So lets get down to the important stuff. During the open beta I tried out my three original top classes; Ironbreaker, shadow warrior, and warrior priest, however because I only had two days to test them I didn't get to explore and expand a whole lot. In the end I decided that the ironbreaker certainly looked the coolest (Stunty spiky ball is just the cutest thing) and they are really fun to play. So saying at the headstart I jumped on Ironclaw where my guild was rolling, and breathlessly made my little stunty as cuddly as possible.
During the headstart I slowly made my way through T1, doing a couple of PQs which were intense, did a lot of exploring and questing and just a little bit of scenarios. Coming from a big background in WoW's battlegrounds (4 twinks) I was excited about the experience/renown/loot aspect of it as well as the role the scenario plays in the game, even though you can't twink in WAR. And there was a difference, a very significant difference; all of a sudden these scenarios mattered, you really desperately wanted to win. You wanted to push your enemies back and rule the castle, something that was completely lacking from something like WSG.
Back in my WoW days, I was very much a solo player, all I wanted to do was rack up the most dmg in a battleground, not really caring about the actual result of the match. And while I still get a rush from seeing my name at the top of the board its not as important as the result of the match. Scenarios were a ton of fun, even though I didn't participate in too many of them, and some of the fights were so intense when I was finally hit with the 'respawn' message I had to take very deep breaths and slink a bit deeper into my chair and family members gave me funny looks.
One thing I noticed though is that Order have a ton of ranged dps (Majority of which are Bright Wizards) but few melee classes and fewer healers. This became a frustration for me as I would often charge at the destruction frontline and have no support while everyone nuked from a long way off, leaving me to die. Also healers would often refuse to heal me, instead concerntrating on the ranged dps classes hanging around them. I have had frequent /rage moments because of this, but luckily it doesn't happy all the time.
As a final note on my T1 experience, I even got to do some open RvR action. I had unknowingly run into an RvR area (A bit hard I know when a big red message comes up, but it happened) and was killing some mobs when a squiggy ran into me. My first thought was to run, but I thought that if I did so he could easily just nuke me down, so I ran at him. he actually appeared at the perfect time because I had my grudges full and also my health full. The battle was over with 20 seconds with me standing victorious, barely losing any health. I was lucky that he hadn't been prepared and had just run into me else the result might have been different, although people say squiggies are useless against melee anyway.
So that was my T1 experience, it was great fun, especially since there were plenty of people around to do stuff with especially PQs, I'm not entirely sure how much I'm going to write about T2 because I hardly remember anything about it, it all goes so quickly...
But if you want to say gday ingame just send a tell to Chappo on Ironclaw, I might not respond straight away because I'm farming renown at the moment.
-Chappo
Ah, what the wonders of population imbalance can do! In an effort to confront the massive favoritism towards destruction Mythic have announced 20% bonuses both to xp and renown. When I heard this I wondered whether my realm would be lucky enough to receive the bonus but alas it was only for half a dozen random ones. Something I found funny was the fact that they put the faction that was getting the bonus up there with 'Order' in blue. What a suprise! Never would have thought of that. The real issue is whether it is going to work, and the answer imo is that it will not.
