Overly Positive

What a difference a group makes.

At the 12 hour mark, I managed to hook up with a group of people. Blazing through PQs and scenarios, I managed to gain a number of ranks and basically tear through a bunch of content.

WAR’s group dynamics make things pretty easy – you can find open parties, look for guilds that are recruiting, use the search option to find friends, and more. even though communication is sorely lacking, it seems that in many cases, you don’t really need to communicate to get the point across.

This is especially good for me, considering after 16 hours of continuous playtime, the caffeine needed to keep me awake is starting to increase. After a bunch of healthy pasta, oatmeal, and other various foods designed to give me the energy needed to continue, I’m starting to feel a bit loopy. I honestly don’t see how some people do it regularly.

Still, for a good cause, nothing is too troubling.

Two more updates to go!

So on a look and feel note I will try to put some screenshots in here to pretty things up. Sadly, I’m really typing off the top of my head and in addition to that, I’m obviously going to be working off of zero sleep, so these thoughts are going to be jumbled, tired, and certainly even worse than my usual subpar humor.

Right now, I’m still crawling along. Seems that When Mythic said the best way was to level with a blend of PvE and RvR, they weren’t kidding. Opting to have a fun experience if it’s going to be a grind, I have basically been levelling exclusive through scenarios the whole day, with a few quests sprinked in for a few k worth of experience. The experience is nice, but ultimately it’s still slow going after about rank 7 or so. It’s possible some of this may be due to the fact that the server isn’t a high pop server. Gorfang is med to high at best, and even prime time sees the open world a little bit barren.

This is probably one of Mythic’s biggest issues as the campaign and fun factor really depends on the population mass. If it’s high, there’s plenty of fun to go around, but if it’s not, well, then, things can get a little bit harder. Even a simple attempt to find a group can take hours.

Still, the Disciple is an interesting class, and while it does have its moments whenit just isn’t that great to play, there are times when it is completely and uttelry fun.

A little bit of a delay here just to get something to eat and drink, and here I am with update 2 of my 24-hour WAR marathon for Children’s Cancer Research for the Extra Life program.

With my guildies signing offline, I was left on my own for the most part. As a result, I am only rank 10. It’s safe to say that with a lot of people now rerollign alts, that actual communication is starting to happen in scenarios, something that just didn’t before due to a lot of reasons. The recent healing renown change, however, has left people short on healers. I can count at least 3 scenarios where I was the only healer, and we aren’t built for sustained healing.

I’m noticing as I level the amount of potential DPS that a Disciple can put out. It’s not a small amount, and if I managed to dump my points accordingly, it actually could be pretty formidable. But this is the classic pitfall of the hybrid healer – doing the role they aren’t at the expense of the role that they are. Disciples put out the DPS they do so they can generate the healing needed for friends. 

It’s a bit appalling, to say the least, to see some of the healers that just don’t bother healing anyone but themselves. It doesn’t take that much to target your tank or that melee in troule and start using abilities that benefit them. Thankfully, even with being a healer that is always the first target, my generosity has paid off, as there are a ton of tanks and melee classes willing to protect the person that keeps them up and running.

After 8 hours of this, I am actually not quite bored yet. Part of this, aside from the charity benefit, is to see how good and tough of a game WAr is – can it be beaten up, played til it’s dog-eared, and still be fun? That remains to be seen. Tiers1 and 2 of the game seem to be, for many people, the most fun they’ve had. Whether or not I can actually get to tier 3 in one day remains to be seen – but I do know that right now, WAR isn’t boring – even though this is clearly not the first time I have leveled a character through all of this.

Back at 9:00pm!

Current rank: 7

4 hours in for 24 hours right now, putting me a 6th of the way though. I have had some normal game sessons go this long, so this really isn’t an issue for me.

For this effort, I wanted to play a support class in honor of the fact that we’re trying to heal kids, and on Destruction I chose the Disciple. I hadn’t touched the Disciple since close dbeta, back when Disciples had a 1 second big heal and no real ability per hit to heal their group. After hearing about how the class had changed I decided to give it another whirl.

For this time period I had the support of my guild on Gorfang, Out of Order, a bunch of IRL friends that decided to play WAR together. with anotehr Disciple and surprisingly, two Squig Herders, we went an astonishing 12-1 in all scenarios. The game definitely rewards team play with victory. How do I know this? Two clear cut victories against what many people call an “overpowered” class at the moment, the Bright Wizard. 5 Bright Wizards couldn’t stop the organization of our little, merry band of warriors, adn those that were in the scenario with us communicated and chatted, something that has been sorely lacking during the first portion of release.

These days, the Disciple is an interesting animal. They aren’t your normal MMO healers, because they have to be at the front lines in order to actually do healing. As a result, they aren’t really the healbot juggernauts of prior MMos, and their mechanic relies on taking from your enemies and making it for your own.

Quick and fast damage mitigation is the Disciple’s forte. By attacking the generate the essence needed to heal, I was able to  delay and even prevent death on the front line classes, frustrating my opponents into backing up so we could accomplish objectives. This was the key reason for a Khaine’s Embrace scenario going 500 – 16.

In beta, I played the Disciple as an assisting DPSer, watching who the melee has targeted and helping out rather than charging in on my own. People respect the Disciple as a class, but not for their damage. They are a support class, and they are always the first target. This was the same way I played the Disciple and did so to great benefit. it’s really come into its own as a unique support class.

At rank 7, and RvR’ing more than PvE’ing, I outstrip many of my PvE quests. Hopefully by the next update I’ll be in tier 2, where we can really see how the Disciple does.

Tomorrow is the big day. I’ve been scaling back on my activities in order ot get enough rest to play WAR for 24 hours for the Extra Life program put up by Sarcastic Gamer. You can still donate – I’ve sent off a number of offline donations as the onlien system has been on the fritz – but is now fixed. Just follow the link to the left.

I’ll be on the Gorfang server, Destruction side, playing a Disciple of Khaine named Liferxtra. I’ll also be blogging, once every four hours, about my experiences, starting from 9:00am CST on the 18th and going to 9:00am CST on the 19th.

Wish me luck! And thanks to those who’ve supported me and promoted this effort, including Syp from WAAAGH! and River from WAY OF THE CHOSEN, among others.