Warhammer Online: Nordenwatch - Specific Strategies

Basic Archetype Strategies

If you play the scenario enough, you will indeed develop tactics that work best for you. But in general, this works for the various archetypes:

TANKS

Get to the flag and fight on the flag.

That is your main role in almost every engagement. If fighting near a captured objective, you can then assist DPS in taking down the opponent. If your objective is in jeopardy, once again you should fight on the flag to prevent its capture. If you have enough people holding the flag, it may occasionally be a good idea to stand with your own team's support, guard a healer, and help them stay alive.

When skirmishing, putting guard on a strong DPS player on your team can help them stay alive longer to really crush the enemy (and see them driven before you!).

MELEE DPS

If your team has no tanks, get to the flag and fight on the flag. If you have tanks, help take down healers and DPS of the enemy. When not fighting for an objective, stay with your team and work to drop the other team's support as quickly as possible. Work together and assist with other DPS players.

STEALTH DPS

If your team has no other melees, bad news... you need to fight on the flag. Sorry. Otherwise, work together with your other DPS to drop their healers and DPS.

The nature of stealth in Warhammer Online is such that scouting is really not a significant role for stealth players. 30 seconds of AP draining stealth does not give you much opportunity to scout the enemy. But there are occasional opportunities for scouting, and you should be on the lookout for them.

If your DPS is high enough, you can occasionally sneak back into the enemy's healers and drop one fast. This is always very helpful to your team.

RANGED DPS

Get in a good position that limits the line of sight of oppposing ranged DPS, and work with other DPS to crush the enemy's healers and DPS. Failure to assist with other DPS can result in a lot of wasted damage that gets healed away. You want to drop people as fast as possible and then move onto the next.

Remember that staying alive usually results in more overall DPS than going berserk and dying soon after. Backing off so HoTs can tick on you is only a brief interruption of your DPS. Blasting away until you die is a much longer loss of DPS as you must wait to respawn and runback (resurrection is rare in Tier 1 since it is learned at level 10).

HEALERS

Keep those tanks (or melee) alive who are fighting on the flag. If they die, your enemy will capture the objective. Keep yourself alive! Many healers forget to heal themselves. If there are DPS who make a habit of killing people attacking you, keep them alive! They are clearly smart players who will help you survive.

Warhammer Online: Nordenwatch Begins!

How it Begins

Order (blue) begins near the Lighthouse objective (blue square on page 1 map) and Destruction begins near the Barracks objective (red square on page 1 map). After the initial objective, both sides have a straight path to the very strategically important Fortress. It should be noted that Order actually has two paths, the lower of which is faster to the Fortress than any route for Destruction. Both sides should be careful to make sure at least one person actually stays and captures the objective near their spawn location. Occasionally everyone is in such a hurry to get to the Fortress that nobody stays and
caps. Generally, it is best for a low level ranged DPS to handle this duty since it is actually helpful if they arrive at the Fortress a few seconds later than the massed army.

The first clash generally happens at or near the Fortress. Assuming balanced team composition, there is usually a large melee battle at the flag with ranged DPS trying to take out each other or each other's healers. Occasionally some members of each side will try to climb the walls to get an advantageous position. This works only if the opposing side is not paying attention. Usually it is better to make use of environmental hiding spots and line of sight for defense.

Sometimes one side will send some of their DPS directly into the back ranks of the foe hoping to take out their support. If they can drop a few healers or ranged DPS fast, this can be very effective. But bear in mind time spent away from the flag is time the other side can be capturing the objective.
What Now?

Follow your team's army. Pass through (or near) the objective close to your spawn and leave 1 person behind to capture it. The rest should move quickly to the Fortress and get in position as quickly as possible. As noted, the player(s) left behind should generally be lower level, ranged DPS. They generally lose no effectiveness from getting to the big Fort battle a few moments later.

The first battle at the Fort will be very hectic. Your first few times in the scenario you may have no idea where to go or what to do. You will eventually find favorite hiding spots or places that give your foes limited line of sight to attack you. If you are playing a tank or a melee DPS, you are probably charging right into the middle so knowing what to do here is somewhat simple.

Focusing fire on the squishiest members of their team is vital here as it is in any RvR engagement. As long as you have at least one person fighting on the flag (who can survive), it is acceptable for remaining melee DPS to move into the opponent's back ranks and try to drop their healers and ranged DPS. This has to be done quickly and all together. Failure to drop them fast means whoever you left at the flag is probably moments from death, and an opposing capture of the Fort will be quick to follow.

World of Warcraft: Easy way to get Higher Learning achievement

Today I discovered a little nasty trick, on how to easy complete this achievement easily. But first, a little explanation on this achievement.

To get this one, you need to find and read 8 different books in Dalaran. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well it's not. Each book has a fixed spawn within the city (see map below), so this makes it bit easier to find them. Now this book shares spawn with other - useless - books (which are however worth reading as they are pretty funny). Once you've read a book (the right one or the dummies), it will despawn after 3 minutes. The respawn timer is between 1.5 and 3 hours and chances are, that the wrong book will spawn.

Higher Learning locations map (click on the map for bigger version):

Now comes the trick: Every time a server is restarted, all the books in Dalaran will respawn, however not always the correct one needed for the achievement. So there are two easy ways to get it:

1. You wait until Server maintenance and until the servers are brought back online and check all the spots above. 3 minutes should be enough to check all the spawns for the books. This is the most reliable way to do it.
2. This one is more based on luck, but since the release of 3.0 patch (back in September), the servers are pretty unstable especially since the release of Wrath of the Lich King and some zones, especially Northrend, crash very often during peak times. Every time a server crashes all books will respawn too. Typically this can only be used on some high population servers which are pretty instable during evening hours.
   
   The typical signs of a server crash are disconnect to the login character list screen and a "World server is not available" message when trying to login. Sometimes the books doesn't respawn, this means that the server didn't crashed just that the users were disconnected from the servers. Usually the server will go down again within the next few minutes, but this time the books will be there for sure.

Have fun book hunting

Warhammer Online: Nordenwatch Summary and Basics

Official Summary

This scenario takes place in the critical beachhead of Nordenwatch. The battle rages around the Lighthouse, Barracks, and Fortress. Take and hold these objectives while killing any enemies you find.

(Source: Nordenwatch loading screen)

Where and How to Join

Nordenwatch is located in the Empire vs. Chaos pairing, but you can queue for the scenario from any Tier 1 zone. To sign up for the scenario, click the icon that is located at approximately 11 o'clock on your mini-map. This opens the scenario queue interface. You can then pick scenarios to join
solo or as a group. You can also join all available scenarios with a single click if you choose. Note that when you use the Join All button the scenario code slightly biases you towards the scenario(s) located in the same pairing as the zone you are physically located in.

Quests

While you can queue for this scenario from any Tier 1 zone in the game, there is one major reason to consider queuing from the Empire v. Chaos pairing. In the Nordland war camp for either realm, you can pick up at least 2 quests that are completed by participating in Nordenwatch. One is for simply participating in the scenario, and the other is for killing 15 players. You do not have to get the killing blow yourself - someone on your team (not the whole scenario team, your specific team) must get the kill. Doing both of these quests is a couple thousand extra experience and a nice chunk of silver. If you are near the top of the tier in rank and do not want to level out, you may choose to stop turning in the quests and save the turn in for after you hit rank 12.

If Nordenwatch scenarios are "popping" slowly for you, then you might be able to simply fly back to your Nordland war camp in between scenarios to turn in the quests and pick them back up again. There is no limit to the number of times you can complete these quests.

Scenario Basics

Duration: 15 minutes

Winning Condition: First team to 500 points, or highest points at the end of duration.

Tier: 1

Player Ranks: 1 through 11

Number of Players: 12 per realm

Score:

Fully Capture the Barracks or Lighthouse: 15 points

Holding Barracks or Lighthouse: 2 points per tick

Fully Capture the Fortress: 30 points

Holding Fortress: 4 points per tick

Killing any Player: 5 points

Notes on Scoring: Flipping an objective from one realm's control to uncontrolled awards no points. If you fail to fully capture it, the other realm can then turn it back to their control and gain capture points.