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WAR: Witching Night, A Blessing in Disguise?

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Witching Night: A blessing in disguise?
November 2nd, 2008 by Malcom

Happy Halloween, everybody! Yes, yes, I realize it’s a couple of days late, but better late than never, right? On that note, I wanted to take this opportunity to properly introduce myself. My name is Malcom, and I’m one of the newest writers here at MMOCrunch.com. If you’ve read some of my previous posts here, you’ll know that I mostly write about the world of Warhammer: Online, as well as some free-to-play MMORPGs that I happen to come by every now and then. Other than that, there’s very little about me to share, and since you’re here to read about MMORPGs, let’s move on! Today, I will be describing my experience with the Witching Night event added to the world of Warhammer: Online on October 29th to honor the real-life celebrations of Halloween. Not only are we going to look into the event itself, and the obtainable rewards, but Mythic’s ulterior motive behind this event. Was Witching Night Mythic’s way of pushing people to the open RvR areas? Was it the miraculous kick-start that we’ve all been hoping RvR would get, or simply yet another item-driven and soon forgotten event?

I. Content Additions

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking “oh god, here comes another holiday event,” but much to my surprise Mythic didn’t simply add two or three items, a quest in Altdorf/Inevitable City and called it a day. Witching Night included one important addition: the Live Events tab to the Tome of Knowledge. We could spend a lot of time speculating what it will be used for in the very distant future, but it does show promise. Mythic has already announced that they will have more live events during the Heavy Metal content update set to take place starting November 17th. The potential for this tool shouldn’t be underestimated in the right hands. For instance, if you were to have a team of people working on live events constantly, you could add a lot of flavour to the game. You could have daily, or weekly events to try to get people away from the daily scenario grind.

II. Influence and PvE

The main event included goals and rewards for both PvE and PvP. When accessing your Live Events tab on your Tome of Knowledge, you would see an influence bar and a “quest” showing your progress on the PvE aspect of the event. In order to complete the PvE side of the live event, you needed to kill: 50 Restless Spirits, 25 Withered Crones, and 10(?) Witching Lords. You would also get basic, advanced, and elite influence rewards as you would obtain from any regular PQ. To obtain influence during the event, you either had to kill the monsters listed on the live events tab, or players. Players seemed to give a minimal amount of influence, and from my experience they were not the best way to go about obtaining it. If anyone had a different experience, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. I would’ve preferred obtaining full influence by killing players than grinding mobs.

The PvE rewards included:

• Mask 4/4 – Obtained as the elite influence reward.
• Mask 3/4 – Obtained as drops from Restless Spirits, and Withered Crones.
• Gift of Dark Tidings – 4 cloaks in total you could choose from, one for each archetype. Each one had different bonuses: one for melee, one for ranged, one for healing, and one for offensive casting.
• Witching Potion – Obtained as the basic influence reward. This gives you an aura for 10 minutes and has a 60 minute cooldown. I don’t know if this was intended or not, but my charges kept resetting at random intervals allowing me to always be at 5/5. You could also obtain a title from using this potion.
• Witch King* Title – Obtained by killing all the required mobs on the Live Events tab.

*To obtain the Witch King title, you actually had to do some or keep track of the RvR PQ. The Witching Lords you needed to complete the “quest” appeared only after one side killed 100 players of the opposing faction. I don’t know if I was the only one this happened to, but whenever I killed a Witching Lord, it gave me credit for five. Not sure exactly how that was intended to work, or if Mythic originally intended for players to only have to kill two and the live events tab displayed ten.