Two Minutes Past The Witching Hour

Lately it seems everybody's been talking about Witching Night. And I mean everybody. Like, all over the place. High and low. Hither and yonder. To and fro. Here and there. Minnie and Mickey.

With good reason, I suppose. Witching Night is the first major content addition to WAR and the first of (presumably) several live events that will come our way. People wanted to see what Mythic was capable of doing, how they could manipulate the game world to make it even more dynamic (dynamic!) for us adventurers.

From reading other people's thoughts and from my own experiences, I'd say the pseudo-Halloween event has been a mixed bag of good candy and eye-rolling toothbrushes.

The first night this went live, I teamed up with a group of guildies to camp a cauldron for a while. Some Destro tried to pop on by and steal our kills, but for once, my services proved useful (land mine! flame turret! blunderbuss!) and we continuously tagged all of the mobs when they spawned. Fairly quickly we filled up on our required mobs (two of the three groups needed for the Witch King title) and several of us got the Gobbo mask drop. Fun, but once we did all that and noticed our influence bars barely moving, we called it a night.

The next couple days after that, I parked my butt at the Black Fire Pass RvR lake and entered into the scary, wonderful, death-prone realm of Open RvR. Snafzg illustrated the eternal conflict between Destruction and Order in this area, which seems pretty accurate to me. Join a warband, cautiously head toward the enemy, and try to meet in a "safe" middle ground to fight, far away from warcamp heroes and siege engines. If nothing else, WAR PvP is teaching me that taking risks in combat and trying to do anything apart from the giant school of fish that you're swimming with is cause for immediate termination. It's like two groups of penguins huddling together for warmth and afraid that if they venture out on a brave mission to get more fish, a walrus is going to pop up and eat them.

Yet I'm not a patient fellow and I have little time to sit back and watch everyone mince around in combat -- an inch forward, inch backwards, and melee DPS getting frustrated out of the wazoo that they're not able to do much. Why aren't we charging more? Oh, that's right -- because the enemy will flee back to their mothers' skirts (i.e., the warcamp) instead of fighting like real men and women of old.

Anyway, it became something of a horrible running joke with me that I'd never see one of these PQs to final completion. We once finished stage one and as we ran to the Lord, I got killed, then couldn't make it back in time for the final blow. Plus, killing 100 enemy players before they kill 100 of you can take seemingly forever.

Finally, last night, I got to see the Big Fatty at the end of the PQ, a giant Nurgling (Nurglar?) with intestines slopping all over the place. There's got to be danger of infection with that. Why the window into the guts? This planet has weird fauna.

As I said earlier, Witching Night's gotten mixed reviews. The bad comes from a hotfixed bug that only allowed a small part of the players to get the Lord kill credited to their account, the frustratingly long influence bar (which, for fluff rewards, was FAR too hefty for most casual players to tackle), and the very slow reset on the RvR PQ. I'm also a little surprised that the capital cities had nothing to do with this event -- you'd think that this sort of holiday would fit in great with the living cities and all that.

Yet I think there's a lot of good that's come from this. First of all, a month and a half into launch, Mythic's pumped out a live event far before anyone expected. People do love the masks (see Mythic? Fluff rules!), and it wasn't hard for even a solo PvE player to get one. Best of all was the not-so-sneaky implementation of a PQ in the RvR lakes. It gave us exactly what we've been clamoring for (or a first step towards it, at least): real incentive to do open world RvR (ORvR) instead of scenarios. I suspect that the slow PQ reset was so that already-formed warbands in the area would try out the other RvR lake objectives, like the BOs and Keeps, as they waited for a reset -- that certainly happened with a couple groups I ran with.

We're only a couple weeks away from our next live event, Heavy Metal (gosh I do love saying that), and I'd say expectations are cautiously optimistic for it, but a bit guarded.

P.S. - Long influence bars = grind = Syp gets bored really, really quickly.