Fires of Kel Vorath

The Vanishing

There are things that happened yesterday, that I feel like I want to talk about…  but at the same time I probably shouldn’t.  Suffice to say a good friend of mine pulled the ripcord yesterday and jettisoned out of the internet briefly.  I kept trying to figure out if it was something I did or said, but it seems like there were just larger things happening that I will never fully understand.  While it was happening though I was supremely confused and depressed to be watching it going on… and felt rather helpless to stop it.  I have a bad habit of trying to internalize these things, and trying to figure out how exactly I had failed the person.  Luckily for us at least, the person seems to be reversing course a bit… and since friends are friends I am ready to welcome them back with open arms regardless.

image A few weeks ago I was moved to send out a blanket tweet and I honestly don’t even remember why at the moment.  While I don’t remember what started it, the sentiment is very heart felt.  Each and every one of you makes my life better in some way.  We might grouse and bicker and have bad days, but at the end of the day I am better off because each of you exists out there and has touched me in some way.  We use the word “community” a lot, but in many ways it doesn’t really sum it up.  You guys are my family, and not the uncle that you never see and always thought was kind of weird…  but the ones you wish you saw more often.  As an adult, your friends are the family you choose to associate with.  I don’t draw lines between real life and online…  because the effect is real either way.  So I just wanted to start my blog post this morning in trying to remind you all what you mean to me.

Fires of Kel Vorath

Belghast.140616.235401 The better part of last night I spent trying to finish out the Auroria zone in Wildstar.  The further into that zone you get, the more intense the questing becomes.  The other night I ran the Ruins of Kel Vorath dungeon with some guildies, and last night I finally reached that area in zone.  It is absolutely massive and everything seems to exist on this grand epic scale.  The only thing I can really equate it to is doing the quests outside of Dire Maul in World of Warcraft, but imagine that Dire Maul was maybe four to five times bigger.  Almost an hour of that time was spent doing a single zone event quest as I helped the dominion retake Kel Vorath.  The rewards were minimal but the experience gain was phenominal.  At the beginning of the night I was level 22 and now I am level 24 and about halfway into it.

I came into Wildstar expecting fun mechanics and a really enjoyable world to wander around in and explore.  I had zero expectations of epic story so I am really pleasantly surprised to find it.  I have no clue how much of the zone I have left.  Right now I am hung up on a main story quest because I cannot for the life of me find the mob I am supposed to be killing.  The indicator is on my map, and I have wandered around the entire area without finding any place that lets me go underground where the indicator seems to point me.  Unfortunately the game is just new enough that there really are not many guides out there that I can even lean on as a crutch.  So if I ever manage to find Kaarg the Divine…  then I imagine I will be wrapping up the zone in rapid succession.  I have the quest leading me out of Auroria to speak to someone at Palerock Post, so I think I am as “done” as it comes other than this one straggler.

PVPness

WildStar64 2014-06-18 07-21-53-292 I don’t have any proper screenshots from last night, so instead here is a shot of me standing on this giant gun.  Zelibeli decided to schedule a PVP night last night, and in an attempt to spur it on I showed up and participated.  Several of my friends had a pen and paper game going on, so I knew attendance would be at least somewhat limited.  I am supposed to be participating in the game, but for one reason or another I have not actually made it to a single meeting.  So I figured it was just fine if I didn’t make this one either.  We actually had five people ready to go for PVP, the only problem was that we were not complimentary levels.  This might be an oversight on their part, but for whatever reason it does not seem like you can mentor down to the lowest player and queue together for PVP.  Maybe this is their way of trying to prevent “smurfing”, but in any case it also meant that we all needed to swap to alts to make this work.

WildStar64 2014-06-18 07-37-25-650I grabbed my level eight warrior, because quite literally… that is the only character I have other than my engineer that has finished the “ship” starter area.  First thing I have to say is that I suck horribly at pvp, and as a result I tend to actively avoid it.  That said PVP in this game is much like PVP was in Warhammer Online… as in it is a phenominal way to level a character.  I went into the night about halfway through level either, and exited the night almost level eleven.  We ran maybe five matches, towards the end we were starting to get the swing of things.  We were playing Walatiki Temple, which in many ways is like a remix of Warsong Gultch.  Instead of being a pure capture the flag scenario, it is a “collect the things” one.  In that you capture these Moodie Masks that spawn in the center of the zone and take them back to your base.

The catch is that you can also capture masks from your base.  So in theory you have to guard the middle objective and your own base to be able to win it.  We were doing a fair job of limiting the hemorrhaging towards the end of the night until someone started shooting off his mouth about how dumb we were for guarding the masks at home… causing the entire team to get distracted and fumble.  People really are the worst part of PVP, and I wish in many ways there was NO chat in the battleground.  If they simply had a smart ping system like league of legends has, I think most of the chat could simply disappear.  The challenge we had last night is that ultimately we ended up against other premades, and quite simply we were not exactly “premade” quality.

In World of Warcraft, if you queued as a five man you got matched against other groups that queued as a five man.  From the way that we got trounced I am guessing that the Exile players were a combination of two five man premades.  They each worked flawlessly to whittle down our defenses and at the same time keep pushing forwards and taking masks.  All of this said… I really was surprised just how much I enjoyed myself, and bolstered by just how little the rest of the AofA folks cared about winning.  We were there to play the game and play it as well as we could while we could.  With that sort of attitude I can totally see this becoming a regular thing.  I like playing anything… and so long as folks keep a good attitude about it I can deal with losing all night long if we do.  The big positive is that win or lose you still get a ton of experience and a satchel of goods, so I came out way ahead at the end of the night.

#Wildstar #WalatikiTemple #Auroria #FiresOfKelVorath

4 thoughts on “Fires of Kel Vorath”

  1. I agree. The nice little group of people on G+ and Twitter I feel are close friends. They listen, they advise and they are their to console you when things go bad to worse, like it did last week with the passing of River. I feel bad when one leaves the group without saying “WHY”. but when they come back that makes things even stronger because they are willing to forgive and return. That is what truly makes a “Family” great.

    Oh and I suck at PVP too. lol

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