Singilized Experiences - First PvP Server

I have played World of Warcraft for quite awhile, while not as long as when it was in the beta, but only a few days after release. I originally started out on a server called Draenor as a Human Warrior named Sindri ,I had a fun time leveling him up to 60, I was on a normal server so primarily what I did at 60 was craft items, and run through a few endgame instances such as Strathlome, Lower Blackrock Spire, and Upper Blackrock Spire a few times.

I didn't really mind my experience there at all, in fact I made a few friends, and I had a guild that did endgame content somewhat regularly. When it wasn't doing anything, I had other things to do like try to get gold for a epic mount, or level up engineering because it seemed fun at the time. I did however leave it because of an unexpected influence in reality. I met someone at my school who I found out also played World of Warcraft, and because he was a much more standard gamer than I was, he already had PvP experience, and was on a PvP server already, but somehow he found out that Blizzard was opening a couple of new servers and included a few PvP ones in it, He probably looked at the World of Warcraft community site and it was listed there, but I didn't do that much either. I ended up deciding to go with him over to a PvP server that he had picked, it was called Firetree, from there I found out how vastly different a PvP server is from a normal server.

The first thing that was different for me was picking a character to play, I saw a few Horde characters while I was on Sindri, I was intrigued by the Orcs mainly after I saw their dance and I thought it was funny and neat. Despite that, I first wanted to try out a “holy” class of which only Trolls, and Undead were able to choose, Undead didn't really appeal to me, so I went with a Troll Priest. That didn't last very long in-fact I don't even remember his name. I ended up only getting to about Sen'jin village before deciding that I really didn't like not being able to do as much damage in favor of healing; so, back to the character creation screen I went. After thinking for awhile, and deciding that since I was on the Horde, I might as well play the Horde specific class, very easily directing me to Shaman.

I honestly knew nothing about the Shaman other than it was Horde only when I first started out, luckily for me I was very pleasantly surprised with it. Right off the bat, I enjoyed small things like the fact that Rockbiter was a weapon enhancement even though I spent most of my time casting Lightning Bolt, and that Earth Shock was a instant cast. I had experience interrupting spells from being on my Warrior before, but I much preferred Earth Shock even though I remember it's range being fairly short, I think I just preferred it because it looked a lot better than pummel, so I ended up really enjoying a Shaman for their interrupting abilities as well. All of this made leveling very fun, along with the fact that all of the quests and areas were completely new to me, it was somewhat confusing to get used too especially with how much traveling around there seemed to be as opposed to being on the Alliance, but at the same time I found out that many things were more confined than Alliance zones, the lack of any sort of random elites or high level things such as the dust devils in Westfall was also a plus.

The main PvP server experience came to me later on, it was also the first time I met up with my RL friend. In Ashenvale, when I was about the right level for it, I went over to it to quest, I originally was avoiding it because it was the first true contested zone that I knew of other than Stone Talon Mountains where I didn't really see any Alliance at all. I wanted to not be under leveled if I had to fight but as I was running out of quests I ended up going to Ashenvale anyway. While I was on my way to do some quests, I ended up getting a message from my friend telling me that there was a big fight on the road, so I decided to go over there, and see what was happening. I remember the numbers on both sides being fairly equal and the horde pushing forward by the time I got there, I don't entirely remember how big the battle was but it wasn't more than 10 people on each side give or take. I joined the fray and decided to see what I could do, I can't remember the exact things I did, but I do remember helping route the Alliance and killing all of them before they got away, I also remember me and my RL friend survived, and I healed him after the battle. Looking back on it now, I believe we won because for the most part we out leveled the Alliance fighters, and my friend's rogue was about 5 or so levels higher than the average for Ashenvale. In any case, after the battle my friend decided to log for the night, and I went on my way questing, I remember getting into a few more fights with the Alliance while I was questing but nothing that was too bad, I never went looking for fights, but instead I just attacked any Alliance I saw while moving from one area to another. The only real problem I remember is when a few high level Alliance came to the Splintertree Outpost, I can't really remember what I did in that situation but I do remember running into the tunnel and hiding, I forget if I was ever found and killed.

From then on into the higher levels it continued pretty much the same, my friend stopped coming online, and he moved away in RL so I was pretty much on my own but it wasn't so bad. I was much more confident in my PvP abilities after Ashenvale, but for the most part I don't really remember being bothered too much in zones such as Azshara, Desolace, and even in the Plaguelands, I believe I might have skipped Strangle Thorn Vale because I was more interested in leveling rather than dealing with Horde/Alliance hit squads, and when I was in STV on Draenor I really didn't like the quests there at all save for the Naga Explorer quest, I mainly liked grinding them because they were fun to kill, plus they were a good source of clams.

I kept on enjoying seeing my Shaman progress especially past level 20 when I got my Ghost Wolf, I think since I was cheap I ended up using that all the way to level 60ish, I do remember I bought a mount sometime around then though. Besides for convenience sake, being a Shaman was just a joy for me to play because I liked being able to do pretty much everything decently. I knew no single area was as good as another classes' and I had to make up for that in other areas, but I felt like I was able to pretty much adapt to nearly every situation. Even at level 60 there were hardly any situations I couldn't find a way to get through. I also enjoyed providing buffs to party members, as a Warrior I had short duration buffs like Battle Shout, but it felt like I had a much bigger impact on others with totems that lasted longer and especially that they had unique and fun effects like putting Windfury or Flametongue on someone's weapons, and being able to share the excitement of Windfury to others was always a fun thing to do.

Despite all of that, my experiences at level 60 ended up being the most fun. I met a lot of different people who I would consider friends but I unfortunately went away from, and didn't keep in contact with them. Evenso I still have nice memories of the people I met such as Smashem, and his friends who were nice enough to let me join their Scholomance group, where I ended up having a lot of fun with them, I also spent a lot of time with them afterwards doing more instances, Skitzors and his friends who broke away from Maelstrom and ended up making a PuG MC raid that resulted in forming Fallen Requiem that I was a part of, and we ended up progressing far, I didn't really talk to Skitzors much but he was friendly enough, and of course many people of Fallen Requiem that I didn't know before the guild was formed, but I enjoyed talking to them.

On the PvP side of things I met a bit more “focused” people who weren't fantastic and not exactly the most friendly people around, but for the most part I PvP'd alone unless I was invited into a group which wasn't too often. I was super excited when the honor system was implemented and I had pretty good gear by then even though this was way before I was going to Onyxia's Lair and Molten Core, I think the most the server had progressed at the time before the formation of Fallen Requiem was Lord Kazaak, and Azureagos. In any case, with a bunch of dungeon items that I put together, as well as a spec that a lot of people would consider weird now days (doesn't go all the way to the end talent, but still concentrates on enhancement for things like flurry and weapon enhancements, but also specs into shocks, and finally it goes into resto for nature's swiftness to get fast emergency heals off) ,and finally with a shield and 1h, I went out looking to get into some PvP battles. At first since I knew Hillsbrad was the center of it all I decided to try there for a few days and while it was pretty fun, especially the hectic moments of the Horde being pushed back and me retreating somewhere to regen my health, or when we managed to push the Alliance back to Southshore or us back to Terran Mill, I found out more about how the honor system worked and with more people, less honor was actually being gained, so I went off on my own. I decided to go ganking essentially, and I searched for Alliance to kill in places like Eastern Plaguelands, Winterspring, Burning Steppes, and so on, it wasn't exactly the most ethical thing to do now that I think about it since it's essentially using people to farm points, but I didn't think that way at the time. However, a lot of the people I found weren't people that were just questing, while I did get some of those now and then, I ended up killing other PvPers, and gold farmers the most, I never camped anyone because even then I hated camping and felt like that was way too much griefing unless they deserved it for one reason or another, and so a lot of the time I ended up just searching, and finding nothing. To that end, being in Hillsbrad 24/7 might have been a better way to go, but I was pretty dedicated to hunting people solo, and I killed about 50-100 people regularly on a daily basis sometimes more. While it wasn't the funnest thing to do, it did pay off in the end I think, as I at one point had the highest PvP rank on the server which was Lieutenant General at the time, and I got my epic mount that way. I was regularly ranked in the top 10 for honor for the week, but I slowed down and eventually wanted to do other things.

I forget the exact reason why, but I ended up leaving Firetree even though I had tons of things going on for me there, and rerolled as a Human Mage on a new server, I think it was out of my want to try to get Grand Marshal before anyone else did, and for some reason I felt like on a new server that would give me a easier chance, I don't exactly remember my logic at the time. What I do know is that I ended up regretting it, and disliking the PvP system for it, I also really didn't like being a mage and that further turned me off, the last straw was that I joined a raiding guild that couldn't be more different than the one I had on Firetree, it was a lot more typical, and the members did things that I really didn't like often, lastly it wasn't serious enough (but it was still the most progressed guild on the server) to actually make any real progress so I got fed up which ended my WoW experiences, at least for awhile.

While none of my PvP server experiences were quite as fun after the first one, I was lucky enough to find one that was very similar to it later on in The Venture Co. so things did turn around eventually. In any case however, I'll never forget Firetree, and while I do miss it when I compare it most of the PvP severs I've been on, if I didn't leave it I possibly wouldn't have ever gone to The Venture Co. and while that itself wasn't the most uplifting server ever, it did have more than enough unique people and experiences in it that I wouldn't want anything any other way.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Four (Final on Choppa)

Today I logged into my Choppa and grinded out the rest of the way to the 10^th renown level, RvR combat remained quite fun, actually going back to the main base camp was the unpleasant part.

I withheld on training from level 8 to 10 to grow out the suspense but I wasn't exactly impressed by the skills I had ended up getting, the level 9 skills however still made up for that. I'm still not entirely sure if using a “great weapon” is better than dual wielding, or what stats to exactly go for, but I had done a few public quests again to gain some magical salvaging components, which let me upgrade all of my items to have a talisman that I wanted in them. As of right now, I believe strength to be my best stat which increases damage directly as well as increasing parries, followed by weapon skill which allows me to penetrate armor. A lot of the jewelry items didn't have offensive stats on them, so I had decided to stack wounds which just increased my health by noticeable amount, that or initiative seemed like the best defensive stats to have. I was able to get new boots, chest, level 8 weapons, and jewelry overall, however that seems like where the endless trial ends in terms of character progression, which disappointed me greatly, as there are even blue weapons on one of the merchants that are within all of the set restrictions of the endless trial, but it doesn't let you buy them unless you have a active subscription, at which point if you did you probably wouldn't really want to stick around in tier 1 anyway.

So in the end while the endless trial does a great demo of WAR I think it almost gives you too much, leaving you ending up wanting to fully experience the first tier of RvR completely, but at the same time, if you want to upgrade that much, like I said before, you probably won't be staying around in the first tier of combat, making the endless trial almost seem unfair, as it does provide advantages to the minority of players who do actually stick around in the first tier of RvR over the endless trial players. For example, every player who seemed neigh invincible were usually level 15s which is the maximum level in tier 1 I believe, it's also the level that the game system sets you at when you enter a scenario or RvR zone, however that player will always have the advantage over trial players since they can only get to level 10. Overall I don't fault the developers for going with this system, as it's not entirely free to play, nor does it ever state that it is, however at the same time, I don't think they would lose much by making the first tier of combat more balanced for the trial players, as it would truly provide a possible “endless” experience rather than having a clear end to it, although in the end, “endless trial” pretty much sums up the experience, there is no end to the trial, however it is a trial.

As for me, I plan on doing some more experimenting with the trial that I'll write about afterward, I want to take another DPS class up for a spin to see if it's experience is similar or completely different than the Choppa.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Two

Promises of power, and more is a reoccuring theme in the Chaos quests, which is what I spent most of today doing with WAR for about an hour, or more specifically more public quests.

When I logged in today I decided to turn in a quest that I had completed yesterday, but on the way using WAR's fairly confusing-at-first but very comprehensive and soon easy to use map, I spotted another public quest area. Still eager from yesterday's experience with it I quickly ran to it and joined the fray.

This time the quest involved a lot more killing, 3 phases of killing to be precise; first up was 50 militiamen men which fell easily before me and the rest of the forces of destruction, and then things got harder. Duelists appeared afterward, all of which were “champion” ranks so they were super hard to solo, luckily most of the players around me were willing to lend a hand, but in all honestly I mostly just looked around for people to assist rather than killing on my own, and with good reason too, the duelists softened up a lot of players, including myself, and as I haven't really found any sort of regenerative out of combat food so far, it's impact on performance was noticeable. Finally the third phase was something else, a hero ranked defender came out and joined the fray, and as expected he was much much stronger than any of the duelists. My first experience of him was pulling aggro and him laying waste to me fairly quickly, luckily the only real penalty for dying was a 15 minute debuff that lowered my stats for abit, however I also died enough repeating the quest in consecutive attempts that I found out that it stacks to 5. At 5 stacks I was super weak, but still able to fight, a lot easier than death penalties I found in other MMOs that I've played at least (Lord of the Rings Online, and of course World of Warcraft).

As I still really enjoyed the public quest, I kept on waiting for the next session to start. The wait was somewhat longer this time however it was hardly noticeable as well, since normal enemies spawn in the area in the meantime, allowing for some quality grinding time for a few minutes before the real thing started. I ended up doing the public quest about 3-4 times mainly to fill up my influence bar, and then I decided it was time to move on. I headed back to the main camp to find the rally master, and received a few new upgrades from the influence points, and the loot bags I received during the public quest itself. A lot of these items had talisman slots, so I did some looking around at the nearby trade skill trainers, and I was definitely surprised not to find the standard ones such as blacksmith, or mining. However I also didn't really look into all of the trade skills in depth; from what I gather there is Scavenging which takes additional items from dead bodies, Salvaging which allows you to break down items into magical components, Cultivation which I was curious about but ended up not taking, I don't entirely know how that works, and finally there is Butchering, which is probably the most standard, but it still is a new take on “skinning” animals. There is also of course still trades that let you make items, although these seem to be fairly minimal as well. Apothecaries make potions and work hand in hand with Cultivation, and Butchering. While Talisman making creates magical talismans and gets supplies from Salvaging, and Scavenging . I ended up taking Talisman Making mainly because it was the first thing I chose at random, and Salvaging with it, I ended up really liking my decision because a few pieces of the new items I got had talisman slots on them, and I was able to fill those in with “weak” on the talisman “power meter” that displays while you create talismans, but way better than the normal quest reward talismans.

While I didn't do much today, that concludes the second day of WAR; to be honest it was a much more positive experience than the first day for some reason, and I'm even more eager to jump into it tomorrow.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Introduction & Part One

For awhile now I have been curious about Warhammer Online or rather WAR as it's short hand would be. I'll admit that I'm somewhat one of the types that a lot of people would label as a MMO jumper, or I would have been if not for my own decision. After quitting World of Warcraft a few years ago before WAR came out, I was looking for a game that would have a emphasis on PvP to my luck WAR was starting to be announced around then and I decided to stop WoW for WAR. However eventually after a long series of waits I decided to go back to WoW and then from then on I forgot about WAR entirely, now after a long period of time (if I remember right, WAR was in the stages of near final and final development throughout Burning Crusade to the WoW player's timeline) and because of the interest in finding out what the Endless Trial is about, I decided to go check it out.

My first few hours with WAR

From the start I thought I knew what class I wanted to play since I spent, quite literally, days of staring at the classes of WAR while it was only a website, but when I got into the character selection screen itself, I was quite fascinated by all of the classes and how they have different animations when they're selected and high lighted. After simply just watching the small animations play over and over again, I decided to go with my first choice of class before looking through the others, the Orc Choppa; although it was very hard to choose against playing as a Black Orc after thinking the selection animation for him was funny (he hits his blade into the ground and has trouble getting it out for those who haven't seen it).

Unfortunately right at the start I was already kind of disjointed from the game as I expected to start out in a racial zone where I wouldn't see anyone but other Greenskins, and maybe a few Dark Elves and Chaos players around, instead I was apparently summoned through the warp by the Chaos directly to be a part of their army. While this part was unexpected it was definitely not entirely unwelcome as I thought exploring the Chaos would be interesting too, and since the characters are predominately Chaos there's plenty of exploring to do, infact I only saw one Orc npc so far.

The style of questing from what I gather is very similar to the post Cataclysm expansion style of questing in WoW, where you actively move with the quests rather than going to a quest hub and picking up dozens of quests, and doing that for pretty much your entire stay. I personally prefer the Cata style as it's more attention grabbing, whereas the other is definitely more classically MMOish.

The combat is very interesting on the other hand, as a Orc Choppa it seems like a lot of abilities are meant to hit hard but also increase the damage I take to the point of being super easy to hurt. To me this in turn means that it would be a overarching factor to deal with as a Choppa as there are some abilities that would exhaust my berserking and thus reduce the damage I take, but also increase the chance to get a critical strike on myself. While all of this sounds counter productive, it remains to be seen if the game's balance is enough so that my offensive power makes up for my vulnerability. On the same note, I enjoy how flashy and decisive most of the attacks are, that's alittle strange coming from a Orc Choppa I know who is suppose to redefine wild and undisciplined, but it's still true, a lot of the strike skills leave a stream of fire from the swing which makes it easily identifiable which attack is just a auto attack and which one is a used attack. At the same time the animation is often so fast you won't gain a appreciation for it the first few dozen times you use it, instead it takes awhile but it still doesn't at all detract from the deserved attention it gets when it's really looked at.

After doing a few quests that mainly involved going to a location of undead or minor daemons and killing them to prove my worth, I came up to the first actual quest hub of a small outpost where the forces of Destruction were mounting an attack on a village, I at first thought this was very neat because it reminded me of the Death Knight intro sequence where pretty much the entire thing is about raiding a town called Havenshire and New Avalon, in WAR however this is where I first encountered public quests.

The addition and style of public quests really drew me in, the set up was that players in the town would have to defend cultists who were preparing to summon a daemon to aid in the further razing of the town. The first thing I noticed is that you never had to actually be in a group during the quest, a window simply popped up that said you were in the vicinity of the public quest and that allowed you to participate in it, even if it was ongoing, the main and only problem with that part of the system is that there really is no visible boundary of the quest, but there still is a boundary, so leaving it would remove you from participation. It does however keep your progress in that session, making it a minor point. The quest itself had multiple short stages making the quest overall fairly fast and painless, the first was to kill milita men that threatened the cultists, moving onto gathering nearby stones from the tombstones to aid in the summoning, finally there was a small scene of the beast coming forth, however as most could suspect the beast itself isn't controlled, and it soon turns on it's chaos controllers, from then on it has to be put down by the players. At the end of all of this a scoreboard pops up ranking your contribution against everyone else, I'm not entirely sure what the contribution scores on but I assume it's based on completing objectives, there are of course other factors like for slaying objectives in terms of how much damage I did to a particular enemy against someone else, but again the scoreboard gives no representation of what it actually scores contribution on. In the end, while that part isn't specifically stated, generally the contribution score is right on the nose. Another factor in a player's score is called the “persistence bonuses” which are awarded if a player participated in the last match but didn't win anything. Finally at the end, everyone does a random dice roll seeming to range from 1 to 999 and that adds to a player's overall score which determines the quality of loot bag they get, and if they get a loot bag at all. I'm not entirely sure if the amount of players participating scales with the amount of loot given out, but I was able to get at least a minor loot bag each time, and sometimes a green quality loot bag. On one occasion out of maybe only 4 attempts in the public quest, I scored the highest on the contributions but ended up being in 5^th place because of the roll. All in all I think the public quest system is a super fun and innovative addition to simply questing, they're more like instances but not entirely as they take place in the world itself; the addition of loot, and competitive ranking helped make it quite easy to come back a few more times.

While I was redoing the public quest just to see what kind of ranks I could get against other people, there were a few Empire players that came by, they were of course level 10 while everyone else around me was level 3-4ish so they were in a clear advantage, however after the current session that was ongoing, everyone decided to team up on them. After a short while the Empire was able to easily kill a few of my allies including myself. We were able to kill them, and as a result I got my first renown points even though I had died. Although I haven't really looked into renown, it seems like it's simply a ranking of how much PvP, or rather RvR that you participate in; success probably also plays a factor into it, however even as a causality I was still was able to gain a degree of points, so it seems like a fairly lenient system, but only time will tell.

Public quests also have another role to attend too as well, the gaining of influence points. Currently I'm not sure if public quests are the only way to gain influence points but it was the only noticeable increment point for me, not that that's a bad thing. Influence allows players to gain “Influence Rewards” which are simply just extra items, you are limited to only one item per tier of influence because as I found out once you use up influence you are not able to gain more of it if you've already reached the maximum amount.

That's about the end of the first few hours I spent with the Warhammer Online Endless Trial on the side of Destruction. There are quite a lot of ways to advance your character from what I've seen so far, from achievements, to stat tracking which is definitely a hook for me. However it remains to be seen if I am able to handle it's all too familiar MMORPG conventions and game play. While WAR definitely has new takes on those said conventions, and game play, it still doesn't separate it enough from the feel of familiarity of other games I've played for me, but I guess the same can be said for every person, and game out there.