It’s that time of year again, where the year closes to an end and reminiscing is rampant in the blogosphere. I started pulling together my thoughts on WAR over the past year by tracking the patch notes and different changes we’ve had, but that ended up being a little over 1000 words, and I had just finished February, so I’ve given up on it. I’m sure you guys don’t need a 6,000 word rant of mine to cause your eyeballs to shrivel up and die. That’s just not friendly at all.

Instead as a separate project I’ve decided to go through the blogroll and weed out some of the blogs that haven’t been active as of late, anything older than a month really. At the same time I’m going to give space to all the general MMO bloggers out there that I follow and frequent with on Twitter. I’m sure that’ll take some time as well. In the end, what you’ll be looking at is a blogroll that has quite a bit more general gaming love in it. Let me know if I’m missing anyone, or if I’ve removed you erroneously.

For my thoughts on the year, it’s been a year alright. I know my blogging habits have dried up a bit, and I tried doing a wordpress blog for a month or two, but ultimately it’s Warhammer that keeps my wordsmithery alive. It’s frustrating as hell too because I’m pretty sure Mythic is doing everything they can to better the game with what they have, alas more and more of my posts are seeing things broken. The thing is, before 1.4 it really seemed like RvR was going to be broken up a bit when the reality was just more hardcore zerging at keeps. I was also under the impression that expanding the Renown ranks to 100 would bring back players hand over fist, and while it had a nice bubble effect, that’s all but popped when they left again seeing it wasn’t the change they were hoping for. Then the Skaven… oh.. the Skaven… I don’t even want to talk about that issue. They tried giving us what we asked for, I just think their interpretation 

The start of the year was awfully bitter having our Scenarios stolen away in the night, I’ve thrown my fit about that, and I can’t expect a whole lot to come of it. Maybe for the anniversary we’ll get a new set of scenarios, maybe not. I think if we get a new set Mythic had better follow through on their promise to have fixed, or at least attempted some significant changes, or it’ll make the past year of 6+1_weekend scenarios a waste of time. The weekend warfronts themselves are a decent idea. They need to get a bit more agile on changing the rewards granted. Wouldn’t it be cool to get some kind of trophy per warfront instead of the current first reward? I can’t imagine the coding needed to change things like that around, maybe it’s just oversight being the culprit here.

The city sieges were the only real jewel for the year. If you had a chance to play them when they were new and fresh and filled with competition, you knew some RvR bliss. Unfortunately, all good things wear off in time and with City sieges becoming a daily occurrence (if not moreso) the awesome changes made to the city became tiresome. The scripted progression of the city is a vast improvement over the old VP system. Now you’re guaranteed all three stages of the city instead of the first 20 minute hustle to try and break some VP threshold before giving up and farming the opposition. Also, your instance is only tied to your instance, you don’t rely on other instances to win at all. This also means that you aren’t hurting your realm if you leave a city siege aside from the players that are still in that single instance.

There’s been a bunch of new high-level gear released out into the wild. Well, there’s the scenario weapons that range from T1 to the top of T4, but with the grind needed to use them it’s not as much fun. As for RR80+ gear the 1.4 patch released a ton of green, blue, and purple armor pieces that drop off RR80+ players. Not to mention the RR90 and RR100 armor sets from solo’ing a PvE boss room, er fighting your way through an intense RvRvE boss battle! My big issue with this is the lack of RR gear dropping from players in that range of RRs from 40-80. There’s a fair amount more itemization needed to be done here, but skipping over it so you can get the 80+ stuff done first is… well…

As for my own progression over the year I’d managed to get my Chosen and Shaman up to RR60-ish before they finally fixed my Engineer to the point I’d play him again. Transferred to Volkmar and got up to RR73 and that’s really the only toon I’ve been playing mainly. Been dabbling with a Swordmaster and Witch Hunter, but leveling another toon to 40… I don’t know if I can handle that again. It’d be 12 or 13 now. I happen to like my Engineer quite a bit with the state of the class as it is, even though in my professional opinion the Tinkerer spec is still badly broken (try using it as a main tree and see how effective you are). I love being able to pug around and just melt things left and right, doing Keep defenses gets really boring but they’re worth a fair chunk of purple numbers if you’re supported at all. My hate for Ventrilo has gotten me shunned, especially when I suggest that instead of me using Vent, everyone else should switch over to Skype instead. I can’t see how that isn’t fair. Vent sucks goat balls in comparison. Maybe if the internet wasn’t riddled with tards that breathe deeply into their open mic, or scream cursing and swearing every time they die people wouldn’t have such a big problem. A little etiquette goes a long way.

Gah, see this? Everything turns into a rant at some point in time. Hehe. At any rate, I’ll be playing WAR for the foreseeable future, and as much as I gripe and whine about how it isn’t everything I could possibly dream it to be I still like the game quite a bit. I’m looking forward to next week when hopefully we hear some direction from the team there about what 1.4.1 and beyond hold in store for us besides bug fixes. Crossing my fingers for some more scenarios.

Happy New Year!