty, off we head back to town.
2230: We queue up for scenarios to have a go, although they don’t seem to pop much, so we also head off to do pqs, we do the normal difficulty one a couple of times, which consists of killing various mobs, and then we move on to the easy pq, for completion sake so that we can get them ticked off.
2245: The scenario pops for both groups while we’re in the middle of the easy PQ and so off we go, there are 11 of us and 1 random (who was apparently insulting us during the match for being useless but I wasn’t paying attention).  Gates of Ekrund consists of 3 capture points on a fortress, with teams coming from each side.  We captured 2 of the points initially while they captured 1, it went back and forwards a bit but was very close in the end, with our crazy group just winning it.  Instead of running head first into all the battles I tended to sneak around capturing the points which were unguarded and even when the points went neutral they never sent more than one person to clear me off the point.
2300: We come out of the scenario and probably confuse a random doing the PQ when 11 people suddenly appear out of nowhere to finish the PQ.  We race through the easy PQ and then move over to the harder PQ, and here it becomes a LOT more interesting.  In this PQ we first had to do the kill x mobs, nice and easy, the second wave however had us disarming “bear” traps as far as I could tell.  However upon touching a trap a champion level mob spawned, which was quite powerful and took a while to take down, we only had 5 minutes to disarm 20 traps and because of the lack of knowing what was coming, and organisation, we failed.  This seemed to require much more practise and organisation than the previous PQs and I think with maybe a level or 2 more, and proper organisation (teams of 3 maybe, 1 to tank the trapper, 1 to DPS it down and 1 to activate the trap while the tank/dps are keeping the trapper busy).  I actually died during this because I ran to a trap but bought 3 or 4 other mobs, and had the trapper on me and I’d ran out of healer range, which was entirely my own fault.
2315: We call it a night on our first WAR outing, its getting late and its been almost 3 hours of pretty non-stop killing of different varieties.

I’d like to say a personal thank you to everyone that joined in last night, I personally had a great time and from looking at twitter and the forums it seemed like everyone else did as well, we made a good start on the game and got people set up in the guild and into mumble, everyone seemed to get on and there were lots of laughs to be had.  I personally can’t wait for next week when we can continue with the rampage and hopefully get near to T2 and have some more RvR fun.