Week 1 Report

So Week 1 of the Casual Community WAR experiment has gone by, and here are some of the results from playing a character completely dictated by the community's whim.

I've played 7 hours so far on my Archmage, at one hour a day, which won by popular vote and a lucky couple of coin flips. I created this character with one click of the "random" box on appearance and name, which got me an appearance not unlike that of Legolas in a dress along with the inexplicably random name of "Fergsilirlis" (try saying that ten times fast).

Now a lot of people have been telling me that the Archmage has had - well, let's just say some challenges with being enjoyed as a class. This was made readily apparent within 5 minutes of me logging into the game and seeing this go over scenario chat:


It is both useful and disturbing to note that this Archmage was naked when they said this.

The primary method for leveling this week as decided by the community was RvR - Scenarios. On Skull Throne, the server which I chose to roll on since Core was the type the community voted for, the scenario pop wait was never longer than 5 minutes during prime time. In fact, I ranked up from level 1 to level 5 having never left the beginning area for quests.

In scenarios, I went an exact 8-8. My average healing done during this time was around 6500 or so. I landed a grand total of 2 deathblows the entire time.

Doing mostly scenarios allowed me to rank up pretty quickly, but there were problems which led to frequent occurrences involving naps in the dirt. For one thing, the Archmage's main heals are a heal and a hot, and a regular hot. The main damage dealers are one direct damage spell and a dot. For the first few levels, I was really unable to keep anyone up, nor was I really able to damage something enough to cause any significant damage.

This is unfortunate considering that the Destruction players I encountered had a severe aversion to dresses - something which I soon discovered was not exclusive to them (more on that later). Until the time I got Boon of Hysh, a long heal spell, my scenario strategies involved trying to hide my tall elf body in shrubbery (an abject failure) or running around in circles madly while casting dots. The Onyxia raid leader would be proud.







The secondary method of leveling as chosen by the community was PvE - Quests. In short, I did half as many quests as I did scenarios - 8 quests which really didn't mean too much to me because by the time I got to them, the mobs were worth a grand total of 20 XP per kill. You can see my very first kill in the picture (no good loot dropped, but I did give myself 50 DKP). Questing while being queued for scenarios is apparently the best way to go - although getting twice as many scenarios and outleveling a quest that ended up being hundreds of xp rather than thousands was not quite so heartening.

The lack of questing meant that my gear was basically the starter gear until I was able to run down to get renown gear from the first warcamp. Because my renown rank was pretty even with my regular rank, access to the Militia gear made my dirtnaps in scenarios slightly less frequent and my fashion not so "fresh off the boat".

Well, wait, there WAS one green item I won, although I think something seems a bit off about it. I can't seem to place it.



Crafting basically came down to simply acquiring the Scavenging and Apothecary skills, but not doing too much with them, mostly because of time. A casual player might not really know too much about the crafting system in WAR, mostly because crafting products are not immediately useful at the early ranks, and having the wrong mix of skills (such as Talisman Making, which as of 1.1 had no containers past the starter ones) means crafting becomes about as exciting and appealing as drilling a hole in one's skull, or watching paint peel.

Of the many comments I got in terms of other things to do, there were frequent comments about using the open party window to find a group. Here you can see my first couple of attempts at socializing with other players:





Aside from my UI layout totally being awful with the chat window, I wasn't having any luck. But just as with everything else with this experiment, I turned to the community for help:






Some sage advice from the Skull Throne community. I suppose I need to try it out next time, although this does speak volumes about how open party, while still an interesting mechanic, doesn't do much to force people to communicate. People apparently need to encounter each other in the wild before partying up, not wonder why the elf with the weird name that sounds like the chick from the Black Eyed Peas is asking to heal them.

So that wraps up week 1. I ended up at renown rank and level 8, putting me at a solid start for 7 hours of work. So far, I've uncovered some interesting things playing WAR casually and at the direction of the community, and plan on continuing to do so for more wall of text reports.

P.S. - Did I tell you I tried ORvR?