So they added their first Raid-isode the other day, by the name of “Infection”. It’s Borg centric whereby you have to disable a transwarp conduit bringing in Borg reinforcements then beam down onto a Federation Starbase in the throes of being assimilated, fight your way past hordes of nasty nasty sci-fi zombies to the Queen’s Lair.

Oh yes. The Queen. Or rather A Queen. The trick here – well I say THE trick, there are many – is not to fall in the “water”. I think it’s described as plasma coolant. It does a craaazy amount of damage that kills you in a second or two. So yes, you have to fight the entire circuit of the spacestation and down a looong, twisty, increasingly Borgie corridor, pass a halfway-house boss that used to be the Captain of the station and then you have this platformer of a Boss Room.

But that’s fine. I actually enjoy the slight absurdity of the encounters, the “challenge” of new content and of course the “phat loots” So yes, first things first, we tried doing this “challenging” 5-man raid for 4-men. 2 of which (myself included) were decidedly rusty after a week or so away and afew patches. So yeah – the space-bit was fine once we read the quest text and worked out what we were supposed to do The corridor fighting took quite some time. A couple of hours before we got our tactics sorted out. One more man would’ve worked out REALLY well >.< But kudos to our healer, as my Science Officer is very focused on debuffs and not heals. We would’ve died more than the 20-bajillion times we did without him XD Simply put – Damn You InterLink Nodes! *shakes fist*

So you’re in the Queen Boss Room and hopping around on the platforms, fighting constantly respawning Borgies. The key to this is going to every corner platform, punching the Borgies into the water (oh yes, you read that right ), then having 3 people simultaneously use 3 consoles to bring down the shields and upload a virus on the corner computers. These start individual countdowns such that you have to have all 4 hacked at the same time to bring the central shield generator’s shields down. You destroythat and then the evil flying Queen gets out and starts to bring down the hurt.

I feel I may’ve made that all sound relatively straightforward. It took us almost 5 hours total todo this Raid-isode (which I’m okay about – it was our first time, we weren’t well-equipped and a man down), 1hr 40mins of which was the zerging the last room, time and time again, trying to work out how todo it right >.< For future reference – do not start doing a Raid at 9pm. Or 10pm for one of our continental team-mates. He was a verrry tired bunny at work the next day.

But you know what? the loot wasn’t that good and the final peice of the pie?

IT DIDN’T BLOODY COMPLETE FOR ME! /RAGE

I just felt the need to get that out there. Don’t start me on the Sixteenth Hall in LOTRO. I’m just glad we got to the bit with my class quest in it. Thanks chaps!

Now onto the topic of this (hopefully succinct) post.

I’ve got back into WAR in a big way lately – moved onto the EU servers and got a couple of local buddies into it too. Firstly, let me just say I love the PvP in this game. If you want drop-in/drop-out 10-20min fun, you’ve got scenarios, if you’re just pissing about – go play PvE. If, on the otherhand, you want some good solid PvP, find a Warband and do some Open RvR. Maybe you’ll even take a Keep, right? WRONG. It seems that after T1 all the good adventurous people leave the game. All you get in T3 warbands is a kind of insipid cowardice that is not becoming of either side, especially the war-mongering Destruction. “Oh noes, there’s some Order there – lets run away”. Even if we outnumber keep defenders 2-to-1, if we don’t have 2 full WBs, nobody wants to try. It disgusts me.

I could understand if there was some risk to this. But the Death Penalty is laughable – it’s 10% reduction to HP (give or take) and costs a couple of silver to fix at a Healer – who you’ll spawn next to. I could understand if there were negligable rewards too. But the fact of the matter is that Mythic have spent some energy making RvR (and all PvP) much more rewarding since launch. There’s normal exp, Renown Rank (PvP level), Influence (for area-based rewards), high-value loot (chance of set-peices – I’ve seen over a dozen in the last couple of hours of RvR), Tokens/Medallions (collect them up to trade for set peices at vendors), “normal items” (Rare -> Common) and plain ol’ money. It’s not like you even have to run all that far when you die (and you will die at SOME point – though not as much as you might think) if your healers are halfway competant. Considering I’m playing a healer – if you’re in a WB with me, there’ll be at least one

I don’t care if it’ll take awhile – all that time we’re racking up rewards and sure, so is the enemy – that’s part of the game. There is no “I Win” button. This is a competition between players. It just strikes me that people want to join these warbands so they can say they only play RvR and that they’re “hardcore” because of it – but all they want todo is comp-stomp the 4 normal guards and 1 champion/hero guard at each of the small Battlefield Objectives. They place an inordinate value in “locking down” the zone for buffs.

What happened to the Player in PvP?

*deep breath*

I feel alittle better now. I’m told that these tactics are exactly that “tactical”. I’m not convinced. I’m also told it’s even more like this at T4. Which’ll be interesting because if the general mentality in MMO high-level PvP prevails – people will only want to have L38+, fully kitted out people in their teams.

*lesigh*