Good Morning Friends! I cannot fully explain to you how freaking good it is to see Everfall in purple once more. Huge props to the folks who fought in the Everfall War and the defense of Restless Shores yesterday. Thanks to streamer Vellum670 I was able to get a front row seat for the battle, and also thanks to them I was able to see just how bad the hatchet exploits were. For those who don’t know there are a few glitches going on right now with the Hatchet, first off if you use Berserk it never actually falls off and just stays active permanently even if you swap weapons. The second problem is with the against all odds perk which increases your damage by 10% for every mob in range of you. This is a great perk, but the problem is that the stacks are never falling off and essentially over time of using the hatchet you are going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300% damage. You can check out this video to see the exploit in action, but right now… knowing it is a thing it seemed like most of the enemy team in both Everfall and Restless shores were using Hatchets for this reason.
You can also just watch the Twitch VOD of the War and you will see at many points the player taking single hits for each damage to kill them in one shot. At one point both Eliyon and I saw him take a single hit for around 22,000 damage and there is nothing that could withstand that. What is even more impressive however is that they managed to push back against this behavior and still win. For those who are not familiar with a War, you have 3 points that you need to capture outside of the fort which will give you access to the fort itself. After that you need to break down the doors and get a team inside that can stand on a point in the center of the fort and capture it. They managed all of this with about a minute left on the timer. On the flip side the same streamer participated in the defense of Restless Shores and through the hatchet exploit they burned through the teams on the three defensive points and Syndicate spent fifteen minutes standing on the point and defending it inside of the fort. There were several times I thought the battle was lost but they managed to push through.
It is odd how streamers have become almost the battle correspondents of this game, embedded with the troops and reporting back on the nonsense that they are seeing. I would love to see a VOD from the Marauder perspective on these wars and see specifically what that team was talking about. In truth I think it is a handful of bad actors, that often times are the folks most vehemently claiming there was no cheating taking place in public chat. It is my hope that this will eventually evolve into an honor system for battle on our server, with all three sides accepting proof of exploiting that will exclude these bad actors from future wars. However there is a serious lack of trust between the sides because everyone assumes everyone else is going to drop the nuke… so they bring their own nukes to the battlefield. I am pretty proud however what I have seen from the Syndicate side because it does not appear that our folks are blatantly using the same tactics.
My other big takeaway of the weekend is that apparently I actually do enjoy PVP in this game, or at least in the form of Outpost Rush. For those not familiar with the game mode, Outpost Rush is a weird love child of something like Alterac Valley in World of Warcraft and Summoners Rift in League of Legends. The end result is this sort of mixed PVE and PVP experience where you can fortify your base and summon monsters to fight on your side, but also can just rush the enemy and capture the points as fast as humanly possible then spawn camp the graveyard. The mechanic that seems to matter the most however is a spawn that shows up roughly ten minutes in to the match called Baroness Hain, which is a clear reference to the Baron from League. She grants the team a health regeneration and defensive buff and also freezes the enemy score for three minutes.
This freeze allows a team time to catch up, or to really snowball the score while the enemy team cannot effectively make progress. However what actually makes the mode great is that win or lose you get a stack of coins and a loot box with three items that are capable of bumping up your gear score snapshot. There are a bunch of weapons that are unique to Outpost Rush, and you can see me getting one of these a spear that I am currently using called Weedkiller. Generally speaking you get around 300 coins for playing the game mode with slightly more if you win, but not a large gap. The hardest part is usually getting the match started because it is currently limited to only players from our own server, but I can see at some point in the future them opening this queue up to be all of the players. The battles seem rather incestuous at the moment with the same forty players swapping back and forth between different combinations of teams.
The other big news for the weekend is that thanks to the buffer of coins that I was getting from Outpost rush, I became comfortable enough to actually buy a Tier 4 house. Given that I mostly withdrew my business from Everfall while it was Green, it got me spending a significant amount more time crafting up in Brightwood. I have to admit I have slowly fallen in love with the town and its easy access to the Northern unclaimed territories. My abode is rather humble at the moment, but I did the important things last night which was craft a set of four storage boxes and equip it with five trophies. I figure I will spend some time crafting items and placing them in my home so it can look a little less spartan. However now that I have done this… there is a big war taking place in a few days that might decide the fate of that territory. The Blades of DaTang seem to be more than capable of defending it however, and given what was experienced over the weekend I feel like they are going to come prepared for some shifty behavior.
The other big change of the weekend is that Covenant aka Yellow now has a territory. Ultimately I think this was a case of us being unprepared for what was about to unfold. Reports from those in the war indicated that the majority of the players fighting for Covenant were actually the Marauder battle hardened A Team. That means that maybe we didn’t stack the deck in quite the same way, and as a result the territory was lost. That said I am mostly okay with it. This means that Covenant now has a territory and quite honestly other than people just not liking the swamp… Weavers Fen is a pretty freaking great zone. It has among the best chest farming available in the game, and my hope is that more Covenant players will gravitate towards viewing it as their new home… which will make the fact that I have a house there useful. The Syndicate have Everfall as our capital city, The Marauders have Windsward, and I am hoping that maybe just maybe our Covenant will start to see Weavers Fen as the same making it a market hub.