Well, That Sucked

You know, I forgot just how hard it is to find a good group when you're looking for one in the Tombs. Doesn't help matters that I suck completely. None of my usual contacts were on, either, so I was stuck PuGing it - and I don't even know what it is people are looking for these days so I don't even know what to spam (What's that? Use Party Search? Ha!) . Absolutely no fame on the evening.

After a bit of that I headed to the RA because damned if I wasn't going to get some killing done. With the rebalance to Blinding Surge, I've shelved that idea for now and instead decided to run a Warrior (almost went with a Rit because I'd like to work on that but, eh.) and tried out a few builds I've been meaning to get around to using (And it gave me an excuse to get my equipment all set into templates and all.). I started out with a Shock/Axe guy then moved to a Steady/Fear Hammer guy like I saw the other day before ending up with a Dragon Sword build. Nothing too fancy in any of them because I just wanted to get some practice playing a melee character in PvP in. Came close a few times but still no glad points. Did manage to get 6k faction in only two or so hours so at least the night wasn't a complete waste.

The rest of the time I've spent watching the Hall to see how the new format's playing out. A few impressions. Seems promising so far. But not without its problems

The best format's probably the shrine one. Lots of opportunities for split squads and ninja capping - a teammate or two running around with the Hero and slipping past people into their bases can do a lot of damage. I've seen some pretty wild comebacks. It just seems like those victory condtions would be the one that would lend themselves best to creating some depth and strategy at the end of a tiff-kat run.

The kill thrill scenario is alright but there are a few hitches. The biggest one, for me, would be how kills are counted. In a straight up deathmatch that's easy but the Halls is a three-way - it seems like there's plenty of room for abuse with, you know, killstealing. Your team waits until someone's low and then spikes them out. The potential for collusion and two teams ganging up on a third also exists and I'm not exactly fond of that.

The whole super happy fun ball way of doing things, though, is just a mess. The Hall is a map with very narrow corridors and chokepoints making it very easy to create a body block. Especially when you know where the relic's going to spawn. Again, the problem of one team just deciding one of the teams isn't going to win and throwing the match in their favor by, say, running relics to another team's Hero or something. And although the relic will kill someone when the timer goes off that's easily avoided by dropping the relic - you only die if your character is holding the relic at the end of the timer.

Well, maybe tomorrow I'll be able to play a few rounds there and have some actual experience with it.

Outlook: I used to be internet famous once. I'm still big. It's the website that's gotten small.


[1] - 20 minutes.