WAR and Lotro musings

Fun War article:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/10/06/play-logs-week-seven-of-warhammer-online-pc

Fun Lotro articles:
http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/previews/5333-LotRO-Mines-of-Moria-Play-Session
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/45334

And a Balrog video just to top off the tanks: (must view!)
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/45291

Lastly, my own rambling commentary:

First of all the Balrog looks freaking awesome. Nuff said, go listen to him tell you how grumpy his bunions have made him from sitting there waiting to be let out.

Second: Mines of Moria is starting to get me excited.

Third: WAR already has me excited to explore it, although there at lots and lots and lots of issues with it, I still love exploring and I love besieging stuff. I just wonder how long WAR will hold its appeal. The T4 content is as yet untested and fallow for the most part, although a group did manage to break through to Altdork on Karak Ten Peaks, they didn't finish the PQ's there (lazy sluggards) and hence didn't get to sack anything. They were defeated by the PVE. How pathetic. They give Destruction a bad name. Hopefully City burnings and churnings will become common soon and then Mythic in the burning death that ensues will come to their senses and change something somewhere.

Naturally they fixed the keep door bug and other easy things right away but they really need to do something in addition because once Destruction owns the whole map, Order will be hard pressed to take it back from a side that is dying for them to try it.

Fourth: Tier 1 Openrvr = broken and wasted content. I hear Tier 2 is better though. I have something to say about this. They really really should have not done it this way. It is important to make an impression fast and you want to play your trump cards quick in an MMO. In all honesty, I think it would have been the best decision for them to have keep sieges, awesome ones, in ALL tiers of content. They may yet fix this, but it has seriously weakened the only thing that many players will see before they quit until they do fix it.

Fifth: Scenarios are great. They may even be too great. I need to get into some Open world RVR soon somewhere before I decide that this game would have been better as a TeamFortress style client with no PVE :P. The PQ's range from "gaming theory success" to "mindless but pleasing solo grind with a long reset" depending on who's around. All in all I'm not sure if I like them and their long term effects or not.

The PVE quests are too much more of the same and you don't level fast enough anymore. They had it right in beta and then slowed it down too much. WoW had more variety. Lotro had more variety. Why can't WAR have more variety? At least there are some caverns and stuff to explore though. I miss WoW's ladder dungeons.

Final rant: Pushing through people. This is dumb. You shouldn't be able to push through the enemy. Nuff said. Fun tip to tanks: Slowly slowly back up and the extra clever ones will keep trying to push through you and wont be able to cuz it keeps resetting. Pushing through friends is fine though.

Final positive thing to end on a positive note: WAR is fun. You should definitely try it. You might even enjoy it. DPS and ironbreakers and black orcs and archmages/shamans ftw.