So Fatal, where you been?

Ready to Pounce!  RawR!

Hey guys, sorry I haven't updated in a while... I've been playing, just nothing of real interest to report I think.  I'll give you a breakdown of what's been going on and I guess you can decide if it's newsworthy or not...

Tuesday July 20, 2010:
Two words:  FlameWalker Ownage... or is that 3 words?  I'm lazy to check the spell description.  The 7/20/10 maintenance patch came with some unexpected side effects... Flame Walkers, those level 100 rolypoly mindless balls of Flame that prestiged Mages can summon, got a sudden, ridiculous buff.  They became not only stronger, but also smarter.  Suddenly Instance Dungeon parties could be formed without the need of a tank or cookies... just cast the Flame Walkers, learn how to lure mobs to them, and watch the carnage...

This was a kind of nice feature I guess.. towards the end I got really good at luring, our elapsed times on Instance runs improved dramatically and the experience gain was pretty good too.  What I didn't like was the fact that my archer now once again sat there collecting dust.  I don't mind picking up my Warlock once in a while, but I've pretty much concluded that I'm much happier playing on my archer, even if I have to kite.

Mage was fun in that I got to help out my guild mates a bit more as we farmed for the elusive set drops out of Nest and the new Secret Laboratory, but I'm glad that the Flame Walkers are back to normal and I can go back to focusing on my cutesy archer!

Do I think the Flame Walkers deserve some sort of buff?  Oh, definitely yes.  As it is right now, the Flame Walkers are ridiculously weak and not intelligent at all.  During the last week, the FWs would at least target mobs within its aggro range, now they kinda just roll about mindlessly, just like they used to.  There should be a happy medium that can be reached.

There were complaints on the forums about some rampant kill stealing done by those Warlocks that would chaincast their FWs and then hit Metamorphosis and go into Bird-Mode as the FWs did their damage.  These particularly unscrupulous players did that oftentimes right in the middle of other players' AOE parties.  Not cool.  Those overpowered FWs had their time and place, using them to deliberately KS and grief other players was not it.

It was, however, pretty clever of some Warlocks to use the FWs and Bird in this manner while not KS'ing.  Below are several screenshots of how it could be done, these are screenies of me taken today in AR at that BlackBear spot way out in the corner near the Spirit NPC thing-a-ma-bobbers.  Thanks to LilAkane for the buff during these screenshots:

Gather mobs with mover

Summon Flame Walker

Get the "Bird" outta there!

Sit back and enjoy!

Obviously the FWs did more damage last week, it was probably 10x what they do now... none of those three bears died by the time they either killed my FW or it had expired.

There were also some grumblings in-game that spoke of these now buffed up mages, because of the super FWs, that were thinking they were all bad ass in FBZ, wiping out newbies and prestiged veterans alike.  I'm glad they got their egos deflated. =)