The Weekly Warhammer Wrapup–#2

I have to admit, with the release of Fable 2 last week, Warhammer as taken a back seat this weekend. However, I did manage to get Spazter to level 27, almost capped my Empire Chapter 13 Influence, took a keep, and played quite a few scenarios this weekend. A couple things of note this week:

Notable Patches and Hot Fixes

If you take a look at the Warhammer Herald, you will see quite a few hot fixes. Instead of going through all of those, I’ll pick out a couple that interested me. Right off the bat I see they’ve adjusted the experience bonus in Open World RvR to 100%. Yup that’s double the XP in Open World RvR. I guess my complaints about how unbalanced the xp gains in scenarios were to the rest of the game didn’t go unnoticed. Here’s another hot fix:

Chaotic Rift: This ability will no longer effect an unlimited number of players, and follows the same target restrictions shared by all other Area of Effect spells

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Chaotic Rift is a Magus spell that used to cast an AoE (Area of Effect) that repeatedly damaged all enemies caught in it’s grasp. Add to that their spell to pull an unlimited number of players to them and you’ve got a major exploit. Basically 2 or 3 Magus and a healer could wipe several groups of Order in seconds with those 2 spells. Not anymore!

The mail system also got a major overhaul this week. Though I didn’t see it in the Hot Fix notes. It used to take 10-15 seconds to open mail, another 20-30 seconds to take whatever item was in it, and yet another 10 seconds to delete the mail. Yeah it was that bad. I had about 20 items in my mail from the auction house and was afraid it was going to take me an hour or more to check it all. I was pleasantly surprised Friday night when I saw it was working a lot faster.

Public Quest: Wagon Defense

This weekend I spent most of my time doing Chapter 13 public quests in Talabecland. Unfortunately, I was only able to pull a group long enough to actually finish any of the public quests once. That brings me to Wagon Defense. You arrive on the scene and can see a bunch of Ungor that have just ambushed a caravan of wagon bearing supplies. Ungor are a race of half men, half beast. Half the soldiers are wounded or dead, the other half need your help beating back the Ungor to get back on the road.

Public Quests have a number of stages. I’ve seen anywhere from 2 to 4 stages. Wagon Defense has 3 stages. In Stage 1 you are tasked with reviving the Injured Wagoneers. The Injured Wagoneers are littered around the area along with the Ambushing Ungor. After you have revived the 20 Injured Wagoneers, Stage 2 begins.

In Stage 2 you have to collect the Supplies and Blasting Powder that the wagons were carrying. However, now the Ambushing Ungors are replaced by Centigors which happen to be Champions. Warhammer rates the “hardness” of an enemy by assigning it one of four titles:

• Regular Mob–this is more of an abscence of any title.  The weakest type of mob.
• Champion–Champions have a little more HP and do a little more damage. You can usually solo them one at a time, but they take a while to beat down.
• Hero–Heroes are quite a bit tougher, they usually take a group if you can get them alone, two if you can’t.
• Lord–Lords are the kind of things you need a fully equipped warband for.

I found you can collect most of the supplies in Stage 2 by avoiding the Champions, but to finish up the stage you will need to kill about half a dozen of them. After the supplies are retrieved, Stage 3 is queued.

In Stage 3 the boss shows up to see how his Ungor are doing with the ambush and to collect the booty. The boss in this case is a Hero by the name of Ghuurash Blackhorn. He is also accompanied by 2 Champions called Blackhorn Shaman. Of course, when Ghuurash sees that most of his ambushers and Centigors are dead, he flips out and turns on the wagoneers.

This stage has what is called a “Fail Condition”. Certainly it wouldn’t be a victory if none of the wagoneers were left to haul the wagons. This stage quickly becomes very difficult, especially if you didn’t bother to kill all of the Centigors in Stage 2. He tends to call them into the fight shortly after you start beating on him. I also tried pulling the Camps in separately and it wasn’t happening.

Wrap-Up

All in all, I really hope that the public quests don’t die out. I think the problem is that there is just too much content. There are 3 pairings that each have 20 (Not sure of that number yet) chapters. Each chapter (after chapter 3) has at least 3 PQs associated with it. That’s a lot of content to get to and, right now, the servers don’t have enough population to fill all of those PQs. I’ve found to effectively finish a PQ in a decent amount of time, you need a least 2 groups on deck. I don’t know if Mythic has to raise the population caps or what, but something needs done or I think they risk dying out.

Well, I plan on putting more time into Warhammer this week now that I’m quite a few hours into Fable 2. My plan is to find a group headed into Gunbad, an awesome dungeon filled with group and public quests, next weekend. Until next week …

Get your WAAAAAGH On!!
-cfalzone