I finally hit rank 40 earlier this week. I haven’t really been racing to max level because I had a feeling there wouldn’t be much there when I got there. I was right, to a degree.
1-40
I mainly played a Sorceress in the Open Beta, so I figured that I’d already be bored with the 1-20 ranks because I had already done them once. It was surprisingly fun. I promised myself that I would PvP my way to rank 40, as PvE rarely interests me. Public Quests however, were a pleasant surprise, and provided some good fun, loot, and experience, between Scenario Queues. I only participated in a couple Keep Sieges pre-40, just to see what the hubbub was about.
1-40 in Warhammer Online compared to 1-70 in WoW, is a huge difference. In WoW I felt that I had to grind out these 60-70 levels before I could actually begin to play the game, whereas here, the fun really started at rank 1. I’ve PvP’d my way through all 40 ranks with guildies, and it’s been a blast. The last couple ranks were definitely hard to achieve, and starting out in tier 4 scenarios at rank 32 was no cakewalk, but in the end it was all much more fun the grinding mobs and doing mindless quests.
So let’s talk about what life is like at rank 40. Keep in mind I’ve only been rank 40 for a few days, and maybe I just haven’t gotten into the groove yet…
Incentive for Renown
From what I remember, renown grants you a couple mastery points along the way to RR80, some titles, trophies, and lets you use some of the renown gear. There’s plenty of renown to get, seeing as I’m only RR39 so far, but what’s the point? I’d really like to see some increase to Open RvR Renown gains, but I’ll get to that later. Right now, I don’t even care about my Renown Rank. I’m sitting at around 820 INT and 645 Wounds, and none of the Renown gear I can get within the next 5-10 Renown Ranks will improve that. I guess the key is to just ignore Renown Rank and go have fun PvPing somewhere, I’ve actually considered going into my UI options and just turning off my Renown bar.
Out of all the renown rewards I’ve seen, there’s maybe one set worth getting, and I need RR46 to even begin collecting it. I assume the rest of the set drops from keep lords, making it near impossible to get, unless I tank the Keep Lord myself.
Keep Sieges
Keep sieges are surprisingly quick. I’ve participated in a few, and most of them go by really quickly. If a Destruction force gathers over a few hours and hits a number of consecutive keeps, it’s very rare that Order will organize themselves to defend until almost all of them are taken. Even then, wouldn’t it be better to just let us have them? As far as I know you don’t get much for defending a keep, other than the renown for killing players. Why not just come back later and retake the keep for renown and loot drops?
That seems to be the popular thing to do. There’s rarely anyone defending, and if there is they don’t make much of an impact; unless Destruction is completely unorganized. The odd time Order does defend, it stops us dead in our tracks; it’s much easier to actually defend a keep than it is to take one. While it’s actually extremely fun to try to take a keep that’s being defending, it usually doesn’t keep people interested very long. That’s also the underlying problem here; if they’re defending, just let them have it, we’ll come back later, right? May as well rename it to ‘Keep Exchange.’
As far as contribution for a Keep Lord kill works, that’s got me confused as well. It seems that nothing you do in a keep siege matters until you get to the keep lord. I’ve participated in sieges where I’ve scored a number of kills, did some organized AoE-ing, and held off the order at the bottom floor with a number of players while the majority of our warband took down the keep lord. In my opinion, we did a hell of a lot more work to ensure our victory, and without us the Keep Lord wouldn’t have gone down, but the contribution rating system didn’t think so. I scored a whopping dead last in contribution. The following keep siege I did nothing; I waited until we ran up to the Keep Lord’s room and attacked only the Keep Lord, none of the guards. This left me in 3rd place overall in contribution…
I’m not sure if that’s intended, or just a bug, but all the important things in a Keep Siege seem to go unnoticed when contribution is calculated, meanwhile the tanking/killing of the actual Keep Lord NPC is apparently valued at the highest tier. The Main Tank on the Keep Lord seems to at least consistently get first in contribution.
I’m in a pretty modest sized guild; we’ll probably end up with around 12 rank 40’s in the coming months. I’ve always been a fan of smaller guilds to just play with some friends, rather than being part of a 300+ man guild with a bunch of strangers. The problem is, most keep sieges and objective taking ends in a zerg, and you just can’t combat that with a 12-man team. We’ve played with a bunch of people from other guilds already, and hopefully that’s a precursor to some solid alliances which will allow us to organize our own keep sieges.
Scenario Grinding
Scenarios are getting boring. I can manage around 900 renown for a full 15-minute Serpent’s Passage, which isn’t all too bad, but taking a World Objective nets us 1000. Most of my guildies don’t seem to like scenarios much anymore, so it’s usually 3 or 4 of us going up against a full organized group of Order rank 40’s. We manage to hold our own, but it gets frustrating with a team and a half full of PUG Destruction. It seems that when most destruction see a group of Order 40’s on the scorecharts, they either AFK behind a rock somewhere, or just complain about it in scenario chat, rather than helping out.
The one thing I’m starting to enjoy about Scenarios, is that if there’s a lot of rank 40’s, it seems they’d rather fight/kill other players than concern themselves with scenario objectives. I guess this yields the most renown since experience isn’t an issue for them. As much as I love worrying about the Serpent’s Passage Salvage, I’m much more interested in a good fight.
Serpent’s Passage is the scenario we get 95% of the time. It’s sad that there are a total of 6 (?) scenarios in tier4 and this is the only one that gets played. It just makes the game get old much faster. The truth is though, I can’t really blame people for only queuing up for the one, considering how completely terrible the other scenarios are. I haven’t actually played all of them; I still haven’t gotten a Maw of Madness or Praag to pop.
World PvP and Objectives
Objectives are fun sometimes. Sometimes when we take an objective, we get resistance from a sold group of Order, and it’s a great time fighting over it. Most of the time however, no order show up to defend, which means it’s essentially an NPC kill for renown. Other times, we just get zerged by a group of 20+ Order, and that’s just pointless. These are by far the most efficient form of Renown I’ve come across. My group 3-manned the world objectives in Dragonwake the other day with nearly no resistance from Order; getting a solid 4k renown for maybe 30 minutes of killing NPCs. It seems World Objectives are starting to follow suit with Keeps where people realize it’s much better for renown to just exchange these objectives, rather than defend them.
Open World RvR and Roaming PvP
Sometimes though, logic and good judgment go out the window and players actually succumb to the urges of *gasp* having fun. What sometimes starts as a keep siege or a world objective push, turns into a flat-out Open RvR war. These ORvR skirmishes are the most fun I’ve had in this game thus far, and I really hope Mythic does something to push these into popularity.
The most fun I’ve had so far at 40 was a completely random world RvR encounter. A couple of my guildmates and I were going to check out an objective in Dragonwake when we ran into an Order 5-man. It was a solid fight, even though the numbers weren’t even. We were eventually overpowered (5 vs 3) due to some quick rezzing from their Runepriest (lol disrupted silence), but it was a great fight nonetheless.
I hope to see a lot more of this in the future. I think if Mythic changed their ‘double experience in ORvR’ change to ‘double renown in ORvR’ it would be enough to encourage people to just roam around in RvR zones looking for fights.
Much akin to the Roaming PvP Nights of World of Warcraft, this would not only provide great fun, but it would be a solid way to gain Renown.
Alt-ernative Lifestyle
I’m starting to find everyone spending more and more time on alts. As much as I love my Sorceress, there’s just nothing to do most of the time at 40, and I find myself just sitting in town, or browsing through the worthless items on the Auction House for the n’th time. The queues have slowed down in primetime, and most people seem to want to plays Alts instead of taking undefended World PvP Objectives. I can’t imagine why.
I’ve started a couple alts myself; after getting a Disciple of Khaine to rank 24, I’ve starting playing my lower rank Witch Elf a lot more. I’ve been told that the Witch Elf is the king of burst damage, and since I have yet to see that in action, I’ve made my own to test it out. I can’t imagine how they have more burst than my Agony specced Sorceress, but I’m keeping an open mind, hopefully I’ll be surprised. I’ve noticed that the tier 2 queues are fairly slow these days as well; while tier 1 is still instant.
I guess I’ll continue waiting for the rest my guild to hit rank 40. Hopefully things will pick up soon. All in all, I enjoyed the trip to 40. I’m glad I stuck to mostly PvPing for experience