Miscellany: City Defense, Sorceress, Bastion Stair

Participated in the defense of the IC last night, was good fun. The defensive group I was in was quite strong and we held off order until the timer ran out, then killed them off and farmed the PQ. Of course I didn't contribute much to the effort, but I made a good show of it, running around crazily, as if my attacks were actually doing damage to the enemy.

But I have to say the whole wait til the timer wears out thing seems a bit sketch. I mean, not exploitive, but just slightly unbalanced towards defenders. After contested wore out, we could still respawn in the city while attackers got the boot when they respawned. Might be more balanced if we had to at least finish stage one of the pq while the city was contested.

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Also, I've been playing my bank alt, a lowbie sorceress, a bit. Quite different, as you might imagine from the Chosen or the zealot (my other active alt). The sorceress kind of sucks to solo with, at least the way I play, because I can't realistically kill champions solo. I suppose I could kite them around terrain, but I have no snare at this point, so it's a bit daunting. I will say that it's very fun to one-shot mobs of the same level.

Scenarios with the sorceress are a real mixed bag. If there's any structure to the group: healing, tanking, that sort of thing, then it's quite a potent experience, but when I'm left alone, I'm a joke. It's a bit frustrating watching tanks and mdps run right past people that are racing up to me, and then getting owned. Probably this gets better as people get more snares and crowd control, but it can certainly be frustrating.

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Which makes me wonder, would I be more RvR focused if my main were a healer or the sorc? I find that healers are the least team-dependant in terms of enjoying doing rvr. I can be on a totally crap team with my zealot and still have fun, but with Czarnal and even more so with the sorc, if my team is underpowered or disorganized, it quickly feels like a chore.

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Also, did a guild run of Bastion Stair left wing on the weekend. Good fun. I like a lot of things about this dungeon: it looks great, the loot is good, and I still like the pqs and quests and all that, very centralized and efficient, like so much in WAR. The downsides of the way these things are built (at least BS and Gunbad) are:

1. a bit uniform. Mobs in left wing are all beastmen: there's a couple outliers ... a gnoblar/ogre optional boss (iirc) and a doombull boss, but basically the same thing over and over. The PQs in the wing are all extremely straightforward too, though the wing boss fight was different and fun.

2. Hard to work on. The second PQ boss is quite hard, harder than anything else, unless we were just completely doing it wrong, which is possible, I suppose. And we couldn't really practice it, because by the time we respawned, the 1st PQ was fully populated and by the time we got past that, the 2nd was reset.