Last night I farted around with the Archmage for the first time. I didn’t play her very much, but the class appears to be both solid and a good match for my own playstyle, as healers go. I’m finding that you don’t really get a feel for a class until around level 8 or so. I also played some on the Ironbreaker, reaching rank 10 and renown 9, and tried to get into some world PvP.
This involves a lot of standing around, until you realize that War is Not Quite Everywhere, and that you need to go to where it’s hanging out at the moment. Thankfully, the locations of world PvP battles are marked on the map with a little red crossed-swords symbol. I still have no idea what an ‘RvR lake’ might be or where I can find one – presumably it’s a feature of Tier 2.
Yesterday’s patch brought some problems with it; among other things, both the Chrace and Crag Mere servers went down repeatedly over the course of the night. And I had my first CTD.
The launch server names were announced yesterday. No word yet on where Casualties will be, and no decision will be announced until Sunday morning. I did hop on the Vent channel for a while, but that leads me to the evening’s most annoying problem, which might or might not be a WAR issue: I can’t get Vent to work correctly with the game. It just doesn’t recognize my push-to-talk key when the game is in the primary window. I tried everything I could think of including scouring the Vent options to find a likely culprit, dug into the Vent troubleshooting FAQ, restarting Vent, restarting WAR, and running WAR in windowed mode. I did get it to work with automatic voice activation – but that’s annoying for everybody. I plan to reinstall the game when I get the disks, so hopefully that will solve the problem, along with the unhappy thing with Xfire not recognizing my install.
I have come to some decisions as to what classes I’ll be playing come launch: for Destruction, the Black Orc; for Order, the Bright Wizard. Both of these have been tremendous fun, and while I’m going to end up making and playing numerous alts, this is where I’ll be concentrating my play for now.
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